Experience is not dear. We come by it as a matter of course, a consolation gift for just staying alive. Which is why there is the memorable and then everything else. No matter how nuanced that gesture with which I swabbed my ear was, it is unnecessary to carry its memory to the end. Maybe, only until tomorrow, at which time I will repeat some version of that gesture again, must I remember. Maybe only for that short period after bathing where I might be prompted to swab by my proximity to the medicine cabinet. I am saved from having to examine the state of my ear, and from having to compare the gestures of then and now, by remembering for just the right amount of time.

My attention shuttles back and forth between a concern for the rhetoricity of form, and the rhetoricity of discourse. In the case of form, my tendency is to insist on the allegorical implications of what can appear to be simply formal, abstract or optical. While in the case of language, I fear and condemn the eclipse of rhetoric, as language becomes image. But it is not that I am against image and in favor of language.

What Politkovskaya writes in her last message to the Russians before she was killed by them is just as relevant here in the US:

Why is the word “terrorism” in quotation marks?

I will spend my future in a hospital of my own design. I must construct a convalescence as I have made myself sick. In the sick-making though, I have not really made anything. A mood maybe — a disposition. So how am I to build myself out of a mood?

Although I had seen documentation photos of Schneeman's Interior Scroll performance before, I hadn't seen the text of the scroll. I read it as an indictment of myself — I saw in the portrait of the unnamed structuralist, a mirror of my own practice and preoccupation. And I saw how clearly gendered that and the paired messiness of performance seemed.

I'm sure that this all makes very little sense. But sense making is a struggle doomed to failure, and that is the point of this whole endeavor anyway. I'm not trying to be arch-ironic or anything, rather, just the opposite. Perhaps it is OK to flail earnestly against the sublime of the material other?

The range of cultural enterprises which depend on the computer for conception, construction, storage, and display, share with that device — as if by an intrinsic and fractal reciprocity of structure — a parametric ontology that imbues them with an aura of the sublime. Attention to this quality of the sublime that adheres to digital projects promises to link the quidity of the computer with aesthetic philosophy and a history of modernist and post-modernist artistic practice.

The triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity–call it the society of the spectacle, call it what you will. The change has certainly not gone unobserved. And yet, we are likely to blinker our awareness of the situation–and imagine that the mechanisms of our governance continue unaffected–that the institutions of democracy are somehow untouched by these changes. But how can this possibly be the case?