[-empyre-] from the [alter]south

[Johannes Birringer]

Simon

for a moment I thought you were serious, here, asking us to collaborate, after
you mentioned that things (the discussion) were elusive ("I've found little to hold on to so far in the discussion. 
Generalities  and inter-institutional affirmations, methodologies and literal  narrations, very little humour or play... maybe a little irony.")
- which i agree with, i found last month too elusive and self-affirmative and became a bit depressed – 
at least I thought you were critical of the elusiveness,  and perhaps even when not couched in theory and philosophy, but 
tending towards the usefully concrete - say what Alonso+Craciun hinted at without fully showing the ways of doing with us (i am reading now
the website http://formasdehacercolectivo.wordpress.com/) – , you now suggest, Simon, that the critical object may not be there
even though it ought to be by "sheer necessity."   

...  am trying to read you,  your paradoxical style is playful and sometimes maddening, I went last night to collaborate with you
in the [alter]south and probably  -for an hour -  read your letter to the visitor of your home - http://squarewhiteworld.com/dear-visitor/ 
-   but you couldn't hear me over the roar of the river.

and Ana, I worry you overestimate, i have no intuitive interest theorizing (or linking theory and practice)  collaboration, collaborative
alliances, networks, "artfully catalysed evaporations" as Simon correctly analyzes them under current economic and corpocratic
conditions. Collaboration is infuriating, and many gestures are futile, thus more infuriating, whatever the nice techniques.


I agree with you, it is necessary, and we do.  and we know it is expedient. 
and we protest loudly that we do, here and there, and someone will possibly do it yesterday at the Venetian thing, 
or in Tacuarembó.

but we are not in fact at a place where rivers meet.


with regards
Johannes Birringer




[Simon schreibt]

 
It is necessary to collaborate. It is expedient to collaborate. You 
can't escape the future.

The object attains criticality when we say, I can't go on. Let us go on.

Or: the left can't go on, can't go on in this pique-assiette magpie 
piecemeal ideological supermarket fashion, branding itself 
anti-capitalist, but not staying still long enough to metamorphose: the 
Maoist gang - Badiou, Zizek, the rest - say they represent a 
constructive alternative - collaborate on the same - to the last 25 
years of destructive, fragmented leftist project, after the 'loss' of 
RES, but without the constructivism that is always on the ground.


Surpassed by events - in the Badiou sense - there is an occupation of 
the event, an attempt to stop. To frame a new kind of listening. ... 
Corporatisation - of education - health - social services - and 
corporate capture of innovation and creativity - pass by without a 
single event (in the Deleuze sense), without the necessity of rupture. 
We are very busy sewing back up the curtain, suturing back up the 
corpus, saving nine.

So let us go on. But how? Professionally? Playing the game of expediency 
but finding the necessity to plant the bomb underneath it - in the ground?

The critical object is there by sheer necessity. Not necessarily 
singular, it demands a minoritarian consensus, a little pause, an hiatus 
amongst us: I have felt /this/? Have you? ... the voices tell me to do 
this. Do they you too? Must we? We /must/!

I am thinking about the Aufhebung onto the political plane where some of 
us are not so strong in the upper body but think anyway we need to lift 
ourselves up to this level which exists purely to cancel our own places 
within it. By cancelling, deriding, not paying for, removing the 
contexts and circumstances around us from which we derive our power, our 
politics, our necessity. Into which we plug. But this derivation, seen 
as a secondary surface affect, is the event itself: a project of 
propinquity.

So art must talk in a certain way to pretend it is in order to be. And 
educators must pay for the pay they receive in a lip service to the 
institutional worlds. And now corpocracy grabs artists and teachers from 
their ground, de-institutionalising them, mocking the institution, if 
not razing it from the political landscape, skyline.

Who is there to answer to? what is now the critical exigency? the 
emergency?

Does it demand a restoration of the institution or another form of 
building within the institution, a form of parasite that the institution 
only played host to? (With the emphasis on play.) The parasite is 
already there in our collaboration, I would suggest. But it is become 
equally vulnerable as the institution itself.

I would ask that "an evaporation of the critical object" is understood 
literally: there are indeed residues, and sometimes when I work with you 
beads of sweat, but they are not from the work of collaboration, we are 
stone to ignore the precipitation of air in atomies of criticality, on 
our bodies, our things, our colleagues. General all over and a product 
of an artfully catalysed evaporation, a hotplate, blood, a man suspended 
above it, a woman, a dripping. Calling attention to what is being 
incorporated from this evaporation. It is on us. To find the necessity 
of the gesture that will make it more than representation, more than 
representative.


Expand further.


Best,
Simon Taylor
www.squarewhiteworld.com