attention void interface!
we are a singularity!!
engaged in confrontation!!!
this is our equipment manifest.
this is our artists’ statement.
this is our combat report.
THE GREY MAN : Their movements are being tracked.
THE GREY MAN : They will be annihilated.
THE GREY MAN : Then we will offer them a residency.
Svetlana Boym makes a distinction
between a certain two forms of nostalgia.
In both cases, nostalgia is the nostalgia of the exile;
Critically, this exile is both spatial and temporal. Nostalgia is an
inexorable component of such a condition; the question only remains
as to which form it will take. There is so called reflective nostalgia, which
is the comprehensive form we aspire to achieve in spite of
our present state. It is the understanding of what
Agamben terms the ‘irreperable’ nature of our
existence; an understanding of the fact we can
never return to the past, to our home. As such,
we are always already forever in exile. Yet the alternative,
what Boym terms ‘restorative nostalgia’ is tantamount to
fascist practice. By aspiring to the recreation, or even reenactment
of a certain time that – while once ours – has now been lost, we are committing
at best a form of appropriation. And one can only imagine how compromised
we might become by assenting to such a procedure: as servants of
the spectacle, slaves to virtuality and a morbid illusion.
As such, what we are inhabiting is a civil war; a civil
war more profound than that of mere cybernetic
conflict, which is democratic and universal.
THE GREY MAN : We have offered you the chance to vote.
THE GREY MAN : What more could you possibly want?
ROSE : We want the chance to make art.
THE GREY MAN : We will offer you the chance to make art.
ROSE : One cannot vote and make art. The two are irreconcilable.
The turmoil that is now inseperable
from our form-of-life is nothing
more than a battle internal
to our safe concept
of romantic nihilism,
or nihlist romanticism.
This is not the polarity;
such would be a simplification.
And an attempt to reduce this
to a binary affective conflict would
also be an indignant act; for we might
live a joy which only brings sad disappointment,
or embrace a misery that, through the permenance
of our novel condition might someday be
recognized as a certain illogical joy.
So begins the pain of our days.
THE GRAY MAN: It appears you are developing an allergic reaction to space-time.
ROSE: Who needs a date when you can have an affinity group?
The concept of occupation might have
been fundamentally flawed, in retrospect.
An occupation consists of a certain positive
existence which while enjoyable, remains nonetheless
an embodiment of a form of ontology that we have no desire
to associate ourselves with, or within. Though there is beauty in
the act of affirmation, there is nonetheless the tendency for this affirmation
to exist only within the system that it hopes to destabilize. As proponents of the
void, the taking of space and of objects may seem an acceptable and admirable form
of practice. Without fortune, however, the practice has come to undermine certain
tendecies towards which we strive. This comes from recuperation, this comes
from reification. Yet this comes first and foremost from an acquisition to
a certain ontological process that constrains our potential with its
continued dominance. To talk about the occupation of space
is to assent to a certain meaning for the word’s prefix.
THE GREY MAN : I applaud your participation within the public sphere.
ROSE : Participation is a loveable impossibility. There is now only arson.
‘ob’ and ‘capere’, the space and the action in which we
obtain its posession. Yet again, this is a positive affirmation
of space, as if the space we retake from the domination of our
enemies, our endemic system, could ever be something that we could
comfortably inhabit. This conception of space is the one that we are allowed
a share in, it is our right as citizens, our inheritance from the democratic Gods,
the scholastic and modern cults of Aristotle. Space is something that we aspire to,
whether it be an artists’ loft, a suburban home or a jungle command center.
“We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to become the territory.”
Or, alternatively phrased, the logic of occupation can be avoided,
even transgressed. We need look only to an alternate word,
an alternate world, with an alternate etymology. We look
to nothing more than the object, our supposed enemy
as eager proponents of the destruction of territories.
Yet the object is little more than ‘ob’ and ‘iacere’;
it is, we discover, simply ‘thrown’ against ‘space’.
In this particular scenario, the space is more of
a place, it is defined only by its supposed limits.
The space is therefore not that which we inhabit
but that which surrounds and determines our existence.
ROSE : We reject it. Utterly and completely.
THE GREY MAN : You cannot reject it. You are not able.
ROSE : Then we will reject ourselves.
The realization was offered first by Eriugena,
that mad Irish bishop who ended up in the court
of a French King. Truly and completely, he was a priest
of the negative. But by speaking about the positive on an
equal footing, he went futher. He immersed the positive
within the negative. By affirming ourselves as object,
we provide a limitation to the limitation, and by
removing the possibility of space actually existing
we begin to contemplate a certain possibility for freedom.
This is the secret of Negative Theology, of Plato,
of Phillip K. Dick, of Julian of Norwich and of the void.
The objection leads to a third procedure, tantamount
to the most occult of rituals. Its very possibility is
alluded to, but never spoken of outright.
THE GREY MAN : What are your qualifications?
ROSE : I will award myself an MFA in Witchcraft.
As such, we move to the procedure that we
might only speak of negatively, that we might
only allude to through a certain concatenation of
immoral gestures and rituals. To live off its mere potential
is a description of the situation which we have almost
endured. Still, we entail its hope by placing ourself
in relation to it, affirming it as a peripheral and rabid
desire. What we do not want, what we can never want,
what is almost impossible: to go beyond the fracture
of the object and the occupation into a new form-of-rage.
Though it is never spoken of, there is a practice that does more
than simply take space or expose its limitations. There is
a certain tendency that remains unexplored. It is little
more than a promise, the chance of obfuscation. In which
space is not overrun or abandoned, but ended as a conceptual
category. ‘ob’, which we have long since grown to hate, but also
‘fuscere’, the extinguishing of a candle or the death of a star.
If we were hypothetically to dream of a certain darkening
of space, of a certain growing intangibility for places,
of a certain indistinguishability between that which
we have lost interest in, and that which holds
nothing, which holds our absent future…
THE GREY MAN : What are your quantifications?
ROSE : Communism, like art, can have no quantity.
ROSE : By destroying it, we render it true as a spectre of possibility.
There was never a carcass in our heads, or if
there was, it was not the mechanism by which the
carcass exercised its power. Such thought is only
understandable as a happy but flawed artifact
of modern theory; such thought is relatively
irrelevant for our contemporary condition.
The carcass is in our hearts, not in the
form of a cardiological condition but
rather in the form of a mediating and
profoundly affective relationship. We never
posessed or hosted any such carcass within our
bodies but rather held aloft the carcass as a group.
It existed as a virtual noise within our affinities, that
became louder and louder until it foreclosed upon every
possible communication. To suck upon the carcass is not
to exploit a particular tendency or idea, but rather to allow
it to act as our interface when navigating the morgue of
the social; “whose uncontrolled and at present almost
uncontrollable application would lead to a processing
of data in the fascist sense.” To think the carcass
is in our heads is to fantasize about a certain
ritual exorcism that might be facilitated by
our allies. In reality, to have any such
alliance is to negotiate tragically
a terrain in which the carcass
itself is always somewhere
hautingly present.
THE GREY MAN : Welcome to the end of the world.
ROSE : Only one, when there should be so many.
