ARMED CELL 7

ARMED CELL 7 JOSHUA CLOVER QUESTIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY ANGELA HUME from MELOS DERECK CLEMONS from FML OLIVE BLACKBURN from COMMUNISM IS UP THERE AND WE ARE DOWN HERE BUT IT IS HAPPENING NOW TED REES from CATASTROPHE CROWN: 1-5 KENNETH GOLDSMITH DISPLACEMENT IS THE NEW TRANSLATION

ARMED CELL 7 Edited by Brian Ang [email protected] armedcell.blogspot.com Covers by Mayakov+sky Platform from an Odyssey (an anti-ode essay on Architecture) mayakov-plus-sky.blogspot.com Physical edition of 100 Free ARMED CELL 7 was first distributed at the East Bay Poetry Summit, Berkeley and Oakland, July 2-6, 2014. ARMED CELL 8 will appear in January 2015. Submit cover images and writing by the end of November 2014 for consideration.

JOSHUA CLOVER

QUESTIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY Immaterial labor. What is it Also does transport create

really and the periphery. A system

value where there was none

and selling dear. The next MIA great again. Fall 2007 spring

damn panegyric. Why do things end and so will be free sang the Dutch oldest bourse 1602 Amsterdam problem. Hi-Cube intermodal

or is that just buying cheap

will it be terrible again.

2005 we will never their

The next Robyn will it be

like again. I’ll show you a god

because teleology.

The land will become sea

villeins. De Witte’s picture

is in Rotterdam do you not

shipping containers used

homeless holding cells Elephant

is not a solution.

of the world’s

see how this is a fucking

for shops Shoreditch also

and Castle. Surplus population

of minor emotions. Hip-hop riots

and the space of flows is one

and the arbitrage

talk I will never give

again. Straight hoodie and luxury Nada. Some of our friends Vol. 2 again together srsly

goods chorus Gucci Gucci Louis

were dating Leninists and so boring but babies are

Also? Reproductive labor. What is it I need an emoticon for lol seem to shudder

that was weird. We should read

definitely Department III. Oh and

really and wages for house

and flinching with dread

A possibility is not a program.

Some big container ships are container equals two

how to hedge against

tip: permanent counterrevolution

Summary as of fiscal

is not coming back. Production

is not coming back.

needs quants!

fourth quarter 2013 Kreayshawn Allan Sekula is not coming back.

coming back some are

underwater. One standard 40 ft

Twenty foot Equivalent Units or TEUs

despite eight additional m

parties Oakland

simultaneously. Why do things

because volatility. What if they figure out

like everything. COINTELPRO

Louis Fendi Fendi

3

it’s not an exact science like

but so does one Hi-Cube

Max Martin. Just a slab of

unfigured air a kind of room maybe three point five

to move. The desire of a planetary

and enough left over for the aesthetic.

What if it’s just cruel mercantile if the rich win the living

civilization three pct

Annualize that shit.

plus dubstep from here on out.

What if it’s just

will envy the dead. Why do things keep on

because reasons.

ANGELA HUME

from MELOS .

(if the life of the mind dies with the sun who will have seen flapping a sudden chirop tera myo desopsia sequoia dendron its shivered limb moon a pin

atmospheric

obsidian economy of river

riprap split intimately like the split down a mammal body (furious with anyone who in the fabrics camphor conifer capped in yellow

(if the sun

were gone we wouldn’t know it

(follow the link to how hot will it get?

threshold beyond

.

to go the grove Santa Lucias granitic basement

which

batholith to bark and cone, fog drip damp the fibrous bed (give of the breast beneath a head loam timber (fear the war: dose estimation wrecked plant

sievert

.

brain sub merged in a bath of heat and minerals (sudden epidemi(c ology

imagine living two thousand years (gland

butterflyshaped

in a girl whose cells refuse to die and all the sea wells

.

back of the globe

tongue

a silvering

lodged like yesterday’s sex symptom so bold binds like the memory of a first unkindness caved irreversible as the palm’s chained

line of the head trace with her index finger

which you

(depression

took hold

year of tar sands

four-degree

scare year of the aquifer at first: night sweats, night blight dreamt of rage’s junk effects vital functions like breathing and the mind’s pigment again diffused like a gum bichromate

(there, a place for a book on song the crisis is

the end of the commons

a very slow violence and we do not heal

is

vocalization declines in foraging

breeding

(and we say not because we did not love

.

no longer have we desiccates dinning lines the skull’s inner amplified to such a pitch medicate the withdrawal of history 10 then 20 then nothing stunning a warm film welling in the stomach like a sink like peace

stopped up

slept and slept we were often so diffusely social

.

such small assemblies distributions of rescue practice (number the days the money involving a question of water involving habits of mutual aid

((for four days I remained in the room streaked like a tub in my throat copper

voluntary rationing

blearing

my lungs arms

voluntary association read: large volumes of seed moved from farm to farm, leading to a great diversity in plants as in spring skin

on the air

odors of

rehearse: mutual protection to make the body more bearable to regain a cathexis of the world save our life

____________ if the life of the mind / dies with the sun references “Can Thought go on without a Body?” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time by Jean-Francois Lyotard. In the section beginning “such small / assemblies,” some of the language is from or resembles language from The Withdrawal of Tradition by Jalal Toufic and Thinking in an Emergency by Elaine Scarry.

DERECK CLEMONS

from FML from Chapter 1 She entered the event hall and hurried, intent on creating as much distance as possible between herself and the Scouts, and determined to take the first door she happened upon. It was a festive, gala event to be sure. Holographs flashed among guests and staff, swarming around each other, into and out of existence, impossible for Ellen to sort even as she squeezed and pushed her way through the crowd. For every guest, there were perhaps two to three floating panels filled with images: a spaceman she recognized as Palmer Eldritch, recently returned from some faraway adventure or other; actress Lindsay Lohan as a mechanized war hero for her latest featured Experience BLR: the Bin Laden Raid; a man who looked exactly like Ben Franklin – that would be Ben Franklin Jr., inventor, investor, and President of the United States Disney Haliburton; footage of Franklin Jr. presenting a medal to Experience researcher Mary Bosworth; several misshapen, spherical, red space aliens that looked exactly like the goombas from Super Mario Brothers and so named ever since their recent, unexplained appearance floating in the depths of the solar system – and more recently waddling about on Earth. Then were the Experiences, so many in number she couldn’t keep up: Tennis Feelings, Fog that Hid Shapes and Distances, Hordes of People Crouching in a Meadow, BLR, and others. She recalled as well that what she didn’t see was vast – that these physical projections were only small extensions of the Prism running through people’s minds. And then she saw the show she’d apparently been in: the Family Vacation members smiling and waving in a driveway here, running through busy streets there, cringing in a car that was flying through the air moments before crashing down to the road again. These images were followed by clips of one of the two teenage girls from the show, clearly associating with the masked characters known as the Pesky Riot Girls. She tried to recall the names of the faces. “My name is Ellen, I’m married to—. My kids—.” But there was nothing else.

She passed a few people in purple wraparound clothing draped with sashes and felt the increasingly familiar shift within her head. If she could just get downstairs to that room, then she could get out and find someplace to form a plan. Then she tripped as the sound clicked on again: “Hello, yes, Disk Seventy-Nine: I was walking in – it must have been one of my sister’s steps, turning left around this person,” she turned left, “right around that one,” and she did, “shoving, speaking but hearing my words and those of another fitting the same grooves: the Tapes were active at last: this is where you come in, Ellen.” Ellen now found herself among several guests in formal attire. They had blanched, papery faces. One of them, holding his stomach, excused himself from the group. “Basically,” she heard the voice say, “if you want to make it out alive, you had better start talking to yourself. Because that is where you’ll find me.” “Find what?” Ellen asked, exasperated. But there was nothing. Someone bumped into her, causing her to step on someone else’s foot. She tried speaking and found only silence. Then she found that if she tried remembering as she spoke, the words rose to her lips: The Tapes were strange and came like this: I tried to hurry but was stuck watching a woman throw back her head and laugh as I stumbled around; a man doubled over, clutching his stomach, his eyes bulging at the floor: the Tapes happen like this: “The Amnesiac Escapes,” timeless, and like so many others before, its path carving an arc through the light, across the ages in so many reflections: the junior high teacher, parched and fanning her face with a hand, her white blouse spotted with sweat – she looks from her students directly at me: I move past and feel her mind leap to the recording: a group of chatterboxes by the fake fireplace, brass cages on their heads – as I pass, their minds also fly to the recorder. This is how I move, not just navigating but creating the maze of the Tapes; the blank-slated figure carved by the Tapes, sickened on the memories, thoughts, which flooded my mind, carrying me with them. This was the frame. Each person I came near, I made sick by the light of the Tapes that ran through me. With it, I rotted their minds – warping their piece of the Prism at each turn. Then the voice – which was like her own, only older – left as quickly as it’d come. She looked around, dazed, and saw that several people to the right and left of her path, many she’d never actually touched, had grown visibly ill and confused. The many others, however, had turned to a tri-D projection of Ben Franklin Jr.’s bespectacled face. At the room’s center – in dizzying, hyper-real colors and shading – it was this outsized projection that had addressed the crowd several times already.

Currently it spoke of innovative technology previews and the motives behind the replay of the explosion: “My greatest achievement, the Prism,” at which most of the guests cheered, “thank you – will measure every guest’s response while it searches for the terrorists among you. And especially one among you – Ellen Griswold – let me say it’s an honor to have join us today.” Her face flashed onto several screens. “Tell us, Ellen, how it feels to have betrayed the citizens of the USDH, Earth, and the solar system by aiding dangerous specters from outer space, and making everybody sick and disrupting my big plans.” The crowd politely clapped, some chuckling at the whimsy and candor, but none seemed truly to believe Ellen was in attendance. A fellow dressed only in a cape, with several sparkling rings on all his fingers, looked directly at her, but his gaze continued wandering without recognition. An elderly woman in a Jupiter costume cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered conspiratorially: “West Coast Express! Ben Franklin Jr.’s latest Installation innovation. Please enjoy this preview of our latest Experiences.” It was an ad. There were several more as the back of the expansive room finally came into view. Several thousand images ran across the back wall in streams, any of them available for download and either Experience or Synthesis. A cluster of people had gathered babbling at nobody Ellen could see: “The Riot Girls and space ghosts confound your senses! The Griswolds are out of control! Experience it now!” “Join me in a tour of this lovely Experience!” She scanned the crowd and saw two Scouts had made their way to the middle of the room, black helmets and khaki-clad shoulders moving above the guests. Ellen ran a hand through her hair and gazed at the blue, swirling lines in the mintgreen carpet, increasingly troubled by it all. Odd that the recording was so insistent upon her speaking – or articulating herself. She tried speaking again, tried remembering, but nothing was there. As Ben Franklin Jr. rambled about how amazing Experiences were and how Feelings helped any occasion, she brushed past a kid in a backpack, then another, and spotted what she’d wanted at the back and headed for it – a set of doors. She twisted and turned among guests crowded about a pair of restrooms, waiting to get in. Then the lights dimmed, and she wasn’t sure anybody else saw this happening – the contour lines of the room and the people in it extended into a place she watched unfold with a weird, new objectivity: the back of her mind slipped away as she spotted the junior high teacher.

She recalled having mentioned this person moments ago when the dimensions of the room had first begun shifting into and back out of place: now she saw her, surrounded by a group of junior school kids – green skirt, white silk blouse dappled with sweat, fanning her face with a hand. She watched Ellen pass. Ellen wondered if the woman’s mind was now “on” the recording – and what that even meant. At the back of the room she saw people were streaming in and out of what looked like a service door. Then she reached out her hands and pushed against one as a tall waiter with white hair did likewise, ignoring her. Once on the other side, in a wide, tiled hallway lit by overhead panels, she watched the white-haired waiter join other staff going in and out of kitchen doors down to her left. She might go through the kitchen or otherwise find a stairwell down to the courtyard, which she could cross – but she had no assurance of reentering on the other side. Better to take the ground-level floor over to the other wing, where the room with the signaling red light was located. Just as she started to move in that direction, however, two Scouts pushed through the doors behind her and quickly approached. One of them grabbed her shoulder. She spun around.

OLIVE BLACKBURN

from COMMUNISM IS UP THERE AND WE ARE DOWN HERE BUT IT IS HAPPENING NOW taking an axe to everything we might have known about ourselves blotting our own eyes come quick we managed to push through and be damned, the portal is open In other major cities, violent acts are singular and isolated The violence in L has become collective and focused But the primary conditions are the same As soon as the kids figure that out, we’re in trouble the consummation of the party will be its demise

Not your bullshit art openings with an open bar and no fucking name tags. Where are the name tags you fuckers? art-cum-work we-are-really-serious Communism represented is communism tamed. The relation between aesthetic risk and militant praxis: Artists who argue for challenging experimentation, risky choices, doing what is not allowed or permitted must face a turn towards criminality. Those who take such an aesthetic project seriously can end up in prison or dead. If you are not ready for such consequences, admit that you want to make normal art.

basically, everything is on the table take possession of the utopian kernel the black pearl the booty We will engage in combat. Long, probably boring, endless war, more like a dog circling to make a bed than an armed offensive. You can be the Military Commissar of the Bad Left

let us specify: savage, ineffective, unconcerned ask me why and i’ll spit in your eye ask me why and i’ll die the drive to be approachable, compassionate, and welcoming is the first misstep of any vanguard nobody talks, everybody walks once you cooperate with the feds, we will renounce and disown you With Friends Like the ISO, Who Needs Enemies?

Next Level security culture: none of us know anything about each other or about anything that is happening her obsessively clandestine habits kept her living in rabbit holes and gnawing on roots indefinitely the undergoing, experiencing, and acting that takes place in ‘real’ or ‘virtual’ proximity to others taking control of this small battleground that the group has become sniffing each other meeting our match too much to want and too much to despise if i forgive you, you will shoot me in the head the deepest secrets we will engrave onto our own femurs to be deciphered after the flesh has decayed off our bones

you are not a comrade you are a priest-in-waiting a bride ready to enter the church and wed the counter-revolution the situation is pushing towards a crisis the inevitable moment has come: pick sides or perish loyalty oaths for one and all inventing one’s use-value for the cell or finding out what it was retroactively what a great, metered militant she is measured, thoughtful, preeminently respectful of feelings a sharp tactician and a diligent researcher

those bellowing mistakes their deafening echo we have no illusions about what happened we do not have any precise feelings about it These developments are no mere hubristic/cultish mistake, however. with crisis after crisis, it’s all bad news the headlines are thick stripes of black the usual pragmatism will prove ineffectual

These are the final days of the capitalist mode of production and we are happy to have a seat at the table. When stepping out of an ironic relationship to ‘current events’ by being fired or fucked with, one thought we are left with is ‘oh, I can do things’ on the eve of the revolution, we will prepare the finest banquet imaginable our favorite food is reception food an insurrection so slow you lose interest while watching it play out as evasive a finale as one could expect

TED REES

from CATASTROPHE CROWN: 1-5 The offing is high-def reflecting as in warp over weft, bowled inversion remains strangling conjurors on prowl for succor in distract and blame. Yet to vacay in locales uneffected by irradiant loss is to lounge in dejection, sipping Maotai in marbled obscurity or wave jade tower beside respirator salesmen. A cough in rain shadow’s gristle, encroachment engines throttle fully and Eurasia trips out on Siberian kush, gathered in a tent constructed of cold. From the top floor, the view’s majesty: an unparticular particular crowds as scrim.

An unparticular particular crowds as scrim, adrift on international circuits ’til settlement sedimenting in moulin blanc vastness as absorptive kettle. In kiddie subatlantic, this new tarn approaches, shore-licking, quotidian of gallons billioning and billioning. We can surf on the cognate’s results, disgorge flotsam onto gross sheen. Such dismalities abetted, she whistles thrice, indicative of unions tide-ruined, imported grit speckling damask yards, climbs towards spectra miles from habitability. I model desert tigerstripe or stalker, mere pebble in crackled moraine, cwm or cirque radiating out equatorial.

Cwm or cirque radiating out equatorial as proppants in slickwater reincarnate alamosauri, Condors sink in idiot sprinkled lushness. The Fata Morgana of subsequence: stumbling in quotidian haboob, bleats of desiccated chattel, blazing star husks forlorn in pahoehoe. Arc-eye endemic in such erg, each burg a Bodie, Bannack, or Barkerville undesignated, belt Kolmanskopped as present fancy, tutting uncertainly with visages shattered. The obvious reference, fresh appendicular whitenesses recline in xerophytic stackers obscuring occasional coned yardangs, paresthesia’s muteness reddening to chronic.

Paresthesia’s muteness reddening to chronic, erected drywall delineated contra sallow gloam, smacks tarred roundabouts, bister accumulated, there is none which is not a poison. Assets glint in symmetrical gridded array, laser-graded efficiency chossing fragilities, mitigation flowing towards a flogged descant, caged and flailing. Spine on lichen, lupine fields concertinaed, dihedral circulations of sheet lightning’s quest for repast now quartered, shorted to dry squalor, links lost in blight. Between dust and altocumulus, severance: slung, clefted abodes vista-pock, whinging xerostomic in buttressed washes, a genuflection to clattering extraneities.

A genuflection to clattering extraneities, glutted promenades sop plushy-strewn, blooming jellies waft heedless, fluorescent attempts to Whac-A-Mole brine-thwarted. Stats thrive, nominal empathies crouch tin-roofed, covenant in slick burgeoning as iron oxidates symmetry. Angler pants de rigeur, dreams of Baros flummoxed, soused strands bulge astarboard each mass. While calamity diminishment rears nattily, so much depends upon the itemization of wretchedness, its direct bosom in scrilla. Thaw measured as such, sole index still in a hypoxic imminence, the swells throb.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH

DISPLACEMENT IS THE NEW TRANSLATION Syntax, like government, can only be obeyed. It is therefore of no use except when you have something particular to command such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots. – John Cage1 Translation is the ultimate humanist gesture. Polite and reasonable, it is an overly cautious bridge builder. Always asking for permission, it begs understanding and friendship. It is optimistic yet provisional, pinning all hopes on a harmonious outcome. In the end, it always fails, for the discourse it sets forth is inevitably off-register; translation is an approximation of discourse – and, in approximating, it produces a new discourse. Displacement is rude and insistent, an unwashed party crasher – uninvited and poorly behaved – refusing to leave. Displacement revels in disjunction, imposing its meaning, agenda, and mores on whatever situation it encounters. Not wishing to placate, it is uncompromising, knowing full well that through stubborn insistence, it will ultimately prevail. Displacement has all the time in the world. Beyond morals, self-appointed, and taking possession because it must, displacement acts simply – and simply acts. Displacement never explains itself, never apologizes. In 2010 at Columbia University’s “Rethinking Poetics” conference, the Mexican-American poet Mónica de la Torre, in the middle of her presentation, broke out, full on, for ten minutes entirely in Spanish, leaving all those who pay lip service to multilingualism and diversity angry because they couldn’t understand what she was saying. De la Torre thereafter resumed her talk in English, never mentioning her intervention. No symbols where none intended. Comprehension is optional; displacement is concretely demonstrative. Globalization engenders displacement. People are displaced, objects are displaced, language is displaced. In a global circulatory system, there is no time – and certainly not enough energy – for tracing the long supply chains that lead to understanding. Instead, there is a blinkered lack of understanding, ultimately yielding to resignation. Nobody seems to ____________ 1

John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 197172,” M: Writings ’67–’72, 1973, 215.

notice anymore. Advertising signs in ballparks are presented in foreign languages, completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of the meatspace audience, addressing instead the far-flung televised, webcast audience; bypassing the local for the unseen, the unknown, the elsewhere. Translation is quaint, a boutique pursuit from a lost world; displacement is brutal fact. Translation is slow food: a good meal with friends, in a warm environment, a bourgeois luxury; displacement is not being able to read the menu in fluorescent-lit refractivity that appeared out of nowhere onto Main Street. Translation is the faux-nostalgia for the LP; displacement is the torrent-laced, mislabeled MP3. Displacement is a four-dimensional object, at once expanding and contracting, unified while exploding, devouring everything in its sight. “Syntax,” said John Cage, “is the arrangement of the army.”2 Legislated by the laws of grammatical concord, syntax sets chains of linguistic assimilation into motion, a situation whereby words are forced to adapt to words surrounding them, formally and sonically. Cage views language as being expressive of a societal politic, and therefore ripe for contestation: “This demilitarization of language is conducted in many ways: a single language is pulverized; the boundaries between two and more languages are crossed; elements not strictly linguistic (graphic, musical) are introduced; etc. Translation becomes, if not impossible, unnecessary.”3 Shattering language into pieces as a political act. Picking them up and putting them back together the wrong way as an act of liberation. Creative misuses of language like homophonic translations and mondegreens as models of playful anarchy. Question linguistic structures, question political structures. Computer networks are also arrangements of the army, but their logic is already that of displacement, pulverization, crossed boundaries. As citizens of these networks, data packets are by nature both stable and nomadic; they offer a parallel for the movement of bodies in space. Moving in bulk, data packets course through networks like charter groups on holiday tours or Bangladeshi workers trundled off to UAE labor camps. Buffered and queued – resulting in variable delays and throughput depending on the network’s capacity and the traffic load – they are dispatched through labyrinths of nodes, borders, switches, gateways, routers, and immigration checkpoints. Aping the mechanics of the RAID drive, displacement spits its subjects across the globe, redundantly segmenting and replicating them – one part can easily be swapped out for another – thereby minimizing chances for loss while increasing chances for totality. We have faith that data packets will constitute themselves as promised but often that proves to be false: the high-def video we were seeking is merely a cellphone grab, held ____________ 2 3

“Foreword,” ibid., unpaginated. Ibid.

up shakily for ninety minutes at a screen in a dim theater. In our computational ecosystem, these spurious artifacts take on the characteristics of an unwanted guest. We invite someone for dinner, but they don’t behave the way we wish: perhaps they’re unkempt, or rude – we toss them out. But sometimes they sneak in unawares. The malware, keylogger, or Trojan horse that surreptitiously slips in under the guise of a pirated program, movie, or link, settles in, becoming a part of the household. Sometimes we have no choice but to accommodate our displaced guest. Displacement, on a larger scale, is no different. Acid rain is displaced weather. Petroleum is displaced prehistoric life. Nuclear waste from Fukushima washing up on the shores of California is displaced industry. Melting polar ice caps are displaced Ice Age. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is displaced geography, a displaced landmass comprised of displaced rubbish. These riotous amalgamations of displaced color and form – accidental collaborations between nature and man – are permanent reefitecture for fishes. Plastic bags twisted around branches of trees become year-round foliage, transforming bare winter oaks into everblues and everreds, technicolor displays that make New England Octobers pale by comparison. Seasonal narratives take on a rouge character: older bags, their shape deformed by sunlight and rough weather, disintegrate into fluttering flaglike shreds before being blown off the trees by gales. Those same gales attach fresh bags to the trees, blossoming anew each day. A tree grows to devour a metal grate that once served as its protector. The tree now becomes the guardian of the grate, swallowing it whole, nestling it deep within its core. A state of détente: the tree doesn’t die. Instead, it adapts like the man who, in midlife after complaining of stomach pains, discovers that he has been carrying his conjoined twin unbeknownst to him within his belly all these years, fetus in fetu. Displaced tumors as fetuses; displaced fetuses as tumors. In Hong Kong after a typhoon, 150 tons of microplastic nurdles were blown into the sea, so small and numerous that they could never be gathered. They’ve become so intermeshed with the sand that beachgoers now prefer nuzzling these new spongy, pliant grains between their toes to the natural sand. PCBs are displaced toxins, permanently enmeshed in the river’s mud. Removing them would only stir up their noxiousness, so they slumber in the riverbed undisturbed for eternity. A part of the river’s ecosystem for so long, it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t there. Retained foreign objects are displaced industrial items which have become lodged inside of living bodies, coexisting with organs and flesh for years without incident or detection. A bullet shot into a boy’s face remains comfortably embedded for the next eighty years. The bullet’s heat sterilizes it; once lodged, infection is impossible. Unnoticed, life goes on. Metal melds with bone: plates in legs, silver in teeth. A teenager swallows a pen,

where it remains in her stomach for a quarter of a century. Finally removed, it still writes. Surgical tools left in bodies are known as retained surgical items. One man is found with sixteen of them inside him. Doctors remark on his body’s amazing ability to get used to things. Displacement is modernism for the 21st century, a child of montage, psychogeography, and the objet trouvé. Appropriation is the engine of displacement, mechanically moving unimpeded toward its goal. Trading in binaries – this either can or cannot be appropriated – appropriation eschews messy questions of morality, ethics and nuance. A boundless annexing machine, it sucks indiscriminately. The consequences are low – transnational, networked, fast-moving and ubiquitous, terrestrial law can’t begin to compete. Instead, appropriation abides by the law of the network, which is the law of open standards, of select all. Flexible and cunning, it always finds a loophole. The digital ecosystem is a decontextualizing machine, wrenching pieces from their constituent structures and flinging them across the globe. In this context of no context, meaning becomes pliant. Detached from their original circumstances, artifacts aren’t devoid of meaning; instead, they acquire new meanings, nestled into new frameworks. By dismantling the precisely constructed framing apparatuses that uphold any ethos, poetic, or politic, appropriation effectively knocks the legs out from under ideology, rendering the subject neutered, little more than a deflated bag of bones. Appropriation is a cipher, cobbling together bits and pieces willy-nilly, resulting in bizarre Frankensteinian artifacts: iPhones cloned with TV antennas and USB ports; PDFs of books with pages pieced together from various editions, in various languages, editions, fonts, and font sizes; some pages are upside down, others are missing entirely; Hollywood blockbusters with hard-coded Telgu subs; Tollywood blockbusters with singed-in Urdu subs. There are ten Harry Potter books in the Chinese series as opposed to the seven penned by J.K. Rowling. Appropriation thrives on provisionality, the craft of the kludge – it’s ugly but it works. Quantity over quality: trawl in deep enough waters with a wide enough net and you’re bound to catch something. Take it now. Sort it later. Or never sort it. Compile & stockpile. Redistribute & resell. Sampling and remixing are based on borrowing. Borrowing is translation. Polite and neighborly, it involves exchange and social discourse, agreed upon terms and conditions. Sampling is the art of mindful recontextualization. You sample a riff of a James Brown song, building your song off it; you don’t simply re-present the whole song and call it your own. Likewise, remixing bears the hand of the mixer, marked by an individual aesthetic. Remixing is a game of telephone, a conversation, mindful of the version which proceeded yours and the version which will follow. “I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used,” said Jimmy Page, commenting on his reworking of preexisting material. “I

always made sure to come up with some variation.”4 Appropriation, on the other hand, is effortless and brutal, dumbly picking things up whole and dropping them whole into new situations. Anonymous and authorless, displaced versions are replicas and knockoffs, indistinguishable from one another except in metaphysical ways: conceptualization, contextualization, and distribution. Robert Smithson didn’t make paintings of the sky; instead, by reflecting it in a mirror, he displaced it, fusing it with the earth, dropping squares of blue into seas of green. Blazing azure one day, smoggy grayish-yellow the next, Smithson’s gestures were at once formal color studies, quiet meditations on nature, and political statements on ecology. The mirror is a displacement machine which appropriates all that passes before it. A pre-programmed automaton, the mirror employs no judgment or morals, indiscriminately displaying all that passes before it. Reflect something emotional, the mirror becomes emotional. Reflect something political, the mirror becomes political. Reflect something erotic, the mirror becomes erotic. The mirror works around the clock, reflecting a dark room all night long when its inhabitants are sleeping, or an empty apartment all day long when its inhabitants are at work. Like its cousin the surveillance camera, the mirror displays scads of dark data, but unlike the NSA, the mirror has no memory: every image passing across its surface is ephemeral. Great crimes are committed before mirrors; no one is ever the wiser. If this mirror could talk... The mirror, then, is closer to a movie screen than CCTV, a surface upon which images are projected/reflected in reverse. But unlike the movie screen, the mirror never goes dark. Smash the mirror, disperse the image. Toss the pieces in the trash, they continue to dumbly reflect. The displaced text is a mirror, taking on the hue of whatever it is placed near. Displaced authorship solely consists of determining what the text will reflect. Reflect something emotional, you have written an emotional text. Reflect something political, you have written a political text. Reflect something erotic, you have written an erotic text. Mirrored writing is not writing: it is copying, moving, and reflecting. Editing is moving. Want to alter your text? Move it elsewhere. The displaced text’s natural environment is in the network. Born of copy-and-paste, everything about the displaced text is circumstantial and temporary. Ricocheting across the networks, the displaced text restlessly replicates, morphs, and self-distributes. The text assumes the affect of a mirror, offering a curious kind of utopianism which should not be confused with nihilism except that, like all utopias, it indirectly advocates a tabula rasa; like most utopias, it has no concrete expression. ____________ 4

Vernon Silver, “Stairway to Heaven: The Song Remains Pretty Similar,” Businessweek, May 15, 2014. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-15/led-zeppelins-stairway-to-heaven-vs-dot-spirits-taurusa-reckoning. Accessed May 28, 2014.

The displaced text is always recycled. Recycled language is politically and ecologically sustainable, promoting reuse and reconditioning as opposed to the manufacture and consumption of the new, counteracting rampant global capitalist consumption by admitting that language is not able to be owned or possessed, that it is a shared and endlessly abundant resource. The digital ecosystem with its replicative and mimetic processes yields limitless resources – too much is never enough. Yet – and this is where it gets interesting – the displaced text’s entwinement with the latest technology, its scraping, warehousing, and hoarding of data, its celebration of baroque excess and fetishizing of waste, aligns it with nefarious global capitalist tendencies. In addition, there’s an imperialistic aspect to it, a colonizing imperative. Like a virus spreading rapidly across networks, it threatens to take on the character of a huge multinational monster. All of these contradictions are part of the discourse of displacement, inseparable from its processes, production, and reception. The limits of the network are the limits of its world. Displacement is a shift away from linear models of political orientation: neither left nor right, progressive nor reactionary, but swirling and sideways. The right tries to seal borders and legislate displacement out of existence, oblivious to the flows that whirl freely around it. Meanwhile, the left still holds out hope against hope for translation – can’t we all just get along? Displacement, instead of responding to difference with understanding and consideration, responds to difference by swallowing it whole. Odd things appear: retained foreign objects. Things that I don’t understand. Things I didn’t ask for. A system update will, unbeknownst to me, drop things into the midst of my environment. I have no idea they are there. I panic and wonder whether I can go back to an earlier version. I can’t. Notwithstanding that, I begin to toy with the idea of going back to the previous system, the one I knew, the one I was comfortable in. There is no going back. I struggle, I whine, I eventually adapt myself to it; the displacement, once obtrusive, becomes the new normal – at least until the next upgrade. I don’t move them – generally they can’t be moved – so I live with them. I learn to accept them, even though I might not understand them. My computer has thousands of such displaced items on it. I can’t translate them. The song that shows up in iTunes. I can’t tell you where it came from. I wish I knew. The song has no identifying information, no ID3 tags, no provenance. But I like it. I tame it by tagging it, domesticate it by filing it on my hard drive. It becomes mine.