Massivholz Rottenlasten.

wb. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.

So I immediately thought if there might be a purely positive conception of veiling, an affirmative conception of veiling. And of course there is this amongst women who choose to wear the veil, and see it as their own affirmative and liberating choice. But I also thought about architecture. Architecture, because for a night I am in Barcelona, and had been walking through the Barri Gotic, and for some reason, it seemed that I had failed to fully explore the Barri Gotic despite having been to this city numerous times. In its most dense sections, the lanes are approximately 3m wide. I was overwhelmed as I walked through them, not just because of the kind of bodily memory that it activated in me (I wrote an undergrad research paper on the spatial poetics of the similarly dense old section of pamplona), but also because I have been living in Berlin. The street that I ride along to get to the Benjamin Archive is Karl Marx Allee, which, despite carrying probably a third of the traffic of new canterbury rd, is 89m wide:

This kind of geographic extensivity can only ever make me think of this quote from Benjamin:

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

I think that is part of the reason why Berlin lacks a certain purchase on me. Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But it doesn’t have the same corporal connection as certain parts of Spain do for me. I read somewhere that Richard Serra responded to criticisms of his large scale steel sculptures in Bilbao’s Guggenheim as ‘intimidating’ and ‘dominating by saying that they were no such thing. In fact they illicit the same feeling as being in the old town of any Spanish city, and that is hardly domineering.

Returning to the notion of veiling, and linked to architecture is Adolf Loos.

In the beginning was cladding [Bekleidung]…. The covering is the oldest architectural detail. Originally it was made out of animal skins or textile products. This meaning of the word [Decke] is still known today in the German languages, then the covering had to be put up somewhere if it were to afford enough shelter. . . . Thus the walls were added. . . Cladding is even older than structure.

For Loos, this ends up – or starts out from – a valuing of the smooth and the unadorned, and is related to a political desire for a kind of anti-particular, modernist cosmopolitanism, as a resolution to the remarkably diverse ethnic makeup of Hapsburg Empire Vienna. Ethnic difference, for Loos, can be erased not through the absolute erasure of ornament, but by a replacement with the proliferations of particularist ornament, with a restrained, classical ornament, which brings logic to shapes and forms in the same way that Latin grammar brings form to language. Here we see once again the threat of linguistic standardisations towards totalitarianism. It seems to me that Loos came to value the walls too much. The walls were only ever there to support the cladding, the clothing. I was reading a letter from Benjamin in the archive the other week in which he recounts hanging out with Brecht and Brecht is acting, playing the part of the state under communism, leaning over towards Benjamin and saying: oh, I know that I should wither away… Structures don’t like handing things over when they’re no longer needed. They continue rattling inside like the deflated ballon in a papier mâché elephant.

So there seems to be two risks I suppose, the veil as positive and negative. The veil, that like Loos’ Latin grammar, must be applied to difference like a fire-blanket. And likewise, the purely negative conception of the veil, which conceals the threat of difference, and must be everywhere unveiled.

This is exactly Novalis’ description of the unveiling of the goddess at Sais (which is apparently why it is famous, Plutarch, I’m being told by the interweb):

Someone arrived there — who lifted the veil of the goddess, at Sais. — But what did he see? He saw — wonder of wonders — himself.

This is the desperate desire of all of the veil-lifters, (that is, if we take them at their best word) to lift the veil of difference, or more specifically, of women who wear veils, and to see, wonder of wonders, themselves.

Both are worrying. Benjamin criticises the unveiling motion of romanticist criticism that hopes to reveal the truth of the work of art because truth is intentionless. Since I am writing this from a strange room in Barcelona that feels like 1941 without the food shortages, and I’m not really being rigorous here, I’m not really going to try to figure out everything that is happening in Benjamin here, but Josh cohen links it to Benjamin’s image of ideas being to objects as constellations are to stars. Something that gives form to objects in a non-intentional way, and refuses to deveil them, since the object of beauty is not the object or the veil, but the object in the veil. Which makes me think again of Benjamin on language and medium, but also, of a few images:
- the movement through the miniscule streets of the Barri Gotic
- A child’s fort built out of sheets and blankets, with the minimal amount of points of suspension since, for it to serve as a place of dwelling, there must be as few obstructions as possible, and as much fabric as possible.
- Architecture without walls.
- Arcades.

According to wordreference.com, it is:
se couvrir, protéger ses arrières, user de précautions, limiter les risques. 

Of course you’ll probably notice that all of them are somewhat unsatisfactory. Se couvrir is obviously just to cover yourself, which seems more cowardly than the measured, and (potentially) ethical hedge one’s bets. Protéger ses arrières is just to protect your arse. To make it cruder, user de précautions seems to be a reference to contraception, which is in direct contradiction with the speculative nature of hedging one’s bets. Sure, they’re hedged, but you still make the bet. In the bedroom, to hedge one’s bets might be something like using pas de précautions, but using the ‘rhythm method’ instead (which, incidentally, is the favoured method of conservative poets). Meanwhile limiter les risques has no idiomatic force. You see, hedging your bets has physical objects hidden in it. First of all, is the hedge (which as well as the fence, gives a nod to the hog), second is the near inclusion of ‘bed’ in ‘bet’. Perhaps this is why, despite its absolute semantic failure, user de precautions, with its coy glance towards the pharmacy, is the best translation. Or you could always just cover your arse and use the English (entre parenthèses).

Sometimes I think about the concept of the relation between what we call writers, what we call publishers, and what we call readers. I don’t think about it enough to really have it figured out. Also, I don’t really understand what a publisher is. Publishers to me seem kind of like RSL clubs: I know they still have more influence than they should, but I can’t help but think that they are largely obsolete. Independent publishers, the kind that I do know a little something about through knowing people involved in running them, seem kind of like bowls clubs: genuinely wonderful institutions, and paradoxically at least as open to adaptation as larger corporations. As irrefutable proof of this mental image, I remind people of Local Consumption Press’ (and now that I goggle, I presume that they are no more?) Sydney launch of Strawberry Hills Forever, held at a bowls club.

My general rule of thumb though for conceiving of how publishers relate to their public, is that at all times, if they can figure out what it is, they give the public what they want. Now in some cases this is very easy. After Harry Potter changed the landscape of publishing, they shrewdly figured out that the public wanted more Harry Potter books. Which was clever, because they could have, say, gambled on the principle of supply and demand, and sat on their copyright, refusing to release books en masse, instead releasing one copy at a time for sale, auctioning them off to the parents of the global elite, as a kind of speculative investment, aggressively prosecuting against any pirate publications. But they didn’t. And the houses that didn’t have the rights to Harry, tried to put out their own versions.

Translation, as I see it, represents the potential for a kind of radical rupture in each language’s literary system. Nobody wants what they can’t understand. Translation brings something into your language that you never even wanted. Not only did you not know that Roberto Bolaño was writing, or that he existed, but if he lived in your house, and he got up every morning and read his latest manuscript to you page by page, you would tell him to please speak English, and go back to your cornflakes, and your Twilight: New Moon. Translation, as with several other speculative forms of literature, tries to break open a cosmos, and engender a people, out of nothing (well, nothing is a little extreme in plural societies, but who would know that watching an ABC book show).

But that seems like a hard slog, so I thought that maybe I would try something new on this blog for a while. Why not pretend I’m a publisher, and focus my energy on the principle of recursion. I was looking through my blog stats today at what I’ve always considered to be the most interesting section of website analytics: the search terms that lead users to a particular site.

It’s interesting for a number of reasons. One the one hand, it shows you something about referentiality/relationality/indexicality in the language practice present in a particular online environment. Or at least, it reveals as much about that nexus as the particular algorithms employed by google, or, say, altavista are capable of. Also, they often paradoxically reveal how search engines can lead people to the exact opposite of where they want to go*, since they are not always all that efficient at distinguishing between direct and indirect language, for example. Meaning that if I write a post analysing and critiquing the language used by Andrew Bolt, for example, chances are I’m going to get a whole bunch of outraged A Current Affair viewers stopping by to try to find out exactly how many “aboriginals” (don’t use an adjective as a noun for a people, nobody calls you “bigoteds”). But most of all, it’s a clue to what the people who came to my blog without previously knowing what it was, came here for.

So the experiment is to become a publisher. That is, to give the people what they want. To begin with, I have a backlog, of the search terms that have brought people here in the past. I’m excited to learn about the “Moroccan war between 1913 and 1926″. I don’t know what I’ll have to say about it, but we’ll see.

The other thing that interests me about this project is that it sets in place the architecture for a kind of request system. In that, any reader of the blog can pick out enough terms at random that they know to have appeared on this site, enter them into a search engine, and they will appear in my search term inbox, as a kind of challenge to find the link between them. Now I’m not saying that will happen, but I would certainly enjoy it if it did.

Now before I start, I have to acknowledge that I did steal this idea, from myself, about five years ago. But that was a one off. This is a process-based project. I’m not going to give it a time limit. It will either be productive or it won’t.

*of course, this is actually a fundamental quality of language. there is no adequate delimiting or erasing force in language. We can never speak out against something. Every time we call out the name of a word to abolish it, the word cranes its neck around and looks at us, as if to say: yes, what did you want?

In concert with Nikita.
Mona makes sense work.

Every kind of turtle.
Every accent is cement.

Betone my beating supermarkt.
Import/export portmonnaie.

My Slavoj your Zizek.

A cockerel is domestic.
A cockerel ate an orange.

My name is on the Fritz.
My Monica is Monica.

I am frankly miles away.
Every troll is loling.

Pi chart tumbleweeds.
I love your lentils.

Brushes burst.
Neversea.

Honda, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Citroen, Renault, Suzuki, Skoda.

I was angling for complements and we recorded the conversation. We are
mixing tapes; we are pearling. Our neighbours are unapproachable and
always a storey above or below. We had to chock the table up
with a book. I bought you a hanger-on, for you to be close
and open.

I performed CPR on a dying animal. I breathed gently
into the auricle. In the arcade, the sun is reflecting off the sago. What
happened to the day? I picked up every indirect object that I could find
and gave them to you. There was a yo-yo. Glitter-glue. I took the cats for a walk.
The bed is depressed, even the mattress. I boil coke and call it tea.
I found a knuckle in the guillotine and made a dramatic, a political
gesture. The cats are walking. Our lungs are so tiny. The cats
are descending two flights. The cats

are fully measured.
The cats are scooping rice with full moon tins. The cats
refuse all measurements. The cats swim. The cats are absorbing
all of the costs and half of the gluten. The cats have ears and mouths.
They have each other. The cats can run against the grain. The cats are
oceanic. The cats are a lost empire.
The cats are a logic and a grammatical rule.
The cats are following and being followed.
The cats are impassive.
The cats are rendering the fat from the meat.
The cats made a cinnamon sandwich.
The cats whisper into a piece of toast–
The kats believe that you are listening on the other side.

 a lone officer in the treaty room in the DMZ.a bartender walks through a pyongyang restaurant.

We can’t help but feel that we are having the wool pulled over our eyes, regardless of how straight-forward the captions might seem. Is nobody going to mention the palm tree, the fact that North Korea seems to have developed an entirely new form of geometrical upholstery. Witness the perfect assembled polygons of the maroon armchairs, the fabric cover of the wooden chair, the flawless parallel lines of the bartender’s red dress? Interspersed as they are amongst images of rice harvesting and ‘desserted’ stretches of highway, we are encouraged to read the series as a specific narrative about the conditions of life on contemporary NK.

Consider these images and their potential captions, as a series of photographic events:

the disused foyer of the STABI (state library) in Berlin. Placards detailing the 350 year history of this building are read by no one. It stands like the remaining shell of the hollowed promises of the enlightenment.

Air quality in Europe has now degraded to such an extent that once famous landmarks seem to vaporise before one’s eyes, bringing new meaning to Marx’s famous quote: ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

Again, the StaBI. It’s no coincidence that StaBi rhymes with Stasi. And where do you think the ‘sta’ in ‘Gestapo’ comes from?

Germans must tire of this prohibitive latticework found in so many ‘public’ bathrooms, allegedly to protect the ageing ceramic from their corrosive, “menschliche Öle” (human oils).