Interview with Pata-No UN LTD
conducted by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
August & October, 2019, by email
Pata-No Un LTD
interviewed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
starting on August 27, 2019
& conducted by email
t,ac: Please explain the name "Pata-No Un LTD".
P-N U L: This might be the most tricky of your requests and also the most seemingly ubiquitously simple/complex to give further information based on. "Pata-No Un LTD", tentatively dubbed a Transmedia Post-Neoist Transnetwork, is a open-handle pseudonym group name in the vein of White Colors, SMILE Magazine or the Neoist Network. It was dubbed as such, featuring the readymade pataphysical neologism "we" coined 'pata-no' (not our first), in 2018 for the pseudo-events (which parodied/played on innumerable intertextual links but especially advertising/media-event aka a pseudo event in relation to Baudrillard and Boorstin) 'post-card game jams'. These particular games in part involved/incorporated (due to their post-medium/transmedia hyperrealistic transaesthetic context not limiting them to any particular medium but involving them all/none whatsoever virtually/simultaneously interlinked in the manner of a happening post-conceptually) as a game (fatal) strategically furthering deconstructions, contextually interlinked to Neoism, of various approaches/examples to institutional critique, mail art, and post-conceptual texts in a cut-up/mash-up/recycling/detournement that ended up both leading to another new collective group pseudonym. In a similar fashion to the friends of Stewart Home The KLF (a band) when they adopted a name for their art foundation the K Foundation (which finally just recently reemerged from its self-imposed 23-year moratorium last year), since in a likewise situation we (and yes as a side-note this is not merely a Neoist, pataphysical or deconstructive "we" there are more than just myself, I'll send pics, involved in Pata-No UN LTD) in this case our prior collective transmedia group open-pseudonyms like the infamous White Colours and our new extensions of their chain of additional aliases Dark Trace $creen (a translation of a Baudrillard phrase) and Pataproxy (the other pataphysical readymade neologism "we" coined), benefitted from having a similar to "tENT", "net set" (with Godel's incompleteness at play) collective open-pseudonym (that much like Pataproxy also toyed with the paradox of a, metalinguistic proper name to a 'pata-' degree) that could act as a proxy regarding anything suiting epitextual language games/modes. In these instances as a gallery/museum (featuring the museumified domestic space you saw prior pics) contacting by way of email the three pataphysical locals that included the Musee Patamechanique for the virtual(ized) "locations", as a media group to spam/troll in a culture jamming and subvertisement manner by sending various academic/art conspiracy intelligentsia and billionaires a variety of invites to the locations for scheduled dates as apart of the game which included sets of more complex decadent actions, and then as eventually a publishing house, and media label for the pseudo-events various outputs/archives, and then extended into a more social media cross-platform operation as part of the non-event games we did (all of these activities/groups play in a manor at the margins of post-conceptual, superfictional and counter-intel). As eluded to above the 'pata-no' portion is even more challenging to contextualize to most, but in this case you might be somewhat prepared on guessing ways to proceed and, in lieu of the still in the works essay and probably eventually another, this might remain an easy venue to give a fairly concise "indefinition" of this 'non-concept' in that it borrows from and remains an extension of the Neoism and its pataphysical lineaments in that like the (open-reading/meaningless) empty qualifier prefix meets suffix of Neo-ism and especially when applying the non-dialectical quandaries/problematics of the various counter-definitional qualifiers of Anti-/Pan-/Post-Neoism or even considering the hypotheticals such as Post-Post-Neoism or Meta-Neoism (much like the New Neoists of Stewart Home's Slow Death) alongside David Zach's -ISM or his and Istvan's Noism; to wit (with overly interxtual interlinks to the postmodern and deconstructive problematics of Yes/No distinction for instance Derrida's remarks/essay on the 'Yes' in Ulysses) we simply dropped the -Ism from the proto-Neoism 'No-Ism' (where much like nihility over nihilism and deconstructing the before/after distinction) and by going epi-meta- (i.e. pata-) to get 'Pata-No' without an '-ism' that may be misconstrued as ideological (even though this is what Neoism already deconstructs through its parodoxical/parodistic inclusion of the mockingly floating-signifier of an '-ism').
t,ac: You have an apparent interest in complex literature. Please list 100 of yr favorite bks & their authors. (My own list is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100Books.html )
P-N U L: Since it'll take my cosmopsisly indecisive ass longer than I wanted to wait to give a full 100 list, in the meantime i'll list ones from yours that we share (that're also going on mine)-
At Swim Two Birds - Flann O'Brien
Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician - Alfred Jarry
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
The Soft Machine - William S. Burroughs
These aren't the only on your list that I'm familiar with but would easily also go on the list I'll make.
t,ac: Since I haven't asked any questions yet is this even an interview?
P-N U L: A most amusing proposition, and since I would propose this were part of a more elaborate transmedia/post-medium game that you aren't necessarily off-base rather it incorporates and navigates the mode/phrase regime/language game (note Lyotard's Just Gaming and The Differend in regards to this) alongside various others to push the limits of the "interview" genre hyperlogically where the margins between it and a more post-conceptual/multimedia/intermedia/mail art set of medium/genre/mode demarcations (further playing with those ambiguous parameters for texts like happenings, and Neoism as open-situation
Included are pics of some of our Neoist experiments with a few of us at Pata-No UN LTD. Included are a pic of a So-Called Whatever (Picture 31), a Generic As-Beenism (Picture 32), and another from one of the Post-Card Game Jams (Picture 30).
or your activities that are covered in A Mere Outline was apart of further challenging these post-conceptual/multimedia/post-medium frameworks) or are both traversed and imploded/transversed transaesthetically (see Baudrillard's Transparency of Evil). All of this to play off of the fatal strategies that new media talking heads in their interviews stumble into but achieves even further hyperrealistic referential paradoxes in non-events like the Gulf Wars. All of which one could include in the historical quandaries when historicizing anything and this process (for whatever documents this like your site or otherwise) is apart of that but at this level of meta-self-reflexivity might embellish the virtuality of this media apparition/appearance (so to speak), with us talking of things like Neoism40, parallels to those of the TV news talking heads.
t,ac: Given that the vast majority of the Neoists, if not all of us, are what's known in popular parlance as "White Males" & that it's now widely believed that "White Males" are the cause of all ills in the world (this is an opinion widely propagated by White Females as a way of escaping their own vast responsibility), do you think it's better for all Neoists to be executed ASAP or for us to be used as sex slaves?
P-N U L: Contemporary left social-justice overlooks too much in its retro-Feminist Foucaultian frenzy, if they read post-feminists like Toril Moi, Helene Cixous or even just Baudrillard's essay "We're All Transexuals Now" they might question the ontological givens of many of their assumptions of demarcation relating to race/gender/sex/sexual identity those like Donna Haraway or the Krokers delve into the vast potentiality of this more. That said obviously fuck the phonophallogocentric patriarchy. Since I'm both disingenuous about any Grand Narrative like 'Truth' or 'Reality' I'm nihilistic towards any "ontology" paradigm and along with the Baudrillard's essay above I don't identify with or agree with any presumption of gender/sex/sexual identity (even though I paradoxically do pursue a hyper-trophied "heteronormative" sex preference cosidering my genetic sex i.e. I fuck cis females). I'm rather a suicidal slut so if any cis fems wanna drag me off to the sex gulags/death camps they can at least try. All of this is also discounted by Neoism applying to anyone/anything and depending on wether you're like Istvan or David Zach you might even consider anyone/everone to already be a Neoist or at least a potential Neoist.
Also in follow up to my prior questions on Neoism and 'Pataphysics here are some additional syzygy to consider:
From the Plunderphonics, 'Pataphysics and Pop Mechanics,
"Listening to Jean Derome talk is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Underneath his calm demeanor lies the heart of a clown, then the soul of a poet, and then the technique of a virtuoso. Since his days of teaching flute and musical theory at CEGEP St-Laurent and Conservatoire du musique de Québec, he has added the hats of improvisor, composer, producer to his menu. Derome is the literary half of Les Granules, the poetry to Lussier's passion. His lyrics, texts, and poems all explore the morphology of words. To Derome, words can be codes, synonyms, antennas, pedal points, tools, raw material for the possibilities syntax Indeed, the deft wordplay of "Matter/Manner" recalls the Pataphysical jeux des mots advanced by the French oulipo group of writers during the 1950s. Its inner logic and playfulness in particular evokes the work of Raymond Queneau, who was fond of elegance and permutation in works like his landmark 1949 Exercises de style." (p.181, Jones).
And from Andrew Hugill's 'Pataphysics: A Useless Guide:
""It will already be apparent that definitions of pataphysics are to be treated with caution. This is because the very notion of a 'definition," which is a cluster of words that gives the specific sense of a term that holds true in all (ot as nearly all as makes no difference) situations, is itself unpataphysical. How can a definition be exceptional, or contain its own contradiction? Nevertheless, there have been useful attempts at a definition of pataphysics, especially those of Jarry himself, which is where we must start. In book Il, chapter 8, "Elements of Pataphysics," of the Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (published posthumously in 1911, and hereinafter called simply Faustroll), he offers the following:
An epiphenomenon is that which is superimposed: upon a phenomenon. Pataphysics, whose etymological spelling should be [...] and actual orthography 'pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe so as to avoid a simple pun, is the science of that which is superimposed upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter's limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often accidental, Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphvsics will examine the laws which govern exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be-and perhaps should be-envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws which are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality. DEFINITION. Pataphysics is the science or imaginary solutions, which symlk)lically attributes the properties on objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments. (Jarry 1965a [1911], 145)
Let us unpick some of the detail in this rich text. The notes to the College de 'Pataphysique's annotated Faustroll point out that the Greek etymology implies both mathematical factorizing, since the latter part is in brackets, and a collapsing of the words into the phrase ep[i ta met]a ta fusika. This in turn suggests that the preceding apostrophe elides the letter e, as in épataphysique. Épater les bourgeois (to shock the bourgeoisie) was an avowed aim of the Decadent poets." (p.3, Hugill).
"Probably the most difficult part of the definition is the phrase "Which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments." Its purpose is, of course, precisely to lead the mind to a state of heightened pataphysical awareness. Ruy Launoir makes some enlightening observations: We represent the real according to our usage of it or according to our very anthropomorphic perceptions of it. The lineaments could therefore be either the these practices, or, which amounts to the same thing in the end, a sort of elementary structure-we know not what-of what is made manifest. All our ideation bears its mark, and no doubt always in exactly the same way, even though circumstances, and indeed individuals, may vary. We cannot suppress these lineaments [. . .] but we can at least divert our and free up our thinking. We must, by considering the possible ways in which we can imaginatively extend all the aspects of an object, be able to combine them in order to obtain a new representation of a linear "something"; pataphysical freedom will be attained at the moment when we can think of objects at once as ordinary and in many other ways, being conscious only of the differences in ingenuity between these representations. This does not exclude other interpretations: one could also say, more simply, that the pataphysician proposes to decorate with new solutions our representations the poverty-stricken, linear, "world." (Launoir 2005, 22-23) In most popular variations, the definitions usually get reduced to the following bullet points which, while having the merit of being both relatively easy to understand and indicative of the nature of pataphysics, are scarcely adequate to do justice to the subject: Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions Pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics Pataphysics is the science of the particular and the laws governing exceptions Pataphysics describes a universe supplementary to this one. To which is sometimes added the last line of Faustroll, whose meaning is somewhat ambiguous. "La Pataphysique est la science . . · " could be the beginning of a new sentence, or a simple statement (Pataphysics is science)' or, as is most usually rendered, an assertion of the particular (Pataphysics is the science). Since Jarry, there have been various additions and developments to its sed as definitions. The College de 'Pataphysique, founded in 1948, has u motto: "La pataphysique est la fin des fins. (Pataphysics is the end of ends)." Punning variations on that phrase have been used elsewhere in college publications, as follows: "La pataphysique est la fin des faims. (Pataphysics is the end of hunger.) La pataphysique est la faim des fins. (Pataphysics is hunger for ends.) La pataphysique est le fin du fin. (Pataphysics is the finest of the fine.)" (Brotchie et al. 2003, 23). It is often declared that pataphysics is, in aspect, imperturbable. The first Vice-Curator of the College de 'Pataphysique, Dr. Irénée-Louis Sandomir, further asserted in the Statutes that 'Pataphysics is "inexhaustible," "illimitable," and "totally serious," indeed it is "the most serious of all the sciences." Various other leading pataphysicians have added their own definitions over the years. Raymond Queneau sharpened up Jarry by declaring that pataphysics "rests on the truth of contradictions and exceptions." Boris Vian emphasized the idea of Equivalence, declaring: "One of the fundamentals of 'Pataphysics is that of Equivalence, which may explain to you this obstinacy we have with regard to what is serious and what is not; for us there is no distinction: it is 'Pataphysics. Whether it suits us or not, everything we do is 'Pataphysics" (Bernard and Vian 1959).
René Daumal observed that that pataphysics is "the opposite of physics" because it comprises "knowledge of the specific and irreducible" (Daumal 1929), whereas Jean Dubuffet and Eugene lonesco preferred to stress its anarchic qualities: "The pataphysical position seems to me to be essentially explosive, implying a mixture of radically incompatible fluids, so why not proclaim Permanent Detonation?"· "'Pataphysics is a huge and elaborately constructed hoax, just as Zen is an exercise in hoaxing" (Brotchie et al. 2003, 30-32). Roger Shattuck adapted Jarry and the College de 'Pataphysique: "All things are pataphysical; yet few men practice 'Pataphysics consciously. Beyond 'Pataphysics lies nothing; 'Pataphysics is the ultimate defense" (Shattuck 1960, 103-107). Fernando Arrabal, whose vigorous Panic Movement was formed in 1962, breathing renewed life into surrealism, seized upon its startling and all embracing aspects: "'Pataphysics is a machine for exploring the world. [It is] a perpetual present: a permanent Gift, Faustian or otherwise; a divine surprise. 'Pataphysics is daily bread. Imperturbable 'pataphysics remains immobile amidst eternal change. 'Pataphysics: Mother of the infinite without reference to space (aerial or dead), and Mother of Ethernity without science of time (rotten weather or past glories)" (Stas 2008, 102). Jean Baudrillard relished its transcendence: "For pataphysics there's no longer any singularity. The grande Gidouille is no longer a singularity, it is a transcendent ventriloquism, to use Lichtenberg's expression. We're all Palotins in a gaseous world from which the great pataphysical fart is released" (Baudrillard 2001, 8)." (p.4-5, Hugill).
"...begun to approach this same idea, beginning with Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle and Quantum Indeterminacy and leading on to the "multiverse" that contains all possible universes, including our own. This apparent convergence of pataphysics with theoretical physics, however, should not lead to any confusion, since pataphysics views the theories of quantum mechanics in precisely the same way as it views every other theoretical, and indeed nontheoretical, understanding: as an imaginary solution. A universe comprised of exceptions implies an equivalence between imaginary solutions. This applies in physics, metaphysics, and pataphysics. As the Regent Marie-Louise Aulard observed: For the College, Jarry is neither a prophet, nor a Messiah, but just the first Pataphysician: a title which it is difficult to contest, for while there have been others, and perhaps "greater" than Jarry, he had the distinction of being the first to introduce the idea of pataphysics and to assign it to its rightful place in the world. However, questions of "greatness" have no meaning for us, by virtue of the postulate of Equivalence. A page of the telephone directory has the same VALUE for us as a page of The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll. (College de 'Pataphysique 1965, 9) Does this really mean that there are no contradictions, no exceptions, possible in pataphysics? As usual, the answer is pataphysically complex and relies upon acceptance of the simultaneous existence of mutually exclusive opposites. The nature of pataphysical exceptions may be best (mis)understood by examining some key concepts such as Anomaly, Clinamen, Syzygy, and Plus-Minus, or, to speak more philosophically, Antinomy." (p.9, Hugill).
""Alongside its digital developments, the twenty-first century has seen a fusion of pataphysical museums. Somehow the very concept of a seems particularly fertile for pataphysics. Perhaps this is because museum visitors so often have to create imaginary solutions to the questions meaning or origins of the objects that they view. Or perhaps it is be- we question the given explanations of those objects, which can often strange or even downright ridiculous. Sometimes we may have the sion that the curators and experts of these museums are inventing stories to explain their collections. At least, as uninformed visitors, we have no way of knowing whether or not that is the case. Part of the pleasure in attending museums lies in this secretive perception: that the objective truthfullness of what we are told is beside the point. The glass cases, the explanatory the plaques, the interactive installations, the illustrated catalogs, even public lectures by experts, serve to provide us with enough of fragmentary evidence to piece together in our minds the lives and activities gone. These are inevitably mysterious. The Musée Patamécanique, created by Neil Salley, exists at a location in Bristol, Rhode Island, USA, and may be visited by appointment only. In an email to the author on 7 August 2010, Salley explained:
Patamechanics may be thought of as a method of manifesting or effects with physical properties-such as dimension, motion, luminosity etc.) that shed light upon the laws short, while 'Pataphysics theoretically explores the laws goveming exceptions, Patamechanics is the study of physical objects that relay these concepts. Musée Patamécanique is the first product of this field of inquiry. It is a half imaginary, half physical, research and educational institution that has been developed as both a vehicle and a foundation, for studying the Science and Art of Patamechanics. The Museum contains various strange mechanical exhibits. The "Pharus Foetidus Viscera," or "Olfactory Lighthouse," by Maxine Edison, is a cylindrical pedestal topped by a bell jar and surrounded by metal octopus arms. Inside the jar, a unicorn horn slowly rotates, causing it to secrete green goop that resembles shampoo gel. This lighthouse emits not photons but a random scattering of molecular oscillations as a curious set of bouquets lift and amuse the olfactory organ to the illusory delights of pomegranate, honeydew melon, eucalyptus, citrus, as well as Christmas tree, papaya, the essence of wood, and sugar cookie. The Auricular-lyrae, or Earolin, by Hans Spinnermen, is a cylindrical glass chamber housing a floating apparition of a giant ear which plays the violin. The Insecto Reanamus, also by Hans Spinnermen, is a device which extracts the dreams of bees and displays them in glass jars. The centerpiece of Le Musée is Time Machine by Dr. Ezekiel Borges Plateau. A spinning disc nearly eight feet across that sounds like a train thundering down the tracks, and when it reaches full-speed a visual treat is revealed that cannot be described except to say that it would make Jules Verne cry. Each tour concludes with a visit to The Laboratory for the Study ofAdvanced Fourth Dimensional Mechanics. The visitors are told that this is an interactive exhibit and that they are invited to explore it for as long as they remain curious. "It is a place where thoughts are as real and important as objects, and every object on display is an endless source of wonder," Salley says as he gently ushers his guests ahead. The passage to this realm is a modest doorway marked "EXIT."" (p.30-31, Hugill).
August 28, 2019:
t,ac: If you were given a choice of being executed or of only speaking either utter nonsense, hyper-intellectualism, bullshit, poppycock, or euphemisms for the rest of your life, wch wd you choose & how would you inform yr persecutors of yr decision?
P-N U L: I'm wildly amused at this hypothetical as I probably come off as only being able to speak a mix of nonsense techno-gibberish, slang and the varieties of meme'd out newspeak already (in many ways thats a 'fatal strategy' of sorts but lets put that aside at this juncture). In lieu of citations from the text in the works at the moment, and although I may not be able to speak for anyone (there remain no legitimate judgement criterion/rules for prescriptives) even my comrades at Pata-No UN LTD but "I" (let's go with "Not Available" or Karen Eliot since we can talk of the autonomy/heteronomy distinction further later) would go with a farce/game akin between escalating by context from Melville's Bartleby, to O-Dog from Menace II Society (a so-called "hood" film) or the theater scene killing Nazis from Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, to Mailer's The Executioners Song and Kafka's The Judgement. So from "I would prefer not to", to:
"These niggas say they heard of me, I ain't heard of you
Get the fuck up out my fucking face, 'fore I murder you
Bitch niggas always jacking Blood, but I know they fu
Whole squad full of fucking killers, I'm a killer too
Sending shots, shots, shots, shots, shots nigga
Everybody get pop, pop, popped nigga
The thing go rrrah, rrrah, rrrah, rrrah, rrrah nigga
We send shots, shots, shots, shots, shots nigga"
(Billy, by 6ix9ine) an approximate (mumble rap) gangsta ("active") nihilist pronouncement, to "just execute me" and/or going jumping off a bridge into a river where as Samuel Weber mentions in his Afterwards to Jean-Francois Lyotard's Just Gaming on the comedy of Kafka short story "The Judgment" where after being condemned to said fate (go jump in a river) suddenly by his father, the son Georg proceeds to do so immediately wherein, "...it is not so much the outlandish "verdict" of the father, but rather the alacrity with which it is put into action by the person it targets." (116). At least you now have an amusing nihilistic Post-Neoist vignette on the obscene hyperrealities of power violence and the deconstruction of justice as (im)possibility.
t,ac: It's the near future. You've been arrested for blasphemy. It hardly matters what you did, somebody's out to get you. You might've challenged a local fundamentalist to an ass-licking contest or merely looked the wrong way at someone. Instead of being threatened w/ torture or death, you're given the choice of Community Service or being on a Neoist 'Reality' TV Show. "Community Service" is of an unknown nature but you met someone who survived it once & they were incapable of telling you what happened. The whole situation is a trick b/c yr persecutors know that you'll pick the TV show. The situation is much like the one depicted in Peter Watkins's great "Punishment Park", the game is fixed, you have little chance of reaching a positive outcome. You pick the Neoist TV Show, the set-up is as follows: You will be locked in a room w/ 5 Neoists for 6 months. All of you will have groceries, all of you will cook, all of you will be provided with enough poison to kill one person only. You will we warned that all of the Neoists are extremely unstable paranoids & that they're all old friends who've known each for decades & been through alot together. Everyone is required to eat food prepared by someone else, eating one's own cooking will result in electrocution of increasing severity. How do you choose whose food to eat & what do you do to increase yr likelihood of survival?
P-N U L: This hypothetical is also very humorous (ironic for this Zero-Sum Game No Show) and reminds me of a cross between the premise of the anime/video game Danganronpa (a high school death game in a similar fashion) and reality shows like (the French) The Loft, The Real World, (these "...great steps towards democratic nihilism.." (26) as Baudrillard calls these shows in Telemorphosis) and even the cooking reality competition show Chopped (this episodes special ingredient is poison). Television as "...an integral telemorphosis of society. Television created a global event (or better, a non-event), in which everyone became trapped. [...] Television has shown itself to be the strongest power within the science of imaginary solutions." (28-29) where your hypothetical show's a doubling of the manifestation of media again "...exploring all the historical forms of torture, served in homeopathic doses, under the guise of mass culture or avant-garde art? This is precisely one of the principle themes of contemporary art." With all of this in play alongside the abeyance of legitimate prescriptives, as well as a lack of interest in teleological goals like survival, depending on the parameters of the show I may be able to coax everyone via game theory strategies of ratios and topographies of poison and cooperation but I would have no interest in a petty bourgeois/idealist interest like survival (although Derrida and Vizenor may have some info regarding 'survivance') in this regard perhaps again like Bartleby we could "prefer not to" or like Gary Gilmore of The Executioners Song go for death in this case like Junko Enoshima of Danganronpa (the person who actually secretly operates the death game in that show by remote ying-yang teddy bear before revealing herself after having been defeated by an expert detective student with anime perseverance) who with her "nihilistic philosophy" "...begins to revel in the ultimate form of despair and commits suicide by subjecting herself to a combination of the executions she inflicted on the other students. At the last second before her death, she becomes bored with despair and dies without knowing the despair of death she was so excited about mere seconds ago. Her body is then dismembered by several members of Ultimate Despair and the parts grafted onto their bodies..." where in a similar fashion I could attempt to consume everyone's poison that they would otherwise would be forced to consume. It depends on the rules of the game at that point if the show runners are looking for entertainment then the former or the later would be devastating to the show and I may be even stopped before my any act of group poison supply consumption since I would then derail the formatting through the non-compliance of my death by a massive poison dosage leaving a forced additional round or dissolution of the game, much like a death by starvation from "preferring not to", if somehow all of these options were prevented or I was bored otherwise I suppose I could do any number of random things. I might even whip up a great menu!
August 29, 2019:
t,ac: In a matter of only a few days, you've watched, in their entirety, these movies of mine online, all but two of them feature-length:
"WARNING: TV Suffocates the Senses like a Bag over the Head" (2009)
"Monte con o sin safos Rides Again" (in collaboration w/ Ryan Broughman) (2016-2017)
"Monty Cantsin Rides Again" (2015)
""Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich" Reading at Te Café" (March, 2017)
"Is this a Black Theorem?" (April, 2017)
"AMD" (2019)
"Devival" (1983, 2013, 2014)
I've made 178 features to date. You're possibly the only person I know who's ever watched more than 2 or 3 of them. An investigative team is moving into your area to quarantine you & study you for paradigm shift affects. Are you OK w/ that?
P-N U L: [no reply]
August 30, 2019:
t,ac: What's yr earliest memory?
P-N U L: The first house my family had perhaps (age 3), I smoke too much weed to remember pointless details in my day to day routine, I find biographical info rather banal (as well as there's an immense deconstructive double-bind discussing these matters) and with the specter of multiple identities in Neoism its rather indulgent to go over, but there you go.
[t,ac: My earliest memory is of a dream I had when I was 3. I wasn't necessarily asking for "biographical info", I was more curious about what memories have stuck with you from what age. My dream memory is still w/ me after 62 yrs.]
t,ac: How did you get to where you are now?
P-N U L: Ironically many of my personal details and some of us also at Pata-No UN LTD resemble the backgrounds of those mentioned in the interviews in Monte Con o Sin Safros Rides Again and Monty Cantsin Rides Again. Basically, I'm an immense slacker, I gave no fucks in high school as a delinquent (graduated late 00s), went to a generic state college (during which I was involved with various projects, groups and research that culminated in our (Post-)Neoist experiments) and graduated in around 5 years. I've been involved in (Post-)Neoism for over 7 years, had plenty of McJobs, but since then I've managed to leverage my lack of any fucks given to get a gig as a do-nothing consultant turned editor/writer.
t,ac: What are "Post-Card Game Jams"?
Included are pics of some of our Neoist experiments with a few of us at Pata-No UN LTD. Included are a pic of a So-Called Whatever (Picture 31), a Generic As-Beenism (Picture 32), and another from one of the Post-Card Game Jams (Picture 30).
P-N U L: *** A Post-It Note on Transmedia Games For Erasure***
Similar to the problematics of the ambiguities of the statement in Derrida's "The Truth In Painting", "..."I am interested in the idiom in painting." [...] That he is interested in the idiomatic expression itself, in the words "in painting"? Interested in words in painting or in the words "in painting"? Or in the words " 'in painting' "?
That he is interested in the idiom in painting, i.e., in what pertains to the idiom, the idiomatic trait or style (that which is singular, proper, inimitable) in the domain of painting, or else? another possible translation-in the singularity or the irreducible specificity of pictorial art, of that "language" which painting is supposed to be, etc.?
Which makes, if you count them well, at least four hy?potheses; but each one divides again, is grafted and contaminated by all the others, and you would never be finished translating them. Nor will I." (p.1-2, Derrida, 1987). So to give further context to this and maybe some of my prior statements that may involve some conflations of signatures or initial mistakes/oversight/gaps in this game throughout this chain so far and various additional aporia, I'd like to give a more information on the constellation of these empty floating signifiers of "terms" played on thus far as a detour. With plenty of quotes for further redaction. A full version of this will probably get included in the text I'm working on at the moment.
This might situate the empty-signifier of transmedia in relation to transaesthetical/transpolitical/transexual/transeconomical games. Where as Baudrillard mentions in an essay "Transpolitics, Transsexuality, Transaesthetics,"
"Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic.
Simultaneously nuts everything has taken on a political meaning, (especially since the 1968 cultural revolution in France). And by everything I mean not only daily life, but also madness, language, and media, as well as desire. The more everything was gradually absorbed in a sphere of liberation and mass collective processes, the more it became political. At the same time, everything has become sexual, everything is an object for desiring: both power and knowledge. Since sexual stereotype has become the master key, all is now interpreted in terms of phantasms and repression. And by the same token, everything aestheticizes itself: politics aestheticizes itself into the spectacle, sex into advertising and pornography and the Whole gamut of activities into what is held to be called culture, which is something totally different from art; this culture is an advertising and media semiologizing process which invades everything.
Each category (the political, the sexual, the aesthetic) is elevated to its highest degree of generalization, to its largest totalization. But at the same time, each category loses - in the same move -all specificity and reabsorbs itself somehow in the others. When everything is political, nothing is political any longer; the word loses all meaning. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any longer; sexuality loses all determinacy. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is either beautiful or ugly any longer and art itself disappears. This strange and paradoxical state of things which is the total accomplishment of an idea, the perfection of the "modern" movement and at the same time, it is its denegation, its liquidation by reason of its very excess and extension beyond its own limits. It is this strange state of things which I shall call by the same trope: the transpolitical, the transsexual, the transaesthetic. And I will analyze together, not by analogy or transfer from one domain to the other, but according to the law which is imposed on us by the situation itself and which we can call postmodern: that is, the law of the confusion of genres and genders.
Art - we see it proliferate everywhere, and the discourse on art, we see it proliferate even faster. But it proliferates according to its specific genius, its adventure, its power of illusion, its capacity to deny the real and oppose another scene to the real, where things obey a superior rule of the game. In art, things obey a transcendental figure where beings, in the likeness of lines and colors on a canvas can lose their meaning, exceed their own purposes and in a flight of seduction, join up with their ideal form, even if it means their own destruction. In this direction and in this meaning, art has disappeared. It has disappeared in a symbolic pact through which it is distinguished from the pure and simple production of aesthetic values that we know by the name of culture; i.e., art is now an infinite proliferation of signs, an infinite recycling of forms, past or present' This is the Xerox degree of culture. There exist no fundamental rules any longer, neither criteria of judgement nor of pleasure (because pleasure demands the rules of the game, and the more intense the pleasure, the more rigorous the rules)." (p.9-10, Stearns and Chaloupka).
Initial remarks in an interview of Baudrillard by Lotringer ("Too Much is Too Much") in The Conspiracy of Art may add to this play on transaesthetic.
" JB- We have reached a critical threshold, a critical mass. Let's assume-it's a hypothesis-that something disappeared with Duchamp and Warhol. Whatever happened afterwards therefore came after it was gone. So much for a history of art.. But the same analysis could be applied to philosophy. Philosophy has disappeared. To a certain extent everything, even this so-called ordinary reality, can be seen in the light of art. We are living in the transaesthetic, were in a giant museum.
SL- This is not exactly the museum without walls Andre Malraux had in mind. No wonder art history has recently achieved a new visibility The more blurred the boundaries, the more necessary it becomes to keep everything in its proper place.
JB- According to art history, for them, first there was classical art and then modern art... But these kinds of distinctions are not really in line with contemporary art. Modern art projected itself into the future: it was the avant-garde. The avant-garde was alright. They dreamed it and it worked. Deconstruction has a transcendent dimension. Now the avant-garde does not work anymore because the system is always two revolutions ahead of us. And intellectuals are trying their best to save the empire of meaning. They are completely off-base. No one is drawing any conclusions from all of this. Politicians are out, and so are intellectuals, even though they resist a bit more. As for art, it has definitively gone beyond its end. We are no longer in a modern perspective of prevision, of rationalization. It is becoming exponential."
(p79-80, Baudrillard, 2005b).
This deconstructs further terms like postmedia.
"The junction of television, telematics and informatics is taking place before our eyes, and will be completed within the decade to come. The digitisation of the television image will soon reach the point where the television screen is at the same time that of the computer and the telematic receiver... a post-media era of collective-individual reappropriation and an interactive use of machines of information, communication, intelligence, art and culture."
(Felix Guattari, Towards a Post-Media Era, 1990).
"Stewart Home as a counter to the technique of appropriation in the postmodernist image economy outlined above, since plagiarism necessarily emphasises points of both material contiguity and disconnection in the transferral of information, art history has tended to emphasise the immateriality of digital practices. This both unfolds onto notions of equivalency in considerations of medium as an ontological category, and effaces the way in which these practices were actually attempting to work through the heterogeneous conditions that inflected upon the circulation of information online. That computer based artistic practices have been grouped and held together under a variety of neologisms, such as 'New Media Art', which tacitly support particular categories of media, speaks to a degree of technological determinism... However, what the critical rhetoric against techno-determinism assumes is that technology even has a stable identity that may oppose and stultify 'art'. Working with the assumption that the plethora of aesthetic categories from 'Net.Art' to 'New Media Art' might actually suggest a fundamental instability in rather than reification of the ontology of digital technology, this paper looks at the way in which the rhetoric of 'postmedia' has been mapped onto the art historical notion of 'post-medium'... Krauss argued that an understanding of medium as 'aggregative', that is to say as a fundamentally heterogeneous structure of interlocking supports and conventions, could be used to displace the essentialising tendencies of Greenbergian modernism. Such an assertion not only presented the possibility that the specificity of mediums need no longer be attached to, or collapsed into, the physicality of their support, but also that it is precisely through the emergence of new technologies, such as video, that a space of indeterminacy was opened up in which to rethink artistic and discursive categories..."
(Kinsley, 70-73).
"Theorising medium outside of its material or physical support, and instead emphasising the interlocking and interdependent structures that comprise it, suggests that representation ought to be understood as a system of imagesigns that have become both inherently decontextualised but also reliant on several different contexts or frames simultaneously. In many ways, therefore, Krauss' reading of the post-medium condition of conceptualism is a descendent of her work on the medium of video... Equivalency and interchangeability are therefore at the heart of Krauss' work on both medium and post-medium, which video somehow seems to sit between in its influence on conceptualism, since they provide a clear iteration of the way in which a postmodern detachment of signifier from signified has been mapped onto a conceptual detachment between figure and ground in the field of representation."
(Kinsley, 75-76).
"an indeterminacy in the ontology of technology... What is important about such practices is that, in the context of thinking post-medium through post-media, artists working 'after the Internet' do not necessarily situate their practice online, nor do they work exclusively with the digital, even while they are critically invested in it. Instead, these practices straddle a variety of media including painting, performance, writing, installation and analogue technologies posing questions beyond the traditional discourses of art and technology, which actually extends something of the mode of working in the mid-'60s outlined above."
(Kinsley, 77-78).
With Rosalind Krauss "...identifying the work of the post-medium condition as conceptual art, installation, and relational aesthetics."
Asked elsewhere on a website "Does a post-medium condition encompass the acknowledgement of the exhibition as a medium?"
Fluxus terms like intermedia, happening and event score add to this issue...
"This explains the impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films... in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world."
(Dick Higgins, Statement On Intermedia)
"...intermedia; the term itself (also applicable in part to the concurrent phenomenon of Happenings) was coined by Fluxus participant Dick Higgins, denoting work whose structures determined the textures of the spaces between media."(p.91, Doris)
"...the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard of-happenings and events... But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well."
(p.9, Kaprow, 1958).
"'Events'. This word, he claims, 'seemed closer to describing the total, multi-sensory experience I was interested in than any other...' [...] Event scores, taut little propositions, exercises, or word-objects, usually printed on small, often disposable, cards or sheets of paper... The events themselves - elegant, ephemeral monostructural gestures which may be performed before an audience, alone or in a group, or in the mind - and the objects which are revealed within their structures, unfold in a space to which words have limited access... mark a culminating moment of what Umberto Eco
described in 1959 as the 'open work'. Such works, notes Eco, 'tend to encourage "acts of conscious freedom" on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations,among which he chooses to set up his own form without being influenced by any external necessity which definitively prescribes the organisation of the work in hand'.."
(p.97-102, Doris)
Which then sets up the deconstruction of the paradox of nonart
"The practice of such an art, which isn't perceived as art, is not so much a contradiction as a paradox. Why this is so requires some background.
When I speak of activities and contexts that don't suggest art, I don't mean that an event like brushing my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or theater) confers "art value" or "art discourse" on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp's initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and function of high art itself. But later it became trivialized, as more and more nonart was put on exhibit by other artists. Regardless of the merits of each case, the same truism was headlined every time we saw a stack of industrial products in a gallery, every time daily life was enacted on a stage: that anything can be estheticized, given the right art packages to put it into. But why should we want to estheticize "anything"? All the irony was lost in those presentations, the provocative questions forgotten. To go on making this kind of move in art seemed to me unproductive."
(Kaprow, Art Which Can't Be Art, 1986)
It also involves deconstructing the popular definition of transmedia while playing out its transfinite mediation, radical intertextual interlinks and multimodality.
"Transmedia, used by itself, simply means "across media." Transmedia, at this level, is one way of talking about convergence as a set of cultural practices. Keep in mind that Marsha Kinder in Playing with Power wrote about "transmedia intertextuality", while I was one of the first to popularize the term, transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling describes one logic for thinking about the flow of content across media. We might also think about transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle, as other logics... a transmedia narrative in which we follow the characters and situations across media... transmedia performance, with the songs moving through YouTube, iTunes, live performances, etc... Multimodality - a term coined by Gunther Kress to talk about how educational design taps the affordances of different instructional media..."
(Henry Jenkins, Transmedia 202: Further Reflections)
This unravels further in relation to conceptual, ultra-conceptual, deconceptual and post-conceptual "art" definitions.
"Concept art was meant to replace all of mathematics with an endeavor which involved a Rorschach-blot semantics; and which did not claim to be cognitive, at least not in the inherited sense... to deal with the issue of formulating "cognitive nihilism" in a way that is not self-defeating... The original concept art was a genre which used visual displays or process objects or text."
(Henry Flynt, The Crystallization of Concept Art in 1961, 1994)
"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."
(Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", 1967)
"Conceptual art... "ultra-conceptual art," as I first called it... for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary... and/or "dematerialized.""
(Lucy R. Lippard, 6 Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1997)
"Conceptualism as it is practised today is pretty vacuous and empty of concepts to the point where it probably deserves a new name, deconceptualism. Deconceptualism retains the forms of conceptualism, including the justificatory verbiage, and it claims descent from Marcel Duchamp. But it is Duchamp as filtered through the empty head of Andy Warhol rather than the French cultural theorists... If we do not have this framework then we risk accepting that anything and everything can be art if someone says it is art. Ironically that idea is at the heart of conceptualism, and without it we would not have deconceptualism. If we accept that art has to have a framework to distinguish it from non-art then what we are really saying is that there is a theory of art that defines that framework. In other words art is underpinned by theory."
(Michael Parakos, "Anarchy In The UK", 2013)
"Surplus is where failure's specificity abides, a specificity that exposes a culture's limits and absurdities, its structures of desire and orders of the real Much of the conceptual and post-conceptual art that emerged from the experiments of the 1960s and 70s can be seen as attempts to isolate and express this surplus. For instance, John Baldessan's Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) (1974)-a sequence of eight photographs that capture a hand throwing four balls into the air, almost but not quite forming a square-expresses a ocular surplus in the way an initially narrow demonstration of repeated failures can become seen as inadvertent juggling act."
(p.7, Priest, 2011)
"...the Situationist International coined the idea of 'détournement' to describe the use of urban spaces for appropriation and critique. A half century on, a post-conceptual generation of artists are exploring new locations for showing and situating their practice within a culture industry which has proven equally as responsive and resilient."
(p.2, Grant Pooke, Post-Conceptual Art Practice: New Directions Part Two)
"Strands within post-conceptual sculpture have frequently been associated with found materials, reminiscent of the neo-avant-garde aesthetic of 'Arte Povera' and the iconography of mass culture. For example, contemporary British artists, Sue Noble and Tim Webster are known for their composite assemblages, comprising found objects and other detritus, which, by adept and imaginative manipulation, are used to form and project highly detailed silhouettes... With the temporary, site-specific work Untitled (Suit in Concrete) (2007) he went onto a City of London building site and encased the work in the unset concrete screed of a basement floor. The intervention was inherently ambiguous; was the suit sinking or emerging; was this a work of transient archaeology, ethnography or a 'happening' in the tradition of Kaprow or Beuys? The detour and site-based intervention to the City of London, one of the engines of laissez- faire capitalism, also suggests a gentle and subversive appropriation of earlier Situationist tropes of the 'dérive' and of 'détournement' the use and navigation of the urban environment to fashion aesthetic and social interventions."
(p.4, Grant Pooke, Post-Conceptual Art Practice: New Directions Part One)
"Regardless of high Modernism's demise, the durability of post-conceptual painting suggests that its practitioners have been re-fashioning and re-defining the medium with some of these earlier histories and aspirations in mind. For a post-1950s generation, such a 'reconstruction' of painting is not just an act of random cultural archaeology or ritual nostalgia. Although conscious that painting is no longer a privileged medium, its practitioners continue to explore the genre's relationship to a constellation of interests... Pryor explores the limits of the painted surface... Pryor's all-over compositions self-consciously refuse any definite hierarchy or ordering of motifs. Casts of fruit and vegetables, referencing the overlooked genre of the still-life, underline a Duchampian engagement with assemblage and the re-use of found objects, appreciable in work by William Henry."
(p.10-11, Grant Pooke, Post-Conceptual Art Practice: New Directions Part One)
We might near an attempt to contextualize this indefinition of "transmedia" in its transaesthetic context by juxtaposing it to at last the post-conceptual/post-aesthetic/post-media as "condition" in relation to this dematerialization.
"...an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively... Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object's becoming wholly obsolete.... the "post-aesthetic" phase supersedes this self-conscious, self-critical art that answers other art according to a determinist schedule.. Dematerialized art is post-aesthetic only in its increasingly non-visual emphases."
(Lucy R. Lippard, The Dematerialization of Art)
"With the unassisted Ready-made, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change one from "appearance" to "conception" was the beginning of "modern" art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually."
(Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy)
"It is at this point that the critical historical significance of the transformation of the ontology of the artwork, effected in the course of the last 50 years, from a craft-based ontology of mediums to a postconceptual, transcategorical ontology of materializations, comes into its own.
This leads me to my main thesis: it is the convergence and mutual conditioning of historical transformations in the ontology of the artwork and the social relations of art space a convergence and mutual conditioning that has its roots in more general economic and communicational processes that makes contemporary art possible, in the emphatic sense of an art of contemporaneity. These convergent and mutually conditioning transformations take the common form of processes of 'de-bordering': on one hand, the de- bordering of the arts as mediums the emergence of genuinely transcategorial practices opening up the conceptual space of a 'generic' art and on the other, the de-bordering of the previously national social spaces of art. This has been an extraordinarily complicated historical process.xi Nonetheless, its result may be summarized, in brief, as the immanent appearance within the work of art of the global socio-spatial dialectic of places, non-places and flows in the form of a dialectical constellation of the aesthetic, conceptual and distributive aspects of art. It is this dialectical constellation that constitutes what I call the 'post-conceptual' character of contemporary art.
Such art has six main features:
1. A necessary but insufficient conceptuality. (Art is constituted by concepts, their relations and their instantiation in practices of discrimination: art/non-art.)
2. A necessary but insufficient aesthetic dimension. (All art requires some form of materialization; that is to say, aesthetic [= spatio-temporal'] presentation.)
3. An anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials. (This is a critical requirement of art's necessary conceptuality.)
4. An expansion to infinity of the possible material means of art. (Transcategoriality) This is the liberating significance of the 'post-medium' condition.
5. A radically distributive that is, irreducibly relational unity of the individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time. (An ontology of materializations.)
6. A historical malleability of the borders of this unity.xii It is the conjunction of the first two of these features that leads to the third and fourth, while the fifth and sixth are expressions of their logical and temporal consequences, respectively.
In sum, contemporary art is 'post'-conceptual to the extent that it registers the historical experience of conceptual art, as a self-conscious movement, as the experience of the impossibility/fallacy of the absolutization of anti-aesthetic, in conjunction with a recognition of an ineliminably conceptual aspect to all art. In this respect, art is post-conceptual to the extent to which it reflectively incorporates the truth (which itself incorporates the untruth) of 'conceptual art': namely, art is necessarily both aesthetic and conceptual.
The spatial character of this dialectic of the aesthetic and the conceptual and its ontological and social significance as an artistic expression of the dialectic of places and non- places appears most clearly in the art of late 1960s and early 1970s in the practices of its textualization and architecturalization or environmentalization. This was a dual practice conceived by Robert Smithson at the time as a dialectic of site and non-site."
(p.10-11, Peter Osborne, "Contemporary Art Is post-conceptual art", 2010).
In this respect, transnationalization represents a fourth stage in a historical narrative of the expansion of the spatial range and conception of 20th-century Western art, which can be summarized as follows: the Euclidian spatiality of objects to the speculative spatiality of planetary relations.
1. The environmentalization of painting and sculpture, from Matisse to Kaprow, via muralism, and on up to the minimalists' investment of negative space. (This is a movement still grounded in the interior, in relations between objects and rooms.)
2. The textualization, architecturalization and expanded environmentalization of art, and the constitution of a generic concept of art, via the exploitation of the constitutive ambiguity of the design/building or conceptualization/materialization relation. (This is the moment of Lewitt, Bochner, Graham, Smithson and Matta-Clark and indeed Hans Haacke.)
3) The post-architectural urbanism of various kinds of project work and the functional redefinition of site, based on an awareness of the constitutive role of non-sites. (Mark Dion and Réne Green might serve as examples here.).
4. The transnationalization of art via its production for and inscription within a transnational art space that mediates the global dialectic of places, non-places and flows, via the institutional forms of the large-scale international exhibition, the market and the migrancy of artists. (This is the moment for which I will be taking The Atlas Group as my exemplar.) It is a profoundly contradictory process in which artists and art-institutional and market forms negotiate the politics of regionalism, post-colonial nationalism and migration, overwriting the general spatial logic of post-conceptual work with global political-economic dynamics.
So how can 'art' occupy, articulate, critically reflect and transfigure so global a transnational space? Only, I think, if the subject-position of its production is able to reflect that is, to construct and thereby express something of the structure of 'the contemporary' itself. The work of The Atlas Group is emblematic here because it draws attention to two distinctive and related aspects of this process: fictionalization and speculative collectivization."
(p.12-13, Peter Osborne, "Contemporary Art Is post-conceptual art", 2010).
"..."post-media condition" in which "no single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the different media influence and determine each other.""
Deconstructing this all obviously is involved both in transaesthetics but also clearly Neoism, including how "Any names that I use as alternatives to my given name don't function as "pseudonyms". I call "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" the 'master' set that includes the other name sets...", as well as much of Stewart Home's disputes with neo-conceptualists like the YBA are entailed in all this. With this we can see a few more accompanying quotes from Baudrillard to consider for erasure, but also parallel how your activities as covered in "A Mere Outline" that we've expanded upon which already challenge ontological/epistemological categories of activities and also as you've said you've, "...explicitly state in lectures, interviews, & writing that I don't think of myself as an 'artist' - that, in fact, I find 'art' to be an over-used context that does more harm than good in terms of helping people understand the subject(s) under discussion." All of which would position Neoism's opposition to being housed within the lineage of the avant garde.
"Warhol is something else, I have always taken him metaphysically, like the reference copy of a script, but not as an artist (it would be a contradiction to call him an artist since he did not want that). There are therefore exceptions that confirm the rule. In other words, the world is aligned on a revolutionary act-the readymade-and forms survive on this counter-field, but all the rest, all of this mechanism has become value (aesthetic value and market value). Art has been transformed into value, and we should oppose form to value-for me, art is fundamentally form-and say that we have been caught in the trap of value and even, through the art market, into a sort of ecstasy of value, a bulimia, an infinite excrescence of value. Luckily, however, I still believe that form-in other words the illusion of the world and the possibility to invent this other scene-persists, though through a form of radical exception."
(p.57, Baudrillard, 2005b).
"In a certain way, he writes off all structures of representation and, in particular, expressive subjectivity, the theater of illusion: the world is a readymade and all we can do is to maintain the illusion or the superstition of art by means of a space in which objects are moved and which will necessarily become a museum. But the museum, as its name indicates, is a sarcophagus all the same. Now all is not over. Duchamp put a scenario in place, but within this generalized aesthetics-and therefore within this inaesthetics of things-very magical events can occur! Andy Warhol is an example, another artist who introduced nothingness into the heart of the image. That is also a fantastic experience, but one that seems to me to be outside the realm of art history."
(p.53, Baudrillard, 2005b)
In another interview...
"JB: Ideas or concepts are all reversible. Good can always be turned into evil, truth into falsehood, etc. But in the materiality of language, each fragment uses up its energy, and there is nothing left save a form of intensity. It is something more radical, more primitive than aesthetics. In the 1970s, Roger Caillois wrote an article in which he called Picasso the great liquidator of all aesthetic values. He claimed that after Picasso, no one could conceive of anything more than a circulation of objects, of fetishes, independent of the circulation of functional objects. One could say, in fact, that the aesthetic world is the world of fetishizing. In the economic realm, money must circulate in any manner it can otherwise there is no value. The same law governs aesthetic objects: there have to be more and more in order for an aesthetic universe to exist. Objects now only have this superstitious function leading to a de facto disappearance of form through an excess of formalization, in other words through an excess use of all forms. There is no worse enemy to form than the availability of all forms.
Catherine Francblin: You seem nostalgic for a primitive state ... one that, in reality certainly never existed...
JB: Of course, and that is why I am not a conservative: I do not aspire to regress to a real object. That would mean cultivating reactionary nostalgia. I know this object does not exist, no more than truth does, I maintain the desire for it through a glance that is a sort of absolute, a divine judgment, in relationship to which all other objects appear in their insignificance. This nostalgia is fundamental. It is lacking in all kinds of creations today. It is a form of mental strategy governing the correct use of nothingness or the void."
(p.74, Baudrillard, 2005b).
I would say this as much challenges Neoism as 'mind game', 'experimental practical philosophy' while also colluding with it. "At the Margins of... "A Mere Outline"" might remain a savvy un-title for some of these supplements that we of Pata-No have at "...introducing nothingness...", all of as deconstructing further any potential categorization of "activities" or mediums. The way in which we play on transmedia would detourn the term/signifier by deconstructing the dialectics of the limits/margins of transcategorical (post-/inter)medium demarcation and immateriality/dematerialization (like Yves Klein's Theater of the Void (in Dimanche) and Immaterial Zones or Andreas Heusser's No Show Museum), as well as any other agonistics including the demarcation of the margins of all language games as we see in Lyotard's Postmodern Fables,
""This is what I would respond: there is a philosophical reason a priori for a litigation to be substituted for a differend. and there is a philosophical reason a priori for that substitution to leave intact language's potential for differends. The first reason stems from the ability of every sentence to put itself or let itself be placed between quotation marks This ability is the very one use (if I may be allowed his word too) in discussion, among many others, as I hope I showed at the beginning. The second reason stems from the ability every sentence has to be linked with another according to heterogeneous ends. As Wittgenstein says, you can play tennis, chess, or bridge. The same is true for language: you can "play" at the true, the just, or the beautiful. You could say that every game has the same end, that of winning. But this is false. All by herself, a child play with pieces of fabric, with no particular end in mind. Writers, too, with their fabrics of language. Comparing genres with games is only valid, obviously, if we admit that the same words or the same sentences can be treated sometimes as tennis balls, or as chess pawns, or playing cards, or bits of fabric.
This being the case, the question of translating one sentence into another, I repeat, poses no particular problem (unless it be that of translation itself, which is an immense one. Maybe it's the most obscure language game of all). But translating the "employment" of a sentence with one aim into its employment with another is impossible Mutatis mutandis, you may utilize tennis balls or playing cards or fabrics in the place of chess pieces, but the moves you impress upon the balls used as pawns are not those you impress when you play tennis with them. I refer to these moves as links. They are nothing more than modes of associating words or sentences. But these modes are heterogeneous. It is false to bring them all back to varieties of rhetoric, or to confuse them with the grammar of a language. Let's accept now that you are beginning to play with the tennis balls in someone's company. You are surprised to observe that this other person does not seem to be playing tennis with these balls, as you thought, but is treating them more like chess pieces. One or the other of you complains that "that's not how you play the game." There is a differend.
When I ask what is the tribunal that will judge the complaint, I am doing nothing more than following out the metaphor already implied in the very term differend. You must not object, as Rorty does, that I am invoking a judge armed with "pre-established criteria. There are such judges only for a game whose rules have been more or less fixed, after the fact, of course, such as chess or tennis. But under the circumstances, you and your partner must decide what game you are playing or wish to play with the balls. This is as far as the comparison goes. For balls do not talk balls. But words and sentences can be taken in reference and also refer to their mode of linking. Language, we tell ourselves, is self-referential. You ask the other what game he or she is playing. Democratic liberalism intervenes then. It declares that it is a good thing for the other to respond and for the discussion to be engaged. In the absence of your interlocution, your partner continuing to play his/her game and you yours, you will not be able to continue to play together. I agree with this. In exploring the nature of the game that you and your partner intend to play, you situate this game as a reference to your discussion (you make a "referral"). Litigation replaces your differend, and you are able to come to an agreement about the way to proceed. But it remains to be proved that it is always better to play together. With their bit of fabric, the little girl and the writer invent or discover many things. The question of Einsamkeitor loneliness needs to be taken up again in terms that far exceed the way in which Wittgenstein interrogates private language. To return to my own aroument, you might object that the writer and the little girl are solitary only as "individuals," but that, in their intimacy, several partners, conscious or not, are engaged in their play, and that they are thus having an internal discussion. But what do we know? We can say they are discussing on the inside only if we postulate that the dissent between intimate partners never exceeds litigation. That is to say, only if we admit that the little girl and the writer suffer only hesitations or contradictions that can be solved by an inner debate. This is what the very notion of the individual presupposes.
I suppose that this can take place in effect. But there is no reason a priori to eliminate the other case, which is that of a differend between intimate partners. Resituated on the "outside," the latter case would be more or less as follows: you are playing tennis with the balls, your partner is playing a game you don't know with them. You ask what it is that he/she is playing, he/she doesn't answer you. What is it reasonable to do? I think what is reasonable is to try to learn the other's game. This is what the little girl and the writer are doing within their respective differends. Writers try to arrange words and sentences as they presume their mute "interlocutor" arranges them. This is called writing, and I could say as much for thought. If something new surfaces as the event of a work within thought or writing, this can only be within this pragmatic disorder. By disorder, I mean only this: that none of the conditions for a free discussion, whether intra- or interindividual, about an identified object is met. In this sense, one can speak of violence. Violence does not at all consist of the presence of police officers in the room who would constrain one of the interlocutors to accept, under threat, the thesis or game of the other. Violence stems from this dilemma: either you reject the unknown game of your partner, you even reject the fact that it is a game, you exclude it, pick up your balls, and seek a valid interlocutor; and this is a violence done to the event and to the unknown of such a kind that you stop writing or thinking; or else, you do violence to yourself in trying to learn the moves that you don't know and that your silent partner imposes upon the balls, I mean upon the words and sentences. This is called the violence of learning to think or write, which is implied in every education.
I believe this violence is inevitable, because I believe the encounter with this bizarre partner is inevitable. Moreover, I believe this encounter to be constitutive, on the same level that the encounter with an unnameable addressee is inevitable for a work. It is even plausible that this addressee and this partner are one and the same. But what do we know? All of this, you, my interlocutors, are quite able to understand, we can have a discussion about it, elaborate it together, and perhaps arrive at a consensus about that other. We can come to agreement on such sentences as: "Yes, there is a bizarre partner; yes, there is an unnameable addressee," etc. But this assent is possible only because that partner, that addressee, that other is precisely not ours while we are discussing. The discussion eliminates that other a priori, since it is not an interlocutor. The discussion can only admit it as a third person, as that about which we discuss. This is what I call placing between quotation marks. We cite that other to come forth (comparaitre). But, at the very moment we are dealing with that other, in writing or in thinking, it in no way comes forth (comparait): it barely even shows forth (parait) and is barely even in our company (compagnie). How can we be liberal democrats with such an other? Consequently, I conclude that it is not more reasonable to make the order of litigation rule over the disorder of the differend, than vice versa. Increasing the capacity to discuss is good; an increasing passibility to the event is just as good. I leave for the reader to draw from this conclusion that fashion he/she judges appropriate to deal with trans-Atlantic relations. As for me, I think the "mainland" Rorty wishes for is not desirable in itself. It would be, it already is, occupied by the Empire of meta-conversation, by communicational pragmatics. Keeping watch over our archipelago seems to me to be a wiser disposition. I'm talking about heterogeneous games" or "genres" of discourse. In America as in Europe, the secret ocean that bathes them is the language of reflection."
(p.142-147, Lyotard, 1997)
Alongside everything as a game in the shadowing of the real and its disappearance as discussed in Baudrillard's The Impossible Exchange
""It does not seek to penetrate some mystery of the world, nor to discover its hidden aspect - it is that hidden aspect. It does not discover that the world has a double life - it is that double life, that parallel life. Merely by conforming to its slightest movements, thought strips the world of its meaning, and predestines it for ends other than the ones itself. Merely by following in its tracks, thought shows that, behind its ends, the world is going nowhere. The act of thinking is of seduction which aims to deflect the world from its being and its meaning risk of being itself seduced and led astray. This is how theory proceeds with the systems it analyses. It does not seek to criticize them, or set limits for them in the real. It maximizes them, exacerbates them, by following their every movement; it seduces them by pushing them to the limit. The object of theory is to arrive at an account of the system which follows out its internal logic to its end, without adding anything, yet which, at the same time, totally inverts that system, revealing its hidden non-meaning, the Nothing which haunts it, that absence at the heart of the system, that shadow running alongside it. An account which is both a pure description of the system In terms of reality and a radical prescription of that same system - demonstrating that it excludes the real and, in the end, means nothing... One may say also that the world indeed lacks 'nothing', and that thought is the shadow cast by that Nothing on the surface of the real world (path of nihility). Radical thought is at the violent intersection of meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth, of the continuity of the world and the continuity of the nothing. It aspires to the status and power of illusion, restoring the non-veracity of facts, the non-signification of the world, and hunting down that nothing which runs beneath the apparent continuity of things... The world was given to us as something enigmatic and unintelligible, and the task of thought is to make it, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible. Since the world is evolving towards a frenzied state of affairs, we have to take a frenzied view of it The player must never be bigger than the game itself, nor the theorist bigger than theory, not theory bigger than the world itself."
(p.149-151, Baudrillard, 2001).
In many ways these act as counterpoints to Stewart Home's writings in "Re:Action #9 - The Margins of Theosophy", during which he conflates Baudrillard's talk of the primitive as a naively anthropological one, although as "...polemical positions in avant-bard texts is intended to undermine the credibility of all forms of "critical" "commentary"...", while also posing in relation to the post-Neoist avant bard that, "We refuse to oppose Baudrillard's theory-fiction with fictive-theory." It's these issues that permeate these margins drifting between postmodernism, to hypperreality and deconstruction to Neoism as intertextually interlinking chains of (incommensurable) empty-floating signifier/games to navigate their paradoxes that remain at the limits of philosophy. In this way transmedia brought to a transaesthetic level remains more like trans(post-/non)media games in that their is no meta-medium/philosophy where, as the Krokers say, "...there is no medium, and there certainly is no message..." (p. xiii, Kroker & Kroker, 1997).
This trans(post-/non)media rests in between these aporia of incommensurability between the (mind) games of (post-)Neoism like from those A Mere Outline and those of Stewart Home's avant-bard and the play of deconstruction, "For the avant-bard, the notion of 'differance' is flawed, by substituting 'a' for 'e' in differ(a)(e)nce to signify the letter as supplement, one merely displaces the problem of the supplement. Is not omega the supplement of alpha in differance? Does not this self-referentiality, this endless regression, lead us to suppose that all text tends towards the fictional (aporia)? That said, the crudeness of such readings recalls Korzbski's 'General Semantics" in the mono-dimensionality of the violence it enacts against (in the name of) deconstruction. This is "absolutely" typical of the way theory functions within avant- bard "fictions". Is this "satire" "instrumentalised" as "depletion" but simultaneously overflowing itself? If this is so, avant-bard discourse might be treated as science-fiction despite the fact that it is singularly lacking in the tropes that are usually taken as constituting the genre." (Stewart Home, Re-Action #9). Such a flaw is only a misreading in favor of the metaphysics of presence but if we take as Derrida does that deconstruction remains always deconstructions then as he mentions in the essay Etc, "And deconstruction is also like a way of thinking set-theory." (p.282, Derrida, 2000). With this deconstruction is neither limited to any category and the displacement remains requisite to the deferral/differentiation of differance in relation nothing/no-thing as supplement that never has determinate presence/absence but's always deferring/differing. Such issues are crucial if we are to situate "transmedia" in relation to hypermedia, "hypermedia... the sense of "hyper-" used here connotes extension and generality: cf. "hyperspace." The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media..." and the deconstruction of the dialectics of anti-/non-art and conceptual art's Platontic and Post-Nietzschean/Heideggerian issues as covered by Florian Cramer when defining 'anti-media' with Neoist research materials, "A 1985 issue of SMILE a zine that could be published by anyone, thus anticipating the shared identity of 'Anonymous' contained an aphorism that is quoted elsewhere in this book:
Anti-art is art because it has entered into a dialectical dialogue with art, re-exposing contradictions that art has tried to conceal. To think that anti-art raises everything to the level of art is quite wrong. Anti-art exists only within the boundaries of art. Outside these boundaries it exists not as anti-art but as madness, bottle-racks and urinals.
A book called 'anti-media' can't help being about 'media' for the same reasons. The only difference is that 'media' lack boundaries where 'art' in the sense of contemporary visual art rather than art in the broadest sense has to draw them out of its own systemic and economic necessity. In both anti-art and anti-media, a love/hate relationship is undeniably at work. And both perhaps signify twentieth-century nostalgia, since the notion of creative industries may be about to make both terms obsolete." (p.14, Cramer, 2013). Again this anticipates and undermines the metamodern/remodern dialectic entailed by the anti-anti-art (which is a reaction to and that falls into the issue of a "post-medium condition") of the Stuckists where "Anti-anti-art is for art." (Billy Childish, Anti-anti-art, 1999). Its an interesting syzygy in this case that where Cramer mentions Chuang Tzu's butcher in relation to metonymy in the boundaries/demarcations of (anti-)media that Baudrillard does so as simulacrum/example of the way in which deconstruction operates.
At last with "transmedia" deconstructed in such a transaesthetic context we can get to how this game/these games as empty anti-set(s) of formless (con)texts (that undermine identification/demarcation as (anti-/non-)art or philosophy) operate and how to navigate the interlinking paradoxical metonymy of these matrices of mediums, differends and incommensurable language games. All of which remain re-traced/erased in playing open "transmedia" games like Bored Games, Post-Card Game Jams and Zero-Sum Game No Shows. Hypothetically, Neoism as a non-concept which acts as open-situation/empty-signifier applied to anything/everything but also the manner in which its a ("mind") game of self-/meta-reflexivity/identification straddles the trans(post-/non)media in this manner and but "transmedia" in this context also allows for exceeding anything that gets conflated as conceptual/multi-media/"noise music"/performance art during those "actions" made by Neoists like those in "A Mere Outline". With all of this in play we might situate "transmedia" (games) in this context as transaesthetic, transdisciplinary, transfinitely transcategorical, open extra/post-meta/monostructural, post-medium/aesthetic/conceptual cut-ups, indeterministically agonistic, patamechanical process/generative cyber-/hypertextual, and non-linear intertextually inter-multimodalistic, detourned exappropriated derives/counterpaths.
Remaining a matter of "...exappropriation since (the radical contradiction of all "capital," of all property or appropriation, as well as all the concepts that depend on it, beginning with that of free subjectivity, thus of emancipation as ordered by these concepts)..." (p.112, Derrida, 1994) since "To deconstruct is also to "stage, assemble." I am sure that Jacques Derrida would agree: to assemble by disassembling..." (p.56, Lyotard, 1990). In this regard playing transmedia games involves playing on the Neoist plagiarism and open multi-pseudonym by deconstructing the "method" of the cut-ups, in that the "...cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and, still camera... all writing is in fact cut-ups... cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduces the cut-up method of random action into game and military strategy... cut-up method could be used to advantage in processing scientific data... cut-ups could add new dimension to films..." (Burroughs, The Third Mind) including "...cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon... The message is scrambled in transmission and then unscrambled at the other end... this is an extension of the cut/up method... scrambling devices was to make the message unintelligible without scrambling the code. Another use for speech scramblers could be to impose thought control on a mass scale. consider the Human body and nervous system as unscrambling devices. A common virus like the cold sore could sensitize the subject to unscramble messages. Drugs like LSD and Dim-N could also act as unscrambling devices. Moreover, the mass media could sensitize millions of people to receive scrambled versions of the same set of data... cut/up video tapes. Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion..." (p.13-18, Burroughs, Electronic Revolution) like industrial music "...improvise and cut-up interactively between electronic image and sound at any given point-they're not just replaying prerecorded video..." (p.131, ReSearch 6-7: Industrial Culture Handbook) or plunderphonics where "...in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced - the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device..." (Oswald, 1985) which rather aligns in a Neoist plagiarist fashion where the "...plagiarist, by contrast, recognises the role the media plays in masking the mechanisms of Power, and actively seeks to disrupt this function... In his Poems, Ducasse wrote: 'Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it'. This maxim summarises the use to which plagiarism has been put ever since. Two, or more, divergent elements are brought together to create new meanings. The resulting sum is greater than the individual parts.
The Lettristes, and later the Situationists, called this process 'detourne?ment' (diversion is a literal translation from the French), but the activity is still popularly known as plagiarism - the term that Lautreamont used." (p.50-1, Home, 1995).
Tying all of this together is the implosion and disappearance of the subject/object distinction (returning to the issues of 'subjectile' and the 'ogjective') with the poetic situation of transference, as in photography, "Every press on the shutter-release, which puts an end to the real presence of the object, also causes me to disappear as subject, and it's in this reciprocal disappearance that a transfusion between the two occurs. It isn't always a successful act, but when it is, this transfusion is the sole condition of success. It is, in a sense, an invocation - an invocation to the Other, the object, to emerge from this disappearance, and so create a poetic situation of transference or a poetic transference of situation. Perhaps in this reciprocity there is a glimmer of a solution to the problem of our notorious 'inability to communicate', to the problem of the non-response of the Other. And perhaps, too, there is a more subtle usage of indifference, and of the fact that people and things tend no longer to mean anything for each other. An anxiety-ridden situation which we try to ward off at all costs with forced signification." (p.144, Baudrillard, 2001). Symptomatic of the poetic situation of transference is the (what Baudrillard calls the machine and elsewhere pataphysical) snobbism in the likes of Warhol or Duchamp, in this way it's interlinked by patamechanics to the games of the Oulipo, ""...the Oulipian experiments are extremely funny and explore the same pataphysical humor that Jarry identified as emerging from the syzygy of words... manage to retain a sense of delight and play, fierce the constraints may be... the delivery Of an elegant, witty, and sophisticated text while behind the scenes, as the reader may or may not perceive, a monumental struggle with the exigencies of a self-imposed set of rules is taking place..." (p.106, Hugill). Where "In pataphysics, the "syzygy of words" provides the path to pataphysical humor, which is "born out of the discovery of the contradictory." [...] The universe, in its syzygistic movements and crystalline form, produces, as if by chance, unexpected alignments of fragments of meaning which, in pataphysics, are generally in opposition." (p.14, Hugill) this gets achieved via "..clusters of methods, that included: anoulipisms (analytical oulipisms, such as combinatorial literature); use of preexisting structures such as lipograms..." (p.108, Hugill) since the combinatorial involves (as Claude Berge reminds us of in Leibniz) "...a new branch of mathematics with ramifications in logic, history, ethics, and metaphysics..." to the "...field of plastic arts, the idea was not entirely new, since Breughel the Elder several years before had numbered the colors of his characters in order to determine their distribution by a roll of the dice; in the field of music, people were beginning to glimpse new possibilities, which were to inspire Mozart in his "Musical Game," a sort of card index that allows anyone to achieve the aleatory composition of waltzes, rondos, and minuets..." whereas with "...combinatory literature... to furnish a more precise definition, we shall rely on the concept of configuration; one looks for a configuration each time one disposes a finite number of objects, and one wishes to dispose them according to certain constraints postulated in advance..." (p.177, Berge, Six Selections By The Oulipo) by this as Hugill quotes the Oulipo strategies resemble how "...André Breton and his temporary friends used to play exquisitely boring games of consequences." (p.112, Hugill). It's a matter of playing with the patamechanics of the borders between "imperceptible" processes (compositional/decisional) like the concept-machine of 'conceptual art' or Cage's compositional processes with the "...perceptible processes... where once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself. Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (the content suggest form), and the processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content)." (Steve Reich, Music as a Gradual Process). Deconstructing the margins between frameworks for improvisation and processes. Comparable to Les Granules Oulipo-esq improvisation constraints are John Zorn's "..."game pieces." Tying together loose strings left dangling by composers such as Earl Brown, Cornelius Cardia, John Cage and Stockhausen, I began to work out complex systems harnessing improvisers in flexible composition formats..." these "...open game systems... This kind of "game" idea... a kind of Fluxus event... that kind of idea and incorporated into a larger context where it was just maybe one of maybe 30 ideas that could be used at any time, cued by members of the group..." and "...to deal with form, not content, with relationships, not with sound. Instructions in these early game pieces do not have musicians on the stage relating to sound. They have musicians on the stage relating to each other. The improvisers on the stage were themselves the sound..." by playing with "...a complex set of rules that, in a sense, turned players on and off like toggle switches to such a complicated degree that it didn't really matter what the content was.. could go on just about anywhere. The piece was still itself. Game pieces can sound like anything and last any length depending on the players and the moment..." and "...a context where anything could happen at any moment and everybody had equal control. It was the players themselves who were making the decisions... so the pieces slowly evolved into complex systems harnessing improvisers in flexible compositional formats..." so that in "...explorations of the game piece medium, as in it, improvisers have themselves become composers." (John Zorn, The Game Pieces). Doing so Zorn intertextually plays out the interlink, despite as Hugill reminds us of Cage's allergy to Jarry, between the imaginary solutions of Cage's silent piece and indeterminacy pieces that has "...composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance. That composition is necessarily experimental. An experimental action is one the outcome of which is not forseen. Being unforseen, this action is not concerned with its excuse. Like the land, like the air, it needs none. A performance of a composition which is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was. Nothing therefore is accomplished by such a performance, since that performance cannot be grasped as an object in time. A recording of such a work has no more value than a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something that had not yet happened...." by further game-like patamechanics which allows for the deconstruction of Ray Brassier's non-philosophical approach to non-idiomatic improvisation of Derek Bailey through non-concerts so that instead of merely trying "...to problematise what 'reacting to one another' might mean by exploring different ways of almost not reacting as a way of reacting. But the point is not to substitute a 'non?reaction' for a 'reaction'; it is to seek out a mode of reaction or non reaction that would overtake any kind of latent or 'hidden' imitation; precisely the kind of imitation that doesn't reveal itself as an imitation the latter applies to most of what gets called 'reacting' in music, whether composed or improvised..." so to "...impose constraints on our interaction..." through various timed parts where "Each of us could decide to play in one or two parts, but not in all three. But we also allowed ourselves the decision not to play in any of the three parts..." and "...for one reason or another we broke the rules, but still this structure generated unusual ways of reacting to one another..." whereby "...we performed a kind of concert, a non? concert..." through the "...relationship between the NON of Derek Bailey's 'NON?idiomatic' and the NON of François Laruelle's 'NON? philosophy'. NON?philosophy is the theory or science of philosophy, treating philosophy as a material. NON?idiomatic playing is supposed to be able to treat all music as a material... they seem to be engaged in trying to free philosophical and musical practice respectively from their institutionalized idioms. Both have very similar relationships to their own historical background. 'NON' as a prefix means that you are not part of something but dealing with it from some kind of exteriority ? yet one which involves the immanence of practice rather than the transcendence of reflection. As a negative prefix, 'NON' also means that you are supposed to have some kind of immanent general point of view: not from above but from within the practice of music itself ? the most immanent point of view possible. It entails that you add a layer of representation such that it either subtracts the previous layer or even unifies all the layers. Laruelle: "Philosophy is always at least philosophy of philosophy"; "non? philosophy is the science of philosophy". Why is non?philosophy as the science of philosophy not a metaphilosophy? Laruelle claims that philosophy is constitutively reflexive: every philosophical claim about X (whether X is an artwork, a scientific theory, or a historical event) is always at the same time a reflection on philosophy's relation to X. In other words, the philosopher is never just talking about this object, but also about how every other philosophy mediates her relationship to this object. Non?philosophy represents an attempt to ascend beyond this level of reflexive mediation while simultaneously descending beneath the level of irreflexive immediacy. It does this by operating in the medium of what Laruelle calls 'real immanence': this is an immediacy that is radically irreflexive, but one that generates a kind of pure practical transcendence (mediation through practice rather than theory). 'Real' as opposed to wholly idealised or conceptualised immanence boils down to the question of the use of theory: the real immanence evoked by Laruelle entails a strictly disciplined practice of philosophy. Instead of exacerbating reflexivity by ascending to a meta?metalevel, non?philosophy adds a third layer of auto?reflexivity that is also a minus (an a + that is a ?) a subtraction that allows us to view all philosophy from a vantage point that is at once singular and universal. Mediating abstraction is concretized and unified through a practice that, as Laruelle puts it, allows it to be 'seen in? One'. This is not some mystical rapture but a practical immersion in abstraction; a concretization of theory that precludes the sort of play 'with' different philosophical idioms indulged in by postmodern ironists. We brandish the NON as the marker for an incapacity that adds a layer of knowing and subtracts a layer of self?consciousness from reflection in such a way as to eliminate complacent gestures of reflexivity: the player's knowing wink to the audience ("you know that I know that you know..."). NON rescinds the complacent reassurances of such ironic distancing by driving an inalienable wedge between the player's intellectual and affective capacities and his technical craft: it pits practice against craft in a gesture of uncrafting. Non?idiomatic music exemplifies a similar agenda: it is informed by knowledge of music and musics, but adds a layer of non?knowledge that would allow the music to be taken 'in?One' (something like a phenomenological époché applied to the whole of music), thereby forestalling he typically postmodern gesture of 'playing with' idioms. NON supposes the impossibility of any second?order discourse 'on' music; it indexes the impossibility of interpretation: one may view all the music of the moment through the filter of electroacoustic music; one may also view the viewing through the window of improvisation. We postulate an equivalence between NON ('non?philosophy'/'non? idiomatic') and UN ('un?conscious'/'un?craft'). Both are about releasing the potency proper to impotence, the capacity proper to incapacity. The practice of uncrafting does not just imply the negation of technique, but the unleashing of a generic potency proper to incapacity, of which technical/practical capacity would be merely a restrictive instance..." (Ray Brassier, Idioms and Idiots) we're able to undermine and deconstruct this "non-philosophical" dialectical presumption of a prescriptive/performative at the pataphysical level in many ways covering Lyotard's remarks on silence/noise in Driftworks as well as the agonistics of language games in the Postmodern Condition, The Differend, Just Gaming, etc. We could even consider it generative, like Eno's generative music, "Generative music... specifies a set of rules and then lets them make the thing." (Brian Eno, Generative Music). In this case a remaining few remaining remarks from Baudrillard may contextualize this further,
""When he claims that he cannot explain how the simulation was maintained, he is 'sincere', since the simulation was from the outset produced by the silent collusion of others. Simulation is like a prophecy which, by being repeated, becomes self-fulfilling. It needs no initial motive; its motive force arises out of the process itself, without any relation of cause and effect. This is why it is absurd to quiz Romans on his motives, or to make him confess to anything whatever. One is responsible only in respect of causes, whereas he can answer only for the fateful sequence of events, the irresistible concatenation of effects (it doesn't make any sense, but it works). The perfect crime is the crime with no ulterior motive; the one which simply follows out a train of thought. Romans's solution was an extreme one. He does at multiple lives, as Luke Rhinehart's hero does, and he does not, strictly speaking, 'act' a character. He haunts his own life as though it were another's; he practices a kind of radical exoticism, of lethal severance from the world.
There are other, more temperate forms of exoticism, of minimal strategies of self-duplication. One such is acting itself, as presented in Diderot's Paradox of the Actor or in Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, conceptions from any compulsion to identify psychologically with the character, or from that general frenzied empathy which holds sway today in the theatre.
There is in the actor, in the best of cases, a form of distance which sees to it that roles and images do not intermingle. He has to maintain the strangeness of the actor's other - the character - on pain of frittering away the power of the stage into theatrical grandstanding. He has to preserve the differential of illusion, the differential of otherness, in order to safeguard the energy specific to the stage. To do so, he has basically to be a snob - has to 'affect' his role rather than personify it, implicitly signifying: 'This is not me; I have nothing to do with this'. Snobbery lies in resisting the easy solution of identifying with anything whatever, anyone whatever, as our whole psychological conformism invites us to. If we are to end up being the exotics of our own lives (as we all are), we may as well cultivate radical exoticism.
Should we take the view that this distance, this off handedness, towards our own being is an exception? Or has it not always been there? Our society has, in fact, become performance-orientated and operational in all its aspects, but it does not believe in these things - though most of the time it does not realize that it does not believe in them. We are unwitting agnostics; we live by this affectation - the product of a profound incredulity- which consists in doing more and doing too much. There is in this a snobbery of the operational, a neurosis of performance which we collectively act and which protects us from a bestial condition or, in other words, from pure functionality (see Kojeve and his alternative of Japanese snobbery or American animality). This is why these 'discontents of civilization' are never so serious as they are said to be, for we secretly play-act technology and performance, play-act information and efficiency. We set the distance to the 'reality', the hyperreality, of our world, as we do that of a photographic lens. It is set at maximum zoom with a stereoscopic range of effects, but we ourselves are not taken in by these. Yet we enjoy the effect of enlargement and the dizzying sense of simulation and, precisely because we do not believe in it, we are capable of going much further with the operational scenario than we would be if we did." (p.70-71, Baudrillard, 2001).
"Clearly, objective chance is merely an illusion, a utopian dream. The Dé-cision (to make a French pun which sums up the whole of Rhinehart's book) is never as arbitrary as we think (just as automatic writing is never truly automatic), and chance never lies in the choice we make from among chance events. Unless, that is, you purely and simply give in to what happens to you - but even then we know that, in the end, nothing happens to you by accident.
The whole book is proof a contrario that it is impossible to opt for chance, impossible to live by a rigorous deregulation of the will, but equally impossible to opt for the will, which, as we know, is self-deluding. In fact, chance does not exist. And neither does the will. The rules governing our lives are to be found elsewhere.
There is, moreover, a strange contradiction between the exercise of the will and the exercise of freedom. It's always nice to take a decision - and equally nice to put one off. You have to know how to play with a decision. The decision is the key thing - what you decide will work out one way or another, whatever you do. Now, every decision taken is a double-edged sword. Adopting a decision Immediately turns it into a prohibition: it becomes something to be transgressed. There is then no difference between it being your decision or someone else's. To decide 'sovereignly', you have to be able to determine how to proceed in relation to your own decision, to reconsider it freely, as though it were in fact someone else's.
To be able to disobey moral rules and laws, to be able to disobey others, is a mark of freedom. But the ability to disobey oneself marks the highest stage of freedom. Obeying one's own will is an even worse vice than being enslaved to one's passions. It is certainly worse than enslavement to the will of others. And it is, indeed, those who submit themselves mercilessly to their own decisions who fill the greater part of the authoritarian ranks, alleging sacrifice on their own part to impose even greater sacrifices on others.
Each stage of servitude is both more subtle and worse than the one which precedes it. Involuntary servitude, the servitude of the slave, is overt violence. Voluntary servitude is a violence consented to: a freedom to will, but not the will to be free. Last comes voluntary self-servitude or enslavement to one; own will: the individual possesses the faculty to will, but is no longer free in respect of it. He is the automatic agent of that faculty. He is the serf to no master but himself. Although it purports to be rid of the will, the self and desire, Rhinehart's fable still pays them far too much respect. The will is presented as a barrier which has to be overcome for total liberation of the self, of all conceivable selves, to be possible. This is still a verv natural order of the will, which is to be transcended in the supernatural order of chance. It is a vision of a desire limited by the law, but with unlock its possibilities. It would seem that in order to break down the barrier of the will, one has to see it as already broken down - to see our most ordinary decisions as already in themselves random in nature, and bearing only a superficial relation to the subject and his will.
Chance is already present everywhere. There is no need to produce it through the simulacrum of an imposed rule. Arbitrariness lies not in choosing chance, but in the unpredictable as it exists, in the relation to others as they are, in the unforeseen events of the world and its appearances. Raw existence is, in the end, more improbable than the improbability of dice, and the oblique line of destiny runs through that existence without either our will or a higher will being involved." (p.60-61, Baudrillard, 2001).
"Programming the deregulation of life is impossible; the rule of chance is impossible, as is any strategy of fate or intentional seduction: it is a contradiction in terms. 'Historical necessity is merely a necessity a fresca (improvised, projected retrospectively on to the event), and it is impossible to predict an event with mathematical certainty before it has actually happened. God himself could not predict it, and the more He was God, the less it would be possible' (Schnitzler). Hence the illusory nature of the dice, with surprise, the unforeseeable, as the only possibility. 'He who truly knows how to live will appreciate the little surprises which always await him in the least significant event.'
In the end, Rhinehart recognizes that everyone else lives multiple lives which are the product of chance too, even if they do not know it and spend their lives trying to deny it. So, the establishment of a purely random universe (if such a thing were possible) would not in the least change the world as it currently exists." (p.62, Baudrillard, 2001).
"The magnificent failure of a defiance of any will of one's own, of an anarchistic defiance of all forms of power (including the power all exert on themselves through that same will). Paradoxically, devolving power to the rolling dice - the attempt to disappropriate the will - ends up resembling the venture of that other anarchist, Stirner, who, in Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, aims for total appropriation and unconditional hegemony of the Ego - where the most liberatory principle ends in the most commonplace tyranny. The unhappy fate of many radical utopias, haunted by their redhibitory defects.
Yet the idea of a society governed by chance, as in Borges's 'Lottery in Babylon' or Rhinehart's Dice Man, is in some sense an idea of an absolute democracy, since it resolves the inequality of objective conditions into an equality of opportunity with respect to a set of rules. Democracy is, of course, based on equality before the law, but that is never as radical as equality before the rule. And it is, indeed, this dream of a radical democracy which haunts the imaginations of all gamblers, and makes all forms of gaming a fantastic attraction in all ages, particularly for the middle and working classes, as a refuge for their thwarted demand for 'social' democracy. It the site of 'luck', the only non-place where good and bad are not distributed in the same way, and, even in its most impoverished forms, it is the only sumptuary activity - that of a sovereign freedom ignorant of the material conditions of its exercise. The site of a supernatural freedom which bears no relation to 'natural' freedom, and has about it more an immediate collusion with the world. Now, the whole pleasure comes from this. Gaming does not liberate us from constraints (since we accept the far stricter constraint of the rules), but it delivers us from freedom. We lose freedom if we live it merely as reality. The miracle of gaming is to make us live our freedom not as reality but as illusion - a higher illusion, an aristocratic challenge to reality. For reality is democratic, and illusion is aristocratic." (p.65-66, Baudrillard, 2001).
"Through this unprecedented liberation of forms, of lines, of colors, of aesthetic conceptions, through the mixing up of all cultures and of all styles, our modernity has produced a general aestheticizing, a promotion of all forms of culture (without forgetting the forms of anti-culture), an assumption of all models of representation and of anti-representation. If art has always been a utopia, that is to say something which escapes realization, today this utopia is fully realized; through the media, computers, and video, everybody has become a potential creator. Even the anti-art movement, which is the last and the most radical of artistic utopias, has been realized since Andy Warhol wanted to become a machine and since Marcel Duchamp erected his bottle rack as a sacred object. The whole industrial machinery of the world found itself aestheticized, the whole insignificance of the world found itself transfigured by aesthetics.
This defines the transaesthetics.
[...]
From an aesthetic point of view, we are no longer either in the beautiful or in the ugly but in the impossibility to judge; we are condemned to indifference. But perhaps there emerges beyond this indifference another type of fascination, substituting itself for this very aesthetic pleasure. For the beautiful and the ugly, once liberated from their respective constraint, are somehow multiplied; they become the more beautiful than beautiful and uglier than ugly, yielding interesting special effects. Thus contemporary painting cultivates not only ugliness (which is still an aesthetic value), but the uglier than ugly (the "bad," the "worse," the "kitsch"), an ugliness elevated to the second power because it is liberated from its relationship to its contrary and henceforth susceptible to redouble itself. Thus, freed from the "true" Mondrian, you are free to produce a Mondrian more Mondrian than Mondrian himself. Freed from the genuine "Naifs painters," one can paint more "naifs" than the naifs, etc. . . . Liberated from the real, you can create things more real than the - real hyperreal. It is, by the way, hyperrealism and pop art which started it all, through their elevation of the photographic reality of daily life to the ironic power. Today, this escalation encompasses, without any distinction, all art forms and styles, all of which participate in the transaesthetic field of simulation." (p.12-14, Stearns & Chaloupka).
Transmedia games, transaesthetically, are driftworking passages/counterpaths between the archipelago of all (language) games/(phrase) regimes including mediums/genres/modes/styles,
"What object could correspond to the Idea of this gearing of faculties, which are understood as capacities for cognition in the broad sense, that is, as capacities to have objects (sometimes as realms, sometimes as territories, sometimes as fields) (KUK:10)? This object could only be a symbol. Let's say, an archipelago. Each genre of discourse would be like an island; the faculty of judgement would be, at least in part, like an admiral or like a provisioner of ships who would launch expeditions from one island to the next, intended to present to one island what was found (or invented, in the archaic sense of the word) in the other, which might serve the former as an "as-if intuition" with which to validate it Whether warr or commerce, this interventionist force has no object, and does not have its own island, but requires a milieu-this would be the sea-the Archepelagos or primary sea as the Aegean was once called...
If a victim of the positivist illusion such as Schlosser, for instance, comes to require that philosophy put an end to debate, he puts philosophy into alarm, into a state of alertness, and thus helps fulfill its natural end. Without wanting to (since he wants the opposite), he helps reinforce this "combative disposition (or constitution) (die streitbare Verfassung) which is not war (which can and should instead prevent war)," but which launches "pacific" expeditions across the archipelago.
It remains that if the critical watchman thinks he can supplement for the absence of a legal provision and go ahead and pass sentence over the differend concerning freedom, it is because he believes himself to be authorized by the Idea that nature pursues its ends by means of this supplementarity. But now, what authorizes him to resort to this Idea of a natural end capable, according to him, of authorizing him to judge without laws? Since it's an Idea (that of nature and thus of ends), he cannot present an ostensible this to validate the authorization. He can present an "as-if this," an analogon, a sign. That sign is his feeling, the feeling that one ought to and is able to judge even in the absence of laws. This feeling, however, is in turn only a proof (Beweisen) certifying that there is a right and a duty to judge outside the law if some nature pursues its ends by means of this feeling. No exit is made from the circle.
Even if we grant that the value signs have for the critical lookout man is what leaves the play of the judgment free with regard to them (finding the case for the rule and the rule for the case), that value nonetheless presupposes a kind of intention (a finality) on the side of what makes sign. By means of the feeling the philosopher has, an as-if subject would signal to him that. under the guise of this sign, a quasi-phrase has taken place whose sense cannot be validated by procedures applicable to cognition, but which still ought to be taken into consideration. Can one pass judgment on signs without presupposing such an intention, be it problematically? That is, without prejudging that an unknown addressor not only delivers but also addresses them to us to be decoded?
Concomitantly, though, if no guiding thread leads the way for the judgment's expeditions, how can the judgment find its way amid the labyrinth of passages? Would the analoga be pure fictions? For what needs would they be forged? This itself is impossible: the passages are what circumscribe the realms of legitimacy, and not the latter which would pre-exist the passages and tolerate them. What are we doing here other than navigating between islands in order paradoxically to declare that their regimens or genres are incommensurable?
Whatever acceptation is given to the Idea of nature, one's right of access to it is only through signs, but the right of access to signs is given by nature. Not even a denaturalized nature and signs of nothing, not even a postmodern nonteleology, can escape this circulus (No. 182).
182. Is this the sense in which we are not modern? Incommensurability, heterogeneity, the differend, the persistence of proper names, the absence of a supreme tribunal? Or, on the other hand, is this the continuation of romanticism, the nostalgia that accompanies the retreat of . , etc. ? Nihilism? A well-executed work of mourning for Being? And the hope that is born with it? Which is still the hope of redemption? With all of this still remaining inscribed within the thought Of a redemptive future? Could it be that "we" are no longer telling ourselves anything? Are "we" not telling, whether bitterly or gladly, the great narrative of the end of great narratives? For thought to remain modern, doesn't it suffice that it think in terms of the end of some history? Or, is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change? But this too is a goal for a certain humanity. A genre. (A bad parody of Nietzsche. Why?)
183. Do ends show up right along with genres (Nos. 174, 179)?-They certainly do, and they take hold of phrases and the instances they present, especially 'We' do not intend them. Our 'intentions' are tensions (to link in a certain way) exerted by genres upon the addressors and addressees of phrases, upon their referents, and upon their senses. We believe that we want to persuade, to seduce, to convince, to be upright, to cause to believe, or to cause to question, but this is because a genre of discourse, whether dialectical, erotic, didactic, ethical, rhetorical, or "ironic," imposes its mode of linking onto "our" phrase and onto "us." There is no reason to call these tensions intentions or wills, except for the vanity of ascribing to our account what is due to occurrence and to the differend it arouses between ways of linking onto it. -But how can one explain, or even describe, this reversal which gives currency to anthropocentrism, this transcendental appearance affecting the we, the illusion of enunciation?
184.Let's recapitulate (Nos. 180, 181): a phrase comes along What will be its fate, to what end will it be subordinated, within what genre of discourse will it take its place? No phrase is the first. This does not only mean that others precede it, but also that the modes of linking implied in the preceding phrases-possible modes of linking therefore-are ready to take the phrase into account and to inscribe it into the pursuit of certain stakes, to actualize themselves by means of it. In this sense, a phrase that comes along is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse. This conflict is a differend, since the success (or the validation) proper to one genre is not the one proper to others. I can come by your place (Nos. 137ff.) allows many diverse linkings, and if not all of them, then at least some of them, stem from different genres of discourse. The multiplicity of stakes, on a par with the multiplicity of genres, turns every linkage into a kind of "victory" of one of them over the others. These others remain neglected, forgotten, or repressed possibilities. There is no need to adduce some will or some intention to describe that. It suffices to pay attention to this: there is only one phrase "at a time" [å la fois] (No. 113). There are many possible linkings (or genres), but only one actual or current "time" [une seule "fois" actuelle].
185. The rules of formation and linkage that determine the regimen of a phrase have to be distinguished, as we have been doing, from the modes of linking that stem from genres of discourse. As Wittgenstein observes, the set of rules constituting the game of tennis or chess is one thing, the set of recommendations which form a strategy for winning is something else. By ignoring the latter, you are considered to play "badly." But it's okay to play "badly": "I know, I'm playing badly but I don't want to play any better." In that case, all my interlocutor can say is: "Ah then that's all right" (Wittgenstein 1929-1930: 5). Not to mention that playing "badly" might be a good strategy, an unprecedented one, which will subsequently be said to be "well played!" Genres of discourse are strategies-of no-one." (p.130-137, Lyotard, 1988).
This deconstructs a reading of transmedia as a would be Gesamtkunstwerk, total medium, or metaphilosophy/technology, instead playing much in line with the deconstructive context of 'writing' as amongst its chain of floating signifiers (and as in relation to the so-called 'truth in painting') including the passe-partout,
"Between the outside and the inside, between the ex?ternal and the internal edge-line, the framer and the framed, the figure and the ground, form and content, signifier and signified, and so on for any two-faced opposition The trait thus divides in this place where it takes place. The emblem for this tapas seems undiscoverable; I shall borrow it from the nomenclature of framing: the passe-partout.
The passe-partout which here creates an event must not pass for a master key. You will not be able to pass it from hand to hand like a convenient instrument, a short treatise, a viaticum or even an organon or pocket canon, in short a transcendental pass, a password to open all doors, decipher all texts and keep their chains under surveillance. If you rushed to understand it in this way, I would have to issue a warning [avertissement): this forward [avertissement] is not a passe-partout.
I write right on the passe-partout well known to picture? framers. And in order to broach it, right on this supposedly virgin surface, generally cut out of a square of cardboard and open in its "middle" to let the work appear. The latter can, moreover, be replaced by another which thus slides into the passe-partout as an "example." To that extent, the passe-partout remains a structure with a movable base; but although it lets something appear, it does not form a frame in the strict sense, rather a frame within the frame. Without ceasing (that goes without saying) to space itself out, it plays its card or its cardboard between the frame, in what is properly speaking its internal edge, and the external edge of what it gives us to see, lets or makes appear in its empty enclosure: the picture, the painting, the figure, the form, the system of strokes [traits] and of colors.
What appears, then, and generally under glass, only appears to do without the passe-partout on which it banks [fait fonds]. This would be almost the place for a preface or a foreward, between, on the one hand, the cover that bears the names (author and publisher) and the titles (work and series or field), the copyright, the fly leaf, and, on the other hand, the first word of the book, here the first line of Lemmata, with which one ought to "begin."
Passe-partout, the word and the thing, has other uses, but what would be the point of listing them? They can be found easily fils se trouvent tout seuls]. And if I were to put them all in a table [tableau: also "picture"-TRANs.], there would always be one that would play among the others, one taken out of the series in order to surround it, with yet one more turn.
Passe-partout nevertheless cannot be written in the plural, by reason of grammatical law. This derives from its idiomatic makeup and the grammatical invariability of the adverb. But it can be understood in the plural: "Curiosities of all sorts, plaster casts, molds, sketches, copies, passe-partout containing engrav?ings" (Theophile Gautier). In a word, it is written in the singular but the law of its agreements may require the plural.
The internal edges of a passe-partout are often beveled." (p.12-13, Derrida, 1987).
With this the passe-partout is the (im)passage of an abyss,
""The abyss. Thus, in the limitation placed upon the practical deduction (in the form of a reversal of its direction), the heterogeneity between ethical phrase and cognitive phrase is marked. This limitation is not due to some finitude of human beings. It results from the absence of a homogeneous language. An "abyss" (KUK, Introduction) separates every descriptive phrase, including the critical metalanguage of the deduction, from the prescriptive phrase. The latter, when taken as the referent of the former, must elude its grasp. The objection is not long in coming. If the abyss between obligation and the world determined by cognition is impassible, then Kantian morals remain an abstraction. You indeed hear Close the door, but the door will never be closed. (Or, conversely, next to the world of morality, is the world of knowledge an abstraction?) -What is truly abstract is to raise the question of the abyss in an alternative way, such that it would have to be either filled in or hollowed out. Now, there is no abyss, as in general no limit, except because each party -to dip back into forensic or warrior symbolism -grants itself a right of inspection over the other's argumentation, and so extends its pretensions beyond its borders. It is at this price that each party discovers its borders.
In our own idiom, this signifies that a family of phrases not only encroaches upon another but also that it cannot avoid resorting to another in order to establish its own legitimacy (Nos. 40, 4 i). In fact. this is the reason why they each appear as adversaries before the judge or critical watchman. How would the latter know that ethics is not cognition unless he tried to elaborate the legitimacy of ethics upon the mold used for cognition, by attempting to deduce the "moral principle" as if it were a principle of cognition, at the price then of conceiving free causality as if it were a causality within the series of causes and effects (KRV: 410-1 1)? It is because he attempts this passage that he discovers its impossibility, that he ascertains that the moral law is not arrived at by deduction, and that he concludes that freedom is that cognitive monster, an originary causality. It is then that he comes to use a mode of passage which is no longer simply the extension of a legitimation from one realm to another, but the establishment of a differential for the respective legitimations. The "as if" is the generic name of this differential. It neither hollows out nor fills in the abyss, it passes or comes to pass over it, and takes it therefore into consideration. It is an Uebergang which is the model for all Uebergänge (Kant Notice 3).
The analogy resulting from the als 0b is an illusion when the differences are forgotten and the differend smothered. It succeeds in being critical, on the contrary, if the modes Of forming and of validating phrases are distinguished and if the fully disclosed differend can thereafter, following Kant's hope, be transformed into a litigation. The as-if depends upon the transcendental imagination for the invention of the comparison, but it depends upon the faculty of judgment for its regulation." (p.123, Lyotard, 1988).
Its in context of all this that the neologism 'hypermade', explored in the article that was already sent where it is not merely a hypergraphic object, might add to both how its a transmedia game while also transmedia games are hypermade, "hyperrealistic transmedia is that of the transfinite opening of transmedia as the implosive remainder of all (con)texts and thus all mediums. Thereby the hypermade as text plays out the transfinite metonymically by not limiting itself to one "form" to be readymade or hypergraphically marked but deconstructively interlinks all texts through synecdoche of readymade "texts" supplemented through overlapping textual palimpsest wether they are "narrowly", graphically, written or are merely interlinking of various (arche-)writing(s)." (p.3, Not Available, Hypermades: Hyperreality and Transmedial/textual Deconstruction, 2018). As an event gets shadowed, traced/erased, from nothing into nothing this "sort of happening" of a (con)text gets detourned/graffitied in trans(post-/non)media games, through these nothing games in abeyance of rules,
"It's really macabre. But you're quite right Pollution is not in our air and water. It's also present in the promiscuity and confusion of genres and styles. It is caused by the proliferation, in the guise of art, of anything and everything. But putting any old thing on display is taking people for a ride. It's blackmail based on insecurity (of judgement and pleasure), and that's not acceptable. The art scene is a spectacle, a show. This means things are degenerating. It's pretty obvious that there's no real space left for painting. What's left is a sort of happening. Times have changed. This is a very ephemeral period. It's not a period of painting. It has much more to do with other forms of expression: photography, cinema, audio-visual media, electronics From now on, this is what art's about. The museum and the happening at one and the same time - things that are utterly contradictory and yet in cahoots." (p.86, Baudrillard, 2017).
"Yes, a sort of ambulant graffiti. It's the first time we saw the appearance on that scale of the hidden side of the media - namely the side of the receivers. Normally, they don't exist, you never see them. People go and survey them with little focus groups, etc., but in this case they were out in the street, making no claims for themselves, neither transgressive nor violent. It's quite astonishing, you see, this affirmation of the most minimal of identities, but at least, 'Right, well, what am I in life? I'm a listener to Énergie and that's important to me.' So, there you are, it's a thing." (p.51, Baudrillard, 2017).
""This game, as any other game, had its basic rule: Nothing was to happen, not one event that might establish any contact or relationship between them. This is the price of seduction. The secret must not be broken, at the risk of the story's falling into banality. Certainly there is something murderous in the situation for the one who is followed. He can feel resentful and victimized. But that is not Sophie's object (even if that notion had taken shape over the course of hours and days-she is also taking a risk: the other might turn the situation to his own advantage and, sensed the strategem, drag her into the destiny of his choice-he is not a victim; he has, after all, as much power as she does). No, murder is more subtle: It consists of following someone step by step, of erasing his traces along the way, and no one can live without traces. If you leave no traces, or if someone takes it upon himself to wipe them out, you are as good as dead. That's what makes anyone turn around after awhile when being followed. Even without warning or clues, he will have some presentiment of this black magic of erased traces, the sorcery that surrounds him. The powerful blond figure behind the scenes leaves no traces as she follows him: She has lost herself in the other's traces. But she steals his traces. She photographs him. She photographs him continuously. Here the photography does not have the voyeur's or archivist's perverse function. It simply says: Here, at that time, at that place, in that light, there was someone. And it also says, at the same There was no reason to be there, at that place, at that moment-indeed, there was no one there-I who followed him, I can assure you that no one was there. These are not souvenir snapshots of a presence, but rather shots of an absence, the absence of the followed, that of the follower, that of their reciprocal absence. "Follow me, then," she was told, "I am more interesting to follow than the housewife on the corner." But that is a misconception and confuses primary interest with the aesthetic intensity of seduction. It does no good to discover, while shadowing someone, that he has, for instance, a double life, save to heighten curiosity-what's important is that it is the shadowing in itself that is the other's double life. To shadow another is to give him, in fact, a double life, parallel existence. Any commonplace existence can be transfigured (without one's knowledge), any exceptional existence can be made commonplace It is this effect of doubling that makes the object surreal in its banality and weaves around it the strange (eventually dangerous?) web of seduction." (p.78-79, Calle & Baudrillard).
This is the counterpath that transmedia games driftwork through, an deconstructively echographic way by "..."identifying the true shape of something unseen/hidden by capturing its echoes or resonance." (Jacques Derrida, Echographies of Television, 2002). Playing on the intertextual links between various derives and counterpath.
"By the finite future of a counterpath from whose perspective I keep watch I keep watch over my memory in advance, as if I were skirting it's path at a dreamer's pace, outside of time, not in the contrary direction, in the adversity of death, but according to the anachrony of an absolute contretemps, in order to celebrate silently the symbol, marriage, and hope of a mysterious "counterpart." This old word, contrapartie, belongs first of all to the code of writing; I love it as much as contre-allée and the feminine silhouette that could be nicknamed counterpart of counterpath. The counterpath would be a counterpart that never leaves me, it would be the same." (p.5, Malabou and Derrida, 2005).
"...why the ultra-leftist revolutionary groups and micro-groups have failed: they had to display their maleness, their brawn, they had to keep the initiative. But the same idea of efficiency drives the bosses-high-level bureaucrats, business executives, decision-makers and officers. Do not say that unlike them, we know the desire of the "masses" (the criticized object): no one knows it, for desire baffles knowledge and power. He who pretends to knoiv it is indeed the educator, the priest, the prince. Nothing will have changed, therefore, if while claiming to serve the desire of the masses you act according to your alleged knowledge and assume their direction. Where do you criticize from? Don't you see that criticizing is still knowing, knowing better? That the critical relation still falls within the sphere of knowledge, of "realization" and thus of the assumption of power? Critique must be drifted out of. Better still: Drifting is in itself the end of all critique." (p13., Lyotard, 1984).
"That is a drift, affecting all civilizations on a worldwide scale... What the new generation accomplishes is the skepticism of kapital, its nihilism: there are no things, no persons, no borders, no knowledges, no beliefs, no reasons to live/die. But this nihilism is simultaneously the strongest affirmation: it contains the potential liberation of drives from the law of value, from the whole system geared to the safekeeping of properties and the preservation of the terms of exchange, and thus to the upholding of exchange itself as an "ironclad necessity."" (p.14., Lyotard, 1984).
"One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll." (p.62, Knabb)
"But the fact that I never retrace my steps when leaving, not at any price, in no way contradicts the irresistible desire: to return to the place of a voyage, come back, turn around, repeat again and again, and to create out of a counterpath a work that reminisces on and commemorates this insistence... Do you know Richard Long's sculptures? He lays down the archive, so to speak, of certain trajectories, often with stones or even with dried mud that draws a circle in a landscape that is literally sculpted by the memory of the artist-and what remains of the work-at-work-in-walking [oeuvre-en-marche] is then exhibited, the voyage becomes a work ("A Walk of Ten Day's in the High Sierra California 1995," "Asia Circle Stones," "Gobi Desert Circle," "White Mid Circle"). . . . Predestinations and coincidences, encounters (responses to the question "what does to (re)turn (oneself around) mean?")." (p.269, Malabou and Derrida, 2005).
Any archive remain a part of transforming the addressee distinction, into one that's post-spectatorial.
"Television spectatorship in this way occupies a post-spectatorial position, one that rescues desire in both apparatus and nihilistic identification from the spectacular annihilation of desire by cinematic positioning... Unleashed from the romanticism of self-reflexive instruction, television exceeds the rules of the cinematic endgame and plays self-reflexivity in terms of non-self, non-sense, a "foul" play of subjective dissolution, of the ego propping its own amputation..." (p.70, Podesta).
"Lyotard goes on to situate the sublime as a sentiment of the postmodernist deconstruction of necessarily inadequate realizations of the modernist attempt to put forward "the unpresentable in presentation itself." As he says, "A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern." That television is, then, modernist is a conclusion irresistibly dependent on the postmodernist designation of spectatorship, that positioning in regard to representation which is already hopelessly convinced of its sublimity, of its postspectatorial status. Having paid the price of death in life in cinematic counterfeits for a whole, the post-spectatorial precipitates the televisual discourse as a continuous and continuously fragmented Imaginary becoming, in Hegel's sense, Absolute Subject: "Pure self-recognition in absolute otherness," a process of sublime self-consumption which in "pure, simple negativity. . . produces its own double and opposition, a process that again negates this indifferent diversity and its opposite. . The Hegelian postmodern, Lyotard's sublime, the televisual spectator: in successful excess they signal an evolution of knowledge set loose from having, from having to have, from the unconscious." (p.72-73, Podesta).
Any text that may be read as one particular medium (via the manner in which they've seemingly been archived) include rather in many ways the "consumption"/reading of the text as apart of the continuity of the text acting like environments, deploy tactics combinatory of those like the Lettrists where those archived seemingly as films but rather weren't "...conceived as a film but almost as a happening, in which the very projection becomes a syncinéma (a term coined by the artist to replace the traditional idea of a session), an action that could be defined as an artistic fact or a social act based on the alteration of the screen and the theatre through the creation of movements in time and space, combined with the participation of the audience and other elements foreign to the actual film.." [Lemaître] or those that are seemingly merely archived as audio texts implode/play on distinctions like Dufrêne when he "...does away with the image completely and makes a sound film, the first example of imaginary film without either a screen or celluloid. Initially conceived as a set of images presenting abstract compositions and everyday objects, as depicted in the script published in Ion, Dufrêne ended up forsaking the images in an act of denial of the medium itself and its materiality. The film consists of a series of sung aphorisms and Lettrist poems, a compendium of practically all the phonetic work he had hitherto produced..." (Reina Sofia, Lettrist Film) or much like the environments of Eno's in that "Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." (Brian Eno, Ambient Music, 1978).
Reworking forms from superfictions, fiction art, and alternate reality games, that are already symptomatic of Neoism,
"Most superfictions use, to a greater or lesser extent, notions of trompe l'oeil, metonymy, the oxymoron, and what I call "heroic amateurism"." (p.35, Hill, Superfiction and Adventurism)
""The Musée Patamécanique is part of a growing body of art that adopts the language and trappings of officialdom... "For artists, adopting official-sounding names -- along with convincing-looking websites and other packaging and marketing -- can be a way to question authority, frequently humorously, while often doing what the organization's names say they do."... the idea of Fictive Arts, "...a term I started using in 2001 to describe a particular form of aesthetic production that doesn't belong to any one field. Fictive artworks have clearly fictional elements but extend outside the realm of the purely fictive in various ways, principally through the creation of realia. A working definition of the term might be: credible fictions created through production of real-world objects, events, and entities."" (Cabinet of Wonders, Pataphysics and Fictive Art)
"We use Sean Stewart's definition as an analytic tool, focusing on the pieces (or problems), platform independence or multimodal communication, collective action and problemsolving and the participatory and interactive nature of the story. As is obvious from these definitions, the overarching story line ties together all of the elements of an ARG into a cohesive whole. We suggest that the collective story that emerges during an ARG normally supplants the grand or master narrative (Lyotard, 1984) and allows players to become actors and heroes."
(Kim et.al, Storytelling in new media, 2009)
Playing on rephotography/re-recording, (TV magic) cut-ups, and (pata-/)metawatching and (pata-/)metageometry, to detourn/deconstruct situations anamorphically distorted post-referentially (via samplers/sampling but also various types of anamorphosis).
"Prince's rephotography helped to create a new art form-photography of photography..." (Times 100 Photos)
"Metawatching... watching ourselves watching... "meta-irony"... taking pictures of taking pictures..." (p.160-170, Foster Wallace)
"Hinges bearing on themes, elements, and materials, the disabled nude: The 3-dim nude of Given is incomplete: the head is formed of two smooth shells; the right upper arm, the ankle, and the right foot, the left foot are missing. However, the same object appears complete to the eye of the voyeur, the absent parts being hidden. The Bride, for her part, is "incomplete": genital apparatus and breasts. But the two incompletenesses are not congruent: the one is masked by the dead angles of the framing and the screens of the decor; the other proceeds from a perfectly visible plane deconstruction. The two women are disabled, and both by projection, but the woman of the Glass because her 4-dim model is untranslatable in perceptual space, the stage-woman because it's impossible for her voyeur to get around her. Metageometry on the one side, lack of mobility on the other. Irony there, humor here?" (p.181, Lyotard, 1990).
"3. Examples: A hinge in logic would be a paradoxical operator, its minimum property would be to stand in the way of one of the great operators of congruence, for example implication (ifp, then q), which is the very serious logical causality. Would it be the case for an inclusive disjunction: and / or? Monsieur Marceland/or Mademoiselle Rrose. Door (of the rue Larrey) open and/or closed If man, then nonwoman; but: if man and / or woman, what then? The and/or hinge appears to affirm the symmetry and the incongruence of the two terms. An equivalent in the theory of modalities might be: it is contingent that it be nee essary that . ("the irony of having chosen [contingency]'the primitive body or object, which inevitably [necessity] becomes according to this perspective [or other conven. .") (DDS, 55) A temporal equivalent: a current future taken as a current past; theme of speed in Duchamp, and its "solution" sought on the side of "a time 3 dim, etc." (DDS, 130) A deontic equivalent: if is obligatory to permit everything. Etc.
4. Pertinence of the hinge for Duchamp, it sustains the tale and above all the spatial device of The Bride See in DDS, 130-137, all the "analogisms" of the passage from the 3- to the 4-dimensional with that from the 2- to the 3- : a rectangle turning like a hinge engenders a cylinder; imagine the hinge-plane of a volume (3-dim) engendering by rotation a 4-dim figure. The two transversals of glass that separate the Bachelor region and the Bride region are also generators of this sort. "Make a hinge-picture." (DDS, 42)
5. Instruction: Here it is a question of a meta- or a patahinge..." (p.128-129, Lyotard, 1990).
"...sampler society where reality is accessed algorithmically, entered, stored, and disappeared digitally; the content of which is a vast labyrinthian archive Of which is a vast labyrinthian archive of found sound-objects... Duchamp finally migrating beyond the prison-house of the plastic arts, and breaking into song, becoming a fantastic sound matrix to which our heads are only illusory optical referents? A new architectural space of music appears, what might be called sound anamorphosis... Duchamp for the ears: a hinged world of sound partitions, displacements, aliasing in a process of endless reproduction...post-referential sound-object: an endlessly reconfigurable sound matrix..." (p.58-59, Kroker, 1993).
"...ongoing attempt to find an idiomatic structure for sampler music. The architectural answer lies in three discrete over-all strategies: the ex nihilo move from nothingness at the opening to nothingness at the end; the gradual prosthetic restructuring of human voices from both metal-like attacks and inhuman wailing to "natural voices" at pitch (fantastically appearing only at the very end); and the slow yielding of dominance established between two rhythmic patterns. Underlying these concerns is one idea: the principle of distortion. A game is played out in which each object is distorted to a lesser or greater degree, each according to different procedures and each with a different result..." (p.94, Kroker, 1993).
"Camouflage, if you have access to cable or satellite (i.e. many stations), try flicking rapidly through all the channels. The cutup produced will often appear to be following your train of thought, as if it is trying to keep up with you by feeding back symbols: association blocks creating a bridge between your thoughts and the flow of imagery. TV-watching often becomes emotionally intense during this procedure. (Also, putting only the soundtrack of TV, without the visuals, through a stereo can provide valuable insights into the camouflage of control TV)... Television and video are ideally suited for the cut-up method, incorporating as they do the milieux of both sound and visuals. It is interesting to interchange the audio and visual portions of two or more different programmes and watch the conflicting messages you are then exposed to... Cut-up TV is decontrolled TV..." (p.105-106, Home, 1997).
"Zapping or Zero-Consciousness Create your own TV collage of life by switching from news to soapopera to sport to documentary to feature film, to the hi-fi system to a quick burst of karaoke. Zapping was bom with the arrival of multichannel cable and satellite broadcasting, coupled with the indispensable aid of the hand-held remote control. This seeming cornucopia of choice to cater to the diversity of individual interest ends up with everyone choosing to watch nothing - the art is in zapping, the auto-creation of your very own postmodern spectacle... Zapping - or zero-consciousness - is a postmodem symptom of impatience without depth... Zapped-out zero-consciousness is also a product of "post-industrial" hyperactivity and extreme anxiety posed by high unemployment and its Japanese-style alternative, "management by stress"." (p.150, Appignanesi et. all).
"Apart from Lautréamont's work-whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a detailed examination- the tendencies toward détournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or accidental. It is in the advertising industry, more than in the domain of decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.
We can first of all define two main categories of detourned elements, without considering whether or not their being brought together is accompanied by corrections introduced in the originals. These are minor détournements and deceptive détournements.
Minor détournement is the détournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed. For example, a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph. Deceptive détournement, also termed premonitory-proposition détournement, is in contrast the détournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from the new context. A slogan of Saint-Just, for example, or a film sequence from Eisenstein.
Extensive detourned works will thus usually be composed of one or more series of deceptive and minor détournements. Several laws on the use of détournement can now be formulated. It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression.
[...]
In closing, we should briefly mention some aspects of what we call ultra-détournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life... Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations-the ultimate goal Of all our activity-everyone will be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them." (p.16-21, Knabb)
"Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it... Psychogeographical research, "the study of the exact Jaws and specific effects of geographical environments, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals," thus takes on a double meaning: active observation of present-day urban agglomerations and development of hypotheses on the structure of a situationist city. The progress of psychogeography depends to a great extent on the statistical extension of its methods of observation, but above all on experimentation by means of concrete interventions in urbanism. Before this stage is attained we cannot be certain of the objective truth of our initial psychogeographical findings. But even if those findings should turn out to be false, they would still be false solutions to what is nevertheless a real problem... The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play." (p.38-39, Knabb)
In many ways this is all at play in and incorporates the various cybernetic feedback-loop short circuiting tactics similar to those of Istvan's loop-machines, Home's films TV Freak (1986) with it's evocation of Hofstadter's video feedback-loops/mise en abymes in Godel, Escher, Bach (p.490-491) and his film Ut Pictura Poesis (1997) that plays with the meta/pata-hinge of detournement/4th wall breaking and when Cramer brings up how "...pataphysics institutes the music machine as the model for its poetics..." when not only discussing Duchamp, Cage and the Oulipo, but also Neoism's 'slogan generator' and how the "...American Neoist tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE built a 'portable booed usic busking unit nuclear brain physics" [surgery] "school lab philosopher's union member's mouthpiece blatnerphone hallucinomat' as a portable recording studio and performance apparatus... The machine's low-cost construction attests to tENTATIVELY's underground audio-visual activism, and its hardware is a sum of its pataphysical poetics: 'booed usic' (booed out user music as a parody of 'mood music'); the 'nuclear brain physics school' (where tests are obtained through subliminal messages heard on a prepared audio tape while sleeping; along with the stipulation to reproduce this audio tape for the next generation of students); the 'philosopher's union' (a union of philosophers, whose members are recorded in 'mouthpieces': grainy close-ups shots taken with an analog Fisher Price camera of mouths speaking about philosophy); the 'blatner phone' (a cassette deck refunctioned as a musical instrument)." (p.213-216, Cramer, 2013).
This all apart of the deconstruction of boundaries of all kinds from genre to form.
"The death drive is marked by surges of tension, what Klossowski calls intensities, Cage events. Dissonances, stridences, positively exaggerated, ugly, silences... What should be said is that no unity, no comprehensive unity, no composition is made with this noise, this sound, this singular intensity, but rather in spite of them. To hear this event is to transform it: into tears, gestures, laughter, dance, words, sounds, theorems, repainting your room, helping a friend move. I can testify to the fact that a black cat (Lhermite) heard Kagel's Music for Renaissance Instruments: bristling of whiskers, fluttering of prowling in the vicinity of the listening room. The intensity of noise-sound = an urge to produce something, circumstantially, in an endless return where nothing repeats itself." (p.92-93, Lyotard, 1984).
"The function of the artist, from then on, is no longer to produce good forms, new good forms, but on the contrary deconstruct them systematically and to accelerate their obsolescence... from an experimental point of view, because an attempt is made to deconstruct the traditional space of sculpture and to invert it; what Heizer produces is a sunk carving on the earth itself. Maybe this is why he has to work in the countryside... because he starts from this primary hypothesis. So, in spite of the fact that the social effect is nil, it is an interesting attempt, one example of a deconstruction among thousands of others, Surrealism having been a mere episode from this point of view, nothing more. . . Only from this point of view though, I insist." (p.26-27, Lyotard, 1984).
"...Neoists were simply interested in historifying themselves as an important art movement. By producing absolutely no works of any worth and concentrating exclusively upon publicity stunts, the Neoists exposed the mechanisms by which the culture industry seeks to endow objects, individuals and events with value.' 'I see!' Jock exclaimed. 'So that's why all you've ever done is produce portraits of the hundred or so individuals involved with what you call The Neoist Revolution. What you're driving at is the fact that the movement had no content other than the personalities of its adherents!' 'Precisely!' Karen whooped. 'And those personalities change as history is made and remade. That's why every time I do a show, it's simply a set of Neoist portraits done in whatever artistic style was flavour of the month when I produced them!' 'But don't you think that you've reached a dead end?' Graham demanded. 'Since you've now become flavour of the month yourself?' 'That's an essential part of the process!' Eliot announced gleefully. 'I'm already working on a new collection-and it consists of exact copies of my early work. The originals were sold for peanuts, these new versions will fetch enormous prices!'" (p.35, Homes, 1996).
Expanding beyond the aesthetic limitations of the Lettrist interest in "..."aesthetic polythanasia," which defines the varied and complex forms of destruction and negation of the artwork... strive to suppress or deny the very characteristics of the medium..." apart of the "...notions of the amplic (amplique) and chiselling (ciselant). According to Isou, the arts go through two alternating phases: the amplic, characterised by the plenitude of stylistic devices and artistic resources, and the chiselling phase, which involves the destruction and negation of the medium, via the atomic dissociation of its elements."(Sabatier, 2014) To the point of deconstructing the boundaries of any and all structures in a way discussed of the libidinal band in Lyotard's Libidinal Economy especially when discussing 'material decomposition',
"The abstract does not act through a simulacrum-effect, but by means of the organization of its material alone. Now this is precisely the merit claimed by theory, that it advances no illusion or ideology, This claim was obeyed by, for example, the strategy of 'material decomposition', which the group 'Support-Surface', in its time, applied to pictorial simulacra: exhibiting frames, canvases, uniform coloured stamps, reels of lightweight wood or tarlatan twisted into the shape of a Moebian band and left lying on the ground, creating in sensible space the exact equivalent of a set of axioms for paintings in the space of language; these were supposed to be nothing other than acceptable statements, as defined by this axiomatic, within its lexis and syntax. And, in fact, Dezeuze and Cane, under the title 'For a Pictorial theoretical Programme's' formulated the theoretical discourse corresponding to those exhibits.
One cannot, of course, say the same for all abstract painters, of whom the 'Support-Surface' group was in any case no less critical than they were of figurative art. Nevertheless, the libidinal dispositif is noticeable in every abstraction, and in particular of the theoretical kind, in that it thwarts the client's transference onto a simulated object, onto a reference. Transference can only bear on the material and its arrangement; is this correct? is it authorized? is this statement acceptable? These become the ·right' questions, the same ones you ask us, theoreticians, and which we question in turn. Questions full of the concern for truth, full of justice and guilt. What does the theoretical text offer its fascinated client? An impregnable body, like a thief, a liar, an imposter who can never be caught. Everything stated in this text is in principle capable of being derived from its set of axioms. A text which is utterly consistent within its own terms and can be derived from itself by explicit procedures, a wide-open organic body, which the client is supposed to be able to go through without the solution of continuity, repeating it or replying to it without error; a body which tolerates no errancy, which defines the apparatuses of exclusion and channels of implication. Every statement formed within it has right on its side: the client may in principle derive it from the others. Nice tautological body of the theoretical text, without any external reference, without a risky interior region where roads and tracks may be lost, a model sealed up in its blank identity, exposing itself to repetition.
The theoretical text is a model, something to imitate, which has itself its own model to imitate, its set of axioms; and this set has its own, properly formalist, model. And rather than seeking to show that the closure of models is impossible (Gödel's theorem), and that there is always a primary opacity of the symbol, of ordinary language, one would do better to identify this return to the same as a dispositif of the passions, no more nor less so than the return to the origin with which hermeneutics would like to contrast it. In both cases it is semiotic; the operation bears only on the relations between signs. Let's rather comprehend this model according to its force. Ibis force is revealed in its expansion through mimesis. The mannequin (mannekijn, little man) presents collection models. It transports the jubilation of the repetition of the same, jouissance through serial reproduction.
The closed body of the theoretical text gives rise, as a model, to this same jouissance. Its tautologous perfection gives rise to the enthusiasm of fidelity in replication. Ideally at least, it goes well beyond biological reproduction, where effects of similarity due to the mixing of genetic codes are not only not excluded, but are inevitable. The organic theoretical body fulfills its mimetic function through parthogenesis. There is an affinity between the theoretical and the virginal. The psychoanalysts will say: the theoretical implies the denial of sexual difference. But in our eyes, this difference is suspiciously semiotic. We say: it implies the denial of disparities, of the heterogeneities of stases and distances which energy travels through; it implies the denial of polymorphism. It needs a form, a good and proper form. Such a form has its basis and its origin in a stable synthetic disjunction.
This disjunction works so hard inside the theoretical body that, ideally, it leads to its immobilization. The paralysis pole we find in the figurative is found here too, displaced from the reference onto the material itself. It is not what is spoken of that becomes immobilized by discourse, as in narrative; it is discourse itself, a system of acceptable statements within the 'chosen' set of axioms, which strives to come to rest. Quite different from the intensive instance in the work of the great abstract painters: in their paintings the still, painted things are set in motion 'on the spot', at the threshold of perception, ceaselessly they are in motion towards motion. But theoretical bodies, as such, are in motion towards rest, like the works of bad abstract painters. They have a goal. Medawar says that a scientific hypothesis relieves an anxiety. Theoretical discourses are instruments for fixing and dispersing intensities, anxiety being the generic name given to all the turns of the disjunctive bar, the common name of the emotions. And he also says that the only difference between the invention (here, however, we are not talking about that at all) of a scientific hypothesis and that of a plastic or musical object, for instance, is that in the latter, affective Intensities are conveyed, whereas it is the rule of the former that their transmission is in principle disaffected, and that its reception should involve no emotion.'
So, the immobilization of the bar into stable disjunctions on the body of theory (concepts) corresponds to a similar immobilization in the zone of contact between the text body and the client body. The theoretical text makes contact with the client only on condition that he is disaffected, neutralized, supposed to be incapable of mobilization, unfeeling, impartial, that is to say having no part in the emotions dissimulated in the text, nor in any others.
This chill is the heat proper to the theoretical. It is not a parody, its libidinal character rather appears in the anonymity which it claims. The famous universality of knowledge, generally understood as the a priori of theoretical discourse in its communicability, is, seen from the pulsional point of view, an act of destruction of personal identities. Only anonymous fragments of the pulsional band are plugged into theoretical discourse, fragments capable of repeating it without transformation. One need no longer marvel, after Freud, that repetition may provide jouissance; it remains to point out here that a faithful repetition, such as theoretical discourse entails, proceeds as much from Eros, inasmuch as it affirms a consistent body, as from the death drives, since this repetition passes through the destruction of particular libidinal dispositifs already formed on the client body, and their dialysis into anonymity. The self-forgetting entailed by theory is already the amnesia proper to the Id.
The paradox, then, of the disjunctive bar, at once motionless and in rapid rotation, becomes less opaque: as disjunctive, it suspends all passage of energy from the client body to the text body and vice versa; in motion, it opens the passage in its same disjunctive function, in the disconnection of the client dispositif in relation to the discourse, it makes a connection out of disconnection, plunging client and text into jouissance through non-copulation and anonymous repetition. The libidinal band emerges at exactly the point where it is meant to be excluded. Now this disconnection at the very point of coupling is equivalent to the internal homogenization required by theoretical discourse in order to form itself as a body. Just as homogenization can be invested with intensity, so the neutralization of the coupled bodies can be accompanied by their extreme excitation. Was this what we had to learn: that the movement towards coldness and death is burning hot? that intensities are not tied to 'life', but may be mobile or fixed on no matter what theme or piece of the great patchwork, including those which, like theoretical discourse, demand extreme coldness and dead replication? We are not saying that this is an error, a perversion, an illusion, an ideology. If mimesis gives you a hard-on [vousfait bander], gentlemen, who are we to object?
Olis is rather what interests us. Capital is also mimetic, commodities producing commodities, that is to say, being exchanged for commodities, the same commuted into the same according to an immanent standard, Sratfa's, for example. If 'knowledge' can become a force of production, as Marx said, it is because it always has been and is, insofar as it is the construction of identities and systems for their reproduction. Capitalist production is this construction of the conditions of repetition-capacity {pouvoir); to produce in order to produce, to sell in order to sell, series, chains, standards. etc. The return obtained through repetition (valid for 500 km and 3 months, the cost-price of your half-price card will be covered after two return journeys) is, after transcription into terms of political economy, this same movement towards paralysis of discourse that we find in theoretical texts. The model makes the series possible, and hence the saving of energetic expenditure.
This saving is not necessarily deadly: redemption implies the lifting of a debt that burdens the displaceability of capital into energy, therefore its enfranchisement. it is free again, it runs to install itself elsewhere. One can thus understand redemption as regeneration: energy fixed in machines and personnel, deposited [disposée], and in this sense very bound (in the body of invested capital), a part escapes from this dispositif and will be deposited elsewhere. The compulsion to stop, in theoretical discourse, has also this function: the circumscription of a field of reference, the production of a model capable of treating it in a predictable fashion, that is to say, according to identity; and the liberation of potencies (puissances). In the manufacture of theory, as in that of productive machines, the robot is necessarily implied, and doubly: it guarantees the replication of the model, and guarantees the saving of energy. It gives rise to ventures and conjunctions.
We do not mean that theory comes from capital, nor the reverse. Nothing comes from anything, nothing is the effect of a cause. But the relationship is close, capital is as old as theory, as old as the West in matters of the determination of identities. Some objections, however: capital does not stop, whereas theoretical discourse tends towards its immobilization; capital is also an elusive, perverse body, theoretical discourse closes itself up into a beautiful organic body: don't these propositions highlight disparities, making the analogy impossible?
On the contrary, they refine it, and we are capable of a certain ingenuity ourselves. Mimesis closes the theoretical text up as a power of statements [pouvoir dénoncés). Elbe model is what makes and remakes, makes in conformity to the made: that is power. The robot has power. the robotmaker, power to the second power, and the maker of the robot-maker, power to the third power. What has no power is the statement itself, in principle, since it is nothing more than an effect. This is why we fight the thought of causes-by powers.
In this regard, the theoretical is a major procedure of invagination and the closure of the great skin upon itself; it proceeds by repetitions; it transforms unprecedented statements into simple innovations, the great pain of saying something we know nothing about into the little worry over modifying the theoretical edifice by the addition of some axiom or other, or by the derivation, in conformity with the laws of formation, of some expression which, despite being new, must be no less well formed. Theory dreams of what an ill-formed expression would be only to dispel the danger. Innovation is allowed only insofar as it will give rise to the repetition of the theoretical model as a self-immobilizing organism. (Just as capital takes new quantities or qualities of energy into account only insofar as it can repeat its axiomatic of equal exchanges on them.)
Nothing enters the system that wasn't there already, that doesn't have its double, that is to say its model. This mimetic relation encourages dreams of the Augustinian similitudo. They differ only as metaphor differs from metonymy, as dependence upon a primary model, received, revealed, transcendent, deviates from the condition of possibility (axiomatic) that the theoretician gives himself as the transcendental authority judging every new statement. In similitudo, authority does not belong to the theoretician, but to those he addresses: the Word alone speaks, the true Locutor is absent; the locutor's word is really only the metaphor for the other; Capitals for absence, lower case for presence; but with mimesis, the theoretician conquers metalanguage, that is, not only the statement, but the statement of the conditions of enunciation. That is why every statement has its double, from the basic set to the system, 'before' it has been offered as an a priori possibility."
(p.259-262, Lyotard, 1993)
It thereby deals with the new supports of multimedia problems of how it can sometimes come "...in the place of discourse, but it does not adequately replace it.." by attempting to preserve "...the rigor, differentiation, refinement which our heritage continues to associate with the classical form of discourse and especially with written discourse, without images on a paper support." (p.143, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002).
This is exemplified by the way in which many of the patamechanisms/processes/games can range from playing with in a Rorschach/indeterminate agonistic strategy of playing with decision that ranges in spatio-temporal/medium and regional ontology demarcation using various intertextual syzygy post-concept-machines, hypermade "objects"/ogjects and supplimental interlinking ergodic cybertext/hypertext para/epitextual elements that utilize the super-temporal and the infinitesimal to detourn the contexts of reading/writing distinctions.
"...imaginary or infinitesimal art, exhibited as of 1956 by Isou, who rarefies sense data in favour of intangible or mental expression, close to conceptual art, and super-temporal art, in which the artist proposes a simple creative framework that viewers, who have become users, can take over in order to develop or even contradict the work that is proposed, without temporal limits."
"...By now the word "hypertext" has become generally accepted for branching and responding text, but the corresponding word "hypermedia", meaning complexes of branching and responding graphics, movies and sound as well as text is much less used. Instead they use the strange term "interactive multimedia": this is four syllables longer, and does not express the idea of extending hypertext."
(Ted Nelson, Literary Machines, 1992)
"...cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of "reading" do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning "work" and "path." In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text."
(p.1, Aarseth, 1997)
"A paratextual element, at least if it consists of a message that has taken on material form, necessarily has a location that can be situated in relation to the location of the text itself: around the text and either within the same volume or at a more respectful (or more prudent) distance... Within the same volume are such elements as the title or the preface and sometimes elements inserted into the interstices of the text, such as chapter titles or certain notes. I will give the name peritext to this first spatial category... The distanced elements are all those messages that, at least originally, are located outside the book, generally with the help of the media (interviews, conversations) or under cover of private communications (letters, diaries, and others). This second category is what, for lack of a better word, I call epitext... As must henceforth go without saying, peritext and epitext completely and entirely share the spatial field of the paratext. In other words, for those who are keen on formulae, paratext = peritext + epitext"
(p.4-5, Genette, 1997)
By doing so all of this, "...artifactuality and actuvirtuality. The first trait is that actuality is, precisely, made [faite]: in order to know what it's made of, one needs nonetheless to know that it is made... While taking the deconstruction of artifactuality as far as possible, we must therefore do everything in our power to guard against this neoidealism and remember, not only that a consistent deconstruction is a thinking of singularity, and therefore of the event, of what it ultimately preserves of the irreducible, but also that "information" is a contradictory and heterogeneous process." (p.3-6, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002)
"What the accelerated development of teletechnologies, of cyberspace, of the new topology of "the virtual" is producing a practical deconstruction of the traditional and dominant concepts of the state and citizen (and thus of "the political") as they are linked to the actuality of the territory. I say "deconstruction" because, ultimately, what I name and try to think under this word is, at bottom, nothing other than this very process, it's "taking-place" in such a way that its happening affects the very experience of place, and the recording (symptomatic, scientific, or philosophical) of this "thing," the trace that traces (inscribes, preserves, carries, refers or defers) the differance of this event which happens to place [qui arrive au lieu] - which happens to take place, and to taking place [qui arrive a (l')avoir-lieu]... The choice does not choose between control and non-control, mastery and non-mastery, property or expropriation. What is at stake here, and it obeys another "logic," rather a "choice" between multiple configurations of mastery without mastery (what I have proposed to call "exappropriation")."
(p.36-37, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002)
"A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and non-phenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical."
(p.117, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002)
And in this way sans totality, with this "...the invisible inside... echography... the inside of my life exhibiting itself outside..." (p10, Derrida and Berrignton, 1993) is "Indeed, just as medical progress, the possibility of radiography, scanners, and grafts, transform our body and our relationship to our body, media space, whether we are spectators or actors, in one way or another, implies a profound transformation of the body and of our relationship to our own body." (p.117, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002). For deconstruction, like in the empty set or Godel's incompleteness theorem, "It would always be necessary to say, if we were to believe them, 'deconstruction and ... et cetera ... etc.'" (p.282, Derrida, 2000).
Its in this manner that Neoism remains a play of/interlinked to deconstruction especially in this implosion of all regional ontologies transfinitely brought beyond their ends (transaesthetic, transpolitical, transeconomic, transsexual) that the terms describing the activities in "A Mere Outline" give us the additional transmedia games patamechanical constraints to get cut-up/for cutting up the operation of the infinite/transfinite litanies of optional "mediums" transcategorically/transdisciplinarily to play with meta-reflexively, where any transmedia game is already in some variation a combination (via infinite/deferred telepresence spacio-temporality/"super-temporality") of all of these "...activities meant to stimulate people's curiosity - usually by creating an unusual situation with no obvious source or explanation... unusual interactions &/or interventions in environments where such incidents are unexpected... an unpopular use of something... lecture type situations generally with a perverse message & audio-visual aids... anything in which there's supposedly a demonstration of or reference to the possibility that roles are flexible... usually involves some element of risk, confrontation, or role-reversal..."
Included are pics of some of our Neoist experiments with a few of us at Pata-No UN LTD. Included are a pic of a So-Called Whatever (Picture 31), a Generic As-Beenism (Picture 32), and another from one of the Post-Card Game Jams (Picture 30).
and it's the So-Called Whatevers as "...just about anything that I might not want to label otherwise..." that opens up these trans(post-non)media games that lie at the margins of impossible exchange of the representations/categorizations of contexts. Its this impossible exchange of incommensurable differends of mediums/genres/modes/styles and their deconstruction that plays on an interlinking continuity of all mediums across all mediums as no medium, as an abeyance of a metamedium (cum patamedium) as a medium without medium (the game of deconstructive (arche-)writing), that trans(post-/non)media games play with this transcategorical continuity of the ideality/iterability/intelligibility, like the "reality effect" of photography but is not afforded identically by any and every type of writing, in the exactitude of recording and the field of knowledge/meaning as "...a series of contiguities..." whereby "This extends the field of what you call intelligibility, the field of knowledge, the field of meaning itself, but in order to accommodate the opposite effect within it; meaning and intelligibility can be extended - on the scale of what you have called the "discrete," the spacing of the discrete only by multiplying the conditions of this very discreteness, in other words, spacing, non-sense, the blank, the interval, everything that bounds [borde] sense and non-sense as it were, exceeds [déborde] or splits it. The origin of sense makes no sense. This is not a negative or nihilistic statement. That which bears intelligibility, that which increases intelligibility, is not intelligible - by definition, by virtue of its topological structure. From this standpoint, technics is not intelligible. This does not mean that it is a source of irrationality, that it is irrational or that it is obscure. It means only that it does not belong, by definition, by virtue of its situation, to the field of what it makes possible. Hence a machine is, in essence, not intelligible, No matter what, even if it makes possible the -deployment or transmission or production of meaning, in itself, as machine, it makes no sense, This absence of sense can also be dispiriting, producing effects of dehumanization, of expropriation, of nihilism. In itself, this non-sense -is not an it is not negative, but it is not positive either." (p.108-125, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002).
With all this a transmedia game is a game that plays with "nothing" as intertextual syzygy by playing with the situations options for mediums/supports as operational patamechanism contraints/processes/rules to undermine or supplement with additional mediums/suppports/processes/contraints/rules/forms in all ways but can never allow for totalization due to the play of differance. This was all apart of experimentally simulating/playing on the various 'species of events' in Baudrillard (with their varying contextual telepresence/telemorphic teletechnology effect based distinctions) in that the (example/model of the) absolute event intertextually linked to by "fitting" the support parameters/constraints of a So-Called Whatever, (the intertextual examples/models of) the hyperevent(s) intertextually linked to by "fitting" the support/form parameters/constraints of a Generic As-Beenism, and so when it came to doing the same for the pseudo-event(s) we developed its various intertextual examples' configurations of mediums/supports/forms as the baseline of patamechnisms for the Post-Card Cam Jams, the same goes for the non-event(s) its intertextual examples'/models' support parameters/constraints as those applied as patamechanisms to the Zero-Sum Game No Show. Intertextual examples/models also act as the patamechanisms of archived texts to sample/exappropriate. And its the Bored Games that may also might get considered as a daily banality on the level of some species of event (unknown as to whether we'd consider it a hyperevent or pure event) and effects a transition At the Margins Of ... "A Mere Outline" by turning a So-Called Whatever into a meta-reflexive trans(post-/non)media game by using various game based hypermades or readymades as Rorschach like patamechanisms/process/event scores to project/play with decisions with indeterminately improvised, a intertextual fatal strategy incorporated in many trans(post-/non)media games.
The pseudo-events experiments, Post Card Game Jams (the name playing on the qualifier of 'post-', a post-card, Neoist Card Games, and (culture) jamming and jamming/improvising), are at an intertextual interlinking syzygy between Jacques Derrida's "The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond" (1987), Jean Baudrillard's "The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures" (1970) and Jean-Francois Lyotard "Postmodern Fables" (1997), as well as many other texts by them and others as interlinked to Neoism especially Stewart Home's discussion in "Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis" (1997) [with parallels to "Slow Death" (1996) which it plays with/interlinks it to this/these same texts for the non-events] and Decadent Action. With parallels to Louis Lawler's "Arranged by Louis Lawler" (1982), Robert Barry's "Prospect '69'" 'non-material' interview/catalogue, Yves Klein's "Dimanche" (1960), Daniel Spoerri's 'snare-pictures' and the pyschogeographic game of incidental urban poker (The Joker) by the Workshop for a Non-Linear Architecture where "...the introduction of the idea of a game of Urban Poker it appeared that this necessary redirecting of the derive had begun..." (p.158, Home, 1997) to name a few.
""Medium is Message
Here, and in this sense at least, we have to accept as a fundamental feature of the analysis of consumption McLuhan's formula that 'the medium is the message'. This means that the true message the media of TV and radio deliver, the one which is decoded and 'consumed' deep down and unconsciously, is not the manifest content of sounds and images, but the constraining pattern - linked to the very technical essence of those media - of the disarticulation of the real into successive and equivalent signs: it is the normal, programmed, miraculous transition from Vietnam to variety, on the basis of a total abstraction of both.
And there is something like a law of technological inertia which means that the closer one gets to true documentary, to 'live coverage', and the more closely the real is pursued with colour, depth and one technical improvement after another, the greater does the real absence from the world grow. And the more the 'truth' of TV or radio has to be recognized: that the primary function of each message is to refer to another message. So Vietnam refers on to advertising, advertising to the TV news, etc., the systematic juxtaposition of these things being the discursive mode of the medium, its message, its meaning. But we have to recognize that, while speaking to and of itself in this way, the medium is imposing a whole system of segmentation and interpretation of the world upon us.
This technological process of mass communications delivers a certain kind of very imperative message: a message-consumption message, a message of segmentation and spectacularization, of misrecognition of the world and foregrounding of information as a commodity, of glorification of content as sign. In short, it performs a conditioning function (in the advertising sense of the term: in this sense, advertising is the 'mass' medium par excellence, and its schemata leave their stamp on ail the other media) and a function of misrecognition." (p.122-123, Baudrillard, 1998)
"We enter here the world of the pseudo-event, of pseudo-history and Pseudo-culture which is discussed by Boorstin in The Image. By this he means a world of events, history, culture and ideas not produced from shifting, contradictory, real experience, but produced as artifacts from and no of the code and the technical manipulation of the medium. It is this, able It thing else, which defines all signification whatsoever as consumable. It is this generalization of the substitution of the code for the referential dimension which defines mass-media consumption." (p.125, Baudrillard, 1998)
"Advertising has a strategic position in this process. It is the reign of the pseudo-event par excellence. It turns the object into an event. In fact, it constructs it as such by eliminating its objective characteristics. It constructs it as a model, as a spectacular news item... Journalists and advertisers are mythic operators: they present the object event as drama, as fiction... The truth is that advertising (like the other mass media) does not deceive us: it is beyond the true and the false, just as fashion is beyond ugliness and beauty and the modem object, in its sign function, is beyond usefulness and uselessness... It turns the object into a pseudo-event, which will become the real event of daily life through the consumer's endorsing its discourse... The mode of 'self-fulfilling prophecy' is the tautological mode. Reality is no longer anything but the model speaking itself. So it is with magical formulas, so it is with simulations and so also with advertising which, among other styles of discourse, plays for preference - on the tautological... And that tautology of discourse seeks, as in the magic formula, to induce tautological repetition by the event. The consumer, by his purchase, will merely ratify the coming to pass of the myth." (p.126-128, Baudrillard, 1998)
"...historicise the avant-garde of the eighties, as well as writing about contemporary manifestations of anti? institutional culture... to understand that by openly campaigning for the Neoist, Plagiarist and Art Strike movements to be incorporated into the collections of leading museums, I'm deterring curators from touching this material. Most art administrators don't like the ways in which they operate to be openly talked about, they'd much rather I remained silent on the subject, so that my work could be shrouded in reverence." (p.6, Home, 1995)
"Decadent Action are the man and woman sitting next to you at the cocktail bar, they have money in their pockets and mischief on their minds. Decadent Action are a High Street anarchist-guerrilla organisation whose main aim is to destroy the capitalist system by a leisurely campaign of good living and overspending. We plan to achieve our aims by making capitalism fall on its own sword. If you neglect and ignore capitalism it will not go away, but feed it to excess for long enough and it will eventually burst. We use the simple economic principles of supply and demand with their intrinsic link to inflation to establish the correctness of our theories. The state must control these factors to run the economy efficiently; throw in the wild card of massive irrational overspending on seemingly random luxury goods and the government is unable to take control. This will lead to hyperinflation and large-scale social unrest, in turn leading to the collapse of the monetary system and disintegration of the state apparatus. So how can you get involved in this conspiracy to overthrow the government without making too much effort or getting your hands dirty? Well, the answer is to spend, spend, spend! Get money, spend it; it's as simple as that. Below we set out ten pointers to help you to become truly decadent and to destroy the monetary system at your leisure." (p.1, Home, 1997).
"A parallel to this escalation exists within the art market. Here too, because commercial equivalence is brought to an end - because the mercantile law of value is done away with - everything becomes more expensive than "expensive," expensive to the second power. Prices become exorbitant and the delirious overbidding proliferates out of control. Thus when there are no longer any rules to the aesthetic game, the latter starts to fire up in all directions; the same is true when all reference to the law of exchange is lost; everything tumbles into an unbridled speculation. There is a necessary relation between the rupture with all logic of aesthetic value within the field of art, and the rupture with all logic of mercantile value, within the market of art. The same mechanical racing, the same madness, the same excess of simulation characterize them both. One can even say that the blazing fire of advertising and media in art is directly proportional to the impossibility of any aesthetic judgement. Value becomes inflamed in the absence of all value judgement. It is the ecstasy of value in every sense.
For this reason, there are, more or less, two art markets (at least in New York). One still regulates itself according to a hierarchy of values, even if the latter are already speculative. The other deregulates itself according to the uncontrollable flotation of the currencies on the international financial market. This amounts to raw speculation, a total and arbitrary fluctuation which seems to have no other justification than precisely to defy the law of value to the point of an irrational limit. This art market takes after the poker game or the potlatch ritual or the space-opera within the hyperspace of value. Must one become scandalized? There is nothing immoral in all this. In the same way as contemporary art is situated beyond beauty and ugliness, the market, itself, is located beyond good and evil." (p.14-15, Stearns and Chaloupka, 1992)
Playing at all the limits of particles/qualifiers like post-, trans-, hyper-, pseudo-, anti-, non-, meta-, pata-, neo- and de- to name of few, for these pata-/meta-reflexive transmedia games of nothingness.
***At last we can wrap up this fuckin shit up with the quick entry condensed counter-move for the abridged version.***
Post Card Game Jams: A transmedia game which involves simultaneously continuous/discrete and supertemporal aspects of role flexibility/reversibility, unexpected and risky actions also with the supports/mediums of a live art auction (and digital catalogue multiples for e-post-cards), press conference, museum/public interventionist actions, (e)mail art/spam/cointelpro, a pata-/meta-detective case and scavenger hunt, trans/intranational travel, a virtual museum and artifactualized/museumified living/space-time/house (and the post-panoptical impossibility of total historicization/documenting of life/locality a la reality TV), superfictional groups, post-conceptual/supertemporal/fictional situations, pataphorical hypermade game-pun/found process/infinite ogjects and a trans(inter)national video-chat/audio-call live (archived) series of hypermade multimedia/instillation scratch/anamorphic feedback-loop machined indeterminately/non-idiomatic generative/process/improvised happenings and urban derive games as some of the pseudo-events' many patamechanisms for intertextual syzygy cut-ups.
[t,ac: WHEW! After having my eyesight suddenly deteriorate, it's back now, & having my computer crash every few minutes, still ongoing, I finally managed to read all that! That's an impressive pastiche of hyperintellectualism! THANK YOU!
Without any intention of disparaging your accomplishment, I'm reminded of my philosophical preoccupations in ca. 1976 when I was trying to formulate a philosophy that I could logically base decisions on. A central facet of this thought process was deciding whether I was moral, immoral, or amoral. I decided I was none of the above - eventually "ethical" substituted for all 3. I decided that ethical & moral aren't synonymous. I also decided that "I had a philosophy once." was the answer to the question "What's your philosophy?"
Basically, I found myself in quagmires of circular reasoning before I reached this point. As such, part of what I meant by "I had a philosophy once." was that any philosophy was likely to impede spontaneous responses to situations that it was best to respond to with an attempt at a fresh mind - hence putting philosophy in the past tense would help me approach situations with an unfettered mind. There are, of course, objections to the feasability of such a claim.
At any rate, my orientation was meant to be practical. I wanted, & still want, to accomplish. When I read the writing of many of the post-Structuralists you quote, if that's what they are, I have to wonder how they manage to survive. My presumptive answer is: through privilege. It's hard for me to imagine most French philosophers & their fellow travelers as having to actually deal with survival without a hefty dose of inherited wealth to smooth their way. That doesn't mean that I don't find the writing interesting - but there's a solipcism to it that seems insulated by wealth. It might interest you to read my recent review of Scott MacDonald's "Avant-Doc" book in which I direct a similar criticism in a bit more depth: "Old MacDonald: Lifestyles-of the rich-in Cambridge": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1150122-old-macdonald?chapter=1 .
That said, I find the layering & accumulation of your text above to be phenomenal!! You & Lacan should play a game similar to the one described above by Lyotard in which one player uses tennis balls to play tennis while the other player moves those balls as if they're chess pieces. May the most inventive person not win, as well as the fellow player, because winning has no place in such a game!
As for Derek Bailey's "nonidiomatic" playing I find myself once again in the world of the 'practical': I have quite a few Bailey recordings & I like them but, for me, what it boils down to is not Bailey's claims to be "nonidiomatic" but whether I hear something that I've never heard before & whether this interests me or not. Under this stipulation, "nonidiomatic" doesn't necessarily live up to its name. The somewhat idiomatic David Starobin might accomplish more.
Traces of the above-mentioned "circular reasoning" do survive in my life in a tendency to 'self-sabotage': I even fight power within myself. As I've stated in other contexts, I generally don't seek power I seek to prevent others from having power over me. As you quoted above:
"Each category (the political, the sexual, the aesthetic) is elevated to its highest degree of generalization, to its largest totalization. But at the same time, each category loses - in the same move -all specificity and reabsorbs itself somehow in the others. When everything is political, nothing is political any longer; the word loses all meaning. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any longer; sexuality loses all determinacy. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is either beautiful or ugly any longer and art itself disappears. This strange and paradoxical state of things which is the total accomplishment of an idea, the perfection of the "modern" movement and at the same time, it is its denegation, its liquidation by reason of its very excess and extension beyond its own limits. It is this strange state of things which I shall call by the same trope: the transpolitical, the transsexual, the transaesthetic." (p.9-10, Stearns and Chaloupka)."
This type of self-negation reminds me of the zen parable to the effect of:
"According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin):
"Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters."
(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)"
But the way I remember it is that after studying Zen the student is floating a few inches off the ground. However, there's a Tim Ore -ism variation on this in which the student, who's been fucking off the whole time, has another body part pointing upward - but that's just for men.
The point being that some people whose work I admire take people through an experience that would seem to be transformative but then.. everything seems the same.. except that it's slightly.. off. The work of "Blaster" Al Ackerman's a good example of the way that things that might seem self-defeating can bring about a sort of shift into an 'alternative reality' in which appearances are deceptive.
I was also delighted to see Luke Rhinehart's "Dice Man" mentioned. Did you know that he wrote a book about EST? I was reading "The Dice Man" in the fall of 1991 at the same time that I organized a PXL-2000 Festival (wtiness the vaudeo compilation from that here: https://youtu.be/KIVUeDkKNDo ). I got involved with a new lover who told me a great story about her parents.
Both parents were psychologists, one studied child psychology, the other was a psychotherapist. The latter had just cured an owner of a football team of overeating. Out of gratitude, the patient made his Lear Jet available to my friend's parents & friends for one week our of every year to go to anywhere in the world that they wanted to. A group of them chose the Mediteranean & off they went in the private jet with all the food & booze catered for them as part of the deal. Some or most or all of them overate & overdrank under such conditions of plenitude & eventually the puking began. The story goes that the puking became a group thing & the interior of this luxury jet became covered in vomit. Imagine the embarrassment.
ANYWAY, my lover invited me to go on the next year's trip & I decided that that would be a great opportunity to shoot a scene, guerrilla-style, from "The Dice Man" using the PXL. The obvious choice being the scene in which the Dice Man picks a variety of personalities to choose every 10 minutes or so that included an erudite psychoanalyst & a sex maniac. Alas, due to the embarrassment of the year before's fiasco, her parents decided against another trip.]
t,ac: Please give some examples of "syzygy", as you put it, that you've experienced in relation to the Monte con o sin safos & the Monty Cantsin who've ridden again?
P-N U L: Perhaps after reading the above note on transmedia games you might've caught that the various medium/formal explorations as well as the undermining and deconstruction of the avant garde/underground (including punk/industrial experimentation which goes for the exploration of pedals and multi-media/cross-platform expansion), but also the vast readings of post-anarchist, pataphysical, neoistic and nihilistic texts but some this also includes the growing up in the Gen X ambiance of Post/Pan-Capitalist globalism and the recombination/recycling/disappearance of so-called Liberal Fascists and Retro-Fascists.
idioideo at verizon dot net
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as Interviewer page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as Interviewee page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE movie-making "Press: Criticism, Interviews, Reviews" home-page
to the "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Sprocket Scientist" home-page
to the "FLICKER" home-page for the alternative cinematic experience
to find out more about why the S.P.C.S.M.E.F. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sea Monkeys by Experimental Filmmakers) is so important
for info on tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's tape/CD publishing label: WIdémoUTH
to see an underdeveloped site re the N.A.A.M.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Multi-Colored Peoples)