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 (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 Book of Love is long and boring, no one can lift the damn thing . . .
June 3, 2012, 1:25 pm
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
emotion,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
pedagogy,
poetry,
psychoanalysis,
sexuality,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
Adam_Phillips,
Ariana_Reines,
Attachment,
Bollas,
Derrida,
Love,
Nancy,
psychoanalysis,
shattered_love,
teaching,
writingDelaminated from week 1 lecture notes, Love Theory (Winter 2012)…
I am a love theorist. I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I sometimes ask them to hold more of an image of me than I can hold. By “sometimes” I mean all the times. The image is the regressed form, not the narrative noise that comes later to try to apply adhesive to the fantasy and its representation in objects, so that I know I am an event that lives in the world. The love and the images available for it are in a Thunderdome death-love match, yet we act as though affect could be held within a steady-state space like meat on a hook, or the image of meat on a hook, since actual meat turns green. Most storage lockers are cold enough to slow down that decay, as we know from narrative and domesticity. Aggressions and tenderness pop around in me without much of a thing on which to project blame steadily or balance an idealization. So it’s just me and phantasmagoric noise that only sometimes feels like a cover song for a structuring shape or an improv around genre. In love I’m left holding the chaos bag and there is no solution that would make these things into sweet puzzle pieces. See Phillips’ reading of attachment as the drive to return to the taste of another person: the “sweetness” love stands for binds itself to an infinity of objects and plots and strategies for investing the scene with a worthiness matching our intensity of a need for its nourishment. This is why, perhaps too, Laplanche uses the word “metabolize.”
This is a philosophical “I”. I don’t feel like using “we,” because I fall into the banality pit when I do. (See Derrida on film on love. He should have trusted his first instinct to say nothing, since what he says is nothing, but he was being a good boy, and trying to maintain his availability for the interviewer’s idealization, the death in life of the call and response: he was trying to be loveable. Maybe the phrases one offers as gifts are the best love because they metarecognize the demand for love in any call: but, in itself, the professor’s discourse is not an opening to the other’s inconvenience, and it is not love if it is not opened to that.) 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,
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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 →
. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought 