sous rature

Absence Presence
Invisible and Visible
Logocentrism
Need for a centre
shopping circulation
roundabout
déviation
ice cream on concrete island

People are still having pyramid sex panic

People are still having sex

ISA
ISA
18.5%
slump
1 in 24
GRID control.
ADVENT of capital
don't ask, don't tell
the visible and the invisible
5 companies that own the world
i always feel like somebody's watching me
share this video within 24 hours, viral strategy
are you married? are you occupying wall street???
2.4 children, keeping up appearances, cash in the attic
epistemology of the closet, marxists killing their wives.

OOZE

fear of being touched

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/10/the_curse_of_tina_part_two.html

Health & Efficiency

CF We are very curious about the movement around the refusal of technology, the neo-ruralist population that migrates and leaves cities for political reasons, and this overall reactionary vision of progress as catastrophe. We are curious about it because we think the next rebellions will be ecologically based: they will take place when people see that their life is endangered by their habits and that, if the system doesn’t change, they won’t have any choice but to get sick and die. Alerts are always launched when it’s too late to react, but what kind of life could we invent by refusing poisons and aiming toward an abstract, ahistorical health? “Health” has today become an objective notion, a form of capital, but the definition of a healthy child or a healthy worker has changed enormously through time and is still different according to one’s country or social class.

The question that we ask ourselves is how could this refusal on the part of a few be more than just a moral gesture toward the many who can’t afford to be involved in this secession? In this kind of position, there is very little space left for the participation and transformation of the urban environment, and the only people who think about these questions do so in a green and reformistic way that won’t go very far since it’s often sponsored by the same companies that contribute to the disaster. We can’t imagine how it could be possible to envision a massive secession and a regressive refusal of technology—it seems like running away from the thing that is responsible for building us, or being morally ashamed by the lifestyle of our time. Pollution and catastrophes are a consequence of the religion of profit, of a certain vision of living creatures, and of a certain idea of pleasure and comfort. These are the things to change but, of course, we do not know how.

Tertiary

Heatsick 'Tertiary' (PAN 19) by •PAN•

Careering

http://www.ubu.com/film/ballard_unmade.html

Consumed.

The Visible and the Invisible

Door Policy

What a Feeling

Red Herring.

Keith
Sidney.

Vaporware
Vaporwear
M&S
Red Herring
Rosebud
Sigil



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyCCJ6B2WE

Cathedral of Light 2. // Cybernetic Light.

Rudi Gernreich

I want simple---electronic junk.

Scenes

Time Based

Stereopathy 3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

Algorithm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14306146

Interiors

Bedroom Ensemble, Claes Oldenburg. 1965.

On the involvement sensation of Heatsick

"An alienation of the motor car takes place if after driving a modern car for a long while we drove a old model T Ford. Suddenly we hear explosions once more; the motor works on the principle of explosion. We start feeling amazed that such a vehicle, indeed any vehicle not drawn by animal pwer, can move.; in short, we understand cars, by looking at them as something strange, new, as a triumph of engineering and to that extent something unnatural. Nature, with certainly embraces the motor car, is suddenly imbued with an element of unnaturalness, and form now on this is an indelible part of the concept of nature."

Brecht "Short Description of a New Technique of Acting".

Gould

One could say that every political action is virtuosic. Every political action, in fact, shares with virtuosity a sense of contingency, the absence of a "finished product," the immediate and unavoidable presence of others. On the one hand, all virtuosity is intrinsically political. Think about the case of Glenn Gould (Gould, The Glenn Gould Reader; and Schneider, Glenn Gould). This great pianist paradoxically, hated the distinctive characteristics of his activity as a performing artist; to put it another way, he detested public exhibition. Throughout his life he fought against the "political dimension" intrinsic to his profession. At a certain point Gould declared that he wanted to abandon the "active life," that is, the act of being exposed to the eyes of others (note: "active life" is the traditional name for politics). In order to make his own virtuosity non-political, he sought to bring his activity as a performing artist as close as possible to the idea of labor, in the strictest sense, which leaves behind extrinsic products. This meant closing himself inside a recording studio, passing off the production of records (excellent ones, by the way) as an "end product." In order to avoid the public-political dimension ingrained in virtuosity, he had to pretend that his masterly performances produced a defined object (independent of the performance itself). Where there is an end product, an autonomous product, there is labor, no longer virtuosity, nor, for that reason, politics.

Stage

Performing artists-dancers, play-actors,
--Page 53--

musicians, and the like — need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their `work,' and both depend upon others for the performance itself" (Arendt, Between Past and Future: 154).

Cash n Carry.

Frightened.

The absence of a substantial community and of any connected "special places" makes it such that the life of the stranger, the not-feeling-at-home, the bios xenikos, are unavoidable and lasting experiences. The multitude of those "without a home" places its trust in the intellect, in the "common places:" in its own way, then, it is a multitude of thinkers (even if these thinkers have only an elementary school education and never read a book, not even under torture).

And now a secondary observation. Sometimes we speak about the childishness of contemporary metropolitan forms of behavior. We speak about it in a deprecatory tone. Once we have agreed that such deprecation is foolish, it would be worth it to ask ourselves if there is something of consistency (in short, a kernel of truth) in the connection between metropolitan life and childhood. Perhaps childhood is the ontogenetic matrix of every subsequent search for protection from the blows of the surrounding world; it exemplifies the necessity of conquering a constituent sense of indecision, an original uncertainty (indecision and uncertainty which at times give way to shame, a feeling unknown to the non-human "baby" which knows from the beginning how to behave). The human baby protects itself by means of repetition (the same fairy tale, one more time, or the same game, or the same gesture). Repetition is understood as a protective strategy in the face of the shock caused by new and unexpected experiences. So, the problem looks like this: is it not true that the experience of the baby is transferred into adult experience, into the prevalent forms of behavior at the center of the great urban aggregates (described by Simmel, Benjamin, and so many others)? The childhood experience of repetition is prolonged even into adulthood, since it constitutes the principal form of safe haven in the absence of solidly established customs, of substantial communities, of a developed and complete ethos. In traditional societies (or, if you like, in the experience of the "people"), the repetition which is so dear to babies gave way to more complex and articulated forms of protection: to ethos; that is to say, to the usages and customs, to the habits which constitute the base of the substantial communities. Now, in the age of the multitude, this substitution no longer occurs. Repetition, far from being replaced, persists. It was Walter Benjamin who got the point. He dedicated a great deal of attention to childhood, to childish games, to the love which a baby has for repetition; and together with this, he identified the sphere in which new forms of perception are created with the technical reproducibility of a work of art (Benjamin, Illuminations). So then, there is some thing to believe in the idea that there is a connection between these two facets of thought. Within the possibility of technical
--Page 40--

reproduction, the child's request for "one more time" comes back again, strengthened; or we might say that the need for repetition as a form of refuge surfaces again. The publicness of the mind, the conspicuousness of "common places," the general intellect — these are also manifested as forms of the reassuring nature of repetition. It is true: today's multitude has something childish in it: but this something is as serious as can be.

Hyper

Being a stranger, that is to say "not-feeling-at-home," is today a condition common to many, an inescapable and shared condition. So then, those who do not feel at home, in order to get a sense of orientation and to protect themselves, must turn to the "common places," or to the most general categories of the linguistic intellect; in this sense, strangers are always thinkers. As you see, I am inverting the direction of the analogy: it is not the thinkers who become strangers in the eyes of the community to which the thinkers belong, but the strangers, the multitude of those "with no home," who are absolutely obliged to attain the status of thinkers. Those "without a home" have no choice but to behave like thinkers: not in order for them to learn something about biology or advanced mathematics, but because they turn to the most essential categories of the abstract intellect in order to protect themselves from the blows of random chance, in order to take refuge from contingency and from the unforeseen.

Paradise Garage

3.2. Common places and "general intellect"

In order to have a better understanding of the contemporary notion of multitude, it will be useful to reflect more profoundly upon which essential resources might be the ones we can count on for protection from the dangerousness of the world. I propose to identify these resources by means of an Aristotelian concept, a linguistic concept (or, better yet, one pertaining to the art of rhetoric): the "common places," the topoi koinoi.

When we speak today of "common places," we mean, for the most part, stereotypical expressions, by now devoid of any meaning, banalities, lifeless metaphors ("morning is golden-mouthed"), trite linguistic conventions. Certainly this was not the original meaning of the expression "common places." For Aristotle (Rhetoric, I, 2, 1358a) the topoi koinoi are the most generally valid logical and linguistic forms Of all of our discourse
--Page 35--

(let us even say, the skeletal structure of it); they allow for the existence of every individual expression we use and they give structure to these expressions as well. Such "places" are common because no one can do without them (from the refined orator to the drunkard who mumbles words hard to understand, from the business person to the politician). Aristotle points out three of these "places": the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, and the category of reciprocity ("If I am her brother, she is my sister").

These categories, like every true skeletal structure, never appear as such. They are the woof of the "life of the mind," but they are an inconspicuous woof. What is it, then, that can actually be seen in the forms of our dis course? The "special places," as Aristotle calls them (topoi idioi). These are ways of saying something — metaphors, witticisms, allocutions, etc. — which are appropriate in one or another sphere of associative life. "Special places" are ways of saying/thinking something which end up being appropriate at a local political party headquarters, or in church, or in a university classroom, or among sports fans of a certain team. And so on. Whether it be the life of the city or its ethos (shared customs), these are articulated by means of "special places" which are different from one another and often incompatible. A certain expression might function in one situation and not in another; a certain type of argumentation might succeed in convincing one audience, but not another, etc.

The transformation with which we must come to terms can be summarized in this way: in today's world, the "special places" of discourse and of argumentation are perishing and dissolving, while immediate visibility is being gained by the "common places," or by generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse. This means that in order to get a sense of orientation in the world and to protect ourselves from its dangers, we can not rely on those forms of thought, of reasoning, or of discourse which have their niche in one particular context or another. The clan of sports fans, the religious community, the branch of a political party, the workplace: all of these "places" obviously continue to exist, but none of them is sufficiently characterized or characterizing as to be able to offer us a wind rose, or a standard of orientation, a trustworthy compass, a unity of specific customs, of specific ways of saying/ thinking things. Everywhere, and in every situation, we speak/ think in the same way, on the basis of logical-linguistic constructs which are as fundamental as they are broadly general. An ethical-rhetorical topography is disappearing. The "common places" (these inadequate principles of the "life of the mind") arc moving to the forefront: the connection between more and less,
--Page 37--

the opposition of opposites, the relationship of reciprocity, etc. These "common places," and these alone, are what exist in terms of offering us a standard of orientation, and thus, some sort of refuge from the direction in which the world is going.

Being no longer inconspicuous, but rather having been flung into the forefront, the "common places" are the apotropaic resource of the contemporary multitude. They appear on the surface, like a toolbox containing things which are immediately useful. What else are they, these "common places," if not the fundamental core of the "life of the mind," the epicenter of that linguistic (in the strictest sense of the word) animal which is the human animal?

Thus, we could say that the "life of the mind" becomes, in itself, public. We turn to the most general categories in order to equip ourselves for the most varied specific situations, no longer having at our disposal any "special" or sectorial ethical-communicative codes. The feeling of not-feeling-at-home and the preeminence of the "common places" go hand in hand. The intellect as such, the pure intellect, becomes the concrete compass wherever the substantial communities fail, and we are always exposed to the world in its totality. The intellect, even in its most rarefied functions, is presented as something common and conspicuous. The "common places" are no longer an unnoticed background, they are no longer concealed by the springing forth of "special places." The "life of the mind" is the One which lies beneath the mode of being of the multitude. Let me repeat, and I must insist upon this: the movement to the forefront on the part of the intellect as such, the fact that the most general and abstract linguistic structures are becoming instruments for orienting one's own conduct-this situation, in my opinion, is one of the conditions which define the contemporary multitude.

At Home He's A Tourist

3.1. Beyond the coupling of the terms fear/anguish

The dialectic of dread and refuge lies at the center of the "Analytic of the Sublime," a section of the Critique of judgment (Kant, Book II, Part I). According to Kant, when I observe a terrifying snowslide while I myself am in safety, I am filled with a pleasing sense of security mixed together, however, with the heightened perception of my own helplessness. Sublime is precisely the word for this twofold feeling which is partially contradictory. With my starting point being the empirical protection which I have benefited from by chance, I am made to ask myself what it is that could guarantee an absolute and systematic protection for my existence. That is to say, I ask myself what it is that might keep me safe, not from one given danger or another, but from the risk inherent in my very being in this world. Where is it that one can find unconditional refuge? Kant answers: in the moral "I", since it is precisely there that one finds something of the non-contingent, or of the realm above the mundane. The transcendent moral law protects my person in an absolute way, since it places the value which is due to it above finite existence and its numerous dangers. The feeling of the sublime (or at least one of its incarnations) consists of taking the relief I feel for having enjoyed a fortuitous place of refuge and transforming it into a search for the unconditional security which only the moral "I" can guarantee.

I have mentioned Kant for one specific reason: because he offers a very clear model of the world in which the dialectic of dread/refuge has been conceived in the last two centuries. There is a sharp bifurcation here: on one hand a particular danger (the snowslide, the malevolent attentions of the Department of the Interior, the loss of one's job, etc.); on the other
--Page 32--

hand, there is the absolute danger connected to our very being in this world. Two forms of protection (and of security) correspond to these two forms of risk (and of dread). In the presence of a real disaster, there are concrete remedies (for example, the mountain refuge when the snowslide comes crashing down). Absolute danger, instead, requires protection from... the world itself. But let us note that the "world" of the human animal can not be put on the same level as the environment of the non-human animal, or rather, of the circumscribed habitat in which the latter animal finds its way around perfectly well on the basis of specialized instincts. There is always something indefinite about the world; it is laden with contingencies and surprises; it is a vital context which is never mastered once and for all; for this reason, it is a source of permanent insecurity. While relative dangers have a "first and last name," absolute dangerousness has no exact face and no unambiguous content.

The Kantian distinction between the two types of risk and security is drawn out in the distinction, traced by Heidegger, between fear and anguish. Fear refers to a very specific fact, to the familiar snowslide or to the loss of one's job; anguish, instead, has no clear cause which sparks it off. In the pages of Heidegger's Being and Time (Heidegger, S 40) anguish is provoked purely and simply by our being exposed to the world, by the uncertainty and indecision with which our relation to this world manifests itself. Fear is always circumscribed and nameable; anguish is ubiquitous, not connected to distinctive causes; it can survive in any given moment or situation. These two forms of dread (fear and anguish), and their corresponding antidotes, lend themselves to a historical-social analysis.

The distinction between circumscribed fear and unspecified fear is operative where there are substantial communities constituting a channel which is capable of directing our praxis and collective experience. It is a channel made of repetitive, and therefore comfortable, usages and customs, made of a consolidated ethos. Fear situates itself inside the community, inside its forms of life and communication. Anguish, on the other hand, makes its appearance when it distances itself from the community to which it belongs, from its shared habits, from its well-known "linguistic games," and then penetrates into the vast world. Outside of the community, fear is ubiquitous, unforeseeable, constant; in short, anguish-ridden. The counterpart of fear is that security which the community can, in principle, guarantee; the counterpart of anguish (or of its showing itself to the world as such) is the shelter procured from religious experience.

So, the dividing line between fear and anguish, between relative dread and absolute dread, is precisely what has failed. The concept of "people," even
--Page 33--

with its many historical variations, is closely bound to the clear separation between a habitual "inside" and an unknown and hostile "outside." The concept of "multitude," instead, hinges upon the ending of such a separation. The distinction between fear and anguish, just like the one between relative shelter and absolute shelter, is groundless for at least three reasons.

The first of these reasons is that one can not speak reasonably of substantial communities. In today's world, impulsive changes do not overturn traditional and repetitive forms of life; what they do is to come between individuals who by now have gotten used to no longer having fixed customs, who have gotten used to sudden change, who have been exposed to the unusual and to the unexpected. What we have, then, at every moment and no matter what, is a reality which is repeatedly innovated. It is therefore not possible to establish an actual distinction between a stable "inside" and an uncertain and telluric "outside." The permanent mutability of the forms of life, and the training needed for confronting the unchecked uncertainty of life, lead us to a direct and continuous relation with the world as such, with the imprecise context of our existence.

What we have, then, is a complete overlapping of fear and anguish. If I lose my job, of course I am forced to confront a well defined danger, one which gives rise to a specific kind of dread; but this real danger is immediately colored by an unidentifiable anguish. It is fused together with a more general disorientation in the presence of the world in which we live; it is identified with the absolute insecurity which lives in the human animal, in as much as the human animal is lacking in specialized instincts. One might say: fear is always anguish-ridden; circumscribed danger always makes us face the general risk of being in this world. If the substantial communities once hid or muffled our relationship with the world, then their dissolution now clarifies this relationship for us: the loss of one's job, or the change which alters the features of the functions of labor, or the loneliness of metropolitan life-all these aspects of our relationship with the world assume many of the traits which formerly belonged to the kind of terror one feels outside the walls of the community. We would need to find a new term here, different from "fear" or "anguish," a term which would take the fusion of these two terms into account. What comes to mind for me is the term uncanny. But it would take too much time here to justify the use of this term (Virno, Mondanita: 65-7).

Let us move on to the second critical approach. According to traditional explanations, fear is a public feeling, while anguish pertains to the individual who has been isolated by a fellow human being. In contrast to fear (which is provoked by a danger pertaining virtually to many members
--Page 34--

of the community and which can be resisted with the help of others), the anguished feeling of being lost evades the public sphere and is concerned only with the so-called interior nature of the individual. This type of explanation has become completely unreliable. For certain reasons, in fact, it must be overturned. Today, all forms of life have the experience of "not feeling at home," which, according to Heidegger, would be the origin of anguish. Thus, there is nothing more shared and more common, and in a certain sense more public, than the feeling of "nor feeling at home." No one is less isolated than the person who feels the fearful pressure of the indefinite world. In other words, that feeling in which fear and anguish converge is immediately the concern of many. One could say, perhaps, that "not feeling at home" is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept of the multitude, while the separation between the "inside" and the "outside," between fear and anguish, is what earmarked the Hobbesian (and not only Hobbesian) idea of people. The people are one, because the substantial community collaborates in order to sedate the fears which spring from circumscribed dangers. The multitude, instead, is united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home," from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.

Now let us consider the third and last critical observation, perhaps the most radical. It concerns the same dread/refuge coupling. What is mistaken in this coupling is the idea that we first experience a sense of dread and, only then, we set ourselves the task of procuring a source of refuge. These stimulus-response or cause-effect models are completely out of place. Rather, one should believe that the original experience would be that of procuring some means of refuge. Above all, we protect ourselves; then, when we are intent on protecting ourselves, we focus on identifying the dangers with which we may have to concern ourselves. Arnold Gehlen used to say that survival, for the human animal, was an oppressive task, and that in order to confront this task we need, above all, to mitigate the disorientation which results from the fact that we are not in possession of a fixed "environment" (Gehlen, Man: His Nature). Within one's living context, this groping attempt to cope with life is basic. Even as we seek to have a sense of orientation which will allow us to protect ourselves, we also perceive, often in retrospect, various forms of danger.

There is more to the story. Not only does danger define itself starting with the original search for refuge, but, and this is the truly crucial point, danger manifests itself for the most part as a specific form of refuge. If we look carefully, we see that danger consists of a horrifying strategy of salvation (one need only think of the cult of some ethnic "enclave"). "The dialectic between danger and refuge is resolved, in the end, in the dialectic
--Page 35--

between alternative forms of protection. In contrast to the sources of refuge to be feared we find the second rank sources of refuge, those which are capable of serving as an antidote to the poisons of the former sources of refuge. From the historical and sociological point of view, it is not difficult to see that evil expresses itself precisely as a horrible response to the risk inherent in this world, as a dangerous search for protection: we need only think about the propensity for entrusting oneself to a sovereign (either in the flesh, or one of those operetta types, it doesn't matter), or about the feverish elbowing to get to the top in one's career, or about xenophobia. We could also say: being truly anguish-ridden is just a certain way of confronting anguish. Let me repeat: what is decisive here is the choice between different strategies of reassurance, the opposition between extremely different forms of refuge. For this reason, let me say in passing, it is foolish either to overlook the theme of security, or (and this is even more foolish) to brandish it without further qualification (not recognizing the true danger in this very theme, or in certain of its types).

The experience of the contemporary (or, if your prefer, of the postFordist) multitude is primarily rooted in this modification of the dialectic of dread-refuge. The many, in as much as they are many, are those who share the feeling of "not feeling at home" and who, in fact, place this experience at the center of their own social and political praxis. Furthermore, in the multitude's mode of being, one can observe with the naked eye a continuous oscillation between different, sometimes diametrically opposed, strategies of reassurance (an oscillation which the people, however, do not understand, since they are an integral part of the sovereign States).

Grammar of the Multitude.

We must ferociously attack

Public/ Private

The contemporary multitude is composed neither of "citizens" nor of "producers;" it occupies a middle region between "individual and collective;" for the multitude, then, the distinction between "public" and "private" is in no way validated. And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state. While one does not wish to sing out-of-tune melodies in the post-modern style ("multiplicity is good, unity is the disaster to beware of"), it is necessary, however, to recognize that the multitude does not clash with the One; rather, it redefines it. Even the many need a form of unity, of being a One. But here is the point: this unity is no longer the State; rather, it is language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise. Unity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather, it is taken for granted, as a background or a necessary precondition. The many must be thought of as the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience. Thus, in a symmetric manner, we must conceive of a One which, far from being something conclusive, might be thought of as the base which authorizes differentiation or which allows for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many.

Grammar of the Multitude 2.2 P.V

Coming Bodies

In the 1920s when the process of capitalist commodification began to invest the human body, observers who were by no means favorable to the phenomenon could not help but notice a positive aspect to it, as if they were confronted with the corrupt text of a prophecy that went beyond the limits of the capitalist mode of production and were faced with the task of deciphering it. This is what gave rise to Siegfried Kracauer's
observations on the "girls" and Walter Benjamin's reflections on the decay
of the aura.
The commodification of the human body, while subjecting it to the iron laws of massification and exchange value, seemed at the
same time to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had
marked it for millennia. Breaking away from the double chains of biological
destiny and individual biography, it took its leave of both the inarticulate
cry of the tragic body and the dumb silence 'of the comic body, and thus
appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated.
The epochal process of the emancipation of the human body from its theo-
logical foundations was thus accomplished in the dances of the "girls," in
the advertising images, and in the gait of fashion models. This process had
already been imposed at an industrial level when, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the invention of lithography and photography encour-
aged the inexpensive distribution of pornographic images: Neither generic
nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form, the
body now became something truly whatever.

The Coming Community-G.A

"You're acting right now"

Public Detachment

3.3. Publicness without a public sphere

We have said that the multitude is defined by the feeling of not-feeling-athome, just as it was defined by the consequent familiarity with "common places," with the abstract intellect. We need to add, now, that the dialectic dread-safe haven is rooted precisely in this familiarity with the abstract intellect. The public and shared character of the "life of the mind" is colored with ambivalence: it is also, in and of itself, the host to negative possibilities, to formidable figures. The public intellect is the unifying base from which there can spring forth either forms of ghastly protection or forms of protection capable of achieving a real sense of comfort (according to the degree in which, as we have said, they safeguard us from the former forms of protection). The public intellect which the multitude draws upon is the point of departure for opposing developments. When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-public public sphere, to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty.

My thesis, in extremely concise form, is this: if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here is the negative side — the evil, if you wish — of the experience of the multitude. Freud in the essay "The Uncanny" (Freud, Collected Papers) shows how the extrinsic power of thought can take on anguishing features. He says that people who are ill, for whom thoughts have an exterior, practical and immediately operative power, fear becoming conditioned and overwhelmed by others. It is the same situation, moreover, which is brought about in a spiritualist seance in which the participants are bound together in a fused relationship which seems to nullify every trace of individual identity. So then, the belief in the "omnipotence of thought," studied by Freud, and the extreme situation of the spiritualist seance exemplify clearly what publicness without a public sphere can become; what general intellect can become when it is not articulated within a political space.

Grammar of the Multitude P.V

Species of Space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14488681

Bacon

'l always think of myself not so much as a painter
but as a medium for accident and chance.

A thousand cards to play.

I play the street life
Because there's no place I can go
Street life
It's the only life I know
Street life
And there's a thousand cards to play
Street life
Until you play your life away

You never people see
Just do you wanna be
And every night you shine
Just like a superstar
The type of life that's played
A temptin' masquerade
You dress you walk you talk
You're who you think you are

Street life
You can run away from time
Street life
For a nickel, for a dime
Street life
But you better not get old
Street life
Or you're gonna feel the cold

There's always love for sale
A grown up fairy tale
Prince charming always smiles
Behind a silver spoon
And if you keep it young
Your song is always sung
Your love will pay your way beneath the silver moon

Street life, street life, street life, oh street life
Hmm, Yeah, oh

I play the street life
Because there's no place I can go
Street life
It's the only life I know
Street life
There's a thousand cards to play
Street life
Until you play your life away
Oh !

Street life, street life, street life, oh street life...

Transparency.

In contemporary art transparency is a kind of foil overlaying secrecy; it does not work. From the hidden bling of the rich to the routine self-critical utterances of the artist or museum; the power grouping makes everything transparent except its own key relationships. For example Liam Gillick, a figure from the 90s who prefigured some of the problems discussed here. His aluminium and plexiglass structures embody notions of discursive space and democratic negotiation, yet these are shown in galleries and institutions whose direction he influences through long term friendships with curators. These synergies are not transparent but invisible. And the same could be said about the not fully publicised friendship between myself and Isabelle Graw of Texte zur Kunst. This phenomenon exists in the top levels of government and the media as well. Conservative journalist Peter Oborne's recent book The Political Class argues that a professional elite has embedded itself in UK government circles and "the broadcasting and newspaper media - which so often talk of transparency - [and] are institutionally more opaque than parliament".(5) A language of transparency is used but, under a populist front, a small group holds all the cards. This network is often based on friendships, at the crossroads between everyday life and work, and what Oborne describes as " the emergence of a marketplace of influence and access".(6) Having a closed groupuscle, previously the Baader-Meinhof or Situationist cell model, can also be seen as a potential maffia and deeply conservative.

The Tail that wags the Dog.

It's more fun to compute.

Fine musical instruments are extremely sensitive, and this sensitivity offers to the performer a subtle control over the sound. Not exactly control though, since the performer shapes but does not finally determine the sound. To shape the sound requires an ongoing mechanism of feedback so that the instrument places not only the controls of the dominion of the player but also puts the player in direct contact witht he sonic surfaces of the instrument. Subtlety is possible because the player hears, from some small distance, the sound produced by the instrument but also because he experiences in his body and immediately the vibrations of the instrument's parts. One does not simply adjust one's playing according to the sound produced but also according to the feel of the instrument against one's flesh, the sensation of the string pinioned under the finger against the fretboard, the back pressure exerted by the column of air in a trumpet varying against one's lips, tongue, and mouth cavity, the vibrating reed in the oboe that makes one's cheek vibrate. These feedback mechanisms preclude a wholly preconceived performance; the player's goals are always provisional, only starting points that set the instrument to vibrating. Ends are never determined, beforehand but are produced from a complex negotiation between player and instrument.

82,3 Sound and Digits.


ADD N TO (X) - METAL FINGERS IN MY BODY von electro

An activity without an end product: the performance of a pianist or of a dancer does not leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, capable of continuing after the performance has ended. An activity which requires the presence of others: the performance [Author uses the English word here] makes sense only if it is seen or heard. It is obvious that these two characteristics are inter-related: virtuosos need the presence of an audience precisely because they are not producing an end product, an object which will circulate through the world once the activity has ceased. Lacking a specific extrinsic product, the virtuoso has to rely on witnesses.
From Aristotle to Glenn Gould. P.V

Mesmerising

http://hypnosisschool.org/hypnotic/history-of-hypnosis.php

Stereopathy 2

Peirce-quincuncial-bright-lines.gif

Women in Love.

Stereopathy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate

As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the same idea as was used decades later to produce digital computers

Briefe an Ed

im just reading the sound ideas book
and thinking about the Turing Machine from Henrik.
picture 4 and 5
http://www.ludlow38.org/index.php?/archive/henrik-olesen/

It's really good.
I'm thinking about how Technology is straight.
Binary.
No INTERSEX.
http://www.monopol-magazin.de/fotostrecke/artikel/20103030/Warum-musste-Alan-Turing-sterben.html?seite=12

It s like Stereopathy, the former title that i got from Adorno.

I guess I'm using acting as a form of schizoanalysis
to unlock the binary forms of behaviour.

My keyboard is a tool to unlock the behaviour-loop
working against/ with (more binary)
repetition loops
defining behaviour.

Master/ Slave Relationships.

Good Sex Illustrated: Tony Duvert.
Lordship & Bondage; Phenomenology of the Spirit: Hegel
Genet
Discipline & Punish.
Leo Bersani: Is the Rectum a Grave?

184BPM SHANGAAN OR BUST! (Speed as ecstatic force, Stereolab DJ 2003)

This week, i finally encountered the full force that is the Shangaan Electro allstars live at Berghain. Suffice to say they blew my socks off.

The thrill was akin to being on the Waltzers, an endless need to go faster, increasing the visceral force. People were invited onstage to lose their shit for a minute, instilling the spirit of Karaoke via dancing, showing us all that it's quite okay to let go.
A used car salesman, seducing the crowd to want MORE, to attain the G Force state of 184BPM. As we approached this state, my brain started whirring and i was transported back to when i saw Stereolab (?!) DJ about ten years ago at All Tomorrow's Parties festival. they started with loose funk, which increased with tempo, gradually introducing more free sax and incomprehensible rhythms, climaxing in a trance that was only shaken having taken a swift loo break, and returning to see the audience in a full on trance, dancing to the most loose and lucid rhythm commanding you to ask how the hell this was achieved. People were whirled up into a frenzy and now that the beat was beyond logic, were in free fall down a mountain, digging their heels into the dancefloor so as to gain a grip, yet still looking like bikes speeding down a side road of the roughest cobblestones.
I was astounded.

Cultural References

The Width of a Circle (Eternal Return)- Biography and Schizophrenia

1. The tonality of the soul is a fluctation of intensity.

2. In order for it to be communicable, the intensity must take itself as an object, and thus turn back on itself.

3. In turning back on itself, the intensity interprets itself. But how can it interpret itself? By becoming a counterweight to itself; for this, the intensity must divide, separate from itself, and come back together. Now this is what happens to the
intensity in what could be called moments of rise and fall; however, it is always the
same fluctuation, a wave (Onde) in the concrete sense ( we might note, in passing, the
importance of the spectacle of sea waves in Nietzsche's contemplations)

4. But does an interpretation presuppose the search for a 'signification'?
Rise and fall: these are designations, and nothing else. Is there any signification
beyond this observation of a rise and fall? Intensity never has any meaning than
that of being an intensity.In itself, the intensity seems to have no meaning.
What is a meaning? What is the agent of meaning?

5. The agent of meaning, and this of signification, once again seems to be the intensity, depending on its various fluctuations. If intensity by itself has no meaning
other than that of being an intensity, how can it be the agent of signification, or be signified as this or that tonality of the soul? We asked above how it could interpret itself, and we answered that, in its rising and fallings, it had to act as a counterweight. But this was nothing more than a simple observation. How then does it acquire a meaning, and how is meaning constituted in the intensity? Precisely by turning back on itself, even in a new fluctuation! By turning back on itself, by repeating and , as it were , imitating itself, it becomes a sign.

6. But a sign is first of all the trace of a fluctuation of intensity. If a sign retains its meaning, it is because the degree of intensity coincides with it; it signifies only through a new afflux of intensity, which in a certain manner joins up with its first trace.

7. But a sign is not only a trace of a fluctuation. It can also mark an absence of intensity- and here too, a new afflux is necessary, if only to signify this absence!

P.K The Experience of the Eternal Return

"..All of this at the last i dimly saw, but an autobiography is an obituary in self form with the last installment missing. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing- still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave hurt and hungry..."

Q.C The Naked Civil Servant

Modern

“In my music there is nothing to understand. It is so superficial that I can’t find anything to say,” Cacciapaglia writes in the liner notes, presumably in character as Steel. “My music is ingenuous, there is nothing inside it and it is for this reason, that I like it. It can be listened to while sipping tea, watching television, or while speaking with a friend. Even in a moment when one has nothing to do or is bored, the music can be listened to attentively and millions of little changes can be discovered. It is certainly not the ideal music; it is just one type of music.

“The computer has been indispensable. It is a marvelously poetic instrument that evokes the beauty of the new technologic environment and it gives everything a great artificial taste of grand actuality. This music can be utilized in many ways and listened to by different people, which is what makes me happy because I want it to be accessible to everyone. I would like it to be even more simplistic, in fact, and my aspiration is to uncover it on a weightless day – so weightless, in fact, as to have it fly away like a balloon.”

Naked and Civil

"As soon as i put on my uniform, the rest of my life solidified round me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was given the sack; my playground, any café or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on."

Carceral Drone

"But it is not on the fringes of society and through successive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more closely placed insertions, under even more insistent surveillance, by an accumulation of disciplinary coercion
...By operating at every level of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level form which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished."

M.F

Having just read 2 Foucault books back to back, i am feeling increasingly nauseated by social networking sites. It really preys into your social/peer fears and insecurities and you know it is abhorrent, yet you can't help logging in anbd seeing what's going on.
In a way it's easier to watch the world from a distance, but it is total Order of Things meets Discipline & Punish. Societal Masochism in a nut shell. Also, when installing a mail programme on my computer i had to process every email i have sent since i opened an account in 2002. that was WEIRD. I subconsciously wanted to do this as a way of processing the years since my dad died, seeing what i have done and how i have progressed. Upon doing this, I was VERY freaked out and have consequently had v crazy mood swings. Also now that therapy is going to finally finish, i have been having lots of thought of the void and the finite. More just hungover reflections (which is my way out of these downpoints) but still, it was somewhat therapeutic to act like a machine, processing your past, getting rid of baggage.

I've been thinking a lot recently about my relationship to machines, specifically my casio keyboard and my macbook. i play the same patterns each time, every day.
stereopathy. same internal conflict of john cage free thoughts vs drone repitition.
which is more liberatory? chance/drone prison or self sabotage from something being formed/ meditation.
Machine factory repitition- modern age.
Drone; what a funny term for music. Drone bees, oh you re such a drone. It doesn't really have positive connotations does it?

My blood circulation,
loop circulation,
circulation of capital
information circulation
nietzsche eternal return mental illness
cycles of abuse
being out of the loop

underground networks
is the ring bahn/circle line conceptually the best one?

Der Radionist (swallowed up by image and industry)

Today i went to the Hamburger Bahnhof. I felt nauseous. Horst Ademeit's obsessive documentation about how society is pushing him to the limits and damaging the body (personal and societal) through secret radiation, Corey Archangel lost in the ecstasy of technological communcations and then the flip side of limits of land/nature art and then mental fluxus limits through video and identity construction. I was left gasping for air.
I seriously felt giddy. My body felt like it was falling apart. Tho the based in Berlin parts was actually very nice, and i felt like i could breathe again.

after some food at Hauptbahnhof (more insanity), we took off for the Neue National Galerie for the Moderne Zeiten period. I always hated Expressionismus. Maybe because of its urge for primitivism and "real", made me think of heterosoc and male hysteria ugh! but recently i've been really obsessed by the garishg colours of Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff and even the Brücke and Blaue Reiter. what the fuck is going on? who cares. I'm into it, and that s what matters. and what's more i can get enough of the fucking stuff. I blame, seeing the Merlin Carpenter expressionism painting from 1990, then getting curious about all the neo expressionism of rainer Fetting etc, loving all the faggy playfulness and roleplay and irony in general. This made me turn back to Kirchner etc in general. Indeed when i was in Hamburg Kunsthalle recently for the Warburg exh, i had a total Damascus road experience over Self Portrait with Model by Kirchner.

I mean, how fucking garish and horrible is that?! Yet just like Dix, i became infactuated with how ugly it was, and how they got away with it at the time (well, that comment goes more for Dix, and his society people portraits). I started to see Dix painting the queer underground bars of Eldorado, yeah! no more hetero anxiety, i'm resolving my Against Nature/ expressionism conflict once and for all!


So back to Der Radionist... I was very attracted as to how this painting is paralleling how i feel with regards to my relationship to the Internet.
I spend so much time in circulation of images and writing and meditating on and about my time on the internet, in real time. In the painting, a paraplegic unable to witness his beloved opera, can new revel avoid his loss thanks to the new found technology of the radio. Holding his liberetto, he can feel as if he is there. I also felt that way when i was reading the information plakate today in HB, and thinking of how different my experience would be if i didn't project my imagination of how the piece would end and how i had codified it in my mind beforehand, what if instead, i had simply sat down without any information and allowed it to wash over me, in real time instead.
Maybe that's why i felt so giddy in the place. I also wonder about what a friend once said about how the internet plays a role in nostalgia.
Anyways, i watching der Radionist, i felt like i was at the centre of hallucinogenic society, a bit like what Dan Graham calls the just past. Experiencing something in real time and also meditating over it, so that you are actually concetrating on something that has just passed. How much time do we spend in the present? How much time are we really connecting to an event/ experience? I felt totally connected to this painting, even tho it is over 70 years old, and the moment has definitely passed!
I then moved swiftly on to Charlie Chaplin and the Modern times clip, which i suspect i had subconsciously influenced my decision to revisit the NNG. I needed some comfort in seeing someone else being literally swallowed up by modernity. I could then feel a part! Der Radionist taps into that feeling of our essential loneliness in the world and questions of how we mediate and interact in our environments. How we want to feel a part of something, whilst being simultaneuosly comfortably numb in our bedroom. Why social networking has exploded onto our lives, manipulating our fear of being left out and giving a space in the privatised sphere of neo liberal society. Mutual drowning and floating in information. Crushed by the wheels of industry.

Intersex

Eldorado was a well-known transvestite bar that flourished in Berlin in the 1920s. It was frequented not only by transvestites and homosexuals but by artists, writers and the beau monde of the day. It became fashionable to enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of mingling with society's outsiders, as Peter Sachse wrote in the Berliner journal in 1927. "The latest rage of Berlin "Society" is to spend an evening in the Eldorado. Over there sits a well-known director of a major bank, just there is a gentleman from the Reichstag and a lot of theatre and film people ... Those who are here for the first time and are curious play a game, trying to guess who out of the "special" clientele is really a "lady" and who is really a "man". They don't always guess right. The techniques of dressing up; doing one's hair and make-up have achieved undreamt of perfection.'

Escape from Discussion Island

Marcel Broodhaers
Andrea Fraser
Hans Haacke

Is it too Deleuzian or Nietzchean to take care of the fact that material bodies are connected to immaterial labour, and that the laptop produces a particular life form?
A slightly hunched body connected to separation, strange to itself, happily amputated, monitored, Facebooking. The new fictions will arise from the unfortunate posture , somehow. While extending the discursive situation and its ever more efficient networks, these fictions will perhaps attempt to delay and defer work under conditions that always already put communicativity to work. Because these practices are networked and somehow public, and always mobilized in flux, communication will be constantly confused with something like a utopian promise. Productive communities and their formal freedoms will be encouraged and swiftly commodified, tracked and mined by marketers. They will be constantly formalized and codified. So the new fictions will have to learn to invent new ways of transforming what mobilizes them into opportunities for immobility.
How can parrhesia happen as a connexionist practice, in a molecular world where power is not located somewhere up above, but is activated everywhere within the most everyday relations between subjects and in the discursive flows that multiply them?

Lyres

Exchanging

"It is conceivable in fact, that the operation that pledges the money is guaranteed by the marketable value of the material from which it is made; or, on the other hand, by another quantity of merchandise, exterior to it, but linked to it by collective consent or the will of the prince. it is this second solution that Law chose, on account of the rarity of precious metal and the fluctuations in its market value. He thought that one could circulate paper money backed by landed property: in which case it was simply a matter of issuing 'banknotes mortgaged against lands and due to be redeemed by annual payments..., these notes will be exchanged, like minted coin, for the value printed on them' As we know, Law was obliged to renounce this technique in his French experiment and subsequently provided surety for his money by means of a trading company. The failure of his enterprise in no way affected the validity of the money-pledge theory that made it possible, but that had also made possible all reflection of any kind on money, even that opposed to Law's conceptions. And when a stable metallic money was established in 1726, the pledge was required to be provided by the actual substance of the coins. What ensured the exchangeability of money, it was decided, was the market value of the metal to be found in it; and Turgot was to criticise Law for having believed that

money is only a sign of wealth, a sign whose credit is based upon the mark of the prince. The mark is on each coin only in order to certify its weight and title...It is therefore as merchandise that money is, not the sign, but the common measure of all other merchandise...
Gold derives its price from its rarity, and far from its being an evil that it should be employed at the same time as both merchandise and measure, these two uses maintain its price"

The Order of Things.

The Moustaches of

LHOOQ
Magnus Hirschfeld
Karl Marx
Groucho Marx

Architectural Project #1

Build a installation replicating a prison phone scenario.
Maybe cut out small circular holes into the glass.
Contamination.
Viral
Glory Hole
Money Circulation (Bank Teller)
2 phones
Interaction (mediation of internet)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_umlxE79R4&NR=1

Poem for today

two guys, wearing velvet jackets, smoking rollies, playing acoustic guitar.

Nuclear Sounds 2011-1998 Presentation of the Steering Wheel in Everyday Traffic Line

Nuclear Family
Nuclear Age
if AIDS don't get you the warheads will.
Careering your cum all over the flyover
Marriage of semtex and production line.
Fine Wine
browse the Helvetica
CAFE OTO.
Upwardly mobile
Time Travel.
Doctors w/o Borders, Waterstones and
Andrew Lloyd Webber enterprises.
The Line of Beauty
absorbed by Cathode Narcissus.

2011-2004-1995

Getting on the train
bypass the
A1073
Andy's Records
CD1+2
first week of release
Reflections Cafe
Panoramic view
into mirror terrasse
House of the Borderland
secret enclave
fog of patchouli
and indecipherable utterings
from beneath
hippie beards
decorated pedestrian underpass
Berlin Wall
Butler's Wharf
riverside concrete united by
pro skateboarders, Waterloo Sunset
and Kingston undergrads
World's End Pub
face baptized in the Lock
as a seven year old misunderstanding
of canal levels
bitteschönbitteschönbitteschön
stumble into Roses
At Home, At School, At Play
He's a Tourist.

Cracked Actor

Crackedactor is a play on the Cathedral of Light
as envisioned by Gropius and later misused by the Nazis in the Cathedral of Light in the Nuremburg Rally
as predicted by Reich in the later misuse of the cultural war later used by branding,
the swastika being the Ur Nike symbol.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Bowie is playing with the phenomenon of cultural leadership.
At the end of the film, Bowie is in bondage to the
fascism of character play.

LA, the centre of post modernism, city of formulation and cut ups.
Rip it up and start again.
City of detritus and assemblage.

Rehearsing your lines
Snorting your lines
Driving along the lines
Don't colour outside of the lines.
they walked in line.

Panopticon

The panopticon principle had been invented by Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, who in 1792 had been declared an honorary French citizen by the Legistlative Assembly in recognition of his works on colonial administration and penal reform.
His main idea was to replace the dungeon-dark underground, a place of oblivion-with the panopticon, a sort of glass hive in which all the drones (the prisoners) would be visible to the queen (the centrally placed quard). Transparent, the cell becomes a suitable unit for study. The panopticon may have been based on Louis XIV's menagerie in which all animal cages surrounded the king's salon.
No longer is the prisoner punished for past crimes: now he's studied as a subject of future misdeeds. No longer is the body alone held captive; now the mind is also invaded.

-Edmund White, "Genet"

Feeling a Bit Mental 7

Captured- (Trapped)- Culprit- Victim- Aggressor

David Friedman : "Do you have anything t say about your personal life?"
Arnold Friedman : "It's personal"

Theatre and Madness
Capturing the Friedmans as a societal portrait of projection, gated communities, nuclear familial relations and multi media interplay.

c.f The Atrocity Exhibition
Discipline and Punish
Infancy & History
Madness, Sanity and the Family
The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life

Feeling a bit Mental 8

"But for what purpose was the world created then?" said Candide
"To drive us mad," replied Martin

Modern Life is Rubbish- Blur as the last Industrial group.

Modern Life is Rubbish

The Role of the Hangover in Cultural Production

Listening to Mezzanine by Massive Attack. Thinking about whether not it is proto Dubstep
(probably not- too mainstream). Though i really like how it taps into the UK Bristol/ Brixton vein. When will my current perverse fascination with dubstep end? A genre that,
up until a few months ago, i completely despised as white intellectual take on electronic music without the balls, and replete with where's-the-weed-anxiety. Dubstep is typically UK, very dark. Now i feel that I am straying away from the subject, especially after having a gchat YT overload with Ed. I'm really fascinated with the progression of Garage-UK Garage-Dubstep-Grime-UK Funky.

But back to Massive Attack. I was listening to Mezzanine and thinking back to when it was released, and not getting it, but always being a little curious about it. However the guitars on it have this weird NIN vibe, which is really not good. I feel like i'm in the Matrix or Fight Club or something (also not good).
Inertia Creeps, however is pretty good, managing to date better than stuff at the time like Ian Brown (that time when the UK music scene was obsessed with Mercury Music Proze style fusion- Primal Scream collabing w/Asian Dub Foundation being a case in point)
So, NIN guitars aside, Mezzanine is suprisingly okay to listen to.
Though NO TRIP HOP RECONSIDERATION!

Artist Statement

Steven Warwick is a time based media artist, living and working in Berlin.
Using his film and video background, he works with loops and assemblage through the medium of music, to create an inter-relational play of sounds and the images that they evoke. The loops are self generated and Warwick is particularly interested in presenting loops in infinitely different orders, to see how they work (or don't) in those contexts,
evoking the methodolgies of Jack Smith and the use of the Version in dub music.

With his background of experimental long form drone music, Warwick is interested in the prolongation of a mood or emotion, which lends itself to further meditation and "nachdenken" or reflection. This reflection has been developed by his interest in dance music, a fascination in both the use of infinite interplay of DJ mixing, and the phenomenon of its social setting (where the music is invisible, and can be seen more as a live installation in real time fluxus).

Warwick is also currently working on a magazine "Feeling a Bit Mental" which can be viewed as an conceptual art piece, focusing on the deconstruction of the use of mass media and interplay, meditations of schizo-geography and the mid point between his musical practice and the frames of film, akin to the use of slide film.

Money

"Money has never seemed to me as precious as people think it.
Indeed it has never seemed to me very useful. For it has no value in itself
and must be transformed to be enjoyed. One must bargain and purchase and often
be cheated, paying dear for poor services."

J.J.R- "The Confessions"

Space

"But the moment of discharge, so desired and so happy, contains its own danger. It is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal;nor will the feel equal forever. They return to their separate houses, they lie down on their own beds, they keep possessions and their names. They do notcast out their relations nor run away from their families."

E.C- "Crowds and Power"

The tower dated from the 13th century, and there was only one cell on each level. The floor was of brick, the walls whitewashed. Three steps led up to a window with three rows of bars, and there were bars inside the chimney, making it impossible to climb. The walls were very thick, and so was the door which had three locks.

R.H. "Bastille" from Marquis De Sade, "The Genius of Passion".

Sense

"Will you feel a presence? Is that how you'll know?"
"Not really a presence," Lise says. " The lack of an absence, that's what it is"

M.S " The Driver's Seat

Eye

Feeling a Bit Mental 6

Modernismus

Room

My room is situated on the forty fifth degree of latitude...It stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, 36 paces in circumference if you hug the wall.
My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or method.I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be.

X.D.M "A Journey Around My Room"

Unpacking

"I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood..."

W.B Unpacking My Library

Colporteurs/ Kolportageroman