Arrival

Still without a method for anonymity, I will be using pronouns for now. Why anonymity? Cage writes in A Year from Monday:

"I have attempted briefly here to set forth a view of the arts which does not separate them from the rest of life, but rather confuses the difference between Art and Life, just as it diminishes the distinctions between space and time. Many of the ideas involved come from the Orient, particularly China and Japan. However, what with the printing press, the airplane, telegraphy, and nowadays Telstar, the distinctions between Occident and Orient are fast disappearing. We live in one world. Likewise the distinctions between self and other are being forgotten. Throughout the world people cooperate to effect an action. Hearing of anonymity, one can imagine the absence of competition."

Cage walks this constant line between a certain hoaky-ness and a clarity and depth of thought, and its sometimes hard to reconcile them. (Watch him on youtube here, for example.) But much of what I am interested in in this project is to take this idea of anonymity seriously. If you watch the youtube clip, it appears at first very random what he is doing. But it is important throughout to remember that Cage choose everything he did very specifically, to create what he called "no matter what eventuality," a way of freeing up the performance from determination and power. This will be a major focus of my talk tomorrow, which I will upload via sound cloud. I will discuss anonymity, its relationship to Silence, and to new media, throughout this blog, in my talks, and in the articles written for Machete.

Two anecdotes for now.

1. Very jet lagged, I heard a talk yesterday on "Where are the animals? Animality and relationality", which turned out to be about happiness. Insisting that happiness in English was too hoaky a word, the speaker used the German, glucklich. He argued that any search to become happy was bound to fail, since happiness was not the possession of any individual. Happiness is always exterior. I asked him after the talk if it was exterior, then where was it. Social democracy, he said. I started to reply but someone interrupted. My reply would have been that a distinction between happiness and social democracy is absolutely necessary. But thinking about it more, the two languages seem the more important point. The friend I am visiting here had a show once entitled, "Yes yes I am happy, aber glucklich ich bin nicht". That seems the crucial point - I am happy in the English sense of personal possession, but the glucklick of social justice is lacking.

2. A man tells me about a group of radicals in Amsterdam in the 80s - I forget their name now - and how he is writing a book about their work as architectural practice. Squatting is architecture, he says, and architecture needs to maintain its place as radical social formation. I ask him if he followed at all the upsurge of interest in Buckmisnter Fuller a few years ago - the return to utopian planning - and suggest that he is suggesting a very interesting model. Utopia from below, as it were. He doesn't reply; just tells me the two things he thinks are wrong with Fuller.