Zeitgeist Spam

Canyon Castator, The path forward will be covered in broken glass and chicken shit, 2017 oil on canvas 72 x 96 inches

Canyon Castator, SOS, 2017. Oil on canvas. 96 x 72 inches. (For Richard, and "The End of the World")

ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US [please see my 21.01.2018 post "Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)" by Trevor Paglen, and you will learn more about Vigilant Solutions, a major player in the game]

 

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.” (Vigilant did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.

ICE agents would be able to query that database in two ways. A historical search would turn up every place a given license plate has been spotted in the last five years, a detailed record of the target’s movements. That data could be used to find a given subject’s residence or even identify associates if a given car is regularly spotted in a specific parking lot.

“Knowing the previous locations of a vehicle can help determine the whereabouts of subjects of criminal investigations or priority aliens to facilitate their interdiction and removal,” an official privacy assessment explains. “In some cases, when other leads have gone cold, the availability of commercial LPR data may be the only viable way to find a subject.”

 

ICE agents can also receive instantaneous email alerts whenever a new record of a particular plate is found — a system known internally as a “hot list.” (The same alerts can also be funneled to the Vigilant’s iOS app.) According to the privacy assessment, as many as 2,500 license plates could be uploaded to the hot list in a single batch, although the assessment does not detail how often new batches can be added. With sightings flooding in from police dashcams and stationary readers on bridges and toll booths, it would be hard for anyone on the list to stay unnoticed for long.

Those powers are particularly troubling given ICE’s recent move to expand deportations beyond criminal offenders, fueling concerns of politically motivated enforcement. In California, state officials have braced for rumored deportation sweeps targeted at sanctuary cities. In New York, community leaders say they’ve been specifically targeted for deportation as a result of their activism. With automated license plate recognition, that targeting would only grow more powerful.

For civil liberties groups, the implications go far beyond immigration. “There are people circulating in our society who are undocumented,” says senior policy analyst Jay Stanley, who studies license plate readers with the ACLU. “Are we as a society, out of our desire to find those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will track all of us?”

The new license plate reader contract comes after years of internal lobbying by the agency. ICE first tested Vigilant’s system in 2012, gauging how effective it was at locating undocumented immigrants. Two years later, the agency issued an open solicitation for the technology, sparking an outcry from civil liberties group. Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson canceled the solicitation shortly afterward, citing privacy concerns, although two field offices subsequently formed rogue contracts with Vigilant in apparent violation of Johnson’s policy. In 2015, Homeland Security issued another call for bids, although an ICE representative said no contract resulted from that solicitation.

As a result, this new contract is the first agency-wide contract ICE has completed with the company, a fact that is reflected in accompanying documents. On December 27th, 2017, Homeland Security issued an updated privacy assessment of license plate reader technology, a move it explained was necessary because “ICE has now entered into a contract with a vendor.”

The new system places some limits on ICE surveillance, but not enough to quiet privacy concerns. Unlike many agencies, ICE won’t upload new data to Vigilant’s system but simply scan through the data that’s already there. In practical terms, that means driving past a Vigilant-linked camera might flag a car to ICE, but driving past an ICE camera won’t flag a car to everyone else using the system. License plates on the hot list will also expire after one year, and the system retains extensive audit logs to help supervisors trace back any abuse of the system.

[JBR; IF YOU BELIEVE ONE WORD OF THE PRECEDING PARAGRAPH YOU ARE A GODDAM FOOL]

Still, the biggest concern for critics is the sheer scale of Vigilant’s network, assembled almost entirely outside of public accountability. “If ICE were to propose a system that would do what Vigilant does, there would be a huge privacy uproar and I don’t think Congress would approve it,” Stanley says. “But because it’s a private contract, they can sidestep that process.”

[NOTE: REPOSTED FROM THE VERGE, 26 JAN 018]

With the Noose Around My Neck 83

Which is to say, 

                                    I’m worn

            so smooth by now I should be able

            to explain everything.

But the truth is,

            // I have no idea. //

In other words, the results are not generalizable. So let me ask you a question: What is the first nonhuman species that comes to mind? 

            // Bird // Snake // Amoeba // Roses // Rocks // Bird

            // Stool // Cat // 2 Cats // Robots // Worm // Lemur

            // Porcupine // Stone people // Crow // Pig // Palo verde

            // Nematode // Liquidambar // Half the people I see on the street

            // Lizards – but I had a gecko // Mesquite // 

(Rocks, Stool, Robots, Stone people ...) Guacas, in part, allow themselves to be seen; they show themselves. “They appear” (in another passage, Pachakuti Yamqui will declare that they also hear and speak), and by being inscribed in space-time, or pacha, they are, to a certain degree, localized. Of course, this localization makes them vulnerable, susceptible to apprehension, disfigurement, and ultimately annihilation — not to mention to modification and translation into other configurations with varying degrees of visibility. But, in part, they do not show themselves. Wakas have a name, a singular noun — what we call, proper. There is no general, pure, ideal, universal, or conceptual guaca — or, there almost isn’t. This almost marks an un/certain im/possibility, a paradox that Pachakuti Yamqui never hesitates to stress — an image that “does not let one see what image it was,” and so on. The poem then, now, is guaCaed — what might we gather from this? How might we translate it? Into what? Again, the poem, as such, cleaves, splits, and concomitantly splits off from the alter. “By being it is not.” By localizing, it is dislocated. By being inscribed, it lends itself to migration and translation, thus becoming fixed and even petrified (there is already borrowing or transference in the migrant Romance language Spanish: “enguacarse” means “to petrify”) in a single language, in a single “code” and “medium,” even in a univocal t[r]opic. It goes mute, translucinates, or interwhelms. It opens (itself) from now on to the ex-terminus as to the gift, to underlining as well as to touch and touch up, to order and injunction, even to abatement and annulment. Who, today, would think it strange to stress that? What can I say— it’s late, and we are doubly spent. We’re out of place if not already completely outside the bounds of this colloquium [and it hasn’t even started yet] — nothing can be done about it. Moreover, can we even emphasize it economically, or for free? Can we even finish beginning to respond, to respond responsibly, what is called responding? And at the same time, can we ex-terminate everything, or almost everything? Can we leave everything that is conclusive empty, vacant, if not uaca or huaca? You see? Whether with u, whether with vee, both graphically eyeless, and even with aitch, hushed, silent in Spanish, half-open. For example, no example. For instance, incidentally, obviously, a risky

            experiment — an ex-periment, again:

            Perfusions, Shimmer, Dis-aster

                        Niemand entfärbt, was jetzt strömt. Paul Celan

            between guaca and its tracture, trajectory

            again, turn, of no return, to that [i-legible] eye

            let or between the ad-scripted or self-in

            scribing, understood,

            petrified, pre-term guaca —

            a rose in arrears, moanstrous roar, pre

            historic intermix-up, excessure, ex-ter

            minus — once and for all, let’s come to Ink

            a terms: manan imatapas niwanchu (“this tells me nothing”)

            let’s come to Ink-a terms again: Aconcagua, wak’akuna, Catamarca or

                        K’ulta, transhadowing

            time-guaca, in no time, but in any event, given, out

            of date: intimate poemachine, inti

            mating sundark, all in all, poemark, now

            sundered, unshuttered — liquid flow

            er’s telary t

            ex-tile — huaca to guaca

            your guacas (pluck up, plow forward), your dis/aster

            living can

            be livid, re-livèd

            can death

            be mortal? — grace me

            with its wak’a uta again?

I mean, we all know that if it hadn’t been for Hermione, Harry would have died in the first book. When it comes to the contrast between passion and comprehension, however, nomads do not have the same problems as sedentary Europeans. The fact that emotionally I do not understand this kind of theatricality at all and also do not find the music “homey” or “familiar,” still less think of it as mine, qualifies me to make an analysis, says Huang Tse-we. She notes that there are baritone operas, tenor operas, soprano operas, contralto operas and bass operas. Baritone operas form the majority. A baritone fights for his daughter and thereby causes her death (Rigoletto, Emilia Galotti). A baritone fights for the tenor and thereby kills the soprano (La Traviata). For reasons lying in the past and without any provocation in the apparent plot a baritone of particular obstinacy fights everyone and causes multiple fatalities (Trovatore, Ernani). A bass definitely kills his enemies. (This happens through Wotan or the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlo.) I am not aware of any exception, writes Huang Tse-we. As if the desire to kill increased with the depth of the human voice. Sopranos, on the other hand, appear threatened, even when they don’t sing (Masaniello). Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano) the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off). Fatal outcomes appear to be related to the registers of the male voice. To me as a nomad, writes Huang Tse-we (also sensitive to the feelings of the oppressed Tibetans), such a stationary dramaturgy seems questionable. Furthermore, it is a mistake to make the human voice or the extremely arbitrary Western European orchestral voice traditions the yardstick for Chinese opera. That, rather, is a matter of a music of form, of sandy deserts, of the wind, of the central heavenly body (the sun). The exhibition follows a recent diagnosis of a second autoimmune disease, in which inflammation causes joints to ossify. I thought about how strange it is that my body could do this to itself, to me, without my control or knowledge. All those blue lights, all that inhospitable furniture, all those mysterious devices with unknown functions –– this is where the humor of my work comes into play, with the juxtaposition of pristine objects and lumpy sculptural forms. The recipe is simple: bones, cold water, acid, simmer don’t boil for some hours. Perhaps it can all be explained by the fact that my Moon’s in Cancer in the 8th House, the House of Death, or that my Mars is in the 12th House, the House of Illness, Secrets, Sorrow, and Self-Undoing. Or, that my father’s mother escaped from North Korea in her childhood and hid this fact from the family until a few years ago, when she accidentally let it slip out, and then swiftly, revealingly, denied it. Or, that my mother suffers from undiagnosed mental illness that was actively denied by her family, and which was then exasperated by a 40-year-long drug addiction hepatitis, and that to this day she remains untreated, as she makes her way in and out of jails, squats, and homelessness. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor — according to the IRS, in 2014, my adjusted gross income was $5,730 (a result of not being well enough to work full-time) — which means that my health insurance is provided by the state of California (Medi-Cal), that my “primary care doctor” is a group of physician’s assistants and nurses in a clinic on the second floor of a strip mall, and that I rely on food stamps to eat. Perhaps I’ve just got thin skin, and have had some bad luck. It’s also important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me — whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” Why not? From my own reading of the myth of “Er,” I agree that super-string theory may be as close as scientists have gotten to interpreting Plato in his Pythagorean mode of thought. But it was not only the ancient Greeks who offered me insights about dimensionality, the ancient Romans did also. While the word diagram is of Greek origin, it was the Romans who drew them. And, of course, a dimensional system is an outline of existence — both in terms of mass and consciousness — with the simple phrase in medias res, the message is clear: as Brother Blue would say: “In the middle of the middle of the middle,” etc. So in 1975 I invented a new type of gyroscope, which I called “The Levogyre”. It consists of a series of nested spheres of fiberglass, and a processional axis that has been fragmented and redistributed in space in the form of two interlocking three-dimensional equiangular spirals. Each shell is filled with ferro-fluidics, which is a ferric compound ground finer that pumice mixed into a very viscous oil, which then acts like copper wire electrically. Each portion of the processional axis is powered by means of on board electric motors mounted within the structure of the axial fragments. On board solenoids act as triggers for outboard radio-frequency power generators. At the torque axis of each shell are mounted fiber optic beds through which are transmitted circular laser beams at, of course, the speed of light. When the device is fired up, it begins with the outermost shell and moves inward creating a torque transfer that increases and, therefore, presses at the speed of light, not as in a mechanical gyroscope where the angular momentum decreases as it approaches the centroid of the device. The device weighs less, therefore, while in operation, than at rest. I felt the Levogyre to be a proto-time machine and developed the concept of The Time Machine based on a method of controlling and amplifying pre and retro cognition [pre-perception of the future and retro-perception of the past]. For the love of god, Montressor! There’s a dispute as to whether a name can be given to mills or not. If an essential root is given to one arm, they might be revolvers in insect’s casings, winding down a river of dirt in giving you, America, too small a thimble, the carcass of instruction and wavy, diminutive hands. There is a slow moving, not fast like the static, I mean light, I mean dark colored turtles, one map giving birth to another, this, flown heavy with rupture and landed after a piece was found,

                    leaving the rest to be divided up

            among awful people, spreadable cheese, ‘dialogic heteroglossia,’ vacuum energy,

                        billions of galaxies,

                                    ‘an array of

                                    gizmos’

                                                my sawdust showing ...

I’ve always liked looking at the dead. But the janitor wasn’t dead, exactly. People always make me laugh. I think I’m supposed to say something about hummingbirds. But I’m not a man. I wanted to touch the janitor. When it rained, smooth leaves burst along the ocotillo’s stems. Take the case of Vigilant Solutions. In January 2016, Vigilant Solutions, the company that boasts of having a database of billions of vehicle locations captured by Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR), signed contracts with a handful of local Texas governments. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the deal went like this: Vigilant Solutions provided police with a suite of ALPR systems for their police cars and access to Vigilant’s larger database. In return, the local government provided Vigilant with records of outstanding arrest warrants and overdue court fees. A list of “flagged” license plates associated with outstanding fines are fed into mobile ALPR systems. When a mobile ALPR system on a police car spots a flagged license plate, the cop pulls the driver over and gives them two options: they can pay the outstanding fine on the spot with a credit card (plus at 25 percent “service fee” that goes directly to Vigilant), or they can be arrested. In addition to their 25 percent surcharge, Vigilant keeps a record of every license plate reading that the local police take, adding information to their massive databases in order to be capitalized in other ways. One bird, which needed to have its claw treated for an infection, squirmed while held, screaming “I have a question!” LOOK INSIDE TO SEE IF YOU’VE WON. What isn’t geopoetics, Eric? “One place,” says an inhabitant of Norminton, “is lots of places if you wait long enuf.” While you wait you can try to eat

            a flake or two

                        from the old quarry wall

                                    since Mars won’t be this close to Earth again

                                                1-800-anxiety

                                                awk-up            kee-aw

                                    nuk                  kwulkulkkul

                        and fur-covered pillows

            for the same price

            and the little box is out on the sidewalk

                        next to the delicatessen

                                    so the old man can sit on it and drink beer

                                                and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day

            and that is why I am not a painter.

                        For the love of god!

                                    ANGLE of incidence

                                                being matter ignited

                                                one sixtieth of luminous intensity

                                    behind wind

                        beginning spiral of two presences

            angle of incidénce observant of sighns

            having fed

                        on cactí

                                    kaaay and kaay and kaay

                                                and agité an-agité and kaay

                                                and kaay and

                                    yyeeagiye yoa

                        ya yoa

            youas youas youas

            romela romelaya romela romelaya a ceeia

                        invisible expressions of warmed snakewood

                                    pochee aida aida huelto aida aida huedo

                                                uniting of three astral plains/planes corresponding to a                                                                                   serpent

                                                altering the sliii’de

so yes, I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” — all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. We kiss again and then I finally muster up the discipline to pull away and push out through the car’s door. I stand up on the sidewalk before the courthouse as flash bulbs burst with blinding luminescence. I shield my eyes, stunned for a moment as I struggle to collect my bearings. “Mr. Tanner!” someone interjects, shoving a microphone in my face. “Is it true you hate unicorns?” “What?” I stammer. “We understand that your mission was funded off the profits of illegally traded unicorn tears, do you have anything to say to that?” “I mean ...” I’m still trying to collect my bearings, struggling to sort through her words. “No, wait, yeah I do. That’s really bad, I didn’t know anything about it.” The reporter nods and repeats my words back to me. “Really bad ... so you’re saying it’s not awful? Is that what you’re saying?” “No, I just ...” I start. “Because it sounds like you’re not really coming out against the illegal trade of unicorn tears,” the reporter continues. “I literally heard about it five seconds ago,” I counter. “That sounds terrible, I don’t really know anything about it but it sounds really bad and I don’t support that.” The reporter nods. “Okay it’s really hard to understand you when you speak in code like this. Can you just answer the question? Do you or don’t you support bad guys doing bad things? Because you haven’t really come out against them.” “I don’t support bad guys,” I try to say as clearly as I possibly can. The reporter just stares at me blankly. “So you’re not going to come out against them?” Suddenly, someone from the mob pushes me from behind and I stumble forward into the film, which begins with Claire sinking deep into the grass of the golf course with her son Leo in her arms, and a horse falling on its side, kind of like the Nietzsche horse ... Some of the images differ, holding out of the possibility of a near miss, a ‘fly-by’ in which we don’t die after all, or even of there being a kind of multiplication of planets, a sort of triplicate vision — but this all remains whatever besides the fact of the planet ooo-eee-ooo hiding behind the sun. “I know things,” Justine says to Claire, “Ride or die, right, girl?” “Ride or die,” says Claire. There is an argument to be made that the golf course happens to be the most useful symbol for all this. “There’s something oddly unheimlich about golf courses. They go on forever and, if you take away all the golfers — and you won’t find a single one here — I mean, fuck. I always loved golf courses and graveyards.” There’s also a magic cave made of sticks, and Van Morrison singing “Mystic Eyes” over a backing track of Wagner. What? Then the Jason Statham character adjusts his tie. Then the overlords shoot 5 trillion tons of aerosols in into the atmosphere. We wrote “I forget” sentences and, when we read them to each other, we found we’d “I remembered” instead. I remembered the Rexroth poem with the lines

            They are murdering all the young men. 
            For half a century now, every day, 
            They have hunted them down and killed them. 
            They are killing them now. 
            At this minute, all over the world, 
            They are killing the young men. 
            They know ten thousand ways to kill them. 

and thought: half a century? Nah, half of forever, and the other half too. Not to mention women. Five minutes later I got the email from Jonty about Fredo Santana dying from lean. This led me to so-called folk healers, and then plants and herbs, with a deeper study of their generative and regenerative properties. One day, while listening to MF Doom’s Special Herbs beat tapes for the umpteenth time, it dawned on me that I wanted this thing I am making and you are reading and analog, to help us collectively remember to take care of our bodies regardless of the violence that life regularly inflicts on our physical selves and psyches. The blood of the thing is the truth of the thing. Which may be why Joyner says his current work in sex tantra shares much with another job he once held, that of Barney the purple dinosaur. “The energy I brought while in the costume is based on the same foundation, which is love,” he tells me. “Everything stems, grows, and evolves from love.” So I went to the tire store and bought some plastic bags and duct tape and shade cloth, a timer, a paper suit, a respirator. And then I borrowed some high-tech stuff: a Geiger counter, a scintillation counter, a mass spectrometer, microscopes. And then I got some syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and some high-pressure bottles of the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. The first day a grizzly and her cub chased us off. The next day mama grizzly and her cub were gone. So this time, we really got started, and I pulled on my white paper suit, I put on my respirator, and then I put the plastic bags over some trees I’d grown. I got my giant syringes, and I injected the bags with my tracer isotope carbon dioxide gases, first the birch. I injected carbon-14, the radioactive gas, into the bag of birch. And then for fir, I injected the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. I used two isotopes, because I was wondering whether there was two-way communication going on between these species. I got to the final bag, the 80^th replicate, and all of a sudden mama grizzly showed up again. And she started to chase me, I had my syringes above my head, I was swatting at mosquitos, I jumped into the truck, and I thought, “This is why people do lab studies.” Lament therefore proves itself to be the genuine opposition of revelation in yet another respect. While lament encompasses all other languages as a unity, it does so in a way that is precisely contrary to revelation: that is, not as a unity of the all, but as a unity of the particular. For if revelation means the stage at which each language is absolutely positive and expresses nothing more than the positivity of the linguistic world — the birth of language (not its origin!) — then lament is precisely the stage at which each language suffers death in a truly tragic sense, in that this language expresses nothing, absolutely nothing positive, but only the pure border. Since, as we have already mentioned, each language lies in both realms – that of the revealed, expressed, and that of the symbolized, silenced — so in its transition each language partakes of lament as its genuinely tragic point. (The language of tragedy is most intimately related to lament). Language in the state of lament destroys itself, and the language of lament is itself, for that very reason, the language of destruction. Everything is at its mercy. Speaking of clowns, John, observe, in his behind-the-scenes repose, Buffo the Great, the Master Clown, who sits by rights not at the head but at the magisterial middle of the table, in the place where Leonardo seats the Christ, reserving to himself the sacramental task of breaking the black bread and dividing it between his disciples. Buffo the Great, the terrible Buffo, hilarious, appalling, devastating Buffo with his round, white face and the inch-wide rings of rouge round his eyes, and his four-cornered mouth, like a bow tie, and, mockery of mockeries, under his roguishly cocked, white, conical cap, he wears a wig that does not simulate hair. It is, in fact, a bladder. Think of that. He wears his insides on his outside, and a portion of his most obscene and intimate insides, at that; so that you might think he is bald, he stores his brains in the organ which, conventionally, stores piss. He is a big man, seven feet high and broad to suit, so that he makes you laugh when he trips over little things. His size is half the fun of it, that he should be so very, very big and yet incapable of coping with the simplest techniques of motion. This giant is the victim of material objects. Things are against him. They wage war on him. When he tries to open a door, the knob comes off in his hand. At moments of consternation, his eyebrows, black and bushy with mascara, shoot up his forehead and his jaw drops as if brow and jaw were pulled by opposing magnets. Tsking his tongue against his yellow, gravestone teeth, he fits the knob back on again with exaggerated care. Steps back. Approaches the door, again, with a laughably unjustified self-confidence. Grasps the knob, firmly; this time, he knows it is secure ... hasn’t he just fixed it himself? But — things fall apart at the very shiver of his tread on the ground. He is himself the centre that does not hold. He specialises in violent slapstick. He likes to burn clown policemen alive. As the mad priest, he will officiate at clown weddings where Grik or Grok in drag is subjected to the most extravagant humiliations. They do a favourite “Clowns’ Christmas Dinner,” in which Buffo takes up his Christ’s place at the table, carving knife in one hand, fork in the other, and some hapless august or other is borne on, with a cockscomb on his head, as the bird. (Much play with the links of sausages with which this bird's trousers are stuffed.) But this roast, such is the way of Buffo’s world, gets up and tries to run away ... Buffo the Great, the Clown of Clowns. He adores the old jokes, the collapsing chairs, the exploding puddings; he says, “The beauty of clowning is, nothing ever changes.” At the climax of his turn, everything having collapsed about him as if a grenade exploded it, he starts to deconstruct himself. His face becomes contorted by the most hideous grimaces, as if he were trying to shake off the very wet white with which it is coated: shake! shake! shake out his teeth, shake off his nose, shake away his eyeballs, let all go flying off in a convulsive selfdismemberment. He begins to spin round and round where he stands. Then, when you think, this time, Buffo the Great must whirl apart into his constituents, as if he had turned into his own centrifuge, the terrific drum roll which accompanies this extraordinary display concludes and Buffo leaps, shaking, into the air, to fall flat on his back. Silence. The lights dim. Very, very slowly and mournfully, now strikes up the Dead March from Saul, led by Grik and Grok, the musical clowns, with bass drum and piccolo, with minuscule fiddle and enormous triangle struck with back-kick of foot, Grik and Grok, who contain within them an entire orchestra. This is the turn called “The Clown’s Funeral.” The rest of the clowns carry in an exceedingly large coffin draped with the Union Jack. They put the coffin down on the sawdust beside Buffo. They start to put him in it. But will he fit? Of course he won’t! His legs and arms can’t be bent, won’t be bent, won’t be ordered about! Nobody can lay out this force of nature, even if it is dead! Pozzo or Bimbo runs off to get an axe to hack bits off him, to cut him down to coffin-size. It turns out the axe is made of rubber. At long, hilarious last, somehow or other they finally contrive to load him into the box and get the coffin lid on top of him, although it keeps on jerking and tilting because dead Buffo can’t and won’t lie down. The clown attendants heave the coffin up on their shoulders; they have some difficulty co-ordinating themselves as pall-bearers. One falls to his knees and, when he rises, down goes another. But, sooner or later, the coffin is aloft upon their shoulders and they prepare to process out of the ring with him. At which Buffo bursts through the coffin lid! Right through. With a great, rending crash, leaving behind a huge, ragged hole, the silhouette of himself, in the flimsy wood. Here he is, again, large as life and white and black and red all over! “Thunder and lightning, did yuz think I was dead?” Tumultuous resurrection of the clown. He leaps from his coffin even as his acolytes hold it high, performing a double somersault on his way to the ground. (He started out in life as an acrobat.) Roars of applause, cheers. He darts round and round the ring, shaking hands, kissing those babies who are not weeping with terror, tousling the heads of bug-eyed children teetering between tears and laughter. Buffo who was dead is now alive again. And all bound out of the ring, lead by this demoniac, malign, enchanted reveller. The other clowns called him the Old Man, as a mark of respect, although he was not yet quite fifty, hovering about the climacteric of his years. His personal habits were dominated by his tremendous and perpetual thirst. His pockets always bulged with bottles; his drinking was prodigious yet always seemed somehow unsatisfactory to himself, as if alcohol were an inadequate substitute for some headier or more substantial intoxicant, as though he would have liked, if he could, to bottle the whole world, tip it down his throat, then piss it against the wall. Like Fevvers, he was Cockney bred and born; his real name was George Buffins, but he had long ago forgotten it, although he was a great patriot, British to the bone, even if as widely travelled as the British Empire in the service of fun. “We kill ourselves,” said Buffo the Great. “Often we hang ourselves with the gaudy braces from which we suspend those trousers loose as the skirts that Muslims wear lest the Messiah be born to a man. Or, sometimes, a pistol may be sneaked from the lion-tamer, his blanks replaced with live bullets. Bang! a bullet through the brain. If in Paris, you can chuck yourself under the Metro. Or, should you have been so lucky as to be able to afford mod. cons, you might gas yourself in your lonely garret, might you not. Despair is the constant companion of the Clown. For not infrequently there is no element of the voluntary in clowning. Often, d’you see, we take to clowning when all else fails. Under these impenetrable disguises of wet white, you might find, were you to look, the features of those who were once proud to be visible. You find there, per example, the aerialiste whose nerve has failed; the bare-back rider who took one tumble too many; the juggler whose hands shake so, from drink or sorrow, that he can no longer keep his balls in the air. And then what is left but the white mask of poor Pierrot, who invites the laughter that would otherwise come unbidden. The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. “The great white heads around the long table nodded slowly in acquiescence. “The mirth the clown creates grows in proportion to the humiliation he is forced to endure,” Buffo continued, refilling his glass with vodka. “And yet, too, you might say, might you not, that the clown is the very image of Christ.” With a nod towards the mildly shining icon in the corner of the stinking kitchen, where night crawled in the form of cockroaches in the corners. “The despised and rejected, the scapegoat upon whose stooped shoulders is heaped the fury of the mob, the object and yet — yet! also he is the subject of laughter. For what we are, we have chosen to be. Yes, young lad, young Jack, young First-of-May, we subject ourselves to laughter from choice. We are the whores of mirth, for, like a whore, we know what we are; we know we are mere hirelings hard at work and yet those who hire us see us as beings perpetually at play. Our work is their pleasure and so they think our work must be our pleasure, too, so there is always an abyss between their notion of our work as play, and ours, of their leisure as our labour. And as for mirth itself, oh, yes, young Jack!” Turning to Walser and waving an admonitory glass at him. “Don’t think I haven’t very often meditated on the subject of laughter, as, in my all too human rags, I grovel on the sawdust. And you want to know what I think? That they don’t laugh in heaven, not even if it were ever so ... Consider the saints as the acts in a great circus. Catherine juggling her wheel. St Lawrence on his grill, a spectacle from any freak-show. Saint Sebastian, best knife-throwing stunt you ever saw! ... And the great ringmaster in the sky, with his white beard and his uplifted finger, for whom all these and many other less sanctified performers put on their turns in the endless ring of fire which surrounds the whirling globe. But never a giggle, never a titter up there. The archangels can call: ‘Bring on the clowns!’ until they’re blue in the face but the celestial band will never strike up the intro to ‘The March of the Gladiators’ on its harps and trumps, never, no fear — for we are doomed to stay down below, nailed on the endless cross of the humiliations of this world! The sons of men. Don't you forget, me lad, we clowns are the sons of men.” The others all droned after him, in unison: “We are the sons of men —

            yet all those Miss Worlds

            we’ve watched break and burn

            are standing strong

            among wisps of cellophane,

            the vases and head of fennel

            are the stars of the play,

            I am both self-critical of,

            and informed by, diva worship;

            My identification with Mariah Carey

            is a totally serious thing.”

            “I think the same thing about Britney Spears.

            She was a big part of my coming of age;

            I identified with her through the teen peaks

            and super-low Cool Ranch Dorito

            and Newport cigarette moments

            I was also having.”

            “I think about Anna Nicole Smith ...”

            “Who is a saint.”

            “I agree, thank you.”

            “I’m very Christian,

            I buy that narrative,

            even the color scheme—khaki and sky ...

            I feel like I live in a remodel,

            before and after.

            It’s a funny relationship ...”

            “It’s a pun.”

            “Is that a pancake underneath?”

            “It’s a plastic cookie with spackle and foundation smeared on it.       

            But please ... take a look at me.

            Take a close look.

            Closer:

            am I molting?”

I shall now inscribe for you details and duties assigned to you as Poet of the Universe and Dream Architect. We ask that you keep a “log” of poetic notions. It may consist of actual notes in your favorite notepad or it may occur on frames of black and white montages of flipping pages of calendars from films from the 1940s. Besides the residency itself and lending a congenial aura to our usually totally deserted industrial plant hidden behind the brick walls on the other side of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks in a particulate haze of twilight or murky afternoon heat waves radiating from the telephone poles running from the San Gabriel Valley toward downtown LA, we are asking that you instruct one workshop in the Poetics of Dream Architecture. Posters of this event appeared in 1991 and 1986. Do you recognize the person in this photograph? Yes, I recognize the person in this photograph as “Swirling Wheelnuts,” who will be found choked to death in his car at 5am on the outskirts of the Walmart parking lot in San Bernardino, CA, having tried to swallow two Burger King RODEO® KING™ Sandwiches, each of which feature two savory flame-grilled beef patties totaling more than ½ lb. of beef, topped with 3 half-strips of thick-cut smoked bacon, signature crispy onion rings, tangy BBQ sauce, American cheese and creamy mayonnaise all on a sesame seed bun, together with a thirty-two oz. Diet Coke, at the same time (wrappers included). Do you recognize the person in this photograph? Yes, I recognize the person in this photograph as “Melissa Arana,” whose death will be officially pronounced as “accidental,” after an “accidental” drone strike by former China Lake-based hunter-killer drone operators who allege they were merely “testing” a General Atomics MQ 9 Reaper on “border crossers.” Critics allege that this scenario is dubious, that it’s a cover-up, due to the fact that Arana was “bug-splattered” and “explodi-yodied” on a dirt road outside Joshua Tree, CA, over 110 miles from the border. Do you recognize the person in this photograph? Yes, I recognize the person in this photograph as the four-year-old “Jane Arana” (child of Sergio Tamayo and Melissa Arana) “accidentally” blown to pieces with her mother in the reported “drone incident” described above. Do you recognize the building in this photograph? Yes. It is the August Bittenoff Dissonance Library, which overlooks a narrow stretch of lawn adjacent to a vast black asphalt parking lot murkily outlined by lamp posts extending toward Soto Street a half mile distant (though if you stand on the Soto Street bridge, the building can’t be seen). “Is there anything else I can help you with? No? Then by all means, have a wonderful evening.” Or, failing that, push a dumpster against the wall, in order to laboriously climb atop it (slipping on slumpy acrid trash bags, huffing and puffing as you clamber back out), grabbing the top of the wall (“Ow! Ouch!”) with both hands and dragging yourself over the wall, almost weeping with fright (“What if I break my freaking ankle?”) as you throw yourself over, landing on all fours in order to break your fall — but insufficiently — as your forehead strikes the ground — and you find yourself lying on your back — stunned — stupefied — gathering your wits — checking out your skull — finding a small pebble embedded in the center of your forehead like a 3^rd eye — looking up at the pancake moon and discovering it really IS a pancake — fresh from the griddle —

[Note: Sources: JBR; Jody Gladding, “Beam”, at Poets.org; JBR; Eric Magrane, “Eric Magrane Surveys his Audience on Poetry, Science, and the Nonhuman”, at Poets & Writers, 1 Nov 012; So let ... question: JBR; What is the first ... people): Eric Magrane, “Eric Magrane Surveys his Audience on Poetry, Science, and the Nonhuman”, at Poets & Writers, 1 Nov 012; Andrés Ajens, Poetry After the Invention of América: Don’t Light the Flower (tr. Michelle Gil-Montero); JBR, a sign I saw at the San Diego Women’s March, 20 Jan 018; Alexander Kluge, “The Phenomenon of the Opera”, at BOMB, 19 Mar 018; Carly Mandel, quoted in Kerry Doran, “Results, Concrete: Carly Mandel Interviewed”, at BOMB, 19 Jan 018; Bonnie, “Bonnie’s Bone Broth (which is really stock)*”, at We Are Canaries, 3 May 015; Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory”, at Mask 24; JBR; Paul Laffoley, “Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate”, Paul Laffoley; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” (hi, Richard!); Roberto Harrison, “An Hispanic Identity Meaning Switches and False Twos”, at Poetry Foundation; a mashup of Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, “Praise for the Neutrino” (tr. Katherine M Heden), JBR, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kevin Davies, and Peter Gizzi; TC Tolbert, “White-lined Sphinx Moth”, in The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (eds. Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos); Maya L Kapoor, “Ocotillo”, in The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (eds. Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos); Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, at The New Inquiry, 8 Dec 016; Jody Gladding, “11 Sentences”, “LOOK INSIDE TO SEE IF YOU’VE WON”, in Translations from Bark Beetle; JBR; M John Harrison, “the wounded hare”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 21 Jan 018; Jody Gladding, “Nesting Ravens”, “Since Mars won’t be this close to Earth again”, “I-800-FEAR”, “Sonogram of Raven Calls”, in Translations from Bark Beetle; Lew Welch, “Olema Satori” (memory quote); Frank O’Hara, “Steps”, at Oblique Angles, “Why I Am Not a Painter”, at Psychogeographic Review, 5 Oct 015; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”; Cecil Taylor, “Chinampas 5’04””, and Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, quoted in Fred Moten, In the Break; Chuck Tingle, Space Raptor Butt Trilogy; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Melancholia Golf - On Apocalyptic Golf in Lars von Trier and Richard Kelly”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Melancholia Golf - On Apocalyptic Golf in Lars von Trier and Richard Kelly”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Melancholia Golf - On Apocalyptic Golf in Lars von Trier and Richard Kelly”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “22 January, 2018”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 22 Jan 018 (deleted post); JBR; Kenneth Rexroth, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, at Bop Secrets; JBR; Harmony Holiday, “An Artist’s Guide to Herbs: Sarsaparilla”, at BOMB, 23 Jan 018; JBR; Rebekah Sager, “The Guy Who Played Barney the Dinosaur Now Runs a Tantric Sex Business”, at Vice, 23 Jan 018; JBR; Suzanne Simard, “How trees talk to each other”, at TED; Gershom Scholem, “On Lament and Lamentation” (trs. Lina Barouch and Paula Schwebel), at Academia.edu; JBR; Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus; Isaac Pool and Jeanine Oleson, “Dorito Divas: Isaac Pool Interviewed by Jeanine Oleson”, at BOMB, 25 Jan 018; Sesshu Foster, “Dear Poet of the Universe”, at Open Space, 24 Jan 018; JBR but see Nadine Schlieper and Robert Pufleb, Alternative Moons, at Alternative Moons]

A wise woman said this, and the next time someone tells me age is just a number I'm going to repeat it to them

Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.”

Thank you for everything, Ms Le Guin. RIP.

 

"Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)" by Trevor Paglen - reposted from The New Inquiry

“Winona”
Eigenface (Colorized),
Labelled Faces in the Wild Dataset
2016

I.

OUR eyes are fleshy things, and for most of human history our visual culture has also been made of fleshy things. The history of images is a history of pigments and dyes, oils, acrylics, silver nitrate and gelatin–materials that one could use to paint a cave, a church, or a canvas. One could use them to make a photograph, or to print pictures on the pages of a magazine. The advent of screen-based media in the latter half of the 20th century wasn’t so different: cathode ray tubes and liquid crystal displays emitted light at frequencies our eyes perceive as color, and densities we perceive as shape.

We’ve gotten pretty good at understanding the vagaries of human vision; the serpentine ways in which images infiltrate and influence culture, their tenuous relationships to everyday life and truth, the means by which they’re harnessed to serve–and resist–power. The theoretical concepts we use to analyze classical visual culture are robust: representation, meaning, spectacle, semiosis, mimesis, and all the rest. For centuries these concepts have helped us to navigate the workings of classical visual culture.

But over the last decade or so, something dramatic has happened. Visual culture has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has largely become invisible. Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop. The advent of machine-to-machine seeing has been barely noticed at large, and poorly understood by those of us who’ve begun to notice the tectonic shift invisibly taking place before our very eyes.

The landscape of invisible images and machine vision is becoming evermore active. Its continued expansion is starting to have profound effects on human life, eclipsing even the rise of mass culture in the mid 20th century. Images have begun to intervene in everyday life, their functions changing from representation and mediation, to activations, operations, and enforcement. Invisible images are actively watching us, poking and prodding, guiding our movements, inflicting pain and inducing pleasure. But all of this is hard to see.

Cultural theorists have long suspected there was something different about digital images than the visual media of yesteryear, but have had trouble putting their finger on it. In the 1990s, for example, there was much to do about the fact that digital images lack an “original.” More recently, the proliferation of images on social media and its implications for inter-subjectivity has been a topic of much discussion among cultural theorists and critics. But these concerns still fail to articulate exactly what’s at stake.

One problem is that these concerns still assume that humans are looking at images, and that the relationship between human viewers and images is the most important moment to analyze–but it’s exactly this assumption of a human subject that I want to question.

What’s truly revolutionary about the advent of digital images is the fact that they are fundamentally machine-readable: they can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time. A photograph shot on a phone creates a machine-readable file that does not reflect light in such a way as to be perceptible to a human eye. A secondary application, like a software-based photo viewer paired with a liquid crystal display and backlight may create something that a human can look at, but the image only appears to human eyes temporarily before reverting back to its immaterial machine form when the phone is put away or the display is turned off. However, the image doesn’t need to be turned into human-readable form in order for a machine to do something with it. This is fundamentally different than a roll of undeveloped film. Although film, too, must be coaxed by a chemical process into a form visible by human eyes, the undeveloped film negative isn’t readable by a human or machine.

The fact that digital images are fundamentally machine-readable regardless of a human subject has enormous implications. It allows for the automation of vision on an enormous scale and, along with it, the exercise of power on dramatically larger and smaller scales than have ever been possible.

Lake Tenaya
Maximally Stable External Regions; Hough Transform
2016

II.

Our built environments are filled with examples of machine-to-machine seeing apparatuses: Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) mounted on police cars, buildings, bridges, highways, and fleets of private vehicles snap photos of every car entering their frames. ALPR operators like the company Vigilant Solutions collect the locations of every car their cameras see, use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to store license plate numbers, and create databases used by police, insurance companies, and the like.[footnote: James Bridle’s “How Britain Exported Next-Generation Surveillance” is an excellent introduction to APLR.] In the consumer sphere, outfits like Euclid Analytics and Real Eyes, among many others, install cameras in malls and department stores to track the motion of people through these spaces with software designed to identify who is looking at what for how long, and to track facial expressions to discern the mood and emotional state of the humans they’re observing. Advertisements, too, have begun to watch and record people. And in the industrial sector, companies like Microscan provide full-fledged imaging systems designed to flag defects in workmanship or materials, and to oversee packaging, shipping, logistics, and transportation for automotive, pharmaceutical, electronics, and packaging industries. All of these systems are only possible because digital images are machine-readable and do not require a human in the analytic loop.

This invisible visual culture isn’t just confined to industrial operations, law enforcement, and “smart” cities, but extends far into what we’d otherwise–and somewhat naively–think of as human-to-human visual culture. I’m referring here to the trillions of images that humans share on digital platforms–ones that at first glance seem to be made by humans for other humans.

On its surface, a platform like Facebook seems analogous to the musty glue-bound photo albums of postwar America. We “share” pictures on the Internet and see how many people “like” them and redistribute them. In the old days, people carried around pictures of their children in wallets and purses, showed them to friends and acquaintances, and set up slideshows of family vacations. What could be more human than a desire to show off one’s children? Interfaces designed for digital image-sharing largely parrot these forms, creating “albums” for selfies, baby pictures, cats, and travel photos.

But the analogy is deeply misleading, because something completely different happens when you share a picture on Facebook than when you bore your neighbors with projected slide shows. When you put an image on Facebook or other social media, you’re feeding an array of immensely powerful artificial intelligence systems information about how to identify people and how to recognize places and objects, habits and preferences, race, class, and gender identifications, economic statuses, and much more.

Regardless of whether a human subject actually sees any of the 2 billion photographs uploaded daily to Facebook-controlled platforms, the photographs on social media are scrutinized by neural networks with a degree of attention that would make even the most steadfast art historian blush. Facebook’s “DeepFace” algorithm, developed in 2014 and deployed in 2015, produces three-dimensional abstractions of individuals’ faces and uses a neural network that achieves over 97 percent accuracy at identifying individuals– a percentage comparable to what a human can achieve, ignoring for a second that no human can recall the faces of billions of people.

There are many others: Facebook’s “DeepMask” and Google’s TensorFlow identify people, places, objects, locations, emotions, gestures, faces, genders, economic statuses, relationships, and much more.
In aggregate, AI systems have appropriated human visual culture and transformed it into a massive, flexible training set. The more images Facebook and Google’s AI systems ingest, the more accurate they become, and the more influence they have on everyday life. The trillions of images we’ve been trained to treat as human-to-human culture are the foundation for increasingly autonomous ways of seeing that bear little resemblance to the visual culture of the past.

Left: “Goldfish”
Linear Classifier, ImageNet Dataset
2016

 

Right: ?“Fire Boat”
Synthetic High Activation, ImageNet Dataset
2016

III.

If we take a peek into the internal workings of machine-vision systems, we find a menagerie of abstractions that seem completely alien to human perception. The machine-machine landscape is not one of representations so much as activations and operations. It’s constituted by active, performative relations much more than classically representational ones. But that isn’t to say that there isn’t a formal underpinning to how computer vision systems work.
All computer vision systems produce mathematical abstractions from the images they’re analyzing, and the qualities of those abstractions are guided by the kind of metadata the algorithm is trying to read. Facial recognition, for instance, typically involves any number of techniques, depending on the application, the desired efficiency, and the available training sets. The Eigenface technique, to take an older example, analyzes someone’s face and subtracts from that the features it has in common with other faces, leaving a unique facial “fingerprint” or facial “archetype.” To recognize a particular person, the algorithm looks for the fingerprint of a given person’s face.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), popularly called “deep learning” networks, are built out of dozens or even hundreds of internal software layers that can pass information back and forth. The earliest layers of the software pick apart a given image into component shapes, gradients, luminosities, and corners. Those individual components are convolved into synthetic shapes. Deeper in the CNN, the synthetic images are compared to other images the network has been trained to recognize, activating software “neurons” when the network finds similarities.

We might think of these synthetic activations and other “hallucinated” structures inside convolutional neural networks as being analogous to the archetypes of some sort of Jungian collective unconscious of artificial intelligence–a tempting, although misleading, metaphor. Neural networks cannot invent their own classes; they’re only able to relate images they ingest to images that they’ve been trained on. And their training sets reveal the historical, geographical, racial, and socio-economic positions of their trainers. Feed an image of Manet’s “Olympia” painting to a CNN trained on the industry-standard “Imagenet” training set, and the CNN is quite sure that it’s looking at a “burrito.” It goes without saying that the “burrito” object class is fairly specific to a youngish person in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the modern “mission style” burrito was invented. Spend a little bit of time with neural networks, and you realize that anyone holding something in their hand is likely to be identified as someone “holding a cellphone,” or “holding a Wii controller.” On a more serious note, engineers at Google decided to deactivate the “gorilla” class after it became clear that its algorithms trained on predominantly white faces and tended to classify African Americans as apes.

The point here is that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-machine visual culture, we need to unlearn how to see like humans. We need to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like. But it’s not just as simple as learning a different vocabulary. Formal concepts contain epistemological assumptions, which in turn have ethical consequences. The theoretical concepts we use to analyze visual culture are profoundly misleading when applied to the machinic landscape, producing distortions, vast blind spots, and wild misinterpretations.

(Research Image)
“Disgust”
Custom Hito Steyerl Emotion Training Set

VI.

There is a temptation to criticize algorithmic image operations on the basis that they’re often “wrong”–that “Olympia” becomes a burrito, and that African Americans are labelled as non-humans. These critiques are easy, but misguided. They implicitly suggest that the problem is simply one of accuracy, to be solved by better training data. Eradicate bias from the training data, the logic goes, and algorithmic operations will be decidedly less racist than human-human interactions. Program the algorithms to see everyone equally and the humans they so lovingly oversee shall be equal. I am not convinced.

Ideology’s ultimate trick has always been to present itself as objective truth, to present historical conditions as eternal, and to present political formations as natural. Because image operations function on an invisible plane and are not dependent on a human seeing-subject (and are therefore not as obviously ideological as giant paintings of Napoleon) they are harder to recognize for what they are: immensely powerful levers of social regulation that serve specific race and class interests while presenting themselves as objective.

The invisible world of images isn’t simply an alternative taxonomy of visuality. It is an active, cunning, exercise of power, one ideally suited to molecular police and market operations–one designed to insert its tendrils into ever-smaller slices of everyday life.

Take the case of Vigilant Solutions. In January 2016, Vigilant Solutions, the company that boasts of having a database of billions of vehicle locations captured by ALPR systems, signed contracts with a handful of local Texas governments. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the deal went like this: Vigilant Solutions provided police with a suite of ALPR systems for their police cars and access to Vigilant’s larger database. In return, the local government provided Vigilant with records of outstanding arrest warrants and overdue court fees. A list of “flagged” license plates associated with outstanding fines are fed into mobile ALPR systems. When a mobile ALPR system on a police car spots a flagged license plate, the cop pulls the driver over and gives them two options: they can pay the outstanding fine on the spot with a credit card (plus at 25 percent “service fee” that goes directly to Vigilant), or they can be arrested. In addition to their 25 percent surcharge, Vigilant keeps a record of every license plate reading that the local police take, adding information to their massive databases in order to be capitalized in other ways. The political operations here are clear. Municipalities are incentivized to balance their budgets on the backs of their most vulnerable populations, to transform their police into tax-collectors, and to effectively sell police surveillance data to private companies. Despite the “objectivity” of the overall system, it unambiguously serves powerful government and corporate interests at the expense of vulnerable populations and civic life.

As governments seek out new sources of revenue in an era of downsizing, and as capital searches out new domains of everyday life to bring into its sphere, the ability to use automated imaging and sensing to extract wealth from smaller and smaller slices of everyday life is irresistible. It’s easy to imagine, for example, an AI algorithm on Facebook noticing an underage woman drinking beer in a photograph from a party. That information is sent to the woman’s auto insurance provider, who subscribes to a Facebook program designed to provide this kind of data to credit agencies, health insurers, advertisers, tax officials, and the police. Her auto insurance premium is adjusted accordingly. A second algorithm combs through her past looking for similar misbehavior that the parent company might profit from. In the classical world of human-human visual culture, the photograph responsible for so much trouble would have been consigned to a shoebox to collect dust and be forgotten. In the machine-machine visual landscape the photograph never goes away. It becomes an active participant in the modulations of her life, with long-term consequences.

Smaller and smaller moments of human life are being transformed into capital, whether it’s the ability to automatically scan thousands of cars for outstanding court fees, or a moment of recklessness captured from a photograph uploaded to the Internet. Your health insurance will be modulated by the baby pictures your parents uploaded of you without your consent. The level of police scrutiny you receive will be guided by your “pattern of life” signature.

The relationship between images and power in the machine-machine landscape is different than in the human visual landscape. The former comes from the enactment of two seemingly paradoxical operations. The first move is the individualization and differentiation of the people, places, and everyday lives of the landscapes under its purview–it creates a specific metadata signature of every single person based on race, class, the places they live, the products they consume, their habits, interests, “likes,” friends, and so on. The second move is to reify those categories, removing any ambiguities in their interpretation so that individualized metadata profiles can be operationalized to collect municipal fees, adjust insurance rates, conduct targeted advertising, prioritize police surveillance, and so on. The overall effect is a society that amplifies diversity (or rather a diversity of metadata signatures) but does so precisely because the differentiations in metadata signatures create inroads for the capitalization and policing of everyday life.

Machine-machine systems are extraordinary intimate instruments of power that operate through an aesthetics and ideology of objectivity, but the categories they employ are designed to reify the forms of power that those systems are set up to serve. As such, the machine-machine landscape forms a kind of hyper-ideology that is especially pernicious precisely because it makes claims to objectivity and equality.

(Research Images)
Magritte, Rosler, Opie
Dense Captioning, Age, Gender, Adult Content Detection

V.

Cultural producers have developed very good tactics and strategies for making interventions into human-human visual culture in order to challenge inequality, racism, and injustice. Counter-hegemonic visual strategies and tactics employed by artists and cultural producers in the human-human sphere often capitalize on the ambiguity of human-human visual culture to produce forms of counter-culture–to make claims, to assert rights, and to expand the field of represented peoples and positions in visual culture. Martha Rosler’s influential artwork “Semiotics of the Kitchen,” for example, transformed the patriarchal image of the kitchen as a representation of masculinist order into a kind of prison; Emory Douglas’s images of African American resistance and solidarity created a visual landscape of self-empowerment; Catherine Opie’s images of queerness developed an alternate vocabulary of gender and power. All of these strategies, and many more, rely on the fact that the relationship between meaning and representation is elastic. But this idea of ambiguity, a cornerstone of semiotic theory from Saussure through Derrida, simply ceases to exist on the plane of quantified machine-machine seeing. There’s no obvious way to intervene in machine-machine systems using visual strategies developed from human-human culture.

Faced with this impasse, some artists and cultural workers are attempting to challenge machine vision systems by creating forms of seeing that are legible to humans but illegible to machines. Artist Adam Harvey, in particular, has developed makeup schemes to thwart facial recognition algorithms, clothing to suppress heat signatures, and pockets designed to prevent cellphones from continually broadcasting their location to sensors in the surrounding landscape. Julian Oliver often takes the opposite tack, developing hyper-predatory machines intended to show the extent to which we are surrounded by sensing machines, and the kinds of intimate information they’re collecting all the time. These are noteworthy projects that help humans learn about the existence of ubiquitous sensing. But these tactics cannot be generalized.

In the long run, developing visual strategies to defeat machine vision algorithms is a losing strategy. Entire branches of computer vision research are dedicated to creating “adversarial” images designed to thwart automated recognition systems. These adversarial images simply get incorporated into training sets used to teach algorithms how to overcome them. What’s more, in order to truly hide from machine vision systems, the tactics deployed today must be able to resist not only algorithms deployed at present, but algorithms that will be deployed in the future. To hide one’s face from Facebook, one would not only have to develop a tactic to thwart the “DeepFace” algorithm of today, but also a facial recognition system from the future.

An effective resistance to the totalizing police and market powers exercised through machine vision won’t be mounted through ad hoc technology. In the long run, there’s no technical “fix” for the exacerbation of the political and economic inequalities that invisible visual culture is primed to encourage. To mediate against the optimizations and predations of a machinic landscape, one must create deliberate inefficiencies and spheres of life removed from market and political predations–“safe houses” in the invisible digital sphere. It is in inefficiency, experimentation, self-expression, and often law-breaking that freedom and political self-representation can be found.

We no longer look at images–images look at us. They no longer simply represent things, but actively intervene in everyday life. We must begin to understand these changes if we are to challenge the exceptional forms of power flowing through the invisible visual culture that we find ourselves enmeshed within.

With the Noose Around My Neck 81

Therefore, Yuk Hui’s effort to go beyond Heidegger’s discourse on technology is largely based on two motivations: 1) a desire to respond to the ontological turn in anthropology, which aims to tackle the problem of modernity by proposing an ontological pluralism; and 2) a desire to update the insufficient discourse on technology that is largely associated with Heidegger’s phobic critique. Hui has proposed that we reopen the question of technics, to show that one must consider technics as a variety of cosmotechnics instead of either technē or modern technology. In his book, he used China as a testing ground for his thesis. Chinese cosmotechnical thought consists of a long history of intellectual discourse on the unity and relation between Qi and Dao. The unification of Qi and Dao is also the unification of the moral and the cosmic, since Chinese metaphysics is fundamentally a moral cosmology or a moral metaphysics, as the New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan has demonstrated. Mou suggests that if in Kant we find a metaphysics of the moral, it is at most a metaphysical exploration of the moral but not a moral metaphysics, since a moral metaphysics can only start with the moral. Mou’s demarcation between Chinese and Western philosophy situates his conviction that Chinese philosophy recognizes and cultivates the intellectual intuition that Kant associated with knowing the noumenon, even as Kant dismissed the possibility that human beings could possess such an intuition. For Mou, the moral arises out of the experience of the infinity of the cosmos, which necessitates infinitization as the condition of possibility for Dasein’s finitude. Dao is not a thing. It is not a concept. It is not the différance. In the Cixi of YiZhuan, Dao is simply said to be “above forms,” while Qi is what is “below forms.” We should notice here that xin er shang xue (the study of what is above forms) is what is used to translate “metaphysics” (one of the equivalences that must be undone). Qi is something that takes space, as we can see from the character — it has four mouths or containers and in the middle there is a dog guarding the utensils. There are multiple meanings of Qi in different doctrines; for example, in classic Confucianism there is Li Qi, in which Qi is crucial for Li (a rite), which is not merely a ceremony but rather a search for unification between the heavens and the human. For our purposes, it will suffice to simply say that Dao belongs to the noumenon according to the Kantian distinction, while Qi belongs to the phenomenon. But it is possible to infinitize Qi so as to infinitize the self and enter into the noumenon — this is the question of art. In order to better understand what I mean by this, we can refer here to the story of the butcher Pao Ding, as told in the Zhuangzi. However, we will have to remind ourselves that this is only an example from antiquity, and a much larger historical view is necessary to comprehend it. Pao Ding is excellent at butchering cows. He claims that the key to being a good butcher doesn’t lie in mastering certain skills, but rather in comprehending the Dao. Replying to a question from Duke Wen Huei about the Dao of butchering cows, Pao Ding points out that having a good knife is not necessarily enough; it is more important to understand the Dao in the cow, so that one does not use the blade to cut through the bones and tendons, but rather to pass alongside them in order to enter into the gaps between them. Here, the literal meaning of “Dao” — “way” or “path” — meshes with its metaphysical sense: What I love is Dao, which is much more splendid than my skill. When I first began to carve a bullock, I saw nothing but the whole bullock. Three years later, I no longer saw the bullock as a whole but in parts. Now I work on it by intuition and do not look at it with my eyes. My visual organs stop functioning while my intuition goes its own way. In accordance with the principle of heaven (nature), I cleave along the main seams and thrust the knife into the big cavities. Following the natural structure of the bullock, I never touch veins or tendons, much less the big bones! Hence, Pao Ding concludes that a good butcher doesn’t rely on the technical objects at his disposal, but rather on Dao, since Dao is more fundamental than Qi (the tool). Pao Ding adds that a good butcher has to change his knife once a year because he cuts through tendons, while a bad butcher has to change his knife every month because he cuts through bones. Pao Ding, on the other hand — an excellent butcher — has not changed his knife in nineteen years, and it looks as if it has just been sharpened with a whetstone. Whenever Pao Ding encounters any difficulty, he slows down the knife and gropes for the right place to move further. It is like visiting a tree and having a gentle conversation:

Hello.

I feel very peaceful here and am wondering if it feels differently to you. You are surrounded by trees that, like you, were damaged by fire. What we would call corpses are scattered around you. Do you feel this? Can you describe what it is like?

As should by now have become obvious, “Nothing is lost in translation. Everything was always already lost, long before we arrived. • Translation is an unwriting of the original, which is never the same as itself anyway. • Translation is an asymptote: no matter how close we try to get, there’s always a space between the two bodies and that is the space where we live. • Untranslatability is at the root of our practice. Moments of untranslatability lead directly to untranslation, undertranslation, overtranslation, an excess, extranslation, a lack, a limit, an excrescence, an impropriety, distranslation, retranslation, multitranslation, a mistake, a conflict, dystranslation. An understanding of the potential in not understanding. An ultratranslation. • Ultratranslation — an awareness or hum or breath. • [...] • Ultratranslation leads us to inevitable failure. We believe failure is productive. • We welcome errors and fissures because they are palpable, textured: those snags are as integral a part of the reading experience as the content, the form, the various kinds of information presented by the texts — always plural, as translation is an act of doubling, or multiplying, or reducing, or all of those at once.” • [...]Like, in one scene, I am standing behind my wheelchair, crashing it again and again into the first steps of the stairs. And drawn down from the first landing comes Derek. He advances, and the joint momentum of mine, the chair’s, and his movement draw him up again: up into a niche in the corridor wall, until he stands suspended in the ceiling of the corridor, one foot dangerously perched on the narrow ledge, braced out, supporting himself for a short time, until he has to swing down again, back, and up on the stairs, out of sight. Without a fixed point of naming, the sequence became ‘Orpheus’ — a drawing from the nether(upper)world, a draw that is frustrated by its own energy, and that returns to the beginning position. Sadly, it appears to now be out of print — but used copies are out there. I stumbled across one a few weeks ago at a used bookstore in Tallahassee. I picked it up and did as I always do: I read the first sentence. In the display window a dozen identical female legs are lined up in a row, feet up, the thighs lopped off at the hip joint resting on the floor, the knees slightly bent, as though the legs had been removed from some chorus of dancers at the precise moment that they are all kicking in unison, and put there in the window, just as they were, or perhaps snipped out, in monotonous multiplicity, from some advertisement showing a pretty girl in her slip pulling on a stocking, sitting on a pouf or on the edge of an unmade bed, her torso leaning backward, with the leg that she is pulling the stocking over raised up high, and a kitten, or a curly-haired puppy gleefully standing on its hind legs, barking, with its pink tongue sticking out ... Situated beneath the diaphragm and weighing between 1500 and 2000 grams, the liver is approximately 28 centimeters wide, 16 centimeters thick, and 8 centimeters high. It occupies all of the right hypochondrium, and extends a short distance over into the left hypochondrium. It is reddish brown in color; its consistency is firm but friable. It is marked with the imprint of contiguous organs. The hepatic artery (carrying oxygenated blood) and the portal vein (carrying blood from the digestive tract and nutritive elements which the liver chemically converts) feed into the pedicle located on its lower surface, from which the hepatic veins arise, carrying off bile to the choledoch and then to the intestine. The tall silhouettes of the skyscrapers are all of a uniform color ...

            blue white sky above

            reflected surface, viewed from system

            what appears to be grey tile

            grey whiteness of fog

            curve of moon peeking thru

            next to NO PARKING ANYTIME sign

            sound of

            the invisible ocean

            continually questioning

            its own existence and

            laughing at its own fat waves

Meanwhile, the diamond is pierced by a long black oval edged in red hues. The outside of the diamond is also edged in red, while the pyramid is edged in green. This element of edging hints at spatial dimension, as well as suggests that the forms are casting a faint aura. At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you can make one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don’t. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. But you’re already on it, scurrying like a cock-a-roach. “Ms X claims that she no longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own words.” “He lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow’ part of his own larynx with his food, etc.” It was good to hear that the Mike Kelley Foundation was able to secure more than 30,000 stuffed animal divinities for the GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt show. This should not be called Planet Earth; it should be called Planet Water. ALERT ALERT “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL”. ALERT ALERT. Ha ha. Just kidding. Hello Dear, my greetings to you, please I am Mrs. Muzammil, I do sincerely [something] your indulgence, also seek your humble committed mind in assisting me to retrieve a valuable package, Please understand that my late husband kept this for safe keeping, which shall serve as insurance should in case things goes bad financially for us, we can be able to rely on this asset to get back on our feet. However as bad as things turned out in my country, he was brutally murdered by the Syrian govt. luckily enough me and my kids escaped now at a UN secure camp. We resided peacefully and comfortably at Syria until the civil war broke out. I, my son and my daughter are now displaced, as a matter of fact stranded. Please be informed that the package is 2 items which one luggage contains sum huge amount of money and the other an expensive item which is 150 kilo of Gold. Now the reason why i contacted you is simply because my late husband designated and instructed for the items to be sent to your country to his partner there as I was informed by the personnel, well to be truthful i am afraid i cannot trust his partner because of him insisting to get hold of the valuable items and continuous persistence is quite frightening, this is why I deem it important to contact a neutral person (you) or anyone with a humble committed heart to assist in every way you can to retrieve this package on our behalf, I expect your kind reply to give you more detail concerning this package and what to do. Thank you very much and waiting for your response. So:

            What is the most pleasant experience you’ve forgotten?

            What is the worst?

            Line 1,076 states “I forgot ‘Mentwabe Dawit’.

            Do you remember Mentwabe Dawit?

            Do you remember Angelina Jolie?

            What do your answers suggest?

            What does this MDR Poetry Project imply about history?

            What does this MDR Poetry Project imply about identity?

            What does this MDR Poetry Project imply about idealism?

            What happens when things are pulled apart from each other; what happens when those same things are put back together?

            If you judge that this is not a poem, what does that say about your judgment?

            Line 409 says, “I forgot a god aspiring to decay.” WTF? Imagine a story that may end with this conclusion.

            Interpret “thing” loosely, eye eee, a person, a relationship, a situation, a conversation, a book, a bunch of trees, a dog’s leash, a children’s toy, etc.

            Line 162 is in italics. Why?

            Line 645 says what was forgotten was a list of U.S. Presidents who were “I”’s “father.” What does “father” stand for?

            Line 1,088 says, “I forgot the opposite of fog.” What is the opposite of fog?

            Line 1,072 says, “I forgot who insisted that rupture is not rupture but a widening of        capacity.”

            Does the statement, “All is One and One is All” belie randomness?

            What is the significance of the term “sa[l]vage”?

            What is the significance of Philip Lamantia? of Gayatri Spivak? of Gertrude Stein?

            Line 209 says, “I forgot whether Love was relevant.” Is Love relevant?

            In reverse of rejection revulsion reversion restrospection redrawing review remind recognize reminisce remembrance recollection

            stubbornly persistent contextual negativity beginning knowledge of consistently pleasing immemorial connection

            staging or reconstructing the human qualities which, for us, form the basis of what has been considered the same as

            “it is super R&B and

            a SkyMall classic”

            equal parts fabric, flesh, fur, and art direction

            Early on we encounter this sentence: “(it always seems to be clear on catastrophic days).”

            So please:

1. Note your elevation above sea level.

2. Map the ¼ mile radius around your home.

3. Draw a line.

4. Go to a different elevation.

                        [...]

8. Observe lists #5 and #11. Why did you organize them as you did? Is there such a thing?

9. Stand up and put your arms out.

10. Write a poem that is 3 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now.

Which is to say it’s shaping up to be a shitty year, and I’m not just talking about the weather or those ridiculous hide-the-hand-and-dangle-three-inches-further sleeves on women’s blouses and things. So far we’ve seen shitpost anointed the digital word of the year by the American Dialect Society, and a list of “Shitty Media Men” making headlines when Harper’s announced plans to publish a story about it. Not to mention shitburger, shit show, ripshit bonkers, and shit sandwich. All that was prologue to the latest shit-storm: the revelation, in the Washington Post that the President of these here Yewnited Benighted States had attacked protections for immigrants from what he called “shithole countries” such as Haiti and El Salvador, as well as the entire continent of Africa. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, going on to suggest that the US should instead bring in more people from Norway. Media jumped all over this: Trump is a racist, Trump is a racist. Well of course Trump is a racist. He’s been a racist all his life, just like his dad. This isn’t man bites dog, this is just more dog bites man. What’s at least as important to me about this is apparently lost on all the commentators, as well as on Trump. So let me lay it down for you: if Haiti and El Salvador are poor and troubled countries right now, it’s because of US and other great power policy, which treats them as colonies, or , at best, pawns. And of course race plays a huge part in that. But. To the degree that Norway is a success story, it’s not because it’s white, it’s because it’s a social democracy, which for a whole series of idiot reasons is an anathema concept in the US. If you like Norway, how about a little more social democracy here, people? I know, I know, but I’ll take what I can get. Which is to say that, while shit has been in our lexicon since Old English, shithole is considerably more recent. Its first appearance in print was in a 1629 book, Liber Lilliati, by J. Lilliat, which reminds me of 120 Days of Sodom with its “Six shitten shotes did I shoote in thy mowth that I shot from my shithole.” Not bad. I think 120 Days of Sodom is pretty unintentionally funny, by the way. Whatever, you just sit there and wait for the money

            To roll in. You stare out at the bounding main — remember

            The bounding main? Such are the fantasies of a boy

            From the core where we make the movies about the core

            And the periphery changing places every few minutes,

            The movies with the dances at the end intercut

            With the credits, the movies with the dances, the dances with

            The songs cut with the credit, cut that shit up one more time.

            Kids gather to make mac n cheese. Your worm is your ear.

            It’s amazing how many acres of you can fit into a fanonian

            Poem because what would that actually look like? White

            tea is just black tea that is a baby; green olives turn into black

            Olives; balsamic vinegar is made with raisins. And here

            All I wanted to talk about was that terrible leslac dignti

                        o hawero
                        rrno pori      od bno

                        mrmdly is

                        shig weit yxzaaana y-
                        po


                        cgot ghuin,    it 7

                        shig kulkk
                        n xprty off wiqap

                                    oegi boyy

                        83.
                        sofka

A man in a suit weeps on TV while tho you have plenty of clean silverware you eat with your hands. As for Dale Pendell, Tom, may he rest in joy in Psychotropia. Maybe try some of this magic stuff? Leaving a little flower offering, or tobacco offering at four cardinal points, or by your door every day. It doesn’t take much, some of the old ones said, to push the world over into the right direction. It just needs a little help, from you ... Just leave a little offering; something that makes the world a little more beautiful. If we can get out without making the world worse, we have succeeded. That’s all we need to do, is find a way not to make things worse. That’s good enough. Add a little bit of beauty someplace. You will see. It is OK to be in this state; it’s a very good place. A very good place. And if magical thinking goes against your grain because you’re quote unquote educated, look at it as art, use aesthetic principles. Look at it as art and theatre, and you can do the same thing that way. I dunno, you think that sounds noetic enough? I think it does.

            seer's sage 
                        truth sage 
            dream sage 
                        ghost sage 
            lizard sage 
                        mouse sage 
            soft-footed sage 
                        cymbals sage 
            roller coaster sage 
                        rocket sage 
            wake-up sage 
                        it's-like-a-dance sage 
            silver fox sage 
                        bare light bulb sage 
            waterfall sage

It's like cat paws, soft cat paws pressing, or like a bunch of bird tongues lapping the mind. Or like tiny fingers, the way ivy fingers reach out to climb a wall ... "Bird tongues lapping the mind." We timed them: they hit four or five times per second. It may be the theta rhythm. It's faster than the mushrooms, and older. It is really very simple. Neither animals nor people have consciousness. It is plants that have consciousness. Animals get consciousness by eating plants.

            garden green sage 
                        bitter bitter sage 
            compost sage 
                        sweet smoke sage 
            riverbank sage 
                        shade-leaf sage 
            crenate-leafed sage 
                        come-to-me sage 
            get-the-willies sage 
                        whispering sage 
            get well sage 
                        get fooled sage 
            candle-in-a-wind sage 
                        nobody knows it sage

            at night, it might envelop the house ...

            checkerboard sage 
                        paisley sage 
            amazing sage 
                        calico ribbon sage 
            vortex sage 
                        owl sage 
            shape-shifting sage 
                        skin-walking sage 
            who-are-you? sage 
                        something-is-moving sage 
            get serious sage 
                        look-we-have-come-through sage 
            on your own sage 
                        she's leaving home sage 
            metate sage

            It's not like being high, it's more like being practical

A Taoist sage, in another range of mountains, after many years of studying the secrets of alchemy with his master, feeling fully accomplished, descended the mountain to move into the world. When evening approached, he stopped at an inn. The people at the inn marveled at the light that seemed to hover about him--a sort of magical glow. The sage was chagrined, realizing that his studies were only half completed ... The essence of the Path of Leaves is just a few friends sitting around in a dark room, perhaps drinking a little beer or tequila. Some talking. Maybe some singing or chanting. To how many people does that sound like a good time?

            ... my rootlets, my neural rootlets ...

            Are your eyes open or closed? Are you sure?

The young woman who cuts my hair tells me I have a nice-shaped skull, it reminds her of the typewriter from the movie “Naked Lunch.” One quart goes for $15,000. So there is simply no way that any mortal human, whatever his pretensions, whatever the social apparatus at his disposal could ever really wield as much power as a god. The same is true in the present, inversely. The absolute forgetting of psychoanalysis under current conditions, or even as current conditions, is just what Tom Cohen calls ‘a second holocaust to come.’ There is nothing modern about a trigger warning. Or rather, we have to be careful to remember what the button is, exactly, and how it gets sticky like a liquid gearstick. Perhaps ‘The phantoms of their brains’ had encrypted themselves in a kind of archaic pop resonance that won’t get or go way — arche-pop is the origin of capital; arche-capital is the pop of the origin, the first button. If the continuity argument is the topnote, then we will have to detect the opposite: something that may happen as time goes on. So, if T as function is a King Baby singularity, then, fuck, I dunno, when I heard King Baby I flashed on King Tubby and lost my train of thought. I’m thinking now of an image from your beautiful reading at Pratt: that white paper dress and the footage you projected onto it: a helicopter from the Vietnam War on fire, spiraling into the ocean. I miss Berlin already. I think of it as a future city of two Koreas. Yes. To some day picnic in the demilitarized zone, the way we all shared a blanket in the middle of Tempelhof Airport. Jay was playing a small Korean gong called a kkwaenggwari. I asked if he could create a kind of frenzy sound. He also played a wooden fisha. And he played little bells his father had bought at the Hubbell Trading Post at Navajo Nation. I took this photo on the day of the solar eclipse. Someone brought a colander to our neighborhood park, and thru its shadow on the sidewalk I got multiple suns. I also want to believe that a mermaid rippled through the sky without feet, like the daughter in the poem by Kim Hyesoon, which is based on an ancient song called “Tosolga,” composed in the Silla period, around 760 CE. Two suns appeared side by side and remained in the sky for ten days; the song was composed to prevent any calamity to the kingdom. So two days ago I was walking with my four-year-old daughter over a bridge in our neighborhood. It was early morning. As we neared the end two men crawled up from under the bridge, out of the branches and weeds, their hands first on the bottom railing and then their bodies lifted up and over, faces puffy with sleep, grasses on their clothes. And she stopped as they were coming onto the walkway, saying to them, “Cool, I can do that too” (meaning the feat of throwing oneself over a railing). They didn’t respond, of course. They walked the opposite direction away from us, back over the bridge we had just walked over. They were likely undocumented refugees. They were in a world that requires them to be unseen. Marlena, my daughter, sensing she hadn’t understood something, asked me what they were doing down there. Any world impossible to explain to a child is an unjust one. Which reminds me. I was once part of a guerrilla bridge-climbing group in New York City. We climbed the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 AM. I remember arriving alone at the top of the Manhattan-side tower. Roosting seagulls had shat grass seeds there, and in the dirt accumulated on and between the bricks a meadow grew.

            Often I am permitted to return to a meadow.

            Weeds will inherit the earth.

So I showed your image to my daughter and she said, “A can. Water. A fish. A fish in water! A fish tank with water and a fish ... Those are all the things that are there.” Which is the same as to say, that the main point of Johann Georg Hamann’s Aesthetics in a Nutshell is probably that scripture and history, and indeed nature itself, are all versions of a single text, a single divine writing, and that the purport of that writing depends radically on how the reader approaches it, which in turn never fails to involve the question of who the reader really is. These last two ideas are set forth with perfect clarity, toward the end of Hamann’s text, in a pair of quotations, the first in Latin from St. Augustine, the second in German from Luther. But rather than call Augustine by name, Hamann cites him as “the Punic church father,” with a footnote mark on the word “Punic.” And if one follows that lead, if one descends here into what Rickels likes to call the text’s “footnote underworld,” one is dragged further and further away from anything like a main point. That “Punic” refers to Augustine’s Carthaginian origins, Hamann doesn’t bother to tell us; we’re supposed to know. Instead, he begins with a reference to Johann David Michaelis’s condescending remarks about Augustine’s Latin style, and then jumps, via a pun (what else?) on the word “Punic,” to the idea of “punning” as developed in an early-eighteenth-century English treatise (necessarily English, since “pun” in German is “Wortspiel”) that is variously attributed to Swift and Sheridan, and jumps from there ... You see what I’m getting at, and if you have looked at the main text of the present book, you probably see something of my reasons for ... goddamit ... though for my part, I forever have the problem of longing for my back and arms to be lightly stroked, in a super intimate fashion, by anyone I sleep with, as though nothing gets in the way of sex, or of shitting, so much as God:  

            ... Specifically, I saw her belly fat

            hang in the same way mine hangs: stretch marks

            having loosened the skin such that, in any position

            other than lying flat on my / her back, it sags

            so I watched her belly swing,

            I thought, “I didn’t know she had the same body

            as me ...”

Do you know what the Orbis Spike is? Can you feel it? Does it hurt? What about dinner? What does it cost? Do you hear something whimpering, mewing, crying? What makes this night different from all other nights? Whom shall I say is calling? According to the EDF, 13,522 signatures are needed to protect this majestic bird. Why don’t I just tell you? What is the question of technology in China?

            Is it?

                        Do they?

“Is this the message? / These reactions are analogous / To those of carbonyl / Compounds to a great extent, / As you can see from a list / On the next page — that page wasn’t / Missing, was it” ... Where is the reptile farm? Shouldn’t the 169 pictures in Deutschland (MACK, 2012) be enough? For a long time this building was the tallest on the island. The crowd at the market swelled and multiplied by sheer osmosis over the years, and swallowed the area into its throngs. Do I mean osmosis? I should have paid attention better, but then I got distracted by The Lesser Moons, The Panda Bear, La Reina Batata, the Despondent Horse, a white peach floating in a jar. As I was leaving Buenos Aires I started doing something similar. “We would like to tie them up by the tails,” she says, referring to the dogs, “make kites / before the lanterns turn on.” After this, they moved to St. Petersburg Florida. Within a few weeks of denying this, I am wearing many layers and wrapping myself exaggeratedly with scarves. Why? Because morphologically the root tip (r) and stem tip (s) open into opposed exfoliation along functions of m and g mapped against d. Plant life-tubes develop this conformal symmetry within the branching of sets and sub-sets, but the full system is non-rotational in that r is the mnemonic pre-echo of s. Minus values of g and m form the closed support loop to the plus values (capable of replication), so that with respect to s all r (-g, -m) is permanently been. Plant time 1d, 2d, 3d ... nd (by mirror symmetry orthogonal to all values of g and m) is thus incremental in bilinear format, negative values increasing steadily along the r-axis (-g, -m), whereas mammal time is monolinear only, “negative” values accumulating in respect of successive states of s increasing from r static as zero limit to memory store. Hence, amigo, the not-yet completed negative increments within the r-system of a plan unit comprise the will-been of the double-ended world tube.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics”, at e-flux 86; JBR; Wendy Burk, “Pinus ponderosa (Ponderosa Pine) Mt. Lemmon, Coronado National Forest June 12, 2010 at 10:55 AM”, at Spiral Orb 2; JBR; Antena, A Manifesto for Ultratranslation, at Antena; JBR; Petra Kuppers, Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape; Christopher Higgs, and Claude Simon, Conducting Bodies (tr. Helen R Lane), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Claude Simon Conducting Bodies (1971)”, at DC’s, 11 Jan 018; Stephen Ratcliffe, “1.12”, at Temporality, 12 Jan 018; d.a. levy, “Tombstone as a Lonely Charm”, in The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: The Art and Poetry of d.a. levy (ed. Mike Golden); John Yau, “A Show That Requires a Different Kind of Looking”, at Hyperallergic, 14 Jan 018; (re ROYGBIV, at Kate Werble Gallery); Gille Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (tr. Brian Massumi), at Palmermethode, 12 Jan 018; Jerome Rothenberg, in conversation, 11 Jan 018, and JBR, off the web, 14 Jan 018 (re a Charlemagne Palestine exhibition in LA); Heriberto Yépez, quoted in Sergio Sarano, “A Counter-Interview with Heriberto Yépez”, at Asymptote, 4 Jan 018; JBR, tho the quoted material was from an actual alert, sent out either in error or to jack up fear to get the country closer to war-against-N-Korea-mode, 13 Jan 018; Mrs. Muzammil, email rec’d 14 Jan 018; JBR; Eileen R Tabios, “A Teaching Guide & a Workshop Suggestion”, in her Murder, Death, Resurrection (thanks, Eileen!); Simone White, Dear Angel of Death, excerpt at Ugly Duckling Press; Ken White, quoted by Prageeta Sharma, and Brian Blanchfield, blurbs for White’s The Getty Fiend, at Les Figues Books; lê thi diem thúy, blurb for Nariko Nagai, Irradiated Cities, at Les Figues Press; JBR; Eric Magrane, “Various Instructions for the Practice of Poetic Field Research”, at University of Arizona Poetry Center, 13 Apr 012; JBR; Nancy Friedman, “Word of the week: Shithole”, at Fritinancy, 14 Jan 018; JBR; Nancy Friedman, “Word of the week: Shithole”, at Fritinancy, 14 Jan 018; JBR; Nancy Friedman, “Word of the week: Shithole”, at Fritinancy, 14 Jan 018; JBR; Jasper Bernes & Joshua Clover, “This Is A Goodbye Kiss, You Dog!”, in Götterdämmerung Family BBQ; Wendy Lotterman, “Crush”, in Amazing Grove; Andrea Abi-Karam, The Aftermath; Wendy Lotterman, “Intense Holiday”, “Powers of Ten”, in Amazing Grove; David Melnick, quoted in Mark Scroggins, “David Melnick: PCOET”, at Culture Industry, 20 Apr 05; Uyen Hua, “[TODAY, BRITAIN’S RETURN]”, in a/s/l; JBR;Uyen Hua, “[TODAY, BRITAIN’S RETURN]”, in a/s/l; JBR; Dale Pendell (RIP), quoted in Gyrus, “Remembering Dale Pendell 1947 – 2018”, at Dreamflesh, 14 Jan 018; JBR; Dale Pendell, “Pharmako/poeia The Salvia divinorum chapter”, at Sage Wisdom; Allison Cobb, “Shout at the devil”, in After We All Died; JBR; Dale Pendell, “Pharmako/poeia The Salvia divinorum chapter”, at Sage Wisdom; Allison Cobb, “You were born”, in After We All Died; JBR; David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, “Introduction: Theses on kingship”, in On Kings; Jonty Tiplady, “Achtung Baby: On Getting in Touch with Your Inner Hitler”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Christian Hawkey and Don Mee Choi, quoted in “Don Mee Choi and Christian Hawkey”, at BOMB, 16 Jan 018 (with an interpolated line by Robert Duncan courtesy of JBR); JBR; Benjamin Bennett, “Foreword”, in Laurence A Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis Volume I Only Psychoanalysis Won the War; JBR; Marie Buck, and Diana Hamilton, quoted in Buck’s “Diana Hamilton, Hyperintimate Poetry, & the Machine for Fighting Anxiety”, at Harriet, 16 Jan 018; JBR (it’s the conquest of the Americas combined with the “pronounced dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide centred on 1610 and captured in Antarctic ice-core records. The drop occurred as a direct result of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Colonisation of the New World led to the deaths of about 50 million indigenous people, ...” the end of their farming, reforestation in Latin America, etc. Simon Lewis, Mark Maslin, and others want to use 1610 as the date the Anthropocene begins); Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris; David Lehman, “Twenty Questions”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Environmental Defense Fund, “URGENT: 13,522 Signatures Needed to Protect This Majestic Bird”, email rec’d 18 Jan 018, 9:55am PST; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris; JBR; Steve Benson, Open Clothes, and Brenda Iijima, If Not Metamorphic?, quoted in Thomas Fink, “The Poetry of Questions”, at Jacket 34; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris; Gerry Johansson, re his Supplement Deutschland, at Photobookstore; blurb for Lorenzo Vitturi, Money Must Be Made, at Self Publish Be Happy; JBR; Alexis Almeida, and Roberta Iannamico, quoted in “Alexis Almeida on translating Roberta Iannamico”, at Essay Daily, 15 Jan 018; JBR; JH Prynne, letter to Edward Dorn, 14 Mar 1972, quoted in Justin Katko, “Relativistic Phytosophy: Towards a Commentary on ‘The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts’”, at Glossator 2]

Are all people fucking stupid??? re the Margaret Atwood/#MeToo thing - an article from the Guardian with my commentary added

Margaret Atwood faces feminist backlash on social media over #MeToo

Ashifa Kassam in Toronto

Canadian author Margaret Atwood is facing a social media backlash after voicing concerns about the #MeToo movement and calling for due process in the case of a former university professor accused of sexual misconduct.

 

[He was given all due process. This is exactly how universities work. I spent 25 years working on a university campus and saw more than one misconduct process happen. From what is known about the case that concerns her, the way it was handled was appropriate, according to university policies. Does that mean I like university policies? Not really, but that's irrelevant here.]

 

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Atwood said the #MeToo movement, which emerged in the wake of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, was the symptom of a broken legal system and had been “seen as a massive wake up call”.

However, she wondered where North American society would go from here. “If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers?” Atwood asked.

[Red herring. If women assert that they've been treated badly, and a few men lose their jobs, all western civilization will fall. How many times have we heard that? The same has been said about people of color getting "uppity", about LGBTQIetc. people asking for a baker to make them a cake, about Muslims in Europe and the US, about people who aren't Xtian, etc etc. If this is the best you have, Atwood, you have nothing, nothing at all.]

She raised the possibility that the answer could leave women divided. “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”

The 78-year-old author of The Handmaid’s Tale drew a parallel between these concerns and those who accused her of being a “bad feminist” after she signed an open letter last year calling for due process for a University of British Columbia professor facing allegations of sexual misconduct.

The university’s administration released few details on the case against Steven Galloway, the former chair of the creative writing program, saying only that he was facing “serious allegations”. After a months-long investigation he was fired, but the official findings were never released. The faculty association said in a statement that all but one of the allegations, including the most serious allegation, were not substantiated.

[If the official findings were never released, how does the faculty association know this? Hmmm ... there is something in this that simply doesn't compute.]

In her piece, Atwood pointed to the university’s lack of transparency around the allegations and noted that Galloway had been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.

“The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn’t say anything to defend himself,” she wrote. “A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see.”

[No. He CHOSE to sign an NDA. A fair-minded person would say he didn't have to sign if he didn't want to. And then conclude that they don't know why he did, but the university and he agreed that both they and he would keep their mouths closed. And a fair-minded person would understand that reports in such cases are not made public to protect BOTH the accuser(s) and the accused. And would then assume that the details of the case are none of their business.]

She likened the affair to the Salem witch trials, in that guilt was assumed of those who were accused.

[Witch trials, all of them, not just the Salem ones, WERE conducted according to law and due process. This is a horrible and ignorant example, which doesn't help her case any. The fact that we no longer agree with the way the law worked at that time does not mean anything more than times change and don't. I say they don't because Atwood's bringing up the witch trials here essentially equates #MeToo to the Inquisition and the judges in Salem, etc. Given how we now feel about the Inquisition and those judges, she has just made monsters of #MeToo. People who compare this to a witch hunt or witch trial are doing to women just what the Inquisitors, etc. did.]

This idea of guilt by accusation had at times been used to usher in a better world or justify new forms of oppression, she wrote. “But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained.”

[I used the term red herring above re this argument, please see above.]

Many online took issue with her view. “If @MargaretAtwood would like to stop warring amongst women, she should stop declaring war against younger, less powerful women and start listening,” wrote one person on Twitter. “In today’s dystopian news: One of the most important feminist voices of our time shits on less powerful women to uphold the power of her powerful male friend,” wrote another.

 

Some accused Atwood of using her position of power to silence those who had come forward with allegations against Galloway. “‘Unsubstantiated’ does not mean innocent. It means there was not enough evidence to convict,” read one tweet.

Others defended Atwood. “Genuinely upsetting to see Margaret Atwood attacked for pointing out that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is the key to a civilised society. That has to still be a thing, yes? How can that suddenly be a bad thing?”

[The professor was fired. He wasn't thrown in jail. The university felt it had cause. He signed off on it. If he hadn't he could have sued them. It seems that this has nothing to do with "innocent until proven guilty." So far, since #MeToo has arisen, about 10 rich and powerful guys have lost their jobs. Oh woe, oh woe. It's the end of the fucking world.]

In a statement to the Guardian, Atwood pointed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, echoing an earlier tweet in which she defended her view by noting that endorsing basic human rights for everyone was not equivalent to warring against women.

Her opinion piece, she said, was meant to highlight the choice we now face; fix the system, bypass it or “burn the system down and replace it with, presumably, another system”.

[That's the first intelligent thing she said. The system should be burnt down. I'd suggest she do a little reading to see why. She could do worse than to start with Maria Mies's Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986), and Women: The Last Colony (1988)]

Our friend Julia Lopez painted this for us

Re: The Inevitable Backlash (reposted from Roger Gathman's Limited, Inc.) [the red stuff is mine]

I watched the interview with Catherine Millet on French TV about the “Tribune” in Le Monde against the #metoo moment.

It was an interesting exercise in the rhetoric of reaction.

That rhetoric serves the ideology of reinforcing the power of the establishment [i.e. patriarchal capitalism], and dis-establishing attacks upon it.

Millet uses the terms “victim” and “strength” – as in strong women – in an almost exemplary way. I could almost draw a Greimas square (but I won’t) to analyze her responses.

Millet’s chief rhetorical instrument is to speak of women imprisoning themselves in “victimization.” It does have an unpleasant feel, this victimization. How much better to be strong!

But an odd thing happens as the conversation proceeds. Using the example of a man putting his hand on a woman’s thigh in public transport, Millet reveals that she is a “strong” woman cause it doesn’t effect her, and that the men who do this are pitiable. They are, hmm, victims, and as such they shouldn’t be denounced.

[...]

In the age of plutocracy, the ideology conceals (as is the tendency of ideologies) a contradiction.

On the one hand, public opinion has long been bombarded by the notion that strength is not merely a description of a contingent use of force in a given situation, but is a virtue all by itself. Once we marry the fetishization of strength to the real image of our society, where there is a chasm between a small group of economic winners and the much larger group of economic losers, the worship of strength legitimizes this order – it even ordains a certain shame in the losers. They are weak!

On the other hand, the establishment gets in on the victimization racket itself. Millet’s “pity” for the “guys” is parallel to such rhetorical tactics as making any attempt to limit the power and the wealth of the BIG MEN (to quote Maria Mies), a form of victimizing the successful. Long ago, a conservative mook named Grover Norquist even pushed this rhetoric to urge a parallel between the estate tax and the Holocaust.

[...]

[V]ictims are not some nasty thing that needs to be expelled from the body politic. I have a strong feeling that if the guy in Millet’s case put his hand not on her knee, but in her purse, and drew out her credit card, she’d have no hesitation about going to the cops. Nor would she be deterred by the reminder that she was acting like a “victim” – because, hmm, she was a victim.

I have strong doubts that Le Monde would publish a tribunal decrying the outcry against those who stole from the wealthy, say. It is only a small part of their collected assets! We should not have a witchhunt against frauds or thieves! I can almost guarantee that if the conversation wasn’t about [...] strangers or bosses putting their hands on women’s bodies, or sending them dick pics – but was about robbing male bosses, picking their pockets, breaking into their homes – there wouldn’t be a tv show about it.

[Re #metoo, in the US I'm beginning to hear, repeatedly, the use of the phrase "witch-hunt" ... from men and women (via various media, no one I know says this) ... hmmm ... while it's certainly possible that there may be some false accusations, I don't believe, not for a second, that that's what this reaction is really about (oddly enough, all the people saying "witch-hunt", etc, are really rich.)]