Another long one..

As I write this, I'm eating around the mold on my pita in an attempt to use up all the hummus before it goes bad. Some dinner. Maybe I'll blame this rambling, even worse than yesterday's, on malnutrition. This one might be a little opaque, but I really hope to get some feedback.- - -I have spent a lot of time thinking about the structurally-created omissions in capitalist systems, both the unacknowledged and the repressed. A message recently posted to a mailing list that I subscribe to crystallized a number of these thoughts. It seems to be the tail end of a discussion that I missed, but the basic gesture involved was an attempt to broaden the concept of capitalism's "residue" to include not only labor and laborers, but "everything that is unnameable within a capitalist symbolic." This residue, both material and representative, lies just on the other side of what the poster calls a "limit of intelligibility."The e-mail then defines the concept of "progress" (however simplifying that term is) as a device that allows those inside the capitalist system to render intelligible all of these unintelligible things. Now to quote a larger part of the e-mail before going on: "However, the progress narrative is obviously a massive simplification, covering over the unintelligibility of certain modes of existence with the certainty that in time they will become more like us."What becomes interesting is that not only are non-standard (often read: non-western) modes of thought and production rendered unintelligible by this system, but also certain things that can be considered within the system (even caused directly by it): feelings of hopelessness in people who are otherwise not 'victims' of capitalist culture, any problem on its own terms ("depression without cures"), anomalies like people 'going postal.' To oversimplify, large parts of the emotional sphere are within the system yet unexplained by it.While the e-mail seems to be discussing this issue on a largely social or political level, it gains added significance for me in relationship to a text I read in the current issue of Frieze magazine (a contemporary art journal based in London.) Titled "Emotional Rescue," it attempts to carve out from within the field of late 1960s and early 1970s conceptual art a space for what the author, Jorg Heiser, calls "Romantic Conceptualism." Artists like Bas Jan Ader and Robert Smithson and contemporary descendants like Jan Timme and Didier Courbot fuse the conceptual with the emotional tenor of Romanticism, thereby connecting what Heiser calls the two endpoints of 'modern artistic subjectivity.'For me, the article was like suddenly turning on a bright light in a semidark room. All of the artists my tastes had me groping toward were suddenly presented before me in contrast to their contemporaries, wrapped up with a neat rhetorical bow that elucidated many of my own thoughts on their artistic production. I was slightly frustrated that Heiser had beaten me to the punch - I was clumsily drafting my own text on several of these artists (is it worth noting that both Ader and Smithson are on my livejournal 'interest' list? Not for nothing, as they say here in New York.) - but nonetheless relieved that I wasn't alone in my thoughts.Then - that's right, there's more! - after reading this, I happened to put on the sole LP of a mid-1990s band called Portraits of Past (record label link). I bought the record for its cover without having any idea who they were or what kind of music they made. At the time, I had been listening to pop punk alone. When the first notes rang out from my speakers - sixteen low throbs from the bass before an explosion of guitars and screaming - I realized that I was in for something incredibly different from anything I was familiar with. It was filled with such emotion, charged with such a dramatic flair, that it refused to be ignored. It ignited in me a search for that particular quality in music that I have not yet stopped. Now, I mainly listen to quiet, experimental electronic music, but nonetheless what registers is that which fuses concept with emotion (for example, Herbert's "Around the House" album, or Autopoiesis' "La Vie a Noir" [both label links].)I gravitate toward the emotional, that which is potentially unintelligible when viewed through its structuring system, when looking at art and listening to music. To return to the e-mail from the mailing list: "The significance of all this is that [by exploring this 'unintelligible' content] we are gesturing toward the outside of 'common' sense, toward things whose exclusion is desirable for a certain framework of meaning to continue, toward things which, if they were allowed to pour into the center would transform it considerably."- - -Is anyone familiar with books I might begin reading that explore the structural limitations/omissions of capitalist systems? I think that this is an issue I'd love to explore from within the realm of artistic production.