Terrain-Vague: a Troll Geography

Between the regulated intensity of the cityscape and the postcard-wholesome countryside there grows a steadily thickening belt of non-location – easily definable in terms of GPS coordinates or dots on a map, yet difficult to grasp in the subjective geography. 

Vørds, part 01

Or: Notes toward a Norwegian-English Dictionary

F60.6

Daytime is eyes everywhere, burning tyrant above casting needles of open sight. You know they can't see through you, you're not transparent, but still you cannot but think of breaking CCTV cameras and mobile phones, crushing eyeballs. You fear that these thoughts too are visible, so eventually you sleep through these hours, preferring to come out of your hole after dark. Dodge, walk away, be gone.

One Man's Garbage

Do you find there are too few museums in your area?
Hardwood oak floors a knee-hurting bitch to walk slowly upon from exhibit to exhibit?
Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art a forbiddingly expensive airplane ticket away?
Actually went to London for a weekend and wanted to go and see the Sutton Hoo collection in the British Museum, but your significant other would rather go shopping and coerced you to join (philistine that s/he is), and you can't go back to London for another look?

Hogwash. You don't even have to walk away from your seat in order to access wonderful art, archaeological findings and historical collections - the Google Cultural Institute has started to make wonderfully detailed high-definition photos of many world-class collections, many of them zoomable for details and all of them accessible for free.

The photographic representations, bordering on artworks in their own right, capture beautifully the hue of the items in question, the complex patterns of strokes in the paintings, the spots and dents in the once-buried items, thus to an extent illustrating a glimpse of what makes these items worth dedicating whole buildings to. "Oh," you might say, "but will never be the same as seeing that Sutton Hoo helmet in real life!"

And then you go for that second trip, and as soon as you get close enough you'll find the Real object, that which cannot be replicated by a picture, is just an unwieldy hardhat. Such is the case with a lot of things; too far away and they are "just a photograph" of something we imagine to be important and special, too close and the magic(k) fades to reveal the dull piece of old scrap metal some graduate student dug up and handed over to his professor for her to take credit for. They seem like two different objects, and in one sense, they are.

Troll Science 101: the Coin Experiment

Summer is here, the sun is shining and yet here you are sitting in front of a computer and reading my depressing blog. Shame on you. Here's a fun little experiment you should do instead.

On Tutorial Art

Tutorial art may be understood (very roughly) as what develops during the process of learning to use a new technique, a new tool, a new method of creative work. Often marked by clumsy experimentation and imperfection, the negative aura (in the Walter Benjamin sense of the word, not the new-age-quackery sense) of seemingly ill-advised use of filters and effects creates curious results that deserve some further exploration. The Ultimate Tutorial Art blog provides some interesting examples of how this effect may be applied.

A few honourable mentions, all from Ultimate Tutorial Art:

by Franz Omar Fanon

ibid.

by almosteveryonegotnipples

By all means go ahead and contest my definition of tutorial art in the comment field below.

Pre-Emptive Notes on the Title

In the normal course of events, if someone asked, I would rather make up some excuse as for my choice of the blog's name. Eventually the matter would come up anyway.

Mercantilism with a Tie

The doctrine of New Public Management was eagerly adopted by the moderate-left Workers' Party in the early 1990's, supposedly as part of an attempt to make the public sector more cost-effective, more accountable to the public and to a greater extent able to provide high-quality services to a society in rapid change.

The prescribed solution was to run all public affairs the way a corporation would, making all the same exact mistakes while restructuring sector after sector according to corporate principles. Privatizing sectors with no actual market competition (which would even for demographic reasons alone often be nearly-impossible anyway) creates a de facto corporate cartel within the state, delivering lower-grade services more slowly, at greater financial and structural costs, accountable to the public as customers or not at all.

To counter this problem, NPM requires all sectors to document their activity in increasing detail, meaning more paper pushers than ever before are in the state's employ as “administrative employees”, undoubtedly creating many jobs, but strangling the organizational structure in its unwilingness to listen to its professional employees except through their unions (admittedly from a technocratic perspective an ingeniously integrated part of Norwegian infrastructure). Hospitals are no longer managed by doctors, for instance, but by economists. With such internal counter-incentives to performance it is a wonder anything gets done at all anymore. Also see the Gjørv Report.

The underlying cause, Corporatism, is of course much older, having replaced feudal government as early as the 16th century and since then proven flexible enough to dodge the gradual reforms of the ruling class as well as the sporadic revolutionary ire of us commoners. It has proven profitable enough to fuel a welfare state, vague enough for its implications not to be grasped in its fullness by the citizenry, expansive enough to seize power on every level. New Public Management is just the current version, arguably with less violence, but by the same logic and with the same long-term results.

Another BP Moment Waiting to Happen

You may know BP from the Mexico Gulf spill and several other engineering misadventures, a short selection of their American accidents alone being available here. Norwegian petrol otherwise being heavily regulated, regarded as public property and usually dealt with in a relatively responsible manner, the Government's apparent consent to BP's new, bright idea of remote-controlling their leaky, shoddily constructed offshore platforms is a tell-tale sign of the creeping desperation, incompetence and sheer wantonness developing in even the most well-managed oil kingdom.


http://www.frifagbevegelse.no/arbeidslivet/article6714039.ece
http://www.dn.no/energi/article1935038.ece

Here's for hoping these clowns are kept out of the Lofoten area. If we are to shit where we eat, may we at least retain the privilege for our own oil corporation.

Real Fascism is Boring

Socialist Norway's only major private institution for independent press grants etc., the wealthy liberal Fritt Ord (“Free Word”) Institution, has recently decided to award a stipend of NOK 75000 to Peder Nøstvold Jensen aka. Fjordman, whose counter-jihadist ramblings combine all the smugly resentful self-appointed victimhood of leftists like his parents (except with himself in the role of the Palestinean) with the misogynistic elements of the “Men's Rights Movement” and what appears to be a paralyzing fear of angry men with beards.

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek describes how, in Fascism, the surplus-enjoyment derived from the ideological praxis is repressed and becomes its obscene underside. In this respect Fjordman's ideology goes one step further – reactionary thought sans jouissance, Fascism without the fun bits. How depressing! How perverse! As for the underlying psychological mechanisms motivating Fjordman's meticulously quixotic reconquista, we may only speculate, but between the attention of U.S. think tanks like Middle East Forum and an apparently never-ending horde of resentful basement dwellers, I'd say he has a future ahead of him regardless of petty grants for books and such.

Much more interesting is the matter of where the good old reactionaries went. The Goebbels types went into Marketing and Advertising, the advisory committees and consultant firms. The Heydrich types started making drones and are wealthier than ever. The Himmler types seem to have gone back to Agrochemistry and its nephew, the GMO industry. But what of the sick, joyous visionaries? The Rosenbergs? The Evolas? The Codreanus? We are taught to fear these demagogues for their destructive rhetoric and their dangerously stupid ideas – meanwhile the quiet paper-pushers, enterprising middle-managers and engineers of corporate feudalism have found a new rhetorical basis excusing and legitimizing new and more profitable ways to perform the same basic routine without the Dionysiac excesses of Despotism, but with the same ruthlessness.

From my own basement-dwelling far-right internet troll days, which began around September 2006 and ended in 2008, I remember Fjordman's tear-dripping dirges over a Europa which has burned and, as the song goes, will burn again. Why wouldn't it? And why must the really existing Fascism be so boring and uninspired?

Introductory Remarks

My name is Gunnar and this is my new blog. I have blogged before, but always given up after two or three posts. The reason is not so much that I feel choked among all the other blogs, or despair for attention, or am too lazy to keep writing – all of which being decent enough excuses to quit, of course. Rather, I have felt that the introductory work has taken too much time and only served to reduce the scope of the blog without contributing any impulses as for what to write about, a negative light giving away the topic without really leading anywhere from there on.

The obvious starting point is therefore to go the other way about it: to use the very symbol of the resulting writer's block as name, logo and trademark for the blog itself.