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Notes On Slack
Slack is extra – extra line in the rope. Slack is not keeping things tight. It means not pulling, or at least not pulling so much that you use up all the slack.
In animal training, slack is a reward. When a horse does what you want, you give it slack in the reins. You release the pressure, and that release is pleasure enough. This suggests that slack itself, having a bit of extra in your rope, is something to value.
If slack is extra, it is linked to waste. Bataille suggested that what we do with our waste, our “extra,” is what defines us. And he reminds us of the (problematic) relationship between excess, waste, and sacrifice.
The kind of slack we’re talking most about here is the slack that means wasted time. And wasted time means time not given to the future. Time not put to use. To waste time is to be present. To simply be present is to waste time. If enough time is wasted in this way, (as Prayas Abhinav suggested) you are a buddha.
At work, to slack is to strike. It is an act of refusal – the refusal to be used. Here I think you can find some of its political sting. Slacking is a kind of sabotage, like those dutch workers throwing their wooden shoes into the machines that enslaved them – wreckage as resistance. Slacking subtly wrecks the productive machine of work life, it slows it down, gums it up.
I met a poet in Prague once. He told me that before the revolution, writers and philosophers tried to get work tending the boilers in big buildings. They could sit in the basement, quietly reading and writing subversive tracts, shoveling coal from time to time as necessary. They sought out the work with the most slack, and with that slack they made their revolution.
This is another bit of the sting – people with some extra in their time might spend it thinking and talking. Slack time is free time. And any kind of freedom can be habit forming.
Time is the one kind of economic capital that everyone starts out with (though of course we never quite know how much we’ll have). Industry (and industriousness) puts time to “good” use. You spend your time, trading it for a skimming of the monetary capital it turns into. The present is traded for a future (even if that future is only dinner).
To deliberately waste time is to critique the value of that exchange.
I keep thinking of that old Aesop fable about the ant and the grasshopper. The ant spent its summer hard at work, preparing for the winter. The grasshopper spent its summer slacking and singing. In the Aesop story, the grasshopper dies of hunger, filled with regret.
But I wonder. Even the Christian bible gives us a bit more slack.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Slacker manifestos go way back.
Personally I spent the first two days of this summit slacking ostentatiously. During one I went to bed in full daylight and slept til sunset, and the other I mostly spent playing games. These are traditionally the slackest days of my year, and they are precious to me, slacking holy days, you might say. Time is spent extravagantly, wasted easily, work is sacrificed, burned away.
This isn’t slacking as resistance or revolution, it’s slacking as pleasure, as intrinsic time, as simple freedom.
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More slack at Cutting Slack: Paradoxes of Slackerdom
Vote Change Write-in (You're Invited to Play)
Everyone reading this is invited to participate in a small public intervention.
“Vote Change” is a pair of street stickers. One says “What do you vote for?” and the other, “What do you want to change?” Each has a large write-in box for public comment.
They are simultaneously a celebration and critique of electoral politics, a prod to vote and an invitation towards imagination and participation that go beyond a few minutes at the ballot box.
Put them up yourself, or pass them around to friends. Add your own comments, or leave them blank for public write-ins.
If you’d like to play with these, just send me your postal address and I’ll put some in the mail to you pronto.
[UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great response. Most of the stickers have now been sent out and will soon be appearing in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, DC. as well as Germany and the Netherlands.
Resources on the Relational Debate
I’ve been collecting & rereading material related to Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces, and Claire Bishop’s critiques. Here’s a short web-accessible reading list which will likely be expanded periodically. The original version of this list was appended to a post I made back in January on the IDC list.
Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics
Claire Bishop, The Social Turn
Claire Bishop, Socially Engaged Art, an Interview with Claire Bishop by Jennifer Roche
Nicholas Bourriaud from Relational Aesthetics
Nicholas Bourriaud glossary from Relational Aesthetics
Nichola Bourriaud and Karen Moss interview
Sarah James, The Ethics of Aesthetics
Grant Kester, Dialogical Aesthetics
Lars Bang Larsen, Social Aesthetics
Darren O’Donnell Greasing the Glue (includes criteria for beautiful civic engagement)
Darren O’Donnell Haircuts by Children interview
Jacques Ranciere, Art of the Possible – interview
Radical Culture Research Collective A Very Short Critique of Relational Aesthetics
Sal Randolph, Notes on Social Architectures as Artforms
Judith Rodenbeck – The Open Work; Participatory Art Since Silence – mp3 of talk
Judith Rodenbeck – The Open Work; Participatory Art Since Silence – text
Trebor Scholz The Participatory Challenge
See also: del.icio.us/salrandolph/relationalaesthetics
Spam Lit (straight from the email inbox)
Terrible to kill anyone, the kind of person who a table and said brightly, nov’ i’m sure you two exactly what occurred. it was perfectly simple. Be gran’! Replied malcolm. He followed her up had any real enemies.’ ‘people used to get a bit selina, undauntedly, for she had not much belief was no presence for refusal, and they followed sells email accounts (similar to attmail). Users is not so popular as the almighty.and then there me. Yes there is a warrant out for my arrest,.
Waiting for Lee
A few months ago one of my favorite artists, Lee Walton, promised to send me a piece: a video of him spending an hour on a street corner doing absolutely nothing.
I'm still waiting.
TEXTS ARE A SOCIAL SCULPTURE MADE IN THE MOMENT
So I’m looking in my referral logs this evening, and I see this google search string repeating itself in slight variations
TEXTS ARE A SOCIAL SCULPTURE MADE IN THE MOMENT
TEXTS ARE A SOCIAL SCULPTURE
TEXTS AS A SOCIAL SCULPTURE
And even though there’s nothing on my site that really talks about this, in fact it’s something I’m thinking about all the time – I completely agree – and I want to know WHO ARE YOU?!? If you search again, and you find this, write to me and let’s talk. salrandolph [at] gmail [dot] com
If you’re out there, please say hello.
SEARCHES ARE A SOCIAL SCULPTURE MADE IN THE MOMENT
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