[-empyre-] Compulsion

[h w]

So, to pick where I left off and go somewhere else.
One of my favourite artists is a friend of mine, Ellen Quinn. Throughout the 1980s she made these HUGE drawings using copper pencils and carbon. She would create these ghostly reflective images. They ranged from 1 x 2 meter to 3 x 3 or even larger. And they would be covered in multiple layers of copper pencils. She had an electric sharpener and went through boxes by the dozen. I have a miniature sketch in copper she made for me a number of years ago - three crows one above the other, but increasingly transparent. Stunning work. Spending hours covering paper with copper pencil - I imagine that was instant flow material, giant seas of copper, one line at a time. I could see spending night after night covering these huge sheets of paper with copper and drawing in with carbon, etching into the metallic sheets and wresting an image out of it. Spending month after month making these giant drawings. We call it art. I certainly do.
That's a repetitive task that results in a communication. The repetition creates value, as it underlines the determination and authenticity of the artist - something we commonly crave in art.
There's a young woman name Rachel Flowers. She has been blind from birth. She is also a keyboard prodigy. Shortly after turning 18, she made a video of her playing Steve Reich's "Piano Phase" (which is normally for two pianos) as a solo piano work. She learned to play it by ear, as it's not available in Braille.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG0eKE1LVgE
In an interview, Steve Reich said that the repetitive nature of his music has roots in his childhood during World War II, where he spent a lot of time on trains. For him modernity was machines doing repetitive things quickly and exactly - everything worked. He also noted that if he, like some of his contemporaries, had grown up in bomb shelters, he might have had a different opinion of machines.
The Puritan Work Ethic is distilled in Taylorism - the efficient movement of bodies with machines creating a "work virtue" of maximised productivity. People who can tolerate repetitiion can become more effective workers, and thus more virtuous workers, resulting in promotions, pay raises, or at least an attaboy or two. The "human" is refined into cyborg. The Cyb part is dependent on an industrial base, which in turn operates from Taylorist principles. The Org part is a necessary adjunct to the Cyb and decentered. Humanity's ontological status is flattened and replaced with an assemblage of "something else's" - a variety of proxies, simulacra, fictions, and differances.
Thus delayed and complexified, this assemblage adds to the complexity of the host society, as a response to reduced resources. The extraction and processing of these resources is then subject to labour, which is Taylorised. Unable to acquire resources privately, and cities having long ago exhausted their local stocks, local production of resources, and food, they are forced to Require the importation of these resources. This importation is compulsory, and their production is produced in repetitive motions and processes, thusly forcing others into the same lifestyle and means of production.
Thus, repetition is a source of work.
Compulsivity is rewarded.

Rachel's an amazing piano player.

I could have mapped all this out last week, but 
I figured a consistent stream, a flow, would be of greater value than a nice boxed set of ideas.

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