Individual and Iconography (self-portrait), 2004, Digitally Altered Image

Graffiti Ethics

Do you accept the marketing images defining your food, your taste, your body, your sex? All the images touching the personal reality, prodding you towards acceptance of the visual content, pushing you to acknowledge the visual legitimacy...

Fowles writes, "one of those pressures, put upon all of us... is that of labelling a person by what he gets money and fame for- by what other people most want to use him as. To call a man a plumber is to describe one aspect of him, but it is also to obscure a number of others..."

I know that I am hazardly strewn in history, a contingent agent of time and place. I am in the office, I am behind cubicle walls, I am forever removed from the leisure class, I am the beuracratic slave, I am not Dutch. These are all true, and they are all me, but they are not wholly me. At this age, at this historical moment, it has perhaps never been easier to not choose, to be the sum of the labels and particulars of context. As cultural barriers break down, political narratives fail, perspective is compartmentalized and co-opted, the emancipation promised by the enlightenment is superceded by the amoebic dreams and claims of late-capitalism, i.e. the complete saturation of the public and private (and personal?) spheres by the market. There are few words, there are few spaces in which an "I" can demarcate itself. The layers and processes of self-definition are so infiltrated by the labels and definitions of capital that it is difficult to say "I" without referring to some vested economic interest/image.

Fowles uses the term "obscure" here (to cover, to conceal, to reduce to neutrality). The connection between self-understanding and seeing, image, ultimately to aesthetics is important.

I will quote Fowles, as I will throughout my blog, "by stating baldly what I believe I hope to force you to state baldly to yourself what you believe. I do not expect agreement. If I wanted that I should have written in a very different form and style, and wrapped my pills in the usual sugar coating. I am not, in short, pleading a case."

There is the possibility that there will be an intrusion of textual life into the biological, the more real. The case we plead, or don't, could be judged. There is a danger that the stories we tell ourselves will turn out to be lies, there is the danger an analyst/arbiter can be found to judge from objectivity... But, this does not change our texts, nor should it pre-empt them. The stories we tell ourselves must always stand in contrast to, in conflict with the massive bulk of texts with which we are assaulted. Only from the personal, from Yoga can we begin to create a text that can create a line of conflict, a border where legitimacy is questioned, crises elevated.