{"id":53,"date":"2019-04-10T08:06:32","date_gmt":"2019-04-10T08:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/?p=53"},"modified":"2019-04-10T08:06:32","modified_gmt":"2019-04-10T08:06:32","slug":"reduction-enforce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/2019\/04\/10\/reduction-enforce\/","title":{"rendered":"Reduction Enforce"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nAllison: I’m in the midst of doing my thesis.
\nAlvy: On what?
\nAllison: Political commitment in twentieth century literature.
\nAlvy: You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.
\nAllison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.<\/p>\n

–Annie Hall, the movie<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She doesn’t love it of course. No one likes it and particularly not anyone smart enough to even understand the idea of a cultural stereotype in the first place. <\/p>\n

His take on her is probably mostly true, but it reduces her. And it’s worse that he divined it all from a single clue, the topic of her thesis. <\/p>\n

I don’t like passing out clues because it makes one vulnerable to this kind of imbecility, and it does not help that the imbecile confesses to his crime in this scene. The deed is done, and she has to live with that. <\/p>\n

Is it really so bad?<\/p>\n

Well, maybe. It poses a challenge to her. She has to deal with it, and maybe she’d rather deal with something else in the moment. <\/p>\n

Social interaction is often pain for a lot of reasons. This is one. <\/p>\n

When I was young I rejected the title of artist for myself, especially in public. Partly I felt it had to be earned, and I hadn’t earned it. Partly I felt it was reductive. Limiting. <\/p>\n

I was very much concerned back then with the question of political commitment or lack thereof in literature, and I rejected it, too. (I argued back and forth with Sartre in my head.) Even now I don’t consider myself all that committed politically, not in any usual sense. I’m more committed to being unusual. <\/p>\n

However, to a lot of the smart people I’ve met, that would not make a lot of sense. I do stand for things strongly when it’s safe to do so, by which I mean when I’m not at my day job, and even there I’ll make a stand pretty often as long as I can do it without being pigeonholed and thus reduced. <\/p>\n

From a slightly different angle. <\/p>\n

All of the art I’ve done shares a certain approach, a kind of uneasiness with the concept of audience. I don’t want direct contact with them, with you, but I very much do want indirect contact. <\/p>\n

So the first time I was really much of an artist, my form was late-night free-form radio. The best thing was that I had a stage, 50000 watts worth of FM, millions of potential listeners even if most all of them were surely sleeping, and I could do very close to anything I wanted with the space and the time. <\/p>\n

But they were limited, these listeners, in their ability to give me feedback in the moment, in their ability to affect my rhythm while I was performing. I couldn’t be heckled. I couldn’t be reduced. <\/p>\n

Later on, it was the same on the Web, and that’s why it drew me as a medium. For the most part it was a one-way transmission, rather than a conversation. <\/p>\n

Now, here and in this form, it’s the same. You can comment if you like. But very much after the fact, and I can decide about whether that commentary becomes a conversation or not. I have the artistic control I need, and I can’t be affected, or hurt, by what you think. <\/p>\n

Also, that’s probably why I call this a spill, instead of art or a blog or a writer’s journal or anything else. Spill is my word. I decide what it means and there can’t be an argument about it. <\/p>\n

I guess I need that. <\/p>\n

Saying it out loud makes me feel fragile and precious. <\/p>\n

But safely. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Allison: I’m in the midst of doing my thesis. Alvy: On what? Allison: Political commitment in twentieth century literature. Alvy: You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}