View current page
...more recent posts
Kodwo Eshun, excerpt of interview from July 2000:
I was really pleased to find an old essay by Sylvere Lothringer which explained how they wanted people to use Semiotexte books for speculative acceleration. Instead, people started using these texts to prove their moral superiority, saying "You are wrong, you have misunderstood Foucault." They used theory for prestige, to block speculation. That is why so many artists used to resent theory. You would get these lame pieces, somebody trying to apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word "ontology" on a cover, instead of taking Parliament to read Heidegger. They always did it the other way round. Theory wasn't being used to pluralize, to see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you listened.
When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form.
I was really inspired by the Futurists and Marinetti. For ten years I only read critiques of the Futurists, saying they were fascists. In fact, they were the first media theorists of the twentieth century. They were amazed by X-rays, by artificial light and lamps, out in the street, by new camera's and photography. They just wanted to explore how new technologies broke up the solidity of the organism and involved lines of force. Futurism, supremacism and constructivism were the science-fiction of the first machine age. The fantastic adventures of the early modernists, from Tatlin to Malevich. Machines, media and art thinking were one and the same. Some artists are just extremely good theorists. Still hard to find, this material. Go and look for the essays of El Lissitsky. The same counts for the speculative writings of the photographers Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. I realized that Barthes never had an academic degree. And why McLuhan used to structure his ideas with number or the alphabet, not be bored to death by the academic obligation to seriousness.
My thoughts are with the people of New Orleans right now. Such a beautiful city, completely unlike anyplace else in the US. This is a terrible tragedy. Steve Gilliard has been noting the racist spin in the mainstream media--black people "loot" supplies, white people "find" them--I kid you not, look at the captions he found. He also reproduces some coded invective from that smug right wing freak Jonah Goldberg.
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg] I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.Aside from the fact that it's incoherent, veiled racism and, doesn't make any sense even as ironic fiction (gilled supermen?)--How could anyone say such horrible things at a time like this? Oh, yeah, this is the same guy who has been urging on the Iraq war but begs off that he's too old to fight it, has a son, etc. We should be praying for people in New Orleans, not comparing the city to Mad Max. In addition to being humor-impaired next to the articulate left (with a few notable exceptions such as PJ O'Rourke and, reaching way back, Evelyn Waugh), wingers have no basic empathy, that's why they're so disgusting.
Posting will be slow again. I prefer the PC to Mac--I like that it's the stripped down "people's computer," more use it so more are sharing PC-centric stuff, it's the favorite of the workplace (same advantage--more users and surfers), it has better lo-fi (stupid) imaging programs, less self-consciously design-y graphics, and some of my favorite musical instrument makers are in Europe and they tend to design for PCs over there. The Mac users on the Native Instruments boards, for example, are constantly complaining they can't get things to work. Also, two friends with Mac laptops gripe that their DVD drives suffered mechanical failure within a few months of purchase, so the laptops could have that super-thin, elegant, "pull it out of your bag at Starbucks and log onto your design blog" look.
The downside of PCs running Windows, as we all know, is periodically you have to wipe your entire hard drive and reload the operating system and all your programs and data because lovable doofuses send you nasty bugs to show how smart and wackily malicious they are. That is what just happened to me--first time ever! My sound, picture and vid files are all backed up but lots of programs have to be re-installed. I'm typing this on an older computer pulled out of mothballs that miraculously still talks to the Net.