Campo obligatorio; no debe dejarse en blanco.

Today I wanted to talk about all the things spinning in my head. And believe me; they are quite a lot.

I have been thinking about the ideas of anxiety, work overload, delusion, infusion, success, lament, loneliness, dirt and silence.

I am not addressing all of them here but they have to do with our ideas of virtue; of good or bad, of improvement of goodwill, as well as their Christian counterparts.

I am not an academic nor I want to become one. I feel like many contemporary practices are born from the white male heterosexual milieu, which devours any adjacent culture to subsume it as one of its choices, i.e. Gay Life, Gay Community, the Arts, Black Arts, Disabled, Transgender, Interdisciplinary. It all fits quite too well. This narrative of the modern project of cultural destruction put forward by Baudrillard, is quite appealing if not quite megalomaniac and cinematic.

I have also fallen within the white male expectation, which my family has been happy to remove from me. It's the very discourse of Structuralism which I am by no means trying to replicate here.

Since I believe in human agency -and I am purposefully avoiding any development of ideas of a metadata to human life (like governmental policy) or equivalent frameworks- I am going to tap into this liberal idea of choice, where you get the life you choose to have (hahahaha!) or worse, that you have the life you Deserve (Privilege Horror Movie). Along these lines I have been thinking if I should pursue this idea of getting lucky; taking a shot at the repositioning of myself might I manage to intermingle with contemporary flows of capital and capitalism. And the answer is a definite No. You might argue that then, since I am in London, I should move myself out of the equation; maybe I should.

I have always though of thinking further to pursue the human project of intellectual advancement, but which for me is more about delight, in exploring other peoples ideas and then reformulating my standpoints. Its not complicated, but it does require a lot of resources, including a lot of time. These I have limited, very in fact. The latest is my computer struggling to interact with any other external device, or connecting to Wifi. I feel sorry for Him. He is going to undergo a few repairs, and yeah, it's the source of a lot of my-if any-income.

Going back to the idea of a Liberal Project, I wanted to talk not only about the death of Religion; us replacing a moral schema with a technocratic/functionalist morale. Its the History of white male heterosexuality, coupled with the fallacy of Free Markets, which I struggle to pronounce in my head. In these fake landscape of functionalism-a cheap cover up for money making-we need to talk about Virtue, and how the very idea of the Pursue of Excellence, i.e. Beethoven, Reinhardt, sorry those all I can think of now, is a form of resistance to practices of Capitalism. The snobby or elitist idea of Excellence is now that I have been long fascinated by. I have been long fascinated by objects and forms of expression that carefully craft and design their form. I think of them as acts of Love and Care, for the very experience of their presence is pleasurable; unless you are full of envy or despair-me-. Virtuosity then is the ability to pursue an activity beyond what would be average, and propels it to the realm of the excellence, or better, to the arena of captivating. Captivating then, if you are a true Artist, can be engineered, and if you are a Tycoon, it can be simulated. Both deal with the enervating idea of Authenticity (I have nothing to say here).
Then the reason a Virtuoso might be an opposing form to capital is because of the practices in which the subject its engaged-it always annoys me how academic writing more often than not misses the idea of the subject or the body, as if objects had a life of their own-. Then the person who has an idea or a hope of expressive perfection has to inevitably deal with the sensible (Plato) as well as with the Ideal (i,e, the world of ideas, of the abstract). The hypostatization of these into an object of expression, doesn't aim at changing the world, but at articulating an idea in the World about the World. Its function is not functional, i.e. It doesn't aim at changing the world physically, for any unassuming body can modify the World. Thus the thinking subject is there to question this unassuming body, the reconsider the object-body-mind question, and to project questions into this realm. Is not an attempt at behavioural science, but an attempt to create a pustule in the minds of the present bodies who share the space or the representation of the object (a whole set of new implications). This Virtuosity then, develops in mastering this ability to reify, to manufacture a narrative which we believe, and that questions our current body schema, changing our gaze upon the world. But really, this is not my point here. My point is that Virtue, requires of the Virtuoso the self-discipline, to perform and re-perform, to edit, to cut, to focus. This goes against the neoliberal idea of deregulation of everything. The destruction of every form of stability and the production and reproduction of flows. Defamiliariy, Decontextualisation, Deformation, Decommon-sense, Destruction, etc. A long etcetera. It cannot be negated its politics are complex, and it cannot be negated that its operational subjects are there for the chase, for the money. For these reasons the establishing of Virtue can be counter-productive, since it needs stable ground-not instability-discipline-not flexibility-and continuity-not "opportunity". The Virtuoso then has lost the battle; and if anyone has a claim against contemporary art it should go against the hyper-modernity on steroids we are going towards at this very moment.  Virtuosity can then be seen as a form of Privilege,


I'd say then, to conclude, that to design this mode of action is the project of the Virtuoso wannabe, and is in the hope of staying away from the flows of capital that it both aims to and aims not to be part of.