lower case, movable type

'The novel is encyclopaedic: all of the different manners of expressing oneself in words can find their place there...Surrealism is always non-academic, always looking for the source of human activity, looking into the back alleys and the darkest clearing in the forest for excitement. 

There are places that have an unbroken tradition, stretching thousands of years back, of telling the same stories over and over again. Mostly here in the West we have lost the ability to protect our culture orally, and maybe we are in danger. What will happen when all the books have flared up and all the Kindles lost their battery power?'

---Sjon. 

~~~

No more elites, and don't fret about it; we're all lower case nowadays. The end of capitalization/capitalism/K. Universal equivalences: everything can be exchanged for everything else, stood in its place, so to speak. Relative prices equals relative evaluations. And to the extent that labour, too, becomes a commodity...well, then you have superfluous labour: I am you and you are me. More: this machine is worth 5 'hands', has so much 'horse power'..bring it all down to some common unit: energy or money. 

Pushpin is as good as poetry. Every place starts to look the same, everyone starts to speak in the same affected way. 

The great publicizing machine that must find some lost long manuscript, drag some obscure author out of hiding, or reveal the most intimate details of a celebrity-and you ain't no-one unless you're someone-all so that it can be forgotten the very next day, repeated with new characters in the oldest game in town. But I'm repeating myself. Like Gaddis. 

The great machine, churning out 'research' papers and commentaries and second-hand exegesis and scraps and quotes and heavy tomes of deep criticism and marginal analysis...deconstruction, revisionism, distillations, concatenations. But by the time it's done you realize it's all been done before or you wonder to yourself what the whole point of it was in the first place. Another game, another diversion of the mind from life, another bit of 'play', which isn't so far away from entertainment and being an 'event'. 

With so much out there, drowning out the silence, the space for reflection, you must hoard the fragments or, better still, gloss them as they pass over you like so many flickering images on a screen. 

~~~

Gutenberg: the Reformation, scientific treatises: the move away from authoritative voices, the finding of one's own individual one. To be with a book, alone, is a kind of freedom. 

At the same time: standardization, the move to vernacular languages, and the book as the first commodity. What is the political importance of this (the twofold meaning of 'subjectivity')? Nationalism and markets. From now on everyone is the same, in some fundamental sense. To stand outside the market, beyond or below state definitions (of your own free will), is to be a heretic or at least an eccentric, a degenerate outsider.

~~~

A very interesting piece by Andrew Winer here.

How to find chance encounters again, how to escape technology? Is technology just a way of replacing ritual? In another sense, though, its allure is that it offers endless possibilities, indeterminacy-when what we wanted or needed was something more rooted, more specific.

...the way techno-consumerism couples Enlightenment, humanist rhetoric like freedom and empowerment and connection with an unabashed pursuit of profit and monopoly-building to the way we keep “handing over basic memory function to a global corporate system of control” every time we reach “for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain’s responsibility to remember.”

~~~

 


'A letter always comes from the past, from elsewhere, rather than from the ever-insistent here and now of the digital. Thinking about writing a letter is different from thinking about writing an email.'

~~~

'The purity and beauty of failure' (which resonates with the Walser/Pessoa theme of the last few weeks).
Amit Chaudhri.