somethought
back - to adrian

7 may 2oo2 - some pop thought...
i try to follow conversations
i don’t have the mental machinery to follow
i’ll file these moments under ‘nonknowledge’
i’m not that familiar with the history of philosophy
but i’m happy to trace the patterns
i’m quite familiar with paul celan
i’m familiar with this going to the edge of language thing.
the effects of drugs or deep meditation.
exploring the cosmos.
like port in ‘the sheltering sky’ as the fever peaks and meaning is ripped away from him as he passes with a scream into the next world.

does this relate to benjemen’s untranslatable?

i understand we all need a bit of order.
and strangely creativity needs its boundaries.
i suppose language is a boundary.
when i’m a more of a representational being I can get a buzz of that stuff.
on the odd occasion that i believe i can be ‘deep’.
but it all gets a bit poetic.
and mystical.

‘we become trapped in a human fashioned earth and representations of that earth there seems no escape outside writing no authentic experience outside the anthropic prison cell’
(some pop paraphrasing of john protovi)

you have to believe that you’re alive in a particular way.
before you can engage with these ideas.
maybe for de landa a kind ‘organic chauvinism’…
in his book ‘a thousand years of nonlinear history’ manuel de landa talks about an “organic chauvinism that leads us to underestimate the vitality of the intensive processes of becoming (what he terms ‘self-organisation’) in other spheres of reality;

“we forget that, despite the many differences between them, living creatures and their inorganic counterparts share a crucial dependence on intense flows of energy and materials. in many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge. as the biogeographer ian g. simmons puts it, ‘the flows of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.’ our organic bodies are, in this sense, nothing but temporary coagulations in these flows: we capture in our bodies a certain flow at birth, then release it again when we die and micro-organisms transform us into a new batch of raw materials." (de landa, manuel; a thousand years of nonlinear history, (zone books, 1997), page 1o3)

into the post human…
and possibilities beyond the signyfying and symbolic regimes of human experience.
beyond here for me is beyond as in beyond good and.
but it not that one is in opposition to the other.
this is where deleuze and guattari's concept of the 'multiplicity and machinic assemblage' is useful for me.
a machinic assemblage can have human and non human components.
asignifying particles and signifying…
some half related bits and bobs and for some probably well trodden deleuze and guattari:
the schizo slipping his body into such machines as one part among others, slipping himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy… (a-o:2)
“everything is a machine… all of them connected to his body” (a-o:2)
“producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic, all species of life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever” (a-o:2)
a multiplicity designates a set of lines or dimensions that are irreducible to one another (dia:vii)
“a multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature”(tp:8)
“there are no points or positions in the rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree or root. there are only lines.” (tp:8) “all multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of there dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of “this” plane increase with the number of connections that are made on it” (tp:9)
the multiplicity grows…
“an assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (tp:8)
the painting as ‘machinic assemblage’.
connections.
“in a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is ‘between’, the between, a set of relations that are not separable from each other”(dia:viii)
this only touches a tip
opens up possibilities for
beyond state philosophy
move away from interpretaion




2 may 2oo2 - entangled up in blue...
i was thinking about entanglement theory and sex.

on my way to work this morning, before i sat down and
opened up my e-mails, i had been thinking about how
the two things might be connected. it seems to me
that they are, only i don’t quite know how yet.

sat on the train i would have usually be thinking
about sex every 7.5 seconds or so but the emergence of
an abscess on a wisdom tooth on friday afternoon at
work had changed all that. i had become more
concerned about the throbbing in a different
anatomical location- my right gum. i had gone to have
emergency dental work on sunday morning as the pain
reached a climax. above the chair, due to the wonders
of modern technology, there was a plasma screen with
attenboroughish underwater views of a coral reef. as
the dentist stuck needles in my gums and prodded my
abscess with a metal spike, i winced in pain and
watched a large school of conga eels slip and slide
through some rocks. instead of the seeing them as
penetrating phalluses, all I saw were conga eels
slipping and sliding through the rocks.

this painful distraction, the large abscess, has over
the last few days allowed me to make objective
enquiries, to reflect that is, about sex and
entanglement theory at some length. on the way back
from the supermarket just now, where the melons were
just melons, i hit on the idea of sending my musings
to cosmo. how to have great sex using entanglement
theory! - unlock the secrets of your mind and body,
what scientists have known for years but never
bothered to tell us etc. i've still got a lot to
think about (it is, after all, only wednesday…)

at first it seemed neccessary to find another animal,
vegetable or mineral to 'entangle' with but on second
thoughts this may not be strictly maybe not...

i got this off the net:

“a feature of entanglement theory is the question of
nonlocality of quantum theory… quantum entanglement
is a peculiar interdependence of or correlation
between experimental data concerning spatially
separated quantum events. nonlocality here means
specifically the presence of instantaneous connections
between spatially separated physical objects or
events”

now call me stupid but this seems to opens up a few
doors. let’s take the astral plane as an example.
far from being a hippy ‘plane of transcendence’ with
entanglement theory it becomes a ‘plane of immanence’.
a total cosmic entanglement, where all relations are
exterior and all relations are immanent. so when
jonathan richman sings his nasally threat to his lover
“i’m gonna meet yer on the astral plane, the astral
plane etc…” we have to take him serious. of course
this has far reaching implications for human rights.
when someone fantasises about you or has naughty
dreams about you, chaos is for a moment rendered
consistent and that crazy thought or odd dream about
the local butcher may be considered as real as
anything else that you believe is real (including
jordan giving birth on the internet). civil liberties
are under threat. and this is before we get into the
realm of mind control. tv land seems almost bearable
in comparison. mind abuse could sweep the country.

but this is not where i want to go with this, i’ve
lost my thread, i want to go home now…




2 may 2oo2 - all i want
i want to think painting
exploring deleuze's notion of becoming
what does it mean to become painting
and how can we begin to write about it
if we cast away artist biography
from art history
what does it mean to write with the artwork

how can we use painting
as a site of intensity producing affects
to write in strange and fluid ways
art as working in an asignifying register
beyond meaning
beyond representation
and interpretation




1 may 2oo2 - adrian is sat at the desk, he thinks...
nothing much very interesting is churned out of these
big plodding machines
in terms of what's spat out at the official level
but i find myself strangely attracted to the museums
and gallery world
i have a perverse taste for the day to day gallery
life

i'd never been in an art gallery until i started at the
tate liverpool when i was 23
i am from a small mining town
son of a miner
my views solidified during the miners strike
i despised everything south
everything london
i can still get bitter
but i'm learning to let go
to resingularize?


my politics were extreme left
i did a social geography degree
art was nothing to do with my life
i was invloved in the peace movement
i was working as a auxillary nurse
and was thinking about becoming a nurse
but that was then

nobody seems to know what to do with art anymore

the tate carries on interpreting and re interpreting
its collection
like all major galleries
which is all they can do
its hard when your dug into a hole
well and truly stratified
cumbersome
lead filled boots etc
i remember thinking this when i started here 8 yrs ago
it cant go on
as i watched the conservtors glue microscopic
paintflakes back on to a canvas
and try to stop the rot of beuys fat batteries
we cant keep on stockpiling
there will come a dejunk period
maybe in 21oo
or other uses will be found for the marble
there must be tonnes of it
throw it into the sea to to stop coastal erosion
or all that canvas
maybe we will need it for clothing after the next
nuclear winter...
or after the next comet hits

i know some u.s. galleries are moving away from this
collecting idea
trying to de junk
"let it go!"
"binbag it"
the tate can't seem to escape the interpretation thing
weve not really gone anywhere n the last 1oo years
we've filled in the cracks
refined all the the narratives

education is now a powerful lobby
its closely connected with gvt funding

"the educators have landed"

how to explain and interpret
how to explain 'often quite difficult concepts' (as they
say)
to the public in need of education

it is still believed that art has an educating
properties


a) we can jumble the collection randomly or
b) have a theme
ie lets sit round and scratch our heads to think of a
new angle on the first world war to display the same
2o pieces of 'war' art

those that think they are outside the gallery system
this tired system

that define themselves in terms of the self same
system
throw their art on the floor in a pile in a cold
squatted warehouse and mutter something about defying
the white cube

but nothing ever that interteresting happens in these
places buildings
i dont think it ever has

revolutions take place elsewhere.



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