{"id":1128,"date":"2022-05-17T18:03:12","date_gmt":"2022-05-17T18:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simeonownproject.practices.site\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2022-10-22T10:24:48","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T10:24:48","slug":"interview-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/2022\/05\/17\/interview-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview May 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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robert singleton<\/a><\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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polemics<\/a><\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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readings<\/a><\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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WIKAL<\/a><\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Interview with Robert Singleton (April 2022)<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Singleton met me at a door and led me up the stairs into his flat, which he shared with a friend whose phone conversations in the adjoining room could be heard throughout our interview. They lived in Tulse Hill, a subdued district quietly nestled in the bustle of South-East London (described by Iain Sinclair as ‘a cemetry of private lives in houses from which furtive men appear with dogs who piss in hedges’), opposite a school. Singleton told me he worked at a school further away. He said he had moved up to London in search of a \u2018scene\u2019 but hadn\u2019t found it \u2013 \u2018I\u2019m sure that stuff does exist, I just haven\u2019t found it, maybe I\u2019m less outgoing than I expected or pictured myself.\u2019 His room was modest and bare, there was a line of maybe a dozen or so books against the wall, a stack at his bedside table and a few notebooks lying around. The walls were white; one wall, that served as the headboard to his bed, with two pillows smushed up against it, was covered in pictures of the luminescent strip-light artworks of Dan Flavin which he had printed out and stuck up. The room\u2019s actual light sources were a good deal less assertive. His desk fitted into the space left between the end of his bed and the far-side wall. On it were two laptops, one stacked on top of the other, and a mic, which he explained had been purchased as part of a, since abandoned, Twitch-stream lecture project, and had never been used. I conducted the interview on a fold out chair he fetched from the kitchen while he pontificated from his desk chair. He cut a slightly ridiculous figure, in his bedroom, characterizing himself as a \u2018late late late late Modernist.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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SINGLETON :<\/strong> \u2026 like really <\/em>late, like completely missed the party, turned up weeks late to the wrong location, so that it doesn\u2019t even matter, even with the right intentions. Late enough that no-one cares anymore, which is kind of liberating \u2013 I don\u2019t need the credentials, the thing doesn\u2019t exist, so it\u2019s free entry because it doesn\u2019t even matter.<\/p>

INTERVIEWER<\/strong> : Then why Modernist, if it doesn\u2019t matter \u2026 why anything?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Because I\u2019ve landed on the idea, and \u2013 I suppose \u2013 the practise, of \u2018falling short\u2019 as a productive starting point for my exploration of the \u2018online’ mind.<\/p>

I think there\u2019s a semi-pervasive, floating belief* that minds partially formed or assembled by exposure to the internet are destined to experience a perpetual falling short of previously held communicative, intellectual, aesthetic etc standards … sometimes this broadens out into a sense that even our experience of reality isn\u2019t as real, is somehow subpar, falling short of some more intensely felt, more authentic version of reality that preceded the Internet**. I\u2019m interested in exploring the implications of this kind of nebulous conviction that the \u2018online mind\u2019 represents a falling short of standards, a slipping away from their anchorage \u2026 and the collection of standards very deeply impressed on me (by reading a certain, increasingly irrelevant, generation of cultural critics, Steiner, Sontag etc) as somehow lost, unattainable, a line against which we are supposed to measure how far we\u2019ve fallen, is that of Modernism. Hence the Late Late Late Late Modernism thing, but I suppose it could just as easily be Late Late Late Late Confucianism or \u2026<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Since the interview Singleton has requested that the reader be informed that he no longer styles himself a ‘late late late late Modernist’ but a ‘Baby Modernist’ who makes ‘Baby Modernism.’ It is unclear what bearing this has on his opening comments, whether he has still ‘completely missed the party’ or is now too early, so I have just let them stand.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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*particularly prevalent, felt with some kind of special intensity, in certain, prominently male, subsections of the online world.<\/p>

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**this sense is ironically alluded to by Patricia Lockwood in ‘No-One Is Talking About This’ : \u2018As she began to type \u2018enormous fatberg made of grease, wet-wipes, and condoms is terrorizing London\u2019s sewers\u2019 her hands began to waver in their outlines \u2026 What in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.\u2019(33)<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> And this ‘falling short’ is what you\u2019re thematising or making explicit in the piece \u2018What I Know About Logic\u2019?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Yeah, pretty much. \u2018What I Know About Logic\u2019 is an exercise. It\u2019s supposed to be a paradigmatic instance of the kind of knowledge structures accumulated by \u2018surfing the web.\u2019 I wanted to see for myself what all my skim-reading, all those twitter-threads, those overheard discussions, half-remembered, those Wikipedia entries and half-read articles, what it all amounted to, what kind of knowledge it could all be made to cohere into. I soon realised that what it amounted to wasn\u2019t grounded knowledge about a subject area (in this case Logic) but an ability to simulate competency in the handling of concepts and ideas associated with a particular subject area\u2026 And then there\u2019s all these interesting questions that arise concerning the boundaries between knowledge and its simulation, what pathways can be created between the two, where the distinctions lie etc.<\/p>

In an attempt to \u2018get at\u2019 these boundaries, expose them, I split the text into 4 levels. 1- (Mostly quite general) Facts about the subject area I can state with certainty ; 2- More specific facts I can\u2019t state with certainty, some connections between these facts ; 3- constructive attempts to give adequate explanations to all the \u2018facts\u2019, to build a coherent picture of their place within the whole subject area and the connections between them, often relying on a combination of guesswork and fabrication ; 4- purely speculative and fantastical incursions into the subject area.<\/p>

The mind transforms its patchwork of remembered internet bits and bobs into premises, saying \u2018these elements, whether based in reality or not, are what I have to work with\u2019 it sets to work constructing coherences out of them, narratives, explications, histories. And this work is happening right at the boundary between the faculties of Imagination and Judgement, in a way that Peli Grietzer\u2019s ongoing work* on the Imaginative faculty has a lot to tell us about\u2026 Imaginative fabrication is used to give ignorance the same formal qualities, the interdependency of structure, the consequentiality, as knowledge. But this simulation of the formal qualities of knowledge is only effective up to a point and within a certain rhetorical context, with the different levels I wanted to direct the readers attention to the points at which that simulated knowledge cracks, the points where ignorance is being covered over, where pressure can be applied so as to force ignorance to reveal itself. While at many points in level 2 the simulation is successful, at level 3 it is pushed beyond breaking point, forced to explain itself, to go into more detail, and ends up drawing on the resources of postulation, estimation and fiction. It\u2019s important to remember though that even here there is still reasoning going on, but reasoning that is forced to \u2018make do\u2019 with faulty premises\/foundations\u2026 As an appendix to the piece I list all the premises that turned out to be incorrect or misremembered.<\/p>

Level 4 is pure fabrication and speculation. Brandom* says that as our statements or assertions become less subject to error, as they move further from the provably incorrect, they also become less conceptual. At Level 3 we are still at the level of a fabricated conceptuality, by Level 4 there is no conceptual content left within the statements, they are pure fiction\u2026 but haven\u2019t we entered the realm of a different form of knowledge, a different relation with truth here?<\/p>

INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> Ok interesting, and do you th-<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Uhh \u2013 One secon- sorry to interrupt, but I would also just like to say that I think this piece is also interesting as a kind of case study for that kind of knowledge so endemic to the internet, the kind of knowledge censoriously labelled \u2018misinformation\u2019, \u2018post-truth\u2019, \u2018conspiracy theory\u2019 whatever. You can see how it builds through the different levels. First the patchwork of general, gleaned facts, maybe in combination with insufficient analytic resources to fully understand them and their interconnections, so that when they\u2019re pressed at they release postulational, speculative explanations and connections, which once unchained from the possibility of provable incorrectness start to develop purely fictitious and even mythical lives\u2026 We are still learning what the particular productive capacity of this internet-assembled mind is.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Peli Grietzer, https:\/\/effects-journal.com\/archive\/vibe-coherence ; https:\/\/twitter.com\/peligrietzer<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> Do you see your work as mapping this productive capacity or tapping it?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Mostly tapping into it. In most of the pieces collected on my website I just leave the outcomes of this \u2018productive capacity\u2019 to stand, I retain the mistaken and fanciful premises which are the residue of our attempts to organise or make sense to ourselves of our endless, branching paths through the contemporary world\u2019s sea of textual content, I leave them to stand without subjecting them to any process of rational refinement. The \u2018Readings\u2019 for example, are really just catalogues of the kind of fanciful premises that can be derived from works of literature when they are read in the same way the internet is \u2018read\u2019 \u2026 \u2018What I Know About Logic\u2019 is more on the mapping side though, because there I show what would happen if I tried to launch actual arguments or critical interpretations from of these premises, giving a portrait or making explicit the type of ignorance left implicit in the other pieces, forcing it to reveal itself.<\/p>

INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> Ok, did I misunderstand you or did you just suggest that your \u2018Readings\u2019 are the kind of critical texts that would be produced by someone reading works of literature in the same way they read the internet?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Hmm \u2026 yeah I want to slightly adjust that, it\u2019s more a case of the \u2018Readings\u2019 being the kinds of critical texts produced by someone using the faculties developed by internet reading (skimming, parsing) for reading literary texts. Seeing how faculties developed to hold together a sustained reading in a textual environment as heterogenous, noise-filled, fleeting as the internet function in more conscientiously arranged environments (like a 19th<\/sup> century realist novel for example) with the hope that the kinds of mishandlings produced by this mismatch may be indicative\u2026 And also I should add, that the textual outcomes of this mismatch aren\u2019t anything near the critical texts <\/em>we\u2019re used to.<\/p>

INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> What kind of relationship would you say they bear to such \u2018critical texts\u2019, if any?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> I think that placing an emphasis on the more pragmatic, peremptory, opportunistic reactions a mind can have towards textual material, the kind of reactions that play a central role in our ability to navigate the internet, in responses to \u2018literary\u2019 material gives us a view of the pre-lives of critical assessments, the embryonic stages of a fully \u2018worked out\u2019 interpretation of the kind we are used to seeing\u2026 the fancies that they build on, the ferment of synaptic ignition. I see these pieces as display boxes for premises that couldn\u2019t be built upon without breaking down into inconsistency, the premises for arguments that could never be made, the bases for crumbling patterns of inference. A kind of gallery of monstrosities or obsolescence then. But the interesting thing is that as long as these mistaken premises aren\u2019t investigated they can be preserved in a kind of prelapsarian innocence. You could think of them like those deformed two-headed lambs on display in the backrooms of weird museums: had they been left to develop naturally they would have quickly died and decomposed into the mud of some field, their monstrosity lost forever, but preserved in formaldehyde they live on, in a limbo, as \u2018curiosities.\u2019<\/p>

The interesting questions for me concern what value these mistaken premises can have on their own terms, what can we learn from such \u2018curiosities\u2019, can they be fruitful, what kind of frame can they provide to help us understand more normative processes of argumentative development? Wrapped in these questions are stylistic ones: what techniques of textual preservation, what particular language-formaldehyde, do such \u2018curiosities\u2019 require in order to stand \u2018on their own terms\u2019?<\/p>

INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> Why do you call them \u2018premises\u2019?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Because in the context of \u2018What I Know About Logic\u2019 that\u2019s the place they have, but outside that context they are always tenuous. By labelling them \u2018premises\u2019 I mean to point towards the processes (of inference, consolidation, ratiocination whatever you want to call it) that would unpick them, reveal their inconsistencies. My premises are always leaning dangerously on the edge of these processes, ready to topple at any moment. This is the challenge I face trying to write in this way, how to treat them so that they don\u2019t topple, how to fix them in this precarious stage, ending chains of implication before they become burdensome to the play of assertion. Being abrupt is the key\u2026. The Knausgaard piece, which is the oldest piece on the website, written at a time when I was still trying to figure out how I wanted to write these pieces, is a failure in this regard. I wasn\u2019t able to stop the various claims and premises in that piece from turning into arguments. Argument grew like a disease in that text; once one sentence follows on consequentially, inferentially, from another it creates the expectation that others will as well, that other connections will follow the pattern. And in that piece my attempts to counteract this were clumsy, the interpolated \u2018literary\u2019 sections, the interview etc.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> Earlier you talked about \u2018the value <\/em>these mistaken premises can have on their own terms\u2019, it\u2019s surprising to me that questions of value would be a concern for you in these texts considering the connection between valuation and argumentation, the fact that attributions of value are usually dependent on the provision of reasons for such an attribution\u2026<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Well I suppose I\u2019m trying to unpick that traditionally indissoluble relation between attributions of value and the construction of arguments in order to justify such attributions. My probably rather na\u00efve and un-worked out belief is that prior to finding value in an art object, during the actual consumption of it, our mind is primarily at work trying to find interest on it, constantly trying to motivate itself to continue its project of consuming the art object, and that it is only once interested, once enthused, that we work on justifying our interest by finding arguments to attribute a kind of objective, communicable value to the object that has aroused such interest. I have no doubt that the processes of finding interest and finding value are much more concurrent and intertwined then this quick sketch suggests, but still think that the focus placed on the latter has been detrimental to our understanding of the role played by the former. I\u2019m interested in trying to give a picture of the whims that propel us through the consumption of an art object, how we whim ourselves into and then through it. So the \u2018Readings\u2019 collected on the website are kind of documents of the ways I have found to make certain texts interesting to myself, to conjure the enthusiasm required for continued reading projects. And in this I\u2019d like to think of myself as skirting around for hints towards a new system for the communication of intersubjective value, ways in which the internet-assembled mind can re-develop the faculty of taste using its own tools\u2026 but I haven\u2019t thought too much about this yet, it\u2019s something I\u2019ll explore through the writing of the pieces.<\/p>

INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> So there\u2019s a kind of will-to-normativity underlying your \u2018experiments in proto-normative textual and critical behaviour\u2019 (as you\u2019ve characterized your own texts)?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> I\u2019ve never said such a thing!<\/p>

INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> You were drunk.<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> [thinking] \u2026 Oh yes, I may have said something along those lines, how embarrassing\u2026 But yes, in answer to your original question, there is a kind of normative \u2018long game\u2019 I suppose. Our relationship with our shared cultural inheritance is very confused, we\u2019re kind of pre-installed with all these valuations of certain art objects while at the same time being completely alienated from the social contexts in which these valuations were first made (alienated in a variety of ways: by our technologically mediated life-world, by our enmeshment in a kind of cognitive capitalism, by the fact that the value systems of previous societies were based on varying forms of exploitation and domination), the estimations aren\u2019t our own, they are as much historical artefacts as the works they\u2019re estimating. We have all the valuations and values and aspirations but without the traditional means of getting there, so we have to try and get there with the materials available to us, the stuff that we have to hand, to find personal, whimsical forms of appreciation and approbation\u2026 and one thing I can say with certainty is that the internet is full of these forms, millions of them, like a weird hothouse of whimsical approbations (and that\u2019s without me even getting started on its incredible Bosch-gallery of communal disapprobations).<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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INTERVIEWER :<\/strong> Twitter is the \u2018hothouse\u2019 you are referring to, right? It seems to be the platform that has had the largest shaping influence on your writing?<\/p>

SINGLETON :<\/strong> Yes, absolutely, Twitter has been very influential for me\u2026 My parents talk about how when a new Bowie or Led Zeppelin record dropped they would line up at the record store, purchase the vinyl, look at it all the way home, pure anticipation, then play it in their rooms, over and over, a personal cultural supernova, my closest analogue to that experience would be the day Deontologistics dropped his thread on Deleuze\u2026 watching all the discussions peeling off in all directions in the replies was a cultural experience \u2026 Anyway, I would say that the parts of Twitter that have most influenced my writing are the sections defined by the activity of competitive, outmatching approbation, all the approbations being basically non-evidential, just personal, personality-displaying, ways of reaching an already determined consensus. Opinions are incredible to watch when they are they are tools of self-promotion, I guess they become \u2018takes.\u2019 This area of Twitter reads like a schizophrenic George Steiner essay, all just different textures of vague critical authority. And recommendations. This is the hothouse I was referring to yes.<\/p>

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Peli Grietzer, https:\/\/effects-journal.com\/archive\/vibe-coherence ; https:\/\/twitter.com\/peligrietzer<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Jacques Roubaud ‘The Great Fire of London’<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

robert singleton polemics readings WIKAL Interview with Robert Singleton (April 2022) Singleton met me at a door and led me up the stairs into his flat, which he shared with a friend whose phone conversations in the adjoining room could be heard throughout our interview. They lived in Tulse Hill, a subdued district quietly nestled… Read More »Interview May 2022<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1988,"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processed-words.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}