In times of change there are moments where everything seems possible, but dawn recedes leaving us, who have taken the chance to form ourselves in the gaze of that potential, left in the thrall of a past which has given way to a haemorrhaging, a recession of our human community. A ritualised incantation of the past, preoccupied with distracting from the cruelty of our time; we convene like morticians over a stiff which cannot be resurrected.
Of course there is value, and also collectivity, in these memories which have allowed us to forge our own identities. Likewise, the history of these years is important and how eventful they have been.... But the circularity of its invocation is bleeding me. Ideas which were fresh, exploratory, polemical four years ago have been realised. The morticians diagnosis has been demonstrated correct! Dublin dies, which is saying something when one considers what it was like prior to all this. Four years ago the outline of the emerging modernisation was cle èar: its urban architecture, gentrification, its infocalyptic dependency.The heart transplanted with a cash register
ÔCapitalism is the celebration of a cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy].There are no ÔweekdaysÕ. There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all it sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worker.Õ
Once theory, the the ramifications imposed themselves without subtlety, rents leaped and the city slumped into a collective paralysis of work, disrupted only by explosions of discipline-ridden frustration on weekend evenings outside the bars and chip shops.
Retrospectively its easy to ascribe even those initial struggles which wrought many of our political natures as playing a preparatory role for the entry of Catholic Pig. In 1991/2 Catholicism appeared to be an important enemy, having held onto much of its most ostensible power. The vehemence and conflict of the fight over abortion, the close è shave even with divorce reinforced a sense of agency. We were undoing that power which had been dominant so long, maybe longer for us, fresh out of Catholic secondary schools and consequently more proximate to its repulsive character! Yet this anti-clericalism has become part of the catechism of the new bourgeois, the common currency of the chattering, who perceive it as a threat to their economic and commodity fetishes, an impediment to final total victory of the Chicago school, a threat to a pretentious cosmopolitanism.
And thus, by a strange quirk of fate we begin to feel nostalgic. Sentimental for the time when the bastards we took on politically had their dominion intact. A grieving for a city which was in ruins, derelict, and even in the depths of misery, passive.. A longing for a recession which will only inflict further punishment on those who are fed to the tiger every day, on a long leash of credit ratings, mortgages and hire-purchase...
The disorientation which has arisen è out of the peace process provides a useful parallel - some atavistic secret yearning for a time before the war was over. Despite the fact that the aspirations of SF are revealed in all their outstanding bankruptcy? All very well to talk about the concessions won for Ôworking-class catholic communitiesÕ of the six counties if it allows one to escape the implications for southern republicans. As a culture which we attached ourselves to, irrespective of the qualifications with regard to the ideologies of republicanism and particularly SF, there are some difficult questions to answer. As a conduit for a radical history which was ambiguous and thus seductive because nothing was clearly ruled out, there was reliance upon it for continuity. This continuum allowed the mapping out of a lineage of agency, literally right back to 1798, whilst imposing a balance of force on the current society. Diverse communities in the south drew sustenance for it, in the conviction of advancing an open-ended t èransformative program. Irrespective of any mitigation which can be prised from the real improvements within the six counties, we can hardly lean on this explanation seeing as there is no commonality of everyday conditions. How many times has republicanism run through this limited loop in a century:revolt, compromise, integrate, manage....
Impasse.
Thus we attribute a sacredness to the antique and the anachronistic, rewriting utopia as eden, the grip toghtens on sentimentality. And we wrangle with divided feelings. The Dublin WorkingmenÕs Club is profoundly seductive in this way, and so we tread lightly, understanding a code of conduct and imputing a little extra. Our secret, to be savoured occasionally, but not to be shared too much as it would be overrun and dissolve into the swamp which surrounds it. Stoneybatter; a love story gone wrong as we participated powerlessly in its shift from a traditional working class culture to the become the new yuppie haven. Bye bye bookshop, hello Åproperty shop. So what: guilt, resignation, ammunition?
ÔOpinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil all over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.Õ
Begin again at the beginning. Draw from our history only thosre elements which assist. Cruel exaction from memory; taxonomy; analysis; the full arsenal of our pataphysical science....
Hello Madamoiselle,
Apologising is a ritual which legitimises bad habits. Nonetheless it is customary that I begin my endlessly postponed responses thus; the euphoria at my escape from luxhumbug penn., the drastic absence of computer terminals _on the iberian peninsula, and the stasis induced by the reclusive cave in the steppes of Sudurbia which I call home - have made me lazy.
Donostia, San Sebastian, call it what you will, was my playgrpound for July in the company of Terry.... What a storm! Rampaging through the fiestas, way too far out of conmtrol, it is a credit to the Bsque people that nothing untoward took place to transform irresponsibility into tragedy. Donostia is a beautiful city on a perfectly crested bay as if from a children's book, with hills at either end, jutting out into the sea. The sand is golden and its no surprise that Franco used to holiday there, even though he despised the Basques and tried to crush their independence and culture. Prune came down as well, and Terry'sd summer job in the mountains gave us the motivation to roam. To the dry mesa of Espejor, Bilbao an ›d its Casca Viejo, Guggenheim museum, Lesaka for the fiesta di San Fermines.... Exhausted and sated I went on to Madrid alone to visit a comrade who helped me through those hard times in Lux. More marvels. The Garden of Delights in Madrid's Prado exposes Dali for the plagiarist he is; Picasso's Guernica and potrtaits of the suvivors in the Rheina Sofia; George Grosz's Metropolis in the Thyssman..... And that's only the art.
Although I had wanted to visit Catrina Kelly in Barcelona, exhaustion overtook me -as it happened there was enough upheaval in her life without my interference anyhow.
Back to Brussels, its jaded elegance, casual dereliction alongside the most modern architecture has to offer, harbouring innumerable eccentricities, many bureaucrats yes, but run-aways as well.
For three months I lived with a Russian boy, at first in family home, then in workers hotel/brothel, after that a park and an a bondoned house. He was doing a stage as well. The Lux state refused him residence. He became a type of elevated clandestino who had to leave, and so he greased wheels in the Commission and fled to Brussels. Words cannot describe my anger at the treatment he met; and words cannot convey my affection for him.
Fine Europeans with their culture, their human rights, their education their instinctive ability to shut the door in the faces of 'outsiders' and say fuck off like it was a varioety hall cabaret act.
Back home. I'm now so uprooted that I don't even have the passion to hate Dublin anymore. I feel like a passenger in transit. Everything takes place before me as if the world was a big train station. Conversation isn't evn of jobs, its about money and property; who is making it? who isn't? why are they not? 'Millionaire parties' for twenty somethings, south dublin fancies itself as the new Rome, and Terry Keane the reincarnate Cleopatr ˆa.
Have you seen 'the city of lost children'?
Who has stolen the children's dreams?
Columbia refused my application. No NY in September. I'm negotiating as to whether it will be possible to delay the award until next year, but I don't really give a fuck.
Alessandra got hit by a drunk driver who was driving the wrong way up Via Fondazza. She has injured her back and the doctors say there may be some long term damage, although the prognosis has improved in the last week. So she's shipwrecked in Bologna when she was supposed to come to Ireland for a holiday and then leave for Berlin to learn German - it has not been her year.
This is not the message I intended to write to you, I have become a nihilst strip[tease artist. Every sentence which begins with bonhommie finishes in bitterness.
Leopardstown is a crystal palace of books. I stay here much of the time, reading, thinking, writing, slee œping late; my established and delinquent habits.
Travelling has wearied me. Thoughts of future journeys nonetheless are my sustenance - pilgrimages without destination, the utopia of somewhere else. There is now no object, to this rambling but to nuture my own illusions. I am the conjurer of my own fascinations, and like a magician at a childrens party must repress the knowledge that what seems like magic, is but banal trickery.
Extremism Disarmed
And yet my mood is not so sullen, so embalmed in depression as it may appear from these words. The dissatisfaction derives from the unspeakable lack of commitiment that I feel to everything, including my own ideas, which I now think of, fondly, as a radicality without instruments, an enchanting cave of useless but fine trinkets.
"These are the last things. A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there t oday. Even the weather is in constant flux..... When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it."
Paul Auster
In the country of Last Things.
The cruel vivisectioniusts, that travel under the title 'architect' and 'urbanist' have done their work. Memory has been dismembered, the city now resembles a monster, the product of biotechnology laboratory, genetically modifed and unfit for human inhabitation.
Ò... the movement lacks a project, a theory, as radical explanation of the world, born by the age It is this argumentation that we have tried to construct, it is a language, sense that we have proposed. This theory is not the cream on a chocalater mousse. It is a means of communication drawn from the movement that it suppor ts. It poses a goal. It proposes a debate to achieve this aim.Ó BdE 8 p.149.
Òthe assurance that we have of things and of people no longer reposes on what has been said and done, bot on that which is going to be said and done, no longer on the past, but on the future.Ó BdE 8 p.93
The Cartography of the damned.
Today those who are dissatisfied with this world dwell in an impoversihed individualism. Convinced of the repugnancy of any collective values, the futility of the abstract quality of militancy, dedicated to the pursuit of the pleasures remaining at the fringe of capiatlism, so a s to draw all towards the centre; an adventurous debauchery at once both leisurely and creative, without the moral and monetary constraints imposed by the hidden hand of austerity. Thid dedication is made blind to the impossibility of its own realisation in the circumstances we occupy. Individualist anarchism embraces the bourgeois individual always for the last time unless...... well, one more time. The warrior figure,. the genius, the prophet, the transgressor, the personification of the dialectic of theory and practice. Irrespective of narcissistic wishes, we are the products of the time which has formed us. This dissected bundle of tendencies we call personality manifests the social organisation of our time and in this reflects its economic deployment. What was called culture has become information, with all that implies. The idea of culture is premised on that which is shared, but opurs is not a time of sharing. The Mass media has not escaped this influence, as its audience cares less and less to consider what in antiquity was called politics. Their trun towards the sensational is not a manipulation in the classical sense, but rather a logical response to the apathy of their environment. Yet even of this degenerate role will they be divested. The entrenchment of that which we call rather unsatisfactorily, modernisation, in a so-called information econmy is a qualitative evolutionary leap in the process of atomisation. Each person will know have their own customised injection of news. Increasingly they renounce news altogether for entertainment. News thus becomes entertainment, but as mass media are by definition a response of the lowest common denominator, only the delay in the permeation of the necessary commodities postpones its demise.
The public sphere has literally been cannibalised by an imperialist private sphere.
Critical declarations of the collapse in the distinction between private and public are deceived by mistaking the content of such types for their goal .
The private is resurgent, seeking to devour all the roles once played by the public. The private is monologue, whose refusal to share is at the same time a fear of otherness. Its logical aim is to inure existence to the influence of society altogether.
The securocratic hysteria is a derivative of this berserker individualism. The taming of the outside world is necessary prior to its absolute subjugation.
Ó thediscipline of the military camp substituted f or the oreder of the city, and a state oif siege substituted for the normal state of society.Ó
Custine
the futurew of copyright
In televcision and radio, it is the broadcasting organisation which assumes the direct cost of copyright, negotiating with rightsholders or their intermediaries on the basis of audience size. The consumer conributes to the covergae of the cost by tolerating advertising time, which in this case as in others should be viewed as a cost. The parallel application f such a scheme to the internet should be obvious, although it requirers the dissolution of the traditional distinction between reproduction right and performance right. Advertising is a tax on the consumer. That tax is the proper kitty from which rightsholders should be compensated. The marketing strategies of ISPs, pornographers and news providers provide a resounding demonstration of this proposition.
Cryptography is central to any contemporary discussion of intellectual property. Cryptography encompasses the ensemble of me thods which are used to restrict access to information, to secure stored information and guarantee the integrity and authenticity of information in transit.
An important premise which informs the following analysis is that there is and should be a fundamental distinction between the commercial exploitation of a creative work (in the broadest sense) and the area of prtivate use. The latter can be principally distinguished by the absence of a revenue derived from that use. A conseqquence of this premise is that the costs of copyroght in a economy of infoprmation based services should not be carried by consumers. Consumers pay for the services built on top of informationbut not for the raw materials. Corporate entites shou;ld pick up the costs and still be able to operate profitable enterprises through valkue added services. Differential use patterns can be identified using simple technological means already within the scope of operators in the electronic environment. Hit counters which are primarily used to bo lster advertising incommes track levels of use. Business agencies exploiting provider content as a basis for further added opn serviuces (such as economic intelligence agencies) ought to pay a higher premium, related duirectly to their end-use. Such tracking could easily be carried out in a privacy protecting manner through the use of anonymising technologies and content rating labels such as those uysed on the PICTS scheme for restricting minor access to pornographic/violent content. The combination of these instruments and policies can result in appreciable increase in social welfare and profitmaximisation for content producers resultingh from the systematic employment of price discrimination.
See Fisher 1999 Microchatges...
Another cost factor to be tak en into account in any economic evaluation of the subject are the expenses linked to enforcement. Property rights holders seek to externalise enforcement costs onto state agencies, thus increasing the value of their assets. As they integrate technological fencing into their products so as to broaden the categories of exploitability, they incur costs which are offset by the jettisoning of previous fencing technologies and , if they can succeed tin installing criminal sanction for transgression of their fencing arrangements, a substantial outlay is avoided through transferral to the state. As consumers pay the larger share of revenues to foot the bill of puiblic expenditure, the costs of criminal law enforcement are a tax on the consumer for the benefit of corporate legal identities
