Monsters Produce the Sleep of Reason, and Mad CO2

Monster RT01O (orange)

Monster RT01P (pink)

Monster RT01T  (teal/light blue)

Monster RT01Y  (yellow)

Monster RT01G (green)

Forgot to post from the other day.

Hidden Order 8"x11" ©Casey Lynch 2015

Another example of experimenting with this camo paper. Cutout negative space and fill it with geometries.

New Work - Pick Your Switch.

Pick Your Switch 11"x14" ©Casey Lynch 2015

Still experimenting with ways to interact with these patterns. This image has the smallest limbs removed - cutout of the printed paper.The image that remains was fixed to a neon yellow-orange Bristol board.

possible direction for some paintings

©Casey Lynch 2015

a digital sketch of a possible direction I might take with some future paintings. thinking about camouflage, blending in, sticking out, Roger Caillois, Jacques Lacan, evolution, excessive mimicry, Darwin, etc.

New Drawings!

Here are some examples of the drawings that are available as the $50 reward on my Kickstarter. They are 9x12 inches, pen and color pencil on parchment paper, with Realtree© printed paper cutouts under the parchment, all mounted on 96lb Bristol board. There will be five versions of each drawing, each with a unique color scheme and page placement.

Monster RT01Y ©Casey Lynch 2015

Raise 'Em Up RT01G ©Casey Lynch 2015

Tailgate RT01P ©Casey Lynch 2015

Some of What I'm Thinking About

I am calling the drawing style "neon light" style. Although I am emulating the "Outer Glow" effect from Adobe Photoshop, neon lights are a motif in Country Music that (as synecdoche) signify a (alcohol) bar, a place that of houses many rituals. The country bar is a place to be alone but with people, to do some thinking, to drown one's sorrows, and to forget. But it is also also a place to celebrate, to dance, to party, and perhaps find a mate.

In Art speak, the Bar may be thought of as a heterotopia, a site where inhabitants are simultaneously present and absent. (Examples are the "space" inside a mirror, a cemetery, and the honeymoon vacation. ~Michel Foucault) "The bar" is also a term used in linguistics. Often illustrated as a diagram, "the bar" is a line that separates the siginifed from the signifier, a barrier that must be crossed in order for meaning to happen ~F. de Saussure.

With this new body of work, I'm thinking about the possible meanings of, and the hidden truths behind imagery that resonates with me as being Southern* or ore broadly, "Country." I am exploring my sentiments for "the country" and the American South through images and objects that sparked both fear and awe in my younger self, and nostalgia and desire in my adult self. The drawings featured here use the pickup truck as both subject and object; a thing that illuminates and is illuminated; a person whose interior is camouflaged but whose outline radiates.

My work has always used artificial light as a trope. In many cultures, religions, and even scientific theories, natural light (and its absence) play a critical role in describing ultimate truths. My work uses artificial light [light sources controlled by humans] to pose questions such as, "What does it mean for light to be artificial? Can there even be a such thing as artificial light?" and by extension, "What can that teach us about Truth?"

Digital Collages - rewards for my upcoming Kickstarter.

These will be printed using premium, museum quality inkjet printing on heavyweight 100# archival paper.

Just Some Good ©2015 (9x16 inches)

el Camino ©2015 (11x14 inches)

Pat Cutlass ©2015 (9x16 inches)

Diesel 250 ©2015 (11x14 inches)

HoooOOOOhhhh!!!

when you look at complex patterns too long, you realize it's just chaos.

Imcompletely Wrong reboot: Quicker, Dirtier, Southier

I will be posting video commentary/criticism as well as regular content to my blog in an effort to produce more content. This is just a test introduction.

Powers Of Horror: Julia Kristeva on being an Adjunct Professor

Here is a lesser known writing by Julia Kristeva on being an adjunct professor. You can see she uses the term "adjunct" as a near-homonym for Lacan's objet a [object petit a] - an object that becomes the focus of a subject's desire, where the actual source of desire is unknown, missing, or posses the general quality of "lack". Kristeva turns the term on its head, showing it as an object of repulsion, but with the same source (or lack thereof).

APPROACHING ADJUNCTION

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,

No eye so vile nor adjunct that brushes not

Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.

     -- Victor Hugo, La Legende des siecles

NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT

There looms, within adjunction, one of those violent, dark re- volts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.

When I am beset by adjunction, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The adjunct is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is adjunct is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The adjunct has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is adjunct, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the adjunct does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its adjunct. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that, "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it to the father's account [verse au pere—pere-uersion]: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, adjunct and adjunction are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.

THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.

Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of adjunction. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I adjunct myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It adjuncts.

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, adjuncted, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of adjunction. It is death infecting life. Adjunct. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes adjunction but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is adjunct, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not adjunct; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Adjunction, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles,* a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter  instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.*. . .

In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children's shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The adjunction of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.

genX are the new Boomers

Valentine's Day 2013

Numbers sourced: http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx 

Feb 14 2013

Another bad meme

Borrowed Nostalgia

(Quite the rough draft, and as always, fully incomplete.)

My wife and I recently had our first child. It is quite the experience, and has really forced me to look back on my life as I look to the future of my daughter's. As with any retrospection, a sense of nostalgia comes into play (as does a sense of embarrassment.) 

As long as I have studied art, and maybe before, I have had a negative view of nostalgia, as it runs contrary to Modernist ideals. As far as I can tell, it runs counter to Postmodern ideology as well, in that the recycling of forms used in PM art is an act of criticism, not fondness. Now, I'm not sure what kind of weight it holds, but I have heard people try to add additional "post"s in front of "postmodern" - i.e., post-postmodern, post-post-postmodern, ad infinitum.; I have never really stuck around to find out what they are pretending to know, but I imagine it must have to do with a re-using of imagery with a more sympathetic approach. Unfortunately, this type of appropriation is doomed to become idolatry or fetishism, and is a surrogate for the womb of the unoriginal, those who fashion pleasurable the stale taste of aestheticized consumerism. Appropriation of this type belongs to the plagiarist.

It seems that the ideas that Nicolas Bourriaud presented in his 2002 masterpiece, Postproduction, have trickled down through a mass of bad artists and good programmers to be misused in the feeble hands of the general consumer, who now believes him/herself to be "creative." Creative, yes, but an artist, no. An act of plagiarism is an act of creation (just as an act of destruction is), but the action of art is an act of synthesis. The former is only a vampiric or zombic act - consumption that creates more consumers, all of whom where once alive, but are now dead; the latter is an act of agriculture, a consumption (of seemingly dead resources) whose product is life. [Here may be a good place to think of Zizek's interpretation of "un" something being worse than it's opposite - the undead being a horrific alternative to the alive.]

Bourriaud made a great case for what may have been the last wave of truly postmodern artist from the 90's in Postproduction, and set up a believable scenario in which we can see the actions of the DJ and computer programmer, selectors and re-arrangers (remixers) of given lexicons, as artistic creators. Bourriaud draws his argument out in such a way that we tend to believe him we he tells us that even flipping the channels on the television is an act of creation because it is an act of selection. Again, creation, yes, art, no.

The artistic DJ and Programmer rearrange their forms in a semiotic way that synthesizes new, intelligible structures capable of becoming fodder for future utterance by others; the plagiaristic flipping of television (or Youtube) channels creates only a virtual cache of wasted time for the masturbatory voyeur.

This is a thin line that I am drawing, but a line that must be drawn. It is a line so thin that often is not recognizable until the artist intentions are spelled out. To make the line more bold, imagine the difference between a PhD thesis and a Third Grade book report.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, nostalgia, we only need to look at the current state of photography to find that nostalgia is no longer readily available, thus must be borrowed. 

In today's modernized countries, essentially everyone has a camera(phone) with him/her at all time (with a virtually infinite digital film roll), which allows for everyone to take pictures of everything all the time. Paired with this phenomena is the new social forum, the social media site - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. - marketplaces for selling [giving] one's image(s) to others. The images are small, numerous (almost infinite), and seemingly fleeting. To view them is similar to watching someone flipping through a thousand television stations and only catching one frame of each show. This fragmented state seems to lie at the foundation of postmodernism, but does not, because it lacks an unapologetic ahistoricism.

The Fauxmodernist, the plagiarizer, seeks to have a history, a stable identity to which she may return, she longs for nostalgia, but there is no nostalgia available. Her history changed so rapidly that no pairing of time/place/technology is available. There are no Polaroids in a box under a bed of the trip to the Grand Canyon; there is a crashed harddrive in a landfill somewhere with 1.2 megapixel pictures of her at a mall which has gone out of business. There are too many pictures on her Facebook page to reminisce over, she is too busy maintaining her current identity with new images. But she knows these images lack substance (therefore so does she). In order to make up for this lack the plagiarist borrows nostalgia from his/her parents; she adds "filters" to make her status update photo look like it was taken in 1976 - in a week, in might have well been. 

There is no "320x240 Logitec webcam" filter on Instagram or similar apps; such a filter would have no significance to speak of. Instead, the signifiers from another era are mimicked in order to simulate the feeling of a meaningful photograph. The photographs may hold some interest, but have no punch, no lasting impression; in the terms of Roland Barthes, they may have some level of studium, but no real punctum.

This may be a bit of a stretch, of course the youngest generations may still develop nostalgia for places/spaces, but I seriously doubt that they form the same sense of nostalgia for past times, technologies and media the way older generations do.

Commemorating the Great Recession

The Great Recession (21 September, 2012) © Casey Lynch 2011

A new work, in the style of Goya. Also, a proposed public sculpture for anywhere there is an apple store...

The Work of Art in the Hyper-Relational Age

Benjamin at Tiravanija Opening © Casey Lynch 2012

The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the relational art elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the relational art “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the relational art. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of an the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value.

For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the relational art. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the relational art its true means of exercise. The relational art with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway.

The relational art makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the relational arts this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

*of course, this is the final section of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction with the words "movie" and "film" replaced with "relational art."  this really saved me a lot of time coming up with a good critical stance...

What makes a meme a meme? Can ambiguity, self-referential-ity, and critical implications make a meme art? Do memes already have these attributes  Are memes already art?

Calling Home

Since I moved out of my parent’s house 10ish years ago, I’ve never had a “home” phone, only a mobile. In that time, I’ve had 5 or 6 phones, and 3 different numbers. I’ve always been pretty good at having Sprint transfer my contacts, or using Google to back them up. Among the ever growing number of contacts was my parents home number, the land-line number to the house that I grew up in. It has always been in there as “Home,”  and there were separate entries for my Mother’s and Father’s mobile numbers, “Mom” and “Dad” respectively.

My wife and I have been together, counting dating, most of those ten years since I left home.  She is listed under “Jennifer Lynch” and “Kittun”. This March, we found out that she is pregnant. In order to try to get some of our finances in order, we decided to sell our house. It was not our first home together (we have lived in apartment homes all over Atlanta, in NYC and Providence,) but it was the first home that we owed, the first property that had our names on the title. Still, we never had a home phone, a shared landline number. When filling out documents, whoever was holding the pen or typing on the keyboard would put her or my mobile number in the “Home” blank – it probably makes for a quintessential definition of the “postmodern home.”

At any rate, we are currently in another apartment, another temporary home, until we get another house.

We used the money we made from selling our house to pay off some debts, buy my wife a new car, and get me a new cell phone. All my contacts transferred just fine: “Jenifer Lynch/Kittun”, “Mom”, “Dad”, “Home,” etcetera, etcetera.

When we moved, we had to transfer all of our utilities, and the cable company convinced my wife to add a home phone to our bundle in order to save some money. I thought this was a good idea, because as someone who does contract work, I could get a fax machine and start writing off a portion of our rent/mortgage as a home office.

A couple weeks went by, we got settled into our new place, and decided that there’s not quite enough space for a fax machine, so the landline went unused. At the same time, we had both been experiencing poor reception in our apartment, so I started thinking that we should maybe get a phone to plug into the wall.

This past weekend, Jennifer and I took a 350 mile round trip to visit all of our parents. We met each set at a different location; at the lake, at the house, at the stadium. We were able to stay in touch, make and change plans, and get directions by using our mobile phones.

While at my parent’s house, I asked my mom if they had any old phones they weren’t using. She listed all the ones lying around their house, to which I responded with a wishy-washy, half-hearted rejection. On a whim that evening, she picked up a $10 corded-phone while running an errand to the office supply store. It was perfect.

When we got back to our apartment, we unpacked our stuff, started the laundry, and took showers. Tonight, relaxing down into my current home, I decided to plug our new phone into the wall to see if it would actually work. (And to find out what our phone number is.)

After hooking it up, I picked up the receiver and heard a noise I hadn’t heard in a long time, a dial-tone. For my first test, I pushed the buttons to call my mobile phone, and recalled how as a teenager, my friends and I would try to play pop songs with the different key tones. Within seconds, my cell phone rang. I had a silly thought that this would be a good opportunity to have a talk with myself.

Then I really realized something. What label was I going to give this new number in my cell phone “contacts?”

Maybe it’s not as big of a deal as I have made it, but knowing that this new number would stick with me at least as long as I continued living in the Atlanta area, it would need a name…

I went to my “contacts” folder on my mobile phone as if I was walking through a wormhole. I first went to the contact “Home.” I clicked “Edit,” and changed the name to “Grandma and Papa,” the name my nephews and nieces, and soon my little baby girl, call my parents. I then went back to my call history, selected my new landline number, and added it to my contacts as “Home.”

Animal (Internet) Farm

In thinking about our diets, and what it is that allows us to eat the way that we do, I stumbled upon a loose connection between freedom, vegetarianism, and the internet.  I start with what I feel is the general understanding of freedom, and will end with a question of how freedom exists.

            I will assume freedom to mean being able to do whatever we want, as long as we do not harm another.  I feel like most people take this to mean that they should always be able to do whatever pleases them, so long as they don’t perceive the one who is hurt…

Animal (Internet) Farm  (© Casey Lynch 2011)

Humans are omnivorous - we can and do get nutrition from eating both plants and other animals.  However, we are not cannibals, we do not eat others of our same species.   Further, the moral law that forbids the killing of (which usually happens before the eating of) another human has been rationalized as truly ethical because to kill another is to remove the basic rights, or oppress the other.  This can be teased out to show that to make another conscious being suffer, directly or indirectly (as is so often the case with murder), is wrong.  This partial definition of freedom is a major foundation of (Westernly-defined) civilized societies.

Somehow, and in many cultures, civilization has extended to non-humans.  In the thousands of years of domesticating of animals, many of us have begun to breach the division between (human) self and (animal) other, assigning non-human animals human-like consciousness, and in turn human-like rights.  This has made it harder for many humans to be able to rationalize killing an animal for any reason, especially for our enjoyment, especially where enjoyment is the sating of hunger (that could be satisfied in other ways.)  For some, not only is the killing of the animal seen as wrong, but to alienate an animal by means of removing it from its natural habitat (farming) is oppressive.

From here I need to jump to Marx for a minute.  As most of us know, Karl Marx saw industrialization and capitalism as modes of production and commerce that were sure to oppress the proletariat and alienate them from their labor.   But alienation not only removes one from the reality of his labor, but also the labor of others.  Further, alienation inserts the proletariat into the reality of the bourgeoisie in that he is allowed not just more leisure time, but more importantly, distance from labor and its consequences under industrialized capitalism.  In this sense, part of the proletariat's alienation is (an ironic) freedom.  In a capitalist society, the proletariat is able to purchase goods made by (other) oppressed peoples without having to feel any empathy or connection to fellow workers.  For example, a normal moral person would not buy a garment directly off of a sweat-shop-factory-line attended by children, nor would he/she make a garment under squalor conditions.  In these two examples, the garment simply would not be had - but many people do buy clothes that are made under such conditions.  A moral or ethical person would not buy goods that he/she knows were made under oppressive conditions, but the alienation that occurs in an industrialized, and especially globalized, society allows us enough distance from that oppressive labor to pretend it does not exist – this is the deniable distance.  This allows to obtain what we actually desire – self gratification.

Here we can return to our discussion of humans as conflicted omnivores.  Many people would not, or are not, capable of killing an animal in order to eat it, but are fully capable of eating a dead animal that has been killed elsewhere, packaged, and presented to them in a form and place that possesses a deniable distance, i.e. the supermarket or restaurant.  We see this in many degrees, even in those who do kill animals.  Few, if any, non-sociopathic people kill an animal with his/her bare hands.  On many farms, the “processing” of cows, chickens, etc. is mechanized - industrialized.  Even the hunter uses a bow or a gun, technologies that not only give a tactical advantage, but a partial deniable distance.  Often, when the hunter obtains proximity to the targeted beast, it is already dead.  In cases where it is not, the job is finished with a subsequent shot, or a blade; rarely with the hand.  Even a relatively short blade creates a distance that makes the act more digestible.  To be extreme, even at the table we use a fork, knife, spoon, or chop-sticks to distance ourselves from our prey’s subjectivity.  Again, in the end are allowed to attain self-gratification.

Here we see freedom being defined as being able to do what one desires through the advantage of existing at a deniable distance from ethically/morally problematic acts.  It is a relative and individual freedom.  It is a freedom based in illusion, and I would suggest that all freedom in the future will be as well.

Returning to Marx, he and Engels saw democracy as the vehicle that would facilitate the rise of the proletariat, and even though it would have to go through the rise and fall of capitalism, ultimately, democracy would lead to the realization of communism.  The debate as to the utopianism of Marxism is not the point here, instead it is to assert that the goal of a communist society is to produce equality, and that this equality is equated with (universal) freedom.  The question now and in the future, in the time of the internet, especially Web 2.0 and beyond, is how does/will deniable distance prevent us from being free.

We all remember (and still hear) the specter of communism’s return in the utopian prophecies of the democracy of the internet.  “Everyone will have a voice,” or “everyone will have a choice.”  The partial truth that precipitates from such proclamations of equality is that as long as you can pay for or get access to a device that connects to the internet, and pay for or find access to a physical site that broadcasts the internet, you will receive some level of freedom to information depending on where in the world you actually, physically live.

First, the internet is not free.  In general, we pay someone somewhere, like the cable or phone company, to connect to it.  Once we are on it, whatever services one believes he/she is obtaining for “free” is actually being paid for by the giving away of one’s  information (think gmail or facebook), personal time/labor (this blog post is one example), or allowing oneself to be inundated with advertising that affects him/her on some level (probably subconsciously.)  In a sense, while one is on the internet, he/she is working for someone else, producing goods in the form of information, without being paid.  All the while, the entities actually reaping the monetary benefits in the real world are widening the gap between the wealthiest few and the majority.

Second, the internet does not make all information free to everyone.  The internet is much less of an anarchic utopia in China than it is in the U.S.  Also, most of us are unsure of if, and how much information is censored in the U.S.  All we know is that we get enough information to gratify our selves.

Finally, web purchases create an indefinite distance between the objects we order online, and the labor that went into their creation.  We usually have no connection to the possibility or actuality of oppression that occurs in the production of goods and services we purchase online.

So what does this mean in terms of the denial distance?  First, the internet seems free because most of us are alienated from the charges we pay to the service providers; we never actually see the physical money before or after it goes to the phone or cable company because we pay it with a credit/debit card, or even more distantly, have it automatically drafted from our account when it is due.  We are abstractly indentured servants.  Second, we essentially never-ever see the inventors/controllers of the content and services we use on the web.  Occasionally we may see a Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs on television, but most of us have never met, or even seen someone like them in real life.  (As a larger irony, I bet most people don’t even know who Larry Page and Sergey Brin are.)  The confusion of producer and consumer, as well as the gap between subject and object on the internet is especially interesting:  because of their nearness to infinity, they most clearly show how deniable distance allows the simulacrum that is democracy to function on the internet.  To further examine this phenomenon may expose an analogy to how democracy functions as ideology everywhere.

We have come to believe that the internet provides us with a virtual reality, leading us to believe that everything we experience on the web is only virtual.  Actually, it would be more accurate to call the internet a semireality.  I use “semireal” as a word descending from Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreal.  Where hyperreality suggests an indistinction between the real and a copy or simulacrum, the semireal is a reality that exists within or parallel to another, completely apprehensible reality.  Semireality places no hierarchical value in distinguishing between some hypothetical real-real versus a hyperreal, but instead emphasizes the relative strata between all possible levels of reality.

It is only in a semireality that democracy is possible, and only through deniable distance that semirealities are comprehended.  In this sense, there must be a deniable distance for democracy to exist.

The internet gives us a virtual infinity of distance between ourselves and our masters.  (Ironically, they have us closer than ever.)  The deniable distance the web provides, the fact that we don’t interact directly with others, whether equal or not, gives us the feeling that we are free to indulge in the gratification of ourselves (under the illusion that there is no ‘real’ other to be harmed by our actions.)  We see neither those who oppress us, or those we oppress.  This should quickly lead to the question of how oneself is oppressed, and if we are okay with this lack of freedom.