the agony of power

“history that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making history.” -jean baudrillard

“in the classical – legal – conception of sovereignty, the monarch isn't just considered superior (“sovereign”) to his miserable subjects in relative terms. Ruling by divine right, his superiority is absolute and transcends vulgar human existence. Taking life or letting live are the sovereign's fundamental attributes. But only when he actually kills – even tyranically, unjustly – does the sovereign fully exert his symbolic rights over life. Foucault suggested that the punishment was all the more ruthless in that it was meant to offset the discontinuous hold of power over society. 'the meshes of the net were too big,' and eluded his grasp. This strategic vision of domination went a long way in accounting for the technological mutation of power in the west at the dawn of the industrial revolution. While outwardly maintaining the image of sovereignty, a new type of disciplinary control sank deeper into the social body, down to its most tenuous elements. What disappeared in the process was symbolic exchange. Foucault's inversion of the system of power from the top down, from the sovereignty of death to the discipline of life, follows the same logic. The new system of power which replaced the old in the nineteenth century had its own claims: the right to take life and let die. Life replaced death as a means of controlling society at large.

Hegel's master/slave dialectics was based on the slave's fear of death. Giving it a perverse twist, bataille hypothesized that there was not just one, but two separate forms of mastery. The first, relying on classical 'domination,' is geared to produce obedient subjects. The master rules because the slave is afraid of death, and he is not. But were the master to actually die, bataille objected, he would lose his mastery. The master was no different from the slave, and dialectics was a con-game. Both were ruled by the fear. Bataille went on to hypothesize another form of sovereignty that would be divorced from domination. The real sovereign is noble, in the nietzschean sense. He doesn't derive his power from his subjects, but from his own death. He only waits it to come, immune from any danger save the one who will murder him. It was in that way that bataille managed to reestablish a symbolic exchange where there was none.” - sylvere lotringer

“bataille looked upon capital as enslaving workers as being the same thing as the sovereign imposing obedience on his subjects. Just because the sovereign chose to let his subjects live didn't mean he let them free. They remained subjected to him in whatever function they carried out. Whether a prisoner of war, whose life was spared; a slave serving in sumptuary domesticity; an emancipated slave; or a serf in the fields, none of their lives were their own. They didn't have to die in order to be dead; their death was differed, kept in suspension, until the sovereign decided otherwise.

And the same holds true for the factory worker. Labor, bataille maintained, was a unilateral gift of capital to the workers and was meant 'to condemn them to a hideous degradation.' contrary to what marx believed, the process of production wasn't set up to extract from them a surplus-value, its real purpose was to subject them to a sacrifice. And bataille dismissed the american 'subterfuge' of compensating workers for the debasement that had been imposed on them. Nothing could modify the fundamental division between noble and ignoble men. 'the cruel game of social life does not vary among the different civilized countries, where the insulting splendor of the rich loses and degrades the human nature of the lower class.'

and 'the scenario has never changed,' baudrillard concurred, since labor power has been instituted on death. Having converted his death into a wage, the worker could only free himself by putting his own death on the line.” -lotringer

“unlike artaud and bataille, his older contemporaries, baudrillard never yearned for an inner experience of death reached through anguish, terror, or eroticism, yet he remained convinced that death as a form internal to the system was the only way left to offset it. As labor was slow death, only an instant and violent challenge could possibly free one from it. Against every 'revolutionary' view, he insisted, 'we must maintain that the only alternative to labor is not free time, or non-labor, it is sacrifice.'[39]” -lotringer

“premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. . . acknowledging death frees us from every subjection and constraint” - montaigne

“power itself must be abolished – and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles – but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate.” -baudrillard

“hegemony works through general masquerade, it relies on the excessive use of every sign and obscenity, the way it mocks its own values, and challenges the rest of the world by its cynicism (“carnivalization”). Classical, historical domination imposed a system of positive values, displaying as well as defending these values. Contemporary hegemony, on the other hand, relies on a symbolic liquidation of every possible value. The terms 'simulacrum,' 'simulation' and 'virtual' summarize this liquidation, in which every signification is eliminated in its own sign, and the profusion of signs parodies a by now unobtainable reality. This is the total masquerade in which domination itself is engulfed. Power is only the parody of the signs of power – just as war is only the parody of signs of war, including technology. Masquerade of war, masquerade of power. We can therefore speak of the hegemony of masquerade, and the masquerade of hegemony. All meaning is abolished in its own sign and the profusion of signs parodies a now undiscoverable reality.” -baudrillard

“power itself must be abolished – and not solely in the refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles – but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate (if the refusal to dominate had the same violence and the same energy as the refusal to be dominated, the dream of revolution would have disappeared long ago). Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.” -baudrillard

“what is at stake in global confrontation is this provocation to generalized exchange, the unbridles exchange of all differences, the challenge for other cultures to equal us in deculturation, the debasement of values, the adhesion to the most disenchanted models. This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations,' but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the west and islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic: physical and mental liquidation, a universal carnivalization imposed by the west at the cost of its own humiliation, its symbolic expropriation – against all of the singularities that resist it. Challenge versus challenge? Potlatch versus potlatch? Does the slow-death strategy or systematic mortification equal the stakes of a sacrificial death? Can this confrontation come to an end and what could be the consequences if one or the other wins?” -baudrillard

“security is the best medium for terror.” -baudrillard

“in the past, totalitarian powers were the ones who enclosed themselves behind walls (the best historical example being the berlin wall) to escape the wave of 'democracy'. Now these 'democracies' are building protective walls to preserve the correct use of freedom from the hordes of immigrants or fanatics. If oppression was only possible behind the soviet iron wall, today, freedom is only possible behind the iron wall of democracy. . . we must therefore recognize that the west has become a totalitarian space – the space of a self-defensive hegemony defending itself against its own weakness.” -baudrillard

borges and I

"the other one, the one called borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of buenos aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the outskirts to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."

-jorge luis borges, from "parables"

ladders to fire

"away from him she could always say: he does not feel. but as soon as he appeared she was baffled. his presence carried such a physical glow that it passed for warmth. his voice was warm like the voice of feeling. his gestures were warm, his hands liked touch. he laid his hands often on human beings, and one might think it was love. but it was just physical warmth, like the summer. it gave off heat like a chemical, but no more."

"he will die of hardness, and i from feeling too much. even when people knock on the door i have a feeling they are not knocking on wood but on my heart. all the blows fall directly on my heart.

even pleasure had its little stabs upon the heart. the perpetual heart-murmur of the sensibilities.

i wish i could learn his secret. i would love to be able to go out for a whole night without feeling all the threads that bind me to him."

"but he knew nothing of her; he was no companion to her sadness. he could never imagine anyone else's mood, only his own. his own were so immense and loud, they filled his world and deafened him to all others. he was not concerned to know whether she could live or breathe within the dark caverns of his whale-like being, within the whale belly of his ego.

somehow he had convinced her that his expansiveness was a sign of bigness. a big man could not belong to one person."

"she knew as he did, that none of the decorations or dignities conferred upon a man or woman could alter the basic talent or lack of talent as a lover. no title of architect emeritus will confer upon them the magic knowledge of the body's structure. no prestidigitation with words will replace the knowledge of the secret places or responsiveness. no medals for courage will confer the graceful audacities, the conquering abductions, the exact knowledge of the battle of love, when the moment for seduction, when for consolidation, when for capitulation. the trade, art and craft that cannot be learned, which requires a divination of the fingertips, the accurate reading of signals from the fluttering of an eyelid, an eye like a microscope to catch the approval of an eyelash, a seismograph to catch the vibrations of the little blue nerves under the skin, the capacity to prognosticate from the direction of the down as from the inclination of the leaves some can predict rain, tell where storms are brooding, where floods are threatening, tell which regions to leave alone, which to invade, which to lull and which to take by force."

-all quotes from ladders to fire by anais nin

sleeplessness

“because i neither played in the wind

nor lived on the equator

nothing charmed me but sleeplessness

and a tree which doesn’t bend to a storm

and a building which doesn’t shake.”

-naguib mahfouz, from the beggar

the dream of destroying

"a science which is postulated on the assumption that human beings are avaricious and will remain avaricious through all eternity is utterly devoid of point (whether in problems of distribution or any other aspect) to a person who is not avaricious. and yet as i read this book, i felt a strange excitement for quite another reason - the sheer courage the author demonstrated in tearing apart without hesitation all manner of conventional ideas. however much i may oppose morality, i am powerless to prevent the image floating before my eyes of the wife of the man i love, coolly and quickly hurrying back to his house. then my thoughts turn destructive. destruction is tragic and piteous and beautiful. the dream of destroying, building anew, perfecting. perhaps even, once one has destroyed, the day of perfecting may never come, but in the passion of love i must destroy."

-osamu dazai, the setting sun

surviving

"as far as laurel had ever known, there had not happened a single blunder in their short life together. but the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. outliving is something we do to them, the fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all."

-eudora welty, the optimist's daughter

to have an end in view

“. . .nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps out did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view – one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know – your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green forest rides to hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.”

“but since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs lagging behind jinny and susan, to have an end in view. I pull on my stockings as I see them pull on theirs. I wait for you to speak and then speak like you. I am drawn here across london to a particular spot, to a particular place, not to see you or you or you, but to light my fire at the general blaze of you who live wholly, indivisibly and without caring.”

from the waves by virginia woolf

stanzas for an imaginary garden

by octavio paz (from itinerary)

the first eight lines describe a somewhat rural, provincial garden. a small enclosure with two entrances. apart from the palm tree already there, you should plant bougainvillaeas, heliotrope, an ash and a pine. you should also install a well. this first text could be placed on one of the entrances to the little garden, either as one stanza on the lintel or on the pediment, or divided into two quartets, one on each of the doorposts:

four adobe walls. bougainvillaeas.

in its quiet flames, eyes

can bathe themselves. the wind passes through leaves

singing praises and herbs on their knees.

the heliotrope crosses over with purple steps,

wrapped in its own aroma. there is a prophet:

the ash tree -- and a meditative: the pine.

the garden is small, the sky infinite.

these four lines could be placed on the other entrance, on the lintel or pediment:

happy rectangle: some palm trees,

jade fountains; time glows,

water sings, the stone is silent, the soul,

suspended in a moment of time, is a fountain.

this text could be placed in the inside of the garden. for example, on the fountain. i imagine a wall over which a curtain of transparent water falls as you read the four lines:

rain, dancing feet and loosened hair,

ankle bitten by lightning,

falls down accompanied by drums:

the tree opens its eyes, revives.

COLOPHON

written after visiting the place:

populous wasteland, a few palms,

plucked feather dusters, hammering

of motors, a prison wall,

dust and rubbish, nobody’s home.

written remembering the imaginary garden:

green survives in my ruins:

in my eyes you look and touch yourself,

you know yourself in me and in me think yourself,

in me you survive, in me you vanish.

cruel optimism

"at the same time, it matters who speaks in this poem: a confident person.  he finds possibility in a moment of suspension and requires neither the logic of the market to secure his value nor the intimate recognition of anything municipally normal or domestic to assure that he has boundaries.  he can hold a nonspace without being meaningful.  this does not seem to threaten him.  thus the instance of optimism might or might not be a part of cruel optimism: we don't know.  the promise is everywhere, and the dissolution of the form of being that existed before the event is not cause for mourning or rejoicing: it is just a fact.  does the episodic nature of the interruption enable him, after the moment, to return to the suburbs refreshed? will they go to a high-end cafe and buy some intensified coffee supercharged by sugar and milk?  will they go get otherwise stimulated?  will they become different in a way on which they can build a world?  is the couple a stand-in for the collective that can now be awake for peace rather than somnambulant?  does the aesthetic moment of the different autonomy they get when they exist together in reverie become not a condition for detaching from the market but the condition of living in it, so that they can think that who they really are are people who can be lost in a moment?  habermas would perhaps note that the fantasy of the lovers' worlding power enables the speaker to disavow how otherwise he is constituted as a man of property and the market.  john ricco might argue that the men's outsideness and outsiderness demonstrates the potential resource of gayness to make a queer antinormativity that does not look back to domesticity wishfully.  it is impossible to say how deep the break is.  by the end, the speaker thinks he really lives now, in a moment of suspension.  he really is a lover, an intimate, no longer the user of gas and fertilizer and the delegator of labor to others.  that was in another life, or so it seems." -lauren berlant, cruel optimism

balance & vulnerability

"when we think of balance, we think everything has to be equal. we don't even think everything has to be equal; we really say everything has to be identical to the standard of measurement we are applying, in this case, ten pounds of lead weights, and nothing must ever move. if nothing ever moves, everything dies. and that is the interesting thing about extreme orderliness in the law and order sense of the word. what happens in fact in a system that demands absolute order is that you get an enormous amount of unnecessary death, a tremendous amount."

"and what is vulnerability? just this: the ability to be wrong, to be foolish, to be weak and silly, to be an idiot. it is the ability to accept one's unworthiness, to accept one's vanity for what it is. it's the ability to be whatever and whoever you are - recognizing that you, like the world, like the earth, are fragile, and that in your fragility lies all the possibility of growth and of death, and that the two are one in the same."

-paula gunn allen, off the reservation

a question of turning

from queer phenomenology by sara ahmed

"my writing moves between conceptual analysis and personal digression.  but why call the personal a digression?  why is it that the personal so often enters writing as if we are being led astray from a proper course?"

"it is not just that bodies are moved by the orientations they have; rather, the orientations we have toward others shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies.  importantly, even what is kept at a distance must still be proximate enough if it is to make or leave an impression."

"phenomenology is full of queer moments; as moments of disorientation that maurice merleau-ponty suggests involve not only 'the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us.'"

"space then becomes a question of 'turning', of directions taken, which not only allow things to appear, but also enable us to find our way through the world by situating ourselves in relation to such things."

"the question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we 'find our way' but how we come to 'feel at home'."

"but 'getting lost' still takes us somewhere; and being lost is a way of inhabiting space by registering what is not familiar: being lost can in its turn become a familiar feeling.  familiarity is shaped by the 'feel' of space or by how spaces 'impress' upon bodies."

untitled by john ashbery

we were warned about spiders, and the
   occasional famine.
we drove downtown to see our
   neighbors.  none of them were home.
we nestled in yards the municipality had
   created,
reminisced about other, different places -
but were they?  hadn't we known it all
       before?

in vineyards where the bee's hymn
   drowns the monotony,
we slept for peace, joining in the great
   run.
he came up to me.
it was all as it had been,
except for the weight of the present,
that scuttled the pact we made with
       heaven.
in truth there was no cause for rejoicing,
nor need to turn around, either.
we were lost just by standing,
listening to the hum of the wires overhead.

bjork & her tv

THE SERMON OF THE TWELVE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

by anne sexton

January?
The month is dumb.
It is fraudulent.
It does not cleanse itself.
The hens lay blood-stained eggs.
Do not lend your bread to anyone
lest it nevermore rise.
Do not eat lentils or your hair will fall out.

Do not rely on February
except when your cat has kittens,
throbbing into the snow.
Do not use knives and forks
unless there is a thaw,
like the yawn of a baby.
The sun in this month
begets a headache
like an angel slapping you in the face.

Earthquakes mean March.
The dragon will move,
and the earth will open like a wound.
There will be great rain or snow
so have some coal for your uncle.
The sun of this month cures all.
Therefore, old women say:
Let the sun of March shine on my daughter,
but let the sun of February shine on my daughter-in-law.
However, if you go to a party
dressed as the anti-Christ
you will be frozen to death by morning.

During the rainstorms of April
the oyster rises from the sea
and opens its shell —
rain enters it —
when it sinks the raindrops
become the pearl.
So take a picnic,
open your body,
and give birth to pearls.

June and July?
These are the months
we call Boiling Water.
There is sweat on the cat but the grape
marries herself to the sun.

Hesitate in August.
Be shy.
Let your toes tremble in their sandals.
However, pick the grape
and eat with confidence.
The grape is the blood of God.
Watch out when holding a knife
or you will behead St. John the Baptist.

Touch the Cross in September,
knock on it three times
and say aloud the name of the Lord.
Put seven bowls of salt on the roof overnight
and the next morning the damp one
will foretell the month of rain.
Do not faint in September
or you will wake up in a dead city.

If someone dies in October
do not sweep the house for three days
or the rest of you will go.
Also do not step on a boy's head
for the devil will enter your ears
like music.

November?
Shave,
whether you have hair or not.
Hair is not good,
nothing is allowed to grow,
all is allowed to die.
Because nothing grows
you may be tempted to count the stars
but beware,
in November counting the stars
gives you boils.
Beware the tall people,
they will go mad.
Don't harm the turtle dove
because he is a great shoe
that has swallowed Christ's blood.

December?
On December fourth
water spurts out of the mouse.
Put herbs in its eyes and boil corn
and put the corn away for the night
so that the Lord may trample on it
and bring you luck.
For many days the Lord has been
shut up in the oven.
After that He is boiled,
but He never dies, never dies.

~ from The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975

because / music

silver soul

stealing beauty

migration

surrender

and ever and

north? these restful blinds slip
smoothly here.  winter's scratch
                    over which year runs
bitter, they are all full of low time

     how authentic!  it's the hurried
watch bending out to dark, the earth, the
river.  aged autumn, why see the house,
last year's car, the farms?  ah,
this long april note down the rows -
celery, and beet.  one might think
without foretaste, how far north,
how quickly the end.
                    these leaves, leaves

no other.  some other.
air turning and yet i stretch the year
among the caress, its last rest
                is at it here
and the year
has his summer so high it
all clouds out winter.  here's to spring?
now here's rows of earth and these
reeds way before here was a how.
we've come this way into time
into lapping how at the sill
and now and there's and that

7.30.13