> Homage to the Homeless
>
> Yes, yes, finally a little politics, a little of the outside
> reality of poverty and homelessness. Let's not forget that homelessness is
> deliberately invented by the societies which then deny responsibility
> for its creation and advent. I know the endless homeless ones who
> wander the streets and beg. Hunger and humilation on the street, and the
> cold, and the indifference and fear (years of it), one encounters in
> others. Those who are called priveliged are just one element in the the
> war of those who
for the emerAgency
Now we have a problem on the table, perhaps a disaster, certainly a
collective trauma.
What is the effect of trauma? shock. It cannot be assimilated into
experience; it remains outside, stuck, repeating itself, returning
literally because we cannot figure it.
What action might be taken? The emerAgency is between the era of
belief in progress and the nihilism of "whatever." How to improve the
world? You will only make things worse (John Cage).
I do not know what to do. At the same time, my discipline offers
me a theory. This theory is as alien to my experience as the problem, the
homlessness. Except for the trauma of being myself.
Such is the method: homelessness is not something to explain.
The emerAgency does not issue a report with a plan for ending
homelessness. Anyway the positivists have published libraries full of such
reports. Rather, the disaster in its literalness (being without figure
because of its traumatic nature)--since it forecloses representation--is
appropriated by the consultant as the vehicle for a metaphor to explore
the feeling of how things are with her or him (what has been called
*Stimmung*, attunement).
Art across the disciplines: this is how it works. The new
consultancy. The disaster is not the object of explanation, but the
subject. The resulting reconfiguration of the problem is then grounded on
a local case. That local instance becomes the scene of change.
best
Greg Ulmer