event mechanics

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• Change theme, 30 July, Slate 1.0 by Dan Cameron
• Change header image, 30 July, modified image: “Event Mechanics” by Glen Fuller
• Change CHMOD permission through filezilla (so code can be edited in wordpress, not through cpanel), 31 July (link)
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• Address title and header image problem on w/s LCD monitors, see below image:

• Insert bloglines blogroll, 31 July
• Create pages: About, Writing, CV, 2 August
• Fix code
• Transfer old blog, create categories, and clean up database, 30% 31 July, 100% 2 August
• Decommission old blog, began 2 August

So when a microwave blows up it is a bit like when a car engine blows up. I have been driving two separate cars as their engines have pretty much blown up. One was on a new engine in a 240 Volvo and which had a faulty casting of the nozzle for the oil return line (snapped off, dropped all the oil). That was smoky but wasn’t loud or immediate, so it didn’t really blow up. The other was my XD Falcon, sitting on 100km/h on the freeway and one of the cylinder linings broke away from the block.

aRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRL BOOM! chunka chunka…

When a microwave blows up, as I found out tonight, it is a lot more like the XD Falcon’s engine letting go at 100km/h than the Volvo’s whimper. I was half expecting something like this to happen, because my microwave made some nasty sounds anyway. It had made ‘broken’ sounds ever since I bought it. I just assumed it was meant to make those sounds cause it was a cheap ass microwave? When my brother came over he tried to use it once when I was out and when I came back he was all sheepish looking and apologetic cause he thought he had broken it. Think about that for a second, something that sounds broken when it is working. Is this not evidence of theway technologies shape our perceptions? I had to explain to him that it always sounded like this.

NERRRRRRR NERRR NER NER NER NERRRRRRR!

I was looking forward to watching one of my favourite movies of all time, 28 Days Later, on the telly tonight. It was an opportunity to get a few hundred more words on the screen before it came on as the 11pm late movie. I did my writing (Mad Max!), so I walked down to the corner shop before it closed and bought some popcorn, you know, the kind you cook yourself in the microwave. It wasn’t the first time I had used the microwave tonight. Ealier, I had reheated tonight’s dinner from last night’s left overs (beef stir fry, rice), and I actually had two bowls cause it was very nice and I was hungry.

Sitting down in my special chair and getting excited about the movie and some nice hot popcorn, my microwave started making its cooking sound and building up even more anticipation….

NERRRRRRR NERRR NER NER NER NERRRRRRR! BOOM! chunka chunka…

WTF?

…NERR…

OH MY GOD! The microwave! IS ON FIRE! and yet…

NERRRwaaaahooooo clunka chunka

ITS STILL COOKING!!!

NERRRrwaaa…

I leapt from my special chair and my whole fire fighting life flashed before my eyes. Hmmm. None of this information helped me, so I ripped out the power cord! The tragic microwave allowed its glass plate to rotate half way round one last time and then the terrible sound ceased. A wave of dread accompanied the silence as I realised…

THE FIRE IS STILL BURNING!

I looked on through the now-smokey reinforced plate-glass of the microwave’s front door. The embers of the electrical fire slowly reduced to a dull glow. They were the remains of a funeral fire lit by my little microwave. A tribute of self-combustion in its last dieing efforts to serve me some piping hot butter-flavoured microwave popcorn. Oh, my good little commodity!! My gaze was heavy, full of sadness. It was one of the first things I bought in Sydney. Its sound although horrendous and not unlike a couple of Darleks talking dirty while copulating (ok, one Darlek masturbating) made it rather unique. It was a familiar sound, something that defined where home was for now. Poor microwave! Sometimes it was the only noise I’d hear all day made by something else besides me. Well, that is a lie, my computer beeps at me, too.

Zlomislic has a written a massive A-to-Z polemic against Lacan and Zizek. I have not read it all, I have to write the diss, but I’ll return to it later. Here is a little below that draws on Mad Max (actually the sequel, Mad Max: The Road Warrior).

When will the Void be revealed for what it is? Does Lacan or Schelling actually lift the veil so that the truth can finally be seen? Does R.D. Laing come closer to the truth when he asks, “How do you plug a void plugging a void? How to inject nothing into fuck all?” Is the Real really unformed ghastly matter so that there is something in God that is not-yet-God, not yet fully constituted reality? Such speculation can lead into a discussion of Mad Max. God does not send his avenging angels to destroy the evil people who happen to enjoy fast cars, free apocalyptic gasoline, leather and a little pillaging. God does not send his angels to help the people dressed in white, guarding their oil, decked out in hockey gear armor. God sends Mad Max his other son. Perhaps Nietzsche announces it best when he writes, “there is much filth in the world; so much is true. But the world itself is not yet a filthy monster”. Didn’t Max come to realize this point? He wanted some gasoline and in the process gets turned inside out. His trials do not make him angry. He can smile even as he realizes the absurdity of his situation. He drives a truck whose great tanker is filled with sand. He thinks its filled with gasoline. The veil is lifted. The truth is known. It’s only sand that pours out; the sand of time keeps flowing. The sun keeps shining perhaps telling us that its never too late to learn to live and how to be human. But Max does not get on the bus where the gasoline is stored safely away. He knows to beware of the Magic Bus and its Leninist driver who tells his passengers that he has a map to the promised land and that he knows the way there because he has a stack of post-card images and bolshevik trading-cards.

!!!!!!

I am writing the section of my Street Machining chapter on the emergence of Street Machining and I am currently discussing Panel Vanning. It is going to be a killer section of my thesis and I am having a hard time writing it. Besides the straight history element it also serves as a wonderful opportunity to play out what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘profound opposition’ between Saussurian linguistics and Hjelmslevian linguistics. This opportunity has presented itself because of John Fiske’s 1983 work on the semiotics of the beach where he briefly discusses panel vans, which contrasts with Sheaver’s 1983 work on ‘custom street vans’ where she offers a very brief discussion of the aesthetics of van art in terms of the event.

In the section of Anti-Oedipus where Deleuze and Guattari talk about this ‘profound opposition’ between Saussurian and Hjelmslevian linguistics they do this with a series of sentences that begin with ‘because’. I am not sure who the translator had to edit the book, but isn’t it a little bit silly having 10 sentences in a row that start with ‘because’? It could be some wierd French thing that doesn’t translate into English very well? I am tempted to approach their text by distilling the 10 sentences into a couple of points and baricading the distilled ‘becauses’ with references to other texts. From ATP:

“Signs are not signs of a thing; they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold in the course of these movements…” 

Territorialization is basically the affective field of desire as it flows, couples and connects (desire in the immanent productive sense, not the negative, lack sense). A sign then is a tipping point (singularity) for the formalization of a particular configuration of content and expression on two separate planes of de/reterritorialisation. Flows of desire and affective relations are crucial, and so is their stratification (capture) through the continual repetition and contraction into habit.

Often when a new style or cultural form erupts into a scene, what erupts is not the desire that produce a field of the various elements in an assemblage, or the event of the affects that bind these elements into pre-personal relations, but the ability of a particular discursive weapon to intervene into these flows, perhaps simply through the power of repetition, affective relations are habitualised and a given population is cultivated. The task then would be to ask what are the flows (of desire), what are the elements (of the assemblage), what are the affects (of a territory), what are the repetitions (of statements), and, lastly, what is the population?

The kicker, and this really is a kicker, is that the discursive apparatus must not repeat the coordinates of various sign-expressions in the same way, lest the productive capacity of desire wonder off like a virus out of quarantine. Repetition of the same only produces homogeneity and system death: flatline. Therefore, the actual event is of feedback-to-feedback, the shifting coordinates between actuality and virtually that capture desire through the differential repetition of the sign-expression with the content of affective relations.

Capitalism does this very well, it heads off in pursuit of desire like a looney tunes cat after a mouse. It is in the interests of capital to make sure that populations exist in a state of post-scarcity so they can be deterritorialised from previous assemblages of necessity. If you are starving then you won’t give a shit about buying a new mobile phone, you may wish you could give a shit though. If desire is not resuscitated to its full productive potential then capitalism will not be able to reterritorialise it into new surplus-value producing assemblages; ther you go capitalists, a reason to help people. It is in my interests to with hold not only my labour power, but the restless productive capacity of desire and the disjunctive gap between it and my interests (cars, academia, etc).

Digitalisation has had a profound impact here too; text and image are no longer ontologically separated but have become expressions of similar codes. The hyperreality of digital codes is that there is no possibility of ascertaining authenticity – editing of images and texts is an ongoing process.

Joost van Loon over @ Space and Culture has published 4 of Seven Theses on Terror. The above is from the fourth. I agree with much of what Joost is writing however the two lines above are problematic as it inverts the logic of the rest of the Fourth Thesis. The Fourth Thesis is pertinent to my work as Joost shifts gears to look at popular culture.

First line: ‘Digitalisation’ is presented as an onto-epistemological discursive mode by Joost, yet this mode existed for a long time before being used online or with computers. I have also looked at the ontological relation between Text and Image, not because of the WoT, but because of car enthusiast magazines. The images and text must work in concert to capture the particular affects of the enthusiasm. This is one of my main points of my dissertation. Cars are ‘tough’ and represented in images to accentuate the ‘toughness’ and the text normally revolves around an axiomatic truth in the first paragraph that reinscribes the subject-object relations of an enthusiasm on an affective level in a particular way. However, diferent magazines had different discursive modes. So, for example, there is a difference between the massifying Street Machine magazine and the old 1980s Supercar magazine. Street Machine treated readers as individual enthusiasts and sought to connect readers directly with the affects of events and cars. Supercar magazine mediated reports on events through the structured and habitualised heirarchical affects of car clubs. When did this ontological link between image and text emerge? I am not sure but going by my genealogy of car enthusiast magazines it was sometime in the late 1970s.

Second line: I’ll assume Joost is implicitly using the Baudrillard argument about the non-events of media simulacrum; that is, of representations refering to representations refering to representations and so on with no ‘originary’ link. I tend to think of this as feedback to feedback with only a provisional locus of stability. However, Baudrillard’s semiotics is still caught up in what D&G call the despotic signifier. The ‘despotic signifer’ captures the assymetrical relation between signified and signifier in pre-capitalist semiotics. (D&G are unclear in other writings, particularly Guattari, when they talk about ‘archaisms’ returning. Does that mean with the return of these archaic social movements that there is a return to the despotic signifier? Isn’t this precisely what is happening?) The simulacrum is used as an endocolonising power, which what I understand the rest of what the Fourth Thesis is about. The ontological link between text and image of this media simulacra captures the affects of particular enthusiasms. Here ‘enthusiasm’ is meant in the broader Kantian sense as the universal of being enthused that can be recognised on the face of others! (Yes, I have been reading;) Replace ‘universal’ with ‘singularity’ and ‘face’ with ‘faciality’ and now you’re cooking. The ontological link between text and image captures a particular mobilising constellation of affects, ie faciality (cf. Deleuze’s affect-image of Cinema 1).

The truth of the hyperreality is irrelevant when the power of the simulacrum does not rely on truth! The truth of the simulcra is determined by the affective resonance of the image, by what it does, not by what it represents. ‘Truth’ is a heavily reinscribed simulcrum, it has an affective gravity that previously dwarfed other ‘truths’. The truth may or may not set you free, but it is certainly what captures you. Also Weber’s comments on Charismatic leadership are relevant, not the stuff about actual leaders, but the short sections where Weber discusses what happens in organisations between leaders. Membership to this charismatically organised population is facilitated through tests of belonging that are carried out by the lesser members. Enter yellow ribbons and national flags…

The ongoing editing is not because of the impossible slippery link between signifier and signified but merely the technical means for the ongoing affective modulation and attunement of populations. Media is thus a biopolitical problem, not a problem of representation.

I’ve got another post in the works written partially in response to Joost’s excellent posts at Space and Culture, but also in reply to the America – Civilization 3 chapter of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY and the absence of what is called the ‘fog of war’. It directly relates to the above as the ‘fog of war’ produces an event horizon that introduces chance into the determinations of the algorithm, thus makes gaming exciting, but on an ‘allegorithmic’ level reproduces docile populations for the warmongering machinations of current state-of-emergency governmental modes.

I have set up a test postgrad wiki here. I am not sure how to set the ‘settings’ or if anyone can edit the wiki pages. Can someone go add something, please!

For examples, here is a simple entry for postgraduate students or a simple unfinished cultural studies. Plus one for me to give a very rough idea of what it could mean to have a personal page online.

Hopefully people will get the idea.

I need a volunteer to eventually help set up a mediawiki wiki. I don’t know any of the programming languages having failed computer science (ok, 1st year programming) at uni. If anyone knows MySQL and php, err, stuff and can help set up a mediawiki wiki, then can you contact me please!!! I am going to lean on some people, but the more the merrier . I sent out an email a while ago, but apparently some epople didn’t receive it!?!?!

Also, if anyone has some connections at a web hosting company and can sought us out with some server space for the wiki files and database jazz for not much then I would be grateful.

I imagine that a second test of a proper mediawiki wiki would need to be carried out.

EDIT: I need to send invitations to people. This is fine for this test wiki, but it will not be like that for the actual wiki!!! So if you want an invite reply to this post with a proper email addy in the correct email field using the haloscan comments. Or just send me an email if you already have my email.

A while ago I bought some clear AU Falcon lenses and amber globes off eBay to replace my amber lenses and clear globes. Yes, it is some fickle car nerd/enthusiast stuff, but I had broken one lense so I thought why not do a little bit of fashion modifying. By ‘fashion’ I mean purely aesthetic trends, compared to say the performance oriented variable-length manifold modification I was planning to do last year but got cold feet cause of lack of space/cash/priorities.

I had waited until after my meeting today to do it. Something as a kind of reward for a good meeting, and for getting my first cycle of sending a complete chapter and getting it back after 3.5 years.

Although I am seriously considering (ie just stopping myself) for going completely crazy and upgrading my 17″ CRT moniter for something nerdilicious like a 20″+ widescreen LCD. I figure that considering I spend at least 8 hours a day in front of this thing I want something I can look at and go “That is totally cool!” Yes, a purely affective thing, nothing to do with my vision. Sort of like what pot plants are meant to do in cubicle offices. I am only considering this because for the first time in ages I have some cash, but I know that I won’t have much cash soon!

EDIT: I bought a Viewsonic 20″ widescreen LCD. And, wow, it actually is more enjoyable sitting here working for 8-10 hours a day.

Had a good meeting today with my principle supervisor. We talked about my tendency to use what she described as theoretical-sledgehammers to crack walnut-examples. Maybe it is a product of a postgraduate or masculine insecurity. I am really not sure. I have certainly trained myself in a specific way when reading and taking notes to understand things by taking them to the limits of their internal consistency. So when I write I write for someone pursuing this understanding, but, of course, I am not writing my dissertation for myself!! Anyway this taking-to-the-limit-of-consistency methods requires two movements (roughly stolen in joy-ride fashion from D&G’s “What is Philosophy?”):

1) An understanding of the mechanics of the argument in question. It really is a mechanics in a way that is not disimilar to the systems or complexity theory approaches in the human sciences that attempt to model social phenomena through mathematics. This doesn’t simply mean understanding the argument, but placing an understanding of the argument that allows it to function as per the author’s intentions in what Foucault called the field of ‘epistemological positivity’ which introduces a radical discontinuity more or less on the scale of paradigms or epistemes. Therefore it is not simply a question of the functioning of the argument but the functioning of the necessary discourse-based socio-technical assemblages incorporated as axiomatic assumptions into the argument when it functions. (‘Intentions’ of course invokes a zone of indiscernibility.) So not simply what does someone argue, or even the functioning of the argument, but the necessary discursive field for the functioning of the argument to happen. Grasp it on a diagrammatic level, as an event.

2) An understanding of the flows of content that allow the argument to function and the limit to these flows. This is a tricky one to explain. An example: It is no point asking of Adorno’s work what happens on the internet, because the functioning of the argument was organised around the flows of psycho-social investment into the social dynamics of one-to-many mass-produced media as distinct from a reified artistic expression. So why use the ‘cultural industry’ argument to study today’s algorithmic databases of cultural information (cf Cunningham’s “Cultural Economy” essay)? Yet, I can see some value in Adorno’s argument, the way he talks about exchange value folding back onto the commodity, thus affecting in a programmatic way the virtuality of the commodity-consumer assemblage and event of consumption. The value depends on who is doing what folding. This is very useful for talking about one half of the circuit of affect cultivation by the post-Fordist culture industries; but then there is the other half are the feedback mechanisms of consumer choice (ie market selection) and so on, and also the drifting dynamic that this produces as it shifts within the circuit of feedback to feedback.

All these things enter into my argument as elements I borrow from different people’s work. My problem is that, to continue the example, I explicate Adorno’s conception of the culture industry, along with about a dozen other theory bits like this. By explication I mean outlining the discursive fields of epistemological positivity and hooking up the machinery of my theoretical apparatus to Adorno’s to massumi’s to D&G’s to whoever’s. This is not the same thing as belonging to a tradition or a discipline, but it is not the opposite either. I do know that one of the reasons my writing is like this is because I don’t have complete draft, so I am writing everything that is possible to say about the functioning of something, rather than only selecting only those aspects that need to be contained in my argument for the argument to function.

Street Machine magazine has its 25th Anniversary issue on the stands. It has a six page history article. Finally I have an official historical account of the 30 year period of which I am writing about in my dissertation.

There has been absolutely no history of ‘contemporary’ modified-car culture in Australia until now. I have wondered in the past if I was going to have to construct a ‘sacrificial history’ just so I could write a ‘genealogical account’. Actually through my blog you can trace how long I have been working on this chapter, over a bloody year!!! Yeah, going through 30 years of magazines and constructing an account of the relation between magazines and the scene via enthusiast discourse is huge amount of work.

The timing of this issue is almost unbelievable. I really can’t quite get a grip on what this means for my dissertation. I don’t have to stuff around explaining why I need to construct an official historical account from over three decades of snippets and brief comments culled from magazines. Not only that but combined with a massive injection of my intuition. Everything has just been made so much easier!

When I first heard about this issue I predicted there would be no mention of the ASMF, the Street Machine Nationals or the role of Street Machining clubs in general, and secondly no mention of Paradise’s attempt to catalyse a progressive program in Street Machining by focusing on automotive performance technologies beyond the V8. A properly engaged account of the history should not overlook either.

The ‘alternative technologies’ point is largely irrelevant now because those technologies (turbos, fuel injection, sports car handling, etc) have been absorbed into the cultural formation of Street Machining, but largely in an assimilative colonising fashion. That is, the technologies have lost their transformative potential as ‘other’ technologies. The absence in this official history of the ASMF and Street Machine Nationals remains is pure ideology; arguably the ideology is built into the institutional structure and relation of the magazine to the scene.

By and large the ASMF and organisational structure of these early clubs (organised around the Fordist leisure time labour of enthusiasts and correlative sociality) has been replaced by the online forums (organised around the post-Fordist primarily informational labour of enthusiasts and correlative sociality). This doesn’t change the fact that Street Machining or Street Machine magazine would not be where it was today (or where it got to in the late 1980s) without the ASMF. Doesn’t anyone wonder why there was a downturn in Street Machine magazine sales at exactly the same period in the early to mid-1990s when the ASMF began the slow process of properly dissolving after the fatal blow of the Summernats in 1987?

So I am earning a wage again, in anticipation of the mid-August cessation of my stipend (scholarship). I worked up until the day I left for Sydney in my last job, but in some respects it is weird working like this again after 3 1/2 years of PhD life. Everything is relatively simple and straightforward. There is very little agonistic to-ing and fro-ing. I do my job and then go home. It certainly helps me organise my time better. The only problem is that the current job is not enough to live off. I will have to find another job when the univeristy money finally does stop. Until then I am saving like crazy. In fact, in a relative paradox this is the first time I have had ‘savings’ in about 7 years, ie I actually have money, while I am anticipating a rough couple of weeks/months until I find some part time work somewhere.

The job I have now is pretty awesome for the hours/pay. As some of you know (as I have already seen you there!!!) it is working as part of the event staff at Gleebooks (thanks to Kirsten for the tip off about work;). It means that in the two weeks or so I have been working there I have already seen and heard some very interesting talks and discussions.

By far the biggest event so far was Carmen Lawrence’s book Fear and Politics. (How do the staff measure events? 240+ wine glasses.) I have bought the book as a present for someone (and got it signed;), so I have been reading it, and it is quite straightforward. The arguments (so far) contained in the book would be familiar to most cultstuds types who have been keeping up with Massumi’s work and other bits and pieces around the place. The book is based on some lectures Lawrence gave last year (see Gary’s post). I will post some further info when I have finished the book.