The Game (8 and 9)
October 26, 2013, 12:06 pm
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
Ordinariness,
pedagogy,
poetry,
Politics,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
Berlant,
comedy,
cruel_optimism,
experiment,
female_complaint,
Katie_Stewart,
poetry,
writingA few posts ago I mentioned exploring experiments in observation and form, with Katie Stewart, in a project called The Hundreds. Two of them have just been published in the experimental journal TAG. You can download them there. Here they are, for the record, though: and this way I can revise them as I refine the project over time.
Abusive Encounters for the Revolution
1. I take writing classes because art that says it loves women hates women and it can’t be undone by theory. Any “story about a woman who” is doomed to be but a laugh. As in love, though, a body can have an episode that savages the story-spectacle shackle, blazoning a freedom for which there’s no world yet and bad luck in the one that is. Bette Davis fires gestures, Cate Blanchet lunges into panorama–and then there’s the Mahalia Jackson incident. Insist on the upshot of the encounter. I have deleted five instances of the word “really” from this hundred.
2. A colleague’s combover is a living crop circle whose origin might just reveal the hand of god. His club sandwich of shame and contempt is braced by the sourdough toast of xo’s. After I ate one I blistered in hives and slept hard for two days in a Benadryl haze. I now have spontaneous “episodes.” O love, we know that the fidelity principle makes details inconvenient. O love, your history is only and always one of collateral damage. But what is it when no love is there or lost? It is as though analogy can force itself into full-bore likeness.
3. On a street corner I was accosted by a homeless mind. It pressured me to house it; I mimed a vomit. Having found no time to invent an intention, I am now bound forever to fail reparation. Aristotle says debt is material and moral and Nietzsche says this way debt can’t be retired. As Arendt says, there is no unsaying. Philosophers of the desert make aloneness less lonely. I aspire to deadpan femininity. An anorexia of the encounter would be a gift card allowing for sadism and the feeling of smallness to run free like flies that shoot through screens.
Continue reading →
The Game (7)
July 24, 2013, 1:48 pm
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
ambivalence,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
economy,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
optimism,
sexuality,
sovereignty,
supervalent_thought,
teaching,
Theory of this Blog,
trauma,
writing | Tags:
Foucault,
Fred_Moten,
Harryette_Mullen,
Joshua_Clover,
Juliana_Spahr,
Katie_Stewart,
Keston_Sutherland,
Lacan,
Lee_Edelman,
WittgensteinThe Hundreds: Method 2x
The game is a form of life coming into being, extension, and activity, the blinking open at the start of the day and the beyond to anything that was explained. If I run out of gas but not out of love, if you let a piece go without completion, if the session isn’t finished but definitively over, if the delicious coffee could only wake us forever, if we could come forth as “I” with the other objects, if we would take in that all things don’t happen for a reason, if the flat voice were other than contract or trauma. If we could be the person we would go out with again, if we could hoist our accusations against ourselves, if I could stop motion sugar and labor power, if we could feel the chance touch with soft eyes and no ducking, if you can bear the arbitrary, if they can bear the common structure, or vomit, or accident, if we could take the hard hit that it’s all brevity and struggle, if the form of life turned toward a way of life, sidestepping this event and that one’s tough but only seeming infinity. Sometimes things have to be forced.
(Lee Edelman, Juliana Spahr, Keston Sutherland, Katie Stewart, Lynn Hejinian, Fred Moten, Joshua Clover, Lacan, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Harryette Mullen, Catherine Malabou)
The Game (5)
May 30, 2013, 11:11 am
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
economy,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
Ordinariness,
poetry,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
Christopher_Bollas,
David_Shields,
Elspeth_Probyn,
Hannah_Arendt,
Juliana_Spahr,
Katie_Stewart,
Leo_Bersani,
Lorelei_SontagTry to forget.
Not unintentional forgetting, but of a thing that insists on being in the flow of things.
It could be the forgetting of a dream you can’t stop because you’re in it, or of a sense that the world is converging over there, on that other guy’s table. All of history did not do its work to produce you. You can imagine that history sought to produce you, but who are you? A bundle of action and feral muttering, a sweet thing inhaled by various strangers, booty for money, a small bird puffing out its chest, a bit scared, an accident.
***
Or it could be of the angry surprise that again you want a thing you can’t have without help. Continue reading →
The Game (3)
April 26, 2013, 11:22 pm
Filed under:
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
depression,
Detachment theory,
emotion,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
Ordinariness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog | Tags:
aesthetics,
Aimee_Mann,
Attachment,
Barbara_Browning,
conceptual_art,
dreams,
Gil-Scott_Heron,
Kate_Lilley,
Kathleen_Stewart,
Love,
sexuality,
writing3. What is the wish of the dream?
I open my hand and a small cluster of people peer up at me out of it silent and bug-eyed. I draw them out of my palm like taffy, but there is no snapping sound and no lost teeth. In a minute the crowded room buzzes harshly, wondering why it had bothered one more time to show up for nothing but an exhausted optimism. I was lucky to be the dreamer because the dreamer never stops being interested. People know when they haven’t said enough, that’s why they dream. Or that’s not why they dream, but why they continue loving.
When I met him he was raking leaves, in his tiny yard; usually they’re across some table in a room. And what of the very bald one who practices his Foucault Face™ in the mirror each day? If I try to write the story of someone who worked hard in case he showed up to work, what is the plot? She played touch tag by saying a thing then running into a field of noise. The delay architecture is so deliberate I can feel the shot-reverse-shot, the voiceover, and the signs of truth tattooed on my often-entered vagina. Continue reading →
The Game
April 10, 2013, 2:56 pm
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
Detachment theory,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
Ordinariness,
pedagogy,
psychoanalysis,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
adults,
affect,
children,
Lydia_Davis,
memory,
psychoanalysis,
things,
writing1. The Test
There’s a can of blueberries at the back of the shelf amid dust and flour mites or whatever it is that gets into the rice, like an old writing file where you made a deposit in the darkness of a late style. As though berries too syrupy even for ice cream and the cheesecakes your mother never got to make were just waiting around for you to be found, like that child in the game. Continue reading →
For example
May 16, 2012, 12:40 am
Filed under:
affect,
ambivalence,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
emotion,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
Ordinariness,
pedagogy,
psychoanalysis,
sexuality,
sovereignty,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
Bloomingdales,
Camera_Obscura,
cigarettes,
femininity,
french-wrap,
high_heels,
mother's_day,
nominalismI noticed, over the last few months, as my mother was dying, that I had taken pictures that seemed very specific. Now I am looking at the archive, as one appraises a drying hand after a manicure.
My mother died of femininity. I told her that I would say this about her. She had said, “Will you write a book about me?” and I asked if she wanted me to. She said “Yes. I want you to say that I left the world a better place because I had you!” I said I thought that this was a bad idea: people would think it an excuse to write about me. She said, “Can you think of another topic?” I offered this phrase about femininity, and explained why. My brother-in-law thought that it would be better to say that my mother died from vanity rather than from femininity. I can see why he would prefer that story; it’s interesting to see how a label shifts the implication.
In her late teens she took up smoking, because it was sold as a weight-reduction aid. When she died she had aggressive stage 4 lung cancer. In her teens she started wearing high heels, to enhance the back arch and ass-to-calves posture whose strut transforms the whole body to a sexual tableau, shifting between teetering and stillness. Later, she had an abortion and on the way out tripped down the stairs in those heels, hurting her back permanently. Decades later, selling dresses at Bloomingdale’s, she was forced to carry, by her estimate, 500 lbs. of clothes each day. Shop girls, you know, are forced to dress like their customers. They have to do this to show that they understand the appropriate universe of taste, even while working like mules in that same universe, carrying to their ladies stacks of hanging things and having to reorganize what their ladies left behind on the dressing room floor. She liked this job, because she liked being known as having good taste.
Continue reading →
The Whole Ethic of Sleepless Evidence
September 24, 2011, 9:44 pm
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
Encounters,
Mood,
Ordinariness,
poetry,
potentiality,
queerness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
C.D. Wright,
Louie,
Louie C.K.,
ordinariness,
poetry,
sexuality,
violence#2 in the series.
I spent most of the summer reading the kind of fierce poetry that moves fearlessly into barely inhabitable breathing space three beats beyond the object that was supposed to anchor attention. A poetics of associology whose noise world sits me down in disbelief at the rare freedom of other people’s minds. Not because attention gets things right (any more than attachment guarantees love), and not because there’s always in operation productive energy that can never be tamed but because—in these poems, and for me–revolt requires curiosity, a tipping over on a verge.
I can’t remember how I heard of C. D. Wright; this book written from within incarcerated space seems to have migrated onto my desk from a lateral impulse I must have had once. People who liked this also liked. It’s been in a pile of revealed intention that I’ve been reading up and down.
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit is one version of the commons: C.D. Wright includes it as a kind of acid irony. After all, the next line, si bleu, si calme, isn’t available as realism to the incarcerated–or the manumitted for now who swerve around aggressively while looking down at their feet, or anyone with a stomach overfull of the indigestible. I read this book and my brain clicked around over it all summer: glory hole, dream hole, peephole. Continue reading →
Being Alive
August 31, 2011, 1:14 am
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
class,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
emotion,
Encounters,
Mood,
optimism,
Ordinariness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog | Tags:
affect_theory,
anorexia,
bulimia,
eating_disorder,
marx,
simmelContact. I just saw the most anorexic woman I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. She was walking in 90 degree heat in full Gaga: white face, red lip, yellow blonde streaks all beautifully blown out yet so sprayed that it barely touched the face it surrounded. Her face looked like an @. She was crossing the street wearing a yellow cape, black skirt, and black opaque tights over legs that could not possibly be thinner. The platform shoe gait was ungraceful, but it was haughty, and my first thought was competitive, as in, when I was anorexic I still could pass, people said, for a manic New York Jew: whereas this person really did look as though if she’d had to dodge a bike too sharply she would have snapped in two.
At Banff a group of us who liked each other turned out to have in our backgrounds the overlap of Oberlin and eating disorder, and I got the impression that the back is not too far a ground from the front for some of us. The curse of recidivism attaches to predators and eating disorders. The revelation of that form of fort/da appeared in this group of people otherwise professionally linked when someone commented that another of us who had just walked by was surely bulimic, and the assurance with which she said this made me ask how she knew, and it was interesting. She saw semi-circles around mouths and eyes. We were all eating at the time, which seemed to be proof of something, although it was proof of nothing.
I thought of all the things I know about the “deepest problems of modern life” that “flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life,” and I thought about another kind of impact I’d been amassing as I continue to think about contact as the intensification of the encounter with non-sovereignty, so of course this series twist happened without quite being a project. All summer I have been taking pictures of phrases that hit me and induced reveries and reorientations that made me both stupid and more alive. Continue reading →
I don’t know if I could do nothing and be that cool with everything
February 15, 2011, 10:33 pm
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
depression,
Detachment theory,
economy,
emotion,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
Ordinariness,
Politics,
potentiality,
sovereignty,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
academia,
affect_theory,
austerity,
Blue_Valentine,
failure,
Greenberg,
history_of_the_present,
responsibilityI experimented with taking a day off. It was likely to be a failure, because it had to be an experiment, as I have no habits of leaving the desk, only habits of clawing a path back to it, which is odd because I never leave it, except when I am forced to by my job or my career, which are also what force me back, or there’s a movie to watch, but even then, if it’s at home, the “desk” comes with me like a friend, resting on the arm of the couch so I can turn to it anxiously when I hit a moment of not understanding. Even at the gym, I work on the elliptical. I am on a plane now. Leonardo DiCaprio’s coffee is shaking slow-mo and the people are acting as though they’re dissociating but his face is too wide, square, fat, or flat for me to cathect, which is a mimetic response.
I had begun to address my life with a flat voice. It was bad: usually I can get by with my drive to remain tethered to the potentially good event while meanwhile the infrastructure stumbles along. The causes of this sudden synthesis toward a dark plateau were, anyway, so overdetermined as to induce an affective semicolon. The correct analysis of a symptom does not reveal, produce, point to, or give confidence about the shape of its cure, which is why so much work in the humanities limps along in the phrases that follow out the description of a problem.
Two new big classes and a paper deadline and a vast job search and the students spilling out all late into December because we ask them to be intellectuals but give them no time to do it, inculcating in the upcoming professional class a fatigue autoerotics along with a shamed and confused awareness that these labor conditions allow only tumbling down a hill and then revising it later to look like a plan, when it was only doing what you could do at the time (my epitaph) in an act of blind hope. A cab driver today told me about all of the men he knows who beat women. I can’t remember why, it was like a dream. We talked of how hard it is to unlearn habits of intimate violence–not just to others but to oneself–since assuming a gender requires violence and shame and competence anxieties that never leave, and people can exhaust (fade or inflate) after a while of showing up for the audition. I promise that next year will be different: I won’t try to finish a book. I will be rolling around in a beginning that has already started. Meanwhile I felt I could crack into permanent consistency, although I don’t know what that would mean, if I didn’t take a day off. Continue reading →
Crossover/Combover: A performance piece (Approach 3: from ASA 2010)
December 25, 2010, 12:54 pm
Filed under:
Belonging,
class,
depression,
Detachment theory,
economy,
emotion,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
Ordinariness,
pedagogy,
Politics,
psychoanalysis,
teaching,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
amitava_kumar,
crisis_of_the_university,
fantasy,
Latour,
realism,
the_ordinary,
Zizek(This is a very lightly revised version of the paper I tried to deliver at the American Studies Association conference as a performance piece that also riffed on the talks just given around me: a complete failure as a performance. Chronologically it was written after the previous two combover pieces were written, and so represents a development of the idea I’ve been serializing here.)
Amitava [Kumar] originally called this panel “The Message Chain.” Its idea was to ask some scholars who see themselves as writers, how, for them, a particular space becomes a “locale” for writing, an event that requires not just attention and consideration but a decision to write outside of the usual academic idiom or medium. This was to be a panel about crossing over, not into death, but toward a bigger life for writing. A spatial impact becomes-event in this view when it induces a communicative action—writing, teaching, and performing–you know, the kinds of things that our careers are made from, although few of us would admit to having the career as our ambition. But that is because ambition is one of the obscene affects of capitalist culture. It’s hard not to think about it, though, when someone asks you to talk about “crossover” writing: when you’re crossing over it’s because your ambition isn’t hiding in a repetition but in sincerity, in the desire to do something for an audience whose relation to reading is unprofessional or outside of the norms our professions perform.
It would not be too strong to say that the capitalist subject is distinguished by its education in judging ambition.
Continue reading →
. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought 