realistically speaking
You spoke of the beginnings of a new metaphor with which we should look at our present condition, like living in Beijing, realistically. Our metaphors come from bicycle encounters and the emotional outcroppings of the everyday. at the time i could only see flesh as a gliding, swerving in and around vehicles, going without cutting corners. We laughed about the flows.
The flesh as meat——not as skin, as I had previously so imagined——is a space of tightness, of form and intimacy and movement as a squeezing of space. Skin as a gliding over and around, all options open except that one moves merely as a compatriot of gravity, touching, just going. Where do we look, realistically, while on our bicycles, in encounter? Nobody cares. Movement is a question of whomever may 让 first, usually predicated upon size. But let us enlarge our frame of view. To examine our reality here is a fleshy matter, full of scars and circumstance. Situationism could be given, rather, a form of agency. Adjacency. Victorious life proposes a next-to. If we were to give up subjectivity and objectivity, can movement presume, ex-stasis? Flow is always a making up of what came before, along the lines of a scar, reaction and healing. Let us make up for imperial autocracy, let us make up for capitalist pigs, let us make up for the sick yellow man! And so we are stuck in a striving or a being, reactionary.
But Vitanza’s scar is a middle place between flesh and skin, along surfaces and imbedded within. Realistically, we find ourselves covering over, working through, both as a form of being and of representation, as spectators and actors, as lifeforms headed inevitably towards death. Is such certainty a place of flesh or of skin? We fall asleep with the TV, we learn to love and hate our lovers. This affect is of flesh and skin, multidirectional, surfaces and interiors all at once.
Scar as both a place and temporality, a contextification. It is the grounding memory of affect, a node upon the flow of the body, or movement ex-stasis. Flashbacks of life in times of death should tear our bodies from such ecstasies; these are the groundings we can never break away from, realistically.
I slipped and hurt myself today, on or off cycles, wet pavement. In the midst of mutual shock, she snapped at me. I’m sorry, I said.
…in the sign of the scar—where foreground and background collapse—negotiating between life and death, skin and scar, public and private, I will hallucinate on a series of cultural objects that would provide us with exemplary ways of “living on” in the scar of the sign as Dasein. But as I do that, note that I do that semiotically across the images being unfolded over there. Da Sein. But. Of Sign. The episode of “Scar Tissue.” I am trying to situate myselves, through a series of interruptions, corruptions, eruptions, between over there and here. Becoming be-tween. Ec-static. Perhaps after a while you, too, will situate yourselves in between there and here.
–Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein”: Scar, … to be accompanied by video
Posted by 丫 | more »chainletter dinner
We prepared some of your recipes…
Maria Kley:
何京蕴 Anouchka van Driel & Jasmina van Driel:
Please click “more” below to see the full recipes.
Posted by o | more »alibi, from latin, ‘in another place; elsewhere’
beijing, may 2010. individually wrapped cookies and the extra air inside packagings to prevent the chips from breaking. full of excitement, woody asks for our permission to polish the wooden surfaces in the room. he later forgets his basketball behind when his grandma rushes him to go eat dinner. fluffy white things getting in my eyes as i’m riding the bike. the daily tears. the precariousness of life in china. so much dust. everything happening out there, in the open, like the man who is trying to ‘hide’ his bag amidst the bush in the middle of a busy highway. all flesh, no skin. we ride the bus and he argues that women are weaker than men, generally speaking, everyone should know their place, he says. gobo, my new favourite. she says i take too much care, like being mama, ‘can you enjoy when you are like this?’ but then a few moments later she says i’m like child. postmaturity? my friends’ babies and wedding plans. so much life happening. the unpronounceable volcano, the mispronounced “debt restructuring”. sigh. where do we go from here. the haunting pronouns. acknowledging the other. ethics, infinitely demanding. hitting a ball against the wall, our mediated exercise. winter turning into summer, no spring. the guilt of being far away. the relief of being far away. the time, the time, the time. i try to make a dorodango. it turns out not that shiny and ends up cracking on the way home.
samples, what to say
metapresence
when i returned to Beijing after approximately one month away, i played the game, as always, of walking around the neighbourhood to see which places have disappeared in my absence, which new businesses or grand ambitions have moved in to replace the failing or derelict, a sort of remapping one’s estrangement within the city. i walked from xiaojingchang hutong to the northern end of andingmen nei, and with hands in pockets passed by a candy bar vendor (new), a book-laden cart full of pirated publications on technology/software (old), and a cardboard box stand topped with rows of socks (old). i walked into the andingmen hotel, where i end up sleeping for several nights, a new tourist in a now familiar city. there was a small exhibition and series of events happening in two of the rooms of the hotel, and it became a quiet but social place to welcome myself back into a place of growing certainty; this was a place delicately juxtaposed with all the awkwardness and adamance that one can have about one’s sense of place in the world. it was called “also space“. during these few days, there was a certain amount of presence, self-consciously experienced and toyed with, a space and socius to make one acutely aware of all the small details of showing and not knowing.
each morning i would wake from the hardish hotel bed in room 221, happy for warmth but tired for tiredness, enter the bathroom and begin to rearrange the selection of hotel offerings, as are commonly found in many temporary lodgings: two plastic wrapped soaps——packaged again in a printed cardboard box——three toothbrushes, two plastic combs with the hotel name in gold-coloured print. I took away one of the toothbrushes and replaced it with a toothbrush in similar packaging from another hotel. I added a plastic wrapped disposable razor labeled, “one to one”, not knowing which hotel i may have taken it from. another time and another space. a sewing kit from yet another hotel, travel-sized toothpaste from germany, travel-sized moisturizing lotion from hong kong. over the course of these few days, some of the items disappeared or were refilled by the service personnel, the blue towels were replenished with white ones. i thought about the possibility of being absolutely present in a place which one can deem home and not home at the same time. when the maid did not make the bed, i did it for her. but i left one of my hairs on the pillowcase along with a dried mandarin peel, and i wondered if any of our guests would notice and ask, “is this an artwork, too?” it’s a funny game to play, to observe everything in an unexpected place as possibly “art”. perhaps not so different from a game of trying to notice all the places that have disappeared or been born in one’s absence.
there was a certain consciousness of presence that i attempted to maintain in these days, living in a hotel in my “home” city. i commuted back and forth to my flat to change clothing, deliberately sprayed on too much perfume. i tried to pay attention to artworks, but fell asleep; a conversation would float past and i would suddenly remember something else that i was supposed to do. and only after a few treks between xiaojingchang and the northern end of andingmen nei did i notice the disappearance of the 24 hour Quick convenience store (old) and insertion of Bee’s cafe (new). Workers move on and on. Presence is a just-fading, a recognition of small distractions.
If we had not noticed the miniscule details of change, development and/or the passing of time around us, would we have missed a minor referencing of the present, a consciousness of our own time away from now, self-reference, a meta-presencing? Present that cannot exist, like a young architect asking questions in the form of statements about scale, he discovers his talk is not there——μετά as “after” or “beyond”, as “with”, “adjacent” and “self”.
Posted by 丫 | more »$2 solidarity, right here (key ring included)
new york misses you already.
Posted by joe | reply »mrs. jeanne dielman, objecthood, health and routine sadness
leaning towards, leaning on, attachments.
靠！to be close to.
Posted by 丫 | reply »all that glitters
(for 邓利、杨鸽、陈延娜 and 陈芳，on participation and parting)
In an exergue to the collection of poems she entitled Requiem, Anna Akhmatova recounts how her poems were born. It was in the 1930s, and for months and months she joined the line outside the prison of Leningrad, trying to hear news of her son, who had been arrested on political grounds. There were dozens of other women in line with her. One day, one of these women recognized her and, turning to her, addressed her with the following simple question: “Can you speak of this?” Akhmatova was silent for a moment and then, without knowing how or why, found an answer to the question: “Yes,” she said, “I can.”
As Agamben notes, “I can” here does not mean a conviction of the possession of certain capacities that guarantee success in ‘describing’ the indescribable, but a radical acceptance of “the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.”
What is set upon the stage for potentiality, where “speech”, but also a refusal to speak can take place? Where do our bodies take us that our words do not? What transitory epics are written in the face, the things that tell you to wait, to feel, to know that this mess we’ve created is greater than ourselves?
things will change soon. i know it. to say, “i wish i could describe it to you better” is to turn around the thing, over and over and over again. like words, nearer and nearing to meaning, wavering infinitely close, proximitous without sameness. Can we speak of these unnameable spaces in between the named? Can you describe them, will you ever know that silence with me here, a glittering in darkness, a deafening roaring?
(partial text and thoughts from Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, and Where Everything is Yet to Happen; photo from OVERSEAS, close by)
Posted by 丫 | reply »at night i dream i speak
for the full moon tonight, the others away or asleep…中秋安
“晚上我做梦说话, 白天做不了什么”
[still image from new work-in-progress, www.overseasproject.net]
Posted by 丫 | reply »in passing, black-capped chickadee
Michael writes to H.F: “We enjoy the space between being ‘in the know’ and simply being attentive to one’s social environment where the unexpected may occur, setting up an interaction that will provide a meaningful communication, ‘loading the decks’.”
It ends with a face in rain, or two, that washed away one after the other like passing faces in a party.
The next day, he sends me a message: “One day I will explain to you why things are so complicated.”
And then it becomes difficult to respond, silence an only recourse, uncovering to plot thickening. The loneliness amidst joyful crowds, like the stripping away of an impersonator who says, “I don’t know. I was born that way.”
People ask questions all the time to which we must answer, “I don’t know.” I can’t remember anymore which way it was when i was born, but somehow I always return to a letter read as a child, from an old woman. I read her as if I were her already, so confounded by the inexplicability of my thoughts, to the possibility of their being expressed. It seems now, in future, utterly impossible to answer any question asked of me. I find less and less the words to place the complexities of my feeling.
Perhaps now back outside of each of those moments, I could answer each of you in turn, eloquently and honestly. Like an old woman’s remembrance of the sound of a black-capped chickadee, a doing nothing kind of being or simply, so simply, the fullness of…
Posted by 丫 | reply »a comment to 什么是文化交流? 或者什么是性交?
- Cultural exchange – Interesting examination – Hm, difficult to define. I think everybody (as the videoclip proves) has their own definition. I added parts from the interview I made with the Chinese women. 文化交流? I was thinking of the word 交流 and it reminded me of the question where I asked to define “性交”. And in addition, I thought Ouyang’s definition of cultural exchange was also very special…and fits to this question.
m：你是怎么理解做爱的？你介意么？
interview1： 你是指两个女生么？我ok的。如果抛开孕育下一代这个想法，这是人的基本的生理需求，很正常。
m：你觉得做爱和性交是一个意思么？
interview1：我觉得意思差不多，是不是一个褒义一个贬义啊？呃…不太知道。
m：为什么是性交会有贬义？那个性是指什么？交是交流吗？
interview1：呃…交，交换一下东西吧。交换一种感受，一种体验吧。可能有些感触只能是通过异性来带给你的。
m：那如果是两个男人在做爱，你可以用性交来形容吗？
interview1：呃…..不知道，应该可以吧。性没有规定是只有异性之间的吧，我不太知道这个词究竟应该怎么定义。
m: 那对女的来说差不多，那自慰是做爱吗？
interview1：我觉得做爱是两个人的事情，而自慰是一个人的，可能效果是一样的，但心里感觉不一样吧。
interview1： 因为每个人都对自己的身体很好奇，我觉得很正常。但是可能自慰这个词在我脑海中出现的比较晚，所以我不是很了解，但是当它出现的时候我还是可以接受的。可能如果再出现的早一点，小学初中的话，我就不能够理解。
m：你能用你自己的话来解释一下“做爱”或者“性交”吗？
interview2：是名词解释吗？就是很自然的一种行为吧。然后，那是生活的一部分。譬如说，如果你把兴趣爱好和工作放在一起，然后你的感情生活和性生活又是一块东西。如果说定义的话，就是生活的一部分而已，没觉得有太多别的东西… 其实我也不是经常会有这样的体力活动，但是我们都会希望会有一个稳定的东西，因为那样⋯⋯就像我之前跟你说过的，我觉得两样东西是不可以分开的。（性）是一个你希望它能够稳定而有故事的东西。如果非要解释的话，我会觉得是一种必需品，不一定在每个阶段都会出现，但是它会是必需品。
m：你觉得“做爱”和“性交”的意思是一样的吗？
interview2：我觉得“性交”也包括动物对吗，但“做爱”是人才用的，你不会说，在街上看到两条狗在做爱。哎，但是也可以，好像也可以这么说。“性交”感觉是写在书上的字…“性交”听起来有动物性。你不会跟你的男朋友说，我们来“性交”吧，你会觉得这句话说出来特别楞。但你会说，我们“做爱”吧。
Posted by mon | reply »