The Debris of the Present

Photo: iPhone surrounded by its future.  Photo taken in my 1973 Chevy Van.

Welcome to the debris of the present. I'm reviving my heretofore "silent" blog about my life and work. A trip to Las Vegas in August of 2006, my first, was the impetus behind the creation of this blog. Intending to record my thoughts and impressions of the quintessential "postmodern" city, more research journey to the heart of 21st century modernity than a standard vacation, I lugged along my hard-back copy of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, the RE/Search Conversations with J.G. Ballard, and a biography of Guy Debord. Of course, I found myself spending more time configuring Moveable Type and setting up my blog than actually writing. I love things that are broken, ruined, decaying, lost, useless, forgotten, and ignored. In short, the debris of the present. And my first trip to Las Vegas didn't disappoint on this score. One of my favorite sites from this trip is already gone, lost to the unrivaled pace of economic development on the Strip: an old abandoned and graffiti-marked water park, Wet n-Wild, with weeds growing in it, a beautiful ruin. This, for me, was my image of Vegas: dust, ruin, decay and the politics of water. In 2007 it was announced that developers planned to build an 1888 foot hotel tower and mega resort on the site of this abandoned water park. This image reminds us that all that is "new" on the strip will one day be, as David Wojnarowicz once so eloquently wrote of our modernity, "picturesque ruins." The Las Vegas mega resort as dust. It's no surprise that in the neighborhood of Las Vegas once called the "Naked City," named for its crime, seediness, and lower class denizens (prostitutes, minorities), is now home to an art gallery called "Dust." (I'll have more to say about this in my work-in-progress, "Las Vegas, Capital of the 21st Century.")

An immanently intelligent culture of the "lost" can be most keenly seen in the area of music and the phenomenon of the reissue. There has been a veritable explosion in the reissue of previously "lost" and "unknown" music from the 1960's and 70's: everything from obscure psychedelic bands, "progressive" rock, folk music, glam, to sunshine pop and easy listening. Music that had almost entirely disappeared, records that went virtually unheard, and even recordings that were made but never issued, are now being released at a record pace. This usage and discovery of cultural debris--what was lost in and to the past, to the present of another time--is a testament to this redemptive intelligence.

And this redemptive intelligence is, in turn, a kind of testament (a testimony) to the fact that nothing in the present can be allowed to exist: nothing new, different, unique. Perhaps there is some way for us to make use of this predicament. What can it mean to think a work that cannot "exist" until its time, its moment, has already passed? This, I believe, is part of our contemporary condition. Blogs, it seems to me, are less concerned with the "past" than recording whatever happens the minute that it happens. This is a major disadvantage to thought. Giorgio Agamben once told me that he had a deep distrust for epistemology. In a public speech he delivered in August of 2002, he put the reasons for his mistrusts in this way: "I don't like these kind of problems. I always have the impression, as once Heidegger put it, that we have here people busy sharpening knives when there is nothing left to cut" ("What is a Paradigm?"--Please note that the transliteration of this speech contains numerous, and often humorous, errors). This is how I feel about blogs. They seem much more interested in "using up" thought than in giving expression to it--to the intelligence of a life, and of the lives, which circulate around them. A blog about the debris of the present, of our modernity, seems like an oxymoron. What is at stake in this is to remain attuned to the excluded of the present--to what has been, and continues to be, lost to our time. I have to say it: I am a reissue. Reissues are much closer to my speed than blogs. After effects. After affects. Perhaps by giving expression to a present that is always being lost we can create a reissue of it. That is, we can give expression to what has been excluded in and by the present moment (including ourselves). To think the debris of the present is to think a present that has been lost to itself, to its time. In this way, thought becomes an affirmative act of redemption. Thought becomes possible. Moreover, to think the belonging of the present is to think that which does not belong to it. But this is entirely unexpected.

I want this blog to be close to life and personal--in a singular sense--yet giving expression to the immanent intelligence of cultural practices and productions that are often neglected, ignored, or treated as "stupid." Immanence means that intelligence is everywhere, particularly in those places where we least expect to find it. My experience has been, both culturally and with my students, that if you look in unexpected places, you find the unexpected. Most of our culture, particularly academic culture, is always in the process of trying to keep up with itself. More often than not, this results in a race past . . . life, past what Michel Foucault once beautifully referred to as "that which is capable of error." In this process, which Debord called the spectacle and Agamben calls the exception, the unexpected, the different, life, all become the debris of the present. What would we hear, I wonder, if we slowed down, even for a moment . . . if we interrupted this process and listened to the echo of that debris? Listening to what was thought but never said, seeing or exposing what was created but never exposed, never exhibited, never shown: these are all vital for thinking the intelligence of potentiality. That is, an immanent thought of the present. 

In writing this "welcome," I am reminded of my own unfinished and unpublished work on experimental lounge, pop, the concept of "sweetness," the 8-track tape as a "dialectical image," and post-war music. In addition to my thoughts and reflections on Vegas, and other cultural observations, I hope to post sections of my own lost work on post-war music, entitled "Sweetness," on this blog. Some of this work, I hope, will eventually find its way into my work-in-progress, Gestures of Love.

Welcome to the debris of the present.

Photo: iPhone surrounded by its future. © 2008 Robert C. Thomas

Image and content © 2006 - 2008 Robert C. Thomas