17: The Crit / Staying with the Trouble

Dear C,

I hope this message finds you well. Our short time together, after meeting on Spare Room, left quite an impression on me. So much so that I wrote a libretto for an operetta about it. It’s a very pared down class parable told through characters based on you, F and myself. I’ve been working with an Italian tenor on the parts based on me, but I had some misgivings about proceeding with the project without consulting you and F first. Perhaps I could come by and share the libretto with you? I imagine this will be an operetta that will exist, like most culture these days, in the metaverse. I’m also interested in interrupting the simple and reductive libretto with conversation and commentary. Would you be interested in learning more? Perhaps also singing and talking about it for the project? I remember you have a beautiful voice—and a good sense of humor! Here is a posthumous trailer I made for a recent crit that features some of the libretto in an installation-like setting. Also, would you extend an invitation to Roger to come swim with me at the London Fields lido now that it’s getting warmer? Afterwards I’d like to take him to one of the many fine sourdough purveyors up here, that I imagine should be up to his standards.

Kindly,
Perry

Dear G,

Thanks again for the heads up on Moten and Tsing

Anna was really a breath of fresh air
after all the mystifying poetics
and scifi speculations

I’ve been exploring Yuk Hui’s work.
Are you familiar?
He’s like the Sino-Heideggerian philosopher prince
for an emerging enlightened engineer class.

His thinking is gaining traction in art circles
and also with what we might call a planetary technocracy,
or what Yuk Hui organizes around cosmotechnics.

I’m fascinated by him, even though I find some of his project questionable.
He’s perhaps an articulation of a nascent planetary disposition,
somewhat humorously endeavoring to account for the unboundable
with an updated cybernetics.

Here’s a nice conversation with the lucid Brian Kuan Wood at e-flux
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/124/446668/a-conversation-on-art-and-cosmotechnics-part-1/
His juxtaposition of shanshui logic with tragist logic
is quite a ride and brings to mind Byung-Chul Han’s excellent
Good Entertainment: Deconstructing the Western Passion Narrative in Art,
which arrives at a more resonant paradox, rather than
call to elevate aesthetics to the plane of logic.

Also been making my way through Pierre Charbonnier’s Affluence and Freedom.
Impressively translated by Andrew Brown
who deals with a grandiloquence that almost tips into hyperventilation
as it erects the biggest containers you can find in the long enlightenment.
It’s quite an achievement in the Latourian tradition of modernist atonement.

I watched a talk with Philip Hoare about Dürer,
he’s kind of a terrible historian but a wonderful storyteller
and I find his energetic curiosity quite infectious.

Please keep sending along recommendations.

Kind thanks,
Perry