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Book Guide Page 1. ARTIFICIAL BEING DICTATORSHIP OF BEAUTY EVERYONE MUST BE FAMOUS! THE ONE AND ONLY 
 The Possessed 2003  WRITE : nonfiction SummaryI return to this manuscript, when I direct a new show -- all my shows are American, I stage them in Alaska.QuestionsNotes 2004 & After
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THE ART OF CULTURE"...he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always served beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organizing life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence." Pasternak about Meyerhold."Aesthetic life" in Kierkegaard.... The following is a result of thinking about it. The story of this chapter is personal and simple. I was struck with the phenomena of posters in America. In hotels, body shops, even in the X-rays lab! Like icons before -- in every home. I see them at garage sales, framed -- they are everywhere. In the Soviet Union it was a propaganda, an indication of public space. What do they signify in America? As if we can't stand the empty WALL. Do we need a window into another world?Of course, posters are cheap and can't be unique. What matters is that we a FRAME (a place) for "art"! Art? Did I say "art"? I did.
1. ARTIFICIAL BEING
Hear me, people! The aesthetics has become metaphysical. Art became REAL. Beauty rules in Paradise! Massive! Total! We mark with it OUR space. I saw posters in Africa, the only sign of time. The posters are to replace the traditional symbols, handmade and unique. They are powerful, technology, the energy of the humanity is within, the bright present.
Posters? No! The artistic presentation of reality, the better and the best. Art selects and magnifies. Virtual and artificial? Art is an epitome of the artificiality....
ART: The Old and the New. An "artificial art" is a new reality, new life. Not an art anymore, but BEING.
The pop doesn't imitate the art but appropriates it, includes it as a part of its kingdom, a small island on the map. Of course, it has to be commodified, for the tourists. Artificial life is build on artistic grounds, how much more influence the art could ark for? Technology, master of the modern, was based on functionality, but who rules the victorious king? In the land where everything is possible, what is a criteria for choices?
Victor Shklovsky's remarks, "The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar'." What do you do when OUR objects are not only familiar but made by us? I can paint a tree and find my way to see it differently, but what about a car? Go and try to paint a tv set, or better -- an image on the screen. TV includes the traditional medias, but the old medias can't include the electronic media. So, how would you make an electronic media "objects" unfamiliar? What a new technique, what art do I have to reflect on my new ARTIFICIAL landscape?
THE BEAUTY PRINCIPLE
We may tentatively define aesthetic form as the result of the transformation (mimesis) of a given content (actual or historical, personal or social fact) into a self-contained whole, a poem, a play, novel, etc. The work is thus "taken out" of the process of reality and assumes a significance of its own. The aesthetic transformation is achieved through the reshaping of language, perception, understanding so that they reveal the essence of reality in its appearance: the repressed potentialities of man and nature. The work of art thus re-presents reality while accusing it. (Marcuse)[1]Ethics? No, too late, we're beyond morals. The Aesthetics! The new principle of self-organization -- the beautiful. No only the present but the future belongs to what we call entertainment. We already entered the millennium of beautification, the final stage of Cultural Revolution. Perhaps, in most primitive forms of popular culture, but, never the less, song and dance became the main apparatus of self-identification. The classical culture knew that the aesthetics do have in it (negated forms) all the social structures. The beauty principle is imposed on everything -- things, bodies, feelings....[1*]I need some help from the near past to define the mode of Art against the dominance of the World Spectacle. Marcuse saw the problem:
--has Western rationality, the development of Reason (=functional, "productive", efficient rationality) reached the point where it can no longer guide and define, in its own terms, the goal, and the direction of (human) progress, and where, in Habermas' words, it is no longer this rationality, the Reason that can "legitimize" the need for change and liberation. Can we say that this task has become incumbent on art, on aesthetic responsibility? aesthetic rationality? (Marcuse)[3]Both "responsibility" and "rationality" I view with suspicions. No less than the art as means of politics (revolutionary theories). I fear of connecting art to any practical or immediate purpose.--the traditional rationality itself has become irrational, destructive, repressive; "abstract" in relation to the human subject and to nature,
--the aesthetic dimension is supposed to undo this repression; this irrationality in the guise of Reason,
--it is to be the medium for the radical transformation of subjectivity which is the precondition of a free society. (Subjectivity = consciousness and instinctual structure)[4]Marcuse:
Art can perform this preparatory function only if it has a rationality of its own: a cognitive function, which discloses
--a truth of its own,
--a reality of its own which, in the form of an imaginary, fictitious world, reveals more (qualitatively (sic) and qualitatively) about the human condition than does the established reality and what it represents.Art, as ideology, tears the ideological veil from the established reality, by re-presenting, re-creating established reality, so that art explodes the repressive rule of "normality".
Art sees reality in the light of its essential negativity and its essential promise (hope).
....Art contests the monopoly of the established society to define what is real (invalidation of the dominant Reality Principle);
--it gives word and image to the repressed potentialities of individuals and things in the established universe,
--it subverts the prevalent consciousness and perception and invokes the "concrete utopia" of liberation: this is the critical potential of art.According to Marcuse, the aesthetic form thus spans both poles of the aesthetic universe:
--the indictment and the reconciliation,
--negation and affirmation, the truth and the beauty,
--mimesis and autonomy.What I look for -- a non-repressive order in which the parts harmonize with each other and with the whole.
My business not the world but the world of a man.
Marcuse's Vision:
It is the idea of a qualitatively new Reality Principle which would subvert not only the social institutions and classes,
--but also the instinctual basis of Western Civilization:
--namely, the fatal link between progress, productivity, and destruction; between liberty and domination.AVANT-POP
We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are always already ready-made and ready for consumption! Mark Amerika & Lance Olsen _SMELLS LIKE AVANT-POP_Think -- the brash and electronic paint. It was a generation ago, several generations back in computer technology. The Mario Brothers. My kids would fill in the colors as in an old fashion coloring book. What was different? Well, the computer did it. They were the choosers. The process of mixing colors, trails and errors, the frustration of mistakes -- all the labor was illuminated. Computer coloring was instant and perfect. In addition this ideal job was re-doable!I never liked coloring books. Even as a child. I never liked the copying. In the past it had a different intent -- the copyists were humans and the great icons were model for a direction, not an imitation. Printing press is the begining of modernity was destined to end up in a copy machine.
....Oh, no! You won't fool me! I know what entertainment means. The innocence of commercials, smiles and giggling of the safe p[lace, fun and games, when the educational and instructional are invisible. If truth and morals are suspended, what do you think is the organizational principle of the would of entertainment? The NICE. We live within the magnetic field of aesthetics. Remember the mode of mythology? Above and beyond of the moral and the political. What a power! (We don't take our entertainment seriously). And we are just at the begining of the Fun Galaxy.Who could imagine that paradise is just Disneyland? Or Las Vegas? Professional carnival, when fun became a big business.
What did you, humans, expected when you dreamed of happiness? Did you know that you were asking for an institutionalized stupidity? The Art never was known for love of logic. The popular art even more so. Mass products are cheap, the virtual even cheaper. How did you see the mass education? Of course, it has to be cheap! We are talking billions of consumers of Beauty! Not one patron but all! If ideology replaced philosophy, culture had to repress art.
Artificial art and culture? Cultural art. Without the vertical (class) what else the cul-art could be?
Friends, what do you do after the realization that life is absurd? Nothing and nonsense. We were advise to make something out of it. What a tragic and heroic position (of individual)! There is another way to deal with it (our collective way). We can turn the terror of nothingness into stupidity, we can play games with it -- and have FUN with the tragic! The idea of fun and canned laughter -- serious big business, an entertainment industry. The sport events -- the emptiness filled with manufactured nothingness!
....Gorki: Aesthetics will become ethics of the future. [ Lenin -- opposite ]Verily, verily! Pop culture is a this mixture -- the NICE! Applied art, a blue toilet and rosie toilet paper. How important is the color coordination? (They still do not dare to place advertisement on it). Why is it better than white and plain?
Practical beauty, not for nothing -- nice looking is good (looking). Ethics are too complicated, too mental, we have no time to evaluate everything, no time to think. "Good Looks" - snap! Camera ready reality, I'm driving through life. Real Art, striking beauty could get me into an accident. I can't stop, I die if I stop for 30 minutes (clinical death).
Any super-market is a perfect illustration of aesthetization of reality. Every box is a piece of art! Vegetables arranged in practical and harmonious manner. If there's no visual order the fruits can't be fresh. But the special lighting and the helper in a nice uniform watering lettuce make me suspicious (they say that the old stuff is put on the top to quicker sale before its life expires). Why not only the product but a package for this product must be design? My children buy the packages. Art sales. [At R. Naked body we call "sex," not flesh!]
Oh, it's only normal. What looks good is good.... So, the store potatoes must look better than potatoes. No matter how good are they in the farmer's hands, they are not good enough next to the same potatoes on the store's stand. Even a nice looking girl can't compete with herself on the cover page. What is good must be processed through the perception machines to be better. No, it's not just psychology of the sale, I feel better eating a "better" potato because I didn't dig it from the dirty ground but took from a nice bag. Is it really better? How would I know? I know only what I know.
I remember the Communist Party directives that Art must serve the people. I thought it's ridiculous, till I arrived to America. Of course, art must serve us! But something does happen to the art when it becomes moral. I knew it Russia; poetry loses a lot on the way to the market. We call it songs.
What is wrong with songs? Dance! Music, of heaven, is played all the time. All you have to do is to let it out. The air is full of it, it's in there. Even in the Alaskan wilderness, even in Antarctica you need only to turn on the radio. Do you have one?
I want you to listen. Do you hear it?
What is it? Drums of war?
"Melody is born with language" -- and dies with the end of language. Rhythm. Rap.
....Are you against beautification? Against turning a wild forest into a park? Do you think that you prefer a wolf to a dog? I don't believe you!Every time I see them in the court room, in white shorts and ties, I have to remind myself that they are murderers. That's not how they really are in REAL life. They are packaged for the jury. But than the salesman (banks or politics) is the same. We know that aesthetics are more powerful than ethics. Don't I know that anything powerful is dangerous? Let me tell you how dangerous art is. It changed my life. Actually, it controls my and your life. I don't think that television is our advance in technology. (The very name is somewhat misleading: it's not only a distance looking but a close look). The moment we decided to see something which we normally can't see, we gave up the reason. Of course, it's good for us to see everything! To know is better than not to know, right? The problem is that we DON'T see it, we DON'T know... nothing could be "transmitted with being REARRANGED. And yes, it will be rearranged according to our moral values. The good will be even better and the bad will be present as very bad. The murder scenes are not that bad in reality. There's no slow motion when you shoot, and no close up even if you're shot. We have to beautify everything, even bad things; the bad things must look really bad and the only way to make them super-bad is to use art.
Is it so bad that everything is attractive? (To keep our attention). Is it in our nature (imagination)? Let me share my confusion with you. I would think that hospital will be the last place I like to be, but the top tv shows are about hospitals. Is it because my weak mind tries to avoid the horrors of being there? Being cut, shot, bled, in pain? How to teach me to be Superman? What if we will beautify bad subjects, will make them into artistic objects? Lets talk about death, it'll help to die in peace. Lets bring me closer to the subjects I can't force myself to face. Only art can do it. But the artist must be responsible, he must remember why we ask him to do it -- to pacify, not to make my pain and fear even more than ever. The Soviet artist must serve the people.... it's called entertainment.
Are you saying that the nicely packaged potatoes are dangerous? Did you say that the better the serial box the more I have to worry? What are talking about? That I was manipulated, fooled, cheated? That I did ask for it? That I will do it again?...
Don't panic. Let me explain it again. Art which serves our ideology reinforces existing beliefs. It betrays it original purpose to examine the norms. Art was an anti-thesis of culture. Born by the culture art was asked to negate it; that's how we moved ahead. Wait a minute! "Moved"? Not moving anymore?
How do you think we can "move" with a such high speed of changes without paying for it? How do you think the pilot in the jet pays for the speed? He is locked up, motionless, he can't even stand up. Video games disciplined a lot of boys, in space, of course. Art must be fully eliminated from our artful culture! Just imagine what a true art would do at this incredible speed. One real idea which NEGATES our popular culture will throw us into total chaos. It will be a bigger catastrophe than in antiquity (one god-man concept). We have to prevent ourselves from the radicals (artists).
The NEA recent stories are an interesting history. Take it from a conservative. The Congressional debates over 100 millions are political, but WHY did this subject made it into American agenda? How did all get into a discussion "What Art Is?" What do we know about it? Oh, we know what we know! And we know what we don't know too! Anything beyond our (mutual) understanding can have our support. Did we forget that Art by definition can't be understood by many? Not Our Art! The whole NEA issue is a matter of principle. Who is there to stand up to tell the American people that they know nothing about art? Any volunteers?
There was a special department at the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They supervised the Ministry of Culture with the help of the KGB. The idea of propaganda and agitation is not to watch and censor, but eradicate the situation when the new could be born. Stalin used the primitive methods -- he shot the artists. It's not smart, because there are always other young souls who will replace the masters. In 1934 the First Writers Congress came with a better technology -- we will shoot the existing artists and replace them with new OUR artists. The place of art can't be vacant, it has to be occupied by the Socialist Realism Art! A few film masters were sent to no other place than Hollywood. They came back to give the Soviet people such masterpieces as "Alexander Nevsky" (Eisenstein's epic) and "Volga-Volga" (Alexandrov's musical comedy); you still can see both on the Russian TV. It was a culturated art, and it was very popular (pop-art?). Good movies! Didn't the great teacher (Lenin) told us that "Film is most important art for us!"? "Us" -- he must be referring to the Communist party. Oh, the shrewd mind, how did he know that movies are NOT art? His class instinct whispered to him that film (totally new over the nationality language) is a difficult media to turn into art. If theatre is born by the public, film is the PUBLICITY.
(Watched on video _Batman and Robin_ with my kids. Introduce the subject without naming it -- the story of Batman.)
Postmodern must be pop-culture. Films made out of comics! No reference to reality, as if "art for art sake." Who are they, American heroes? The wonders of technology, but what about new men? As if in the Greek mythology, only without gods. Evil characters (comical) and good guys who defend the people (victims). Folk mind never liked realism. There is nothing in those fairy-tales about me, my problems, my days. A full departure from the present. But what are the principles of American fantasy? Personal invisibility? The great advantage of the folk mentality that their stories serve children and adults. Hercules is good for all ages. (New TV serial, including the politically correct female version). Those fantasies survived the great novels, will the art could survive the pop-culture? Amazing but understandable that the folk stories reappeared at the time of democracy when the masses rule. And they only began their cultural (popular) revolution which is based on the principles of communism. The first communists expected that all will read (and write) great literature; literacy was needed and the rest would come naturally. We impose literacy on masses no less than taxes, we enforce the knowledge on all and everyone.
Now is a question for myself; why do I reject their fantasies? Sophocles and Dostoevsky didn't.
This blurring of the traditional distinctions between 'high' and 'pop' art becomes a central, defining feature of postmodernism itself. Today such distinctions are, if anything, even more difficult to maintain than they were only a quarter of a century ago. Should rock videos by Madonna, Peter Gabriel, or Laurie Anderson be considered mainstream simply because they are enormously popular--even though they employ visual and poetic techniques that twenty-five years ago would certainly have been considered highly experimental? Is William Gibson's 'cyberpunk' novel, Neuromancer, 'avant-garde' since it employs unusual formal techniques (the use of collage, cut-ups, appropriation of other texts, the introduction of bizarre new vocabularies and metaphors)? Or does its publication by the genre science-fiction industry establish it as pop? Are television shows like Max Headroom, the early Saturday Night Live, or David Lynch's recent Twin Peaks 'underground' works because they utilize so many features associated with postmodern innovation---or 'pop art' because they were, in fact, 'merely' television shows? --Larry McCaffery, "The Avant-Pop Phenomenon"[5]
What about my own relations with myself? I am drowned deep into pop-culture, I live in it no less than a fish exists only in water. Pop is my environment. I know that I can't defeat the communist in me, he is always there and I have to co-exist with him.
Fredric Jameson has described the beginnings of the end of the world as we know it as involving, "a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life--from economic value and state power practice to the very structure of the psyche itself--can be said to have become cultural in some original and as yet untheorized sense." This unprecedented expansion of culture, made possible specifically by the exponential growth of technology, changed the contours of the world: {pop culture not only displaced nature and "colonized" the physical space of nearly every country on earth, but (just as importantly) it began to colonize even those inner, subjective realms that nearly everyone once believed were inviolable, such as people's unconscious, sexual desires, and memories.}[6]
Cultural studies are a result of cultural revolution. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: esthetic living. Foucault on culture as disciplines. Technology (media) made the culturation possible.
2. THE LITERATURE OF INFORMATION
More is different. -- Kevin Kelly, Out of Control.
In high school they told me that there is a different law for big numbers. I knew it, I lived it on the streets of Moscow. The many were the curse of my life. If a single other is a negation of me, what do I do with millions and billions? How to understand "MORE"? I had to start from accepting it.
....Mediagenic Reality? We construct it and "media" must be understood in old arts terms -- a material.What is the popular media engine? The attention of the many. What is this gravitation field? Mass production is a military principle. Do I believe that after "The Titanic" the human race and its history will be different? Is it less "historical" than the conflict with Iraq?
Today everything has a potential to be a mass product. The digital technology dismisses the idea of "fake."
Mediascape.... before landscape.
BOOK AS A POSTER
Visual instead of imaginary? Mass books and movies are merging.
How did it work in the world before us?
The communication formula: sender > media > receiver
That's what we thought before the idea of dialogism.
The book distribution formula:
Author --> Agent --> Editor/Publisher --> Printer --> Distributor --> Retailer --> Consumer
Now,
The electronic data formula:Author (Sender) --> Interactive Participant (Receiver)
More simplified and direct? Is it so? If we forget about the technology which makes it simple. The incredible complexity of the technology and the process hidden in our acts of communication are transparent in the VALUES of pm culture. According to interactive model, nothing could be send which can be received! Our art exist only in a process of receiving. This extremities of the dialogue kill the art as we know.
The theatre model. Let me tell you what I do as a stage director.... (T-simulacra).
Defending simulacra?
I lived with the thought of immanent and antagonistic conflict between art and culture. A good poster or a bad painting? A bad painting won't make it as a poster. We can't have that many masterpieces to put them in every home. And this a violation of the communist principle!
The attackers of the pop, why don't they admit their resentment of people, the mass, the majority? Why don't they call them enemies?
3. THEATRICAlITY
Entertainment, the Divergence. And -- POSTERS ARE THE ART PROPAGANDA!
Rousseau: "we must henceforth keep ourselves from being seen as we are."
Realism? Mimesis into Simulacra. (See _Social and Socialist Realism_).
Rousseau, the one of the "fathers" of French Revolution, not only the French.
His apparent hostility has two elements, one moral, and the second epistemological. On the moral level, Rousseau's concern is with the status of the audience. He argues that in the contemporary theater what the audience experiences as emotion is not really their own. Thus one can afford to be upset or take pleasure in the spectacle for in the theater "nothing is required" of the audience. By "nothing is required" Rousseau means that our emotions have not life-consequences. It is, as it were, irresponsible to be an audience member, a bit as if one were on holiday from one's everyday, common humanity. For Rousseau, this irresponsibility is associated with the experience of an isolation which keeps one from being at home with one's self, a home which, he is at pains to show, can only be achieved with others.
That's how our entertainment keeps us away from being together, it replaces our "serious" connections with "light" communality. The entertainment is getting so big because it has very important social function to perform -- to keep us from becoming a society. Our relationships must be easy to change and manipulate; we don't want to be in a position of Bosnia where the (non-pop) culture breeds killing. We wouldn't go to kill the neighbor over the tv show. Our local patriotism is based on sport teams. Athens and Venice had a different sense of self-identity and an idea of culture. Their "entertainment" had an opposite purpose; it was universal, not global.
The source of this moral danger -- the danger of irresponsibility -- derives from a second more basic quality of theater. Theater is, inevitably almost, representation. Here Rousseau's hostility to theater reflects and is reflecting in his hostility to representative sovereignty. Representation (on stage) requires interpretation of its audience, whereas a just political society was to be built from that which was so transparent in time and space that it could not be other that what it was. No matter what its subject theater cannot be common. And it cannot be the everyday -- it is the perfected, immortal, transcendent particular self, precisely that self that wants to overlook the common, more like a god than a human being.
The Early Modernism (18 century): the human, the direct, the natural v. spectacle, imitation, representation and illusion for illusion's sake: the popular against central power.
We expropriated the spectacular of the elite and made into the total spectacle. Mass production of the spectacle replaced the natural!
It is true that in this situation, once we are in it, philosophy and theater can give us a simulacrum of virtue, in order to "keep us from the horror of ourselves were we to see ourselves discovered." In these circumstances, representation can maintain perhaps the appearance of public virtue without that virtue being found in our hearts. Commonalty would be, to paraphrase Thoreau, a phrase on the lips of most people, but in the hearts of very few. For those who have no humanity, philosophy and theater can give them the clothing of the human, but it cannot make available the experience of oneself or another as human.
The choice then is between being a human being and the theatricality of not-being. Being a human being is the result of a constitution and our only other choice is the existence of non-being. The reason for this is that the common -- the moi-common -- is what humans are as humans. Its existence is, we might say, our essence.
The problem with representation then, both in theater and in politics, is not just that it induces passivity into an audience but that some human qualities, perhaps precisely those qualities that mark the human, cannot be represented and be what they are. Just as you cannot promise for me, nor meaningfully say for me that I am sorry, and just as Cordelia cannot "heave her heart into her throat" truly to speak the words her father would require of her, some acts must be my acts and cannot be given over. You can report my promises: but you cannot make them for me. I must presently perform those actions. Rousseau's political hostility to the idea of the representation of sovereignty as well as his opposition to theater is based on his understanding of what the nature of commonality is.
....The Mousetrap. Stage on stage, Double Theatre. And you thought that the double is too many! Welcome to the multitude!...4. POST-ART
The Postmodern is an artistic idea. Its logic is emotional and the new feelings are digital. Since the second reality is our product, it has all the attributes of being human.
One of the main tenets of postmodernism is: I, whoever that is, will put together these bits of data and form a Text, while you, whoever that is, will produce your own meaning based on what you bring to the Text. One of the main tenets of Avant-Pop writing is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.[7]
Bakhtin would correct this statement. The Text (whatever that is) is the main element where I-and-You (whatever that is) do gain an existence. The Marxist view that I am always the Collective (Self) and You (Other) makes our meeting an event. (see Foucault). It's a flow of the Collective.
When everything is based on the Artistic Idea, what kind of art could we have? If art became a material for culture, shouldn't we consider it as a culture and culture as a true art? Is it possible that Fellini is not the end of the process but the begining? Kurosawa is a program developer for MTV? This upside down world of the postmodern, where the high is in fact is the low, sees the art(ist) only as a servant of the popular. (Oh, the reminiscence of my Communist past, the voices of the Party!)
Electronic writers. All of us. I spend more time with the screen than with the book. Book became an accompaniment to some electronic forms (most often as a manual).
The Post-Art in my books has a more simple implication than the postmodern philosophy.
I painted the posters... Yes, I bought a few Alaskan scenery pictures (for a dollar) and painted what was already there. [IMAGES] I like it!
I did it in secret in my garage, at night. I knew that the great artists of the past thought that I went crazy. They didn't know that my next moves will be not photos, but their masterpieces. I didn't get the posters of Raphael and Picasso for a dollar. The modernism still didn't make it to garage sales.
I like white, blank, empty canvases, but as a postmodern creature I like to redo somebody's else art. That's the true dialogues, gentlemen! Sometimes I do it to my own paintings. I paint on the top a portrait, leaving the original painting as a background. I quote myself. After all I am the Other whom I know (and don't know) best.
Come on, what do you think any photo does? It transforms reality without a full separation from it. Why not to treat photograph as a reality, too? Great photographs! Great posters! Great life! What a beautiful world! I am in love with the being alive again! Love, love!
DICTATORSHIP OF BEAUTY
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats, Ode to a Grecian UrnOh, the silly ones! You don't appreciate it, the art. Silly me! I am stuck between myself and others. Do I appreciate the readers? If not how much do I appreciate my art? Why can't I, the lover of orthodoxy, accept this simple paradox? Who taught me to be stupid? Not I! I am ashamed to read my writing!
Oh, the balance between Inside and Outside! Of course, I am insulted by this constant inclusion. As a part of the community, race, citizenship, humanity. What do they say? Can you hear them? "To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults." (Adorno)8 Most of them ready to cry "we" because it's the safest way to advocate the personal interests. "We, the Russians" or "We, the people" -- about me, my individual demands. I know you, comrades. Am I against the direct physical collective in any form? Friend, you have to learn more about resurrection.
.... my story ..."Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar." (191) The science does it, knowledge is the destruction of hatred! What about art? The dissimilar in similarity?...."The task of art today is to bring chaos into order." (222) As always. Today we should correct this formula -- to make visible the order of chaos! Our second nature is complex, not chaotic. We increase this complexity to the point when it looks like a total chaos.EVERYONE MUST BE FAMOUS!
"He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof." (210) They smile and they laugh, they are popular!
We have to make the high art into the popular -- "... everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination." (204)[9] Communism demand that the great split, the division between the high and the low must be overcome. If we want art to be a domination it has be for all. Impossible? Oh, you haven't understood resurrection yet. We are not interested in possible!
What do you mean calling our time The Information Age? What is our business if not humanization (beatification) of the world? I wrote it on Feb. 26, 1998, when "The Titanic" after ten weeks at the movie theatres approaches one billion dollars in earning. Why do we invest THAT much into "entertainment"? What is about it, the machine of socialization?
There is another aspect of taking them from the street -- the control. They are removed from active living, because they are not ready to live as artists. They can't write or act, but they forget it in the theatre; they feel as they are HEROES. Let them dream, let them think that they CAN. Let them be poison with the sensation of being all-powerful. They are better in their sleep.
"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime." (111) I love it. The same could be said about love. Balzak equaled a written novel with one night with a woman. We have to make them all very busy. We have to destroy the idea of "free" time. The paradox: we can't leave them alone and must place everyone into circumstances of solitude! We make them extroverts in order to create introverts.
THE ONE AND ONLY
"Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you." (128) Why intellectuals only? Advice to all -- no representation! The end of representative democracy? "Direct democracy" in style of libertarians? Are you aware that you become your own representative? You become, no, not a citizen, but a politician! Poet and leader. We are almost ready -- every opinion counts and ... almost equal.
"Revolutionary" nature of (any) art:
My argument is that precisely because art works are monads they lead to the universal by virtue of their principle of particularization. In other words, the general characteristics of art are more than just responses to the need for conceptual reflection: they also testify to the fact that the principle of individuation has its limits and that neither it nor its opposite should be ontologized. Art works approach this limit by ruthlessly pursuing the principle of individuation, whereas if they pose as universals, they end up being accidental and pseudo-individual like examples of a type or species. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 259.)Alienation from the alienated social relations of the whole, the "ontology of actuality," is the aim of art. Using the "evil" (alienation) against the evil. Alienation from alienation -- death defeated by death.
Four hours a day of TV? More, please! We need to develop the channels and the want for all of them. We have to hook everyone. To control? Yes. To educate? Yes. One way or another we have to connect them and move them up. We have to replace the natural environment to prevent them from sliding back into the animal existence. Through coercion and seduction we have to transport the billions into pm (human) conditions. to force them into a solitude to teach of self-awareness. We will corner them with art, even if it's MTV.
Independence. About the idea of "personal culture": "The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power." (Adorno 185) That's why paradise insists on singularity, it's never for masses, even if it's crowded. The entrance is for one only. He has to declare himself a private property and give it by will to all.
NOTES
Resource: http://www.altx.com
There is a book waiting to take over me "The View Points" -- It grows silently on the hard drive. Not about film, about the new way of thinking. This chapter is a transition.
[1*] (See Adorno2 and Culart.nts).
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Film-North * Anatoly Antohin
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