Twelve fragments for future moderation of Tomarken.com slash two.
Richard Tebrick, Moderator of the paralysis perpetually on the horizon
Seconds filled with a quivering silence, like a sheet of blank paper wrapped in electricity. (Kobo Abe)
The enigma (the secret) is precisely the absence of any question - where there is no room even to introduce a question - without, however, this absence’s providing the answer. (Maurice Blanchot)
- § I was talking to a comic book artist from Los Angeles, after this last Academy Awards, about whether it was reasonable to suggest that film has a pedagogical telos, or whether instead Hollywood was just a bunch of George Clooney style hubris. I think you know why we were talking about this: Crash. Do we say that a film with a good message is a good film?
- § I was reading Beckmann’s email transcript with the VH1 Behind the Music people, listen to this question: “Is Tom Marken.com a humor website or is it a site for people to post conspiracy theories?” Awesome. I realized a good answer is that Tomarken is not a genre website. It is only ever a website. And not in a livejournal way. Livejournals are websites for the sake of publicizing one’s diary. The clue is in the name. It is the internet’s version of high school. Tomarken is not here to share your bookmarks.
- § What is Tomarken? What compels us to keep asking that? How and or why could we possibly still be making this web page? These are all questions. Fine questions, to be answered by a person of class and candor. I will not answer them. “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” This is a demonstration; this is a secret.
- § The staggering temptation is to say this: “Tomarken.com is a leaf in the wind.” But I doubt it is.
- § I think Tomarken.com is a paper shredder, a mass grave of signification. But, and this is why the phenomenon of the mass grave can exist, the corpse is not the proof of the individual, death itself is.
- § What makes someone see something they’ve written and think, “This is a good thing to put on Tomarken?” What is a good thing to put on Tomarken? What is Tomarken good for?
- § Most websites are billboards with games. They are doing something. Tomarken.com isn’t doing anything but being a website. It can’t. And at the same time, it doesn’t want to do anything that tries to push forward website gadget-wizardry in some kind of Clement Greenberg-esque technophiliac/design-teleological way: as if that were “website”.
- § Website: A blank sheet of paper wrapped in electricity.
- § Tomarken: So full it’s empty.
- § Incessantly posting our meager usage statistics. Why? For what? The absence of the question, our epigraph promises, is not it’s answer. Writing without genre, style, idiom: “..a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.” But: (1) where the idiot is signification itself, and (2) where signifiying nothing is only as the auto-breaching of total “full” signification. Everything at once as nothing, or almost nothing; a piece of wire tracing the smallest circle, a secret.
- § Hundreds of ideas: transposed, ripped from their housing, written on scraps of paper, thrown into a drawer. An ocean of signification being pulled into a black hole whose center resists signification, and does nothing else. Tomarken.com, and let this now be taken with its full charge of meaning, has website written all over it. How does this require moderation? A mission: a seashell, a piece of fruit. Moderator of: real, moderation, paralysis on the horizon. These are the same things. One simply and lazily moderates the thread to make sure it does not pull through and become simply a straight line. Gravity’s night-watchman.
