Radical Verses

I had a conversation with Melanie last night about activist methodology. For this project I'm working on, format and tone is important - I'm working on it for selfish reasons, but I'm also hoping to contribute to the already bubbling discourse on aesthetics and life - so I'd like to find a way to present my ideas that won't come off abrasively.

This morning, reading through the Dhammapada, I realized that it was a wonderful model of a radical activist work. Here's a bit from it:

Those who take the non-real for the real and the real for the non-real and thus fall victims to erroneous notions, never reach the essence of reality.

Having realized the essential as the essential and the nonessential as the nonessential, they by thus following correct thinking attain the essential.

So, for now, I'm working with the idea of writing an essay, and then boiling it down into verses, and repeating for every section of this project. I haven't been able to let go of that traditional essay format entirely - I'm a parenthetical statement, constant footnote kind of guy, I need to work with a rhizome of interconnecting statements - but the idea of pairing essays with clean (at least on the surface) verses seems like just the right thing. Douglas Hofstadter did it in his own radical activist work, Godel, Escher, Bach, with his pairing of essays and fantasy dialogs.

And Cole Swenson seems to be doing it in her poetry. Radical verses seem to have just the right amount of ambiguity and room for free play - though, I'm still a fan of the complementary essay. (Swenson scholars seem to be too ;) )

Structuring Aesthetics

I'm going back to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire now that I have the time to give it the attention it deserves. This is the first step into a project I hope to spend a few years on, and that will hopefully materialize at some point (or several points) as an essay or a book - or maybe a generative web-based installation, we'll see what the best format will be. The project is essentially driven by a question that has bothered me for years - since I began to look at what I do creatively in a critical light.

I'm interested in taking a que from Foucault, to examine the patterns and ripples surrounding the production of aesthetic objects. I'm using all those words in a really broad sense - by aesthetic object I mean a painting or a song as much as I mean a community or an event. I'm interested in the deep structure of functional aesthetics - that is, I want to look at how art and artful practice (ideally in the spirit of Derridian play, or Cageian play, but also the artful practice of propaganda, coercion, and other manifestations of power for example) are components of living, how they might produce meaning, or how they might be symptomatic of ideologies. It seems to me that the aesthetic and the functional can't be seperated, and that I'll need to look at one as a component of the other, and the other way around - Myer and I have had some nice discussions on this topic. It also seems like the conflict between the self and the multitude, or the self and the other will be a rich area to look into. I'm launching out from a Marxist base because it feels the most solid - we'll see where I might land.

Wherever it is, I want to arrive firmly in the arena of the real - that is, i'd like to develop a methodology by working through these theories. I'll say plainly that I'm working with an activist's mindset, and I want to come away from this with a toolset I can utilize in my creative work and elsewhere.

After I finish Empire right now I think i'll move onto A Hacker Manifesto - Wark's definition of a hacker as an information producer, and a special emerging class in the information age rubs me the right way.

(ps, i was lucky enough to find the same photo i used the last time i posted about negri, but with more of negri's office visible - hopefully that will be a nice complement to my understanding of his book this time around. i'd like to see a little more of his office ;-) )