thank you to king689soulclassics
we wrote twice last year. growing smaller in our livelihood. making reparations, finding ourselves present, losing words of reflection for bullshit become routine. it’s an alienating experience to observe others speaking in endless strings of aphorism and cliché, like miraculously knowing the code for things that you did not care to know about. flooded gates . cinema and the sound of air conditioning . the ballad of the broken birdie records, that was forever.
you can describe things, but you cannot tell them.
she said we made it up to overcome change, that forever . because the passing arcs of the sun and moon were just too much. the drummer’s steady hands were deceiving, when it had only been about the joy and trauma of difference that really counted . “difference and deferral” . counting . rational concepts . and a one. and a one.
like a new way of seeing something.
two, three. counting and singing again, rushing into nines and ten. time was not the matter at hand, and i could only otherwise imagine some kind of spatial parameter (cigarette, balcony, distance from one apartment to another), but of course it’s less rational than that, our descriptions are as infinite as desire. we’ll be 靠谱 one day.
it sounds too prescribed, doesn’t it——sticking to the score——exactly what we didn’t want. so instead we became impulsive, 花心 flowery hearts, the wallow, those hands grabbing at your face, fear, the sort. no……please ask me to write songs instead, wait for that moment of forever . two times a year at least.
“when it had only been about the joy and trauma of difference that really counted”
one says “only” here almost as if it were a pejorative? it’s only everything!
“What if art triggered a potential for co-spasming? And what if this spasm, which is a celibate ‘state of birth’ (Merleau-Ponty), were shared by/via the artwork as a matrixial borderspace of co-birth? Subjectivity would be suspended to allow archaic transsubjectivity with the m/Other to renew its borderlinking, transmitting, and dispersal.”
(Bracha Ettinger, ‘The Heimlich’)
You are soooo right! I have seen that so many times. I kind of want to smack people when I see that :)
@sportsbabel, not meant as pejorative, sorry… but moreso just another kind of realisation counter to the pleasure of rhythm’s constancy.
how does subjectivity get suspended by co-birth? couldn’t it only ever be realised in subjectivity, though at least one beyond “who we are, bodily, [that] is already a way of being “for” the other, appearing in ways that we cannot see, being a body for another in a way that I cannot be for myself, and so dispossessed, perspectivally, by our very sociality.” (Butler) Is that ‘blindness’ no longer subjective, really?
i think the way i understand it here is that even though this co-birth is very much bodily, it is the singular-plural body, the resonant body, the fleshy body that exists-between-two (or perhaps more). this body doesn’t take a subjectivity-as-identity, but rather a subjectivity-as-perception that emerges in simondon’s “collective individuation”.
that said, these aesthetic co-births we are describing don’t happen quite as “neatly” as does the human gestation-labour-expulsion program, over 9 months say. it can be slower and more prolonged, with perhaps more intense peaks along the way. this waviness between intensity and subsiding in narrative, between intuition and reflective intellect, or singular-plural and “other”—and the minor perturbations of psychic shockwave interferences therein—i think this is here here we get to a dispossession (and anxiety) concerning subjectivity.