jane dark's sugarhigh!

u-u-utopian

The barstool u-utopian regularly argues two things. First, utopia is a mere opium dream because human nature does not allow of a perfected society. Second, those attempted ("actually existing") utopian programs have turned out imperfect societies.

These two complaints may seem to accompany each other, but are in fact contradictory: in order to be dismissed, utopia must be non-historical and historical at once. But the situation is even more curious. Joined together, these two claims do not rule out all utopias, but rather argue on utopia's behalf: we all know it won't be perfect, and so the only mater at hand is whether aiming at some utopia might improve currently unacceptable conditions.

If such refutations nonetheless help one accept current conditions, then it is this u-utopian thinking — not utopian thought — which is the opium dream.

evolution: five paragraph essay

It seems inevitable he will have to run for President at some point. There's just something so...pure about Michael Bloomberg.

Extraordinary wealth among national leaders has likely always been with us. The collusion of wealth and image mastery with the modern media environment takes an important step with John F. Kennedy's televised debates with Nixon en route to the White House, but reaches a new intensity with the ascent of a media figurehead to the Presidency in 1981. The telltale sign of this ongoing intensification was Ross Perot, who appeared in 1992 as a retrogressive test to determine whether unalloyed cash — money as such — could still bid for the job.

After that signal rebuke to mere money, the new logic was extended even further in the laboratory of Italy's Second Republic, wherein staggering wealth and media power (rather than mere prowess and access) were synthesized in the avian body of Silvio Berlusconi.

But from intensification to purification can be a more subtle leap than we imagine. This is the true achievement of Mike Bloomberg, in whose existence the historic accommodation closes upon itself as both set of facts and as ideological space. Not only does he possess Perotesque wealth beyond the realm of mere tactics, strategic wealth, but his media empire is about money: "Bloomberg L.P. is the largest financial news and data company in the world."

In this sense his herald was Steve Forbes, but Bloomberg achieves a far greater clarity; his company sells information about money largely to financial institutions, and before its founding he worked for Salomon Brothers, the largest issuer/trader of bonds in the country, and the firm that pioneered the shift to entirely derivative-based trading. It is no secret that the position of politics lags several years behind that of economics; surely the time has come for a true son of Spectacular Capital to assume the position.

world trade center

"You kept me alive," John McLoughlin says to his wife Donna, as he's wheeled past her at the film's conclusion; he has just spent a long day and night buried, slipping away from human thought. It might as well be "9/11" itself on the gurney, whispering to Hollywood. What was once unrepresentable has slipped, without much intermediate phase, into what must be represented every few weeks — for no reason other than to make sure we still feel the right way about the formerly historical events which have already been replaced by thoughtless shorthand. Oliver Stone's claim that the film isn't political, which received so much scoffing from "both sides of the aisle," is more or less true; the memorial (and this film is a celluloid Iwo Jima statue, nothing more, nothing less) isn't any more "political" than soundtrack music existing only to tell you exactly how to feel about a set of supposed facts, the discussion of which would somehow dishonor the very feelings you've just been instructed to have.

Meanwhile, the best talkie about 9/11 continues to be this, which proceeds from the fact of the event itself's escape into history, taking the dead with it. No one comes back. Everyone is fucked up. Those facts, unrecuperable and unresolvable, are the whirlpool on whose banks every action and gesture takes place.

An epic poem is a poem including history, sez Pound, but don't get it twisted. History and "actual events" are, at this point, mutually exclusive, and pointedly so. But this is simply another way of naming the spectacle.

il faut se manifester

¶ Poems (like humans) do better when treated by poets as ends, not means — manifesting, not causing. The insistence that poems should be instruments toward some social end is limiting and damaging.

¶ However, critics might take poems as means — as part of social production; this is independent of the poet's making of the poem-as-end. These are fundamentally distinct conceptual matters.

¶ This fact and nothing else explains the diffident relations between poets and critics, though the fact often appears masked and in costume.

¶ The recognition of this categorical difference is shaped historically by the catastrophe of instrumental reason that defines Western modernity; said recognition and nothing else is what is meant by "the death of the author," though this fact too often appears masked for occasions.

¶ Though the categorical difference often appears adversarial, this conceals the actual adversarial relations.

¶ The poet's adversary (and we are not at all abashed to speak in such terms) is reification, spectacle — that is to say, dead manifestation.

¶ The critic's adversary is, in short, the advertiser (or politician): someone who, adopting the critic's position regarding social production, recuperates art-as-means toward the end of consolidating and advancing current conditions.

excursive notes

• Best use principle: remarkable that the site, with its internal vistas, endless balconies and catwalks, bunkerlike pavilions, irregular outcroppings and overdetermined lines-of-sight, hasn't been consecrated to an ongoing paintball tournament.

• Another way to pose the situation: there are more cafés than there are great paintings.

• "Based on the example paintings, I want to go to the fuckin' niveau supérieur of the East."

• Compare to the Alamo: "race war Disneyland."

• Title of a section of the John Heartfield exhibit: "Battle of Images in Magazines." Possible reasons this couldn't be title for culture in general: none.

• "Passive appropriation may simply be another name for culture."