Transductions

The prerequisite for any egalitarian concept is that equality pertains to a world I don’t have to make any sacrifice to live in. Political theories or policies that tell us we will have to sacrifice ‘a part of our current privileges’ in order to enter a world where people are equal are stupid and dangerous without exception.

They are, because sacrifice, however rational it may present itself, will establish the logic of envy: The only real motive for me (or anyone) to renounce a privilege out of free will is the pleasure that comes from knowing that others will not be able to enjoy it — the most destructive pleasure, or maybe even the only truly destructive pleasure.

Equality is a value incompatible with sacrifice.

Emergence is a mystification of the nearby. As fits an age that has come to understand origins too well (and become too versed in this understanding-well) to be really interested in them anymore. “With insight in the origin, the meaninglessness of the origin grows,” Nietzsche wrote in The Dawn, “while the Around-us and In-us gradually starts to display colors and mysteries and treasures of meaning old humankind wouldn’t have dreamed of.” Emergence’s sphere of interest is a temporal Around-us and In-us: We find fascinating what enhances our present acting, the average of three to seven dwarfs on whose shoulders we stand, while the giant far down below whose enormous toes are probably dug into the ground, that monument of an early rise, hardly provokes more than a tourist’s assiduousness. Same with the far-off future: Even if I were able to know what target mankind will hit in five hundred thousand years, I’d care less than about the last five minutes of a Discovery Channel program — and not even because I won’t be there, but because my scientist contemporaries already know so much about it that my curiosity feels compelled to swerve towards the enigmatic world of the immediate consequences, and instead of to mankind it applies to a few dozen or a few hundred people who experience something slightly out of time.

If one only wouldn’t mix up emergence with an anonymous or ‘systematic’ hazard (wouldn’t use it as an excuse for the fact that things happen)! We’d need a personal notion of emergence. (Personal: not ‘emergent for me,’ but: my emergence.)

Brecht claimed one spectator who smoked (“a single man with a cigar in the stalls of a Shakespeare performance”) could initiate the breakdown of occidental art. A revision of that statement today would, instead of on the lonely fight led by a partisan with his cigar as his weapon against the seductive powers of emotion-saturated spectacle and its attention regime, focus on the slightly asymmetrical partition of the present through the non-concentrated, effortless, discreetly (or at least non-dramatically) luxuriant activity of smoking. And it would ask for the difference between someone who smokes while following a performance, and someone who follows a performances while smoking.

For diversion never splits presence up into symmetrical contemporaneousness. In diverted presence there is always already a slight inclination, a bearing based on the attendee’s preferring something: I don’t do two things at the same time – I’m doing something while I’m doing something else. And insofar as my being-there determines my being, I am not the coexistence of two activities correlated to ‘two things on my mind,’ but I am the one who enjoys the inclination to slightly favor one of them, in order to do the other one meanwhile, as his freedom. I am the subject of that pleasure.

After her elder sister had gone upstairs and the bass twanging talk with her brother in law ebbed away step by step, she did what she thought was appropriate. She went flat down on the mat and composed herself for sleep. Next to the corpse it smelled of incense and oranges. One ear on the ear of the mother, she heard the rain like something outside of both, the living or the dead. For a while fears and doubts stuck around where her body touched the ground. She performed little jerks forward and backward, trying not to move too much. Then she came to a rest.

This would also be a point to start thinking about how to re-politicize the flâneur – as Ligna have attempted in their radio ballet The Flaneurs’ Conspiracy (Die Verschwörung der Flaneure), which was performed on May 6 2009 at the MyZeil mall in Frankfurt am Main. In the 19th and early 20th century the flâneur was a potentially political figure because he was an-economic: an idler who seemed to command random amounts of free time, and although his world were the urban shopping malls he never consumed (except for coffee/alcohol and cigarettes, the elixir of a productivity independent of solid resources, feeding on nothing but intensification; and the very symbol of waste). The flâneur was removed from the dynamics of exchange by an essentially aesthetic constitution of his being-aware and of the movements this awareness guided: Taking everything in that presented itself in terms of ‘scenes of living,’ he did this in a state of disinterested receptivity that couldn’t fail to help telling taking in from consuming (not least because it was virtually infinite, never became full and fed, knew no exhaustion that wouldn’t work as a further incentive). By virtue of his awareness’s complexion, the flâneur is a genuinely literary figure. The only ‘meaning’ that brings his motions in line with regular production is writing, and writing is what moves his feet through the labyrinth of the city (a flâneur does not even takes notes, he walks authoring).

As a political character who stands in for the possibility to escape from the power of economy in the midst of capitalist fracas, the flâneur has become just as questionable as the resilience of aesthetics: The economic value attention has taken on in the socio-economies of the late 20th and 21st century makes it difficult to defend the difference between disinterested reception and consumption, or the heterogeneity of aesthetic producing from those creative activities that meanwhile count as work performance. The political point of the flâneur today would rather be in the lightness and facility of movement, in what makes flânerie lighter, indeed easier than mere ambling along. It would be about rediscovering what modernity has left unsatisfied of an aristocratic freedom, a ‘being free of…,’ which couples lightness with intemperance. And, at the same time, about multiplying this aristocratic freedom-led trajectory across bourgeois terrain: flâneurs, many of them — organizing a conspiracy between those walking separately — contructing a phantasma that enables the social imaginary to feel infiltrated by them, to project fears of a better life on them.

« …

2: The flaneur doesn’t have a target
4: He walks for the sake of walking. His movement, his gestures are means without ends.
2: The flaneur doesn’t exist anymore.
1: Yet the passages are dreaming secretly of the flaneurs’ return.
4: The malls, the passages of our days, are being controlled by security guards and surveillance cameras in order to prevent that return.

…

3: Yawn! Cover your mouths with a hand. Yawn again.
2: Boredom is a warm gray plaid, its inside lined with the most glowing silk. Into this plaid we wrap ourselves when we are dreaming.
3: Pause. Close your eyes.
2: Being in these rooms elapses without accent, like the goings on in dreams. Flanerie is the rythm of this slumber.
1: Boredom is the step to great deeds.
3: Close your eyes and walk on.
4: For what will the passage’s name stand in the future?
2: Which future use could be made of this place?
3: Look around.

…

4: We would like to ask you to leave a present in this mall before you go.
3: Take out the sugar cubes without attracting attention. Take one cube and —
2: Put it at a place you consider appropriate.
3: Don’t take this too easy!
…
1: The sugar cube ought not to be too easily visible, but you should not hide it, either.
2: Have you found a place?
3: Then leave it there and walk on.
…
3: distribute your sugar cubes one after one across the mall. If you happen to find another cube during your search for places, put one of yours on the top.
2: Produce a little, volatile sugar sculpture.
4: Every age does not only dream the next, but dreaming it urges it to awake.
1: It carries its own finale in itself and unfolds it with cunning. With the commodities economy convulsing, we start to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before their decay.
3: Whereever you see a sugar tower: enlarge it by one more cube!
2: But take care that the tower doesn’t collapse!
1: The flaneurs’ conspiracy becomes manifest in small melancholy objects.
2: Its growth is unforeseeable, its dispensation in space to be planned by nobody.
1: Their appearance is without end.
3: Dispersed, meaningless presents, requested by nobody.
2: Unintelligible signals to a world where everything has its place.»

(Ligna, The Flaneurs’ Conspiracy, radio ballett script)

[Footnote removed from text at 8:29 pm MET, Feb 28 2010]