{"id":424,"date":"2013-05-09T17:32:10","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T17:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=424"},"modified":"2013-05-15T22:38:57","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T22:38:57","slug":"writing-in-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/urbanities\/writing-in-the-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing in The Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"450px-Stuffed_barn_owl,_Hereford_Museum_and_Art_Gallery_-_DSCF1950\"<\/a>The title of this thread does not reference C\u00e9sar Vallejo.\u00a0 Or rather, to the extent the Vallejo should inform everything<\/i> that we think generally, I had something else in mind, in particular.\u00a0 Several days ago my comrade Craig Epplin reminded me to listen to Fear of Music<\/i> by Talking Heads.<\/p>\n

Air \/ Air \/ Can hurt you too<\/p>\n

What kind of air is this?\u00a0 The song signals David Byrne\u2019s own sense of paranoia, fear, vulnerability, exposure.\u00a0 Subjective terror.\u00a0 His skin offers little or no protection, the very air through which he walks lashes through his nervous system.\u00a0 Yet the song is far more clever than this.\u00a0 Byrne doesn\u2019t merely wail out his own existential angst, as if he were the only actor in this predicament.\u00a0 He understands perfectly that the situation is far worse, because it is the air that wishes to lash out at him<\/i>.\u00a0 He is exposed, and the air understands this an opportunity of which to take advantage.<\/p>\n

Some people never worry about the air \/ Some people never had experience with air<\/p>\n

The air is something to worry about, because it carries volition, a will.\u00a0 A will to respond to what we have pumped into it, with our smokestacks, tailpipes, water mains, bovine rectums, ballpoint pens, printing presses, artillery, deconstruction.\u00a0 We sent the air a letter without realizing what we were doing, and now the air wishes to write back. \u00a0A will that is not at all subjective, but not quite objective either.\u00a0 An object that wishes things, curses us.\u00a0 Is this paranoia?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 It\u2019s a schizo-analysis of the situation.\u00a0 It\u2019s accurate.<\/p>\n

We have grown accustomed to addressing the air as if it were a medium.\u00a0 \u201cMedium\u201d as an open field in which things occur, to be more precise.\u00a0 (One can imagine how much more felicitous it would have been to ask the wind for its clairvoyance.)\u00a0 We have also recently realized that the medium is the message, or so we think.\u00a0 McLuhan\u2019s slogan is beautifully constructed, but not quite sufficient.\u00a0 The medium for McLuhan is only a passive relay for messages, even as it relays the message that it is a certain kind of medium.\u00a0 His slogan does not, perhaps cannot, take into consideration machines that actively construct their own messages, their own conversations.\u00a0 Not machines for communication, but communicative machines.\u00a0 Such communicative machines are not necessarily artificial, man-made; they may be cybernetic and\/or organic.<\/p>\n

Nothing is natural anymore, the air is not natural<\/i> air, no matter where you go on the globe.\u00a0 And when nothing is natural, nothing can be artificial, for the very reason that there is no way to delimit one from the other.\u00a0 The air can be a machine, too.\u00a0 Communicative machine.<\/p>\n

This air is city air.\u00a0 When you breathe in the fresh country air, remember that it is still city air.\u00a0 The city limits have been set to infinity, mainly for the benefit of capitalists.\u00a0 You can\u2019t get there from here, because there is<\/i> here.\u00a0 We used to think of the city as a place to build walls around the air.\u00a0 You could connect these walls together in a square, leave the roof off, create some nice colonnaded passages through the walls, and call it a stoa<\/i>.\u00a0 (You could even place some philosophers there, have them walk around muttering things to themselves.)\u00a0 People could walk into the open space in the middle of the square and yell at one another, air out our grievances of one another, and call it an agora<\/i>.\u00a0 We built this polis<\/i>, and this fact was central to our identity, our etchings in marble and glass, the desire to outlive ourselves through object-making.\u00a0 We thought ourselves citizens, as if it were us that built this place, we built this polis<\/i>, razed through the landscape and raised up walls against the air.\u00a0 The air merely transmitted our politics.\u00a0 And we wrote millions of words about the politics we ourselves transmitted through the air, in order to describe it, criticize it, theorize<\/i> it.<\/p>\n

\u201cUrbanities\u201d does not accept, tolerate or submit to such an unbearably narrow vision of the world.\u00a0 Walls do not cut off, cut through or contain.\u00a0 They network with the air.\u00a0 The city is ecology, and the world is urban ecology \u2013 not metaphorically, but tautologically.\u00a0 The ecology is not a medium for thought or action (as if these could be mutually exclusive).\u00a0 Ecology is<\/i> thought and action, ecological thinking, ecological acting, ecological praxis.\u00a0 Rather than an empty box, we begin from the fact that the air is a machine, a machine composed of complex systems.\u00a0 Ecology \u2013 and hence city \u2013 emerges at the intersection of complex systems as they collide into one another, translate into one another.\u00a0 Poetic ecology.<\/p>\n

Our discourse does not describe the air, therefore.\u00a0 We do not air our views here.\u00a0 Discourse is yet another complex system that translates itself into the ecological matrix that is city.\u00a0 When we write, we write in(to) the air, into the air you breathe.\u00a0 When we publish, the air takes our words through your body as radiation, damaging and mutating strands of DNA along its way into your wireless router.\u00a0 Air irradiates the city.\u00a0 Theories about the air fly about the air, commingling with code, life, climate.\u00a0 Theories about the city are not about the city.\u00a0 We will not save the city with theory, save the world from itself, because theories are not part of the solution.\u00a0 Theories do not theorize a problem.\u00a0 They are<\/i> the problem, as sure as coal.<\/p>\n

The air feels this.\u00a0 Bristles with it.\u00a0 Sprays some graffiti on the wall.<\/p>\n

Fuck.\u00a0 You.\u00a0 Air.<\/p>\n

— Justin Read<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The title of this thread does not reference C\u00e9sar Vallejo.\u00a0 Or rather, to the extent the Vallejo should inform everything that we think generally, I had something else in mind, in particular.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-urbanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}