Hans Ulrich Obrist In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem

Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

An interview with William t. Vollmann about his visual art from the ‘Quarterly Conversation’

A DAY IN WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN’S STUDIO

William T. Vollmann appears at the door just as I turn in to his driveway. It’s raining, so he helps me carry my camera bags in. I offer up a Christmas cactus and a box of tangerines. Vollmann has a Christmas cactus story, and after he first checks that I’ve locked my car, he tells it: as a child he saved one segment of a Christmas cactus, and it lived, soon to germinate in his rooftop garden.

Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I’m prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.

Once inside Vollmann’s studio I’m confronted with walls that are covered, salon style, with art. Just past women’s and men’s restrooms painted in rough strokes of bold color (in the restrooms hang longtime Vollmann collaborator Ken Miller’s prostitute photos) there’s a dark bedroom/library complete with Vollmann’s oft-mentioned meat-locker closet. After that an art-lined corridor where art hangs on blonde wood runners, ready to be critiqued. Over the studio entrance is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It appears that Vollmann’s prodigious writings are matched by his capacity to produce and collect visual art.

Images from Greece along with Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “The Parisian Orgy”

This is not my favorite translation, I prefer Paul Schmidt’s, but oh well….

Louise Bourgeois Interview

 ‘My art is a form of restoration’

In a rare interview with one of the world’s greatest living artists, Rachel Cooke asks Louise Bourgeois to reflect on her extraordinary career 

 

RC: You moved to New York early in your career. What effect did this have?

LB: I was a ‘runaway girl’ from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I’m not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup. In coming to New York, I was suddenly independent from them. I did feel the affects of being French. There was both isolation and stimulation. Homesickness was the theme of the early sculptures.

Terry Eagleton on Milton’s 400th Birthday

 

Milton’s republic

Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley in conversation: Beckett, Adorno, Blanchot, Comedy, Death, and so on….

 

 

Interview with Simon Critchley, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Essex

Conducted by: Tom McCarthy (General Secretary, INS) 
Venue: Office of Anti-Matter, Austrian Cultural Institute, London 
Date: 29/03/01 
Present: Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, Corin Sworn, Anthony Auerbach, Penny McCarthy, Victoria Scott, Paul Perry, Alexander Hamilton, Jen wu, Others

 

Tom McCarthy: You write in your book Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature that the task of philosophical modernity is the thinking through of the first death, the über death, which is the death of God. So my first question is: what is the meaning of this death?

Simon Critchley: It’s a big question. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’, and that’s written on toilet walls all over the world. But he then went on to say: ‘And we have killed him.’

Jonathan Lethem on Roberto Bolano, followed by an interview with Natasha Wimmer, translator of ‘2666’ and ‘The Savage Detectives’

 

The Departed

By JONATHAN LETHEM

2666

By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer

By 898 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Cloth and paper, $30

In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin,Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?

The Inimitable Frere Dupont

 

FOR EARTHEN CUP

By Frere Dupont

Complex Reproduction

The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing. The fact that the labourer consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and not to please the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production, because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation. All the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what is strictly necessary, and he is far away from imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their labourers to take the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food. [ – Karl Marx chapter 23: simple reproduction, Capital, vol 1]

To place some emphasis here,

The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation.

This evidently has not been the case since 1914; the whole apparatus of social control from the outsourcing of “training” from private enterprise to state education, to ceaseless “welfare” interference, to continuous regulation of industrial relations, all prove that the capitalist social relation finds it extremely difficult to reproduce itself when relying on the working class”s “instincts of selfpreservation and of propagation”.

Richard Serra Interview

 

 

Metal Works

Richard Serra’s new show of monumental sculptures heralds the artist’s first exhibition in London for 16 years. In a rare interview, he talked with Adrian Searle about the evolution of his ideas and his plans for the future

For over 40 years, American artist Richard Serra has tested the limits and possibilities of sculpture, film and drawing. In the 1960s he began his investigation into the imaginative and physical potential of materials and their relationship with the site and viewer. Since the early 1970s Serra has become best-known for the monumental sculptures he has created for various architectural, urban and landscape settings. In 2007 New York’s Museum of Modern Art honoured Serra’s career with a retrospective and earlier this year his major work Promenade was installed at the Grand Palais, Paris. His current show at Gagosian Gallery, London, runs until 20 December, and includes three new steel sculptures. It is the first exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK since Weight and Measure was presented at the Tate Gallery in 1992. He gave a rare interview to Adrian Searle in London in late September.

The sky is blue black

starlings unfold their wings

quit their pediments 

to write a letter

returned.

The setting sun 

fills teeth with gold.

Like a shred of meat 

I’m lodged in this town.

 

-John Berger

Badiou Interview from 1994, skip the intro: Secularization of Infinity, Set Theory, Truth, Philosophy, Situations, Disaster, Love, Emancipation…

 

Being by numbers – interview with artists and philosopher Alain Badiou – Interview

Lauren Sedofsky

Alain Badiou is an anomaly. What he has attempted has all the allure of the obviously impossible. That’s the fascination of the thing. Judge it retrograde or eminently contemporary, aberrant or a stroke of genius, but take it squarely for what it is: the painstaking effort on the part of an Althusserian Marxist, longtime Maoist, and unanalyzed disciple of Lacan to quit the confines that several generations of “limit-makers” have erected around philosophical practice.

Rimbaud “Democracy”

 

 

Democracy

 

   “The flag’s off to that filthy place, and our speech drowns the sound of

The drum.

   “In the metropolis we’ll feed the most cynical whoring.

We’ll smash all logical revolts.

   “On to the languid, scented lands!-in the service of the most gigantic

industrial or military exploitation.

   “Farewell here, anywhere. Conscripts of good intention, we’ll have

savage philosophy; knowing nothing of science,

depraved in our pleasures; to hell with the world around us…

This is the real advance. Forward… march!”

 

 

 

AR

Some Arthur Schopenhauer – The Architect of Gloom.

Compared to the bleakness of scientists stealing brains from rat fetuses and placing them in robots, I felt that Schopenhauer’s grim musings would be gleeful.

“There are only pessimists and liars”-Paul Virilio 

“The truth is ugly.” – Friedrich Nietzsche 

Arthur Schopenhauer

Studies in Pessimism

---

ON THE SUFFERINGS OF THE WORLD.

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

A poem by Wallace Stevens

The Death of a Soldier

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

Some Poems by Emily Dickinson

 

A WORD.

A word is dead

When it is said,

  Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

  That day
 

Technology

 

by John Zerzan

Tech-nol-o-gy n. According to Webster’s: industrial or applied science. In reality: the ensemble of division of labor/production/industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. it is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we live in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and commodification.

Diogenes the Cynic

LIFE OF DIOGENES

---

DIOGENES was a native of Sinope, the son of Tresius, a money-changer. And Diocles says that he was forced to flee from his native city, as his father kept the public bank there, and had adulterated the coinage.

Alfredo M. Bonanno: From Riot to Insurrection

 

 

Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism

Renzo Novatore

 

 

My soul is a sacrilegious temple

in which the bells of sin and crime,

voluptuous and perverse,

 loudly ring out revolt and despair.

PIRATE RANT

Captain BellamyDaniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote what became the first standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringle’s Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most effective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates.

CAN’T EAT FLAG SO IT GOES TO PAWNSHOP

OKLAHOMA CITY—The depression is endangering patriotism. Here this week “there breathed a man with soul so dead,” or with stomach so empty, that he gave a silk American flag for $2 to a pawnbroker.

Proprietors said during the past few months persons have pawned dogs, false teeth, and almost every other possession imaginable, but this was the first flag. 

Kraken!

 

 It is a fragment of a very long poem, Vittoria, by Pasolini (SGs: Marx, Film, Poetry, Politics, Love, etc…).