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 »at risk, facticity.
C = the condition of not knowing (gap) the possibility of being wrong
Posted by 丫 | reply »treatise on the university of disaster
I had no idea what he was talking about, really. Reverberations pass away easily, behind the ears, at pressure points, when cooking. Roles are performed in adequate fashion, resulting in countering feelings of inadequacy, words flow, nothing is communicated. The treatise is about performance, perhaps. Insinuation of a guise, this is not real, whichever how you really feel. No, really. Keeping it real.
Had no idea what i was talking about really. Sometimes the emotions would arise, and one would find oneself unable to act appropriately, a subjective propriety, a nicety. Trying not to look too hard at his pimples. The palimpsest of his pimples, because even thirty-somethings get them, oh yes, renewal, we can feel like teenagers again and again and over again.
Your postmaturity, maybe. Treatises that we haven’t written yet, half-thoughts, names dropped, another drifting off on the bus again. No, there. When the girl with the ponytail steps on my foot in the bus, I notice her, her captivated audience of fellow passengers, a spectacle in action. She is playing paper-rock-scissors with a boy shorter than her, perhaps that is what it makes it more obvious that he is cheating the game, as his eyes steal glances upwards on every count, towards her poised hand, ready to draw. If he is quick he can change his draw at the last moment, just after he’s seen her paper or rock or scissor coming down like an absurd call of judgement. His is fickle and cunning at the same time. Paper wraps around rock. But each time the breath before the draw is prolonged just a bit longer; she knows his game. He knows she knows his game. And the game shifts a little bit, bus ride bumpy, to a different battle of suspense: who will cheat on the other first. the classic grid of one to another strategy, don’t call it war, it’s just the way things are. remember that lecture that we went to where you didn’t understand? Punnett for non-pundits, I’m on the bus and I could observe this moment for hours. fault or fancy? their fists are suspended in mid-air, holding on a bit longer than forever. this is a treatise on the university of disaster.
Posted by 丫 | more »Zürich night
Photo courtesy of Nic Shepherd
Some 15 minutes after having been abandoned at the Perla Mode by an American living in Zürich, I found him again at another opening at a small exhibition space called Les Complices. He made some comment about how I was typically Canadian because of the desire I expressed (which admittedly had structured my last 5 years) to keep going out rather than back to North America. I had not assigned value to my statement, and in my view it could indeed be taken as a lack of control and capriciousness. The space, which had a DJ playing, was a queer art space. I was not sure if my jocular, drunk brotherness was appreciated, and I was in the mood to joke. Out front one of the drunk women, who turned out to be a Canadian from Montreal, tried to convince her acquaintances to go out to a non-gay place to dance. She appeared to be quite drunk, and unless I was mistaken, the other two were not very fond of her. She had pimples. The other two returned to their friends inside and I was left, so she asked me and I thought, why not, I’d like to go dancing. We walked arm in arm down the street to a place right on Langstrasse. She joked with the bouncer who tried to remain stern, they were obviously familiar with each other, and it made me feel that this was a small town. Inside it was hip hop night, and various large men rocked back and forth in the red velvet surroundings. She knew someone (although they claimed they hadn’t known each other before) and they began talking. She asked me to buy her a drink, but I really had no money on me. This other girl seemed to be looking for someone to go home with. They asked me if I wanted to fuck, said that it was what everyone in the room wants. I joked that I was a virgin and the girl believed me, appeared to take pity on me, which made me uncomfortable – when I retracted the statement she asked me what kind of lover I was. I motioned to some of the large men standing near the turntables “maybe they want to fuck.” She considered this and went to see about it. When the lesbian’s back was also turned I used the opportunity to slip out the front door with my backpack on. I walked home along the vacant street car lines. I kept thinking of the girl’s sad expression when she said she came to the bar quite regularly, but no one had interest in fucking her. It made me kind of sad too.
[courtesy of Michael Eddy, October 2009]
Posted by o | reply »もう一つの夏の俳句 | another summer haiku | 夏天的俳句诗
或许、
夏天时有风、
有时清凉有时痛
一想它就疯
2006年日文俳句诗的变奏曲 by 高灵 Ling and 逗号 Comma。上海2008年7月
Posted by 丫 | reply »sous les pavés, la plage
BEFORE AND DURING AND AFTER: Three days’ thought on media culture and artificial life
…as responsible human beings, we forget (Ha, seduction!). Were we unable to, every horror and every pain experienced as the newly born would retain itself, excruciating, just as every moment of laughter and joy, but we would never recover. The mirrors of Lacan are as inevitably linked to artificial life as self and world. And forgetfulness is not so much saying no as being able to say yes again. Are you ready to rule the world?
—-From a small text written, weaving writing experiment, flow. June 2008, Saas-Fee. Read the full essay [here]. Apologies for lack of page numbers for notes/references, please write if you need more.
Posted by 丫 | reply »for severality, on fragility 1
To sustain fragility, a stamp on the box or the curiosity of half-opened contents. She says it is a trauma, beyond or prior to event, infliction in mere seconds or unconscious years, is p(h)ys(ch)ical.
He shudders in late afternoon half-sun. Sometimes, somewhere else and longing to be repeated, never repeated, she recoils, not horror. Those prickling sparks of the nerves they call falling asleep, …i’m exhausted.
Fragility means that you might find yourself not on the subjective level (coming, pre-, before you), we are partial to (one another) and we are partial (a many subjectivities). The pieces lay strewn and ambitious! What is already fragmented can beg a prism-like movement, sometimes slight twisting of the wrist to open a new light, from Levinas’ very first illumination (but in the refusal of darkness).
Once we saw three at once, a tunnel lining an enormous thundering sky, and we drove through them all.
—-not a means to an object, we pass through what passes through us. Fragility, the broken glass after the break, under but begging the open, makes transparent without needing to be seen. But it is not concealment as such (those chatting at the bar simply do not notice), nor a state to induce fascination (stillness, displacing life) so much as laying bare, not bare or just being there, in the middle of an ongoing process. The prolongation of fragility is not a state of being, but may find itself in the invisible inconsistencies of ritual, the anticipation or the suspension of an event. Its fascinance can never be an isolated moment, for it can only exist in relation to the other, as cause or affect or the relinquishing notion of wanting to be part of all of you. That longing, whether in pain or love, is more real that real itself, for it is the realm of the possible-not-yet.
Fucking phantasy! I owe you one.
1 Martin Hielscher, Hiroaki Kanai, Sean Smith, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Pierre Huyghe, Bracha Ettinger
Posted by 丫 | reply »re:
Barthes references the “obtuse meaning” as beyond signification, where it is neither informational nor symbolic. There is no proper structure; it is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty in naming or identifying. “If the obtuse meaning cannot be described, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not copy anything—-how do you describe something that doesn’t represent anything?” (from notes, seminar of Hubertus von Amelunxen, Saas-Fee June 2008)
Posted by 丫 | reply »re: re:presentation
thoughts on the subject of clarity, or, in support of the seductive drones ///
If that longing could be drawn out, literally, it could have taken this form, what would have attempted a seduction in the most subtle and powerless way, or, would it be possible to ask you to stay. These are not questions so much as awkward statements, one would like the fluent strength of rationality, pretty scripts to address the subject, but so much said, so much would dull the edges of the discourse as much as anything. To abstain from that articulation may be a political statement, or even an uncertainty, but it should be possible to make exactly that wavering attempt, without course to addressing one’s audience as potential convert, without the determinacy of the commodified idea.
We have lost the ability to simply search openly, our lateral glides across hyperspace become hierarchies of large type and the diversities of ’state life’ mistaken for richness. But please do not misunderstand (…) …this is not a call for a return to authenticity or something more primal than the now. As such would be merely another flight. But to embrace all that we have not resolved, as seeking beings—-because we have not caught up to our own embodiment, urbanity, presence, or forces of habit—-can, with relief, never be clear. If it were, would we have conquered our own existences, overly latent, and been made subjects of our own subjectivity? Is this crass, or is it a call to vitalism? Would the critics of Coleridge sneer and we be comfortingly dismissed back to the ‘little’ motions of everyday life? Ha! Seduction.
Perhaps, but it is an embedded one. Everyday, everyday, everyday. The question is in the answer is in the question.
Posted by 丫 | reply »notes on love and writing, turning thirty again, obachans grin
To write is to permit others to conclude one’s own discourse, and writing is only a proposition whose answer one never knows. One writes in order to be loved, one is read without being able to be loved, it is doubtless this distance which constitutes the writer. (Roland Barthes)
::writing about writing, between shanghai and beijing, 2 December
today i become a writer. written self reading a purple journal like being in this airplane, oh i fucked up fucked up so many times, “it’s just that this year has been so full of small, stupid, non-descript disasters, not the big ones that could at least be identified as crisis.” sometimes in reading their words i describe my own surroundings, the small spaces around the page being written as we read others: (please fall in love with me). He is nonchalant about loose trivia on japanese aesthetics like mentioning the names of people he knows.
“The proximity of two differing individuals can become too intense.” (Arnold Barkus)
They are all your friends. And the more old friends that keep popping up in magazines, oh, we must be doing okay. And all the ones that don’t, that come up instead in cafés, in the airplane a couple rows ahead, on someone’s facebook friend list or just in my memory, well… we’re all sorry it turned out this way, we haven’t turned out at all, or against all, or we’re just turning…
so many things happened this year, i lose sight of the things that matter most.
but i’ll love you through the pages of a matte-papered magazine, and maybe that’s enough for today.
“30″, Binna Choi, from The Sole Proprietor and Other Stories, ed. Melissa Lim and Heman Chong:
Perhaps this sudden consciousness of my turning thirty has become entangled with my untamed anxiety, which stems from my own difficulty in being myself when with others. In other words, what mattered, bothered and concerned me can be summed up as my “relationality” with her, him, another me, different me, disappearing me or whatever, or the air, time, space or something. With her leaving and being. With him next to me or with him annoying me. With the density or stuffiness of air. With speed. With intensity…
I am writing about turning thirty, but in doing so, I could be seeking to deny or erase it. This piece is written in the present, about a somewhat unknown future that we are in the process of progressing towards. I hope that the significance of turning thirty will surface later on. You know, I will never be thirty – I will only be two thousand, two hundred and and seven years old next year, I bet.
Hence “writing about turning thirty” is a means of pulling myself out of the preconceived position one has as part of one’s culture or society. It is also a way for me to create an interstice for myself without deliberate avoidance of particular cultural or temporal frameworks. I am trying to prevent these aspects from governing me or my being with “others” within and outside of these frames. I want to take responsibility for my life or lives of others in mine, and ultimately grin — rather than laugh with sound — in the face of my struggles, strengths, delights – like that mad girl on a bus who glared at me as I stared back at her years ago.
Before I can reach this state that allows me to “grin”, let me pose a fundamental question: why do I write? I’d asked this same question quite a few times before, and I know that I have a problem with delving into it. Actually I even doubt that I had ever “written” in the most idealistic sense of that word. I reckon my fantasy is that writing for me is an opportunity to communicate in silence, to compose and liberate what is a part of me, be it my fascination, wonder, despair, concern, joy, beliefs, thoughts and so on — without being dogmatic. I want to believe that I make friends and love through writing.
writing having been written, between beijing and tokyo and los angeles and dallas/fort worth, 22 december
today, before leaving Beijing, it was written: “yes!”
There is no fear in that. No fear, no fear. Its beauty is impressed upon my skin as much as it distances. it was like looking again into the past. Every new realisation is also recognition of all that past in which you did not know it before! Linda didn’t get it at the time. Now she’s married and has dogs, surely she knows something we do not?
It was brought up again over dinner that that desire to cut off was as much the fear of being disconnected from. He cannot understand the difference between the cup there, or here, or there… And I thought we bought this salad. Well, you certainly didn’t buy me. But it’s the cup and the salad and the me and the you, and if we acknowledge no distinctions between any or all, how far can we go in attempt of love? Should we be left formless? Where would we go, and how would we know who we are anymore?
He reminds her that they are all connected. Of course, all these things are written into the body. Past is future is present, so just watch. I watch what i do not see: the big-eyed girl crying in secret, the small-eyed girl crying all day. I wish you could see more so that i wouldn’t have to explain anymore.
“Giorgio Agamben claims that the most important political goal is to find new ways to make the human body inoperative, in the sense that poetry makes language inoperative, to find new uses for the human body.” Would you want that I gave myself completely to you? Would you want that i agreed with everything you said, that everything that you wanted was what i wanted, too? I keep trying to think with those words, read from a monk when I was in Japan: “utmost reverence”. I try to say “yes!” too. But it’s not what I want. So please stop telling me everything you know about me. Because you don’t. And you won’t so long as your eyes stay wanting.
Posted by 丫 | more »You are watching. I am watching, too. We just don’t always see the same thing.
installation, the morning after
As creators, we can say that there is an audience for our work, whereby “public” is both an excuse and a reason. And yet as creators within a social sphere, our unabashed ability to colonialise spaces, and even publics, actually distances us from any notion of real interaction rather than that of working context-specific, conscientiously and in cohesion with those collaborating with us.In the example of the bi/tri-ennial, the clearest cut form of discourse seems to lie not within the vocabulary of the host city, not within the realm of “the work” and at times hardly even within the actual processes of production. As recently overheard from an independent curator about the opening night party of the 2007 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, “Well, that’s what we came for.”Chief curator of the Biennale Ma Qingyun is at a loss. “But we worked so hard…”The bi/tri-ennial are event-based phenomenona, as new technology, “our latest project”, and another friday night scene. Critical exchange, then, takes a cue, as a breather after all that hard work—-at bars, the after-parties and nestled within the snide comments made during other people’s speeches. It is hard to understand what sort of feedback and interaction one can stimulate or expect from an event involving a mass public audience. “I hope they’ll collect the press clippings,” says one architect in the back of the taxi, on the way to a bar after the after-party. And yes, these traditional forms of review may still be helpful and necessary within a larger system of creative production. But the formality of a critic’s theoretical opinion or a blogger’s on-the-scene action shots bely the stagnancy of the actuality. The sponsor hotel where most exhibitors stay always makes for a much more active and dynamic space than that last exhibition hall.Where are the relationships between work, audience and creator within the framework of the art event? Are we merely using ideas as a way of colonialising the spectacle space? Working carries over into presentation carries over into documentation carries over into publicisation. And where again is the space for the work? Somewhere between making contacts and trying to catch hold of the installation team to get the right equipment.
This is not meant to bemoan the poor artist who tries to be simultaneously active in all of these areas of art production. Nor can we blame the event structure alone. But is it naïve to still long for project-based work that does not neglect the need for post-planning, responsibility and respect for the other?Would it be possible to leave an event of this kind without a feeling of the morning-after?
after “The Laugh of the Medusa”: Je suis femme, mais ceci n’est qu’une tentative l’écriture féminine (still learning)
When she was young, she wanted to be a writer. She wasn’t yet a woman, and thus had not yet learned of what she was capable, and of what she shouldn’t be capable. When one is young, emotions and outbursts and all of the new knowledge of the world flow freely as growth, sexless and unafraid. When one is an infant, there is nothing more enchanting, more delicious, more upsetting, or more terrifying than that of the present moment; this is the fearlessness of childhood feeling. Her words, as intensities, would do that to her, unleashed like her stories and streams and “a world of searching”.
But it was ironically when she entered the university that she was suddenly labeled a foreigner in her world of words. Not to say she wasn’t included. She could now count herself equally among the Others: female and foreign.
Not until many years later did she realise that this was how easy it had been to shut her up! Her youthful a-sex grew out of her body, and she grew into her silence instead. The spaces within her head had always been loud, but now the reverberations cancel one another so that she forgets, so that she-grown-up-into-woman grows into herself, and that writing that had previously inscribed her childhood fantasies now inscribes into itself, disappearing like the folds of kneaded dough that slowly squash themselves with each turn of the baker’s hand.It was in this sense that she lost the ability to write herself. Writing, as in the inscription of mind to her body, such that each was closed in turn (“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time”). She had not the idea, young woman, where it was she should find herself: in mind, in body, in words. She had learned to segregate her many selves along this process of becoming woman, because that is the nature of woman, giver, to be able to be “for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant.” At every instant she gives herself away; she, escapee of herself.But to where would she escape? And if she was constantly running, would she ever find? Or does finding necessitate the specificity of time-space-body-mind-word? (“The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still.”) She wanted to be everywhere, just as she wanted to be everyone, to be that “desire-that-gives”. There is a balance to be had in the giving of herself and finding it in anOther. But perhaps she had given herself away too much already.In being everyone, everywhere, in wanting to love, she could not clearly differentiate anymore, because “she doesn’t ‘know’ what she’s giving, she doesn’t measure it”. She was paralysed in that flight. Her communication fell through to a generalised dis-course (lack of inter-course!). She had lost her voice. She had given herself up to the signifiers speaking through her.(“In one another we will never be lacking.”) This consoled her. But it still gave no indication of direction, or balance, her own becoming, and said nothing of where, and how much “she comes in, comes-in-between herself me and you”. But if we can no longer distinguish between ourselves and the Others, she thought, if there is no outside, no distinction, no sex——then maybe we can simply lay equally, yes, “in one another”. Multiplicitous, such that there is nothing given that is not also received——not in order to, but simply, in between ourselves, me and you. This does not imply a disappearance of either identity but a recovery of the Self in the Other. Giving then outlines a wholly newfound space, still, without the requirements of preposition, the directions from you, toward me or at you. Giving, like words as they are being put to paper: “We’ve come back from always.”
And suddenly, she thought to write everything down…
——–
[All quotes taken from Hélene Cixous, "Le rire de la méduse", 1975]
Posted by 丫 | reply »