Re: [-empyre-] Exposure

["G.H. Hovagimyan" <ghh@thing.net>]

On Jul 9, 2006, at 12:47 PM, M White wrote:

> Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured
> faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are
> likely to associate exposure with different pleasures
> and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker,
> adjunct, "alien," juvenile, fan producer, and sex
> worker.

gh comments:

Your categories are points of view created by a corporate society in  
which everyone has a role. Your underclass functions as the chaotic  
miasmic countervalence or "other." You play right into the major  
discourse of Western Techno-culture. You re-inforce it.  In another  
culture people might be categorized as, sinners, knights, peasants,  
nobleman, etc.. This is the reason why people riot in the Banlieu's  
of France. It 's the reason why the Arab world claims that the  West  
does not respect them. The same age-of-enlightenment supposedly  
dispassionate observer is in reality creating the conditions for an  
oppressive corporate mono-culture. This dialectic presumes that the  
underclass  wants nothing more than to be part of the ruling  
technocrats. It assumes that the Arab world wants a Western style  
capitalist democracy. What if that's not true?  Indeed from my point  
of view people live their lives in spite of the ruling hegemony.
What if one does not have a "will to power?"
You put artists in the successful category that's even more of a  
problem for me. That's perhaps the most interesting of your mistakes  
and exposes the corporate classes point of view. Artist's who play  
the mercantile game of the art market are accepted by the  
technocrats. Those who don't are ignored or perhaps they must pick  
another category such as faculty member or maybe adjunct.
I have a colleague who is an artist and runs a major artists'  
alternative web site here in New York. Since this is America, there  
is little or no funding for experimental art endeavors no matter how  
beneficial they might be to the society at large. He is totally  
without money and has been sleeping on my couch for a year.  He is  
living the life of an anarchist nomad. He is not young. This is not a  
romantic choice.  He doesn't fit into one of your categories. He is  
in a non-category perhaps akin to Hakim Bey's temporary autonomous  
zone. Your analysis of exposure is so incredibly trite it's  
laughable. It's a position born of privilege. It has the same sense  
as Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant and playing as a milk  
maid. Another romantic choice from a different era.
The "bare life" of the 21st century is a life that is lived in spite  
of the military-entertainment complex. It is a life that is not  
incorporated or crushed by the the supposed benefits of corporate  
global culture.  As an artist I insist that I live my life without  
categories. That is freedom. My colleague who sleeps on my couch  
lives in a zone of bare life. I make art that defies categories. My  
ongoing digital performance piece RANTAPOD <http:// 
spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod> is a stripping away to bare life. The  
corporate art market an the military-entertainment complex don't have  
a mechanism to include this work. It is significant and exists in  
spite of it being outside the realm of corporate categories. It is  
only by a lucky circumstance that I am not the one who is sleeping on  
the couch in someone else's home.


G.H. Hovagimyan
http://nujus.net/gh/
http://post.thing.net/gh/