Empty eyes of defunct TVs blindly mirroring what lies before
"this emptying is also the precondition for a new form of
retention, of holding on, as the image presents us with a
kind of hole that is in reality a waiting receptacle, with
the voiding of the image only allowing an opening onto
the past, the filling of this hole with the data of both
memory and desire. We face the receptacle that is the
camera opening onto the receptacle of the shop window,
filled with the receptacles of the television screens,
analog receivers that no longer project the information
of the mass media but passively accept the aleatory life
of the events of the nearby street: the cars, buildings and
also the artist reflected on an entirely transformed—
photographic—form of the screen." 376
Consider the idea of screen and screen. I screen allows you to view images when considered in the context of a TV. A screen hides or obscures what is behind it when it is used to block wind, in dressing rooms or as a diversion.
A tsunami of credit
"If
we want to follow the poet manqué of the current crisis,
or more accurately its poète maudit, Alan Greenspan, we
have perhaps entered today not an economic crash at all,
but what he called instead memorably a “credit tsunami.”
[18] The metaphor is no longer the (modernist) one of
the crash, calling for strategies of disjunction, collision,
and montage. Instead it is of the tsunami, a metaphorics
of flow, overflow, and excess, of echoes and reboundings,
of chain reaction, of inundation and flood—liquidity
gone awry. It is not a question of the industrial object
crumpled before us, but of the flood plain swept bare, the
barren aftermath of a catastrophic clearing. Stated in this
way, the metaphor surely seems appropriate for an era of
abstraction as intense as the one through which we have
been passing. Such is the imagination and the “writing
of the disaster” that we must broach. Perhaps we need to
imagine dams more than crashes, stoppages more than
collisions. Perhaps we need drainage. Perhaps we need
new forms of emptying more than of collapse." 375
I traveled in Thailand shortly before the tsunami hit in 2004. The shacks and warm people who made their living and built their lives on the beaches were wiped out. The young man that served us drinks, the overly agressive massueses smearing Noxema on sandy skin, and the German tourists in their Speedos. Anyone on the beachfront. I did hear that the beaches were the most beautiful that had been in a long time right after, pristine, wiped free of commerce, capitalism; replaced by pristine nature.
The Chicago fire was a total devistation of an existing culture but in its wake was a planned city with paved streets, building codes, green spaces, and public shorelines. Devastation-Reincarnation, the creator and destroyer go hand in hand.
The credit tsunami allowed even the average American to see money as an abstraction. The revealing of the abstraction of what money is as opposed to what it represents. I have seen a resurgence of DIY and bartering culture and even creation of new currencies since the crash bubble. The American dream has been revealed as a dream, a farce, a game. Taken too seriously you cannot win. If you think there are no winners then you have already lost.
