It's a wonderful life (1)

1  lying (on the carpet).   Shall we say for the sake of brevity, utopia and truth that 'home' is a place where one can be bored without having to give account; and, for sake of brevity, utopia and truth, 'housing', it's encasement?   Shall we say, it is a place to relax; a place to share a joke; a place steeped in promised-fulfilled comfort zones or rough-riding nights (with willing players at hand); a place to be perfectly and completely ill; to read a book (or write one); a place to wander; a place to fuck; a place to hide, re-group, bathe, play drums, remember the 'I' of me or the 'you' of they without penalty of death, unwanted humiliation or shame.   (Well, maybe this kind of 'home' exists only in bathrooms with doors firmly shut). Let us dream it as a kind of sumptuous, generous portable fire! this home, this banquet! And when necessary, let it leap from our brains, and desires, and pleasures and wants into some kind of   permanent structure, some kind of perimeter, ready and able to hide, contain, reframe that fire, that ice, wind, drought, that crazy kind of nourishment. (Perhaps this is what Lyotard meant when he so quietly wrote: 'who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love.')

Housing-as-hiding-as-home: mutant knowledge, shape-shifting to fit the needs of its inhabitants.

2  a word of warning.   'Anyone who does not who understand why we must speak   of these things, must feel what we say to be mere trifling.' (2)  

3    vicious circle (part I).   Our doubts form systems, and systems form our horizons; horizons form our paths; and paths, our goals; goals form our experiences; experiences, our doubts; doubts form our systems; systems form our horizons... Stuck in that vicious circle? Don't go blaming your tools (or other logics of instrumental reason).

4  covering a multiplicity of sins (perhaps). How did you begin your journey? With eyes aglow and tail a-wagging or were you forced by great gulfs of war, famine, gangland terror? Perhaps it was a family life not quite up to scratch; or maybe you were a wolf, running hungry with the pack? Perhaps you are a freedom fighter (or an artist or deserter or all three)? Perhaps your bravery/ cowardice/ complicity makes you think you are: invisible.   Then again (and instead), perhaps you are just very scared; or perhaps, just maybe, you are not scared enough.   Hindsight is not just 20-20 vision; and romanticism is not just for fools and horses.

5    on the dark side (of the moon); sense-certainty as vicious circle (part II).   Perhaps what propels your every move is a certain sense of discipline; a certain sense of lust, a certain sense of ambition , one rooted in neither love nor money.   A certain kind of (bureaucratic) intelligence, this certain sense of discipline and order: a certain kind of fear, a certain kind of cruelty. A certain kind of paranoia, we so nonchalantly call: management.

6  in between engagements.   Access to washing machines can be a luxury for some, especially for those who find themselves walking the streets -   with no cover against all that pigeon shit.

7  private culture/public nature:(Cheshire cat).   Have you noticed that privacy has gone all post-modern? Slipping and sliding through the public sphere(s) rather than opposed to it; secretly but overtly adorned now in one outfit, now in another; sometimes wearing the all too fashionable axes of evil garments (truth and will and God is On Our Side outfits); sometimes wearing only the Emperor's new clothes?    Diverse cultural memories take flight and scatter into the void, and in their sacred places: the resurrection of a homogeneous memory, a singular public memory, a unilateral laugh.    A funny kind of security, this inverse resurrection of the age-old nature/culture divide; an odd kind of historical clarity; a peculiar kind of nationalism, this newborn oxymoron 'public nature': simultaneously itself, its Other, and its synthesized brand-name naming(s), which in turn form the groundless grounds and heightless heights for both its lacks and its excesses.

8  dream home (house/hungry/harm) .   Close your eyes and picture yourself in the dream home of your dreams! Or perhaps you are worried you will never get there! Or perhaps you are already in it!   Is your household dream vision a foreseeable expression of your own hard work and sweat, a collective effort, or just a roll of the dice? Maybe it is all three.    In a fit of depression, I should like to say 'only the roll of the dice'; in collective wolf mode, I should prefer to say 'the pack's own doing'; in being the bold and the beautiful, I should like to say 'a good architect'.

9  acoustic curiosity. May I have this next dance? Shall we swirl 'round the room, intoxicated by the rhythm codes of the browns, the blues and yellows, caught only by our grinding hips and slick two-step moves?   Perhaps in this swirl we shall begin to trust (if we must trust at all), in the hardly audible knowledge sounds of voice and guts and laughter-sweats.   Put on those dancing shoes!

10     fluid dynamics: It's been a long, hard day at (a) work; (b) play; (c) fill in the blank.   Tiredness starts at the back of the neck, life being rather a grind, repetitive, monotonous and a little bit grey.   As I enter my house, I realise I'm entering the home of my youth, a kind of neo-suburban-military split-level affair, snug, uniformed, sometimes green and tucked away in a ticky tacky county as part of a ticky-tacky city, surrounded by a series of ticky-tacky confederate states, just a few miles south of the Mason-Dixon line.   It is here I where I learn what it means to be a Yankee and how not to fit in.   It is here where I learn how to skateboard, my finest achievement being able to go downhill at top speed: on my head.   It is here where I learn how to play 'doctor' and where I start my very first period.   It is here where I open the door to this house, all red walled and blue carpeted, with my mother sitting at a table or on the couch.   I am always shocked to see her - as she is dead - nevertheless, we have the same conversation, time after time, door after door: 'My God! You're alive!' I shout in (a) joy; (b) grief; (c) horror.   I run to her hugging her, alternatively as a grown adult, alternatively as a child, hugging her, hugging her! 'It's okay, dear,' she gently responds, running her fingers through my hair, 'When realised I was alive, I simply opened the casket and came home.'

11     light switch (I). First, the mathematical problem of certainty: Did you know that the square root of any positive number after zero is eventually - I mean, after awhile (that is, at least to nine digits, sometimes rounded up or down) - always and without fail equal to: 1?    Peculiar, though not fascinating, except to the very few.   Indeed, probably only to those with calculators and extra time on their hands, bored with some other administrational task (say, figuring out the law of averages). But, with the aid of light avoidance techniques - blank stares, self-abuse, whimsy, for example - surprising things can be accomplished! And even with the most simple of calculators!   Like pressing the magic ? [square root] button enough times until a 1 emerges from any (positive) anonymous chaos.

12     light switch (II).     Second, the mathematical problem of uncertainty, that nagging little problem presented by irrational numbers and their friends (möebus strips, string theories, relativity, fragmented infinities, surface structure circuitries, quanta, and other tidal waves-dots-webs, 3D game boards and their ilk).   Despite the aging fact that Gödel shows, unrelentingly, how uncertainty is neither void nor 'Other' nor imaginary friend nor utopian option of the Real, the consequences of his theorem still eludes our grasp.   On the other hand, perhaps we should just run back to our nice little calculators, and avoid trespassing onto these mathematically peculiar swamplands of tension and delight: I should like to say: No! (but without so much certainty).

13  fluid dynamics.   Before her death it was David, and before his, it was Lorne; Michael (a flaming queen), a couple days earlier... I used to borrow Ricky's leather jacket: now I've inherited it. Danny, Andrew, Tessa, Teddy, Sam (we called him 'Daddy')...   The funeral Alan prepared for himself was particularly riveting (made me think that I, too, should have Gregorian chants and naked people carrying white lit candles, solemnly and in step when my death-time comes).

14  learning how to be [me] .   First riddle of the seven sphinxes: what does 'visual culture' mean to a blind person? Answer: that which lies in the elsewhere of representation, gaze, spectacle.   We might wish to call this 'elsewhere' a matter of installation ; ie, a matter of installing into a singular-zap-instant: a memory; an event, a signature [including one's own signature], the multiple criss-crossed dimensions of a curved time (one could say 'duration') which becomes 'recognisable' in the economy of its 'being there/being here/being with.'   We might want to call this vision an acoustic ; its being made manifest, a poetic , though one ripped away from its Nicomachean Ethics and other Aristotelian moorings of what usually passes for the sacred and the profane.    Perhaps what we are searching for, blindly or otherwise, is a kind of poetic whose 'techne' resembles more closely a queer kind of recipe of the literal, the elemental, the periodic chemical, the gene pool, the mimetic - one shot through with a 'something else' [say the sensuousness of its smell, taste, voice, touch]. A different sense of time -- perhaps a 'cooking time'; even a 'toxic time'(for cooking need not produce something healthy for it to 'work'). Maybe it just boils down to a question of seeing with one's ears, hearing with one's pulse, smelling with one's eyes and etc.   Or maybe it is just a plea to take seriously habeas corpus , 'there shall be the body' for any and all forms of truth games to occur.  

15  re-cycled pride (learning how to be [me]) .    Second riddle of the seven sphinxes: what lies between the supposed rarefied air of genius and the ready-made unity of 'common' sense? The ambitious (social) climber thinks of bridges to their hilltops, and answers: networking! making a name! But perhaps the answer is closer to a dose of wilful conceit and its maligned offspring, doubt and experimentation.   But then this arrogance requires a certain kind of faith, a certain kind of compulsion, a certain kind of certainty, say about one's own ability to know [the whatever] whilst simultaneously accepting that one must take the leap 'out there' for no other reason than that it must be done [now].    A strange kind of juridical move, this oddly disciplined sense of self, this mastering of several-selves without implanting a singular self as master; a risk-taking without dwelling for an instant on the possible disasters of what might happen 'if' the knowing might have been gathered from a whole series of misguided judgements or parochial rumours or community standards. A certain kind of conceit, this kind of faith - Kierkegaard might call it: a certain kind of trembling.

16  the importance of a particular compulsion . Let's say the poetics of trembling involves the directorial voice of   both bearing and saying   'yes' - a 'yes' saying   of the me-selves and the we-selves and the they-selves, tattooed neatly within the parentheses of one's own flesh, history, habit, humour. A kind of dynamic carnal knowledge without the dialectical and etc. end-game of Eden or its apples or attendant serpents, angels or God.   But if faith, curiosity, experimentation, work of art, politics, aesthetics, ethics   of comportment and so on   are to side-step an inherent messianism or even a quasi-messianism which otherwise must be admitted to our pleasant little game of truth, then perhaps the following helpful rules of the game should   be kept in mind: 'don't look down and don't look back'.   Paradoxically, of course, should you follow that unconditional rhythm of that beat, you may end up ruminating without memory, experimenting without doubt, installing without the intensity of a compulsive stylistics. Or, to re-work an old phrase: you may be forced to repeat the grinning nightmares of history, patched   this time (simultaneously) as   tragedy, farce, and sterilised violation. (But now we have secretly sneaked in another way to speak of carnal knowledge, without ridding the picture of its moral imperative!) A risk if ever there was one.

17  the cool factor .   Vanity, says   Nietzsche, is the skin of the soul. Lies, a mark of imagination or even cunning, and if done in the absence of wilful deceit, a matter of supposed innocence.   But what of the cool factor -- that 'unsayable something' that gives off a kind of confidence or style   of knowing (the whatever).   Despite its call to a basic form of signature, law or event, its statement is that of paradoxical inhabitation: the inhabiting of detachment, etched with dry wit, relaxation, sensuous uncaring and the temperate codes of stuttering as a kind of fashion sense.   Dare to say it has little to do with Religion, Politics, or Art and has a whole lot more to do with confronting and accepting head-on a very particular impurity and very particular grammar; that is, the grammatical impurity of the death sentence.   A kind of repeatable knowledge that one is going to die many times in the time span of their mortality, whilst precisely at the same time, one knows very well that one is going to die only once.   Here in the parenthesis of time we so nonchalantly call 'our own life', history pops up as different dress codes, and one must learn how to use/discard/re-cognise those codes not unlike yesterday's T-shirt.

18  digression [or the uses and abuses of kneeling] .   Perhaps it is safer to say that faith and trembling have more to do with the necessity to submit - and not only that! but to know how and when, without knowing "why" exactly, and without knowing to whom or even to what one 'kneels'.   On the other hand, perhaps this kind of faith has nothing to do with kneeling or any other form of submission, and I've just been carried away with trying to explain what happens when I sniff out the uncharted paths in a manner according to my custom, especially when night stealths towards day: the stillness of air! the light! the dew! the quietness of tone!   the possibility to connect a this with a that! Perhaps what I am mentioning has only a tiny micro slice to do with submission - but I mention it anyway, for no other reason than that the combination of light, and touch, and sound, and smell compels me to inhabit my body differently ; now aligned/maligned with a stranger series of curiosities, hungers, expectations, promises, threats.    This has very little to do with losing (or conversely, with finding) 'my' self. It's a peculiar submission; perhaps even a peculiar mastery - this gutter-ground gift, this instant eventness of desire and   pleasure and discipline and wandering :   this holy place of the bended knee. (But perhaps I am confusing the formal requirements of Philosophy and Art and Religion with their bastardised cousins, greed, hunger, curiosity, sloth).   It is a delicate game we are playing, after all.

19  beyond good,   better, and best. You find yourself encrusted in a huge game of chess. What will you do to ensure the Queen or King is protected, especially if you start off as Pawn of even as Rook? Maybe you're already a Queen (or King), but you've been trapped by believing in your own propaganda, or can only think up to move three,   and now have lost all sense of propriety and strategy within the art of this kind of power / game.   Maybe you've lost the entire sense of the game or even of power itself (not to mention its art) for no other reason than that you thought you were playing checkers or   bridge.    Perhaps your real status is as Bishop and what motivates your every step is a peevish hunger to change the status quo's status to something more desirable , say a transition toward saintliness, namely, your own. Knights have their own advantage, what with their declared love for armour, the gallantry of the warrior horse,   and the beauty of its smells.   But whatever position you may occupy on this board, there are two things that will never enter this game:   the faith (or not) in miracles and the importance of trust.

20  old joke revitalised.     Dolly-sheep genetics (not quite) aside, there is now the

(il)legal possibility of cloning humans. So, you arrive at a party, as the old joke used to go, but now, instead of   worrying whether someone might be wearing the same bargain basement outfit, they are wearing your body, warts, bad haircut and all.    This may not be a problem for those workaholics who need to have replicants at their service answering their mail, attending to boring events,   doing the bills, settling old scores.   But what if you don't quite approve of what the 'other-yous' might be doing? Or what if they're having more fun than you are having at the moment you voyeuristically or otherwise watch 'their' goings-on? What if there are so many 'other-yous' floating about that you cannot even keep track of their pathways and actions.   What if you   forget who the original 'you' is.    Plato could never have envisioned this kind of mimesis, not to mention, this kind of 'originality' or 'copying'.    Should we?   Would this constitute a different 'deadly sin', say the 'eighth' deadly sin? Or is this the first deadly sin of a new code of ethics, series of timings, multiple happenings, events, weltanschuungen ?   Or should we just side-step the whole question of sins, time, speed, world views,   altogether? I want to say: 'hey there, wait just a minute! I need some room [time, space] to think!   Let me just be! [all of the me(s)]!   

21  the tired man speaks. (The tired man speaks... In the last mili-seconds of the 'what does it matter', the tired man speaks, wears, brandishes his/her last speck of individuality, possession, dignity).   Hmmm. Haven't we   heard this somewhere before, say in some famous man's remarks about the ability or not to write poetry after the genocidal stamping out of human identities, as so many singular beings (identified, too, with the individual group identity of jew, christian, moslem, gay, mad, whore, gypsy, 'other') were condemned to endure.   A collective head-stone of black ash, smoke and dust, which, as Adorno so morbid-eloquently put it:   wriggled ever skyward from the ovens of   Auschwitz and elsewhere.   I want to say, by saying this: that to want , and to know   that one wants should not be forgotten or thrown away, as if, 'unimportant', 'begging the question'.   For those honest enough to admit it, it remains at the very basis of a new being, poetics, and indeed, politics.  

22.    the cunning of democracy .     Amongst all this dolly-sheep business, and quite distinct from the elemental fascist rules of a massification-game, it would seem possible, indeed probable, that a something 'new' or a something 'else' - perhaps even a something 'better' - is   being invented, born, repeated.    (The spoiled child speaks, unwilling to accept the fascist game as the only game of a massified life left for us to play).   One dreams here of, say, democracy - with echoes of the age old plea-command   to change the subject (or at least to recognise there might be some other agenda at play), especially if the people who are suggesting 'it cannot be otherwise' just happen to be in positions of power.

23.   discursive whoring :   Tell all, reveal nothing. (perverted Heideggerianism) .

24  playing with fire (illusion) .    One must learn the tools of one's trade.   Is it so difficult to surmise from this declaration that if the tools are infinitely complex, multiple, layered, or even (indeed, especially) 'deadly', then they must be 'handled with care'?    A certain coolness, a certain detachment, a certain humour, a certain respect for their toxicity is in order, is   required, demanded. There is no room for concepts like 'morality', not to mention 'the lack' or 'the excess' (though they seem always to creep in, by the by).   These bugbears work off a particular use of contradiction and negation to underscore and value 'difference', 'identity', plurality', 'meaning', 'truth', 'relation', 'the visual'.   In the metaphysics of this move, one falls prey to the now infamous 'excluded middle', which, in its wake, is filled with the aforementioned excesses and lacks, self and Others, spectacles, gazes, and etcetera. But if we take seriously 'the tools of our trade', the only entity able to fill this aporia (and by so doing, makes mockery   of it) is life itself.   Toxic to the extreme; a violent kind of graphic mutilated fleeting 'ready-made' projection, neither excess nor lack;   inhabiting (if only for an instant) its 'being here'.    Perhaps I want to rewrite this 'event' as   violence; its projection: memory.   Its fleeting recognition: installation.   Its very existence: a stylistics.   Its dynamic: a politics.   An a-radical, strategic, politics, gently (or otherwise) renamed: poetics.   But take care! For inhabiting this poetic, where metaphysics bumps up, over, into and alongside its variegated technologies; where history gains a whole new lease on life; where identity gives way to signatures and copies; where speed and distance overtakes time and, indeed, becomes it -means there's always the risk, indeed, the probability, that you will get burned, and burned alive.    

25.   opening. closing. beginning. ending. hypertext.   So now I want to play a game.   Let it not be 'war or peace' (or any of its variations: 'war as peace' , 'war and peace', & etc).   This game will have no known rules (well ... no rules, except one).   The players will be issued seductive little chits of many colours, though none of them primary.   This game will stretch well into the night, with plenty of stimulants for all.   Hairstyles and other cool factors will be considered secondary, though not unimportant.   As it will be taking place worldwide, hyper-linked and net-projected off satellites everywhere, thousands - no, millions! - will be able to place bets on their favourite pawns. The one rule: capture will 'count' only if it occurs using that odd little 15 th century chess invention given over only to the pawn: the rule of en passant.

26.   us (post)postmoderns! In the techno shift which characterises 'our' age (epoch, world-view), meta-narratives give way to libidinal economies   and rhizomatic excretions, or so the new political philosophies pray tell, produce, witness.   Perhaps this means that 'us, (post) postmoderns' are not the slightest bit interested in purity or any of its related paraphernalia: the perfect, the flawless, the pure event, pure transcendence, pure object, pure subject, pure otherness, pure lack, pure violence, pure morality, pure mastery; pure submission.   We dislike the subject of purity; probably dislike even more those who try to achieve it; and we do so with a honed and malevolent vehemence reaching - almost - the pure itself.   But it does not reach it - and it never will.   For this dislike, indeed, this rage, is borne from the intricacies of politics itself: the dirty, multiple, warped flight paths of those cruel humiliations and associated power games we so lightly call 'spice of life'.

27.   guilty /exception.   At the same time, us (post) postmoderns seem to want also to say: 'My position is bound by the square I occupy on the board!'    And not only that! but that 'we are wounded and our mutilated legs/identities/ economies of scale prevent us from advancing but just one square at a time!' Except of course, during the opening volley when, say, the promise seems   'real' or 'new-born', innocent, fresh, witty, virginal: hopeful.    Then the pawn as only a pawn can do, respectfully or otherwise makes its move: twice.

28.   employer .   To whom or to what does this ability/restriction to move one way or ` another, owe its allegiance? I want to say: to long-range Strategy! or to the immediacy of Tactics! or perhaps just Tradition, Habit, Money, Religion! Maybe the one or two-step move comes down to just a Whim   or a Whine or all of the above or something else altogether.    But whatever it comes down to, and despite the one and only rule to our post- post-modern game - ie, the wily use of en passant to win the battle of certainty against all odds or at least most of them - perhaps we cannot, in the final analysis, or even (and especially) in the middle of it, avoid the age-old Machiavellian instruction to the Prince, binaric to its core, sophomoric in its zero-sum logic and crucial to the building of a modern industrialised world; the one every young student, soldier, statesman and street militant alike learns by rote and takes to heart;   to wit: there   will always be 'leaders and led,'   'friends and enemies,' 'axes of evil and good' in order to   sustain or create new power regimes, and indeed, in order to create the very stuffing of politics/movement itself.  

But I want to say: No! That's not right! (though it's not exactly wrong).

29.   quick thinking. That the status quo's status manages to   reproduce   itself in a seemingly infinite series of discrete (or otherwise) power plays, discussions, media blitzes, clever advertisements, 'smart' bombs and other   bizarre/cruel experiments (like growing human ears onto mouses' heads) - and yet remain intimately knotted to a political nostalgia, and not to the very multiple dimensional structures   to which this rapid obsolescence is tied - is not a big mystery.  

30.   irony.   G iven the demands of credit card credit and the slippery economies to which those demands give birth, means that in the end (or in the middle of the end), the only people who will have money in their pockets will be: the poor.    Power will have long since evacuated that domain.

31  a bad smell .    Wouldn't this (either-or{ism}) create a kind of   'brain dead but still alive' moralism rooted to   a time (not so) long ago past - and in some places, not past at all - we might wish to call oppressive ?

32  fluid dynamics..    We might wish to say, then, that the art of warfare is   a 'delicate business'; but what it produces is not.   While it is true that this art produces many things - cruel, saturated, ingenious, dark; it, most of all produces one thing.   And that one thing is the nakedness of death itself; the relentless finality, the no-going-back of life.   One could shed 120 tears for every day of Sodom; one could spit into the wind or prostate oneself forever and always -- or not at all.   One could stamp a foot; one could write three long poems; one could lay down in the street en masse; one could laugh out loud; one could memorialise to eternity all the beauty of all the people! and their cities! and their cultures! gone gone gone! one could replay their anger, their whimsy, their philosophies, their cooking sense, or even the way they look when they wake up in the morning.   But, in the end, it simply doesn't matter:   They are not coming home.   And that's the whole, damn, sickening truth, no matter how you cut it.   Or how it cuts you.

This putrid skin!   Would it not to have ever been so alive!

33.   rehearsal. ' Yea, but I am ashamed, disgraced, dishonoured, degraded, exploded: my notorious crimes and villainies are come to light ( deprendi miserum est [it is a wretched thing to be caught]), my filthy lust, abominable oppression and avarice lies open, my good name's lost, my fortune's gone, I have been stigmatized, whipped at post, arraigned and condemned, I am a common obloquy, I have lost my ears, odious, execrable, abhorred of God and men.   Be content, 'tis but a nine days' wonder, and as one sorrow drives out another, one passion another, one cloud another, one rumour is expelled by another; every day almost come new sun to your ears, as how the sun was eclipsed, meteors seen i' th' air, monsters born, prodigies, how the Turks were overthrown in Persia, an earthquake in Helvetica, Calabria, Japan, or China, an inundation in Holland, a great plague in Constantinople, a fire at Prague, a dearth in Germany, such a man I made a lord, a bishop, another hanged, deposed, pursued to death, for some murder, treason, rape, theft, oppression, all which we do hear at first with a kind of admiration, detestation, consternation, but by and by they are buried in silence...

Comfort thyself, thou art not the sole man.' (3)

34.   relearning how to fly ( same, but different).   Well, if it is true that the age into which we have flung   ourselves (or have been flung) - this age we so euphemistically call 'the information age' or age of (supposedly 'new') technologies -   if it is true that this age is able to re-write the event, the signature, indeed laws around nationhood, societies, bodies, ethics, 'truth' into a whole new massification economy, a whole new   'end-game-now-as-mid-game' of warfare or history or politics or philosophy or art (and all other modernist narratives of science and of life); if it is true that this post- post-modern predicament of ours produces   and continues to produce, invent and accept violent poverty, violent extremes in living standards, knowledge, and access to power   (and the expediential rate at which these extremes seem to be proliferating); if it is true that this post- post modern dispersion of particalised-/wave-lengths of power, micro-powers/ multiply- dimensioned and libidinal bandwidths of power,   and the regularities to which new types of power relations   are made to 'stick' in a way that rips through our bodies and plays itself out as if the Eternal Return of Night of the Living Dead ;   if it is   true that our post- post modern world STILL seems to   be producing fascist agendas left, right and centred,   or vacant identities crushed by instrumentalised reason and all its related paraphernalia; if it is true, worst of all, that we seem always already bent on the sickly path of bombs over bodies -    does not mean that it is doing exactly and precisely this all the time, every time or - more importantly - that   it cannot be otherwise.

I am not dreaming.

Photography: James Swinson, Lambeth, London 2004

(1)Part of this text rehearses in a different guise, several fragments from my Games of Truth: A Blood Poetic in seven part harmony (this is me speaking to you),   (London: University of Greenwich, 2003).   Originally published as an intervention laced throughout the book Housing , ed. Lieven de Boeck, (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Publishers, 2004).

(2)Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, 125, (Basil Blackwell: London, 1974), p. 174.

(3)The Anatomy of Melancholy , in three volumes, (1621), pp. 199-200.

 

Johnny Golding (Sue Golding/johnny de philo) is a philosopher whose research covers the intra/interdisciplinary discourses on aesthetics, media arts, and mathematics under the rubric of 'visual/acoustic poetics'. Her manuscripts include Dirty Theory (2005, forthcoming), Games of Truth : A blood poetics in seven part harmony (2003); Honour (1999), the eight technologies of otherness (1996) and Gramsci's Democratic Theory (1993).  Film and video work has been shown throughout the UK, Europe and US galleries and contemporary arts institutes.  They include In God We Trust (2005); I spy with my little eye (2002); once upon a wormhole (1999). Currently holds a Chair in Philosophy of the Visual Arts and Communication Technologies and is Programme Director for the postgraduate New Media Arts programme: Critical Studies, New Media and the Practising Arts, University of Greenwich, London.