June 2009

Artists Generate Theory

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Quote from Kodwo Eshun interview, via Travis Hallenbeck:

I was really pleased to find an old essay by Sylvere Lothringer which explained how they wanted people to use Semiotexte books for speculative acceleration. Instead, people started using these text to prove their moral superiority, saying "You are wrong, you have misunderstood Foucault." They used theory for prestige, to block speculation. That is why so many artists used to resent theory. You would get these lame pieces, somebody trying to apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word "ontology" on a cover, instead of taking Parliament to read Heidegger. They always did it the other way round. Theory wasn't being used to pluralize, to see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you listened.

When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form.

Messing With Echidnas

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New York Times story about long-beaked echidnas, or spiny anteaters, intelligent, mellow creatures of the Indonesian rain forest:

Echidnas keep their cool, all right. “They’re one of the most pacifistic mammals,” Dr. Rismiller said. “Nobody bothers them; they don’t bother anybody. There’s a lot we could learn from them.”

Except we haven't:

It took Mr. Opiang months of searching before he found his first echidna. Then he discovered that if he followed trails of freshly dug nose pokes at night — the holes that echidnas made with their beaks as they foraged for earthworms — he could find a den where a sated echidna would be hiding. He learned to grab them under the stomach, where there were no spines. “If you hold them against yourself, they’re friendly and they won’t struggle,” he said. Over five years he managed to capture, measure and, in most cases, attach radio transmitters to 22 individuals.

Air Raid from the Future

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From Salon letters about the Air France/Brazil crash:

somthing stinks
"The captain of a Spanish airliner claimed to have seen "an intense flash of white light" in the area where the plane was lost"

Yeah, 'cause no-one would EVER describe a flash of lightning as "an intense flash of white light".

You do love your conspiracy theories.

-- Lynx

Move along
The "white light" was probably just the people of the future travelling back in time to harvest the passengers, since they were going to die anyway.

They obviously need to re-seed humanity with people who haven't yet ceased being able to reproduce due to pollutants and whatnot. I think this was the subject of a documentary film.

See--much more plausible than "lightning." Who ever heard of lightning occuring in a thunderstorm?

-- Kevin C

@Kevin C
Not quite a documentary film. A terrific science fiction short story by John Varley that was published in a compilation called "The Persistence of Vision". Great book, by the way. I'm pretty sure that they didn't put out a flash of light, though. The whole point of the kidnapping was to do it secretly because if anybody found out the entire thing would not have happened.

-- jebldmm

Had not heard of the Varley yarn. The short story was "Air Raid," and the ideas were developed in the novel Millennium, made into a movie with Kris Kristofferson. Here's the Wikipedia synopsis of the book:

Millennium features a civilization that has dubbed itself "The Last Age". Due to millennia of warfare of every type (nineteen nuclear wars alone), the Earth has been heavily polluted and humanity's gene pool irreparably damaged. They have thus embarked on a desperate plan; time travel into the past, collect healthy humans, and send them to an uncontaminated planet to rebuild civilization.

The time travelers can only take people that will have no further effect on the timeline - those who have vanished without a trace, or died without being observed - otherwise they would be changing the past, which risks a temporal paradox and perhaps even a catastrophic breakdown of the fabric of time. Though they collect everyone they can, they exert a great deal of effort on those destined to die in various disasters such as sinking ships and crashing airplanes (and once a century of Roman soldiers lost and dying in the North African desert). As such incidents leave no survivors to report interference and change the timeline, they can freely remove the living but soon-to-die victims, and replace them with convincing corpses they have manufactured in the future.

The novel deals with several of the raids, their inevitable discovery in the present day, and the fallout that results from changes to the present day reverberating into the future.