Recording Surface

So here’s my schema for classifying some of the communiques/occupations/actions of the last few months: The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection is Situationist, the New School Occupation is autonomist, and the Communique from the Absent Future is anarchist. Okay, that’s pretty silly, and reductive of course, since I’m not really sure what any of those mean. But it does at least explain why the first of these is my least favorite.

The common logic of these “movements,” especially the last two, pivots around two points: occupation and the insistence on not demanding. Occupation, as the communiques make clear, isn’t a tactic for reprivileging the territorial or producing a new commons on top of the old. Instead it’s a disruption of the current functioning and a revealing of fault lines — a way to “blast the mindless structure.” Demanding, on the other hand, is just another way of asking for something, of recognizing someone else’s right to ownership. Occupation does the opposite of demanding: it takes, without worrying over how the action will be represented or asking for permission — it “needs no introduction, no visas or carte blanche.”

So, the occupiers aren’t really Situationist, autonomist, or anarchist. They are, to put it in punk rock terms, Teenagers from Mars:

We land in barren fields
On the Arizona plains
The insemination of little girls
In the middle of wet dreams

And we don’t care
And we don’t care, we don’t care
We don’t care, and we don’t care
And we don’t care

Sorry for the lack of posts. I’ve been preparing for and having guests, plus too much work. But I did manage to submit the following essay proposal, which was positively received. Now I’ve got to write the thing. Eeeek! (more…)

Yesterday we had a lovely wander of the university — including the inside of Charlie Wittman’s tower, where I’d never actually been before — and it’s small libraries, particularly the ones that look like they used to be boilerrooms and that have tape on the floor leading you in and out since there’s no way to orient yourself, no windows or even walls, just monotonous stacks of books. (more…)

(For the Love of Hate)

A few days ago I finally heard, a mere twelve years after it was released, Kathy McCarty’s Dead Dog’s Eyeball, her record of Daniel Johnston songs. The versions are nice as far as they go, but like most covers of Johnston’s songs I’ve heard, they are animated by one mistaken motivation: to realize the potential of the songs. (more…)

I’m sure there’s a theme in here somewhere. (more…)

The jazzist take on the relationship between Bix Beiderbecke’s biography and his music goes something like this: While Bix suffered lots of insecurities, doubts, disappointments, and despair in his life — all of which gave rise to the alcoholism that killed him at the age of 28 — he was able to overcome these once he stepped on stage or into the recording studio. (more…)

…But just because they are avenues of escape and not fantasies doesn’t mean they are all the same, or that they are all desirable. It seems to me there are two kinds of escape, at least, and here again, D.H. Lawrence’s stories in The Woman Who Rode Away outline the contours of each of them. (more…)

A few additional points on the last post: (more…)

In the essay “1968 and After,” Katja Diefenbach outlines the post-60s arc of minor politics by pointing to its “attribut[ing] too much significance to the de-territorializing, unleashing, progressive element of capitalism” and to its “merging [with the] cadre model of discipline, [which] led to a mobilization of life at every level.” (more…)

While most of the left responded to Bush’s Iraq speech with its obligatory capitol-steps sloganeering and advice on making a graceful withdrawal, others proffered very different ideas of exit. (more…)