28.10.06
THE LETTING GO: How One's Passion Sets In Motion The Passion Of Others
"The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existent truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. No explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it."
--M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
Above: David Audet in Ybor Square Space
When I was eight years old, I was young,
and I was shy. On the last day of school
I asked my art teacher to sign my yearbook,
standing out among the live oak trees,
out where we had spun clay until
our hands were dry and chalky
like the hands of gymnasts.
David pressed hard with my neon pen, leaving bold-faced
indentions upon the glossy paper. He haphazardly
scribbled and handed it over, and of course
I eagerly flipped around to find his signature before walking away.
He had given himself a beard and mustache
in his photograph. He had written
YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.
While I was reading before him
David verbally reiterated his note,
eyes catching me instructively,
holding me for a moment.
I understood, right?
I HAVE IT IF I WANT IT. BUT
I HAVE TO WANT IT.
And yes, I said of course.
Yes of course.
David Audet is the best art teacher
I think I've ever had. He had eyes
disproportionately keener than the rest of his body,
which was husky, unshaven, unkempt.
He arranged art galleries exhibiting
stale Cuban sandwiches. He constantly reeked
of body odor. He had built a deck, gingerly, around
the old oak trees to hold classes. He would simply
sit in the center of this deck with us circled around
him, and play guitar while the peacocks screamed
in circles, around us. He would have us draw him
in bursts of sixty seconds and then have us rotate,
cyclical, around one another to capture all angles.
When it rained we cried out and ran inside.
We would go into small unused rooms, smelling him
and listening to him telling us how the government had
assassinated John Lennon until the situation was too
repugnant for there to be room in it for our juvenile art.
David was prone to bursts of violent rage at his young
students. Eventually the school dismissed him, hired him
back, and dismissed him again. One wants to attribute this
either to his memories of the Vietnam War or to his
perennial occupational overexposure to paint thinner.
David Audet loved to eat avocado sandwiches and
in class he would eat them as he taught us to cast
pottery in the traditional Raku style. Sen-No-Rikyu.
David was too big in himself to fit neatly anywhere.
Even Lee Academy was too much for him. The school,
which it would admittedly be quite an understatement
to say was not the most oppressive I've encountered,
could not contain the firing glazes which interested him,
and glittered.
YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.
If his note in my yearbook had read
IF YOU WANT IT / YOU'VE GOT IT,
David would have entered the fallible
sphere of logic which his statement preexists.
But no -- his area of expertise was precisely
the precognitive moment of inspiration where the question is not,
"How best can we analyze this?"
no -- David asks, in true form for the visual artist,
"WHY WOULD ONE WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE
THE EXISTENCE OF OBJECTS WORTH ANALYSIS, AT ALL?"
The realm where possibility is made actual
does not rest in the dry and stiffened fingertips
of some absolute objective truth which existed fully formed
thousands of years ago as it stands dusty, before me now --
no. "The only pre-existent Logos is the world itself."
This sphere begins entirely frothing in liquid slip, fires precisely
in the lowest temperatures of my immediate,
glittering desire. Here the genesis of meaning --
And here the condemnation of meaning,
Fissures caused by air and water in the clay,
As banal and violent as an act validated in its own performance.
Upon the littlest effort it takes for my fingers to wield their water
over the indentions in lumps of pliable earth, fanning and smoothing the
Thing into Being -- upon this depends the very being of the tradition itself.
Soren Kierkegaard says: life is lived forwards but
understood backwards. I had always contested this.
But what if memory were found to be like the heat left in an object
long after the fire has gone -- the residual glow of ceramic sake-cups
and pitchers, indelibly, only there after they have left the kiln.
Then we could only understand the past. David Audet's influence was to
plunge us all the more, in spite of history, into the
establishing values for the future. He became our personal history so that
when we were adults, then we might turn our heads
over our shoulders
like someone who just saw a friend walk past in a crowd.
I could not have fathomed it then, age seven,
face covered in white paint, hands covered in dust
and chalky like the hands of gymnasts.
Only over time did the man grow to glow
with a phenomenological heat. Only now I begin
chipping slow flecks off the marble
of what I learned there, still covered in paint,
David still living by the lake in a trailer next door.
--M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
Above: David Audet in Ybor Square Space
When I was eight years old, I was young,
and I was shy. On the last day of school
I asked my art teacher to sign my yearbook,
standing out among the live oak trees,
out where we had spun clay until
our hands were dry and chalky
like the hands of gymnasts.
David pressed hard with my neon pen, leaving bold-faced
indentions upon the glossy paper. He haphazardly
scribbled and handed it over, and of course
I eagerly flipped around to find his signature before walking away.
He had given himself a beard and mustache
in his photograph. He had written
YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.
While I was reading before him
David verbally reiterated his note,
eyes catching me instructively,
holding me for a moment.
I understood, right?
I HAVE IT IF I WANT IT. BUT
I HAVE TO WANT IT.
And yes, I said of course.
Yes of course.
David Audet is the best art teacher
I think I've ever had. He had eyes
disproportionately keener than the rest of his body,
which was husky, unshaven, unkempt.
He arranged art galleries exhibiting
stale Cuban sandwiches. He constantly reeked
of body odor. He had built a deck, gingerly, around
the old oak trees to hold classes. He would simply
sit in the center of this deck with us circled around
him, and play guitar while the peacocks screamed
in circles, around us. He would have us draw him
in bursts of sixty seconds and then have us rotate,
cyclical, around one another to capture all angles.
When it rained we cried out and ran inside.
We would go into small unused rooms, smelling him
and listening to him telling us how the government had
assassinated John Lennon until the situation was too
repugnant for there to be room in it for our juvenile art.
David was prone to bursts of violent rage at his young
students. Eventually the school dismissed him, hired him
back, and dismissed him again. One wants to attribute this
either to his memories of the Vietnam War or to his
perennial occupational overexposure to paint thinner.
David Audet loved to eat avocado sandwiches and
in class he would eat them as he taught us to cast
pottery in the traditional Raku style. Sen-No-Rikyu.
David was too big in himself to fit neatly anywhere.
Even Lee Academy was too much for him. The school,
which it would admittedly be quite an understatement
to say was not the most oppressive I've encountered,
could not contain the firing glazes which interested him,
and glittered.
YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.
If his note in my yearbook had read
IF YOU WANT IT / YOU'VE GOT IT,
David would have entered the fallible
sphere of logic which his statement preexists.
But no -- his area of expertise was precisely
the precognitive moment of inspiration where the question is not,
"How best can we analyze this?"
no -- David asks, in true form for the visual artist,
"WHY WOULD ONE WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE
THE EXISTENCE OF OBJECTS WORTH ANALYSIS, AT ALL?"
The realm where possibility is made actual
does not rest in the dry and stiffened fingertips
of some absolute objective truth which existed fully formed
thousands of years ago as it stands dusty, before me now --
no. "The only pre-existent Logos is the world itself."
This sphere begins entirely frothing in liquid slip, fires precisely
in the lowest temperatures of my immediate,
glittering desire. Here the genesis of meaning --
And here the condemnation of meaning,
Fissures caused by air and water in the clay,
As banal and violent as an act validated in its own performance.
Upon the littlest effort it takes for my fingers to wield their water
over the indentions in lumps of pliable earth, fanning and smoothing the
Thing into Being -- upon this depends the very being of the tradition itself.
Soren Kierkegaard says: life is lived forwards but
understood backwards. I had always contested this.
But what if memory were found to be like the heat left in an object
long after the fire has gone -- the residual glow of ceramic sake-cups
and pitchers, indelibly, only there after they have left the kiln.
Then we could only understand the past. David Audet's influence was to
plunge us all the more, in spite of history, into the
establishing values for the future. He became our personal history so that
when we were adults, then we might turn our heads
over our shoulders
like someone who just saw a friend walk past in a crowd.
I could not have fathomed it then, age seven,
face covered in white paint, hands covered in dust
and chalky like the hands of gymnasts.
Only over time did the man grow to glow
with a phenomenological heat. Only now I begin
chipping slow flecks off the marble
of what I learned there, still covered in paint,
David still living by the lake in a trailer next door.
25.10.06
A PRELUDE TO THE LETTING GO
Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?
Sen-No-Rikyu
| re: machines rendering manual labor unnecessary - the difference is that the upper classes always gained reactive identity by way of a condescension toward those who did their bodily labor, be they african-american slaves, the proletariat, or women. one cannot in the same way condescend to a machine, and thus the reactivity by which we tried to assert our detached superiority over the body disappears, for it no longer has a subject-as-object upon which to displace/inflict its gaze -- only mere objects -- indeed the objects for which the oppressed classes have, throughout history, shed inexhaustible torrents of blood.
| re: what happens when the detachment from modes of power which is necessary for any true criticism & radical rennovation of values to take place does not coincide the establishment and affirmation of positive alternative values -- those who would be radicals are powerless, and become rematriculated into original power structures as members of lowest, most oppressed class; they go to jail, they become impoverished and marginalized. thus we reject the ascetic denial of power. BUT the most radical revolutionary will be a conservative the day after the revolution.
Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?
Sen-No-Rikyu
Sen-No-Rikyu
| re: machines rendering manual labor unnecessary - the difference is that the upper classes always gained reactive identity by way of a condescension toward those who did their bodily labor, be they african-american slaves, the proletariat, or women. one cannot in the same way condescend to a machine, and thus the reactivity by which we tried to assert our detached superiority over the body disappears, for it no longer has a subject-as-object upon which to displace/inflict its gaze -- only mere objects -- indeed the objects for which the oppressed classes have, throughout history, shed inexhaustible torrents of blood.
| re: what happens when the detachment from modes of power which is necessary for any true criticism & radical rennovation of values to take place does not coincide the establishment and affirmation of positive alternative values -- those who would be radicals are powerless, and become rematriculated into original power structures as members of lowest, most oppressed class; they go to jail, they become impoverished and marginalized. thus we reject the ascetic denial of power. BUT the most radical revolutionary will be a conservative the day after the revolution.
Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?
Sen-No-Rikyu
13.10.06
What's going to be the death of me? Static electricity.
Why does a house cat, when it is left outside, invariably come back to its master? Cats do not think of us as a part of their "pack" -- they are, allegedly, "not social animals." Even when they do stay with us their independence, to say nothing of the real neuroses some domesticated animals (caged birds...) display, assures us that it is only out of a lack of alternatives. That is precisely it. A cat who escapes comes back when it realizes that it prefers regular meals, albeit regular meals in servitude. It does not want the freedom to starve, and the ones who do -- well, they drop off our radar. And thusly do we construct the universality of our sovereignty.
Thusly do women remain oppressed. There are other options, of course -- last time I checked, women did have the option to get paid for their jobs. And last time I checked women get paid on average half what men do for comparable work. We will continue to accept the dinner offers of traditional gentlemen so long as that is the most certain way to ensure a regular meal. Men don't have the option of such dependence at all, but women -- well, it's unfortunate, but you know how things are. These days, nobody much looks out for the strays.
Thusly do women remain oppressed. There are other options, of course -- last time I checked, women did have the option to get paid for their jobs. And last time I checked women get paid on average half what men do for comparable work. We will continue to accept the dinner offers of traditional gentlemen so long as that is the most certain way to ensure a regular meal. Men don't have the option of such dependence at all, but women -- well, it's unfortunate, but you know how things are. These days, nobody much looks out for the strays.
10.10.06
Miss Madonna, won't you give me a kiss.
i. days need yet to begin
as life begins, unconscious,
so that waking is intuitive
and shortly after the day's light -- discrete
from the clock-tick of day.
this day has yet begun as
a weathered and phlegmatic exhale
after the exhaustion that results,
incomparably,
from a day full, without exertion.
ii. If we do not know ourselves to have a culture on par with Ancient Greece, if we cannot properly revel in our passions in the sphere of some ideal, then it is because the Greeks, and the ideal, have already been historicized. All understanding moves against the current in this way, and before we ever had occasion to claim lack, this responsibility should have been obvious. Since, by looking at our demographic's deep dissatisfation with the current state of American culture, we know that it was not, we have occasion to identify yet another failure of modernization, of the democratic state, of the herd. The failing is precisely when our ignorance of our own power becomes, effectively, the lack of power. Like the joke about red ink in the Zizek film -- we have all become culturally indolent by way of the formative effects of totalizing homogenization in media. If some cultural practice has not been presented to us, prefabricated and preordained, by some media, well then we imagine at the very least that it must be strictly taboo -- or, most often, that it does not exist at all. This betrays a fundamental existential ignorance, or a similarly fundamental laziness -- either way, an irresponsibility toward the care of the self. The next question that we ask -- well, what does historicizing do, anyway, so that we might ourselves? What is recollection in its transfigurative power, and how does one seize it as one chooses and acts? This question is not asking for proof of possibility, for it already has that powdering its very bones. Rather, it asks for the greatest absurdity when we are working in such a general & abstract conceptual framework -- it asks for self-disclosure to come from an outside source.
iii. "You are standing as if on the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration and must depart -- but then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the greengrocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill." / "Close air always becomes noxious."
as life begins, unconscious,
so that waking is intuitive
and shortly after the day's light -- discrete
from the clock-tick of day.
this day has yet begun as
a weathered and phlegmatic exhale
after the exhaustion that results,
incomparably,
from a day full, without exertion.
ii. If we do not know ourselves to have a culture on par with Ancient Greece, if we cannot properly revel in our passions in the sphere of some ideal, then it is because the Greeks, and the ideal, have already been historicized. All understanding moves against the current in this way, and before we ever had occasion to claim lack, this responsibility should have been obvious. Since, by looking at our demographic's deep dissatisfation with the current state of American culture, we know that it was not, we have occasion to identify yet another failure of modernization, of the democratic state, of the herd. The failing is precisely when our ignorance of our own power becomes, effectively, the lack of power. Like the joke about red ink in the Zizek film -- we have all become culturally indolent by way of the formative effects of totalizing homogenization in media. If some cultural practice has not been presented to us, prefabricated and preordained, by some media, well then we imagine at the very least that it must be strictly taboo -- or, most often, that it does not exist at all. This betrays a fundamental existential ignorance, or a similarly fundamental laziness -- either way, an irresponsibility toward the care of the self. The next question that we ask -- well, what does historicizing do, anyway, so that we might ourselves? What is recollection in its transfigurative power, and how does one seize it as one chooses and acts? This question is not asking for proof of possibility, for it already has that powdering its very bones. Rather, it asks for the greatest absurdity when we are working in such a general & abstract conceptual framework -- it asks for self-disclosure to come from an outside source.
iii. "You are standing as if on the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration and must depart -- but then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the greengrocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill." / "Close air always becomes noxious."
24.9.06
23.9.06
God is love. I do not love. God is love. I do not love.
I have to get rid of all my art directly after I make it these days; if I don't purge it I can't stop looking at it and it immediately falls apart. I give it to people and it's alleged to be my gift to them, my narcissism, and they thank me. Why do they thank me? They are taking my monsters and housing them in the cupboards of their viscera and their intentions and their vulnerabilities. Those things get locked in. Why do they thank me? I just lose respect for what hangs around too long.
I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.
Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.
I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.
I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.
Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.
I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.
Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.
I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.
I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.
Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.
19.9.06
Some fifteen-year-old somewhere in the world.
All I can bring myself to talk about is art.
1. At the end of this video there is a performance of "Baboon," from JD's The Coroner's Gambit, that everyone everywhere should see.
2. It is my contention that John's song "Wild Sage" (from newest album Get Lonely; lyrics here ) is narrated by an anonymous one of the mental patients he worked with as a psychiatric nurse in California. The "wild sage growing in the weeds" is a metaphoric reference to the population of the insane, entangled in the panopticon beneath the grit of its institutional power, and despite their status as self-aware individuals capable of complicated thought and emotion, etc etc etc. In other news, I hate interpretation of art.
3. It seems that this is the state of things.
1. At the end of this video there is a performance of "Baboon," from JD's The Coroner's Gambit, that everyone everywhere should see.
2. It is my contention that John's song "Wild Sage" (from newest album Get Lonely; lyrics here ) is narrated by an anonymous one of the mental patients he worked with as a psychiatric nurse in California. The "wild sage growing in the weeds" is a metaphoric reference to the population of the insane, entangled in the panopticon beneath the grit of its institutional power, and despite their status as self-aware individuals capable of complicated thought and emotion, etc etc etc. In other news, I hate interpretation of art.
3. It seems that this is the state of things.
11.9.06
And all the ceilings in New York have come down.
"Boredom is the root of all evil."
[S. Kierkegaard]
I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.
People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?
When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.
We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.
a
[S. Kierkegaard]
I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.
People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?
When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.
We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.
a
8.9.06
THE INDENTIONS OF YOUR OVERTONES; THEIR RECOVERY*
when the dipping of the sun is less
a finished gift, more an organ embarassed
to have been, a seeing which draws color
to itself looking less murderous, more opaque
bruise-purple weather to me, seeping
consistent and banal through all diaries
when mornings warp awfully, running water etching
new preludes for a decade which is running
its fingers between my legs despite protest
giving mercy its name, and moving through
radio darkness gritting dirt into dark skins
hovering above that clay, grounding toothless hat-dippers
who forget the grinding of their teeth
when footsteps fall away from paged-novel pulses
and rush plagues, waking, into reclaimed water, fingering
mildew over three stacked nickels, dousing names
that exhibit their bodies in saltwater, schools of public transit
arranging in old teams; they drink the smoke of my tobacco
packed in highways and reclaiming old loyalties, harvested
like laundry stains, extending bloodless legs in broadcast
i change my position
*This is an impenetrable poem which summons up an impenetrable landscape in order to avoid actually explaining how the notion of going home is always the death of ambition
a finished gift, more an organ embarassed
to have been, a seeing which draws color
to itself looking less murderous, more opaque
bruise-purple weather to me, seeping
consistent and banal through all diaries
when mornings warp awfully, running water etching
new preludes for a decade which is running
its fingers between my legs despite protest
giving mercy its name, and moving through
radio darkness gritting dirt into dark skins
hovering above that clay, grounding toothless hat-dippers
who forget the grinding of their teeth
when footsteps fall away from paged-novel pulses
and rush plagues, waking, into reclaimed water, fingering
mildew over three stacked nickels, dousing names
that exhibit their bodies in saltwater, schools of public transit
arranging in old teams; they drink the smoke of my tobacco
packed in highways and reclaiming old loyalties, harvested
like laundry stains, extending bloodless legs in broadcast
i change my position
*This is an impenetrable poem which summons up an impenetrable landscape in order to avoid actually explaining how the notion of going home is always the death of ambition
3.9.06
A, "On Nothing In Particular"
"We never saw one another directly, of course; instead we always looked -- as any individual will always look at any other individual -- indirectly. This means that whatever we saw when we tried to look at one another was entirely mediated by the standards of an instantiated third gaze, which, we imagined, constituted the rest of society."
29.8.06
And now here's Soledad Brian.
I know that none of my blog audience watches the news, or at least the important news, and I'm concerned for your ability to stay on top of the important issues of our day. So here they are exactly as I found them*, but conveniently abbreviated entirely into the digest-headline form you find below. Guess which headline is fake**, and remember that brevity is... wit.
a) Man Accused of Killing 7 Prostitutes
b) Jessica Simpson Loses Voice
c) Kids Watch Clown Crushed To Death
d) Virgin Mary Found On Turtle
e) Woman Has 14-Pound Baby Girl
f) Widely Publicized Child Sex-Object Murder Case, Due To Wide Publication, Gets Attention From Pathologically Lying Child-Sex Aficionados Who Then Must Necessarly Get Widely Publicized Themselves
*Well, I wasn't actually able to quote headline f verbatum as, I'll be darned, you just aren't able to find any articles on it anymore. Guess the news doesn't like to sensationalize particularly sensitive and singular court cases for too long or anything, especially when the coverage necessarily includes graphic descriptions of violence, sexuality, and/or social taboo. But I remember back in the day, when our tabloids still cared about JonBenet Ramsey. And this is more or less how they read.
**None
a) Man Accused of Killing 7 Prostitutes
b) Jessica Simpson Loses Voice
c) Kids Watch Clown Crushed To Death
d) Virgin Mary Found On Turtle
e) Woman Has 14-Pound Baby Girl
f) Widely Publicized Child Sex-Object Murder Case, Due To Wide Publication, Gets Attention From Pathologically Lying Child-Sex Aficionados Who Then Must Necessarly Get Widely Publicized Themselves
*Well, I wasn't actually able to quote headline f verbatum as, I'll be darned, you just aren't able to find any articles on it anymore. Guess the news doesn't like to sensationalize particularly sensitive and singular court cases for too long or anything, especially when the coverage necessarily includes graphic descriptions of violence, sexuality, and/or social taboo. But I remember back in the day, when our tabloids still cared about JonBenet Ramsey. And this is more or less how they read.
**None
And ballet slippers will hurt my feet
...the way your ideals of beauty are a suspension of your own image, a projection of it out into the world, as a general framework within which you wait, until you encounter and incarnate beauty -- and precisely then you run the risk of ruining it. you yourself change from the suffering of this loss, and the ideal necessarily changes with you, moving close beneath your own flesh until the moment your consciousness lapses entirely, until the moment you die...
the appreciation of childhood, nostalgic or otherwise, then arises from precisely a desire to evade death and finitude yourself -- one seeks redemption and self-verification in the respite of possession, and especially here through possession of an object "childhood" one seeks to perpetuate one's own life, "in the abundance of its fertility," indefinitely. and at once excessive fixation on being-towards death is necessarily a pathos, necessarily pathological, for in thinking of mortality consciousness conceives of itself as dying. in pursuit of beauty we seek respite FROM mortality, and yet it is through thorough engagement with life that one is aware of oneself as beginning to age.
we can then explain at once why we find a conjunction of fertility and childishness, of sexuality and the youthful image, in popular media and popular ideals of the beautiful. a woman is sexually attractive, generally speaking, when she has disproportionately large eyes, or is from the waist-down tiny as a six-year old and from the waist up, pregnant. and it is through appreciating youth and fertility as beauty in a woman that man precisely can HAVE a child, recreate himself THROUGH their child, precisely distance himself from the imminence of his finitude -- though he also admits of this limitation IN the need to give himself sexually and emotionally to youthfulness as an OTHER in the woman and ultimately, also the child. age truly begins to decline once even one's children are grown. death awaits beyond self-fulfillment in this way. though in a patriarchal society this standard would apply only to women as objects of sexual desire, i should note that to the extent that when ANYONE finds this youth-oriented concept of beauty sexually attractive, they are likely facing the finitude of their own status, historically or personally, and attempting to surmount their own impotence in the same way men of a patriarchal society do -- thus particularly fitting is DeBeauvoir's questionably-phrased call for a "brotherhood" of men and women.
an ideal of beauty which fulfilled no more than the desperate need to affirm one's own virility and youth in the face of one's own weakness cannot be of any solace here, can it? and this is why it develops. but ultimately an ideal of beauty can only perhaps be of partial solace. the greater question is how to balance the corruptive force of power with the subjugative force of powerlessness in oneself -- for one is deceiving oneself to say that the appeal of the childish other, the innocent other, is not contingent on the perceived powerlessness of that childishness -- an attempt to gain immortality through projecting nostalgia for youth outward into an object of consumption. and if it is not possible to make oneself the object of one's own desires, through vagaries like the notion of self-realization (that is always also a disunification from the immediate self), we could then only explore the potential of an ascetic relinquishment of any attachment to the movement of desiring itself.
the appreciation of childhood, nostalgic or otherwise, then arises from precisely a desire to evade death and finitude yourself -- one seeks redemption and self-verification in the respite of possession, and especially here through possession of an object "childhood" one seeks to perpetuate one's own life, "in the abundance of its fertility," indefinitely. and at once excessive fixation on being-towards death is necessarily a pathos, necessarily pathological, for in thinking of mortality consciousness conceives of itself as dying. in pursuit of beauty we seek respite FROM mortality, and yet it is through thorough engagement with life that one is aware of oneself as beginning to age.
we can then explain at once why we find a conjunction of fertility and childishness, of sexuality and the youthful image, in popular media and popular ideals of the beautiful. a woman is sexually attractive, generally speaking, when she has disproportionately large eyes, or is from the waist-down tiny as a six-year old and from the waist up, pregnant. and it is through appreciating youth and fertility as beauty in a woman that man precisely can HAVE a child, recreate himself THROUGH their child, precisely distance himself from the imminence of his finitude -- though he also admits of this limitation IN the need to give himself sexually and emotionally to youthfulness as an OTHER in the woman and ultimately, also the child. age truly begins to decline once even one's children are grown. death awaits beyond self-fulfillment in this way. though in a patriarchal society this standard would apply only to women as objects of sexual desire, i should note that to the extent that when ANYONE finds this youth-oriented concept of beauty sexually attractive, they are likely facing the finitude of their own status, historically or personally, and attempting to surmount their own impotence in the same way men of a patriarchal society do -- thus particularly fitting is DeBeauvoir's questionably-phrased call for a "brotherhood" of men and women.
an ideal of beauty which fulfilled no more than the desperate need to affirm one's own virility and youth in the face of one's own weakness cannot be of any solace here, can it? and this is why it develops. but ultimately an ideal of beauty can only perhaps be of partial solace. the greater question is how to balance the corruptive force of power with the subjugative force of powerlessness in oneself -- for one is deceiving oneself to say that the appeal of the childish other, the innocent other, is not contingent on the perceived powerlessness of that childishness -- an attempt to gain immortality through projecting nostalgia for youth outward into an object of consumption. and if it is not possible to make oneself the object of one's own desires, through vagaries like the notion of self-realization (that is always also a disunification from the immediate self), we could then only explore the potential of an ascetic relinquishment of any attachment to the movement of desiring itself.
27.8.06
I forgot the password.
I've this summer, in my desperation, ended up watching both the Derrida documentary and the Zizek documentary, both productions of "Zeitgeist" films. I'm not going to apologize for this desperation -- it raises some interesting issues, and even allows me to better comment on the film. Precisely the only thing keeping me from exhibiting desperation would be this attempt at concealing the distaste I had for my surroundings all summer, in the name of maintenance of a public image. Rather than do that I find it interesting to think about the way Derrida and Zizek each reacted to the possibility of fetishization as it works through the public image which is being projected when something vaguely resembling a biographical film is made about you.
Both men seem to be aware of the constraints such a concern places on a sort of enlightenment-style disregard for style -- an emphasis on Derrida or Zizek's "style" taking priority over their "actual theoretical ideas," a distinction which Zizek at least thinks can be strictly maintained. But at the same time his thought seems to me to preclude such a distinction in some ways. Okay, so Derrida at first requested that no images be published of him, ever. This makes it seem as if he already had the problems that go along with having a public image in mind, and wished to avoid them entirely -- and indeed, a lot of what he says in the film seems to be predominantly concerned with the qeustion of tension between theory and praxis -- to a point he agrees with Heidegger, who agrees with Aristotle, that a philosopher is born, thinks, and dies. The preemptive rejection of a philosopher as a knowable human being, and the identification of a knowable human being with "style," surreptitiously sets you up to want to know more about the secret life of the philosopher, and the documentary tries to taunt you with this -- filming Derrida very ambiguously explaining his behavior is in many ways completely artificial because of the fact that he is being filmed, and so on. On the otehr hand, Zizek's reaction to the cult of personality forming around him is a blunt cry of "Confound it, you idiots!" which means not that you shouldn't want to know about a philosopher, lest you embarass him by emphasizing personal style, but more -- why are you not able to think about a philosopher as a living person without turning her into a caricature of herself?
Precisely what he is trying to avoid here appears in his other talk about surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment having the homology of desire -- precisely the problem he has with public images is the emphasis it places on philosophy without philosophy, precisely the way one seeks cybersex as sex without the sex-act. His realization, unlike Derrida's, admits its contingency on the reaction, admits that he didn't originally think it would even be necessary. His role as a philosopher, when he sees people coming to him as a brilliant thinker who will tell leftists finally "what to do," he sees as to react by making these people ask themselves to what extent such requests are even legitimate, why they might have such needs to begin with. His public image complements this with a public suicide, and an artificial image of himself on the ground after having leapt a flight of stairs. The image of his playing dead is not the black nothingness of a prohibitive warning, as in Derrida, but rather as the aftereffect of an insult, a rejection of flattery. The absence of an image still by its very being named can't deny its status of existing as an image for others, not the same as this image of something - of suicide. In fact it's more insulting to have nothing.
Ultimately, though, both Derrida and Zizek share animosity towards the idea of the passing fad, the ironic sitcom of the real. What we are lacking in popular culture is the ability to take anything seriously. We are afraid of the implications behind any move we might make and so we choose, in the name of not tarnishing reputations, not to say anything at all. Rather than what we fear as weight we prefer cartoons of weight, and to make our impotence more palatable we express it as a joke, as if self-awareness already is articulated freedom. But one cannot have chosen not to be in freedom, and so we still fail to say anything meaningdul when we make a joke of discrimination, of class oppression, in order to give the appearance that we are able to somehow disengage from our conditions simply by having a basic awareness of them. We replace any decisive action with ironic remarks and with style -- I still don't know if I understand how style can possibly have weight so long as it is measured against a distinction from underpinning theoretical content (Nietzsche, anyone?). And irony is so pervasive that even the deepest suffering can become a trinket of its amusement. We think that we bequeath fair treatment to the suffering person so long as she is able to address us colloquially with an affirmation of her satirization. In this way we miss the point of the morbid, as an impetus to challenge whatever conditions result in it. More important and less understood than the sheer morbidity is the reasoning behind its appearance in art. Why does the Zizek film end with him throwing himself down a flight of stairs? Well, his other option was what, to end his talk on the artificiality and insincerity of public image by waving goodbye? Sorry adoring fans, I'll deproblematize your adoration some other time. For now I have to go enjoy my champagne and the idle preening of small talk with the film producers. Life goes on.
The problem is that this fear of weight does not itself even indicate any real object around which the satire orients itself -- the elementary definition of the real, for Zizek, is "death which resists symbolization," the negative that resists symbolization -- and that, stated as such, is absolutely meaningless. For example, there is no "real difference" between the liberal and conservative camps insofar as there is not a definition of that difference which does not already originate from the liberal or conservative side; at most, positively, there is a "difference from." And yet this "difference from," weightless as it is, carries even greater and more insidious forms of the weight which is barring free possibilities for change -- because we do not have the trite but firmly established vocabulary for change that we do for the status quo, and the status quo is becoming global capitalism. Still we claim a so-called society of tolerance and free choice, and still we enforce the injunction to ENJOY which is even more pervasive than the injunction simply to DO. The alleged postmodern individual appeals to a basic humanity which has been recovered after a loss of the meaning, a loss of the real, but these appeals carry all the same and even further restrictions on our behavior -- we must tolerate even the petty sitcoms which ease their nausea lest we risk social alienation. This constitutes an authority which precisely disallows any opposition in its denial that it itself is even an authority. It denies that real radical change, expansion of vocabularies for articulating lack of freedom, and indeed real social tolerance would require us to make any compromises in our comfortable patterns of etiquette, even the etiquette of ironic self-abnegation!, at all.
Both men seem to be aware of the constraints such a concern places on a sort of enlightenment-style disregard for style -- an emphasis on Derrida or Zizek's "style" taking priority over their "actual theoretical ideas," a distinction which Zizek at least thinks can be strictly maintained. But at the same time his thought seems to me to preclude such a distinction in some ways. Okay, so Derrida at first requested that no images be published of him, ever. This makes it seem as if he already had the problems that go along with having a public image in mind, and wished to avoid them entirely -- and indeed, a lot of what he says in the film seems to be predominantly concerned with the qeustion of tension between theory and praxis -- to a point he agrees with Heidegger, who agrees with Aristotle, that a philosopher is born, thinks, and dies. The preemptive rejection of a philosopher as a knowable human being, and the identification of a knowable human being with "style," surreptitiously sets you up to want to know more about the secret life of the philosopher, and the documentary tries to taunt you with this -- filming Derrida very ambiguously explaining his behavior is in many ways completely artificial because of the fact that he is being filmed, and so on. On the otehr hand, Zizek's reaction to the cult of personality forming around him is a blunt cry of "Confound it, you idiots!" which means not that you shouldn't want to know about a philosopher, lest you embarass him by emphasizing personal style, but more -- why are you not able to think about a philosopher as a living person without turning her into a caricature of herself?
Precisely what he is trying to avoid here appears in his other talk about surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment having the homology of desire -- precisely the problem he has with public images is the emphasis it places on philosophy without philosophy, precisely the way one seeks cybersex as sex without the sex-act. His realization, unlike Derrida's, admits its contingency on the reaction, admits that he didn't originally think it would even be necessary. His role as a philosopher, when he sees people coming to him as a brilliant thinker who will tell leftists finally "what to do," he sees as to react by making these people ask themselves to what extent such requests are even legitimate, why they might have such needs to begin with. His public image complements this with a public suicide, and an artificial image of himself on the ground after having leapt a flight of stairs. The image of his playing dead is not the black nothingness of a prohibitive warning, as in Derrida, but rather as the aftereffect of an insult, a rejection of flattery. The absence of an image still by its very being named can't deny its status of existing as an image for others, not the same as this image of something - of suicide. In fact it's more insulting to have nothing.
Ultimately, though, both Derrida and Zizek share animosity towards the idea of the passing fad, the ironic sitcom of the real. What we are lacking in popular culture is the ability to take anything seriously. We are afraid of the implications behind any move we might make and so we choose, in the name of not tarnishing reputations, not to say anything at all. Rather than what we fear as weight we prefer cartoons of weight, and to make our impotence more palatable we express it as a joke, as if self-awareness already is articulated freedom. But one cannot have chosen not to be in freedom, and so we still fail to say anything meaningdul when we make a joke of discrimination, of class oppression, in order to give the appearance that we are able to somehow disengage from our conditions simply by having a basic awareness of them. We replace any decisive action with ironic remarks and with style -- I still don't know if I understand how style can possibly have weight so long as it is measured against a distinction from underpinning theoretical content (Nietzsche, anyone?). And irony is so pervasive that even the deepest suffering can become a trinket of its amusement. We think that we bequeath fair treatment to the suffering person so long as she is able to address us colloquially with an affirmation of her satirization. In this way we miss the point of the morbid, as an impetus to challenge whatever conditions result in it. More important and less understood than the sheer morbidity is the reasoning behind its appearance in art. Why does the Zizek film end with him throwing himself down a flight of stairs? Well, his other option was what, to end his talk on the artificiality and insincerity of public image by waving goodbye? Sorry adoring fans, I'll deproblematize your adoration some other time. For now I have to go enjoy my champagne and the idle preening of small talk with the film producers. Life goes on.
The problem is that this fear of weight does not itself even indicate any real object around which the satire orients itself -- the elementary definition of the real, for Zizek, is "death which resists symbolization," the negative that resists symbolization -- and that, stated as such, is absolutely meaningless. For example, there is no "real difference" between the liberal and conservative camps insofar as there is not a definition of that difference which does not already originate from the liberal or conservative side; at most, positively, there is a "difference from." And yet this "difference from," weightless as it is, carries even greater and more insidious forms of the weight which is barring free possibilities for change -- because we do not have the trite but firmly established vocabulary for change that we do for the status quo, and the status quo is becoming global capitalism. Still we claim a so-called society of tolerance and free choice, and still we enforce the injunction to ENJOY which is even more pervasive than the injunction simply to DO. The alleged postmodern individual appeals to a basic humanity which has been recovered after a loss of the meaning, a loss of the real, but these appeals carry all the same and even further restrictions on our behavior -- we must tolerate even the petty sitcoms which ease their nausea lest we risk social alienation. This constitutes an authority which precisely disallows any opposition in its denial that it itself is even an authority. It denies that real radical change, expansion of vocabularies for articulating lack of freedom, and indeed real social tolerance would require us to make any compromises in our comfortable patterns of etiquette, even the etiquette of ironic self-abnegation!, at all.
25.8.06
God will come and wash away our tattoos and all the cocaine
Woke up in Pittsburgh early this morning after twelve hours of sleep. Breathed in air. Attic windows illuminate brick houses, metal roofing washed iridescent with rust and rain. Houses crowded so elegantly, distant pines spread across the distant mountains walling us into Sharpesburg. Tea outside for breakfast, the Zenith for lunch. My cousin Brian suggesting the city is "paradise, under deconstruction," noting how the poorest parts of the town lack a single grocery store, yet never are wanting for the spires of Catholic churches. And men who bartend and hunt deer will refuse neat scotch to dirty niggers, and angsty chickenwire art spins slowly, suspended from the ceilings of antique shops. All the architecture has always already been defaced by graffiti here, dust ignited neon under bridges, and everywhere an unfaded revelry of names humming in cacophonous blue and red beneath the traffic, indicating a population forged entirely in neglect like steel. I alternate between reading Machiavelli's "The Prince" and de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince." I befriend a girl with a pink mohawk and a jump rope. I run my fingers along our halls of stained glass and peeled wallpaper, stucco Greek doorways, dried flowers pinned everywhere. In the evening we sit outside on concrete stairs, overdressed for the poor part of town. And I start drinking blueberry Stolichnaya and I grow aware that the heart may yet awaken from its sleeping.
21.8.06
Agemo's Hoops
Ed is a 34-year old man who lives in La Mirada, CA. Originally from Taipei, Ed is an unemployed market/financial analyst. His interests include high fidelity audio, the San Francisco Giants, epistemology, and Tao. Ed enjoys reading Murakami, Hume, Merleau-Ponty, Mencius, LaoTzu, SunTzu, Magazines about gadgets/cars/stereos. Friends are pressuring him to marry his current girlfriend. Ed has been viewing my Friendster profile.
I find the prospect of knowing who looks at my Friendster profile, when and how often they do so, pretty creepy. This is part of the reasoning behind my overall conclusion -- Friendster (and to a slightly lesser extent, Myspace & Facebook) is/are combining with 4:00 AM to destroy something essential to the fabric of the universe. And yet I continue to make use of these websites' services, while Rupert Murdoch looks on.
How could I let this happen? I think the problem here is aptly summed up in a selection from this "Ed" character's profile. Given that, by posting his information on Friendster, Ed effectively makes the information public knowledge, I do not have any internal qualms about reproducing said information here in order to make my point. As usual, the only part that really terrifies me is the way his beautiful, white-stockinged girlfriend is awkward, immobile beneath his embrace, which holds as one would a treasured thing that otherwise evades us entirely.
ABOUT ME:
Pensive, introspective, uncaring, aloof, unpolished, sleepy, uninterested, deductive, accurate, debilitated, meandering, not to the point, day dreaming, holistic, Chinese, noodle lover, insatiable appetite, always broke, anti-social, hates phones, love etnie sandals, cold, starved, spoiled, dejected, rejected, humiliated, objectified, assumed, senile, no flavor, anti-authoritative, anti-establishment, anti-religion, anti-affiliation, anti-sensationalistic, bilingual, chaotic, deprived, sentimental, regretful, strategic, anti-hand lotion, anti-beauty products, anti-art for art's sake, epistomlogical, phenomenological, humanistic, stubborn, insightful, uncommunicative, unexpressive, uncontrollable, unmotivated, undomesticated, under educated, not pliable, unmaleable, unassimliated, reductionistic, underappreciated, underrated, under dog, prefers boxers, hates sox, hates suits, hates ties, hates saturated oil, likes oil paintings, dislike oil spills, environmentally minded but not environmentally active, semi political, semi libertarian, semi leftist, pro choice, pro education, no war, screw social security, universal sufferage, uninitiative, plays fair, drives fast, speaks slow, bad penmanship, fast typer, eloquent writer, disdainful, hates euphemisms, hates to make promises, black sheep, scape goat, misunderstood, misinterpreted, emphasizes fundamentals, existential, nihilistic, never used drugs, (seeks) humility,
I find the prospect of knowing who looks at my Friendster profile, when and how often they do so, pretty creepy. This is part of the reasoning behind my overall conclusion -- Friendster (and to a slightly lesser extent, Myspace & Facebook) is/are combining with 4:00 AM to destroy something essential to the fabric of the universe. And yet I continue to make use of these websites' services, while Rupert Murdoch looks on.
How could I let this happen? I think the problem here is aptly summed up in a selection from this "Ed" character's profile. Given that, by posting his information on Friendster, Ed effectively makes the information public knowledge, I do not have any internal qualms about reproducing said information here in order to make my point. As usual, the only part that really terrifies me is the way his beautiful, white-stockinged girlfriend is awkward, immobile beneath his embrace, which holds as one would a treasured thing that otherwise evades us entirely.
ABOUT ME:
Pensive, introspective, uncaring, aloof, unpolished, sleepy, uninterested, deductive, accurate, debilitated, meandering, not to the point, day dreaming, holistic, Chinese, noodle lover, insatiable appetite, always broke, anti-social, hates phones, love etnie sandals, cold, starved, spoiled, dejected, rejected, humiliated, objectified, assumed, senile, no flavor, anti-authoritative, anti-establishment, anti-religion, anti-affiliation, anti-sensationalistic, bilingual, chaotic, deprived, sentimental, regretful, strategic, anti-hand lotion, anti-beauty products, anti-art for art's sake, epistomlogical, phenomenological, humanistic, stubborn, insightful, uncommunicative, unexpressive, uncontrollable, unmotivated, undomesticated, under educated, not pliable, unmaleable, unassimliated, reductionistic, underappreciated, underrated, under dog, prefers boxers, hates sox, hates suits, hates ties, hates saturated oil, likes oil paintings, dislike oil spills, environmentally minded but not environmentally active, semi political, semi libertarian, semi leftist, pro choice, pro education, no war, screw social security, universal sufferage, uninitiative, plays fair, drives fast, speaks slow, bad penmanship, fast typer, eloquent writer, disdainful, hates euphemisms, hates to make promises, black sheep, scape goat, misunderstood, misinterpreted, emphasizes fundamentals, existential, nihilistic, never used drugs, (seeks) humility,
11.8.06
Even though no one has ever asked
I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than
the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim.
But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no
avail and I cannot swim after all.
Kafka
the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim.
But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no
avail and I cannot swim after all.
Kafka
Medicine bottle collection on the windowsill --
LEVINAS: One has to respond to one's right to be, not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law, or judicial entity, but because of one's fear for the Other. My being-in-the-world or my 'place in the sun,' my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? Pascal's 'my place in the sun' marks the beginning of the image of the usurpation of the whole earth. A fear for all the violence and murder my existing might generate, in spite of its conscious and intentional innocence. A fear which reaches back past my 'self-consciousness' in spite of whatever moves are made towards a bonne conscience by a pure perseverance in being. It is the fear of occupying someone else's place with the Da of my Dasein; it is the inability to occupy a place, a profound utopia.
So I'm going to try to summarize my criticisms of De Beauvoir's text a little. First, I think I should establish that her argument is styled something like this --
a) The problem, most basically, is a problem with the abstract category of identity that makes somebody a "woman."
b) Inherent to this category is a reactive and passive, solipsistic and narcissistic cult of self which encloses the person in what De Beauvoir establishes as a "situation" which prevents her from being free, whatever that may mean, and from being autonomous (economically, psychologically, whatev) enough to make her own place in the world.
c) The way to solve the problems associated with this category is to disengage from the situation of being a woman. Part of this disengagement would involve the understanding that this essential & abstract concept "woman" does not really bind us as a gender -- we need to distinguish, then, between "women," who have no potential to change, and "females," who can evade the necessity of the category of being a "woman."
d) Here De Beauvoir actually spends a lot of time explaining why women are unable to really establish a community between themselves and other women -- because every action they make, so long as they are women, remains determined by the expectations of the male gaze.
Right. but here is the problem:
e) Since we don't really have anywhere to begin with establishing an autonomous mit-sein composed of women without reverting to the reactive roles, to a greater or lesser extent to break free of the man's rein involves adopting the dominant values within a system that has primarily been established by men.
She seems to me to be concerned to detach herself from women in general, which is fine, but also to locate herself in a place that will allow chauvinist critics of feminism to feel some sort of common ground with her. In the meantime this will involve, in the text, long encyclopaedic descriptions of the way women fail. "She looks at herself too much to see anything; she understands in others only what she recognizes as like herself in them; whatever is not germane to her own case, her own history, remains outside her comprehension." The whole thing, ironically, reeks of misogyny -- keeping in mind her relationship with Sartre -- and as I remarked to Ben last night, reminds me of the way a father would degrade and insult his son in order to spur the son onto something higher. I'm ultimately really grateful that this text exists, as opposed to no text, but it certainly could have been done without either repeating the passive habits of behavior that allow women to become oppressed to begin with or merely appropriating the behavior of the oppressors.
Now, the issue I have with the Levinas quotation in relation to all of this -- well, first note that in every giving there is also a receiving and in every receiving there is also a giving. The problem with presuming to take that much responsibility for the Other's mortality is that it runs the risk of depriving the Other precisely of their own responsibility for it -- thusly their own ability to change it. And I think it is that feeling of unjustifiable guilt that has allowed, say, women to continue putting their own best interests aside for the sake of the men they want in their lives, Christians to put their best interests aside for the sake of God, which in turn allows for their lives to be more and more controlled. I should mention that Levinas is very religious. Anyway, to respond to what you said, about semen staining the mountaintops -- I love the conceit, right, but theoretically speaking it isn't exactly men who are doing the usurping, who historically have done it. It's white, property-owning men. All one would have to do then to be worthy of feeling this sort of idolized guilt is fall into one of those three categories (cf. Solomon's post on my wall) -- am I white? Do I own property? Am I male?
Now, we might want to think about issues with private property, and race or even gender as a social construct. But we should be able to realize that guilt in-itself, except as a bare motivation to self-criticism (which I don't think most guilt is) is not the answer. Nor is coddling the oppressed class. Ben was talking about how, when he was reading The Second Sex, he grew pretty pessimistic about the possibilities of human relationship insofar as she encyclopaedically lays out the ways in which one human being can dominate another -- noting that even the most earnest care and attention can be an insidious form of this -- Christian charity, right. So... I'm speaking really generally, and even if I were speaking more clearly, I'd eventually just start writing a dissertation, so I'm going to end it here. There's a scene in the Zizek documentary where Zizek is on a panel, and one of the people who is also on the panel stands up and says "Okay -- so I really like Zizek, and, well, he's probably got the highest I.Q. of anyone in the room -- I'd bet money on that -- still -- there are --- well, he's probably been speaking at least three times as much as any of us here."
By the way, what the hell is up with I.Q.? Srsly.
DEBEAUVOIR: Many of the faults for which women are reproached – mediocrity, laziness, frivolity, servility – simply express the fact that their horizon is closed. It is said that woman is sensual, she wallows in immanence; but she has first been shut up in it. The harem slave feels no morbid passion for rose preserves and perfumed baths: she has to kill time. When woman suffocates in a dull gynaeceum – brothel or middle-class home – she is bound to take refuge in comfort and well-being; besides that, if she eagerly seeks sexual pleasure, it is very often because she is deprived of it. Sexually unsatisfied, doomed to male crudeness, "condemned to masculine ugliness," she finds consolation in creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caress of water, of sunshine, of a woman friend, of a young lover. If she seems to man so "physical" a creature, it is because her situation leads her to attach extreme important to her animal nature. The call of the flesh is no louder in her than in the male, but she catches its least murmurs and amplifies them. Sexual pleasure, like rending pain, represents the stunning triumph of the immediate; in the violence of the instant, the future and the universe are denied; what lies outside the carnal flame is nothing; for the brief moment of this apotheosis, woman is no longer mutilated and frustrated. But, once again, she values these triumphs of immanence only because immanence is her lot. (603)
Okay.
So I'm going to try to summarize my criticisms of De Beauvoir's text a little. First, I think I should establish that her argument is styled something like this --
a) The problem, most basically, is a problem with the abstract category of identity that makes somebody a "woman."
b) Inherent to this category is a reactive and passive, solipsistic and narcissistic cult of self which encloses the person in what De Beauvoir establishes as a "situation" which prevents her from being free, whatever that may mean, and from being autonomous (economically, psychologically, whatev) enough to make her own place in the world.
c) The way to solve the problems associated with this category is to disengage from the situation of being a woman. Part of this disengagement would involve the understanding that this essential & abstract concept "woman" does not really bind us as a gender -- we need to distinguish, then, between "women," who have no potential to change, and "females," who can evade the necessity of the category of being a "woman."
d) Here De Beauvoir actually spends a lot of time explaining why women are unable to really establish a community between themselves and other women -- because every action they make, so long as they are women, remains determined by the expectations of the male gaze.
Right. but here is the problem:
e) Since we don't really have anywhere to begin with establishing an autonomous mit-sein composed of women without reverting to the reactive roles, to a greater or lesser extent to break free of the man's rein involves adopting the dominant values within a system that has primarily been established by men.
She seems to me to be concerned to detach herself from women in general, which is fine, but also to locate herself in a place that will allow chauvinist critics of feminism to feel some sort of common ground with her. In the meantime this will involve, in the text, long encyclopaedic descriptions of the way women fail. "She looks at herself too much to see anything; she understands in others only what she recognizes as like herself in them; whatever is not germane to her own case, her own history, remains outside her comprehension." The whole thing, ironically, reeks of misogyny -- keeping in mind her relationship with Sartre -- and as I remarked to Ben last night, reminds me of the way a father would degrade and insult his son in order to spur the son onto something higher. I'm ultimately really grateful that this text exists, as opposed to no text, but it certainly could have been done without either repeating the passive habits of behavior that allow women to become oppressed to begin with or merely appropriating the behavior of the oppressors.
Now, the issue I have with the Levinas quotation in relation to all of this -- well, first note that in every giving there is also a receiving and in every receiving there is also a giving. The problem with presuming to take that much responsibility for the Other's mortality is that it runs the risk of depriving the Other precisely of their own responsibility for it -- thusly their own ability to change it. And I think it is that feeling of unjustifiable guilt that has allowed, say, women to continue putting their own best interests aside for the sake of the men they want in their lives, Christians to put their best interests aside for the sake of God, which in turn allows for their lives to be more and more controlled. I should mention that Levinas is very religious. Anyway, to respond to what you said, about semen staining the mountaintops -- I love the conceit, right, but theoretically speaking it isn't exactly men who are doing the usurping, who historically have done it. It's white, property-owning men. All one would have to do then to be worthy of feeling this sort of idolized guilt is fall into one of those three categories (cf. Solomon's post on my wall) -- am I white? Do I own property? Am I male?
Now, we might want to think about issues with private property, and race or even gender as a social construct. But we should be able to realize that guilt in-itself, except as a bare motivation to self-criticism (which I don't think most guilt is) is not the answer. Nor is coddling the oppressed class. Ben was talking about how, when he was reading The Second Sex, he grew pretty pessimistic about the possibilities of human relationship insofar as she encyclopaedically lays out the ways in which one human being can dominate another -- noting that even the most earnest care and attention can be an insidious form of this -- Christian charity, right. So... I'm speaking really generally, and even if I were speaking more clearly, I'd eventually just start writing a dissertation, so I'm going to end it here. There's a scene in the Zizek documentary where Zizek is on a panel, and one of the people who is also on the panel stands up and says "Okay -- so I really like Zizek, and, well, he's probably got the highest I.Q. of anyone in the room -- I'd bet money on that -- still -- there are --- well, he's probably been speaking at least three times as much as any of us here."
By the way, what the hell is up with I.Q.? Srsly.
16.6.06
Confessions of a Feminazi
"I think this reason why girls don't do well on multiple choice tests goes all the way back to the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, Adam and Eve. God said, 'All right, Eve, multiple choice or multiple orgasms, what's it going to be?' And we all know what was chosen." [Rush Limbaugh]
Rush Limbaugh is host of the most listened to radio talk show in the United States, with an estimated audience between 13 and 20 million listeners weekly. The show has been known to garner calls from such influential, conservative politicians as Vice President Dick Cheney.
Last night I was thinking about how, whenever I write in a journal, it's generally addressed to a dominant subject who on some level, I aim to gain the recognition and approval, or admiration of. April phrased the writer's position in Hegel's master-slave dialectic as one of the slave, and ultimately this is good, because the writer or artist gets indirect recognition through her or his works. I think part of this involves letting the form and the content of the world cleave evenly into the slavish and the lordly. For, while there's no way around the vulnerable, other-oriented structure essential to the written language, the tone of what's written can certainly oscillate between one that is desperately vying for attention, such that what's being discussed becomes almost irrelevant, and one that is more confidently engaged with issues – ultimately, self-addressed, like all truly scholarly work. And how strange, that writing should appeal to others more powerfully in proportion to its being self-addressed! The difference is that leisurely sense of play which must exist to meaningfully deal with the realm of ideas.
Now, this is related to a more general problem of lifestyle that I worry about – if this conceptual war, or war in principle, against shallow attention-seeking bleeds into any action we might take, or make, then does that mean that there is something essentially oppressive about romantic desire? Let me make the steps between that leap more clear. Is it possible to be involved with someone romantically without resorting to that sheerly other-oriented behavior that so traditionally leads women to be, or feel incapable of, a substantive societal or political life on a general par with men? To provide a feasible model, and because the word “romantic” is ultimately so expendable, I'm going to say No. To do this involves defining romance on the one hand, as the experience of passive upsweep as your love (not lust) for somebody overtakes you, on the traditionally but not exclusively feminine side. Simultaneously and alternatively, romance works as the action taken by the traditionally masculine role, something which involves earning a worth which allows one to receive affection from the object of desire, and earning this by precisely overwhelming her . The 'romance,' as it were, is always going to possess this structure – the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic can again be used here to say that the feminine has her immediate needs sated by the masculine, who receives indirect recognition, by way of substantive action, as opposed to the woman's direct recognition, by way of immediate physicality. Thus woman is “master,” man is “slave.” Not only does a patriarchal Christian conception of chivalry and selflessness give the slave the upper hand here, but even the more reasonable Hegelian model claims that, ultimately, the slave who achieves recognition indirectly through the fruits of her or his labors is more free than the master, who as such grows utterly dependent upon what the slave can provide.
I do need to read and think more about how Hegel moves from this asymmetry to a mutual recognition before my conclusions are set in stone, but it is clear that the traditional romance outlined above will oppress the woman insofar as she can only occupy this space wherein she ought be happy so long as her immediate needs are satisfied. And part of the difficulty, using the analogy, is that the slave does have the privilege of being aware of the entire structure of the relationship, for she or he produces what satiates the master's needs through work (labor? action?), through earning money to buy dinner, say, while the master merely is led out the door to the restaurant table. Receiving such things well is a difficult art and a dangerous one to practice exclusively.
In the traditional heterosexual relationship, the female, treated as master, generally does not recognize herself as such, in the usual sense of the word. Because of our desire for mutual recognition, or at least related to this desire, we too easily take liberty and assume that the other feels the way we do, and furthermore that this is just how all love feels when in reality the other is watching this play unfold and grows in danger of assuming that the simple, passive immediacy is just how women feel about love, which of course is, on his side, mostly a result of the asymmetrical fetishization of woman as flesh and all of the aesthetic judgments which, despite their complete relativity, have been essentialized so as to say that the female form is “just more beautiful.” This narrative is never free of some hetero-normative subtext, no matter who voices it. And the process of fetishizing another person's being-as-flesh causes problems when it leads to trying to understand their desires as they are inertly expressed in the flesh, as can be seen clearly by the eyes of the other. This touches upon the well-known feminist argument that even our basic epistemology is founded upon a conception of knowledge as sight that not only goes along with a conception of woman as body, as object of sight, but also does an injustice to the knower's ability to experience himself as body. Think of the judgment men so often make that a woman is romantically or sexually interested in him simply because a) her appearance “appeals” to him, as it were, and b) she does not actively resist the performative actions he takes to embody his own desire, actions which are, in the traditional role of slave, an anticipation of the woman/master's needs so that the slave himself can gain the liberty he desires. If she accepts the dinner out, a gift which is supposed to be offered, and indeed precisely is offered in freedom on the part of the giver, oftentimes if she even accepts the man's company and conversation, she becomes aware of herself as in the awkward position of being expected to feel as if she has received some great privilege, and as such now bears a certain romantic responsibility to the giver. The woman is only really recognizing and relating to the other when she, too, is able to freely take action, when she asserts her subjectivity as more than the inert fleshly recipient of desire, and as such, all too often the only thing the man is seeing is his own desire, projected into the features that form the actual visceral content of his desire. No relationship really happens in the traditional heterosexual romantic power-struggle.
I believe that, at base, this situation is only able to continue at all because of the false consciousness a woman develops when she finds her needs for mutual recognition seems to have no other outlet than the fetishization of her own body, and comes to believe that self-actualization results from the “I” molding its body into what it wants aesthetically, which is really, of course, only the internalization of what whoever it is that she wants wants out of her, as object. Ultimately what I think is the teleological goal here is an efficient way to produce the married, monogamous, childbearing couple, obviously something useful to a greater society looking for a higher population, or new workers for its economy. Now, the Disneyland attitude so many children in middle-class America are brought up with disagrees – its claim is that some other more lofty self-actualization is the goal of their romantic relationship, with that structure in society perhaps only as a dutiful consequence of romance. But all one need do is travel a little, or indeed ask a member of a more impoverished economic class, to make this deflowered utilitarian aspect of the romantic relationship strikingly apparent. And where we turn to our own movement past the Industrial Revolution, our economic independence, or our world population problems, as proof that this is not essentially the goal of the heterosexual romance, I am confident to say that insofar as the dynamic still exists despite these things, it is for the sake of a) a new goal on the part of those oppressing, but more tragically, more crucially, out of b) sheer emotivist ignorance of what the dynamic really is, what it must entail, as I outlined above, how essentially inextricable from those exclusionary and power-laden roles the concept of 'romance' is.
Where we might look for love as an egalitarian friendship, founded upon a condition of mutual recognition, we need another name entirely, and certainly not before the ones who have so much to lose learn how to analyze their Disneyland lifestyles, and are able to define their terms. This must involve a radical revaluation of gender and reproductive roles and priorities in society – i.e., are we in this over-populated, orphanage-filled, purchased-at-Wal-Mart world really fulfilling ourselves by pursuing those two related and omnipresent goals of material wealth and biological children to be supported by this wealth? How is the picket-fence that most heterosexual women and men have, on some level, hardwired into their life's ambition going to further either a personal or a global good?
Genuine relationship must be fostered within a condition of leisure, of not at all safety but precisely as a sublimely trivial play. This attitude is so often cast aside by a frenzied set of sexual scruples and romantic longings which are eager to classify the other as either a) an object acceptable for some predecided romantic role, or b) an object unacceptable for such a role. In my view, what we know as love is composed of physical intimacy (which is only a ritual exception to the
arbitrary Victorian norm of prudish scrupulousness), sexual intimacy (which, in the ideal sense, is impossible when one is wearing all those anxious hetero-normative blinders, tinted lenses, and the like), and friendship. None of these, except for the purely symbolic act of physical nearness, is really possible within that dynamic of romance, which is left as a surreptitiously oppressive structure which has been artlessly sheathed in ritual.
"Excepting one whom I love still more,” answered the voluntary beggar. “You yourself are good, and even better than a cow, O Zarathustra.”
“Away, away with you, you wicked flatterer!” Zarathustra cried with malice. “Why do you corrupt me with such praise and honeyed flattery? Away, away from me!” he cried once more and brandished his stick at the affectionate beggar, who ran away quickly.
Rush Limbaugh is host of the most listened to radio talk show in the United States, with an estimated audience between 13 and 20 million listeners weekly. The show has been known to garner calls from such influential, conservative politicians as Vice President Dick Cheney.
Last night I was thinking about how, whenever I write in a journal, it's generally addressed to a dominant subject who on some level, I aim to gain the recognition and approval, or admiration of. April phrased the writer's position in Hegel's master-slave dialectic as one of the slave, and ultimately this is good, because the writer or artist gets indirect recognition through her or his works. I think part of this involves letting the form and the content of the world cleave evenly into the slavish and the lordly. For, while there's no way around the vulnerable, other-oriented structure essential to the written language, the tone of what's written can certainly oscillate between one that is desperately vying for attention, such that what's being discussed becomes almost irrelevant, and one that is more confidently engaged with issues – ultimately, self-addressed, like all truly scholarly work. And how strange, that writing should appeal to others more powerfully in proportion to its being self-addressed! The difference is that leisurely sense of play which must exist to meaningfully deal with the realm of ideas.
Now, this is related to a more general problem of lifestyle that I worry about – if this conceptual war, or war in principle, against shallow attention-seeking bleeds into any action we might take, or make, then does that mean that there is something essentially oppressive about romantic desire? Let me make the steps between that leap more clear. Is it possible to be involved with someone romantically without resorting to that sheerly other-oriented behavior that so traditionally leads women to be, or feel incapable of, a substantive societal or political life on a general par with men? To provide a feasible model, and because the word “romantic” is ultimately so expendable, I'm going to say No. To do this involves defining romance on the one hand, as the experience of passive upsweep as your love (not lust) for somebody overtakes you, on the traditionally but not exclusively feminine side. Simultaneously and alternatively, romance works as the action taken by the traditionally masculine role, something which involves earning a worth which allows one to receive affection from the object of desire, and earning this by precisely overwhelming her . The 'romance,' as it were, is always going to possess this structure – the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic can again be used here to say that the feminine has her immediate needs sated by the masculine, who receives indirect recognition, by way of substantive action, as opposed to the woman's direct recognition, by way of immediate physicality. Thus woman is “master,” man is “slave.” Not only does a patriarchal Christian conception of chivalry and selflessness give the slave the upper hand here, but even the more reasonable Hegelian model claims that, ultimately, the slave who achieves recognition indirectly through the fruits of her or his labors is more free than the master, who as such grows utterly dependent upon what the slave can provide.
I do need to read and think more about how Hegel moves from this asymmetry to a mutual recognition before my conclusions are set in stone, but it is clear that the traditional romance outlined above will oppress the woman insofar as she can only occupy this space wherein she ought be happy so long as her immediate needs are satisfied. And part of the difficulty, using the analogy, is that the slave does have the privilege of being aware of the entire structure of the relationship, for she or he produces what satiates the master's needs through work (labor? action?), through earning money to buy dinner, say, while the master merely is led out the door to the restaurant table. Receiving such things well is a difficult art and a dangerous one to practice exclusively.
In the traditional heterosexual relationship, the female, treated as master, generally does not recognize herself as such, in the usual sense of the word. Because of our desire for mutual recognition, or at least related to this desire, we too easily take liberty and assume that the other feels the way we do, and furthermore that this is just how all love feels when in reality the other is watching this play unfold and grows in danger of assuming that the simple, passive immediacy is just how women feel about love, which of course is, on his side, mostly a result of the asymmetrical fetishization of woman as flesh and all of the aesthetic judgments which, despite their complete relativity, have been essentialized so as to say that the female form is “just more beautiful.” This narrative is never free of some hetero-normative subtext, no matter who voices it. And the process of fetishizing another person's being-as-flesh causes problems when it leads to trying to understand their desires as they are inertly expressed in the flesh, as can be seen clearly by the eyes of the other. This touches upon the well-known feminist argument that even our basic epistemology is founded upon a conception of knowledge as sight that not only goes along with a conception of woman as body, as object of sight, but also does an injustice to the knower's ability to experience himself as body. Think of the judgment men so often make that a woman is romantically or sexually interested in him simply because a) her appearance “appeals” to him, as it were, and b) she does not actively resist the performative actions he takes to embody his own desire, actions which are, in the traditional role of slave, an anticipation of the woman/master's needs so that the slave himself can gain the liberty he desires. If she accepts the dinner out, a gift which is supposed to be offered, and indeed precisely is offered in freedom on the part of the giver, oftentimes if she even accepts the man's company and conversation, she becomes aware of herself as in the awkward position of being expected to feel as if she has received some great privilege, and as such now bears a certain romantic responsibility to the giver. The woman is only really recognizing and relating to the other when she, too, is able to freely take action, when she asserts her subjectivity as more than the inert fleshly recipient of desire, and as such, all too often the only thing the man is seeing is his own desire, projected into the features that form the actual visceral content of his desire. No relationship really happens in the traditional heterosexual romantic power-struggle.
I believe that, at base, this situation is only able to continue at all because of the false consciousness a woman develops when she finds her needs for mutual recognition seems to have no other outlet than the fetishization of her own body, and comes to believe that self-actualization results from the “I” molding its body into what it wants aesthetically, which is really, of course, only the internalization of what whoever it is that she wants wants out of her, as object. Ultimately what I think is the teleological goal here is an efficient way to produce the married, monogamous, childbearing couple, obviously something useful to a greater society looking for a higher population, or new workers for its economy. Now, the Disneyland attitude so many children in middle-class America are brought up with disagrees – its claim is that some other more lofty self-actualization is the goal of their romantic relationship, with that structure in society perhaps only as a dutiful consequence of romance. But all one need do is travel a little, or indeed ask a member of a more impoverished economic class, to make this deflowered utilitarian aspect of the romantic relationship strikingly apparent. And where we turn to our own movement past the Industrial Revolution, our economic independence, or our world population problems, as proof that this is not essentially the goal of the heterosexual romance, I am confident to say that insofar as the dynamic still exists despite these things, it is for the sake of a) a new goal on the part of those oppressing, but more tragically, more crucially, out of b) sheer emotivist ignorance of what the dynamic really is, what it must entail, as I outlined above, how essentially inextricable from those exclusionary and power-laden roles the concept of 'romance' is.
Where we might look for love as an egalitarian friendship, founded upon a condition of mutual recognition, we need another name entirely, and certainly not before the ones who have so much to lose learn how to analyze their Disneyland lifestyles, and are able to define their terms. This must involve a radical revaluation of gender and reproductive roles and priorities in society – i.e., are we in this over-populated, orphanage-filled, purchased-at-Wal-Mart world really fulfilling ourselves by pursuing those two related and omnipresent goals of material wealth and biological children to be supported by this wealth? How is the picket-fence that most heterosexual women and men have, on some level, hardwired into their life's ambition going to further either a personal or a global good?
Genuine relationship must be fostered within a condition of leisure, of not at all safety but precisely as a sublimely trivial play. This attitude is so often cast aside by a frenzied set of sexual scruples and romantic longings which are eager to classify the other as either a) an object acceptable for some predecided romantic role, or b) an object unacceptable for such a role. In my view, what we know as love is composed of physical intimacy (which is only a ritual exception to the
arbitrary Victorian norm of prudish scrupulousness), sexual intimacy (which, in the ideal sense, is impossible when one is wearing all those anxious hetero-normative blinders, tinted lenses, and the like), and friendship. None of these, except for the purely symbolic act of physical nearness, is really possible within that dynamic of romance, which is left as a surreptitiously oppressive structure which has been artlessly sheathed in ritual.
"Excepting one whom I love still more,” answered the voluntary beggar. “You yourself are good, and even better than a cow, O Zarathustra.”
“Away, away with you, you wicked flatterer!” Zarathustra cried with malice. “Why do you corrupt me with such praise and honeyed flattery? Away, away from me!” he cried once more and brandished his stick at the affectionate beggar, who ran away quickly.
26.5.06
Always in life we all must make this mistake.
My father takes me to buy three twelve-packs of Heineken's worth of metallic acrylic paints last night, tells me stories about his World-War II Veteran father taking him to buy new guitar strings
when he himself was eighteen, when he, unlike myself, had a stress-related ulcer in his stomach.
when he himself was eighteen, when he, unlike myself, had a stress-related ulcer in his stomach.
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