March 19, 2015

Willem de Kooning d. March 19, 1997

Sitting On an Airplane, a Mule Lauren Berlantberfrois

1. I am reading other people’s work during a long travel corseting. Much of it is interesting and plausible: I try, it tries. I feel dull toward it, pickled. Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed, buried, encrypted, and diluted that the energetic and risk-taking impulse became sealed and delivered in the form of a defense against thinking any more about it. Along the way, something might have happened to the scene the question stood for: or not. 2. I never fall out of love, but run out of gas. That’s what I mean by thinking as a transformation within stuckness. All the noise of research and explanation gets created to materialize the thickness of an interest; the noise circles around its object and barely, usually, congeals the force to move it anywhere, although sometimes it does. The thought is never finished—in Deleuzean terms, the problem-event that governs the situation is in potential–but what I’m talking about in the finishing is something else, the movement within stuckness between making an opening and defending against so much of that which spikes out from the openings one makes until the thing has to be relinquished and moved into the world.

Willem de Kooning

The Algorithmic Self Frank PasqualeThe Hedgehog Review: Vol. 17 No. 1 (Spring 2015)

To negotiate contemporary algorithms of reputation and search—ranging from resumé optimization on LinkedIn to strategic Facebook status updates to OkCupid profile grooming—we are increasingly called on to adopt an algorithmic self, one well practiced in strategic self-promotion. This algorithmic selfhood may be critical to finding job opportunities (or even maintaining a reliable circle of friends and family) in an era of accelerating social change. But it can also become self-defeating. Consider, for instance, the self-promoter whose status updates on Facebook or LinkedIn gradually tip from informative to annoying. Or the search engine-optimizing website whose tactics become a bit too aggressive, thereby causing it to run afoul of Google’s web spam team and consequently sink into obscurity. The algorithms remain stubbornly opaque amid rapidly changing social norms. A cyber-vertigo results, as we are pressed to promote our algorithmic selves but puzzled over the best way to do so. This is not an entirely new problem: We have always competed for better deals, for popularity, for prominence as an authority or a desirable person. But just as our metabolic systems may be ill adapted to a world of cheap, hidden sugar, the social cues and instinctive emotional responses that we’ve developed over evolutionary time are not adequate guides to the platforms on which our algorithmic selves now must compete and cooperate. To navigate them properly, we need the help of thoughtful observers who can understand today’s strategies of self-making within a larger historical and normative context.

Willem de Kooning

Zombie Apocalypse as Mindfulness Manifesto (after Žižek) Chris Goto-JonesPostmodern Culture Volume 24, Number 1

Of course, it is not the case that the mindfulness movement demonizes all thought, only certain types of thought that involve cycles of rumination. Mindfulness training generally takes the form of therapeutic interventions designed to transform our patterns of thought. While the idea that particular styles of thinking can be pathologized with political significance evokes the controversial anti-psychiatry movement, one of the particular characteristics of the mindfulness movement is that it does not target an ostensibly deviant minority of individuals for “correction” by authority, but instead asserts that it is the majority that is somehow muddle-headed and sick. The hegemonic discourse is the source of toxicity rather than the basis for rectification. In this case, the political relations implied by the therapeutic model are not the personalised power-relations of the centre and periphery of society (or even relations between state and society) as suggested by the anti-psychiatrists, but rather the disjunction is between the material conditions of capitalism and the psychic conditions of humanity in general: with a few exceptions, we are all muddle-headed about how to live in capitalism in a healthy way. The mindfulness movement seeks to reveal and resolve a kind of false-consciousness generated by the dynamics of capitalism itself.

One of the difficulties of this situation which has not been adequately addressed by the “movement” concerns the political meaning and significance of this (r)evolutionary, therapeutic agenda. To some extent, this question has simply not been asked because of the movement’s focus on therapeutic efficacy for individuals. At the very least, the movement suggests two political positions: the first is that mindfulness enables a form of genuinely healthy authenticity that emancipates people from the suffering foisted upon them by capitalism (even while leaving the structures and institutions of capitalism materially untouched); the second is that mindfulness functions as a form of secular religion within capitalism – a contemporary opiate for the people – serving as a new form of ideological domination that enables people to endure the alienating conditions of capitalism without calling for material revolution, redistribution, or institutional change.

This essay is a playful attempt to explore the terrain outlined by these two interpretations, utilizing the imaginary contrast between the mindful meditator and the mindless zombie. In the end, the image of the zombie apocalypse emerges as an ironic manifesto for the mindfulness movement in capitalist societies.

Willem de Kooning

Voices of the Ordinary; A Brazilian SongCarl E. Kandutsch

"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

I. Prefatory remarks: The occasion of this essay

This article will have succeeded in achieving its purpose to the extent that it accurately accounts for the occasion of its writing. It is not written to prove or argue a point, to uncover new evidence, to elaborate a new theory, or even to intervene in any ongoing conversation concerning music, ordinary language philosophy, aesthetics, or any other current topic of which I am aware. This writing aspires to the condition of philosophy in the sense that it seeks to articulate the conditions that underlie its production. More specifically, the writing is occasioned by an intuition responding to a particular song, and its purpose is, to paraphrase Emerson, to suggest a tuition for that intuition; in other words, to test the validity of the intuition by outlining terms of criticism for what may be heard in the song. The song is called "Diariamente" in Portuguese, which can be translated into English as "Everyday," or "Daily." It represents an instance of contemporary "musica popular brasileira" or "MPB," written by Nando Reis (born 1963), formerly the bassist and lead singer of the rock band Titas. In this essay I focus on a live performance in 1995 by Marisa Monte, which can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=873oaywNJws.