Neutral Strata

Integrated information for a rather single purpose

[neutralstrata-blog]

Now, because power realises itself in physical space, anarchists’ relation to this is important. Of course insurrection is an individual fact and so in that place deep inside us, at night as we are about to go to sleep, we think ‘... well, in the last analysis things aren’t too bad’, one feels at peace with oneself and falls 32 asleep. There, in that particular place inside us, that private space, we can move about as we please. But then we must transfer ourselves into the physical space of social reality. And physical space, when you think about it, is almost exclusively under the control of power. So, when we move about in this space we carry this value of insurrection with us, these revolutionary values, and measure them in a clash in which we are not the only ones present.

Alfredo Bonanno, Affinity

[neutralstrata-blog]

That is why we maintain there is a need for the formation of small groups based on the concept of affinity, even tiny groups made up of very few comrades who know each other and deepen this knowledge because there cannot be affinity if one does not have knowledge of the other. One can only recognise one’s affinities by going into the elements that determine one’s differences, by frequenting each other. 

(...)  a group that meets to discuss things and in discussing prepares itself for doing and through that doing contributes to developing discussion that transforms itself into discussion about things to be done, this is the mechanism of the affinity group.

Alfredo Bonanno, Affinity

[neutralstrata-blog]

...because [works of art] are such expensive, sought-after objects, the museum frames the experience of encountering them as the veneration of fetish objects, where the emphasis is placed on the object itself rather than what it can trigger within the subject. This is very unfortunate. It seems to me that art resides within and in between subjects, and subjects don’t always require work to produce themselves. For example, falling in love, or having a religious or aesthetic experience does not require work, so why should art require work to come into being?

Anton Vidokle: Art without work? FULL

[neutralstrata-blog]

Art can cease to be a report on sensations and become a direct organization of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us.

Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution

[neutralstrata-blog]

The traditional goal of aesthetics is to make one feel, in privation and absence, certain past elements of life that through the mediation of art would escape the confusion of appearances, since appearance is what suffers from the reign of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty inseparable from duration, and tending even to lay claim to eternity. The situationist goal is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life, through the variation of fleeting moments resolutely arranged. The success of these moments can only be their passing effect. Situationists consider cultural activity, from the standpoint of totality, as an experimental method for constructing daily life, which can be permanently developed with the extension of leisure and the disappearance of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).

Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution

[neutralstrata-blog]

As always, the battles that swirl around epistemology are ultimately questions of ethics and politics. As Bacon noted, knowledge is power. And knowledge is not simply power in the sense that it allows us to control or master the world around us, but rather knowledge is also power in the sense that it determines who is authorized to speak, who is authorized to govern, and is the power to determine what place persons and other entities should, by right, occupy within the social order. No, questions of knowledge are not innocent questions. Rather, they are questions intimately related to life, governance, and freedom. A person's epistemology very much reflects their idea of what the social order ought to be, even if this is not immediately apparent in the arid speculations of epistemology.

Levi Bryant - Democracy of objects

[neutralstrata-blog]

The more poetically one remembers, the more easily one forgets, for remembering poetically is really just an expression of forgetfulness. In remembering poetically, what was experienced has already undergone a change in which it has lost all that was painful. To remember in this way, one must be careful how one lives, especially how one enjoys.

(...)

The carrying of secret weapons is forbidden, indeed, by the police, yet no weapon is as dangerous as the trick of being able to remember. It is a peculiar feeling when, in the midst of enjoyment, one looks at it in order to remember.

Having perfected the art of forgetting and the art of remembering, one is then in a position to play battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or - Crop Rotation

[neutralstrata-blog]

To forget – all men want to do that, and when they come across something unpleasant they always say, ‘If only I could forget!’ But forgetting is an art that must be practised beforehand. Being able to forget depends always on how one remembers, but how one remembers depends in turn on how one experiences reality.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or - Crop Rotation

[neutralstrata-blog]

A writer who does not teach other writers teaches nobody. The crucial point, therefore, is that a writer's production must have the character of a model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their production and, secondly, it must be able to place an improved apparatus at their disposal. This apparatus will be the better, the more consumers it brings in contact with the production process - in short, the more readers or spectators it turns into collaborators. 

Walter Benjamin, the author as producer

[neutralstrata-blog]

"Social relations, as we know, are determined by production relations. And when materialist criticism approached a work, it used to ask what was the position of that work vis-a-vis the social production relations of its time. That is an important question. But also a very difficult one. The answer to it is not always unequivocal. And I should now like to propose a more immediate question for your consideration. A question which is somewhat more modest, which goes less far, but which, it seems to me, stands a better chance of being answered. Instead of asking: what is the position of a work vis-a-vis the productive relations of its time, does it underwrite these relations, is it reactionary, or does it aspire to overthrow them, is it revolutionary? - instead of this question, or at any rate before this question, I should like to propose a different one. Before I ask: what is a work's position vis-a-vis the production relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position within them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words, it is directly concerned with literary technique.

(...) political commitment, however revolutionary it mayseem, functions in a counter-revolutionary way so long as the writerexperiences his solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind andnot as a producer. 

(...) And so we come back to the thesis we proposed at the beginning: the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better still chosen, on the basis of his position within the production process. "

Walter Benjamin / The Author as Producer

[neutralstrata-blog]

Google Books is interesting because it resituates an entire system of reading. Google books is not optimized for lengthy reading, or scanning or copying. It is anti-novelistic in that sense, and favors short form reading. It’s a kind of reading system that makes owning the book irrelevant. Once a book is scanned into a database and cross-referenced with a other titles, what does one have? Does one have a book anymore? Or do you just have information linked to other information. Reading a book today feels a lot like the latter to me...

(...)

What is a book? Something that categorizes and controls data and organizes specific reading formats: i.e. the book is a generalized reading environment, what Luhmann terms a “loosely coupled medium,” coupled to various publishing mechanisms, printed- and non-printed formats, people, meta data tags, wives, genres, TV, the “spectral” cinema, scanners, Chinese people, etc. One might call this “poetry,” but one could just as easily call it “literary studies,” “fiction,” “obit,” or “family.”

Tan Lin vía 

[neutralstrata-blog]

Metadata can be used to name, describe, catalogue and indicate ownership or copyright for a digital audio file, and its presence makes it much easier to locate a specific audio file within a group – through use of a search engine that accesses the metadata. As different digital audio formats were developed, it was agreed that a standardized and specific location would be set aside within the digital files where this information could be stored. VÍA

[neutralstrata-blog]

The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates back and forth: between a physical page and a digital file, between one reader and another, between an economy of objects and an economy of data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither as "readable" as the original book nor the inevitable ebook, always containing too much visual information or too little.

sean dockray via 

[p-dpa]

To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

William Carlos Williams (1944)

[neutralstrata-blog]

In an age of acceleration and over-production, wherein the very ontology of published language has been transformed by its reformation through and as principally-digital data, the most intelligent and imaginative poetic responses seem to have come from the field of so-called Conceptual writing. Basically this is because conceptualist approaches to cultural production demand that "makers" consider what they make in the context of their field or community at the level of social epistemology as well as that of the projective imaginary. That is, the maker-subject recognizes herself as just one producer within a specific community and history of possibilities that are united by some shared concerns (technical, political, economic, geographic, sexual, whatever), and which are in turn embedded in other communities and histories of production. Those maker-subjects re-imagine those shared concerns by holding them together, often in dispute, which means that they don't have to agree on what those concerns "mean," but that they do privilege them as a/the problematic(s) for their community of production. The job, then, is to develop that shared problematic(s).

/ Nick Thurston on Steve Zultanski vía BOMB

[neutralstrata-blog]

I think “author” is probably pretty good — better than “writer,” say — but an author in Michel Foucault’s sense: not so much a person who makes something, but the person responsible, the person who can claim cultural benefits from a work and who takes the blame for a work.

Craig Dworkin 

source: