the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.
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a summer in pieces

…i think you are the one i have been waiting for. maybe i am your missing piece

     but i am not missing a piece. there is no place you would fit

that is too bad. i was hoping that perhaps i could roll with you…

     you cannot roll with me, but perhaps you can roll by yourself

by myself? a missing piece cannot roll by itself

     have you ever tried?

 

                (from the missing piece meets the big o, by shel silverstein)

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whatever singularities (hurrah for you and me and you and you and you)

Whatever singularities cannot form a societas within a society of the spectacle because they do not possess any identity to vindicate or any social bond whereby to seek recognition. …The threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging (just like Cantor’s inconsistent multiplicity). The whatever singularity—-this singularity that wants to take possession of belonging itself as well as of its own being-into-language, and that thus declines any identity and any condition of belonging—-is the new, nonsubjective, and socially inconsistent protagonist of the coming politics.

–from “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle“, Giorgio Agamben

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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.

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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

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11:36:38 | 没有，飞机要进入雷区了，我要关机了，等会再和你们聊。 No. The airplane is about to enter a thunder zone. I have to turn the machine off. I’ll chat with you again later.

5月13日地震抢救现场上午直播群里的一个记者在地震抢救现场给我们上午做的直播 QQ instant messenger relay from netizen 绮梦, meaning Pleasant Dream, in the accompaniment of the entourage of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the morning of May 13:

10:07:29 | 现场简直不能看了 The scene is unbearable to watch

10:08:33 | 年过花甲的总理已经哭得不成样子了 The grey-haired premier is crying his eyes out

10:10:16 | 刚刚挖开的地方又塌方了 The location that was just excavated has just collapsed once more

10:11:24 | 这倒霉天气还在下雨，现在一线的军人已经被下达死命令，必须冒雨解救 It is still raining in this rotten weather. The frontline soldiers have been given a must-do order to make the rescue in the rain

10:11:30 | 我就在现场 I am at the scene

10:11:56 | 我现在是在都江堰市 I am presently in Dujiangyan city

10:13:24 | 交通已经瘫痪了，人员和物资很难运进去 Traffic has been paralyzed so that it is hard to get personnel and material in

10:13:47 | 汶川现在还不让我们去 Wenchuan won’t let us go there right now

10:15:21 | 汶川的交通完全封闭了，现场到底怎么样我不知道，不过早上总理指示军队不管有多大代价，必须进城 All traffic to Wenchuan has been stopped. I don’t know what it is like out there. But the Premier gave an directive to the army to enter the city at any price

10:16:03 | 倒霉天气在下雨，飞机几次都不能降落，伞兵马上就要起飞了 It is still raining in this rotten weather. The airplanes are unable to land after several failed attempts. The paratroopers are about to take off

10:17:36 | 飞机在汶川空投物资了 The airplanes are dropping material into Wenchuan

10:20:06 | 被压在废墟下的300多学生现在很危险啊，刚才一次的营救又失败了，现在总理在现场组织再次营救。 The more than 300 students trapped underneath the rubble are in great danger. The last rescue attempt failed again. The Premier is organizing another rescue right now

10:20:47 | 啊 总理摔到了， The Premier just tripped and fell down

10:21:35 | 照片我正在传给北京，不经过审核的是不允许发布的 I am transmitting the photo to Beijing. But it can’t be distributed until it has been approved

10:22:21 | 我和几个同行现在开了9台电脑，同时在传消息 I and several colleaglues are running nine computers to send information out

10:22:37 | 这个QQ在关键时候传的真慢 This QQ thing is really slow in the most critical moments

10:23:39 | 突击队又上了 The special forces have moved in again

10:25:04 | 如果你现在看见老爷子的样子，你马上就会哭的 If you can see Grandpa Wen now, you would cry immediately

10:26:40 | 老爷子的手臂受伤出血了，他把要给他包扎的医务人员推开了 Grandpa’s arm is bleeding. He just shoved aside the medical aide who wants to give him bandage

10:27:09 | 好消息，发现一名学生了 Good news, a student has been found

10:28:00 | 总理跑到塌方点了，在帮忙呢 The Premier has gone over to the collapse point to help

10:28:13 | 向峨乡中学 Xiangexiang Middle School

10:28:33 | 拖出来了，医生在抢救 The student has been pulled out and the doctors are providing treatment

10:28:56 | 部队上来的人还不是很多 Not a lot of army soldiers have arrived

10:29:07 | 交通太困难 Transportation is too hard

10:29:42 | 现在还不一定，这个看样子看活着，吊瓶氧气都挂上了 It is still uncertain but this one appears to be alive. They are using IV drips and oxygen

10:31:06 | 啊，又塌了 Oh, another collapse

10:31:28 | 突击队一个人被埋进去了 A member of the special forces has been buried

10:32:40 | 等等，我到前面看看 Wait, let me move up and take a look

10:36:24 | 我回来了，抢救出来了 I am back. He has been rescued.

10:37:16 | 最新消息，彭州被困的10万群众危险！！！ Latest news: the 100,000 trapped in Pengzhou are in danger!!!

10:38:49 | 由于大雨的影响，工程兵几次架桥失败，附近已经出现泥石流迹象，电话直接是叫通总理的，情况很危险！！！ Due to the heavy rains, the engineers have failed several times to erect a new bridge. There are signs of mudslides in the surrounding area. The telephone call was put through directly to the Premier. The situation is very dangerous!!!

10:39:19 | 由于桥梁倒塌，彭州市10万群众被堵在山中，救灾人员和物资无法运入。已经出现泥石流迹象 Due to a collapsed bridge, the 100,000 people of Pengzhou are trapped up in the mountain. The rescue personnel and material cannot enter. There are signs of mudslides.

10:41:11 | 总理电话里大喊，我不管你们怎么样，我只要这10万群众脱险，这是命令。他把电话摔了 The Premier is screaming into the telephone: “I don’t care what you have to do. I want those 100,000 people out of danger. That is an order.” Then he slammed the phone down

10:41:33 | 头一次看见老爷子这么厉害 This is the first time that I have seen the old man react so strongly

10:41:54 | 汶川现在还没通知去，估计情况不是很好 Wenchuan has not notified us to go there yet. The situation is probably not very good

10:42:16 | 我现在在通讯帐篷里 I am in the communications tent

10:43:54 | 汶川最新消息，雨开始小了，空投物资已经扔下去了，空降兵已经在外围机场登机了 The latest news from Wenchuan is that the rain has lessened and the material are being air-dropped. The paratroopers are boarding the planes at the outlying airport

10:45:19 | 现在所有的国外记者都在关注号称中国最精锐的特种部队首次公开亮相 All the overseas reporters are paying attention to the first public appearance of China’s best elite troops

10:46:50 | 总理现在和登机部队领导说话 The Premier said, “I have only one thing to say. The people have been feeding you, so you see what you can do.”

11:11:00 | 总理说，我就一句话，是人民在养你们，你们自己看着办。 Hi, I am right now in a military helicopter. I am nervous because this is the first time that I have been in such an airplane

11:12:51 | 我现在在直升机上，估计一个小时后就到什肪了 I am in the helicopter. I estimate that I will arrive at Shitang in one hour’s time

11:34:40 | 最新消息，汶川的映秀、漩口、卧龙三镇通讯信号很弱，至今也无法联系。估计三镇有将近两万多人被困，余震不断，大雨连绵，情况非常严峻，由于能见度太差，无法判断准确情况。总参命令，当空降部队到达汶川上空时，如果条件不允许，就不惜代价强行伞降！ Latest news, the signals from Yingxiu, Xuankou and Wolong towns are very weak, and no communication has been made so far. It is estimated that almost 20,000 people are trapped in those three towns. The aftershocks are continuing. The situation is very grim. Since visibility is too poor, it is difficult to assess the situation. The Command Headquarters has issued the order to the paratroopers that even if the conditions do not permit, they will parachute down no matter what the price is!

11:36:38 | 没有，飞机要进入雷区了，我要关机了，等会再和你们聊。 No. The airplane is about to enter a thunder zone. I have to turn the machine off. I’ll chat with you again later.

13:44:33 | 我来了，让各位着急了 Here I come. Sorry to leave you waiting

13:45:12 | 我现在是在什邡化工厂，这里的情况比预想的要好 I am at the Shitang Chemical Factory. The situation is better than anticipated

13:45:42 | 抢救工作正在顺利有序的展开 The rescue work is going on in an orderly fashion

13:46:49 | 汶川还没消息，空降部队已经快抵达了 No news from Wenchuan. The paratroopers are about to arrive

13:47:20 | 总理中午到德阳了，听说那里情况不是很好 The Premier arrived in Deyang at noon. I heard that the situation there is not very good

13:50:56 | 都江堰方面的最新消息，中午这两个小时，已经抢救出60多名孩子 The latest news from Dujiangyan. More than 60 children have been rescued during the two hours since noon

13:51:25 | 照片不经过审查是不允许随便发布的，这是纪律 Photos that have not been approved are not to be distributed. Those are the disciplinary rules

13:53:58 | 因为雨很大，泥石流和塌方事件越来越多，情况很糟糕 Due to the heavy rains, there are more and more incidents of mudslides and collapses. The situation is very bad

13:57:38 | 彭州的架桥部队进展顺利，有望在最短时间完工并救出被困的10万群众 The bridge engineer corps are doing well in Pengzhou. There is hope to rescue the trapped 100,000 people in the shortest time

13:59:41 | 成都军区特种侦察大队以徒步越野方式向汶川开进，希望能够成功并指引空降部队空投 The Chengdu Military District special scout corps is traversing the wilderness towards Wenchuan. It is hoped that they can succeed and direct the parachute drop.

[以上内容转载自钱烈宪博客，帖子的标题是“温受伤了”。据说是一位网名“绮梦”的新闻从业人员13号从现场发回的消息。我们无法证实其真实性，仅供大家参考。英文是为东南西北博客翻译的。The transcript above has been translated into English by Roland Soong of EastSouthNorthWest from the blog of Raymond Zhou, who reprinted the text from another blog posting titled “Wen injured”. Raymond titled his blog post “What moved me most”. Thank you to a for the initial relay.]

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strangers (to ourselves)

virno.jpg

from paolo virno, the grammar of the multitude

christmasisover.jpg

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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.

You are watching. I am watching, too. We just don’t always see the same thing.

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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]

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