Update

Yo, FYI for the 2-3 people who actually look at this, I haven’t been working on any creative writing lately, but have been doing stuff on my Tumblr. Go check it out.

Update: New Tumblr: “The New Flesh”

I have a Tumblr up and running now. Whereas I’ve generally used this blog for publishing my artistic/poetic pursuits, I will be using this new Tumblr to explore my political interests. I will still be posting my longer analyses and writings on here, but hope that this Tumblr will allow me to do some productive blogging between my longer posts on this blog. You can view my Tumblr here.

 

Here is the about blurb from my Tumblr to give you a sense of what I’m interested in doing with it:

“The medium, or process, of our time — electric technology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, every institution formerly taken for granted. [. . .] Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. “

-Marshall McLuhan,
The Medium is the Massage

The name of this blog derives from David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” With the beginning of this Tumblr, I become more “jacked-in,” more cyborg and more posthuman, than ever: not any less flesh, but still so much more than flesh. Or perhaps that has been becoming the case all along, and this is just a new phase in the teleology of technological society, or perhaps things now are simply different. Teleologies, metanarratives, might be an ultimately empty, if not dangerous, narratological schema, but wherever we are now, there is no going back to wherever we came from.

As Dylan sang, “The times they are a-changing.” And though that has always been the case, even long before he put it into words, the statement’s exigency seems more obvious now than ever. And I do not think that sentiment is merely a vanity of someone living at the edge of the future.

Whatever the case, the newest form our posthumanization has taken, i.e., the most current style of our subjectification, is indisputably shaped by and around the presence of the digital, the internet, and most recently social media technologies. As new technologies, and especially internet technologies, continue to proliferate the tactics of our subjectification, so too do the sites of our subjectification quantitatively increase. These sites are inevitably sites for “control,” whether that term should be understood in postive (productive) or negative (coercive) terms; what is more important, however: each of these sites is also a site for potential resistance. Either way, the presence of struggle, of power, and the necessity of its terms and language seems self-evident. The need for new strategies and tactics is urgent.

The future is now. The future is weird. And, as Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

It seems the preliminary step in harnessing these sites of resistance is to embrace them in terms of the part of us that they have become. Non-action is not a possibility. We have gone too far now to look back desiringly toward the “human.” Remember Lot’s wife?

To conceive of this Tumblr as anything other than a new cyborg apparatus, as a way of becoming more “plugged-in,” as a part of myself — something that shapes not just my subjectivity, but my the very mode and possibility of my subjectification — would be not just politically negligent, but epistemogically fantastic.

This Tumblr is not about originality, but about bricolage, détournement, and radical juxatpositions, for the purpose of subversion, disruption, and, most of all resistance: the digital as a cybernetic extension of the body, and that body as a weapon. The question of whether I am creating something new in this process, i.e., unifying, or simply shuffling around pre-existent media, i.e., promoting further fragmentation and schizophrenia, seems debatable. But whether this is work or entropy or, more probably, a dialogism between the two, the question of power is not irrelevant. For me, it is the primay concern. Here’s to solidarity with the cyborg resistance.

“Long live the New Flesh.”

 
If you can recommend any other Tumblr accounts that it might be useful for me to begin following, please post them in the comments or contact me via Tumblr.

Song of the Day: “When You Sleep,” My Bloody Valentine

 

 

I am not dead, I swear, but merely sleeping… And, perhaps, to stay asleep is death’s functional equivalent. But does not sleep also always imply the chance for waking up…?

And finally comes the snow. And thank [sic] god for that. For the snow was all he really wished for these days. It was the best for which he could have hoped.

Song of the day: “Tunic (Song for Karen),” Sonic Youth.

“I feel like I’m disappearing – /
getting smaller every day, /
but I look in your eyes – /
and I’m bigger in every way. /

She said: /
You aren’t never going anywhere. /
You aren’t never going anywhere. /
I ain’t never going anywhere. /
I ain’t never going anywhere.”

“Grangerization” seems to bear a lot of potential as a fun postmodern project/a useful experiment in stylistic strategy.

Song of the Day: The Pixies, “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)”

“In Heaven, everything is fine. /
In Heaven everything is fine. /
In Heaven, everything is fine. /
You’ve got your good thing /
and you’ve got mine.”

The Post Before Christmas: William S. Burroughs, “The Junky’s Christmas”

***

Interviewer Daniel Odier: “[. . .] It has been said that you are a great moralist; what do you think?”

Burroughs: “Yes, I would say perhaps too much so. [. . .]”

– The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, by Daniel Odier and William S. Burroughs

***

“The Junky’s Christmas,” by William S. Burroughs

[Thanks to Kenton Stalder from UMD for sending this to me a Christmas or two ago.]

Pt. 1:

Pt. 2:

Pt. 3:

Pt. 4:

“For Christ’s sake,” Danny said, “I must have scored for the immaculate fix!”

***

Gotta love the way Burroughs gets into the holidays. See also his “Thanksgiving Prayer,” directed By Gus Van Sant, which I failed to post back in November. One of my fave holiday traditions:

[p.s. Note the irony, too, in the fact that this seems to be only available via VEVO on Youtube now. I’m sure Burroughs would appreciate that fans have to sit through a Kit Kat commercial or whatever to be able to enjoy this. The incongruity is laughable. But, what would you expect? Capitalism, especially in regard to advertising intended to charm the consumer into consumption, is insidiously efficient at appropriating whatever it can to achieve its ends: no matter how antithetical the appropriated text itself is (hell, it makes a radical text that much more innocuous to the strategies of global capital, no?). Well, thanks for the Kit Kats destined to be shit out of wholesome American guts… ]

Petrarch is gonna eat his heart out…