war of molarity

Some quotes from a book by Brain Massumi who takes his cues from Deleuze and Guattari.

“The life cycle of a plane of transcendence: 1) production of a coded image, 2) application of the code to bodies / infolding into habit, 3) unfolding into life’s paths, 4) reproduction of the code in new images (most likely with selective modifications).” p.114

“It is imperialist by nature. A system of interiority, the plane of transcendence has no mechanisms by which to interact with the outside as outside, no terms with which to understand it in its own right. It can only deal with an unidentified body by putting it to the test, either assigning it an acceptable category and taking into the fold, or assigning it a bad category and attacking it. Incorporate or annihilate. Anything perceptible to the forces of molarity, but resistant to selective evaluation, is reacted to as a potential threat to the purity of the plane of transcendence and the stasis it polices. Molarity cannot tolerate anything remaining outside its purview, it must constantly expand its domain in an outward drive of conquest of the “Other,” identified as Enemy. That becomes the catch-all category, the operative category. If bodies can be duplicitous, passing as one identity while continuing to incarnate another, every body is a potential enemy. Any body might prove to be an intruder threatening the beloved identity with masked subversion and contamination by foreign matter. Molarization is as paranoid as it is imperialist. Any suspicious movement, even on the part of a duly identified body – particularly one assigned a devalued identity – lands it in the enemy camp, an internal enemy answering to the enemy from without: a potential defector from habit, a subversive and degenerate. A new front of domestic conquest widens the war for molarity. Institutional regularization becomes ever-more severe (discipline), and selective evaluation increasingly vigilant (surveillance). Discipline requires rigid segregation of bodies according to category, in order to prevent unseemly mixing of the identity blurring it may lead to. Surveillance requires a carefully maintained hierarchy, a pyramid of supervisory and command positions.” p.115

From
Massumi, Brian
A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia- Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992.

a not unrelated event...

related in the sense that its work by a contributor to this blog, while also being related (if a little tangentally) to that contributors contributions. for those who have trouble reading the invite the here are the details

Opening- Wed 12th July 6-8pm
Runs from Thurs 13 to Sun 23rd July
Open- Thurs-Sun, 12pm-6pm
at
Pelt
Unit 2, 46 Balfour Street
Chippendale
Sydney, NSW 2008

CONES OF ZONTACT

Loose Projects are doing an err... intervention into the biennale on sydney which opens this week.


In spoonerising the theme of this year's biennale, Loose are prviding a catalogue and a series of events tyring to showcase the actual art practices exisisitng in sydney - and align them with the internaitonal art star juggernaut of the biennale.

the CONES Of ZONTACT launch will be held this thursday 8th June at Level 2, 168 Day street Sdyney.

There''ll also be a roundtable discussion on this saturday 10th June from 6-8pm. same place.

Guest Speakers are:

Ian Milliss,
Rheuban Keenan
Zanny Begg
Margaret Mayhew


since 2 of the speakers are on this blog - I thought it would be worth promoting on the OSAS site!

I think the organisers hope to have a more general floor based discussion on the possibilities and limitations of the whole biennale thing in its currently evolved format.

is it parasitic? derivative? derogatory? bloody amazing? boring? irrelevant?

exscuse banal questions above and hope to see you at one of the above


cheers

mayhem

Back to the Program

this is meant to be a brief little thing - to get people posting again.

The art life has had some feisty comments wars about the non maquarification of East Sydney Teach- and so maybe that's where the steam from this forum is going?

maybe?

or is everyone hunkering down to the onerous tedium of scrabbling on the edges of the culture industry and knowledge economy....shows, marking, proposals, aquittals, teaching etc.....?

I am interested in the condition of precarity as generative of creativity, of ideas, of activity. where threat is a source of interesting things.

the millis show - was a nice reminder of this - how the sixties communities of service economy fringe workers plus 'emerging' artists, and ye olde grande working class, were a soruce of really amazing social ferment......

so different to the isolate pockets of latterday warehouse squatters, occupying discrete not yet colonised zones of real estate in bland bourgeois suburbs like balmain and pyrmont....... or not?

but i segue.

in my own little corner of the sandstone academy. hell i don't even have a corner, it's a space i pass through on occasion - a series of tracks and encounters, but lets call it a corner anyway...

....I'm acutely aware of the current precarity of research,teaching study in arts. Academic merit is a fraught and weak justification for continuing to fund schools of research. Universities are meant to be cash generating corporate cows.

in some circles, i've heard phD students describe their research practice as 'a job', with people actually saying 'I treat it as a job, I go to work and I achieve outcomes.' as if introjecting this neoliberalist bullshit will save them from the cold nasty fact that intellecutal endeavour is NOT valued in our society, and is constantly under threat.

I'm sorry if I incite moans all round by citing Walter Benjamin, but his view of the present, of making hisotyr, of acting in the present as a historical moment but I really believ ethat this sense of CRISIS is what makes any work really CRITICAL.

I woke up today and thought 'what if I found out that I was going to die in the next 6 months?', and I realised that I would keep doing what I'm doing. that this matters to me that much, and that this is my 'life work' - in the beuyssian sense. I would define 'life-work' as that activity that we continue in the face of the immanence of death, with an immense sense of the precarity and fragility of our activity and our life, and of something that we give ourselves to in that moment of accepting the precarity of life, the terror of death and the awareness of its inevitability.

I believe that art is any activity which encompasses this 'life work'. It includes writing, teaching and social interventions of play, encounter and community building. I think any institution, grouping, porject which wants to attch itsllef to 'art form', must somehow embody this form of life work, and a strong sense of the precarity and precioussness of what this means.

In relation to my former art school, I'm aware of the rich sense of community I gained by attending it, but this is one that has largely flourished outside of its walls. so I'm wondering what will happen to this commuity as the art school is faced with its own collapse or transformation.

I went to a very odd meeting at the sandstone pillar yesteday. Amidst gargoyles, desks and the fusty murmures of atrophied adolescent neuroticism, there was a subtext of the immense fragility of our endeavour. The university is an institution which begrudgingly supports academic research or intellectual endeavour, and teaching and research are primarily forms of cash generation. Art departments, even arts departments are under threat. the activity of researhc has to be concealed, disguised, somehow fudged beneath the requisite administrative parameters of KEY PERFMRANCE NDICATORS. (like levels of coursework enrollments, or timely phD completions) Within this i'm intrigued to see how people behave. Intrigued to see who bury themselves further into their little burrows of books, words, dreams. Waiting out their tenure, while counting their superannuation, acting the cynic. their dusty gloom, barely aleviated by catty snipes at other academics researchers. Playing dead. Immense adolescent impotence, that evokes images of Casuauban from eliots middlemarch. Insipid dreams of the morally dead. However other profs, chat, move, respond. Still talk, form links, still teach. find new activites, new entres, new endeavours, new exchanges. Universities are still immsensely privileged sites of encounter, of words, books, bodies, classrooms, access to absorbing, circulating and creating ideas, and community.

i'd stilll say the main benefit of the institutions i've attended has been access to social networks. Art school, enabled me to learn the rules in order socially negotiate 'the art scene', and university did much the same. Hell so did squatting. In fact most of the people I know now - are through networks of squatting or study! (even internet networks usually feed into or feed off real world connections in these other spheres) Why is that?

is it the precarity? the limited time? the proximity of physical and idealised community? is it the site?
or is the activity?

this question is going to make me sound horribly elitist and privileged, but, WHAT DO WORKERs DO? How do people, stuck together spending vast amounts of time collectively living a form of psychic death (and don't EVER try to tell me that work, the labouring monkey suit, flouro gear, rubber gloves hourly rate watch the clock shit is ANYTHING but psychic death) actuallly create honest and meaninglful relationships? OK there's always the pub later, but spending 8-10 hours a day, lying to yourself and lying to other people cannot be washed away wiht a few cold schooners.. And most sydney pubs suck. How do people survive in the burbs? I've only lived in country towns or around newtown, so I don't know. Apart from life modelling, none of the jobs I've had have offered even the remotest connection to rich social networks. How do people cope?

I'm asking these questions here, because whatever we mean by open source, does need to consider the social geopgraphies of what we'd like to promote in our walless pedagogical project. I'm also painfully aware of my own extremely limited experience in creating comunities and wonder how that impacts on what I'd be able to constribute to such a project.

what do other people think?

Key thinkers - an open source

i can't think of a better place to plug free talk fests.
Last year's series of lectures was packed out - and I remember befor eI went bakc to uni tha tI was always desperate to find some intersting source of ideas.

So here's the cut and paste. Hope its useful

The Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences presents the
2006 Key Concepts Public Lecture Series. Seven free public lectures
presented by prominent University of Sydney thinkers exploring the
issues that affect our common existence.

Enlightening, at times entertaining and certain to provoke conversation,
the series will be presented on Wednesday evenings from 6.15pm to 7.30pm
at the Footbridge Theatre, Parramatta Road, The University of Sydney.

Launching the 2006 series, Andrew Fitzmaurice will present a lecture on
the concept of 'Terra nullius'.

The term has roused emotion ever since it first entered public debate in
the 1980s because it captured our sense of the injustice of Aboriginal
dispossession. In the past two years terra nullius has become doubly
emotive as a number of political commentators have sought to show that
the idea had no part in our history. Terra nullius certainly is
conspicuously absent from the historical record in Australia.

In this lecture, Fitzmaurice will propose, however, that terra nullius
was generated by the history of European colonisation, or European
'expansion'. It is because terra nullius was created by our historical
experience that it has exerted such a hold on contemporary political
imagination.

Other lectures in the series are:
10 May 'Nationalism' Glenda Sluga
17 May 'Freedom' Duncan Ivison
24 May 'Truth' Huw Price
31 May 'Racism' Ghassan Hage
7 June 'Death' Jennann Ismael
14 June 'Globalisation' Raewyn Connell

Details of the full program can be found at www.rihss.usyd.edu.au

Venue: Footbridge Theatre, Parramatta Road, The University of Sydney
Time: 6.15pm - 7.30pm, Wednesday evenings
Entry: Free. No bookings necessary.
Contact: Nicholas Haskins
T: 9036 7219
E: nicholas.haskins@rihss.usyd.edu.au
W: www.rihss.usyd.edu.au

Please join us for refreshments after the lecture.

ART the manifesto part 1

You can see I'm getting very bored. I've put half of this on this blog and the rest is on artandmayhem so none of the other OSAS's come up here and wring my neck...

This is a great point for me to try to articulate something that I don't think I'm doing at all. It's like trying to explain Spanish or playing the piano or growing cell cultures. But it makes a nice break, from trudge typing through long slow meandering interviews - that seem to make about as much point as a bloody cricket test match. Green. White. Sun. Red ball. Yellow bat. Green grass stains. Yes its all good, yes its all no good. It's no good, god its good. Not. Gaaaah!

I like Elizabeth Grosz's last biofetish explanation of ART. That it’s some animal fecund thing. I heard that and saw glistening bits of Bataille and Deleuze sparkling around my head in a sensuous excess of autumn leaves and really drippy pink sticky flouro oil paint. Multiplying madly. Creatures create. Creatures do shit that makes no sense, that is not economically rational at all. It is not deterministic and the rationality is one that is aligned with process rather than product. Like playing solitaire or stupid board games. Lining up leaves or collecting blue things, or having a reproductive system based on menstruation. What kind of evolution is that?

I've been meaning to read Popper’s later work - the one where he goes 'they took it too far, my anti-determinist thing - those pesky humanities philosophers - I just wanted a more flexible framework for understanding experimental change - damn those postmodernists'. but, yeah, I get distracted. I've been meaning to get back into the studio too.

So art could be, can be, has been anything, right?

So why do I cringe when some sad fuck at some party comes up to me and says, yeah, err, I'm kind of an artist, you know, I do this stuff where we organise information and.... (and like, he works in RETAIL or something)???

Why do I cringe when I walk past that nice dykey cafe with tall the well publicised 'queer art exhibition' that makes me want to rip my fingernails out?

Part of me, does after all, embrace bad art. I love the excrescence of it, the towering piles of shit surging from people’s small minds and inept fingers everywhere. At a certain point, bad art makes less sense and does less damage than bad surgery, or bad writing, or bad computer programming. And it’s often easier to ignore than bad music too, and it lasts much less than bad acting.

I decided to go to art school about a decade ago - when that book 'the artists way' came out. I heard about it from a North American woman - who used to go to the same community college painting class that I was attending. This was great - because self-help books are always far more fun when read out in a Californian accent. It was a fantastically cheesy tome, playing on the romanticist myth or the artist - and constructing the perfect authentic self - based around notions of autonomy and imagination and play. And then it was such a best seller that when the sequel came out 'the artists way at work' no one really seemed to notice!

But yeah, I bought the myth of authenticity, or autonomy, of serious play, and I still do. (you know that line at the end of Foucault’s the order of things about Humanism – being like a face drawn in the sand that gets away by the tide of history? – THAT SCARES ME). I'm just a bit more knowing and cautious about the structures whereby that's managed. My own art training was in painting, at a reasonably traditional school (well, modernist) - which I attended - mainly because there was no HECS on the then diploma course. Actually at art school I was barely interested in painting at all - and could hardly draw, and barely learned, but painters seemed to get the best deal, and my friends were in painting so that's where I stayed.

I probably learnt more about paint afterwards. And I learnt, not only the technical stuff, but also the imaginative stuff, how minds and experiences are formed - while forming - and are - while not entirely constructed by language - then certainly mediated - by - not even language - but 'meaning making structures'. I think that meaning making structures - are patterns and habits and forms of play by which we structure our interactions with our selves, our own thoughts, our own bodies, the spaces around us, the materials we have. The stuff we touch and shape and use.

In terms of THE ART PROJECT - then I have to write about my metier - my media/speciality - because that's the one that I know. I'd call myself a painter - just because I've had a reasonably serious relationship with paint for the past ten years. There are certain words that I only know in Spanish or French or English -and certain sensations, expressions, states that I only know in 'paint'. I know what type of gestures, consistencies, colours and marks make me happy or sad or awkward or anxious in the same way that certain sounds delight my ears - or certain physical touches arouse or repel me. I know painting like I know my own body, or my (ex) lover's body. The texture, my habitual movements, the ones I fight against. The bits where I fuck up or fail or stumble -and where things flow and fly like magic.

Maybe this is why I’ve hardly been near my studio for the past month. Can I still call myself a painter, when I’m not painting? And how long can that go for? I’m spending more time wrestling with words at the moment. My sex life, rage, tears, grief, hysteria, pain, joy, lust etc. – contorts itself inward and gets hammered out on the keyboard as my bum hardens on the seat below me. Fine stuff but it’s not paint. There’s no drip, no odd gestures. No flays of pink, no flinging of Payne’s grey. No working up of yellows and greens with the right bits of oil, no transparent slicks, no sacred muds. This time my thoughts aren’t being worked out in the movement of arms and legs. No pacing up and down before my easel, no panting. I’m not even listening to music. The thoughts get pushed right down. I try to walk them off – because I need to feel this space, this stillness of words. It’s not painting. It’s not mad movements in space with some coloured semi liquid – semi solid hanging off and object in my hand, or smeared across my elbows and hips, on my face, in my hair. Hopefully some of it ends up spread across a surface that arbitrarily ends somewhere. The only rule for painting, is that you use paint, or something like it. Like using letters or a script if you’re writing. That’s it. I wouldn’t call myself a writer if I wasn’t writing, so why call myself a painter if I’m not doing it?

The best analogy for my artistic metier (painting) is sex. Not only because it tallies nicely with Liz Grosz's animal play kind of thing, but also because there's a lot of cultural attention given to sex - and its something people can identify with. Sex is constantly fraught with anxiety, failure, incompetence - as well as intense joy, crazy pleasure - mad terror, tears, weird smells and messy fluids. I can't really say that our culture allows much space for that sort of thing at all - I mean even food has been gourmetted within an inch of its life - or dulled down to scary bland industrial pap. Most food experiences in anglo industrialised societies are intensely simulacral - we're just consuming a bunch of signifiers, rather than having some sort of rich physical interaction with stuff that could have an element of surprise...... I think that's why I'm also fascinated with pornography - because it represents an increasing cultural colonisation and commodification of what has been a reasonably private and largely secretive experience. Look at the way vulvas have entered the regimes of public bodily maintenance - with every second beautician offering bikini waxes! Even scrotums and perineums are part of consumer cultures personal maintenance. How many men getting a sack and crack wax check out their own perineum in the mirror? Its not that easy! so why do people bother? and what has this got to do with art? or OSAS?

I'd like to think that ART - as a culturally contested zone where desires, play, surprise and rules get mediated. Of course this means that any activity that is 'avant garde' is placed immediately in a position of recuperation within consumer culture and this is largely what ART institutions are designed to do: manage creativity so it can be harnessed and projected back into the capitalist imaginary. The specualtive art market is just the financial fetishizing of this very significant cultural role that ART actually plays in consumer society. I also think that 'outsider' art is just as implicated within capitalist cultural management as anything else. And I don’t see kitsch as some sort of quasi-primitivist authentic parallel universe. I think shunting art into this little space of ‘outsiderism’ often just facilitates the acute conformity, either of the individuals concerned, or of the society that champions it. The most bourgeoise boring fucks in the world wet themselves at the idea of the artist as ‘enfant terrible’, and the real tragedy of genuinely madness – is that mentally ill people are incredibly boring. There are few surprises in a solid word salad.

So I think art is implicated with capitalism. Artists do operate largely as extreme sports entrepreneurs. Most of us are just fledgling bits of the petite bourgeoise who find new forms of real estate (from squats to warehouse apartments), new fashion (obvious) new communication systems (blogs, podcasting, film) and other accroutements. And also new forms of self sufficiency. Artists work from home, work odd hours, don’t unionise, don’t separate themselves from their work. We’re a perfect model for the new TEAMCREW corporate slaves of the new knowledge economy. Why is it that so many artists either come from middle class (open minded but cautious parents) families, or drag along huge suitcases of their aspirational class resenting baggage?

I shouldn’t be so cynical should I? Why do I cane the avant-garde – when so much art, especially in Sydney is not even aspiring to being avant-garde? Its just really drab flat stylised shit – that’s about as transgressive as a misspelt cappuccino in a country town? You know the kath & kim stuff on Glenmore road, or the evil evil toadlike shit of Pro Hart & Charles Billich, that sucks the soul out through your eyeballs. People reckon they are “aussie heros” but people also vote for John Howard. There’s no excuses for confusing demagogy with popularism.

I think its because the avant-garde still represents the capitalist imaginary and its an imaginary that still holds true for most people – and almost certainly for the readers/contributors of OSAS. How many of us are scraping by the fringes of academia/curatorship – or some other little fucked up corner of the knowledge economy? (Who else is living off a trust account? Or an inheritance?) Just on the edge of some nice hidey hole – that we try to despise while clinging to like a life-raft as we drift on the sea of precarity… Hell! there’s no way I’d say no to a lectureship or some nice curatorial position – would you? Isn’t OSAS also about creating our own circulations – our own new niche that can allow us to wedge our way into the systems that exist. I’ve heard that a couple of uni lecturers now mention my BLOG in their art writing courses. It gives them easy kudos to be talking about blogging – when they only publish where they can earn DEST credit points, and it might help me brow-nose my way into the odd guest lecturing scam – where I get paid to be the officially sponsored freak for an hour. Queer theory anyone? Would you like it illustrated or served with Deleuze? Then I can say I’m an artist, maybe show a coupla slides from some naked whacky performance piece – but no, not my oil paintings. No that won’t quite do, will it?

the big B (aka Pierre)

OK This is going to be a bit of a work in progress because my brain is in the toilet. So this may be a blog style wiki attempt to engage in some theoretical discourse. - and maybe - that's what we could start doing on this blog perhaps??? - ya know? - "the stupid as a painters guide to critical theory"????

Ghassan Hage (cool anthropology dude from Sydney Uni) gave a really nice introductory lecture on Pierre Bourdieu last year at sydney University. The lecture was free and open and if he runs it again - I'll let people know. Ghassan has done lots of qualittative ethnogrpahic researhc on contemproary communities - particular pelstinian disapora - and he has written some punchy but elegant stuff on contemrpoary austrlaina racism. I *think* he takes a structured/sociological approach to analysing racism inpopular culture - and he uses PB's framworks to do this..... (but i've read his stuff very quickly and briefly - and I need to read books 3 times before my brain remembers anything


Life Facts: Pierre Bourdieu (In strine say his name as Bored Yer) came from COrreze in central france (same region as Jaques Chriac). Its a hole of a place and I bet he was glad to get out. He was a university sociologist - doing lots of nice qualitative ethnography - partcularly of the culture industries (see books I have read below), but in recent years - decided to adopt a higher profile as a public intellectual. I think the later years were inspired by Jacues chiracs government. Apparently PB was extremely worried about the possibility for independent research continuing when the naiton was being run by a bunch of right wing ingorant crypto fascist clots - and he decided that research could only be independent - if it was acutally contested and fought for in the public sphere. so in addition to writing cool books and journal articles, he went on demos and strikes and stuff and went on lots of chat shows. He became a bit of a leftie saint in the media in France. Nouvelle Observeteur did a big frature on him when he died - but that doen't detract from the quality of his writings. since he died (end of 2001) he's become a bit of a hotshot word to bandy around Australian critical cognoscetti circles. this isn't helped by the fact that Artspace ran some big symposium "the Rules of Art" in homage to 2002. I was working that day and couldn't go - and I'm still quite cheesed about the fact - but if anyone did go or knows how to get copies of the proceedings - lemme know.

The Bourdieu I have read - are basically 3 books: "the rules of art", "the love of art", and "distinctions". I've read them only in translation in english.

"Rules of Art" - is more about literary than art criticism, and is based around Gustave Flaubert (who wrote Madame bovary). I guess Flaubert is the 'field' that PB analyses. PB was a sociaologist first and the reason why he is intersting to art(s) writers is because he brought a fresh approach to analysing artworks/practices. rules of Art is nice - because he gave an acocunt of the Frnehc 19C avante garde as a socilogical entity - and had nice defamiliarisation things going on so the narrative of 'the assent of modernism' was able to be looked at in a context - and some of its limitations accounted for sensibly and clearly.

"the love of art" - is a classic ethnographic style text. He and the other guy (the co-author whose name I've forgotten) did a whole heap of interviews with patrons at big french art gallleries - and analyised their income, aspirations, backgrounds, views of art etc. In france, ART is this freaky fucking state religion that the grande bourgeoise totally wet themselves aobut all the time - and it is an extremely elitist aspirational kind of thing - so analysing art like some exotic little social practice - was a bit subversive in this context. Especially since it was done in the 1960's.

"distictions" - was written in the 1980's - and covers similar turf to the love of art - but he uses more sociological discussion of various layers of the art public. actually my mind has gone completely blank - even though i've spent the past 2 years reading bits and citing bits of it in bits of writing that i've done. It could be because I've got a full bladder and am arrranging my evening by SMS.

Distinctions has more of the famous Bourdieu stuff about "habitas" in it - plus his analysis of how aspirationaism actually works itself out in cultural practices.

PB is interesting because he's analysed class not as a fixed thing - but looked at what happens as poeple negotiate their class mobility and identity. I guess this is why his stuff on the 19C parisian avante garde is so interesting - because he was one of the early people to describe artists' own quite complicit role in challenging but also supporting? err - being supported by capitalsm - particulalyr the more entrepreneurial end of emerging bourgeouises.

Bascially if you've ever wondered why 'arty' suburbs slide so fast into the morass of new money boringness, then Pierre's the man you should be reading.
Habitas? - kind of a funny term - where you want to be, where you imagine yourself to be, whihc is not always where you are........

Pierre also had some great postmarxist sociology on time, retirement and the uselessness of leisure, which is right up my Raole Vaneigem (situationist)loving little street.

I think I like distinctions - because he analyses various pretentionus wankers seriously, in the sense of showing the inflected and contested nature of originality, authenticity and appreciation in art. Other people have done this further since - sociology of art -and in some art-pedagogy..... I'm interested in it for my own research because he provides a model - not only for doing sociology with various art communities (contmeprary, professional, amateur, traiditonal etc.), and emphaiszing wha practics occur and the attitudes that form them.

I also find his approach an extremely refreshing change from the semiotic emphasis in a lot of art theory - which focusses on finding meaning in certain images or objects (or artifacts of practices) - and which I find overly textual. i'm interested in why poeple do bad drawings, why people make certain kitsch shit, or do things which seem meaningless......... and what meaning they derive from that.