Nmherman on 22 Feb 2001 15:12:45 -0000


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[Nettime-bold] Fwd: Essay for Netochka Nezvanova, February 1, 2001 

 


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The Wedding

"Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore, 
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood."

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The most important question for every writer is of course what to write.  
This question concerns many writers off and on through the course of their 
careers.  Often one knows exactly what to write, and thus discovers the 
Muses, or Eumenides, who in the Oresteia were transfigured out of the Erinyes 
or Furies of Vengeance by Athena, in order to preserve democracy itself.

For the US writer, things are even more mysterious.  After all, we are doomed 
to chronicle the rise, corruption, and fall of US democracy.  All the false 
tales of our purity and grace are of course baloney.  In this respect the 
entire tragic structure is denied us.

Some soothsayers have prayed to a floating feather, thus framing it and 
reading as you go.  That type of tomfoolery is no longer humorous to my point 
of view.  Rather decadent, in a beaureaucratic erosion-of-ecosystems kind of 
way, and not suited to the questions of those writing without any 
Aristotelian ground to stand on.  The Europeans call for Proscenium VR, an 
absurd call for quiet over the engines of destruction.  We are dying, we are 
all of us dying, and we don't even know it, but that's OK.  Proscenium VR, 
even if we achieve it, won't bring back any authority at all to the US 
writer.  The muses, so to speak, aren't connected to us any more.  Or, you 
might say, they aren't connected to us yet.  In either respect, it is hard to 
reconcile any talk of democracy with the US.  

Therefore there is a lot of slumming in all cultural professions.  Go along, 
get along.  It is as if we were photocopying images of pieces of pre-arranged 
blueprints and selleing the copies bound and sealed.  No design, per se, is 
possible without communication and Wines has confirmed the crisis of 
communication in postmodern architecture (James Wines, De-Architecture, 
1987).  The slumming occurs as the larger group seeks to erase any sense of 
backstabbing among the chosen professionals.  Too much internal violence will 
cripple any organization.  Design becomes frozen in complacency and 
repetition, which is already evident in the advertisement as cultural 
recycler and hence as both sanitation and environmental protection.  The 
professions cannot afford to debate the issues of loss of democracy because 
they are committed to its preservation, not its resurrection.  The loss of 
democracy cannot even be discussed, much less addressed.  This is unfortunate 
precisely because it nullifies the Euro prescription and leaves the 
subsequent talk or toil even more dystopically absurd.  The proscenium will 
never come back, US democracy will never come back, US claim to cathartic art 
will never come back; these are lost conditions and can never be returned to.

The US Constitution proclaims "no slavery," in its announcement to refuse 
taxation without representation.  But profit is dependent on slavery and 
hence became a forbidden topic.  We cannot allow ourselves to be prevented 
from accenting the "no slavery" origins of the Constitution, especially when 
the great document of the twenty-first century--money itself--remains to be 
written.  The US constitution ought not to be read as "no writing," but as 
"no enslavement of non-writers by writers."  By reasoning like this we can 
arrive at a new image of democracy and even a vocabulary of image-formation 
that will resurrect the non-slavery spirit of the Constitution.  Of course 
the US government will not survive in its current two-party system (diverse 
only nominally); the new party will curtail expansion of US coercion until 
the no-slavery subtext of the Constitution becomes enforceable again.  

Good For Language

Theater is almost a frame for verbal expression.  It would be, were it not 
that the environment was fundamentally averse to any naive concepts like 
framing.  Theater isn't a frame at all, in fact.  This has been confirmed for 
musicians, particularly those who, like Petersburg's unhappy Yefimov, are 
unable to subscribe to a financial definition of ability.  Theater is more 
like an empty box.  Who would hang an empty box upon the wall?  Very few.  
Theater is more like Blake's virgin's ear, "a maelstorm to suck things in."  
A passing kind of phenomenon ill-suited to architectural interpretation, 
especially in times of artistic dormancy in the housing of institutions.  The 
proscenium is what is fought against, as we see in Alcestis, an unkind 
punishment averted only through blind luck.  

Heroism gone political--genius applied to social factors--brought the 
carefully described power of ancient Greece to a halt.  This is only apparent 
if one tries to resurrect ancient Greece as a living ecosystem.  As ruins 
only it confers the dubious honor of eternal proscenium.  Professions, 
thriving as they do on insoluble approaches to problems, pursue the 
ruin-recording of a dead democracy as if it were in itself a worthy 
occupation.  This is the error of backward thinking.  After all, you can't 
look at Greece through the image that killed it, can you?  That would be 
folly and inhospitable to say the least.  No, the only way to realize the 
life of Greece is to see its remnants in all living things.  Errors such as 
slavery are best relegated to obsolescence.  I am sure this is what Euripedes 
would tell us if he were alive today.  

Fortunately, the doctrine of no-slavery is a perfect compositional adornment 
for the reconstitution of money as such.  We need not convert heroism into 
politics, because it is within us to conceive of satisfying alternatives.  
Aristotle should be a lesson in organizational management, not in hygienic 
public relations.  The no-slavery doctrine, as if by a stroke of fate, does 
not suffer under modular composition.  The proscenium turns out not to rest 
on us like a curse after all.  The curse is to live without it, to see the 
fresh and new in every gorgeous day, and to walk unenvied by the gods.  "For 
he is a jealous god" won't ring as a threat anymore after the peaceful 
conversion from disastrous to sustainable production is made.  

If modular composition be our only gift, though reward in conscience only, it 
heralds the loss of many former securities.  Chief among these is the 
legitimacy of consent.  Slavery having evolved into taxation and further into 
consumption, consent is in ironic jeopardy.  For the disappearance of consent 
is the unhoped-for side effect of the cumulative value required to sustain 
expanding monetary institutions.  By conflating modular composition with 
universal privatisation of wealth, the ability to write money declines in 
proportion to the expansion of financial reach.  Consent disappears and the 
no-slavery potential of any extant legislation withers on the branch.  

The recombinant value of life, or in this case, the artist's profession, is 
lost with the enforcement of financial law.  Hence Yefimov dies in hope of a 
reconstituted talent-system that he himself never learned to express.  The 
martyrs do not leave indulgences but curses, and just as the sins of the 
fathers will be visited upon the sons even unto the fifth generation, the US 
will have to resurrect the modular composition of money very like the 
Russophile will have to observe the cognitive caricature of genius.  There's 
no other way out while law is necessary and immodular.  Life has to work with 
life, and not empty promises.  This tells us consent is almost a return to 
life; in matter of fact it is.  

Ignorance of how to express or register consent is the loss of life that 
urban financialism inflicts on the contemporary writer.  A wedding is a 
simple image of consent despite the bulk of evidence to confirm its use as a 
tool of slavery.  Perhaps it is significant that slavery now goes about 
dressed in the robes of marriage.  Marriage is one of several barriers to the 
writing of money in the twenty-first century.  Rather than trample an already 
ashen effigy, let us visualize some image of consent which does not arouse 
feelings of parricide.  The image ought to begin as innocuous and without 
taint as possible.  In fact, modular composition provides another mystically 
apropos option.  

For is it not clear to all that consent requires modular composition?  It's 
frightening our civics teachers haven't stumbled on this one.  Perhaps they 
fear the porous properties of a modular composition used on universities.  
Either way, the image of the wedding as modular can resurrect the previously 
extinct phenomenon of consent.  This resurrection will only be "artistic" if 
it relinqishes all ecosystemic goals to simple financial careerism.  An 
ecosystem of consent is a dangerous substance now bred only in labs.  
However, it must survive if the future is not to be surrendered to the 
coroner and the estate tax.  Consent, like genius, once out of the bottle 
will blot out that which has gone before.  The dangerous step must be taken.

End of part one.

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Refs:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/