cream * 14 * : the Joy of Closure

[Frederic Madre]

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                 cream  * 14 *


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I have closed our weblog, http://2balles.cc . It means that there is now one
less vanishing point on the web. It means that there is one less spot that can
be passed thru mindlessly, selfishly consumed and discarded as just a clicked-
by accident, next, next, next, click thru it, next, next, next, all of them and
away on your narrow circle of affinities. It means that there is a door, not an
end, a door that is closed now. To get thru this door you have to say the Magic
word, the Magickest and Wordiest of all words: Your Name. A subscription, an
inscription of your name of choice is necessary. It stops there. Knock. Knock.
Who's here? Let no one unversed in their own desire enter here. There is a
pause that you can't click. Step back, wait beyond this door and take a little
time to think before the next click takes you away, think that when you have
clicked all the clicks and you have ticked-off all the bookmarks you got, you
still have not been anywhere and have found nothing of what you were looking
for, which was ultimately yourself. You have been lost and at this door, now
closed, you have to wonder where you are, how you arrived here and why you
would want to get in. Yes, closing down the borderless web makes sense and it's
now that it makes sense. Suddenly there is an inside and an outside: a new dimension
is created. The web could have been rhizomatic, and it once was, it is now a set
of circularities that intersect only by chance. There is no escape from those
circles, they are the result of a long history of gentrification, by taste and
laziness. Networking ultimately coalesced and coldly fused into very small
pockets of chosen kowtow, by default more than intent. We had an audience of
millions, we thought, and the potential of that thrilling audience was
trumpeted by each word of the name of our stage: The World Wide Web. Tens of
millions of users, hand on mouse, ready, set, go, yet look at your paltry logs,
yet look at the 40 repeating names in your Inbox, yet look at your own hand now
painfully clutched on a mouse ready to click again thru the same measly 25
websites! Look at yourself and think of sets theory. After a long session of
click-thrus, a peregrination on the elements of one such set, when they have
all been clicked and put away, there is always the Null set that remains. And
baby, it's you. Now there is a new chance, this chance is offered by closure
and seclusion. It's offered by a door and a pause. Look at Heath Bunting's
BorderXing, it tells us how beautiful borders are, how exciting it is to not be
able to go somewhere, how desirable it is to become one of those static social
clients or to, knock knock, and be able to click-thru Heath's border. Look at
Olia Lialina's Some Universe, it is an unlinking and unspoiled - for it is
closed- world, a pit where we are thrust by a trapped link, sure, but cannot
get out of, just bound to gaze at this vertical landscape within which
glittering remains tell us of the curse of invasion. Pause, look and think what
to do next, of our own will. This is an introduction to the Joy of Closure.
This is a call for participation, it will not be distributed freely. It is
addressed only to people that I have chosen. It is a call for a new Clique.
Knock, knock: You can be either In or Out, now have a peek at The Joy of
Closure.

 	Frederic Madre.  May, December 2003, Paris.


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contents of this cream:

Blackhawk: The Horizon & the Terminator
Josephine Bosma: Review: Networking the World by Armand Mattelart
Ms. O.: One Story

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                           ~
                           ~ The Horizon & the Terminator.
                           ~

1. The River Kwai Paradox

What is the value of a pursuit of excellence, rigor, beauty, or any of the
other traditional aims of a life lived meaningfully when these are done in
the context of an evil system?  Must we make an a priori decision to engage
or disengage in regard to this larger political structure?  I refuse to
consider my work as the indirect product of a concrete empire ruled by
avaricious religious fanatics who flout the rule of law, grant rights to
corporations yet not individuals, & value us only according to the capital
we possess or our ability to generate it.  Am I prepared to watch Democracy
fail?  Am I prepared to work in the harness of a state of "never-ending
war"?  Am I prepared to allow what was the symbol of our solidarity be
transmuted into a rampage of military adventurism?  Am I prepared to watch
helplessly as what was a semi-autonomous cultural entity is sucked up &
assimilated by the amoeba of Media/America?  Remember the film, "Bridge on
the River Kwai", in which prisoners of war are asked to build a bridge for
their captors?  Have those of us who author culture been functionally
transformed into POWs?  Do we "whistle while we work", just on principle?
Do we give lip-service to resistance, gesture emptily & go about our
business?  If effective resistance is possible, to what extent does it warp
or even defeat our work itself?  Do evil times require good thought, or
evil thought?  Or can one somehow bypass the issue entirely?


2.  The Collapse of Time

Dark & dire times.  When did this happen last? Can we do now what was done
then?  We must go back to the 50's to find a precedent.  The art world was
then divorced from mass-culture which it despised -- so much so that it
could afford to ironically comment on it, mine it, repurpose & rebroadcast
it... the further irony being that this selfsame culture product (e.g. Pop)
ultimately became the basis for the sanctification of junk-culture on the
screen of culture's self-reifying critical monitor.  It is time to return
to the 50's, to divide our attentions.  It is our ability to author culture
which is the hallmark of our resistance.  Therefore resistance need not be
the content of that culture... such is inherent anyway.  Though mine was
one of the voices calling for the parsing of mass-culture as art so as to
learn what it could teach, now I say:  ignore it... not completely, no more
than one should ignore a wild beast or a man with a gun, but we are no
longer influenc ing it, no longer even able to monitor it.  We can only
serve it... or turn away.  The appropriate response to life in a construct
which has become evil is to do what we do anyway.  An ignoring of our
circumstances is not tantamount to collaboration... we are not going to win
this battle, & therefore we must return to the Underground.  We have
deluded ourselves as to the efficacy of our efforts for too long.  As
culture-producers we are being victimized by our very ability to recreate
realities so as to work operations upon them.  What is external & objective
reality to others is internal & subjective to us.  The Others freely walk
thru clouds of poison yet we are forced to breathe it.  If we do not
convoke an over-arching critical & hermeneutic distance we will not
survive.  It is this distance which is our bridge to any possible future.
To survive the war we must sanctify the utterly different uses to which we
put the weapons it is waged with.

3. The Adoration of the Cloister.

Those of us who know what culture is, what it does, how it works, etc. will
simply have to cultivate our disdain for the a-cultural so as to reach the
next level; to despise & proactively ignore all but the grinding of the
largest teeth on the media engine's bull-gear... to rededicate ourselves to
our mission IN OUR OWN TERMS.  The Enemy has left us no choice. We will
voice our resistance in a language they do not & will never learn to speak.
We've said, "Never Again!" & yet it's "Again".  Whether we wanted this or
not, we have functionally become both a world & a people apart, & yes, we
walk among them, our works exist alongside theirs -- but from here on in
it's Black Cat's Bones: Those Who Know Don't Tell, Those Who Tell Don't
Know.  The only exception to this is Education, & that means Youth.  Forget
the Masses, they are cheerfully on their way to the abattoir, it's not
worth trying to save them unless one still believes in the efficacy of
gesture for its own sake.  We've gone beyond that... far beyond.  We hyped
the medium so as to garner attention; it was always the hope that once
attention was rendered, we could go back to talking about "just art".
However the attention received was never equal to our expectations. So now
we must continue to work in inadvertent secret.  Embrace what has become
our Arcana.  We could erect walls & within them have virtual monasteries.
But these walls already exist, we've lamented their existence for the span
of the Movement.  So now we need only acknowledge them, who's in, who's
out.  These are not barricades yet rather semi-permeable membranes (as
befits rhizomes), we are free to come & go -- however with the
understanding that we are increasingly surveilled, we make no further
attempt to translate our own language, soon it will be our only aegis. The
Net was the first place art ever went where it was not the original
cultural activity there.  It has been colonized out f rom under us & there
is no longer any scope for "going native".  Now it can only function
(partially) as the philotic connectivity which allows us to exist, not like
the original cloisters isolated in a sea of barbarism, yet like a parallel
structure, a secret empire if you will, an empire of culture to oppose the
one hell-bent on culture's destruction.  The walls have gone up & they will
not come down for the foreseeable future -- it no longer matters what we
think of them, yet as time passes we will learn to love them...


-- Blackhawk.  May/September 2003, New York City.


                           ~
                           ~ Review: Networking the World - Armand Mattelart
                           ~


"Communication means standardizing and doing away with chance."

(This is not a new book (2000), but a worthwhile read for everyone
involved in the development of any kind of new media structures. )

I read most of Networking the World during the war on Irak. It was a
strange experience, as if the unfolding stories of the war and western
policies towards the middle east in the media simply picked up on
where the book ended. Networking the World basically tells the story
of how new technologies, technologies that connect people over large
distances with unprecedented speed, have been (ab)used for the
implementation of economic liberal ideologies into mainstream thought.
The book painstakingly describes step by step how, from the first,
19th century technologies (trains, telegraph) to the new media
technologies of today (the internet), advocates of technological
progress have managed to replace discourses on freedom and democracy
for humankind by a dominant discourse on freedom of communication
technologies (and their owners or producers), by carefully avoiding a
debate on cultural issues.

Armand Mattelart describes how the desire for a brotherhood of men
has time and time again been confused with its simple material
representation: unlimited connections. Maybe the way sentiments around
freedom have resulted in almost uncontrollable international trade
(globalization) should ring an alarm bell or two. "The contrast is
striking between utopian discourse on promises for a better world due
to technology, and the reality of struggles for control of
communication devices and hegemony over norms and systems" writes
Mattelart. Only a few pages earlier he noted: "Communication was
destined to replace religion (from the Latin religare, to link)
because, like religion, it had the function of linking disconnected
members of an underlying community and drawing numbed civilisations
from their torpor, from Greece to Asia Minor and from Spain to
Russia."

However, the mistake to look at connections rather then (social and
cultural) content, to technological development rather then a
development of society as a whole, has brought the utopian dream
of a global unity down to the purely market driven globalization we
are facing today. Mattelart does seem to think the internet (World
Communication) can be some kind of "tropism of global flows",
which can "serve as a tool for analyzing the globalization of the
system in progress, without fetishizing it, by restoring its historical
concreteness." He then continues with a view of networks that is
rather different from the rhizome metaphor: "[World Communication]
reminds us that networks, embedded as they are in the international
division of labour, organise space hierarchically and lead to an
ever-widening gap between power centers and peripheral loci". If you
did not have any doubts about the liberating effects of the internet yet,
this book is garanteed to put your feet firmly on the ground.

more elaborate german review of the same book:
http://www.avinus.de/html/armand_mattelart.html

an english language review:
http://www.corpse.org/issue_9/broken_news/solomon.htm


-- Josephine Bosma. Amsterdam, June 2003.


                           ~
                           ~ One Story.
                           ~

My name is Ms. O. The name I use, not my name, the name to abuse myself. I
am Legend. Ms. O. or another name, I have countless names, email addresses
everywhere and I can write with them and I could read with them, countless,
they are countless as the fears that I've had. I am a stranger to it all, I
have my other name and I have my other body secluded from The Screen. They
type O. The names and the bodies that hurt are inside the screen, so I
change them as often as there is new fear. They love it, the Legend of Ms.
O., they read it and I read they. A post here or there, the story of one
name, of another name that I made up for this Blog or another. I hide
inside the fear of my names, I look for relief in the posts of others,
there are not a million stories out there, there is perhaps one story, the
One Story inside which I'm hidden. If I find this story (one day I will
find it on a Blog) if I find this story I will be relieved and will be able
to quit. For now everywhere I surf is remote. The urge I can't control, I
have to check the new posts and all the new names out there. They are always
full and always filling. I reload, they read me, I read they, we reload.
No one is writing the One Story yet, I have not found it, but they are nearly
there. That, I know.
I reload for a new story to appear. Expectation, of the freshly posted.
I surf somewhere else. I reload somewhere else and it goes on. And so it goes,
and so it goes, the day passes away after so many reloads, I wish there was
nothing new when I reload. I wish that you please don't write again, I wish that
you please stop to hurt me, I wish that the expectation of the One Story
would stop. I wish that I could stop it myself. The expectation of my body
is excruciating and so exciting because it never comes, it is an infinite
desire that is never fulfilled. Reload the page, reload the desire, find
another name, hide there for a while and reload the desire, ad lib. I am
Legend to myself, a stranger to my name. Nobody endless.

 	Ms. O. Limoges, December 2003.

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cream is an experimental collaboration of writers and curators in the field of
art, with a focus on art in networks. You can subscribe to cream and we invite
you to forward this mail to anybody you feel might be interested in the content
of cream.

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Contributors and supporters of cream so far: Saul Albert, Inke Arns, Tilman
Baumgaertel, Josephine Bosma, Sarah Cook, Florian Cramer, Steve Dietz, Katharina
Gsöllpointner, Karin Hinterleitner, Frederic Madre, Armin Medosch, Robbin
Murphy, Tetsuo Kogawa, Uli Wegenast, Alex McLean, Jo Walsh, Michael Weinkove.

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contact cream at:  cream-info at laudanum.net
web site:  cream.artcriticism.org

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