NONSITE || Tyrone Williams and Pat Clifford: “Pale Approximations”... Who Can/May Speak?

Just a couple slivers. Tyrone's "these expirations are just transformations into soil" echoed back to Rob's questions about how how the processes and products of a micro-culture* like non-site) can be archived specifically for re-use. (*my term not Rob's.) The notion of "failed" or "impossible" translations kept coming up. I didn't like hearing those words in this context. Mainly because I resist the necessary presuppositions. Within the ongoing discussion of the problematics of "cultural translation" I mentioned my view that the recent controversy surrounding sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a case where there was in fact a cultural division (between the immediate physical audience for the sermons and the national audience for the mediated controversy) and that this was paradoxically a case where a kind of cultural translation was in order. Someone quickly brought up the strong parallels with speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speeches that are now culturally "forgotten." From Wikipedia: "Some have also noted that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made similar comments about U.S. foreign policy and claimed that America was the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", and at another point King stated: "America was founded on genocide, and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive." The differences between Wright's & King's careers and ambitions, and between larger social contexts, specific social contexts (viable presidential campaign by a black man) and relative mediaverses probably defuses the utility of a comparison but does not dilute the irony. After the evening ends I walk down Treat Street, in the shadows of trees under the streetlights. As I pass, George Oppen's bullet-riddled body, draped atop dead dogs in a ditch, calls out to or to no one: Le gusta este jardin que es sujo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!"