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Image and text source: Wired Magazine

June 23, 2008

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

Read the entire article at Wired Magazine

By John Lichman

[Batman: Gotham Knight is a straight-to-DVD omnibus film released today on Standard Def and Blu-Ray.]

There are vast differences between the three mediums of Batman. In print, he is an icon, a brooding detective who tries to steep himself in realism but is always drawn into the fantasy realm of the DC Universe; in live-action, he is forever straddling camp with Adam West drinking milk, Michael Keaton scowling in a rubber one-piece, and Christian Bale convincing us, genuinely, that anyone can use his family's fortune for a personal vendetta. But it is in animated form that the Batman mythos has become legendary. In a Dark Knight companion piece akin to The Animatrix, Warner Brothers today releases Batman: Gotham Knight, a six-episode omnibus featuring different teams of American writers and Japanese production houses, all to produce—well, it's hard to tell what we're supposed to get out of this.

Prior to Christopher Nolan's reformatting in Batman Begins, the finest interpretation of the Dark Knight was Batman: The Animated Series, which originally aired from 1992-1995 before returning in a slightly varied form from 1997-1999. Here, the edged noir look that Bob Kane made famous came to life: Batman was a large, hulking figure who flew through 1950s inspired landscapes mixed with retro-futuristic planes, robots and themes. B:TAS even presented sly nods to longer term fans, such as having Adam West guest-voice the fictional Gray Ghost, who, it was revealed, inspired Bruce's design of the Batman; or the Cagney-esque episode, "It's Never Too Late," when a mob boss losing the gang war is asked by Batman to turn over on another boss, all the while going through the motions of classic Catholic guilt. And then there's the Emmy-nominated "Heart of Ice," which introduces Victor Friese/Mr. Freeze into the Batman universe. It's also responsible for ret-conning the character of Harley Quinn—who had previously never existed—into the actual DC Comics due to her popularity.

B:TAS proved what could be done with the limitless imagination of a comic-book universe, all the while paying dues to the obvious noir, horror, fantasy, and pulp influences. One week Batman could be battling the Joker, the next an episode could focus on the Gotham City Police Department and Detective Harvey Bullock (originally a corrupt cop in the comic who then became the hard-nosed, gruff stereotype we've come to love).

B:TAS is an incredible work of art. Batman: Gotham Knight is an awful attempt at cashing in on a franchise and little else. It begins with Have I Got A Story to Tell You, a take on the episode "Legend of the Dark Knight," where four kids—all skateboarders, natch—assemble in a warehouse and begin chattering about the Batman each of them saw: at first he's like a vampire (modeled after the Elseworlds character of Batman vs. Dracula, Batman: Red Rein and Batman: Crimson Mist), melting into the ground and moving at super-human speed; then he's a variation on the Man-Bat, followed by a description of an armored man-in-suit; and, finally, he's the bleeding vigilante that is more human than he'd like the population to believe.

Story's art cues and visual style more than make up for the entirely uninteresting plot. Unfortunately, it's followed by the even more uninteresting Crossfire, in which two Gotham City Police officers begrudgingly accept Batman as a necessary evil for fighting crime—an especially helpful viewpoint when they manage to park their car between two opposing gangs during a fire fight.

Field Test is another case where the art makes up for the storytelling deficiencies. Helmed by Hiroshi Morioka and produced by Bee Train, the company responsible for such anime titles as Noir and Madlax, it starts with technobabble about magnetic fields, but then perfectly showcases how Batman, after he discovers a way to make himself impervious to bullets, co-opts his multi-billion dollar company in order to finance his personal vendetta. Of course, being Batman—and thus the personification of White Man's Middle Class Guilt/Obsession—he quickly learns that when you have bullets flying everywhere but at you, someone is bound to be picked off.

In Darkness Dwells is a simplistic showcase for Studio Madhouse, still riding high off the success of Death Note, in which Batman fights Killer Croc and Scarecrow. It showcases how the GCPD are reluctantly working with the Dark Knight and gives a possible origin for Croc in the Nolan series, but that's about it.

Working Through Pain is the weakest of the six, despite having impressive production values. It's a morality tale that opens with a gunshot Batman hiding in the sewers, struggling to remember his training from an Official Indian Mystic (aka Cassandra) who once taught him that fear is the mindkiller, spice is life, and to ride sandworms or something. Quips like "pain exists in two forms: exterior, that which we cannot control, and interior, which we can," cut like a knife, especially when you realize this was written by Brian Azzarello. Bruce replies that of course he's researched the techniques—since he is The Goddamn Batman after all—but Official Indian Mystic counters: "What of the spiritual nature?"

The infamous line from Frank "WHORESWHORESWHORES" Miller's All-Star Batman #1. Which was far better than "Working Through Pain."

After an extended montage, Bruce beats up some people and Official Indian Mystic relates this bit of wisdom: "Your pain is leading you down the path of destruction." Meanwhile, back in the sewers of Gotham, the bullet-wounded Batman is waiting for Alfred to find him. In the meantime, he's gone bat-shit crazy and begun digging through the garbage, finding a small arsenal of guns just lying in the trash. One by one he picks them up and cradles them in the sorriest attempt at symbolism since Crash. Once Alfred finds him, even he's weirded out by what Batman is doing and says, "Sir, give me your hand." Arms full of guns and clearly trying to tie this thing up, he mutters, "I-I can't."

Luckily, the omnibus ends with Deadshot, another Studio Madhouse production, which opens with Bruce Wayne day-dreaming about his favorite topic (his parents' murder) before realizing he doesn't like guns for the three-hundreth time that morning. But it eventually brings up the most interesting aspect of the Batman mythos, as he acknowledges the seductive power of a gun and how it feeds into and breeds the character of Deadshot, an assassin-for-hire introduced in a sequence that puts Golgo 13 to shame.

Yet while the episode is once more impressive on the visual level, it's treading no new water with the character or the series. Which is basically how Gotham Knight acts: a modern undertaking on an old series, one that implies that an anime visual style is more relevant nowadays and not at all re-hashed from B:TAS. It's clear that Warner learned its lesson with the overextended Animatrix, only releasing six animated shorts here. But they feel impossibly underwhelming when you take into account all the other animated DVDs you can find featuring the Bat. In total, only Bee Train's submission truly stands out.

Oh well, here's hoping the real film (coming next week) isn't nearly as disappointing.
____________________________________________
John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

This is the first episode covering SITE Santa Fe’s “Lucky Number Seven“, the seventh edition of the international Biennial in New Mexico, USA. This video shows the work by Martí Anson. Martí Anson is one of the 22 artists who have been commissioned to create a work for “Lucky Number Seven“, which was curated by Lance M. Fung. Spanish artist Martí Anson (born in 1967, lives and works in Barcelona) took a building to New Mexico. He built a copy of an original old flour mill in his home town Mataró, Spain, as expression of his astonishment caused by the controversy that was stirred up by the proposed demolition of the mill. He carried out the whole project with his own hands. After the exhibition, the building will be handed over to the city. Like several other artists Martí Anson has selected an off-site location to make his work for the Biennial. The building is located at the auxiliary parking lot of Museum Hill, where the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, the Wheelwright Museum, and the Museum of International Folk Art are located. Santa Fe, July 5, 2008.

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1. R.I.P. Bruce Conner: David Hudson gathers the response so far at GreenCine. Of particular note: Ray Pride at Movie City Indie. Share your thoughts in the comments section.

["Artforum reports Bruce Conner, in declining health in recent years, has died. "Bruce Conner, a San Francisco–based artist known for his assemblages, films, drawings, and interdisciplinary works, passed away Monday afternoon. Conner moved to San Francisco in 1957 and quickly found his place within the city’s vibrant Beat community. His gauzy assemblages of scraps salvaged from abandoned buildings, nylon stockings, doll parts, and other found materials gained him art-world attention, as did A Movie (1958), an avant-garde film that juxtaposed footage from B movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, and other fragments, all set to a musical score... 'Report' target leader.png Conner was active in the Bay Area’s 1960s counterculture scene, designing light shows for Family Dog performances at the Avalon Ballroom, and in the ’70s focused on drawing and photography..." There will be no funeral."]

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2. Michael Koresky and Chris Wisniewski inaugurate a new column at indieWIRE on Queer Cinema. First installment: "Fest Forward: Activism. Identification, Titillation and Entertainment."

["For this, our first column about where queer cinema's at, and possibly where it's headed, we could think of no better place to start than the films selected for this month's slate of LGBT festivals (from San Francisco's recent Frameline and last month's NewFest in New York to Los Angeles's upcoming Outfest). If there's been any impression from the films we saw this year, it would be that reality has, with some exception, trumped fiction, but more significantly, the best films were those that dared, in this so-called "post-gay" climate, to remind us that all is not necessarily alright, whether in governmental policy ("Ask Not"), with the continued practice of safe sex ("Sex Positive"), or, most dramatically, under Islamic law ("Be Like Others," "A Jihad for Love") While I adored the festival's romantic, inspiring centerpiece "Chris & Don: A Love Story," a documentary about the decades-long romance between Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood, currently in limited release, I most admired those filmmakers who weren't ready to hang up their activist hats just yet."]

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3. "Theatrical Thoughts": Jamie Stuart's latest column for Stream.

["Over the past couple of years, I've often wondered what the state of movies will look like by the time I've completed my first feature. Around 2005, it occurred to me that I might never shoot a feature on celluloid; most likely, I would start off on a small picture that utilized Mini-DV or 720p, and by the time that project played out, higher HD formats would be more readily accepted for future endeavors. Over the past year or so, however, I've started to consider that my first picture might not even receive a theatrical release, and go out through the internet or home video instead. I'm relatively content with the former scenario, but fairly nervous about the latter."]

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4. "‘Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer,’ Stan Laurel and ‘Remembrance of Things to Come’": Dave Kehr's latest DVD column for the Times, on Thorold Dickinson, Stan Laurel, and Chris Marker.

["In the many short films and features they made together from the late 1920s to the early ’50s, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy present such fully developed characters and such an enduring portrait of friendship that it’s hard to believe that Laurel had an existence independent of his partner. But exist he did, and as the recently issued second volume of “The Stan Laurel Collection” from Kino illustrates, it was an extensive and varied existence."]

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5. "Goat and dog arrested in Alabama": They go well together.

["The goat was arrested, the Mercedes-Benz was assaulted and the dog came along for the ride. It happened Sunday when a woman driving the Mercedes saw a goat and dog playing on U.S. 72 in northern Alabama, Sheriff Mike Blakely said. She stopped, afraid they would get hit, Blakely said. But the goat jumped on the car and wouldn't come down. Fearing scratches and dents in her import's paint job, she called the Limestone County Sheriff's Department. A deputy got the goat down and put it in his patrol car, but then the dog jumped into his back seat too."]

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Quote of the Day: William Hazlitt

"The way to procure insults is to submit to them: a man meets with no more respect than he exacts."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The tablet in this picture prompts Time Magazine to ask: "Was Jesus' Resurrection a Sequel?"



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Clip of the Day: Danger Mouse and Duckula. Ah, what Thames Television gave us back in the day.



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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

New this week are Thorold Dickinson’s 1955 film “Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer,” “The Stan Laurel Collection, Volume 2” and Chris Marker’s “Remembrance of Things to Come.”

The monstrous body of capital — the socius, or the Body without Organs — is massive, imposing, and unavoidable. It defines the very situation in which we live. It is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning. In this sense, capital truly is a “divine” force: it suffuses itself into everything, and it subsumes everything. But this divinity is not the end of the story. The monstrous body of capital is indeed everywhere; but for all that, it is not everything. It has grown to be a “transcendental condition” — but it is not transcendent. In Kantian terms, its status is regulative and not constitutive. Or as Marx puts it, the “laws” of capital logic are only “tendential” ones; they are not totalizing or deterministic. The body of capital is therefore not-all. For one thing, it is never satiated; this means that some margin always remains beyond its grasp, some activity that has not yet been capitalized and appropriated. For another thing, it remains infested by parasites, the remnants that it has been unable to transform into itself. As Deleuze and Guattari say, “the surface of this uncreated body swarms with them, as a lion’s mane swarms with fleas.” We ourselves are these fleas; and even as the body of capital strives to eliminate us, it also cannot exist without us. Just as God needs a creation that is separate from himself, and free to disobey him and err in its ways: so capital requires an external source of inputs, as well as an external dumping ground for outputs. It needs conditions that are not yet its own, and also those that are no longer its own. It must always demand additional ‘raw material’ to subsume, and it must always demand an outlet for the results of this subsumption. In short, capital is not really “self-engendered”; it needs both producers from whom it can extort productive labor, and consumers to whom it can sell its products.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s account, therefore, the Body without Organs is only one of three “syntheses” that together compose the “transcendental conditions” of capitalist existence. The socius is the matrix of surplus appropriation, and then of circulation and distribution. It operates what Deleuze and Guattari call a disjunctive synthesis, or a synthesis of recording, “of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference.” But such a process cannot continue indefinitely, all on its own. The disjunctive synthesis of capital is not a perpetual motion machine; it is not a closed, self-contained, self-renewing system. Contrary to the assumptions of neoclassical economics, it is not an equilibrium system. Rather, it is what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call a dissipative structure, a far-from-equilibrium conductor of flows of energy. If the socius were only able to feed back upon itself, and live upon its own resources, it would either suffer a short circuit and quickly burn out, or else slowly succumb to entropy. This is precisely why it is not-all. In order to function, the disjunctive synthesis must be preceded by a connective synthesis, a synthesis of production, or “of actions and of passions”: a fuel upon which the body of capital is able to feed. And it must be followed by a conjunctive synthesis, a synthesis of consumption or consummation (consommation), “of sensual pleasures, of anxiety, and of pain”: a spark of self-enjoyment that discharges tensions and reboots the entire reproductive process.

The socius can be described as a disjunctive synthesis, because of the way that it captures all production, appropriates or “attributes” this production to itself, and then divides and distributes the fruits of this production, according to a “system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift and slide about.” Capital is not a substance, but a process and a relation: a process of continual metamorphosis, and a series of “relationships between… producers,” that “take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour” (Marx). In its “constantly renewed movement,” capital does not “prefer” one form to another, or even one path of transformations to another. The channels of circulation and the objects of distribution are therefore always changing, even as the outcome of the process — the “valorization” of the capital being circulated, thanks to the sale and consumption of the product, and the consequent “reflux of money to its starting point” — remains the same. The disjunctive synthesis comes down to a play of differences that do not make a difference, or of choices that have no consequence or significance. “No matter what two organs are involved, the way in which they are attached to the body without organs must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between the two amount to the same on the slippery surface.”

Deleuze and Guattari’s first synthesis, the connective synthesis of production, can be identified with the actual labor process: that is to say, with “purposeful activity’” that transforms the world. The young Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts describes this process as “Man’s species being,” involving the worker’s immediate relation to “nature,” or to “the sensuous external world.” For nature is “the material on which [the worker's] labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.” Deleuze and Guattari follow this definition when they present the connective synthesis as “universal primary production” in the course of which human “industry” has a “fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.” Strictly speaking, this process is not (or is not yet) subjective. In Marx’s terms, the individual human being is not yet separated from “the life of the species” as a whole, nor from nature, which is humanity’s “inorganic body.” In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, similarly, there can be “no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species.”

When free production is described in this way, it may sound a bit too much like Rousseau’s “state of nature” (or perhaps, in Deleuze and Guattari’s version, like the aggressively outrageous anarchy of Otto Muehl’s Actions-Analytic Kommune, as presented in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie). But neither Marx, nor Deleuze and Guattari, ever suggest that such “production” actually has (or might ever once have had) an independent, objective existence; it is always intertwined with other social processes, or with other syntheses. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx only evokes production in the context of a discussion about how human beings’ species-specific “life-activity has been systematically estranged from human beings themselves, leading to the isolation of “individual life in its abstract form.” The later Marx, abjuring such existential language, instead emphasizes the way that “the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value.” But where productive labor is a living, social, and embodied process, value-creation involves all the abstraction inherent to the extraction and realization of surplus value. It is not the case, therefore, that free production comes chronologically first, and is only appropriated afterwards by the capitalist; rather, once the mechanisms of capitalism are in place, the capitalists themselves organize social production with the aim of extracting value.

Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the connective synthesis never takes place all by itself: “there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and recording, without any sort of mediation, and recording and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself.” The connective synthesis of production is always already accompanied by the other syntheses, and in particular by the disjunctive synthesis of recording, which both organizes the connective process, and appropriates its products. In the connective synthesis, “there is no need to distinguish…between production and its product… The pure ‘thisness’ of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing.” But in the disjunctive synthesis of recording, the product is taken out of the flow, separated from the production process of which it was a part. This is what transforms it into a commodity. In its “pure thisness,” it was “an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness,” Marx says. In this process, the first (connective synthesis is branched upon, and subordinated to, the second (disjunctive) synthesis. This is why capitalism presents us with “a fetishistic, perverse, bewitched world” in which the “apparent objective movement” of the full body or socius appears to us as the motor of social reproduction. Although the disjunctive synthesis depends, both logically and materially, upon the connective synthesis, it always appears as if the second synthesis came first. And this appearance is itself a basic principle of social organization and social reproduction.

[Discussion of the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption, will follow in a later posting]

Selected material I Iistened to today on Last FM:

Cut Chemist – The Audience Is Listening Theme Song
Birdy Nam Nam – Jazz It at Home
Funki Porcini – Long Road
DJ Food – Eyes Cream
DJ Vadim – Your Revolution (W, Sarah Jones - Dj Nappa Remix)
The Herbaliser – Forty Winks
DJ Shadow – Walkie Talkie
Blockhead – Day Light
Amon Tobin – Bitter & Twisted
Kid Koala – Roll Credits

BY ANDRE SOARES, LOS ANGELES, USA (CINEMA MINIMA)

The 12th edition of the Fantasia Film Festival, North America’s premier genre film festival, began on July 3 and continues until July 23 in Montreal.

This year, the festival has been showcasing films from about two dozen countries, including Japan, Spain, South Korea, Italy, Uruguay,and Canada. Oftentimes, those are either world or North American premieres.

Among the screening films are BAD BIOLOGY, about a sexually (highly) dysfunctional couple; MACHINE GIRL, in which an avenging young woman replaces her chopped-off hand with a machine gun; and Dario Argento’s MOTHER OF TEARS.

Keith Waterfield has a lengthy article on the Fantasia Film Festival selections.

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BY ANDRE SOARES, LOS ANGELES, USA (CINEMA MINIMA)

IFP, the "oldest and largest organization of independent filmmakers" in the US, announced that the 18th Annual Gotham Awards ceremony will take place at the Gotham Awards’ new home, Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, on Tuesday, December 2.

Submissions are currently being accepted in five of the six competitive categories: Best Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Actor, Breakthrough Director, and Best Ensemble Cast. Applications are available at http://gotham.ifp.org. The deadline for submissions is 5pm EST on Monday, September 22, 2008.

The Gotham Awards nominations will be announced on October 20.

Among the winners at the 2007 Gotham awards were Sean Penn’s INTO THE WILD, Michael Moore’s SICKO, and Ellen Page (for JUNO).

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Text source: USA TODAY

Originally published on 5/20/08

SAN FRANCISCO — The future of magazine publishing increasingly is appearing on a digital display — not just a newsstand.

Advancements in software and hardware are making it easier for a growing faction of consumers — including coveted younger readers called screen-agers — to read their favorite publications on the Internet or download and read them later offline.

“It’s not Jetsons. It’s real,” says Richard Maggiotto, CEO of Zinio, one of a dozen or so companies that specialize in creating digital editions of magazines and newspapers.

Read the entire Article at USA TODAY

The beasts of “Hellboy II” began as drawings in Guillermo del Toro’s visual diary. The director offers a peek into that world.

Chicago filmmaker Ben Byer has died.

Barbara Klinger hat die noch wenige bekannte Kultur des Heimkinos untersucht. In ihrem Buch “Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home” (University of California Press) nimmt sie sich fünf Aspekte dieser kulturellen Alltagspraxis vor:

• Die Liebhaber von High End-Technik für das Kino zuhause.
• Die Sammler von Filmen auf DVD nach der Ära der Videokassette.
• Das Kabelfernsehen als Medium der nationalen Filmgeschichte am Beispiel von American Movie Classics (AMC).
• Das Vergnügen, Filme nach eigenen Wünschen mehrfach ansehen zu können.
• Das Genre des parodistischen Kurzfilms im Web.

Leider werden diese spannenden Themen nicht wirklich erforscht, wie es vielleicht ein Ethnologe mit seinem Instrumentarium machen könnte. Lediglich die Texte der Beteiligten, vowiegend die der Anbieter, werden mit den Methoden der Cultural Studies untersucht. Das gilt vor allem für die ersten drei Kapitel:

“In previous chapters I have concentrated on the home’s discursive construction as an exhibition venue for cinema, registering viewers’ reactions indirectly through industry sources, newspaper and magazine articles, Web sites, and scholarly accounts.” (Barbara Klinger, S. 137)

Daraus entsteht ein Bild, das sich nur teilweise mit der Wirklichkeit einer neuen Medienpraxis deckt, da es lediglich die Absichten der Medienindustrie reflektiert. Die ehemaligen Konsumenten sind jedoch mit den Instrumenten, die das Internet bietet, aus ihrer passiven Rolle herausgetreten und beeinflussen mit ihrer eigenständigen Öffentlichkeit in Foren, Blogs und anderen Webangeboten über nationale Grenzen hinweg nachweislich so stark die Publikationspraxis der Medienindustrie, dass man von einer neuen Art von Filmkultur sprechen kann (siehe “The 21st Century Cinephile”). Das gerät in solchen Studien reiner Textexegese jedoch aus dem Blick.

Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, die mit Begriffen wie “textual”, “narrative”, “rhetoric”, “discursive” hantieren, sind also mit Vorsicht zu genießen. Ihr Erkenntniswert ist eingeschränkt. Die Literaturliste und der Anmerkungsapparat in Barabara Klingers Buch sind jedoch sehr lohnend.

Michael Portnoy (born 1971 in Wahington, DC, lives and works in New York City) is a multimedia artist, choreographer, musician, actor. As a director of behavior Michael Portnoy investigates social exchange and the rules of communication and play. This video documents the “abstract gambling at the solid felt table with Dir. of Behavior, Michael Portnoy” in a secret room of Kunsthalle Basel that took place during the opening of the exhibition “Word Event“. Kunsthalle Basel, June 28, 2008.

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Related Articles:

• André Avelãs: Untitled / Performance / Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
• Kunsthalle Basel: Word Event, Guido van der Werve, Armando Andrade Tudela

1. Interesting discussion going on in this GreenCine entry, in response to Richard Schickel's L.A. Times review of Richard Brody's Jean-Luc Godard biography.

[Craig Keller in GreenCine comments: "Richard Schickel is exactly the sort of middle-brow, bourgeois twit to which Brody aspires in his quest to become The American Godard Authority Ripe for Hire by Mainstream Publications to Comment Upon His Godard'ness. (Pronounced with a hard 'D' at the end, as is the wont of people like Brody and Schickel.) To wit: "Godard's a cranky hermit; one of his theories is that World War II represented a decisive break in film history. As he sees it, the Nazis and the Americans unconsciously conspired to destroy European culture, the former with the Holocaust, the latter with their imperial economic designs. He appears to equate these two depredations morally, which says a lot about the limits of being an autodidact." -- To quote Ezra Pound (sort of) on 'Bambi': "Filth." Brody's urinous biography is a love-letter to the Schickel Aesthetic. Smugly content in its 'sensible' moralistic anti-fervor, and then some. Absolute poison."]

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2. "LEGO artist building bigger career": From CNN.

[" Since CNN spoke with LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya a year ago, his popularity has skyrocketed. Just check out his clientele. Donald Trump recently asked Sawaya to create a replica of the new hotel he's building in Dubai. With 10 days to complete it, and only architectural renderings to work from, Sawaya toiled away in his Manhattan studio snapping tiny bricks together, barely sleeping, to finish the curvy 10-foot statue in time for its unveiling. His work has also created a, well ... buzz with entertainers. Sawaya built a 4-foot bumblebee for Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz to offer his new bride, Ashlee Simpson, as a wedding gift. Stephen Colbert wanted a piece of the action too. The comedian invited Sawaya on his show last August to present a life-size LEGO Colbert replica. "He loved it," says Sawaya. "He called it actual art!""]

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3. "The Tip of the Sword": Over at Liverputty, Jeffrey Hill gives us a brief history of the USS Midway.

["Like her name suggests, the USS Midway was born out of battle hardened experience and wartime ingenuity. There is something almost organic about her life - even during the earliest moments of construction the Midway was adapting to a changing world. For 47 years she went through a variety of modernizations that kept her and her men at the vanguard of U.S. naval power, responding to crises and providing service well beyond the scope of her planners' intentions. Today's role of aircraft carriers, in no small degree, is born out of what the Midway did as experimentation and precedence. She's been a nuclear deterrent, a scientific guinea pig, an escape for refugees, a symbol of American power and humanity, and, of course, a lethal weapon."]

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4. "A Serious Undertaking": A Newsweek web exclusive on funeral industry reform.

["Americans spend between $11 billion and $15 billion on funerals each year, and four major corporations account for 11 percent of the 20,000 funeral homes in the United States, tending to cluster in individual communities. The "big four"—Services Corporation International, Stewart Enterprises, Carriage and Stonemor—own just a quarter of the funeral homes in Seattle, for example, but own 80 percent of the funeral homes in Yakima, a few hours east. The FCA members from across the country gathered in Seattle in last June to attend seminars on home funerals; "green burial," including caskets made from recycled paper; and, most important, educating the public on how to navigate what many members consider a corrupt and ossified industry. "The funeral corporations use predatory sales tactics and aggressive marketing to get people—who are in shock—to spend more than they can afford on services they don't want or need," says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the FCA."]

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5. "What's a penis worth? $795,000, court rules": Question for the doc: How do you fuck that up?!!

["A court has ordered a Romanian surgeon to pay $795,000 in compensation to a patient whose penis he accidentally severed during an operation. In July 2004, Dr. Naum Ciomu made a surgical error while operating on the man's testicles, severing the penis instead of making an incision to the testicle. The Bucharest Magistrates Court ruled Friday that Ciomu had been "superficial" in his approach to the operation, ordered the fine and handed Ciomu a one-year suspended prison sentence. The ruling can be appealed. A piece of muscle from the man's arm has now been attached to where his penis was, but its function is aesthetic."]

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Quote of the Day: George Jean Nathan

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): This 'bot for president? So sayeth Frank Rich. And Rod Dreher too, it seems.



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Clip of the Day: The Kool-Aid man will body snatch ya...

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.

Tom Rothman, the co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, has developed a cult following for his historical monologues and self-deprecating style on the show “Fox Legacy.”

Will Smith’s “Hancock” scored $66 million in domestic ticket sales over the weekend, affirming his drawing power but leaving Hollywood short of the peaks it hit during last year’s Fourth of July holiday period.

“Gonzo” is a fascinating history lesson and a bit of a cautionary tale about how fame can turn into the scourge of talent.

The 14-minute video Guitar Drag, 2000, shows an amplified Fender guitar attached to a rope being pulled behind a pick-up truck. As the guitar drags across back roads and dirt trails, it produces a range of cacophonous musical sounds that often correlate to what is seen. Guitar Drag explores the collected mythologies of the guitar, the rural South and the truck, and Marclay evokes such disparate associations as rock-and-roll guitar smashing and the history of lynching in the South.






Available at KaraGarga.

Paolo Virno’s newly-translated book, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, is somewhat misleadingly titled, since it has very little to say about the concept of the multitude as featured in Virno’s previously-translated book, as well as in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Rather, it is a text composed of three essays, a longish one about jokes and the logic of innovation, flanked by two much shorter ones that deal with the ambivalent legacy of humanity’s linguistic powers.

The first essay argues against the notion, crystallized by Carl Schmitt but held more generally in the “common sense” of political philosophy and conceptual thought (from Hobbes, we might say, through Freud, right down to Steven Pinker), that any democratic or liberatory political theory is founded in the naive view that human nature is innately harmonious and good, whereas the more “realistic” view of the human capacity for “evil” mandates belief in a strong and repressive State. Virno argues, to the contrary, that if we are to worry about the “evil” in human nature — which is really our “openness to the world,” or our underdetermination by our biology, which is what makes it possible for us to have “a virtually unlimited species-specific ambivalence” — then we have all the more reason to worry about what happens when the power to act (to do evil as well as to mitigate it) is concentrated in something like the State’s “monopoly of violence.”

Theorists of the State, from Hobbes to Schmitt, posit the transition from a state of nature to a civil state, involving the rule of a sovereign (in the conservative version), or the rule of law (in the liberal version), as a defense against this innate aggressiveness that would be endemic to the state of nature. But Virno says that this transition is never complete; even a sovereignty based on laws still has to declare a “state of exception” in order to maintain its rule; and this state of exception is, in effect, a return to the never-surpassed “state of nature.” The state of exception is a state in which rules are never firm, but are themselves subject to change and reinvention. We move back from the fixed rules to the human situation that gave rise to them in the first place. Though the “state of exception” has often been described as the totalitarian danger of our current situation, it is also a state in which the multitude can itself elaborate new practices and new forms of invention.

The third essay in the book makes a similar argument, in a somewhat simpler form. Sympathy with others of our kind is an innate biological endowment of our species — here Virno makes reference to recent discoveries involving mirror neurons. But language frees us, for both good and ill, from this state of sympathy. Language gives us the power of negation, which is the ability to deny the humanity of the other (the Jew, the “Musselman,” the non-white) and hence to torture and kill them mercilessly. Since there is no possibility of returning to a prelinguistic state, the only solution to this potentiality for evil is to potentialize language to a further level, make it go meta-, have it reflect back on itself, in a “negation of the negation.” The power to objectify and kill is also the power to heal, to establish “reciprocal recognition.” Just as the state of exception is the ambivalent locus both of tyrannical imposition and of democratic redemption, so the potentiality of language is the ambivalent locus both of murderous destruction and of the elaboration of community, or of the multitude.

But both these essays are little more than footnotes to the long central essay, “Jokes and Innovative Action,” that is most of the book. Virno rather curiously takes Freud’s book on jokes as his primary text, despite disclaiming any interest in the Freudian theory of the unconscious. All his examples of jokes come from Freud; but he reclassifies these jokes in terms of their status as public acts of expression (”performative utterances” in a way, though precisely they do not positively refer back to institutions in the way that a performative utterance like “I sentence you to a year in prison” does), as gestures that disrupt the “normal” functioning of a rule, and as “paralogisms” (logical fallacies, or defective syllogisms).

The point behind all these classifications is a Wittgensteinian one. Most of the time, in “normal” situations, we apply rules to concrete situations unproblematically. But in fact a rule is never sufficient to dictate how it is to be applied in any situation whatsoever — any attempt to do so involves making a second rule to explain how to apply the first rule, then a third rule to explain how to apply the second rule, and so on in any infinite regress. There is always an incommensurability between abstract rules and pragmatic acts of applying those rules. We have to appeal, as Wittgenstein says, to actual practices in a given “form of life.” But these forms of life are themselves subject to change. A joke is a disruptive intervention in this process; it introduces an “aberrant” application of a rule, thus exposing to view the inherent incommensurability between rule and application. It throws us back upon the “form of life” in which the language game of which the rule is a part is embedded. It exposes the contingency of the form of life, the way it could be otherwise. It returns us to what Wittgenstein calls “the common behavior of humankind.”

Virno interprets this “common behavior” to be our species-specific biological endowment (basic “human nature”) — or with the “regularities” of human behavior that ultimately underlie all rules, but which explicit rules cannot fully encompass. The gap between an explicit rule and the way we can apply it refers back to this prior gap between rules and the regularities upon which they are based, but which they are never able to encompass. This is in turn the case because Virno — as we have seen –defines basic human, species-specific and biological regularities not as a fixed “nature” but precisely as an underdetermination, a reservoir of potentiality — something whose incompleteness can only be given fixed form by the still-more-indeterminate, and still-more-open-to-potentiality, power of language. Language is what fixes our biological potentiality into specific forms, but it is also (as jokes witness) what allows us to rupture any given fixity, and reconfigure things otherwise. Wittgenstein’s return to the “regularity” of empirically-observed human nature as the court of last appeal for what cannot be guaranteed or grounded by rational argument is also a kind of return to the state-of-exception-as-state-of-nature, or to the moment of emergece when language first emerges out of our innate drives, both reshaping and giving form to these drives, and opening them up to a still more radical indeterminacy.

Virno claims that this is what is happening, in miniature, in jokes when they twist intentions and laws, multiply meanings, and turn seemingly fixed principles into their opposites, or into sheer absurdity. He therefore takes the joke as a miniaturized version, or as a paradigm case, of innovation and creativity in general. The way that jokes play with and disrupt previously fixed and accepted meanings, is a small version of the way that any form of social innovation or creativity alters relations that were previously taken for granted or seen as fixed.

Ultimately, Virno says that jokes and all forms of social innovation play on the indeterminacy between grammatical statements and empirical statements — an indeterminacy that is the major focus of Wittgenstein’s last writing, collected in the volume On Certainty. Wittgenstein says, on the one hand, that certain statements are not in themselves either true or false — because they express the presuppositions that we are already taking for granted and pointing back to when we make any judgment of truth or falsity. For Wittgenstein, it is a weird category error to assert the truth of a statement like “I know that I have two hands” — because we do not “know” this, so much as we already presuppose it whenever we learn something, or come to know something. My sense of having two hands is precognitive (which is precisely why I do not have to check all the time to make sure that I really do have two hands, neither more nor less).

On the other hand, however, and at the same time, Wittgenstein says that this pre-knowledge is not absolute. Over time, there can be shifts in which sorts of statements are empirical ones (that can be true or false), and which statements are foundational or grammatical ones (already presupposed in an act of cognition). I might lose one of my hands in a horrible accident, for instance. Or some empirical fact might become so central to my understanding of everything that it would come to take on the form of a pre-assumed (grammatical) statement, rather than a merely empirical one. These things can and do change over the course of time. One language game morphs or mutates into a different one. For Virno, this is where social innovation takes place. Jokes are the simplest example of such a process of change: one in which “an openly ‘fallacious’ conjecture… reveals in a flash a different way of applying the rules of the game” (163), and thereby changes the nature of the game altogether, or allows us to stop playing one game and to play a different one instead. Virno expands this reading, in order to suggest that it really comprises a theory of crisis in Wittgenstein, so that his naturalism is something more than just a passive cataloging of various “forms of life” — something which he says is “stubbornly ignored by all of Wittgenstein’s scholars” (163).

How useful and convincing is all of this? To my mind, the best part of Virno’s argument is the last thing I mentioned: his parsing of Wittgenstein on the shadowy and always-changing boundary between the “grammatical” and the “empirical.” I think that this is a more informal and naturalistic version of what Deleuze calls “transcendental empiricism.” At any given moment there is a transcendental field that determines what is possible and what is not, and that delineates for us the shape of the empirical (which cannot be interpreted without it). At the same time, this “transcendental field” is not only not an absolute (in Kant’s language, as transcendental it is precisely not transcendent), but is itself something that has an empirical genesis within time, and that varies through time. (This is the point that I was trying to make in a previous posting: capitalism arises entirely contingently, but once it has imposed itself it takes on the shape of a transcendental, circumscribing both what we can experience, and how we can experience it).

Now, doubtless this always-open possibility of shifting the boundary between the empirical and the transcendental, or of turning one into the other, is where creativity and innovation are located. The bad, or mainstream, interpretation of Kant is the one that always insists upon the necessity of separating the transcendental (the regulative, the norm) from the empirical — that is how you get Habermas, for instance. A much better Kantianism is the one — it can be found explicitly in Lyotard, for instance; and I argue that it also works implicitly in Whitehead and in Deleuze) — that sees the gap or incommensurability between the transcendental/regulative and the empirical not as a barrier, so much as a space that is sufficiently open as to allow for innovative transformation.

So, to this extent I find Virno’s formulations (including his reading of Wittgenstein) extremely useful. But I also find Virno’s discussion curiously bland and incomplete, and this because of its failure (due to its “naturalistic” orientation?) to say enough either about aesthetics, or about political economy. I think, on the one hand, that the view of creativity and innovation implicit in Virno’s discussion needs to be thought at greater length within the framework of a post-Kantian aesthetics, and that this aesthetics needs to be affirmed precisely against the temptation (all too common in current academic discourse) to render it in “ethical” terms. (I won’t say more about this here, because it is the implicit argument of my entire book on Whitehead and Deleuze). On the other hand, I find Virno’s silence on matters of political economy quite disappointing in someone who explicitly presents himself as a Marxist or post-Marxist philosopher. Rather than deepening a sense of how we might understand the “multitude” in the framework of contemporary global capitalism, Virno opts for a much vaguer, and context-free, understanding of how social and cultural change is possible. He prefers to speak in terms of the State, and of the foundations of law and sovereignty, than in terms of modes and relations of production. I know my position here is an unpopular one, but I am enough of a “vulgar Marxist” to think that these sorts of political-philosophy distinctions are too vague and abstract to have any sort of traction when they are separated from “economic” considerations. (Again, this is an argument that needs to be pursued at greater length than I have the time or the patience to do here).

But the limitations of Virno’s argument in this respect are most evident when he discusses the forms of social change. Basically, he lists two. One of them is “exodus”: the Israelites, faced with the choice between submitting to the Pharaoh and rebelling against him, instead make the oblique move of leaving Egypt altogether. This for Virno is the exemplary situation of changing the parameters of what is possible, changing the rules of the game instead of just moving within an already-given game or form of life. The obvious reference, beyond the Bible, is to the Italian “autonomist” movement of the 1960s/1970s, which is the point of origin for Virno’s thought just as it is for Negri’s. Now, much as I admire the emphasis on obliqueness rather than dialectical oppositions, I also suspect that the idea of “exouds” is a too easy one — in the sense that, when capitalism subsumes all aspects of contemporary life, outside the factory as well as inside, it is as difficult actually to find a point of exodus as it is easy to make the declaration that one is doing so. “Lateral thinking” is a business buzzword more than an anti-capitalist strategy. Things like “open software” and “creative commons” copyright licenses are not anywhere near as radical as they sound — if anything, they not only coexist easily with a capitalist economy, but presuppose a capitalist economy for their functioning. All too often, what we celebrate as escapes from the capitalist machine in fact work as comfortable niches within it.

But Virno’s other form of change, “innovation,” is even more problematic. It seems to me to be symptomatic that Virno introduces his discussion of what he calls entrepreneurial innovation with the disclaimer that this involves “a meaning of the term ‘entrepreneur’ that is quite distinct from the sickening an odious meaning of the word that is prevalent among the apologists of the capitalist mode of production” (148); and yet, immediately after this caveat, he goes on to explain what he means by “entrepreneurial innovation” by referring to the authority of Joseph Schumpeter, the one theorist of the entire 20th century who is most responsible for the “sickening and odious” meaning that Virno ostensibly rejects. Virno insists that, for Schumpeter, “it would be a mistake to confuse the entrepreneur with the CEO of a capitalistic enterprise, or even worse, with its owner.” This is because, for Schumpeter, entrepreneurism is “a basically human aptitude… a species-specific faculty.” However, this disclaimer will not stand. On the one hand, the entrepreneur is not the same as the CEO or owner, only because the former refers to a moment of “invention,” whereas the latter refers to an already-established enterprise. When the businessman ceases to innovate actively, and instead simply reaps the fruits of his market dominance, then he has become a CEO instead of an entrepreneur. Bill Gates was a Schumpeterian entrepreneur in the 1970s; by the 1990s he had become just another CEO. The owners of Google, whose innovations surpassed those of Microsoft, are now making the same transition. Even if the entrepreneur is not yet a CEO, his actions are only intelligible in the framework of a capitalist economy. If the entrepreneur is successful, then he inevitably becomes a CEO. To say that Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is a basic human aptitude is precisely to say (as Virno doesn’t want to say) that capitalism is intrinsic to, and inevitablely a part of, human nature. (My own commentary on Schumpeter is available here).

I think that Virno’s reference to Schumpeter is symptomatic, because it offers the clearest example of how he fumbles what seems to me to be one of the great issues of our age: which is, precisely, how to disarticulate notions of creativity and innovation and the New from their current hegemony in the business schools and in the ways that actually-existing capitalism actually functions. VIrno fails to work through this disarticulation, precisely because he has already preassumed it. I myself don’t claim by any means to have solved this problem — the fact that we can neither give up on innovation, creativity, and the New, nor accept the way that the relentless demand for them is precisely the motor that drives capitalism and blocks any other form of social and economic organization from being even minimally thinkable — but I feel that Virno fails to acknowledge it sufficiently as a problem. In consequence, for all that his speculation in this book offers a response to the Hobbesian or Schmittian glorification of the State, it doesn’t offer any response to the far more serious problem of our subordination to the relentless machinery, or monstrous body, of capital accumulation.