Édouard Glissant calls them “flash agents” (agents d’éclat).114 The French term combines the connotations of “flashy” or “dazzling,” and “explosive.” Flash agents emit signs that strike: that hit with impact and produce a shock. They are point-sign bombers. They scatter-bomb the media, hoping for a large impact, but most often settling for an accumulation of micro-shocks. The current moniker for them is “social media influencers.” They vie for attention as if it were a rare natural resource, and extract surplus-value from it. p 269

…

The personality of power 2Read More »

The digitally connected body

The affectivo-emotive range of the social media is wide and varied. But it continually throws a body off-balance. The digitally connected body is a body on edge—on the paranoid edge. This makes for edgy personalities with a tendency toward intensities of paranoia. That tendency is a constant built into the affective complexion of social media— an unremitting pole around which lives come to oscillate.

/../

Trump does not utter well-formed statements, carrying truth-value and conveying an ideology. He spews point-signs. He performs media strikes. The strikes are not well-targeted, effectively coordinated attacks. They are hit-and- miss disturbances, designed to continually stir things up.

/../

Trump, as media figure, is literally, effectively, contagiously a collective person operating in the associated milieu of a paranoid full body.

/../

A positive notion of a different logic must be constructed.

…

The personality of powerRead More »

‘Thought enwraps us. Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.’

C.S. Peirce

Ik bezocht de Steve McQueen expositie in De Pont. Na de vier werken ervaren te hebben keek ik naar de film Steve McQueen in his own words waarin hij zeer helder sprak over de werken in de expositie. Bij binnenkomst werd de film aangeraden als introductie maar ik zie het liever na de andere werken. Deze film is voor mij een onderdeel van de expositie. Mijn voorkeur om het als laatste te zien is dat ik eerst de werken wil ervaren zoals ze zijn. Steve McQueen in his own words geeft vervolgens extra informatie en beïnvloed mijn kijken. Een verrijking. Ik krijg zo meer inzicht, een extra ervaring.

Tijdens het kijken van de film miste ik mijn notitieboekje maar gelukkig is de film op de website van De Pont te zien.

“An individual man is a wave” by C.S. Pierce, quoted in The Personality of Power by Brian Massumi

“Great art is in essence unaffected by subjectiveness, by period and location.”
Anni Albers, “Work with material’ 1937

“Much of our education today prepares us for a later day that never comes.
Knowing for later is not knowing at all.”
Anni Albers, 1944