Welcome to our first instance of jərˈmān, CutBank's new media series. We couldn't have asked for a more exciting piece with which to initiate our series. Find the piece as well as a statement regarding the piece below. For more information about the series, see the page here. As a part of this series, we would like to encourage an ongoing critical discussion of the works featured. Please send all critical and creative responses to the following piece, The Wilderness, to jermaincutbank@gmail.com and we will publish them here on the website.
The Wilderness from The Unstitute on Vimeo.
1) On Repercussionism
1.1) No content: A series of superficial movements, which, taken together, form a global movement incorporating each series.
1.2) Series: each video [movement] contains a series of movements. This series proliferates [rhizome] into avenues and alleyways, rooms and chambers; sequential sectional additions. The series provides the desired movement – never singular, absolute, permanent, profound – always plural, temporary, mobile, superficial.
1.3) Expression comes before conceptualisation. Conceptualisation as discharge of energy into immediate arrest. The economy of Repercussionism cannot produce sufficient ‘repercussive energy’ under the arrest of conceptualisation, through the ‘discharge in thought’. Repercussionism is inconsiderate.
1.4) Since we are dealing with superficial movements, expressions without ready conceptualisations but proliferated by plurals, the concept of facade – and the perspective which permits this spectacle – becomes nonsensical. ‘Facade’ becomes a positive object detached of its negative connotation ‘deception’ – each identity a mask, only more masks underneath, what is profound merely has no bottom, like a broken bucket. The container unfit for bearing; the content cannot resist slipping away.
1.5) Inasmuch as ‘facade’ eradicates permanent persons, so does guilt, as a necessary prerequisite, have nothing to hold onto and slips away. Personalities migrate, guilt cannot anchor the personality, guilt proliferates into energy, into action, and the name ‘guilt’, what is signified by the name ‘guilt’, slips. ‘Facade’ becomes a series of chambers, a movement within or through them becomes practical freedom.
2) Auxiliaries
2.1) Each video is a chamber, a repercussion emanating from primary movement or desire. Successive movements follow, superficial movements, always against the ‘taking-back of’ movements as guilt demands.
2.2) Each ‘repercussion’ is a navigating-freedom, an ecstatic connection between each successive ‘repercussion’. The absence of ‘content’ within discourse permits non-linear, non-triangulated, superficial movement; reactions, abreactions, negations, resistances.
2.3) “The guilty one is the subject of the statement.” If that subject migrates, proliferates via extension, via “becoming-facade”, guilt dis-integrates, (no coherent whole against which it can ‘index’ and make sensible); becomes a toy, a fiction (to be re-written, re-inscribed, at will.) The toy-fiction ‘guilt’ becomes a positively charged object – the world [global movement] is not seen, but invented.