#peli grietzer

[ourladyofperpetualnaptime]

Modernist forms[. . .] are concrete adaptations or developments in the technology of cognitive mapping—they are pragmatically sociohistorically contingent methods for creating mental models of the structures and dynamics of phenomena. [. . . T]he ‘ambient meaning’ viewpoint treats Modernist form as a method of map-making, rather than as a map: I treat abstraction, parataxis, fragmentation, indeterminacy, polysemy and polyvalence not as representations of a psychological or cultural predicament but as methods of a process of cognition.

peli grietzer, from mood, vibe, system: the geometry of ambient meaning

[spilledreality]

I said, I spent the morning writing a manifesto on clashing discursive styles, and I spent the evening learning that the nurture v. combat carving had already been discovered by about 12 different people, and it reminded me of that bit from Amerikkkkka where Peli says, I said, ‘I spent the week deciding Kant was the first Modernist, then spent the weekend discovering that Clement Greenberg called Kant the first Modernist. Which is exactly what I hated about childhood the first time around: you thought you and the world were having a conversation but actually you were talking back to the recorded message on the world’s answering machine.’

[biunivocal]

https://effects-journal.com/archive/vibe-coherence

Fredric Jameson, even though you can think of him as, like, the biggest enemy of vibes, says that there was a fall at some point after the era of Balzac where literature lost its ability to grasp the causal structure of social-material reality, and that, as we move into modernism and postmodernism, writers were content to substitute for that grasp of the causal structure of social-material reality sort of vague affinities or lists, like in Knausgård. He would say that what literature should do is help us grasp how different factors interact to produce the world of experience, and that it should do this in a way that is itself experientially graspable. Whatever sort of unity you find in a list isn’t going to get you very far... In a way, my disagreement with contemporary Jamesonians is not about whether grasping vibes somehow contributes to the struggle, but about whether the cognitive connection to causal-material reality is an intrinsic or necessary aspect of vibe grasping. I think that vibe grasping is a step towards something valuable in itself. A Jamesonian might agree that you could get this kind of vibe coherence first, but if it doesn’t lead to another kind of coherence, then it’s a dead end. A Jamesonian would have some skepticism that, if you’re currently grasping only vibes, you’re on the road to grasping more than vibes. Or even that the grasping of a vibe is indirectly beneficial to deeper cognitive functions...

Any field of aesthetic coherence can be converted into an interpretive schema for the world at large. Whether it was designed to do so or whether it will have something very interesting for us if we use it that way is a further question, but there is always a story to be told about how aesthetic coherence has the potential to turn into a pair of glasses. It defines a very natural aesthetic coherence-to-interpretive schema pipeline: the idea that every aesthetically coherent assemblage is a compressed representation and interpretive schema for itself and therefore potentially for things that are even a little bit like it or even remotely like it. 

It’s definitely become part of how I think of works of art now. First, I absorb the capacity of the work to hold together, and then I start to think about which things in the world approximately hold together in the same way, and as I find them I can start looking at them with the same attunement that I developed in order to grasp the coherence of the work of art. The slogan for this is: you can learn a way of seeing by apprehending the set of objects that this way of seeing sees the best. 

My friends who are in those sorts of practices moving between the representational and the non-representational have found this way of thinking really useful, like people who do experimental film and also installation, or people who do experimental dance and choreography which sometimes veers towards performance art and sometimes towards more theater and blends them. They’re thinking about different modalities and techniques that create a field of consistency that naturally repurposes itself for interpreting things outside its strict boundaries. In this sense, vibe is a unified theory of mimesis for things that are directly mimetic and for things that aren’t at all.

[canonical-transformation]

Gnoses and Gestalts: Archons as Vibe Checks

(CW: unsubstantiated theory)

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are Celestia, the Second Throne of the Heavens. You have usurped the throne from the Primordial One, laid waste to the civilisation of the Seelies, and now hold dominion over the mortal realm of Teyvat.

Say, too, that you are in the process of carving the world into seven nations, implementing a system of Gnoses wielded by seven Archons, in order to (error: speculation out of scope for this post).

And suppose—to run with the voxel-pixel motifs associated with you, Celestia—that your mind(s) are inhuman, that your neurology and biology are alien to this world, that you look at mortals and terrestrial "gods" alike and see only the mysterious cognition of jellyfish and ant colonies (metaphorically).

Allogenes are, in part, a mechanism for getting 'better' Archons. You intend to allocate Visions to those with the potential to achieve Godhood (presumably Archonhood).

You don't have a grasp on mortal (or demigod or god or etc.) psychology, not nearly enough to run a job interview for a farmhand, let alone an Archon.

How do you do it?

(N.B. For simplicity, I'll be treating Celestia as a singular entity with consistent goals: maybe a hive mind, maybe a collection of seraphim all aligned on the same purpose, whatever. Also let's drop the second-person hypothetical now that we're below the cut.)

Well, the groundwork had been laid: the Archon War was a pretty good start. A vicious free-for-all between all terrestrial powers, resulting in seven clear winners? The War was a well-optimised mechanism for selecting something. (Whatever Celestia's goal was in having seven Archons+Gnoses, we can assume that the War's selection process comports with that goal.)

Now, recall, we're assuming that the hearts and minds of Teyvat are like black boxes. It's easy to comprehend the actions of nations in aggregate, but to inspect, say, Mao Xiangling and conclude that she has the potential to achieve Godhood, that she's worth allocating one of their bounded(?) supply of Visions towards? How do you do that without understanding human desire (or yokai desire or wind-spirit desire, etc.)?

Can a brainwave scan tell you that? Can analysis of the neurochemical mix in a little vertebrate alien's brain tell you, at any given moment, that this person is a candidate for Godhood?

Well, the convenient thing is, you're not analysing vertebrate alien brains from scratch.

You have access to seven entire brains of Archon War winners.

You can't be sure what goes on in the Archons' minds either, but they're structurally far more similar to the mortals' minds than to your own.

So what if you just... compared them?

Imagine "what makes somebody a suitable Archon?" as a question, and these seven Archons are all different but seemingly good answers. Celestia can look at the Archons' minds. How do these minds work? How do the Archons think?

(a pilgrimage[...]; a battle ¶ is the noblest and most eminent in ¶ someday, they will blow towards a brighter future ¶ a very, very long dream[...] the dancing circle ¶ you shoulder the grievances of the world ¶ this is the trust[...] betray it, and you have tainted ¶ my ideals have no stains)

...and once Celestia understood the shape that Archons contort their minds into at the height of their power, it's not too hard an exercise to look out for mortals doing the same.

Moments of self-certain unchangeability. Moments of resistance and defiance. Moments of unwavering idealism. And so on.

And really, how else could Celestia find Vision wielders, if not by searching for people who, for just a moment in time, resemble an Archon?

(❤️❤️ with thanks to @eujean for their recent Visions theory posts, which inspired me to write this up. There's more to say but I think this gives the general idea of this maybe-not-crack headcanon)

Side note: I titled this post "Archons as Vibe Checks" following Peli Grietzer's fascinating account (link) of computational models coincidentally encoding vibes, or aesthetics, or the impression that a gestalt leaves (where a gestalt, approximately, is a collection of things which collectively have more 'meaning' than the sum of its parts).

Side side note: a quick self-plug for Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, which builds upon this theory with 45 standalone Vision stories.

[maxksx]

[thehoundera]

The only thing I ever, ever want from art is the ability to feel about what I could previously only feel in. Maybe my definition of bad art is 'when the object-language and the meta-language are the same'.

peli grietzer, quoted in lucca fraser's "metacomedy and metalanguage"

[indelicateink]

This essay is A+

To be a “high functioning” anything, let’s say, is just to know that you can work liberal subjectivity OK today but maybe not next week. A strictly finite talent for the long, merciless art of living in a house, speaking a language, and exchanging money, labor, goods, and services in that occult proportion that keeps you in circulation. We are probably past the last of our personhood already. We are probably running a credit line of brute executive function against minds and bodies that yield nothing anymore, depleted fucking soil. Some of us fall back on our families and renew ourselves. Some of us fall back on our families and don’t. Some of us fall into the hands of barbarism absent socialism, maybe making it back out and maybe not. Some of us have material recourse but die. It’s a weird “us,” built on material half-truths and asymmetrical feelings of symmetry — you won’t be shocked to learn intersectionality applies, and in particular the combo of middle-class roots and cis-ness is a hell of a good safety net — but I’ve made brothers, sisters, siblings in the mutual recognition of a season underground, and in the knowledge that we ate the pomegranate seeds.  I think we sense each other with a kind of instinct, even online, and find ways to find each other.

[ibasuhaus]

LEWITT/LERISSE Sol LeWitt et Chrystele Lerisse 2019 The exhibition LeWitt & Lerisse presents important drawings by Sol LeWitt alongside the contemporary photographs of Chrystèle Lerisse, an artist based in the remote landscape of rural France. Against the backdrop of political change, movement and the insecurity of our historical moment, the exhibition explores the use of systems by the two artists alongside the affective force of their work. The comparability of the two artists, separated by more than just generations and continents, is centred around the artists’ use of programs and series, which are considered as primary and take precedence over the objects and meanings they transmit. Beyond the mechanic simplicity of their programs, they code a deeply complex modelling of our historical world through its mood or ‘vibe’.1 LeWitt’s work is strongly influenced by the developments in information and communication theory of his time. He re-organised the relationship between the artist, the viewer and the artwork so that it could be understood as a process of communication and not simply the transmission of idea and meaning. Taking the idea of a social system as developed by Niklas Luhmann2, systems should be understood as a set of simplifications of the overwhelming chaotic data of our environment so that the transmission of information is possible. This sets up an opposition between system and environment; systems intersect with subsystems and there are differentiations of systems. Systems self-produce through communication - “Communication always communicates that it communicates”3 - and evolve and change to detoxify themselves in case of malfunction. This recursive structure allows for the emergence of ambient meanings embedded in the space of possibility of the system. With the work of Chrystèle Lerisse, the relation that the system has with its environment (defined as that which it can not communicate with) emerges with force. A system resists elements that attempt to enter it from outside, especially if these elements threaten the internal integrity of the system. The visibility and ability to produce meaning is defined by the system that generates those meanings, but with Lerisse’s work, the new question of the border-space between an encroaching chaotic environment and a (destabilized) interiority is articulated. Lerisse points beyond the system to its possible transformation, its evolution and detoxification. Her series always promises more, their incomplete ghostly appearance code more than just environmental noise. The Border is between an inarticulate external space and the space of meaning; between environment and system. Hers is a lament, a cry not yet of words, already emerging from a new differentiation, a communication not yet comprehensible, but becoming. 1. Peli Grietzer, A Theory of Vibe, Glass bead Journal, 2017 2. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of society Vol1, Stanford UP, 2012 3. Following Jonathan Flatley’s proposal in his article, Art Machine, in Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Squares, Edited by Nicholas Baume, MIT Press,2001

[kenotype]

Peli Grietzer on Art

[spilledreality]

The obvious perversity of avant-gardes is how they never stop talking of exploding the culture around them but seem much more concerned with the insides of their own new utopian spaces. The avant-garde demands to receive the key to the city but will not even reach out its hand. It makes a claim on the masses and holds on to the margins for its dear life; it calls out to the uninitiated in treatises declaring that those who don’t already get it are already dead to these times.

If the history of avant-garde really is a history of failed revolutionary quests, it is a failure so total it can’t even be called that; it would be like saying I failed to become fluent in Italian by re-watching The Godfather. Wouldn’t it be better to say I was just watching The Godfather?

[gausspdf]

GPDF216 : Peli Grietzer : The Trials of St. Anthony

Peli Grietzer

The Trials of St. Anthony

2016

PDF

[maxksx]

The universe is an uncanny hybrid of the allegorical and the mechanical, the personal and the impersonal, the lawlike and the arbitrary, the exact and the ineffable, and signal to noise ratio is terrible across the board, but both teleological and causal reason have their moments. If you’re very clever, very desperate, very unafraid, and very patient, then after a million years you learn to chain these patches of intelligibility together, put together a machine for living that’s a lot like personhood.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/season-underground-russian-doll-mental-illness/?fbclid=IwAR2q2tM8jkYSNvDW3Fk5YxBXMLfj1vcJVngANtV5xwxf6IlVm-sTQpBQX5w#!

[spilledreality]

Cultural Criticism on the Internet

I spent all of 2018 trying anything to see what'd stick: weird PDF experiments in commonplace and experimental fiction; a parody of the Artforum diary style, a 40pg CogSci paper exploring the implications of Bayesian learning for avant-garde art, wrote verse that will never see the light of day, got back into pop music criticism with The 1975 and Mark Fisher and the Bodega profile. Nothing "stuck" from a reception standpoint but I did think a lot about what pulls me into nonfiction writing (criticism especially) and what makes a piece stick around for months/years later.

Some components I could put together:

Tonal and formal irreverence

Sheer competence/expertise in a domain (especially an unfamiliar domain), which can be borderline pornographic to experience

A sense of strangeness—an implicit set of references, vibe, or milieu-gestalt that I want alternately to assimilate and assimilate into.

Scaled insight, starting at the level of a single observation about an exhibit (artwork, subject-at-hand, whatever) and working up to larger points about the exhibit working up to larger points about a system/life/the world/whatever.

Snarkiness: a willingness to bite in and hold on; a self-assuredness that only hedges when necessary and knows when it can get away with something.

Sticking up for the little guy, e.g. “let me show you why X cultural item that everyone thinks is worthless/unimportant is actually really interesting and  effective” —since in doing so bare all the critical-hegemonic value assumptions, revealing them as one of many plausibly legitimate critical-aesthetic hegemonies. Some of the writing shows even the faintest glimmers of what an alternative ideology would look like

In particular I’m thinking of SMG’s incredible writings on Prometheus, Peli Grietzer’s essay on Vampire Weekend, Hotel Concierge, and The Sublemon. A lot of this writing started on Tumblr and was before my time, but crucially/sadly seems to be less of a thing than it used to be.

[spilledreality]

phillips as poplit

It was spring, around 11am and cold; we had teas with condensed milk in a small Malaysian place in the Lower East Side and I held up an AbEx painter book that was on sale and you made a joke about the page layout. 

For about a week the prior May I’d wondered whether or why there hadn't been a poptimist moment in literature, whether that was even a coherent concept. I’d been convinced by a friend the main reason was popular literature was missing the impassioned obsession with craft and technical production, the “Futurist (as in Italian) machine-worship thing.”

But now I was wondering, somewhere between Ludlow and Allen Street, whether this might be an entirely separate question from whether there was admirable or highbrow pop literature. George Melly who raises the topic of pop literature in the 1970 Revolt Into Style thinks the answer to this second question is also no: 

The written word, at any rate ‘between hard covers,’ represents a permanence of a sort. Thought is trapped there... There is a further objection: to write and to read are solitary activities. Pop is communal, tribal, a shared experience. 

None of these convinced you when I read them out loud, which made me finally sure they didn’t convince me either. Records are as physical as books, you said; the digital has untethered writing from any distinctive permanence or aura thereof; pop experiences can clearly be solo and yet also somehow communal (think the opening scenes of Almost Famous, the discovery of his older sister’s record collection, its portal into another world). 

With the Sticky Fingers cover in my eyes I told you “I have this weird suspicion that writers like Kaitlin Phillips might be innovators of pop literature. All the traits are there (for a masculinized version, think rock’n’roll). An emphasis on style over content, the way and electricity with which you deliver a line, the cult of personality and aspirational quality of fandom, the quasi-total package of high-status youth, the conversion of private life into public life, image and glamour. This seems like one of the most exciting developments in recent writing; we probably needed a pop literature, or at least it was inevitable.” But I told you I also thought we needed to be clear about what pop literature was. Reading Maggie in contrast, what strikes me always is her honesty, her willingness to bear the grotesque or deeply shameful without immediately redeeming her image, without the savvy branding or the sleight of hand that turns flaw into costly signal, or weakness into an display of competitive femininity. 

By the time you checked email over kabocha squash & sake I was mostly talking to myself: “The vision’s always felt to me like, ‘let's replace a history of brutal economic hierarchies with a future of brutal social hierarchies,’ which, middle school sucked for a lot of people and might be worse than capitalism but, your mileage may vary.” Maybe I don’t see a serious problem in reveling in bad ideology, maybe the style makes up for it. Maybe it’s the sometimes Janus face of some of these scenes which grates, one face making, with moral indignity, a claim towards the radically anti-hierarchical, while the other indulges gleefully the pleasures of life at the top.

ii.

Of pop music Alva Noë writes, “the artist is not a vehicle for music; instead music is a vehicle for the artist.” Pop music is the “art of pure personal style,” a manipulation of cultural codes to enthrall and to convert. What propaganda is to art, advertisement is to pop, a hypnosis, an attempt at psychic implantation.

The music, or here, the writing, is a conjuring act of personality, an apparition summoned by the right triangulation of tone, the attitude, and taste (these all being orientations towards, the how instead of what— in a word, style). The material world is transformed into iconography: objects are used by people, therefore status is transferred through association. “We can all agree that bath salts are passé,” Phillips opens a college essay of hers, “Eastern Promises,” written for the Spectator. Five years later, her Bookforum review of a Rhonda Lieberman tribute begins in explosive baroque prose: 

Not just because I—Barnard shiksa from the boonies—was conditioned to envy my more socially savvy Jewish American counterparts for their sunglasses (from Selima), their scarves (not Hermès, actually) knotted the way their mothers taught them, and other birthright privileges awarded young ladies of a certain socioeconomic-religious-cultural demographic, who I imagine learned about Freud from their fathers (this is just a fantasy!), am I fascinated by Rhonda Lieberman.

These links between people and objects, and their history, constitute a cultural graph on which the pop work has been positioned. The objects gets separated out like God on the first day, splitting darkness from light: in or out, low or high, melted into sacred vs profane. In a poptimist or “post-critical” era, this is one of the few discourses which revels Roxy-like in aristocratic sentiment. Often, relatedly, there is in pop a a deep interest in fame and inner circles, celebrity and its half-sibling fashion— see Warhol, Bowie, Gaga. 

From early in Phillips’s writing career, agile code-switching is a cornerstone of the performance. “You might shvitz—uh, sweat—with Dad at a Mikvah” she writes aside references to W.H. Auden, Mick Jagger, and Benjamin Britten in “Eastern Promises.” The article, which sells the virtues of bathhouses to her college classmates, includes as primary selling points the potential for brush-ups with celebrity, the history of Someones who have been sighted through the steam. (Another article from that time is a sprawling amateur-journo investigation of St. A’s, the hyper-elite Columbia fraternity which sports a private chef.) Like a young Joan Didion, there's a self-deprecation in her writing that can only be read as irony in-context: “I came up from [the pool] shrieking... I report only that I made no friends.”

Another piece from 2013, a longform on Tao Lin, was linked to by the LARB, Ron Silliman's blog, and some alt literature sites. She wrote about Lin’s demonstrated savvy at building an online following, speculated on the mechanics at play: “Many critics, and fellow bloggers, ask ‘why?,’ but perhaps the more pertinent line of inquiry is ‘how?’” She had started a Twitter account at n+1, @nplusoneinterns, that took as its shtick the pretense of being a group account. Tao Lin himself ended up asking her to make a similar account for him; she gave out the password to classmates to post whatever they wanted. She wasn’t alone in fielding this kind of request; there was a small army of Lin fans that he led and encouraged in growing his reputation through stickering public spaces and making fan blogs.[1]

Phillips’s iconographic matriarch is always Rhonda Lieberman. “She embodies the particular kind of East Coast sophistication I ideated and craved, a wry dinner-party companion known for asides about her complicated relationships with intellectuals.” In Lieberman's writing, the academic-intellectual is turned into a life texture: “1) daily horoscopes and tarot readings; 2) Friedrich Nietzsche; 3) listening to [others on] Prozac.” Like Lieberman, Phillips smashes the high and the low side-by-side (more code-switching, the cultural-linguistic equivalent of turning on a dime): “Derrida is the Madonna of thought. He’s antiphallogocentric and a total diva.” Or, “Thorstein Veblen’s pecuniary emulation, i.e., the Jewish American Princess who buys a Coach purse at twelve only to learn about Prada a year later.” Abstract --> concrete via the i.e.. Lieberman herself is proto-pop, a total mother. “Reviewing a book by Lieberman weirdly feels like reviewing her,” Phillips confesses.

iii.

The flags are at half mast in Union Square: I’m watching you watch a squirrel, seriously fat, scaling Lincoln’s brass left leg. The trees are black-denuded still, it’s too early in the year. Post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Derrida: the dollar used bookstands are stacked with them, some kind of sign. The end of an era or an era’s perpetuation? The last clearings or signs of health? Internal readings (formalist, structuralist, New Critical) vs. external readings (Marxist, biographical, sociological, Bourdieuian). The visiting European intellectuals who come lecture, give panel talks, do their continent disservice so routinely out of touch, or banal, or sentimental in that way middle-aged liberals get.

You had recently started switching from kairos, event-time, to chronos, sequential-numeric. Off of summer’s “after the party,” or “when we wake up,” and onto the worldtime of 9:00 a.m. It was making me grumpy, a feeling counteracted only by the way the teenagers next to us were talking: “perf,” “def,” “I’m totally jeal.”

[1] Is it only fair I trace her provenance this way? From her essay on Lin, “His decision to be a writer seems to have cemented during his senior year, in 2004, when Lin went into self-imposed isolation. He left the dorms and moved to New Jersey.” Later: “His first three years out of college are marked by their tenacious, discursive productivity. In fact, from his output during this period, it is hard to tell he lost hope at all.”