public space sounds like the demand for signs. s'il vous plait.

     How will we sell the language

          and if there are no technocrats

               and if there were no technocrats

Where would art be today? while on my first trip to the Soviet Union, as it was called at that time. Before the dawn of this new market-oriented millennium. Engineers I discovered are the most literal-minded people: the source of their, and perhaps all power. In Russia engineers love the poetry of Mayakovsky and, one supposes, more people have been slaughtered by bureaucrats than anywhere else in the world. Ancient Egypt?

Thus, to paraphrase a journalist I know, you always know it's a bureaucracy when they refuse, ever, to use the word bureaucracy. The bureaucrat is the only real form of representation known to mankind, one might argue, the ur-form of the division of labor, continually playing on his/her dual status, an enfolding or mirroring, as both metonymy and metaphor for the State. And therefore a necessary requisite of any political ideology, from anarchic, to democratic to totalitarian--or is totalitarianism just a word for bureaucratic rule without any ideological pretenses whatsoever. Why did Marxism fail? Did the avant-garde fail to save the proletariat? Was it the absence of public space? or an excess? Can public space be overbuilt . . . where does one dump semiotic waste?

               Have you noticed, somewhere in all the layers of Deep Forest's sound, what sounds like a trumpeting voice, a play, or parody on

the voice of a French Bureaucrat.

Barthes, actually, pointed out the French Bureaucracy's talent for manipulating the image of the Afro-French soldier in service of the Empire. So, is it a parody, or a misrepresentation? To what extent is public space a phantasy of power, or power-sharing. From an article by James Fallows on the controversy over the State's regulation of "encryption devices":

     "The government's other response has been to emphasize its ability to 'make markets'."

What's worse? the bureaucracy, or the market? Academics, for instance, tend usually to think of themselves as "Anti-administration", or at least the currently hegemonic Baby boom generation has adopted this pose. Or even, that they are the enlightened administrators. But to be an out/insider, in buro-political terms, is to think according to what paradigm, to flatter yourself that you are creating what kind of institution. Or are you merely cornering the market for whatever it is you are;

So, ask yourself, what are bureaucrats really like? Are you one? What kind, or type? Make lists . . .

          And then sell yourself to me . . .

The background is a front and then?

                Boris Uspensky, in fact. He was walking home from the office one day, and then? He pointed out in his book Poetics of Composition (Poetika kompozitsii is the transliteration) that the background, ugly curtains, especially in the icon, is always more semiotically marked for artifice, insincerity, inauthenticity: in order to

                                                   make the illusion of the foreground more real, hyper-real, or even to sacralize its effects: we may be extrapolating here. Background music. In the supermarket--isn't the rhetorical purpose of the music's obvious inauthenticity to heighten our perception of the food's authenticity. This is real food. Real booze. Don't pay "artificial" prices. It's no wonder is it, that such music makes people paranoid? Always thinking they're trying to brainwash us. As if they would need some hi-tech cleverness to do that. We willingly, don't we, participate in any form of brainwashing we can get our hands on. Feel the bureaucrat within        yourself. S/he is the demand for your mind, for whatever of your mind you are able to supply the cultural market.           Science is possible, as Viktor Shklovsky put it, lay bare the device. And

Sure, ambient music could be political, if it empowers those who embody disenfranchised productive forces to think in terms of consumption, that is, what they want, not just what they "need"--to forget production, and

     if it does not merely appropriate the rhetoric of production in order to foreground the enjoyment of a techno-specialized, niche-defined, aesthetically self-referential (read Kantian) form of consumption by tired bureaucrats seeking to forget production.