Some passages from The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow:
*
Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy of activism will negotiate the stretch between speculative desire and the shortfall of action in her or his own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough horizon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: failure, confusion, and the falling out of comrades. There is no right way to balance these things…
*
One can’t help remarking that internecine fights are often the hottest – because of the tearing apart of what is also – in some ways – connected, and because other more powerful enemies are further off, even harder to imagine as subject to change.
*
...the strange line we draw between work and play
*
The women retold tales Dorthy had loved about the triumph of eros over thanatos, like the one about a woman who falls off an ocean liner and, some hours later, when they discover she’s gone and turn back, they find her because she’s still swimming.
*
In an anecdote she loved, a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive and survives.
*
The unorganized are always the most vulnerable to cynical or instrumental manipulation. They can’t produce social institutions that shape or interpret political experience.
*
…things come from outside, and people make use of what comes, even from tainted hands.
*
How obvious this sounds now, how rare and shocking then. The courage it took to demand a new place in history can no longer be imagined.
*
Words are their way of denouncing mayhem and of living in it. As far as I know, writing puts power and powerlessness together like no other experience. As far as I know.
*
I live with a composer, Daniel Goode, who has a piece called “Finding the Unison Sentence.” A group of people are to start talking, each one talking continuously, all trying to find a sentence they want to say together. I used to think the piece was a failure, since the groups never came close to unison, petering out instead. But the composer suggested that on the contrary, perhaps the piece shows that there is no unison sentence.
*
People make change; it’s never only a matter of macro forces which no one can predict or influence; we are, gulp, in some sense implicated in the construction of our world. Art is one way into imagining something different, activism another. Always people are imagining, wanting, and acting from somewhere in themselves, or rather from often unacknowledged multiple states of self.
*
There is always the personal question of how to survive being forgotten or aggressively misunderstood. Inevitably, with longevity or luck, one outlives one’s formative moment. In the case of those who were a part of ecstatic, hopeful, utopian movements, this common tragedy of the mismatch between an individual’s life and the arc of history is likely to be particularly acute. For them, forgetting goes beyond personal loss to the loss of the whole world.
But one step beyond these feelings, that one’s acts and words of protest have been specially chosen for neglect and insult, lies another more reliable experience feminists share: in modernity, feminism keeps returning. Though obscurity and abuse dog feminism, self-conscious feminist struggles are constantly finding new forms. Even if each return is greeted as if it were for the first time – the New Woman again and again – still she keeps coming. And she keeps bringing back some version of feminist resistance.
*
Dinnerstein offered a subtle, revealing account of the deals men and women have traditionally struck with each other, including what was for me the first intelligible, usable explanation for women’s shamed acquiescence in male power, and our ambivalence about our own uses of force. She saw the female monopoly of infant care as decisive in all the gender asymmetry of social life that follows. It is a woman who introduces us to the world before we can recognize her as a limited, mortal being like ourselves. Struggling out from under the control of this first alluring, seemingly all-powerful person is the biggest fight we ever fight. Exhausted, we fling ourselves out of the sea full of mermaids onto the dry land of minotaurs who roar and strut but who nonetheless seem much more tamable and rational in contrast to the mother still stalking in an infantile layer of our personality.
Dinnerstein argues that male power in the public sphere feels right, even when terrible; at least male tyranny stands on the firm ground of adult mastery and will; at least it seems solid in its denial of absurdity, limitation, and death. For the most part, public projects are carried on without the constant modifying influence of doubts. One boldly builds the bomb: one doesn’t let anxiety about how to stow radioactive garbage slow one down. Worrying about the waste products of human efforts is somebody else’s job, and that irritating, nagging somebody is a woman. Men agree to build the world while women agree both to support them in this struggle and to give vent, like harmless jesters, to the knowledge both sexes have that “there is something trivial and empty, ugly and sad, in what he does.” A proverb records this bargain: Men must work and women must weep.
In spite of feminism’s extraordinary energy and collective will, which did indeed change so much, hatred and fear of women is entrenched, pervasive within us as well as without. The Mermaid and the Minotaur didn’t rescue me from this fact, or from my vulnerability to policing by men, but Dinnersteinian knowledge shifted the burden, making my common womanish feelings of self-doubt, foolishness, inconsequence into a shared – perhaps an alterable – condition.
Such a public airing of women’s often unconscious, usually private griefs went a long way toward explaining where the powerful rage of feminism comes from in our time. The ancient symbiosis between men and women, with its traditional divisions of labor, was never fully consensual, never reliable. In modernity, the old arrangements show increasing strain. Women notice and suffer from this crisis more. They are now supposed to do both men’s and women’s traditional work, an emotional and physical overload neither honored nor supported by the culture. Because they are the ones who were dependent on that symbiosis to recognize themselves as valuable and whole, they feel bitter when men retreat from the traditional responsibilities of the old bargain. But finally, however much they depend on it, women lost more under the old regime, sacrificing sexual impulse and worldly freedom. From that dear old familiar system’s decay they have the least to lose.
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September 12, 2019
August 28, 2019
Vilma Espín: "Well, there are always some who fail."
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A meeting had been called for November 28, but I didn’t give it much importance. It was just one more meeting, I thought. But it turned out to be preparations of all the action groups for November 30. On the morning of the 29th, Frank told me the boat had left Mexico, so we were to have everything ready for the early morning hours of the 30th.
I had many things to do, including giving the action groups the addresses of the “medicine chests.” All the arrangements were last minute. Things were done in a big hurry, but the secret was tightly kept right up to the very moment of the action.
Everyone had been informed it was a trial run, a test. But at 6 a.m. we were all told, “This is not a drill. The boat has already left, and it should land today.” It was scheduled to arrive at 7 a.m., and that’s when all the events of November 30 began.
I was to stay home in order to give a tape we’d recorded the night before to a man who was going to play it on national radio through a telephone hookup. The tape reported Fidel’s arrival and called on the people to rise up in revolt.
But the tape was never broadcast, since the man who was supposed to do it was so scared he burned it… Well, there are always some who fail. But almost everything else was carried out exactly as planned.
– Vilma Espín, on the November 30 action from the Cuban revolution
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A meeting had been called for November 28, but I didn’t give it much importance. It was just one more meeting, I thought. But it turned out to be preparations of all the action groups for November 30. On the morning of the 29th, Frank told me the boat had left Mexico, so we were to have everything ready for the early morning hours of the 30th.
I had many things to do, including giving the action groups the addresses of the “medicine chests.” All the arrangements were last minute. Things were done in a big hurry, but the secret was tightly kept right up to the very moment of the action.
Everyone had been informed it was a trial run, a test. But at 6 a.m. we were all told, “This is not a drill. The boat has already left, and it should land today.” It was scheduled to arrive at 7 a.m., and that’s when all the events of November 30 began.
I was to stay home in order to give a tape we’d recorded the night before to a man who was going to play it on national radio through a telephone hookup. The tape reported Fidel’s arrival and called on the people to rise up in revolt.
But the tape was never broadcast, since the man who was supposed to do it was so scared he burned it… Well, there are always some who fail. But almost everything else was carried out exactly as planned.
– Vilma Espín, on the November 30 action from the Cuban revolution
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August 23, 2019
the lie is no longer necessary
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Democracy was a lie capitalism told the world in order to win the propaganda war against communism. Now that communism is gone the lie is no longer necessary.
When capitalism is threatened it turns into fascism to stamp out resistance. And our current ecological collapse threatens the validity of capitalism more than anything that’s come before.
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Democracy was a lie capitalism told the world in order to win the propaganda war against communism. Now that communism is gone the lie is no longer necessary.
When capitalism is threatened it turns into fascism to stamp out resistance. And our current ecological collapse threatens the validity of capitalism more than anything that’s come before.
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August 20, 2019
the first thirty pages
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Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing.
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Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing.
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August 9, 2019
Music I like perhaps mainly because it makes me feel a little bit better about getting older
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"Don’t last too long
The world changes under your feet
Life is eternal, life is so brief, and life is so sweet"
- Robyn Hitchcock, The Man Who Loves the Rain
“There was a time, there was a time that I've known
When my work, when my films just weren't shown
Big city screens, big city dreams, remain
I did my good work while knowing it wasn't my time
Sometimes this world, sometimes this world has its cracks
I fell through, but I can do magic to turned backs”
- Robert Forster, Remain
*
Between some Robert Forster solo records (Songs to Play, Inferno) and some Edwyn Collins solo records (Understated, Badbea, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation) I no longer think getting old in rock 'n' roll is such a bad thing.
(When I posted this on social media someone also mentioned Peter Perrett's How The West Was Won.)
(And of course, now and always, Robert Wyatt's Comicopera.)
UPDATE: I felt I needed to add at least three more records to this post (though of course I'm sure there are hundreds of others also worthy of being added): The Devil Laughs by Stuart Moxham & Louis Philippe, Negative Capability by Marianne Faithfull and Pleasure, Joy and Happiness by Eddie Chacon.
FURTHER UPDATE: Recently I've been listening a lot to Guesswork by Lloyd Cole, Shufflemania! by Robyn Hitchcock and the first HOUSE OF ALL record.
I’m actually not sure I’d find myself listening to any of these records if I wasn’t actively trying to feel better about getting older. The fact that most (but not all) of these records are by straight white men is probably wrong, but is also related to the fact that I’m a straight white man trying to make myself feel better about getting older. In some ways, none of these records are as good as the records these artists made when they were younger. But some of them are still pretty good.
And since I now realize this post is mostly about aging, out of curiosity, I thought I would take a moment to look it up:
Robert Wyatt was born in 1945
Marianne Faithfull was born in 1946
Peter Perrett was born in 1952
Robyn Hitchcock was born in 1953
Stuart Moxham was born in 1955
Robert Forster was born in 1957
Louis Philippe was born in 1959
Edwyn Collins was born in 1959
Lloyd Cole was born in 1961
Eddie Chacon was born in 1963
(I was born in 1971)
.
"Don’t last too long
The world changes under your feet
Life is eternal, life is so brief, and life is so sweet"
- Robyn Hitchcock, The Man Who Loves the Rain
“There was a time, there was a time that I've known
When my work, when my films just weren't shown
Big city screens, big city dreams, remain
I did my good work while knowing it wasn't my time
Sometimes this world, sometimes this world has its cracks
I fell through, but I can do magic to turned backs”
- Robert Forster, Remain
*
Between some Robert Forster solo records (Songs to Play, Inferno) and some Edwyn Collins solo records (Understated, Badbea, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation) I no longer think getting old in rock 'n' roll is such a bad thing.
(When I posted this on social media someone also mentioned Peter Perrett's How The West Was Won.)
(And of course, now and always, Robert Wyatt's Comicopera.)
UPDATE: I felt I needed to add at least three more records to this post (though of course I'm sure there are hundreds of others also worthy of being added): The Devil Laughs by Stuart Moxham & Louis Philippe, Negative Capability by Marianne Faithfull and Pleasure, Joy and Happiness by Eddie Chacon.
FURTHER UPDATE: Recently I've been listening a lot to Guesswork by Lloyd Cole, Shufflemania! by Robyn Hitchcock and the first HOUSE OF ALL record.
I’m actually not sure I’d find myself listening to any of these records if I wasn’t actively trying to feel better about getting older. The fact that most (but not all) of these records are by straight white men is probably wrong, but is also related to the fact that I’m a straight white man trying to make myself feel better about getting older. In some ways, none of these records are as good as the records these artists made when they were younger. But some of them are still pretty good.
And since I now realize this post is mostly about aging, out of curiosity, I thought I would take a moment to look it up:
Robert Wyatt was born in 1945
Marianne Faithfull was born in 1946
Peter Perrett was born in 1952
Robyn Hitchcock was born in 1953
Stuart Moxham was born in 1955
Robert Forster was born in 1957
Louis Philippe was born in 1959
Edwyn Collins was born in 1959
Lloyd Cole was born in 1961
Eddie Chacon was born in 1963
(I was born in 1971)
.
August 7, 2019
Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout
Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout:
*
The experience of this theatre-goer, then, is one in which anticipation gives way to disappointment, in which pleasure is bound up with anxiety and even perhaps pain and illness, in which acting is confused with vulgar interruption, in which the transcendent possibilities of the world’s greatest dramatic poetry appear to pass by almost unnoticed in a ‘deliberate monotone’, and success appears as dependent upon the audience as it is upon the artistic capability of the actor. Yet for all this, for all the confusion, anxiety and disappointment, it is an experience which he cannot bear to bring to an end, and to which he will repeatedly seek to return.
*
This ambivalence certainly characterizes my own relationship with the theatre. Theatre, being queasy, makes me queasy. That such queasiness is widespread, that we find theatre uncomfortable, compromised, boring, conventional, bourgeois, overpriced and unsatisfactory most of the time, is I think not only generally accepted as true, but also generally accepted as part and parcel of the whole business. Theatre’s failure, when theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps constitutive. What I want to argue here is that it is precisely in theatre’s failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois pastime that its political value is to be found. Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital.
*
Of course, never in the history of theatre has the social position of the actor been so similar to the social situation of the character: they are, at last, contemporaries, and more than that, members of the same social class. This means that the ‘actual life’ the actor is required to simulate is close enough to her own for her life to become a private resource for public display. While Diderot feared that the actor’s over-identification with the emotions of the character would be detrimental to theatrical representation because it would lead the actor to lose control of her technique, the new danger for the actor is that their new technique, along with the new forms and subject matter of bourgeois naturalist drama, might permit so intense an over-identification, that the actor might no longer be required to act at all, but instead just effectively ‘be’ a version of herself.
*
McKinnie points out that the theatre is an economic subsector in which work is clearly alienated. Picking up on this perception one notes how the employee’s time is regulated with rigorous force by bells and curtains, how both the rehearsal process and the nightly routine of performances are dominated by repetitive activity, how wage levels are set in structures of extreme differentiation, how these are maintained by a huge pool of surplus labour which renders effective industrial organization impossible, and how the core activity itself is both a metaphor of alienation and alienation itself: the actor is paid to appear in public speaking words written by someone else and executing physical movement which has at the very least usually been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny by a representative of the management who effectively enjoys the power of hiring and firing. The actor is both sign and referent of the wholly alienated wage slave.
.
*
The experience of this theatre-goer, then, is one in which anticipation gives way to disappointment, in which pleasure is bound up with anxiety and even perhaps pain and illness, in which acting is confused with vulgar interruption, in which the transcendent possibilities of the world’s greatest dramatic poetry appear to pass by almost unnoticed in a ‘deliberate monotone’, and success appears as dependent upon the audience as it is upon the artistic capability of the actor. Yet for all this, for all the confusion, anxiety and disappointment, it is an experience which he cannot bear to bring to an end, and to which he will repeatedly seek to return.
*
This ambivalence certainly characterizes my own relationship with the theatre. Theatre, being queasy, makes me queasy. That such queasiness is widespread, that we find theatre uncomfortable, compromised, boring, conventional, bourgeois, overpriced and unsatisfactory most of the time, is I think not only generally accepted as true, but also generally accepted as part and parcel of the whole business. Theatre’s failure, when theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps constitutive. What I want to argue here is that it is precisely in theatre’s failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois pastime that its political value is to be found. Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital.
*
Of course, never in the history of theatre has the social position of the actor been so similar to the social situation of the character: they are, at last, contemporaries, and more than that, members of the same social class. This means that the ‘actual life’ the actor is required to simulate is close enough to her own for her life to become a private resource for public display. While Diderot feared that the actor’s over-identification with the emotions of the character would be detrimental to theatrical representation because it would lead the actor to lose control of her technique, the new danger for the actor is that their new technique, along with the new forms and subject matter of bourgeois naturalist drama, might permit so intense an over-identification, that the actor might no longer be required to act at all, but instead just effectively ‘be’ a version of herself.
*
McKinnie points out that the theatre is an economic subsector in which work is clearly alienated. Picking up on this perception one notes how the employee’s time is regulated with rigorous force by bells and curtains, how both the rehearsal process and the nightly routine of performances are dominated by repetitive activity, how wage levels are set in structures of extreme differentiation, how these are maintained by a huge pool of surplus labour which renders effective industrial organization impossible, and how the core activity itself is both a metaphor of alienation and alienation itself: the actor is paid to appear in public speaking words written by someone else and executing physical movement which has at the very least usually been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny by a representative of the management who effectively enjoys the power of hiring and firing. The actor is both sign and referent of the wholly alienated wage slave.
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August 5, 2019
Jorge Herralde on running the publishing house Anagrama
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This job is wonderful, though it’s not easy, can be difficult, but by its nature it offers great joy and huge disappointments. It’s a roller coaster. It’s, as I said in an article once, about dolling out and receiving pain. Dolling out pain to so many manuscripts that one has to reject. If it’s an author you have no ties to, they experience the pain, but when it’s an author who has published several books with you but you decide not to go with, it’s painful for the publisher and even more so for the author. And then one receives pain, when there are misunderstandings with authors who are very much to the publisher’s liking but who decide to listen to siren songs, which can be deafening.
– Jorge Herralde, on running the publishing house Anagrama
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This job is wonderful, though it’s not easy, can be difficult, but by its nature it offers great joy and huge disappointments. It’s a roller coaster. It’s, as I said in an article once, about dolling out and receiving pain. Dolling out pain to so many manuscripts that one has to reject. If it’s an author you have no ties to, they experience the pain, but when it’s an author who has published several books with you but you decide not to go with, it’s painful for the publisher and even more so for the author. And then one receives pain, when there are misunderstandings with authors who are very much to the publisher’s liking but who decide to listen to siren songs, which can be deafening.
– Jorge Herralde, on running the publishing house Anagrama
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August 2, 2019
Jessa Crispin Quote
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“Don’t end up like Bertolt Brecht.”
That seems like horrible advice. Shouldn’t the goal of life be to end up as close to Bertolt Brecht as possible. I need a little context.
“When Brecht moved to Los Angeles, he had such a difficult time learning English that he gave up. It soured him, being unable to communicate, and he started to hate America. Read his journals, you’ll see.”
For Stefan, every topic of conversation circles back to Bertolt Brecht, the way for me every topic of conversation circles back to William James. I take his point, which is made in impeccable English, shaming me further. I have been stubborn about learning to speak German. It feeds into my unsettled state. Why learn German if I’m only going to be here for a few years? But then how can I know if I want to stay unless I assimilate a little and give the place a chance? It is mortifying when someone addresses me in German I can’t follow, and yet part of me likes the little bubble I live in, the way I can tune out conversations on the subway because I can’t follow them anyway.
“Read Brecht’s journals,” Stefan repeats. “And learn German.”
– Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project
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“Don’t end up like Bertolt Brecht.”
That seems like horrible advice. Shouldn’t the goal of life be to end up as close to Bertolt Brecht as possible. I need a little context.
“When Brecht moved to Los Angeles, he had such a difficult time learning English that he gave up. It soured him, being unable to communicate, and he started to hate America. Read his journals, you’ll see.”
For Stefan, every topic of conversation circles back to Bertolt Brecht, the way for me every topic of conversation circles back to William James. I take his point, which is made in impeccable English, shaming me further. I have been stubborn about learning to speak German. It feeds into my unsettled state. Why learn German if I’m only going to be here for a few years? But then how can I know if I want to stay unless I assimilate a little and give the place a chance? It is mortifying when someone addresses me in German I can’t follow, and yet part of me likes the little bubble I live in, the way I can tune out conversations on the subway because I can’t follow them anyway.
“Read Brecht’s journals,” Stefan repeats. “And learn German.”
– Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project
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July 31, 2019
Susanne Moser: "But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet ..."
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Laurie Mazur: With the story of climate change, there's so much loss: loss of the familiar, of places we love, of the stable climate that gave us a huge boost as a species. Are there things to be gained as well from moving out of that certainty?
Susanne Moser: I certainly think so. The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet.
It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.
When [atmospheric concentration of carbon passed] 415 parts per million, people were saying that we had never had these kinds of atmospheric conditions during the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet. And we’re now moving to double that, and beyond.
So we’re having to deal with completely new environmental conditions, and we will be changed by that. Can we imagine that? No. Can we try to imagine that we’re not just clobbering each other over the head or blowing each other up? I can imagine something different.
Laurie Mazur: When you imagine it, what is the best thing about that new world?
Susanne Moser: That we will be a nondominant species again. I'm not the first one to say that. But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet within the confines of its resources, without damaging it, and in fact making it part of our species’ purpose to recreate and nourish the conditions for the continuity of life.
In my highest aspirations for the human species, that’s what we will be: servants of life.
[From Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.]
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Laurie Mazur: With the story of climate change, there's so much loss: loss of the familiar, of places we love, of the stable climate that gave us a huge boost as a species. Are there things to be gained as well from moving out of that certainty?
Susanne Moser: I certainly think so. The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet.
It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.
When [atmospheric concentration of carbon passed] 415 parts per million, people were saying that we had never had these kinds of atmospheric conditions during the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet. And we’re now moving to double that, and beyond.
So we’re having to deal with completely new environmental conditions, and we will be changed by that. Can we imagine that? No. Can we try to imagine that we’re not just clobbering each other over the head or blowing each other up? I can imagine something different.
Laurie Mazur: When you imagine it, what is the best thing about that new world?
Susanne Moser: That we will be a nondominant species again. I'm not the first one to say that. But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet within the confines of its resources, without damaging it, and in fact making it part of our species’ purpose to recreate and nourish the conditions for the continuity of life.
In my highest aspirations for the human species, that’s what we will be: servants of life.
[From Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.]
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July 28, 2019
Lidija Haas Quote
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At a party, a woman in her twenties, someone you find slightly intimidating, tells you that you and others your age (mid-thirties) are being used as “beards” by men who employ your friendship as a convenient badge of feminism while behaving poorly, when your back is turned, toward younger, less professionally established women. The claim doesn’t seem to be an attack; she’s trying to help you make more informed decisions. Your first reaction is, You think I’m established? Your second: How could I possibly know if what she describes is happening? And third: It’s probably true. (This last strikes you as an alternate instance of what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known.”) Can people abuse power they don’t see themselves as possessing? All the better, probably. Not seeing power must be a function of having it.
- Lidija Haas, #ETTU?
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At a party, a woman in her twenties, someone you find slightly intimidating, tells you that you and others your age (mid-thirties) are being used as “beards” by men who employ your friendship as a convenient badge of feminism while behaving poorly, when your back is turned, toward younger, less professionally established women. The claim doesn’t seem to be an attack; she’s trying to help you make more informed decisions. Your first reaction is, You think I’m established? Your second: How could I possibly know if what she describes is happening? And third: It’s probably true. (This last strikes you as an alternate instance of what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known.”) Can people abuse power they don’t see themselves as possessing? All the better, probably. Not seeing power must be a function of having it.
- Lidija Haas, #ETTU?
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July 24, 2019
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote
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The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential to the complexity of freedom.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential to the complexity of freedom.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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July 21, 2019
Erin Hill Quote
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I have been thinking about sharing, it is a pillar, is a gesture, and I have been trying to notice its smallest interactions. Upstairs wakes us.
The birds were awake when I was awake, 7:18, that’s new for Berlin sunrises.
I don’t think the Share button on Facebook is actually for sharing, doesn’t sharing involve an intended receiver?
The share button is for spreading, and spreading is territorial, is taking up space.
Sharing is fundamentally about survival.
I don’t believe myself in what I’ve written here… but it’s early.
– Erin Hill, Real Life Magic
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I have been thinking about sharing, it is a pillar, is a gesture, and I have been trying to notice its smallest interactions. Upstairs wakes us.
The birds were awake when I was awake, 7:18, that’s new for Berlin sunrises.
I don’t think the Share button on Facebook is actually for sharing, doesn’t sharing involve an intended receiver?
The share button is for spreading, and spreading is territorial, is taking up space.
Sharing is fundamentally about survival.
I don’t believe myself in what I’ve written here… but it’s early.
– Erin Hill, Real Life Magic
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June 27, 2019
Aravinda Ananda Quote
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One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people’s sense of fundamental worth and belonging. Not entitlement or superiority, but a deeper feeling that they do belong among other humans and will not be discarded as they learn. The last thing I want to do right now in my stage of racial identity development is hold space for white people; I actually want to get really far away from them. But you can’t shame someone out of a shame aversion, and so working with white people has become very important for me. Caucusing in order to do that kind of hard work of drilling down into white assumptions and fragility in a way that can hold people and bring them through the work has been so valuable. It responds to that call to “hold your people.”
- Aravinda Ananda, from Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture
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One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people’s sense of fundamental worth and belonging. Not entitlement or superiority, but a deeper feeling that they do belong among other humans and will not be discarded as they learn. The last thing I want to do right now in my stage of racial identity development is hold space for white people; I actually want to get really far away from them. But you can’t shame someone out of a shame aversion, and so working with white people has become very important for me. Caucusing in order to do that kind of hard work of drilling down into white assumptions and fragility in a way that can hold people and bring them through the work has been so valuable. It responds to that call to “hold your people.”
- Aravinda Ananda, from Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture
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June 22, 2019
Nora Samaran Quote
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Men with avoidant attachment styles may not notice the confusing nonverbal signalling they are actively doing very early on that prevents safety from happening with women they want to nurture and support, who may become more and more imbalanced towards them in response.
Since ‘absence of nurturance’ is just an absence, it can be hard to recognize early. When early avoidant responses to requests for closeness are not noticed as such, attachment science teaches us, ‘protest behaviour’ – the distress when needs aren’t met – may get louder over time, in ways both people are contributing to and neither understand. It becomes all too easy in a patriarchal culture that values rugged individualism over interdependence to call an anxiously-attached woman ‘crazy’ without noticing the parallel avoidant responses that are contributing, that are ‘crazymaking’. In other words, it takes two to enter into the avoidant-anxious trap, but patriarchal culture normalizes an avoidant style and stigmatizes an anxious style, wherever it appears.
None of this is worthy of shame; fundamentally, all of the insecure styles are based in an unquestioned belief that people will not be there for them and that nurturance is somehow a problem rather than wholly desirable and good. Avoidant attachers ‘know’ from an early age that the ice will break, the chair will collapse, best not to try. Insecure attachment styles are not chosen, are not conscious or intentional, and it is an understatement to say they are not easy to change. They deserve understanding, compassion, and empathy.
And yet living without loving, secure attachment bonds is the loneliest experience in the human repertoire.
- Nora Samaran, The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture
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Men with avoidant attachment styles may not notice the confusing nonverbal signalling they are actively doing very early on that prevents safety from happening with women they want to nurture and support, who may become more and more imbalanced towards them in response.
Since ‘absence of nurturance’ is just an absence, it can be hard to recognize early. When early avoidant responses to requests for closeness are not noticed as such, attachment science teaches us, ‘protest behaviour’ – the distress when needs aren’t met – may get louder over time, in ways both people are contributing to and neither understand. It becomes all too easy in a patriarchal culture that values rugged individualism over interdependence to call an anxiously-attached woman ‘crazy’ without noticing the parallel avoidant responses that are contributing, that are ‘crazymaking’. In other words, it takes two to enter into the avoidant-anxious trap, but patriarchal culture normalizes an avoidant style and stigmatizes an anxious style, wherever it appears.
None of this is worthy of shame; fundamentally, all of the insecure styles are based in an unquestioned belief that people will not be there for them and that nurturance is somehow a problem rather than wholly desirable and good. Avoidant attachers ‘know’ from an early age that the ice will break, the chair will collapse, best not to try. Insecure attachment styles are not chosen, are not conscious or intentional, and it is an understatement to say they are not easy to change. They deserve understanding, compassion, and empathy.
And yet living without loving, secure attachment bonds is the loneliest experience in the human repertoire.
- Nora Samaran, The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture
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June 18, 2019
The more novels I write...
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The more novels I write the more deeply I question the ethics of writing fiction. (Perhaps this has something to do with taking things from life and from the world and transforming them without the ability to give proper credit.)
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The more novels I write the more deeply I question the ethics of writing fiction. (Perhaps this has something to do with taking things from life and from the world and transforming them without the ability to give proper credit.)
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May 27, 2019
the exact same feeling
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I have this overwhelming feeling of failure. Then I think, probably no matter what I had done, or how it had gone, it would have changed nothing: I would have had the exact same feeling of failure. Because I still would have failed to completely change the world (for the better.)
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I have this overwhelming feeling of failure. Then I think, probably no matter what I had done, or how it had gone, it would have changed nothing: I would have had the exact same feeling of failure. Because I still would have failed to completely change the world (for the better.)
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May 24, 2019
The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live.
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The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live. So many of the stories we currently learn from, often from a very young age, are provided to us through popular culture, through movies and television. The creators of these stories most often center them around conflict. Conflict is a part of life, therefore learning how to work through conflict could be one useful approach to any given culture’s stories. However, so many of our popular culture’s versions of conflict focus on a hero and a villain, or some variation on that pattern, and the story ends when the hero defeats the villain, and the viewer is expected to most identify with the protagonist, with the hero. This is no way to have any sort of general understanding as to how we should approach conflict, and yet having been raised on such stories our subconscious is shot through with them, and we see the results of this all the time, in how the people around us approach every sort of interaction and situation. Vanquishing an enemy is no way to resolve a conflict.
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The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live. So many of the stories we currently learn from, often from a very young age, are provided to us through popular culture, through movies and television. The creators of these stories most often center them around conflict. Conflict is a part of life, therefore learning how to work through conflict could be one useful approach to any given culture’s stories. However, so many of our popular culture’s versions of conflict focus on a hero and a villain, or some variation on that pattern, and the story ends when the hero defeats the villain, and the viewer is expected to most identify with the protagonist, with the hero. This is no way to have any sort of general understanding as to how we should approach conflict, and yet having been raised on such stories our subconscious is shot through with them, and we see the results of this all the time, in how the people around us approach every sort of interaction and situation. Vanquishing an enemy is no way to resolve a conflict.
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May 21, 2019
dian marino Quote
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I advocate difference but I also advocate connectedness. To me being different in a creative way means that I’m willing to connect my difference to other people’s differences. That can be a paradoxical connection – that people would want to be clear about their different positions, where their differences are located, and then also wish to figure things out collaboratively, collectively. Frequently when we encounter difference, we don’t explore it; we try to manage it. Perhaps we can search for common threads while we appreciate our differences.
– dian marino, Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance
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I advocate difference but I also advocate connectedness. To me being different in a creative way means that I’m willing to connect my difference to other people’s differences. That can be a paradoxical connection – that people would want to be clear about their different positions, where their differences are located, and then also wish to figure things out collaboratively, collectively. Frequently when we encounter difference, we don’t explore it; we try to manage it. Perhaps we can search for common threads while we appreciate our differences.
– dian marino, Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance
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April 24, 2019
Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling
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Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines:
PME-ART: du difficile art d’être ensemble
L’Authenticité, un sentiment : mode d’emploi : Paradoxe sur un comédien
«L’authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi»: l’art des possibles
L’homme qui n’aimait pas le théâtre
Adaptation: plus authentique que jamais
Critique. L’Authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi. CISM
(Perhaps there is something slightly ironic in that all the press so far has been in French and the performance is entirely in English. But thus is my life here in Montreal.)
(And, of course, you can find the rest of the PME-ART links here.)
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Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines:
PME-ART: du difficile art d’être ensemble
L’Authenticité, un sentiment : mode d’emploi : Paradoxe sur un comédien
«L’authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi»: l’art des possibles
L’homme qui n’aimait pas le théâtre
Adaptation: plus authentique que jamais
Critique. L’Authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi. CISM
(Perhaps there is something slightly ironic in that all the press so far has been in French and the performance is entirely in English. But thus is my life here in Montreal.)
(And, of course, you can find the rest of the PME-ART links here.)
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April 18, 2019
Carmen Maria Machado Quote
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In her essay “On Liking Women,” trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu completely dismembers this idea, and asks: what if it doesn’t matter? What if queerness or transness is about moving towards desire, and not affirming some inherent trait? Why is the lack-of-choice narrative necessary? This is obviously a very controversial idea, but I find it bracing, exciting, even moving: the idea that one might choose what gives them pleasure no matter their instincts or body or social constructs, and no one should have anything to say about that. I’m not saying all queerness is chosen, but rather that we should be open to that possibility.
- Carmen Maria Machado
[You can find the rest of the interview here.]
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In her essay “On Liking Women,” trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu completely dismembers this idea, and asks: what if it doesn’t matter? What if queerness or transness is about moving towards desire, and not affirming some inherent trait? Why is the lack-of-choice narrative necessary? This is obviously a very controversial idea, but I find it bracing, exciting, even moving: the idea that one might choose what gives them pleasure no matter their instincts or body or social constructs, and no one should have anything to say about that. I’m not saying all queerness is chosen, but rather that we should be open to that possibility.
- Carmen Maria Machado
[You can find the rest of the interview here.]
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March 29, 2019
Claudia La Rocco Quote
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I wake up and it is like I have always been. All of them staring with their big cow eyes, pale frames flush against one another. I don’t know enough then to know why I shouldn’t like these faces and of course in fact I also love one of them. The pelican sucks the world down into itself. There is no before. I wake up.
When they ask Jacob Wren to name a difference between him and a person he loves, he says I feel completely different from everyone in almost every way but know there is no way this can be factually true. Also, I fear I don’t really love anyone. A simpler answer: I always drink coffee black.
The rogue AI robot was pretty angry by the time we found her. She was holed up in Toledo, and she made a point of saying, and this is a direct quote, that she didn’t think it was worth wasting her whole fucking life just to satisfy some ridiculous fantasy about staying alive forever, whatever the fuck that means. End quote. She swore a lot.
The monster when she opened her wings was the palest, most beautiful of reds. What you might say was saffron. She was sexually insatiable. She was immortal. She was cursed.
Or maybe, my avatar says, just maybe I am an alien intelligence sent to inhabit a viable life form in order to help, uh, shake things up a bit on this backwater planet, by which, yes, I mean Earth, you’ve read enough science-fiction to know that I am in fact talking about your stupid planet.
– Claudia La Rocco, petit cadeau
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I wake up and it is like I have always been. All of them staring with their big cow eyes, pale frames flush against one another. I don’t know enough then to know why I shouldn’t like these faces and of course in fact I also love one of them. The pelican sucks the world down into itself. There is no before. I wake up.
When they ask Jacob Wren to name a difference between him and a person he loves, he says I feel completely different from everyone in almost every way but know there is no way this can be factually true. Also, I fear I don’t really love anyone. A simpler answer: I always drink coffee black.
The rogue AI robot was pretty angry by the time we found her. She was holed up in Toledo, and she made a point of saying, and this is a direct quote, that she didn’t think it was worth wasting her whole fucking life just to satisfy some ridiculous fantasy about staying alive forever, whatever the fuck that means. End quote. She swore a lot.
The monster when she opened her wings was the palest, most beautiful of reds. What you might say was saffron. She was sexually insatiable. She was immortal. She was cursed.
Or maybe, my avatar says, just maybe I am an alien intelligence sent to inhabit a viable life form in order to help, uh, shake things up a bit on this backwater planet, by which, yes, I mean Earth, you’ve read enough science-fiction to know that I am in fact talking about your stupid planet.
– Claudia La Rocco, petit cadeau
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March 24, 2019
Kari Marie Norgaard Quote
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This state of affairs brings to mind the work of historical psychologist Robert J. Lifton. Lifton’s research on Hiroshima survivors describes people in states of shock, unable to respond rationally to the world around them. He calls this condition “psychic numbing.” Following his initial studies in Japan, much of Lifton’s work has been devoted to describing the effect of nuclear weapons on human psychology, particularly for Americans (see, for example, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial). Out of this project, Lifton describes people today as living in an “age of numbing” due to their awareness of the possibility of extinction (from the presence of both nuclear weapons and the capacity for environmental degradation). In this usage, numbing comes not from a traumatic event, but from a crisis of meaning. Lifton says that all of us who live in the nuclear age experience some degree of psychic numbing. We know that our lives can end at any moment, yet we live as though we do not know this. Lifton calls this condition the “absurdity of the double life.” We live with “the knowledge on the one hand that we, each of us, could be consumed in a moment together with everyone and everything we have touched or loved, and on the other our tendency to go about business as usual – continue with our routines as though no such threat existed.” According to Lifton, the absurdity of the double life profoundly affects our thinking, feeling, identity, sense of empowerment, political imagination, and morality. He writes, “If at any moment nothing might matter, who is to say that nothing matters now?”
– Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life
.
This state of affairs brings to mind the work of historical psychologist Robert J. Lifton. Lifton’s research on Hiroshima survivors describes people in states of shock, unable to respond rationally to the world around them. He calls this condition “psychic numbing.” Following his initial studies in Japan, much of Lifton’s work has been devoted to describing the effect of nuclear weapons on human psychology, particularly for Americans (see, for example, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial). Out of this project, Lifton describes people today as living in an “age of numbing” due to their awareness of the possibility of extinction (from the presence of both nuclear weapons and the capacity for environmental degradation). In this usage, numbing comes not from a traumatic event, but from a crisis of meaning. Lifton says that all of us who live in the nuclear age experience some degree of psychic numbing. We know that our lives can end at any moment, yet we live as though we do not know this. Lifton calls this condition the “absurdity of the double life.” We live with “the knowledge on the one hand that we, each of us, could be consumed in a moment together with everyone and everything we have touched or loved, and on the other our tendency to go about business as usual – continue with our routines as though no such threat existed.” According to Lifton, the absurdity of the double life profoundly affects our thinking, feeling, identity, sense of empowerment, political imagination, and morality. He writes, “If at any moment nothing might matter, who is to say that nothing matters now?”
– Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life
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March 12, 2019
the brevity of astrology
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I don't know so much about astrology, though I do hear a fair bit about it these days, but I read a tweet this morning about my sign and it unnerved me that my entire personality could so easily be summed up in so few words:
"cancer is ruled by the moon and wants and struggles with wanting to process and feel their emotional vulnerability + connect with others, while also remaining elusive and always somewhat hidden + isolated from the world"
(I suspect the book I'm currently writing is almost entirely summed up in these words + literature + politics. But who needs literature and politics. Maybe I should dedicate my life to the brevity of astrology.)
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I don't know so much about astrology, though I do hear a fair bit about it these days, but I read a tweet this morning about my sign and it unnerved me that my entire personality could so easily be summed up in so few words:
"cancer is ruled by the moon and wants and struggles with wanting to process and feel their emotional vulnerability + connect with others, while also remaining elusive and always somewhat hidden + isolated from the world"
(I suspect the book I'm currently writing is almost entirely summed up in these words + literature + politics. But who needs literature and politics. Maybe I should dedicate my life to the brevity of astrology.)
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March 8, 2019
Peter Linebaugh on Silvia Federici
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As a woman and a feminist she observes the production of the commons in the everyday labours of reproduction - the washing, cuddling, cooking, consoling, sweeping, pleasing, cleaning, exciting, mopping, reassuring, dusting, dressing, feeding children, having children and caring for the sick and the elderly.
- Peter Linebaugh on Silvia Federici
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As a woman and a feminist she observes the production of the commons in the everyday labours of reproduction - the washing, cuddling, cooking, consoling, sweeping, pleasing, cleaning, exciting, mopping, reassuring, dusting, dressing, feeding children, having children and caring for the sick and the elderly.
- Peter Linebaugh on Silvia Federici
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January 17, 2019
A possible premonition for my future...
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“He is currently working on a novel about solar energy, telepathic kittens and cuddling.”
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“He is currently working on a novel about solar energy, telepathic kittens and cuddling.”
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January 14, 2019
Where I Come From We Show Love
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I said to myself: you should write about how much you like cuddling. How come you’ve never written about that before? Is it too personal? Too intimate? You’ve written so much about loneliness and yet hardly anything about how much you like cuddling. But, then again, do I really have anything to say about it? Just that I like it and then my mind goes blank trying to figure out what else might be said. Also asking myself if the reason I don’t write about it is because I’m not sure I’ve ever really experienced cuddling not connected to sex. Or in a way that wasn’t sexual. And so I wonder: what is it exactly that I’m saying I really like?
*
At the Noname concert she’s introducing the band and starts by introducing the keyboard player (sorry I don’t remember his name), and we applaud for him, but then she suggests we haven't applauded heartily enough, that we should applaud more enthusiastically, saying: “where I come from we show love.” And right away I feel the anxiety that where I come from it was the opposite. People were awkward, insecure and timid, and I often experienced this as them being cold. I think: where I come from we didn’t show love and of course fear that I still don’t. And don’t think I’ll ever really be able to embody anything like it or know what’s an appropriate expression. But in that moment Noname isn’t exactly talking about love, she’s talking about applause and cheering, so of course we all applaud and cheer for the keyboard player, and then for the rest of the band as each one is introduced.
*
I’ve decided to call this a short story. And as I’m writing it I find myself wondering: is there some way that writing a short story might change my life? If I write that I really like cuddling – and people who know me, but who don’t know I really like cuddling, read it – would that change anything. What kind of confession is it exactly? It doesn’t seem like much, but I find myself unusually reluctant to write about it, so that must mean it’s actually quite a lot. I’ve been writing and publishing for about thirty years now and have gradually come to the conclusion that nothing I write or publish changes my life very much, or at all. But is it very much or at all? Why don’t I quite know?
*
I could maybe start again from another angle. I was writing a novel about war, about a utopia surrounded by war, and I was doing a great deal of research. All that reading and thinking about war became so undeniably bleak. When I began writing novels, many years ago, I promised myself I wasn’t going to write depressing novels but now, about fifteen years after declaring this goal, I was somewhat falling short of it. I felt confident that my war novel wasn’t only depressing, that it was also strange and thoughtful and funny and defined by some slight yet sharp sliver of hope, but it was also clearly depressing. And I thought: if this book is extra-depressing when compared to the others, then whatever I write next should be extra-not-depressing to compensate, and what could I think of that I found extra-not-depressing and the only thing I could think of was cuddling. (That’s not entirely true, I also considered writing about solar energy.) But what kind of novel, or short story, could one possibly write about cuddling? There is something so static about it. And yet isn’t so much of the problem with the world, and with art, embodied by the fact that’s it’s so easy to imagine writing a novel about war and so difficult to imagine writing a novel about cuddling?
*
Someone posts on social media, something like: “touch deprivation is a real thing, we should be talking about it more.” And I try to get my mind around it: touch deprivation is a real thing. Also, on the internet, I remember reading about a “loneliness epidemic,” a phrase that feels to me almost satirical but at the same time all-too-real. (The time I spend online is often spent in a kind of mesmerized loneliness.) There is a loneliness epidemic and it is on the rise. And loneliness is bad for your health. And people can even, in some sense, die from it. And I wonder what it would really take for me to believe such things as facts. Or what community feels like? Or what solidarity feels like? How reading an article, or even a single sentence, on the internet lodges inside your brain and makes you see the world differently, even if you are not entirely convinced that the article or sentence is true. Or in precisely what sense it is true. I’ve thought this before, and think it now again, that the problem is I see my loneliness as my own, as my own private problem, and not as part of some larger social loneliness that we all must try to work towards solving together. I have never tried internet dating, and wonder if the reason I have never tried it is that I don’t want to think of all the people on the internet as real. I would find it almost unbearably sad. But of course they are real. Or most of them are real. And it’s almost terrifying the degree to which I’d prefer not to see it.
.
I said to myself: you should write about how much you like cuddling. How come you’ve never written about that before? Is it too personal? Too intimate? You’ve written so much about loneliness and yet hardly anything about how much you like cuddling. But, then again, do I really have anything to say about it? Just that I like it and then my mind goes blank trying to figure out what else might be said. Also asking myself if the reason I don’t write about it is because I’m not sure I’ve ever really experienced cuddling not connected to sex. Or in a way that wasn’t sexual. And so I wonder: what is it exactly that I’m saying I really like?
*
At the Noname concert she’s introducing the band and starts by introducing the keyboard player (sorry I don’t remember his name), and we applaud for him, but then she suggests we haven't applauded heartily enough, that we should applaud more enthusiastically, saying: “where I come from we show love.” And right away I feel the anxiety that where I come from it was the opposite. People were awkward, insecure and timid, and I often experienced this as them being cold. I think: where I come from we didn’t show love and of course fear that I still don’t. And don’t think I’ll ever really be able to embody anything like it or know what’s an appropriate expression. But in that moment Noname isn’t exactly talking about love, she’s talking about applause and cheering, so of course we all applaud and cheer for the keyboard player, and then for the rest of the band as each one is introduced.
*
I’ve decided to call this a short story. And as I’m writing it I find myself wondering: is there some way that writing a short story might change my life? If I write that I really like cuddling – and people who know me, but who don’t know I really like cuddling, read it – would that change anything. What kind of confession is it exactly? It doesn’t seem like much, but I find myself unusually reluctant to write about it, so that must mean it’s actually quite a lot. I’ve been writing and publishing for about thirty years now and have gradually come to the conclusion that nothing I write or publish changes my life very much, or at all. But is it very much or at all? Why don’t I quite know?
*
I could maybe start again from another angle. I was writing a novel about war, about a utopia surrounded by war, and I was doing a great deal of research. All that reading and thinking about war became so undeniably bleak. When I began writing novels, many years ago, I promised myself I wasn’t going to write depressing novels but now, about fifteen years after declaring this goal, I was somewhat falling short of it. I felt confident that my war novel wasn’t only depressing, that it was also strange and thoughtful and funny and defined by some slight yet sharp sliver of hope, but it was also clearly depressing. And I thought: if this book is extra-depressing when compared to the others, then whatever I write next should be extra-not-depressing to compensate, and what could I think of that I found extra-not-depressing and the only thing I could think of was cuddling. (That’s not entirely true, I also considered writing about solar energy.) But what kind of novel, or short story, could one possibly write about cuddling? There is something so static about it. And yet isn’t so much of the problem with the world, and with art, embodied by the fact that’s it’s so easy to imagine writing a novel about war and so difficult to imagine writing a novel about cuddling?
*
Someone posts on social media, something like: “touch deprivation is a real thing, we should be talking about it more.” And I try to get my mind around it: touch deprivation is a real thing. Also, on the internet, I remember reading about a “loneliness epidemic,” a phrase that feels to me almost satirical but at the same time all-too-real. (The time I spend online is often spent in a kind of mesmerized loneliness.) There is a loneliness epidemic and it is on the rise. And loneliness is bad for your health. And people can even, in some sense, die from it. And I wonder what it would really take for me to believe such things as facts. Or what community feels like? Or what solidarity feels like? How reading an article, or even a single sentence, on the internet lodges inside your brain and makes you see the world differently, even if you are not entirely convinced that the article or sentence is true. Or in precisely what sense it is true. I’ve thought this before, and think it now again, that the problem is I see my loneliness as my own, as my own private problem, and not as part of some larger social loneliness that we all must try to work towards solving together. I have never tried internet dating, and wonder if the reason I have never tried it is that I don’t want to think of all the people on the internet as real. I would find it almost unbearably sad. But of course they are real. Or most of them are real. And it’s almost terrifying the degree to which I’d prefer not to see it.
.
January 11, 2019
"Strangely enough my ambition tends to come in moments of depression." / A few passages from David Bowie: An Oral History
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[I thought I had never been that interested in David Bowie. But I guess reading David Bowie: An Oral History proved me wrong. Here are a few passages:]
He played with the idea of being a rock star but he was very good at sabotaging that role. And at the moment when he looked like he might become Billy Joel or Elton John - that moment when you get accepted and therefore you are fixed, he walked away. He had to work out: How can I be famous; how can I be that star that I want to be, but also be able to keep changing? Because of course the very consequences often of keeping changing is that you ruin your popularity because those that love you want you to be the same. So he managed to be absolutely the same all the time, always David Bowie, by constantly changing.
- Paul Morley (on seventies Bowie)
His self-analysis was lacerating. He talked a lot about his sense of self, and one of the things that came across, and this was not false modesty, was his constant anxiety that what he was doing wasn’t quite interesting enough. Here was a person who seriously pushed himself, and constantly reevaluated his contribution, and he found himself lacking. Blessing and curse.
- Angus MacKinnon
Even when he was out of favour, he was aware of his out-of-favourness and he was exploiting that because to try not to be out of favour would have been deeply uncool.
- Paul Morley
My biggest mistake during the ‘80s was trying to anticipate what the audience wanted.
- David Bowie
Strangely enough my ambition tends to come in moments of depression.
- David Bowie
.
[I thought I had never been that interested in David Bowie. But I guess reading David Bowie: An Oral History proved me wrong. Here are a few passages:]
He played with the idea of being a rock star but he was very good at sabotaging that role. And at the moment when he looked like he might become Billy Joel or Elton John - that moment when you get accepted and therefore you are fixed, he walked away. He had to work out: How can I be famous; how can I be that star that I want to be, but also be able to keep changing? Because of course the very consequences often of keeping changing is that you ruin your popularity because those that love you want you to be the same. So he managed to be absolutely the same all the time, always David Bowie, by constantly changing.
- Paul Morley (on seventies Bowie)
His self-analysis was lacerating. He talked a lot about his sense of self, and one of the things that came across, and this was not false modesty, was his constant anxiety that what he was doing wasn’t quite interesting enough. Here was a person who seriously pushed himself, and constantly reevaluated his contribution, and he found himself lacking. Blessing and curse.
- Angus MacKinnon
Even when he was out of favour, he was aware of his out-of-favourness and he was exploiting that because to try not to be out of favour would have been deeply uncool.
- Paul Morley
My biggest mistake during the ‘80s was trying to anticipate what the audience wanted.
- David Bowie
Strangely enough my ambition tends to come in moments of depression.
- David Bowie
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January 7, 2019
Kristen Ross: "Why did something happen rather than nothing? And what was the nature of the event that occurred?"
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But the real question, I believe, lies elsewhere, outside the parameters of revolution, failed or not. Why did something happen rather than nothing? And what was the nature of the event that occurred? The attention given to the problematics of power has effaced another set problems at issue in May, and 1960s culture more generally, which we might begin to group under the heading of a no less political question – the question of equality. I mean equality not in any objective sense of status, income, function, or the supposedly “equal” dynamics of contracts or reforms, nor as an explicit demand or a program, but rather as something that emerges in the course of the struggle and is verified subjectively, declared and experienced in the here and now as what is, and not what should be. Such an experience lies to the side of “seizing state power;” outside of that story. The narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power, in other words, is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power. In 1968, “seizing state power” was not only part of the state’s narrative, it expressed the state’s informing desire to complete itself – that is, to totally assimilate the everyday to its own necessities. Limiting May ’68 to that story, to the desire or the failure to seize centralized power, has circumscribed the very definition of “the political,” crushing or effacing in the process a political dimension to the events that may in fact have constituted the true threat to the forces of order, the reason for their panic. That dimension lay in a subjectivation enabled by the synchronizing of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student. It lay in the central idea of May ’68: the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. It lay in the verification of equality not as any objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such. In the course of the struggle, practices were developed that demonstrated such a synchronization, that acted to constitute a common – though far from consensual – space and time. And those practices verified the irrelevance of the division of labour – what for Durkheim was nothing more and nothing less than that which holds a society together and guarantees the continuity of its reproduction. As such, these practices form as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of state – perhaps more so.
- Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives
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But the real question, I believe, lies elsewhere, outside the parameters of revolution, failed or not. Why did something happen rather than nothing? And what was the nature of the event that occurred? The attention given to the problematics of power has effaced another set problems at issue in May, and 1960s culture more generally, which we might begin to group under the heading of a no less political question – the question of equality. I mean equality not in any objective sense of status, income, function, or the supposedly “equal” dynamics of contracts or reforms, nor as an explicit demand or a program, but rather as something that emerges in the course of the struggle and is verified subjectively, declared and experienced in the here and now as what is, and not what should be. Such an experience lies to the side of “seizing state power;” outside of that story. The narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power, in other words, is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power. In 1968, “seizing state power” was not only part of the state’s narrative, it expressed the state’s informing desire to complete itself – that is, to totally assimilate the everyday to its own necessities. Limiting May ’68 to that story, to the desire or the failure to seize centralized power, has circumscribed the very definition of “the political,” crushing or effacing in the process a political dimension to the events that may in fact have constituted the true threat to the forces of order, the reason for their panic. That dimension lay in a subjectivation enabled by the synchronizing of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student. It lay in the central idea of May ’68: the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. It lay in the verification of equality not as any objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such. In the course of the struggle, practices were developed that demonstrated such a synchronization, that acted to constitute a common – though far from consensual – space and time. And those practices verified the irrelevance of the division of labour – what for Durkheim was nothing more and nothing less than that which holds a society together and guarantees the continuity of its reproduction. As such, these practices form as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of state – perhaps more so.
- Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives
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January 4, 2019
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: "There were so many agent provocateurs and informers that it was thought that half the membership of some organizations were infiltrators."
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Police surveillance and infiltration would only grow worse. More than half the fugitive’s on the FBI’s most wanted list were charged with politically motivated crimes. There were so many agent provocateurs and informers that it was thought that half the membership of some organizations were infiltrators. Even the alternative literary presses and moderate antiwar and peace groups were not exempt. The FBI, using provocateurs, was also partly responsible for the violent direction the movement was taking. Inexplicable suicides and accidental deaths were being reported among former participants of the Venceremos Brigades. In the growing atmosphere of surveillance and danger, the necessity to develop a clandestine structure began to seem like the only way to continue our work.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975
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Police surveillance and infiltration would only grow worse. More than half the fugitive’s on the FBI’s most wanted list were charged with politically motivated crimes. There were so many agent provocateurs and informers that it was thought that half the membership of some organizations were infiltrators. Even the alternative literary presses and moderate antiwar and peace groups were not exempt. The FBI, using provocateurs, was also partly responsible for the violent direction the movement was taking. Inexplicable suicides and accidental deaths were being reported among former participants of the Venceremos Brigades. In the growing atmosphere of surveillance and danger, the necessity to develop a clandestine structure began to seem like the only way to continue our work.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975
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Brian Holmes: "A different kind of self can only emerge from resistance to the psychic tsunami of continuous crisis."
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Globalism has produced an unprecedented concentration of socially and ecologically unbearable wealth, an oligarchy beyond anyone’s control. It is too corrupt to govern, too unjust to bear and too powerful to stop without a detailed, sweeping and widely comprehensible project, capable of swaying millions of hearts for more than twenty-four hours, and for more than twenty-four years. No one will create such a project by simply vibrating on the wavelengths of the present. We are entering the kind of era that gives birth to great philosophies and messianic religions. The secret societies of today do not conspire, they don’t use encryption, they don’t plan spectacular campaigns or media coups. They meet steadily and publicly to express emotions, exchange ideas, map systemic trends and constitute world pictures. They learn resilience, renewal, and above all, the capacity to recognise the efforts of similar groups without necessarily coming to immediate agreement.
A different kind of self can only emerge from resistance to the psychic tsunami of continuous crisis. Disconnecting from the neoliberal neural net does not mean ignoring emergent facts, earth-shaking events or split-second changes. It means re-attuning bodies and minds to the deep time of necessary and inevitable transformations in the earth system.
– Brian Holmes, from How do 7 billion interconnected bodies resolve an endless crisis
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Globalism has produced an unprecedented concentration of socially and ecologically unbearable wealth, an oligarchy beyond anyone’s control. It is too corrupt to govern, too unjust to bear and too powerful to stop without a detailed, sweeping and widely comprehensible project, capable of swaying millions of hearts for more than twenty-four hours, and for more than twenty-four years. No one will create such a project by simply vibrating on the wavelengths of the present. We are entering the kind of era that gives birth to great philosophies and messianic religions. The secret societies of today do not conspire, they don’t use encryption, they don’t plan spectacular campaigns or media coups. They meet steadily and publicly to express emotions, exchange ideas, map systemic trends and constitute world pictures. They learn resilience, renewal, and above all, the capacity to recognise the efforts of similar groups without necessarily coming to immediate agreement.
A different kind of self can only emerge from resistance to the psychic tsunami of continuous crisis. Disconnecting from the neoliberal neural net does not mean ignoring emergent facts, earth-shaking events or split-second changes. It means re-attuning bodies and minds to the deep time of necessary and inevitable transformations in the earth system.
– Brian Holmes, from How do 7 billion interconnected bodies resolve an endless crisis
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January 3, 2019
Brian Holmes: "On the other side of the door – outside, if you like – is everyday life, where basically art tends to dissolve and become invisible, or it’s like a cherished memory that you occasionally share with other people."
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Art is a strongly vexed thing because art’s worth money. And it’s worth money because it has a signature. And not only that... it’s not as crude as that, because you can also say that art’s worth money because it has a kind of prestige based on how identifiable the decisions are in it, so we can find out how original it is. That’s how you can price it, by the original decisions. To make those decisions identifiable, the artist has to have chosen to do one thing and not other. To do that they have to be an artist, they have to be an individual.
Or, if they’re a collective, they have to operate as a collective that’s so rigorously controlled that you could say the collective has chosen to do this and not that. And then you can compare it to a whole set of things. That becomes a very evaluative approach where you would analyse the worth of anything in any kind of market by how much it’s comparable to and stands out from other things. Unfortunately that doesn’t have anything to do with collectivity in the sense of creating the basis of autonomy, by which I mean, creating shareable things that will help people to gain a footing in the world, from which they can determine their own experience, their own destiny. Art is continually being pushed away from this quest for collective autonomy.
At the same time, art is the word that we have for places where creation and invention take place. We know that in a complex society, language and images and imagination are some of the places where invention and creativity can happen the most frequently and fruitfully. So art is at a vexed pass, it’s caught between forces that push for its identification and evaluation, and very different desires seeking something that creates autonomy: a difference, other- ness, escape. Art as trap, art as liberation.
But it’s not like there’s an either/or. A lot of people are on the threshold. On one side of the door is the art world, where all those operations of evaluation take place. On the other side of the door – outside, if you like – is everyday life, where basically art tends to dissolve and become invisible, or it’s like a cherished memory that you occasionally share with other people. In the end most people are actually on the threshold. They’re going back and forth between these two things. They don’t go all the way into daily life as the pure unalloyed creation of collective autonomy, because when they do, they get completely lost as artists. Occasionally you meet them. You might run into this person and eventually you find out that they have all of these things to say about art and life, and you’d have never suspected because they didn’t give a sign. But when you stay on the threshold, you can instantly find the people who have lots to say... because they’re producing the signs. They have lots to say all the time, about signs which point away from where they are. It’s weird... but I think if you’re honest with yourself, you will probably have to admit that you’re living on this threshold. Maybe another place to start this conversation is what to do with that location, because it’s real.
– Brian Holmes from Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons
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Art is a strongly vexed thing because art’s worth money. And it’s worth money because it has a signature. And not only that... it’s not as crude as that, because you can also say that art’s worth money because it has a kind of prestige based on how identifiable the decisions are in it, so we can find out how original it is. That’s how you can price it, by the original decisions. To make those decisions identifiable, the artist has to have chosen to do one thing and not other. To do that they have to be an artist, they have to be an individual.
Or, if they’re a collective, they have to operate as a collective that’s so rigorously controlled that you could say the collective has chosen to do this and not that. And then you can compare it to a whole set of things. That becomes a very evaluative approach where you would analyse the worth of anything in any kind of market by how much it’s comparable to and stands out from other things. Unfortunately that doesn’t have anything to do with collectivity in the sense of creating the basis of autonomy, by which I mean, creating shareable things that will help people to gain a footing in the world, from which they can determine their own experience, their own destiny. Art is continually being pushed away from this quest for collective autonomy.
At the same time, art is the word that we have for places where creation and invention take place. We know that in a complex society, language and images and imagination are some of the places where invention and creativity can happen the most frequently and fruitfully. So art is at a vexed pass, it’s caught between forces that push for its identification and evaluation, and very different desires seeking something that creates autonomy: a difference, other- ness, escape. Art as trap, art as liberation.
But it’s not like there’s an either/or. A lot of people are on the threshold. On one side of the door is the art world, where all those operations of evaluation take place. On the other side of the door – outside, if you like – is everyday life, where basically art tends to dissolve and become invisible, or it’s like a cherished memory that you occasionally share with other people. In the end most people are actually on the threshold. They’re going back and forth between these two things. They don’t go all the way into daily life as the pure unalloyed creation of collective autonomy, because when they do, they get completely lost as artists. Occasionally you meet them. You might run into this person and eventually you find out that they have all of these things to say about art and life, and you’d have never suspected because they didn’t give a sign. But when you stay on the threshold, you can instantly find the people who have lots to say... because they’re producing the signs. They have lots to say all the time, about signs which point away from where they are. It’s weird... but I think if you’re honest with yourself, you will probably have to admit that you’re living on this threshold. Maybe another place to start this conversation is what to do with that location, because it’s real.
– Brian Holmes from Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons
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January 1, 2019
A playlist from 2018
I wasn't going to post this. It's 559 videos long and, as I believe I also said last year, I feel it is little more than a testament to how addicted I am to the internet. But, it seems, just like I can't seem to stop myself from saving all the songs I listen to over the year onto a playlist, I can't seem to stop myself from posting it. If I've done so all the previous years than why not this one as well.
Very often, in the office, unsure of what to listen to, I find myself listening to this playlist, starting from the middle or near the end. Or at the beginning. Or listening to lists from previous years. When I'm not online I often can't remember these songs at all, what they are called or who they are by. I feel, before the internet, I remembered so much more about the songs I heard, and most likely also heard far fewer songs.
So many songs.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: "She was researching viruses, hoping to identify a fatal one that would attack males only."
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It took several days for Flo to arrange the meeting with Valerie [Solanas], so T-Grace took me to women’s meetings in New York and introduced me to dozens of women’s liberation activists: some reformists, some radicals, some extremists. One was a young lesbian biologist who avidly supported Valerie, whom she took quite literally. She was researching viruses, hoping to identify a fatal one that would attack males only. She said that once males were eradicated, she planned to introduce chemical reproduction without sperm. Furthermore, women would no longer carry the fetus; rather, the process would take place in the laboratory. She chatted about this idea as if she were discussing the weather. Now I understood what Stokely Carmichael had meant when he said that young black militants in Chicago had called him “Uncle Tom.” When I challenged the young woman, she called me a “daddy’s girl,” Valerie’s term for male-identified women.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975
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It took several days for Flo to arrange the meeting with Valerie [Solanas], so T-Grace took me to women’s meetings in New York and introduced me to dozens of women’s liberation activists: some reformists, some radicals, some extremists. One was a young lesbian biologist who avidly supported Valerie, whom she took quite literally. She was researching viruses, hoping to identify a fatal one that would attack males only. She said that once males were eradicated, she planned to introduce chemical reproduction without sperm. Furthermore, women would no longer carry the fetus; rather, the process would take place in the laboratory. She chatted about this idea as if she were discussing the weather. Now I understood what Stokely Carmichael had meant when he said that young black militants in Chicago had called him “Uncle Tom.” When I challenged the young woman, she called me a “daddy’s girl,” Valerie’s term for male-identified women.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975
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December 31, 2018
December 18, 2018
Some favourite things from my 2018
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[So, yes, as previously mentioned I really do love lists. As with previous years these are in no particular order and not all of them were released in 2018.]
Books
Clandestine Occupations – Diana Block
This Little Art – Kate Briggs
Blood on the Border – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
nîtisânak – Jas M. Morgan
Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown
The Iliac Crest – Cristina Rivera Garza
Thereafter Johnnie – Carolivia Herron
The Needle’s Eye – Fanny Howe
David Hammons: Bliz-Aard Ball Sale – Elena Filipovic
Tell Them I Said No – Martin Herbert
Reading Practice for Rust and Holograms – Nadia Chaney
Music
Rapsody – Laila’s Wisdom
Ivy Sole – Overgrown
Leikeli47 – Acrylic
DijahSB – Dead Is the Pessimist in Me
Noname – Room 25
The Sorority – Pledge
Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Keyboard Fantasies
Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa
Sharon Signs To Cherry Red - Independent Women 1979-1985
Sorja Morja – Sorja
Yasuaki Shimizu – Kakashi
Sonotanotanpenz – 31
Sandro Perri – In Another Life
Devotion – Tirzah
Visual Art
Vies performatives / Performing Lives – Curator: Zoë Chan / with: Bertille Bak, Lisa Jackson, Yoshua Okón, Helen Reed, May Truong
Performance
thegiftsofthegifted – projets hybris
Nous serons universel.le.s – Kamissa Ma Koïta
A Casual (Strikethrough) Reconstruction – Nadia Myre & Johanna Nutter
Sadonna – Miguel Gutierrez and the Slutinos*
Hasards préparés – Dorian Nuskind-Oder & Simon Grenier-Poirier
Film
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me – Jumana Manna
Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival – Fabrizio Terranova
* I liked Sadonna so much I went back to see it the second night and was also extremely struck by two texts I read this year by Miguel Gutierrez: Notes on Idleness and Labor and Does Abstraction Belong to White People?
.
[So, yes, as previously mentioned I really do love lists. As with previous years these are in no particular order and not all of them were released in 2018.]
Books
Clandestine Occupations – Diana Block
This Little Art – Kate Briggs
Blood on the Border – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
nîtisânak – Jas M. Morgan
Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown
The Iliac Crest – Cristina Rivera Garza
Thereafter Johnnie – Carolivia Herron
The Needle’s Eye – Fanny Howe
David Hammons: Bliz-Aard Ball Sale – Elena Filipovic
Tell Them I Said No – Martin Herbert
Reading Practice for Rust and Holograms – Nadia Chaney
Music
Rapsody – Laila’s Wisdom
Ivy Sole – Overgrown
Leikeli47 – Acrylic
DijahSB – Dead Is the Pessimist in Me
Noname – Room 25
The Sorority – Pledge
Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Keyboard Fantasies
Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa
Sharon Signs To Cherry Red - Independent Women 1979-1985
Sorja Morja – Sorja
Yasuaki Shimizu – Kakashi
Sonotanotanpenz – 31
Sandro Perri – In Another Life
Devotion – Tirzah
Visual Art
Vies performatives / Performing Lives – Curator: Zoë Chan / with: Bertille Bak, Lisa Jackson, Yoshua Okón, Helen Reed, May Truong
Performance
thegiftsofthegifted – projets hybris
Nous serons universel.le.s – Kamissa Ma Koïta
A Casual (Strikethrough) Reconstruction – Nadia Myre & Johanna Nutter
Sadonna – Miguel Gutierrez and the Slutinos*
Hasards préparés – Dorian Nuskind-Oder & Simon Grenier-Poirier
Film
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me – Jumana Manna
Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival – Fabrizio Terranova
* I liked Sadonna so much I went back to see it the second night and was also extremely struck by two texts I read this year by Miguel Gutierrez: Notes on Idleness and Labor and Does Abstraction Belong to White People?
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November 29, 2018
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: "Women loved to tell that story and would add that since that incident the men in Managua had left their hands off female strangers in public."
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One story making the rounds when I first arrived was that a policewoman, armed and in uniform, was standing on a packed morning bus headed to her job at the Ministry of Interior when a man pinched her bottom. She drew her sidearm, turned, and shot the assailant dead. The policewoman was placed on leave until trial, at which she was found not guilty based on self-defence and returned to her job. Women loved to tell that story and would add that since that incident the men in Managua had left their hands off female strangers in public.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War
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One story making the rounds when I first arrived was that a policewoman, armed and in uniform, was standing on a packed morning bus headed to her job at the Ministry of Interior when a man pinched her bottom. She drew her sidearm, turned, and shot the assailant dead. The policewoman was placed on leave until trial, at which she was found not guilty based on self-defence and returned to her job. Women loved to tell that story and would add that since that incident the men in Managua had left their hands off female strangers in public.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War
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November 21, 2018
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: "The administration was that brazen."
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The deputy director of the CIA, Bobby Ray Inman, one of the weirdest of that cast of spook characters, was featured at a press conference exhibiting grainy photographs that resembled Rorschach inkblot tests. In a seeming parody of a TV meteorologist, he pointed his white stick at various parts of the photograph and recounted a narrative that had nothing to do with the picture, which he then described as unassailable evidence. The story he told was of a massive Cuban occupation of the northeast region of Nicaragua. He claimed that the landing strip at Puerto Cabezas was being prepared for fighter jets to land and that a Cuban military base was being built; the most telling detail of all, he said, was the appearance of a baseball diamond, which proved the Cubans were there to stay. This caused amusement in Nicaragua, where baseball had been the national sport ever since the US Marines had first occupied the country in the 1890s.
I never figured out if Inman was completely insane or quite crafty. In any case, he resigned in March 1982, and his boss, William Casey, was even loonier. At times, it seemed absurd to try to counteract this nuttiness with rationality. But it was not only the spooks; General Alexander Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state, held a press conference at the Dupont Circle Hilton Hotel in Washington in which he pointed to another photograph (blown up almost two stories tall) and described what he termed as widespread massacres. The photograph showed human bodies enveloped in flames. Haig claimed that these were Miskitu Indians being burned alive by Sandinista soldiers. Newspapers featured the photograph with headlines screaming of massacres and atrocities against the Nicaraguan Indians. During the following days, tiny correction boxes appeared in newspapers - why it wasn’t a big story itself I couldn’t figure out - reporting that the photograph was the property of the conservative French daily Le Figaro, and was taken in 1978, before the Sandinistas took power. The photo actually showed the Red Cross burning corpses of the victims of Somoza’s bombing of civilians in Managua in 1978. The irony was that such massacres were actually happening in nearby Guatemala as Haig spoke, massacres about which the administration said nothing. To my knowledge, no reporter ever questioned Haig about his allegations and misrepresentation of the photograph, nor did he ever admit his deception. The administration was that brazen. Even when corrections were printed, the lies created a kind of populist genocidal logic, in which “exaggerations” were then acknowledged, but people assumed that there must be some core of truth to the charges nevertheless.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War
.
The deputy director of the CIA, Bobby Ray Inman, one of the weirdest of that cast of spook characters, was featured at a press conference exhibiting grainy photographs that resembled Rorschach inkblot tests. In a seeming parody of a TV meteorologist, he pointed his white stick at various parts of the photograph and recounted a narrative that had nothing to do with the picture, which he then described as unassailable evidence. The story he told was of a massive Cuban occupation of the northeast region of Nicaragua. He claimed that the landing strip at Puerto Cabezas was being prepared for fighter jets to land and that a Cuban military base was being built; the most telling detail of all, he said, was the appearance of a baseball diamond, which proved the Cubans were there to stay. This caused amusement in Nicaragua, where baseball had been the national sport ever since the US Marines had first occupied the country in the 1890s.
I never figured out if Inman was completely insane or quite crafty. In any case, he resigned in March 1982, and his boss, William Casey, was even loonier. At times, it seemed absurd to try to counteract this nuttiness with rationality. But it was not only the spooks; General Alexander Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state, held a press conference at the Dupont Circle Hilton Hotel in Washington in which he pointed to another photograph (blown up almost two stories tall) and described what he termed as widespread massacres. The photograph showed human bodies enveloped in flames. Haig claimed that these were Miskitu Indians being burned alive by Sandinista soldiers. Newspapers featured the photograph with headlines screaming of massacres and atrocities against the Nicaraguan Indians. During the following days, tiny correction boxes appeared in newspapers - why it wasn’t a big story itself I couldn’t figure out - reporting that the photograph was the property of the conservative French daily Le Figaro, and was taken in 1978, before the Sandinistas took power. The photo actually showed the Red Cross burning corpses of the victims of Somoza’s bombing of civilians in Managua in 1978. The irony was that such massacres were actually happening in nearby Guatemala as Haig spoke, massacres about which the administration said nothing. To my knowledge, no reporter ever questioned Haig about his allegations and misrepresentation of the photograph, nor did he ever admit his deception. The administration was that brazen. Even when corrections were printed, the lies created a kind of populist genocidal logic, in which “exaggerations” were then acknowledged, but people assumed that there must be some core of truth to the charges nevertheless.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War
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October 28, 2018
Walt McClements / Lonesome Leash Quote
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"I wrote “Gallery Floor” based on two things; an unexpected, charming and short lived (by design) romance with a wonderful man, and reading this book, “Polyamorous Love Song” by Jacob Wren, which is a really lovely piece of experimental fiction. In it, the narrator says this: “most already existing love songs, mainstream or otherwise, were directed towards one person, the ultimate soulmate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song … might undermine some basic songwriting assumptions.”
I thought to take up the challenge proposed in the book, but in many ways feel I failed, as I found the structure of the love song in general warped the narrative tone into one of high drama, like the person you’re singing about is all that matters in the world of the song, and you’re nothing without them. Wren later writes “love songs are propaganda for monogamy,” and after my first attempt at a polyamorous love song I’d have to agree, but think trying to dismantle the structure is a worthwhile exercise."
- Walt McClements / Lonesome Leash
[You can read the rest of the interview here.]
[And listen to the beautiful song “Gallery Floor,” here.]
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"I wrote “Gallery Floor” based on two things; an unexpected, charming and short lived (by design) romance with a wonderful man, and reading this book, “Polyamorous Love Song” by Jacob Wren, which is a really lovely piece of experimental fiction. In it, the narrator says this: “most already existing love songs, mainstream or otherwise, were directed towards one person, the ultimate soulmate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song … might undermine some basic songwriting assumptions.”
I thought to take up the challenge proposed in the book, but in many ways feel I failed, as I found the structure of the love song in general warped the narrative tone into one of high drama, like the person you’re singing about is all that matters in the world of the song, and you’re nothing without them. Wren later writes “love songs are propaganda for monogamy,” and after my first attempt at a polyamorous love song I’d have to agree, but think trying to dismantle the structure is a worthwhile exercise."
- Walt McClements / Lonesome Leash
[You can read the rest of the interview here.]
[And listen to the beautiful song “Gallery Floor,” here.]
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October 26, 2018
October 24, 2018
Miguel Gutierrez Quote
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A few years ago I started to feel that I needed take a break from making performances. I was beginning to feel trapped in a cycle of making and presenting, touring and teaching. My friend mickey introduced me to Walter Benjamin’s quote “the eternal hellish return of the same,” and while Benjamin said this in relationship to the merry go-round of fashion shows and making new designs every year, it felt like a pretty accurate description for the cycle I felt trapped in. One jet lagged night in Hamburg I busied myself by counting all of the nights over the course of the past five years I had spent home and all of the nights I had spent away for work and it came out to 50/50. I was surprised because it felt like I’d been away from home even more than that, but I realized that that was because a lot of the time I spent at home I was either recovering from jet lag or gearing up for another trip. I felt like I could never settle into thinking of New York as my real home and pretty much, over time, most of my friends began to assume that I was gone even when I was home, as I lost the will to keep them up to date with my schedule.
At first I thought I would just stop making art altogether, but I quickly realized that that was ridiculous. It wasn’t about not making stuff per se it was about not leaving all of the time. I began to say no to every offer I got to teach out of town, as this is the kind of travel that usually feels the most isolating, because I’m by myself rather than with my fellow performers. I decided I would only leave New York to tour work that I’d already made. My manager, who, like me, is prone to drama, started calling this whole idea of mine THE SHUTDOWN. I found out he was portraying it as such to other professionals in the field, and this made me nervous. I know how quickly you can fall off the radar of relevance in this field. I started to say, no, I am taking a sabbatical. Seemed like a softer word. It’s conceptual of course because I don’t have a university job or a fellowship or any savings for that matter. I still have to figure out how to make money.
But I have to do it. I have become suspicious of this cycle of production because I feel like it keeps me from truly imagining other modes of artmaking or other notions of audience. I’ve made things that end up in mostly white spaces for mostly white people. I’ve made things that cost a certain amount of money that some people can afford and a lot of people can’t. I’ve made things that mean a lot to certain people in this particular city and that have no impact on most people in other places. The first two concerns are big – like, really, truly how does that change? The last concern feels like it’s about ego, or my persistent wish to become even bigger and more famous somehow. This itinerant lifestyle is also partly to blame for the fact that I haven’t had a boyfriend for over four years. Although, at the same time, this lifestyle has helped me to appreciate and value the sweet intimacies available in other temporal modes of romantic or sexual relation. In Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure there is a cogent and beautiful critique of monogamous hetero-patriarchal family as the dominant and dominating form of kinship, and a real celebration of other, queer forms. I think of this critique often whenever I feel like I’m being too slutty. “I’m experimenting with other forms of queer kinship!” I tell myself and sometimes it’s true and sometimes it isn’t. The point is that the nature of constant production has rendered it impossible for me to know HOW I really feel or WHAT I really want from relationship.
So I’m in it now. 2016 – the year of the sabbatical. I’m not sure what to say about it yet. It’s early days. I CAN report that it’s incredible what a shift of intention or language to describe what you’re doing does to your psyche and to your interactions with others. Right now, quite simply, there’s nothing that I want from anyone. No show that I’m trying to get, no project funding, no good review that I’m hoping for. I’ve gone to a couple of performances this year and the process of sitting and watching something in the theater already feels a little alien and slightly purposeless. Not in a huge existential crisis way, I’m just feeling it out. I’m still comparing myself and my work to this person’s work – does that ever end? – but it feels… softer. I run into people, professionals, peer artists, who don’t know anything of my mythical “sabbatical” and they ask me “So what’s next?” And it’s satisfying to me and them puzzling to them (and to me) when I say, nothing. Nothing’s next. I’m not making a piece right now. And they look at me and I look at them. And they look at me and I look at them. I can’t really be sure what is happening in that moment but I can say that something else happens in that moment.
- Miguel Gutierrez, Notes on Idleness and Labor
.
A few years ago I started to feel that I needed take a break from making performances. I was beginning to feel trapped in a cycle of making and presenting, touring and teaching. My friend mickey introduced me to Walter Benjamin’s quote “the eternal hellish return of the same,” and while Benjamin said this in relationship to the merry go-round of fashion shows and making new designs every year, it felt like a pretty accurate description for the cycle I felt trapped in. One jet lagged night in Hamburg I busied myself by counting all of the nights over the course of the past five years I had spent home and all of the nights I had spent away for work and it came out to 50/50. I was surprised because it felt like I’d been away from home even more than that, but I realized that that was because a lot of the time I spent at home I was either recovering from jet lag or gearing up for another trip. I felt like I could never settle into thinking of New York as my real home and pretty much, over time, most of my friends began to assume that I was gone even when I was home, as I lost the will to keep them up to date with my schedule.
At first I thought I would just stop making art altogether, but I quickly realized that that was ridiculous. It wasn’t about not making stuff per se it was about not leaving all of the time. I began to say no to every offer I got to teach out of town, as this is the kind of travel that usually feels the most isolating, because I’m by myself rather than with my fellow performers. I decided I would only leave New York to tour work that I’d already made. My manager, who, like me, is prone to drama, started calling this whole idea of mine THE SHUTDOWN. I found out he was portraying it as such to other professionals in the field, and this made me nervous. I know how quickly you can fall off the radar of relevance in this field. I started to say, no, I am taking a sabbatical. Seemed like a softer word. It’s conceptual of course because I don’t have a university job or a fellowship or any savings for that matter. I still have to figure out how to make money.
But I have to do it. I have become suspicious of this cycle of production because I feel like it keeps me from truly imagining other modes of artmaking or other notions of audience. I’ve made things that end up in mostly white spaces for mostly white people. I’ve made things that cost a certain amount of money that some people can afford and a lot of people can’t. I’ve made things that mean a lot to certain people in this particular city and that have no impact on most people in other places. The first two concerns are big – like, really, truly how does that change? The last concern feels like it’s about ego, or my persistent wish to become even bigger and more famous somehow. This itinerant lifestyle is also partly to blame for the fact that I haven’t had a boyfriend for over four years. Although, at the same time, this lifestyle has helped me to appreciate and value the sweet intimacies available in other temporal modes of romantic or sexual relation. In Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure there is a cogent and beautiful critique of monogamous hetero-patriarchal family as the dominant and dominating form of kinship, and a real celebration of other, queer forms. I think of this critique often whenever I feel like I’m being too slutty. “I’m experimenting with other forms of queer kinship!” I tell myself and sometimes it’s true and sometimes it isn’t. The point is that the nature of constant production has rendered it impossible for me to know HOW I really feel or WHAT I really want from relationship.
So I’m in it now. 2016 – the year of the sabbatical. I’m not sure what to say about it yet. It’s early days. I CAN report that it’s incredible what a shift of intention or language to describe what you’re doing does to your psyche and to your interactions with others. Right now, quite simply, there’s nothing that I want from anyone. No show that I’m trying to get, no project funding, no good review that I’m hoping for. I’ve gone to a couple of performances this year and the process of sitting and watching something in the theater already feels a little alien and slightly purposeless. Not in a huge existential crisis way, I’m just feeling it out. I’m still comparing myself and my work to this person’s work – does that ever end? – but it feels… softer. I run into people, professionals, peer artists, who don’t know anything of my mythical “sabbatical” and they ask me “So what’s next?” And it’s satisfying to me and them puzzling to them (and to me) when I say, nothing. Nothing’s next. I’m not making a piece right now. And they look at me and I look at them. And they look at me and I look at them. I can’t really be sure what is happening in that moment but I can say that something else happens in that moment.
- Miguel Gutierrez, Notes on Idleness and Labor
.
October 14, 2018
Possible opening for a book-length essay tentatively entitled The Conditions for Human Flourishing
.
I’m worried that I’m going to write too many books. This is book number eight. Perhaps I think eight is already too many. But it is also already too late to have written less. Philip Roth dies in [reminder to look up the year that Philip Roth dies.] At the book store they dedicate a small wall to all of his books, most of them in the same edition, each with the exact same spine. And standing in front of his books I think: he is my exact image of a writer who wrote too many books. I’ve only ever read one book by Philip Roth and I liked it but thought he completely fucked up the ending. I imagine someone reading this and then, years later, meeting me, out of curiosity asking me which Roth title I once read. And I imagine myself telling them.
And this next thought is really a stretch. But I imagine that writing too many books has something to do with the end of the world. (I just remembered that I’ve actually read two books by Roth, both a very long time ago.) That to produce and continue producing, without any thought for limits or demand, and what’s more to produce as an individual, away from any collectivity or collective constraints, is tangentially connected to the desire for infinite growth on our rather finite planet. Of course, I will not produce books infinitely or even indefinitely. Sooner or later I will die. And this is also somehow connected to the end of the world. We overproduce because we know the clock is ticking, that we are running out of time, a perverse inversion of the fact that we are running out of time because we overproduce.
But I have already misspoke. I don’t believe the coming environmental collapse will be the end of the world. I believe billions of people will die, the world population will be corrected towards previous levels, it will be the worst thing humanity has ever witnessed and therefore also a wakeup call for us to change our ways. This isn’t what I want to happen. Just as I don’t want to write too many books. And another related thought: I find it extremely difficult to just do nothing. This is a quote from Ruth Levitas:
[Unfinished]
.
I’m worried that I’m going to write too many books. This is book number eight. Perhaps I think eight is already too many. But it is also already too late to have written less. Philip Roth dies in [reminder to look up the year that Philip Roth dies.] At the book store they dedicate a small wall to all of his books, most of them in the same edition, each with the exact same spine. And standing in front of his books I think: he is my exact image of a writer who wrote too many books. I’ve only ever read one book by Philip Roth and I liked it but thought he completely fucked up the ending. I imagine someone reading this and then, years later, meeting me, out of curiosity asking me which Roth title I once read. And I imagine myself telling them.
And this next thought is really a stretch. But I imagine that writing too many books has something to do with the end of the world. (I just remembered that I’ve actually read two books by Roth, both a very long time ago.) That to produce and continue producing, without any thought for limits or demand, and what’s more to produce as an individual, away from any collectivity or collective constraints, is tangentially connected to the desire for infinite growth on our rather finite planet. Of course, I will not produce books infinitely or even indefinitely. Sooner or later I will die. And this is also somehow connected to the end of the world. We overproduce because we know the clock is ticking, that we are running out of time, a perverse inversion of the fact that we are running out of time because we overproduce.
But I have already misspoke. I don’t believe the coming environmental collapse will be the end of the world. I believe billions of people will die, the world population will be corrected towards previous levels, it will be the worst thing humanity has ever witnessed and therefore also a wakeup call for us to change our ways. This isn’t what I want to happen. Just as I don’t want to write too many books. And another related thought: I find it extremely difficult to just do nothing. This is a quote from Ruth Levitas:
However, ‘doing nothing’ is here intended also as a positive proposal. Politicians may declare that 'we need to do more and we need to do it faster’. The opposite is true. We need to do less, and we need to do it more slowly. Doing a lot more nothing, including sleeping, would reduce resource consumption, lower stress levels and enable social relations more conducive to dignity and grace…I really love the books of Renee Gladman. When I read them, I feel many similarities and affinities between how and why we both write. However, when it comes to my identity, I am probably more like Philip Roth, who I feel almost no affinity towards.
[Unfinished]
.
Notes towards a novel tentatively entitled Promiscuous Bewilderment
.
A person who sets up a museum in their home.
A horse that climbs into a boat.
Reading a non-fiction book and encountering a minor character, a character mentioned only in passing, but who is clearly portrayed as despicable, and then gradually realizing the character is based on you.
Being a public figure whose private life does not match up with their public image. The fear of being exposed or being blackmailed.
Spending years trying to find your idol, finding him, at which point he attempts to scam you out of money.
.
A person who sets up a museum in their home.
A horse that climbs into a boat.
Reading a non-fiction book and encountering a minor character, a character mentioned only in passing, but who is clearly portrayed as despicable, and then gradually realizing the character is based on you.
Being a public figure whose private life does not match up with their public image. The fear of being exposed or being blackmailed.
Spending years trying to find your idol, finding him, at which point he attempts to scam you out of money.
.
October 8, 2018
15 Favorite Compilations
.
[As is well documented, I really love lists. A few years ago I made a list of Twenty all-time albums. I was recently thinking that, since then, my favourite albums have substantially changed, or a least I might well have twenty new ones. But then I thought such a process could easily just go on forever. And I also got to thinking that a lot of the records I listen to the most are in fact compilations. So here, in no particular order, is a list of some of those.]
1970’s Algerian Folk And Pop
1970's Algerian Proto-Rai Underground
Black Man's Cry: The Inspiration Of Fela Kuti
Brand New Wayo - Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Madness 1979-1983
Lipa Kodi Ya City Council: Nigerian High Life
Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974-1984
Sky Girl: Compiled by Julien Dechery and DJ Sundae
Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa
Sharon Signs To Cherry Red: Independent Women 1979-1985
Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992
Good God! Apocryphal Hymns
Nextlife
Gumba Fire: Bubblegum Soul & Synth-Boogie in 1980s South Africa
Louder Than A Bomb Mixtape 2018
Jamla is the Squad
.
[As is well documented, I really love lists. A few years ago I made a list of Twenty all-time albums. I was recently thinking that, since then, my favourite albums have substantially changed, or a least I might well have twenty new ones. But then I thought such a process could easily just go on forever. And I also got to thinking that a lot of the records I listen to the most are in fact compilations. So here, in no particular order, is a list of some of those.]
1970’s Algerian Folk And Pop
1970's Algerian Proto-Rai Underground
Black Man's Cry: The Inspiration Of Fela Kuti
Brand New Wayo - Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Madness 1979-1983
Lipa Kodi Ya City Council: Nigerian High Life
Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974-1984
Sky Girl: Compiled by Julien Dechery and DJ Sundae
Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa
Sharon Signs To Cherry Red: Independent Women 1979-1985
Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992
Good God! Apocryphal Hymns
Nextlife
Gumba Fire: Bubblegum Soul & Synth-Boogie in 1980s South Africa
Louder Than A Bomb Mixtape 2018
Jamla is the Squad
.
October 3, 2018
October Thought Residency
.
For the month of October I will be in Thought Residency at the SpiderWebShow. Posting 30 seconds of thought three days a week. You can find it all here.
.
For the month of October I will be in Thought Residency at the SpiderWebShow. Posting 30 seconds of thought three days a week. You can find it all here.
.
September 4, 2018
A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling in Malmö, Düsseldorf and Reykjavík
.
The new PME-ART project A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling will be on tour soon:
Malmö
October 26th & 27th, 2018
InKonst
Facebook Event
Düsseldorf
November 7th & 9th, 2018
FFT Juta
Facebook Event
Reykjavík
November 15th & 16th, 2018
Everybody´s Spectacular
Facebook Event
[As well, if you don't already know, there is also a book: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART.]
.
The new PME-ART project A User’s Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling will be on tour soon:
Malmö
October 26th & 27th, 2018
InKonst
Facebook Event
Düsseldorf
November 7th & 9th, 2018
FFT Juta
Facebook Event
Reykjavík
November 15th & 16th, 2018
Everybody´s Spectacular
Facebook Event
[As well, if you don't already know, there is also a book: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART.]
.
August 29, 2018
M. NourbeSe Philip Quote
.
It was during those lectures I heard one of the truisms that form part of the canon on African art, and one which helps foster another type of erasure - this time about Western art. It also reveals how useful African art and primitivism have become as countercultural alternatives to Western art practices.
African art is functional, inseparable from the social order, the argument goes, vis-à-vis the Western art tradition where art by designation is what we have come to understand art to mean. Integral to this approach is the belief that art exists here in the West over and above the social order - often apart from the social order. The commodity value assigned to art - and to the artist - makes it a part of the economy, but essentially it is a thing apart - alien, alienated and, at times, alienating.
It is, however, integral to the concept and understanding of art here in the West, that its connection to the social matrix - to labour, history and politics - not be seen, acknowledged or articulated. Which is where the African and Oceanic - the primitive - has served such a useful purpose, for with the primitive, the cultural connections between art and the social fabric - although irrevocably torn - could be clearly seen and held up as a significant difference from the Western tradition.
On the one hand, the cultural object forcibly torn out of its context, assigned artistic value and meaning, and reinterpreted as functional - an integral part of the social order; on the other, the cultural object still within its context, but with its connections to the social fabric hidden or obliterated. What are, in fact, flip sides of the same coin are presented as radical differences.
- M. NourbeSe Philip, from Blank: Essays & Interviews
.
It was during those lectures I heard one of the truisms that form part of the canon on African art, and one which helps foster another type of erasure - this time about Western art. It also reveals how useful African art and primitivism have become as countercultural alternatives to Western art practices.
African art is functional, inseparable from the social order, the argument goes, vis-à-vis the Western art tradition where art by designation is what we have come to understand art to mean. Integral to this approach is the belief that art exists here in the West over and above the social order - often apart from the social order. The commodity value assigned to art - and to the artist - makes it a part of the economy, but essentially it is a thing apart - alien, alienated and, at times, alienating.
It is, however, integral to the concept and understanding of art here in the West, that its connection to the social matrix - to labour, history and politics - not be seen, acknowledged or articulated. Which is where the African and Oceanic - the primitive - has served such a useful purpose, for with the primitive, the cultural connections between art and the social fabric - although irrevocably torn - could be clearly seen and held up as a significant difference from the Western tradition.
On the one hand, the cultural object forcibly torn out of its context, assigned artistic value and meaning, and reinterpreted as functional - an integral part of the social order; on the other, the cultural object still within its context, but with its connections to the social fabric hidden or obliterated. What are, in fact, flip sides of the same coin are presented as radical differences.
- M. NourbeSe Philip, from Blank: Essays & Interviews
.
August 28, 2018
keyon gaskin: "You can get it how i decide to give it to you, but you can't get it like you want it. Now what?"
.
i haven't always had normative access to this world, being in my body, being how i am. It has everything to do with being queer, punk, anti-professional, anti-capitalist. i've been refused access the whole time, and now you want to access me? You can get it how i decide to give it to you, but you can't get it like you want it. Now what?
But i'm also not invested in my success, and this is also a big part of my practice that i hold onto. Look, i can die poor and nobody can know my work. i love my family and friends, eating, being by the water, enjoying existence. i am a very resourceful person and i'll be fine. i don't need your institution to validate me.
- keyon gaskin
[From: keyon gaskin in conversation with Essence Harden.]
.
i haven't always had normative access to this world, being in my body, being how i am. It has everything to do with being queer, punk, anti-professional, anti-capitalist. i've been refused access the whole time, and now you want to access me? You can get it how i decide to give it to you, but you can't get it like you want it. Now what?
But i'm also not invested in my success, and this is also a big part of my practice that i hold onto. Look, i can die poor and nobody can know my work. i love my family and friends, eating, being by the water, enjoying existence. i am a very resourceful person and i'll be fine. i don't need your institution to validate me.
- keyon gaskin
[From: keyon gaskin in conversation with Essence Harden.]
.
August 24, 2018
August 19, 2018
David Graeber Quote
.
In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely and very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves “the Avant Garde”. It was Marx though who began to significantly change the idea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true revolutionary class — he didn’t actually use the term “vanguard” in his own writing — because they were the one that was the most oppressed, or as he put it “negated” by capitalism, and therefore had the least to lose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything significant to offer. The results we all know. The idea of a vanguard party dedicated to both organizing and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willingness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late ’60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as the leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a curious effect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiques, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always defined themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then finally the Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter denunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical conclusion was for the International to be finally reduced to two members, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)
The historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes have been explored at length by others. For me though the really intriguing questions is: why is it that artists have so often been so drawn to revolutionary politics to begin with? Because it does seem to be the case that, even in times and places when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary change, the one place one is most likely to find one is among artists, authors, and musicians; even more so, in fact, than among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the answer must have something to do with alienation. There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively) — that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated production — and the ability to imagine social alternatives; particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity. Which would allow us to see the historical shift between seeing the vanguard as the relatively unalienated artists (or perhaps intellectuals) to seeing them as the representatives of the “most oppressed” in a new light. In fact, I would suggest, revolutionary coalitions always tend to consist of an alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than it might sound, because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to occur when these two categories come to overlap. That would at any rate explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftspeople — or alternately, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftspeople — who actually rise up and overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people’s struggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to as the “anti-globalization” movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is technologically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it is almost inevitable that they should take a leading role.
- David Graeber, from The Twilight of Vanguardism
.
In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely and very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves “the Avant Garde”. It was Marx though who began to significantly change the idea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true revolutionary class — he didn’t actually use the term “vanguard” in his own writing — because they were the one that was the most oppressed, or as he put it “negated” by capitalism, and therefore had the least to lose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything significant to offer. The results we all know. The idea of a vanguard party dedicated to both organizing and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willingness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late ’60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as the leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a curious effect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiques, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always defined themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then finally the Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter denunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical conclusion was for the International to be finally reduced to two members, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)
The historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes have been explored at length by others. For me though the really intriguing questions is: why is it that artists have so often been so drawn to revolutionary politics to begin with? Because it does seem to be the case that, even in times and places when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary change, the one place one is most likely to find one is among artists, authors, and musicians; even more so, in fact, than among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the answer must have something to do with alienation. There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively) — that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated production — and the ability to imagine social alternatives; particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity. Which would allow us to see the historical shift between seeing the vanguard as the relatively unalienated artists (or perhaps intellectuals) to seeing them as the representatives of the “most oppressed” in a new light. In fact, I would suggest, revolutionary coalitions always tend to consist of an alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than it might sound, because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to occur when these two categories come to overlap. That would at any rate explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftspeople — or alternately, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftspeople — who actually rise up and overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people’s struggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to as the “anti-globalization” movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is technologically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it is almost inevitable that they should take a leading role.
- David Graeber, from The Twilight of Vanguardism
.
August 18, 2018
Maria Irene Fornes Quote
.
I think it’s more obvious when the fame stops and the person cannot continue putting out and putting out and putting out – and so the public or the press stop being flattering, and then it’s very painful. People can spend a year being famous, the talk of the town, and then, gradually, there is a kind of lessening of it until in the end there is none of it. It can destroy people. Almost like someone they adored died, or something inside them died. I saw that happen with a couple of people who were friends of mine. And I thought, I certainly would not ever wish not to be famous but if I ever am famous I promise myself to be very, very, careful.
- Maria Irene Fornes
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I think it’s more obvious when the fame stops and the person cannot continue putting out and putting out and putting out – and so the public or the press stop being flattering, and then it’s very painful. People can spend a year being famous, the talk of the town, and then, gradually, there is a kind of lessening of it until in the end there is none of it. It can destroy people. Almost like someone they adored died, or something inside them died. I saw that happen with a couple of people who were friends of mine. And I thought, I certainly would not ever wish not to be famous but if I ever am famous I promise myself to be very, very, careful.
- Maria Irene Fornes
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August 17, 2018
Gustavo Esteva Quote
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I was in the streets and I was participating in the reactions against the killings. But, still, I was very puzzled with a very intense moral conflict inside myself. I rushed to my Gandhi, the guy of non-violence, to read again and to try to understand myself. I discovered something that I had not read before. There is an interview with Gandhi and he talks with his son. There has been an attempt against Gandhi. And his son asks Gandhi, “Father, what should I do if there is a guy trying to kill you, comes against you and tries to kill you? Should I preach non-violence? Should I passively observe the situation? Or should I use my violence against him to stop the killing?” And Gandhi smiled and said, “Well, the only thing you must not do is to do nothing because if non-violence is the supreme virtue, to be cowardly is the worst of vices and you must not be a coward. You must do something. Passive resistance is not the best. Perhaps it is the only resource of the weak but the weak also have violence and they can use the violence as the last resource if they are the weak.” “Non-violence is for the strong,” said Gandhi. “It would be criminal if I preach non-violence to a mouse on the point of being devoured by a cat. If I am preaching non-violence to the Hindu it is because I don’t see why 300 million people are afraid of 150,000 British. Because they are strong, they should use non-violence.”
- Gustavo Esteva
[From Interview with Gustavo Esteva: The Society of the Different.]
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I was in the streets and I was participating in the reactions against the killings. But, still, I was very puzzled with a very intense moral conflict inside myself. I rushed to my Gandhi, the guy of non-violence, to read again and to try to understand myself. I discovered something that I had not read before. There is an interview with Gandhi and he talks with his son. There has been an attempt against Gandhi. And his son asks Gandhi, “Father, what should I do if there is a guy trying to kill you, comes against you and tries to kill you? Should I preach non-violence? Should I passively observe the situation? Or should I use my violence against him to stop the killing?” And Gandhi smiled and said, “Well, the only thing you must not do is to do nothing because if non-violence is the supreme virtue, to be cowardly is the worst of vices and you must not be a coward. You must do something. Passive resistance is not the best. Perhaps it is the only resource of the weak but the weak also have violence and they can use the violence as the last resource if they are the weak.” “Non-violence is for the strong,” said Gandhi. “It would be criminal if I preach non-violence to a mouse on the point of being devoured by a cat. If I am preaching non-violence to the Hindu it is because I don’t see why 300 million people are afraid of 150,000 British. Because they are strong, they should use non-violence.”
- Gustavo Esteva
[From Interview with Gustavo Esteva: The Society of the Different.]
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August 15, 2018
Yasmin Nair Quote
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Because I am actually, surprisingly, deeply optimistic. And I can give you historical examples. I’ll give you an example: when people talk about queer history, we tend to forget that there was a time, just to take the most recent history, there was a time in the 30s and 40s when to be outed as gay was the end of your life. And it was completely unrealistic to ever imagine a world where you could actually be out. And if that has changed today, to a degree, it is because we had relentless hope! [Laughter.] There’s this crazy optimism that we had. But if you fast-forward just a few decades, think about the ‘80s, and you think about the fact that the reason why we ever got anything resembling healthcare for queer people, the reason we got even just one motherfucking AIDS drug, ever, was that a whole ton of people—with many of whom I have many differences over marriage, since their radicalism turned out to be bound to a time and place—but a whole lot of very angry queers fucked up the system, and said “You can’t even conceive of the idea that I could die peacefully in a hospital, but I’m going to tell you that it has to be possible. You can’t even conceive of me as a person who deserves life, but I’m going to tell you that you need to work on pharmaceuticals for me.” I mean queer history has always been about demanding the impossible. And, you know, call it optimism, call it brashness, call it just a refusal to take no for an answer… So when people come to me and say, oh, you’re not being realistic, I want to ask, well, what motherfucking revolution has not been unrealistic?
- Yasmin Nair
[from An Interview with Yasmin Nair, Part Two: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma]
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Because I am actually, surprisingly, deeply optimistic. And I can give you historical examples. I’ll give you an example: when people talk about queer history, we tend to forget that there was a time, just to take the most recent history, there was a time in the 30s and 40s when to be outed as gay was the end of your life. And it was completely unrealistic to ever imagine a world where you could actually be out. And if that has changed today, to a degree, it is because we had relentless hope! [Laughter.] There’s this crazy optimism that we had. But if you fast-forward just a few decades, think about the ‘80s, and you think about the fact that the reason why we ever got anything resembling healthcare for queer people, the reason we got even just one motherfucking AIDS drug, ever, was that a whole ton of people—with many of whom I have many differences over marriage, since their radicalism turned out to be bound to a time and place—but a whole lot of very angry queers fucked up the system, and said “You can’t even conceive of the idea that I could die peacefully in a hospital, but I’m going to tell you that it has to be possible. You can’t even conceive of me as a person who deserves life, but I’m going to tell you that you need to work on pharmaceuticals for me.” I mean queer history has always been about demanding the impossible. And, you know, call it optimism, call it brashness, call it just a refusal to take no for an answer… So when people come to me and say, oh, you’re not being realistic, I want to ask, well, what motherfucking revolution has not been unrealistic?
- Yasmin Nair
[from An Interview with Yasmin Nair, Part Two: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma]
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August 14, 2018
Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda Quote
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But to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race—that it’s the one region of self or experience that is free of race—and that I have a right to imagine whoever I want, and that it damages and deforms my art to set limits on my imagination—acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made “me.” So to say, as a white writer, that I have a right to write about whoever I want, including writing from the point of view of characters of color—that I have a right of access and that my creativity and artistry is harmed if I am told I cannot do so—is to make a mistake. It is to begin the conversation in the wrong place. It is the wrong place because, for one, it mistakes critical response for prohibition (we’ve all heard the inflationary rhetoric of scandalized whiteness). But it is also a mistake because our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds. To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.
- Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, from On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary
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But to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race—that it’s the one region of self or experience that is free of race—and that I have a right to imagine whoever I want, and that it damages and deforms my art to set limits on my imagination—acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made “me.” So to say, as a white writer, that I have a right to write about whoever I want, including writing from the point of view of characters of color—that I have a right of access and that my creativity and artistry is harmed if I am told I cannot do so—is to make a mistake. It is to begin the conversation in the wrong place. It is the wrong place because, for one, it mistakes critical response for prohibition (we’ve all heard the inflationary rhetoric of scandalized whiteness). But it is also a mistake because our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds. To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.
- Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, from On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary
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August 5, 2018
adrienne maree brown: "connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness..."
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Understanding that you can be wrong, have been wrong, helps to increase the compassion needed to work through the emotional and material impacts of being wronged by another.
We often think that we must hold our position, regardless of what we learn or feel. But in fact, the opposite is true. We must learn to develop positions together, adapting to the changing conditions around us - sometimes this means we must relinquish our positions, to voice our feelings and thoughts, and hear and be influenced, by other people's opinions and information. Dialectical humanism suggests that mature humans actually need to be able to adjust beliefs and plans in the realm of changing conditions.
I know there is this idea that we grow less radical as we age, and that relinquishing radical positions is a way this manifests. This keeps people from allowing themselves to be open to their own new emotions, their new understandings. I think the truth is that, as we age, we realize the world is more complex, and we allow ourselves to get woven into that complexity. I am more radical now than I was ten years ago, although it may not look like it. I am more radical in my body, I am more radical in my clarity about the apocalyptic future and my belief that connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness - we don't want to cling to outdated paradigms; we want to cling to each other and shift the paradigms.
The world is changing all the time."
- adrienne maree brown, from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds
.
Understanding that you can be wrong, have been wrong, helps to increase the compassion needed to work through the emotional and material impacts of being wronged by another.
We often think that we must hold our position, regardless of what we learn or feel. But in fact, the opposite is true. We must learn to develop positions together, adapting to the changing conditions around us - sometimes this means we must relinquish our positions, to voice our feelings and thoughts, and hear and be influenced, by other people's opinions and information. Dialectical humanism suggests that mature humans actually need to be able to adjust beliefs and plans in the realm of changing conditions.
I know there is this idea that we grow less radical as we age, and that relinquishing radical positions is a way this manifests. This keeps people from allowing themselves to be open to their own new emotions, their new understandings. I think the truth is that, as we age, we realize the world is more complex, and we allow ourselves to get woven into that complexity. I am more radical now than I was ten years ago, although it may not look like it. I am more radical in my body, I am more radical in my clarity about the apocalyptic future and my belief that connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness - we don't want to cling to outdated paradigms; we want to cling to each other and shift the paradigms.
The world is changing all the time."
- adrienne maree brown, from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds
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August 4, 2018
Six quotations on individualism
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There is no ‘human individual.’ There is a psyche that is socialized and, in this socialization, in the final result, there is almost nothing individual in the true sense of the term.
– Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments
Social emancipation is not the choice of community against individualism. The very opposition of community to individualism is pointless. A form of community is always a form of individuality at the same time.
– Jacques Rancière, Democracy, Equality, Emancipation in a Changing World
In the 1960s many people came to realize that in a truly revolutionary collective experience what comes into being is not a faceless or anonymous crowd or “mass” but, rather, a new level of being… in which individuality is not effaced but completed by collectivity. It is an experience that has now slowly been forgotten, its traces systematically effaced by the return of desperate individualisms of all kinds.
– Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method
The trouble is, as soon as therapeutic schools start to formalize and professionalize their procedures they nearly always—advertently or not—enmesh themselves in interiorizing philosophies of one kind or another. There are in fact very few approaches to psychological therapy that don’t in some measure subscribe to individualist, idealist and/or what I call magical voluntarist positions. All such approaches have their foundation in a general cultural assumption that is in fact very hard to shake off—i.e., that fundamentally we are all individuals who just happen to find ourselves in societies. I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that fundamentally we are social creatures who just happen to feel as individuals.
– David Smail
The European bourgeoisie were progressive when they defended the individual from the excessive control of the father in the family and against the collective regulations of the church and feudal society. However, the capitalist system then went on to champion and protect the rights of the individual property owners against the rights of the mass of exploited workers and peasants. When capitalism had its impact on Africa in the colonial period, the idea of individualism was already in its reactionary phase. It was no longer serving to liberate the majority but rather to enslave the majority for the benefit of a few.
– Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
This is not to say there is no space for individual creation - I love the selfishness of closing the world out and unleashing the realm of my imagination and creativity. But how do we disrupt the constant individualism of creation when it comes to society, our shared planet, our resources?
The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the foundational level in this world.
Meaningful collaboration both relies on and deepens relationship - the stronger the bond between the people or groups in collaboration, the more possibility you hold. In beginning this work, notice who you feel drawn to, and where you find ease. And notice who challenges you, who makes the edges of your ideas grow or fortify. I find that my best work has happened during my most challenging collaborations, because there are actual differences that are converging and creating more space, ways forward that serve more than one worldview.
– adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds
.
There is no ‘human individual.’ There is a psyche that is socialized and, in this socialization, in the final result, there is almost nothing individual in the true sense of the term.
– Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments
Social emancipation is not the choice of community against individualism. The very opposition of community to individualism is pointless. A form of community is always a form of individuality at the same time.
– Jacques Rancière, Democracy, Equality, Emancipation in a Changing World
In the 1960s many people came to realize that in a truly revolutionary collective experience what comes into being is not a faceless or anonymous crowd or “mass” but, rather, a new level of being… in which individuality is not effaced but completed by collectivity. It is an experience that has now slowly been forgotten, its traces systematically effaced by the return of desperate individualisms of all kinds.
– Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method
The trouble is, as soon as therapeutic schools start to formalize and professionalize their procedures they nearly always—advertently or not—enmesh themselves in interiorizing philosophies of one kind or another. There are in fact very few approaches to psychological therapy that don’t in some measure subscribe to individualist, idealist and/or what I call magical voluntarist positions. All such approaches have their foundation in a general cultural assumption that is in fact very hard to shake off—i.e., that fundamentally we are all individuals who just happen to find ourselves in societies. I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that fundamentally we are social creatures who just happen to feel as individuals.
– David Smail
The European bourgeoisie were progressive when they defended the individual from the excessive control of the father in the family and against the collective regulations of the church and feudal society. However, the capitalist system then went on to champion and protect the rights of the individual property owners against the rights of the mass of exploited workers and peasants. When capitalism had its impact on Africa in the colonial period, the idea of individualism was already in its reactionary phase. It was no longer serving to liberate the majority but rather to enslave the majority for the benefit of a few.
– Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
This is not to say there is no space for individual creation - I love the selfishness of closing the world out and unleashing the realm of my imagination and creativity. But how do we disrupt the constant individualism of creation when it comes to society, our shared planet, our resources?
The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the foundational level in this world.
Meaningful collaboration both relies on and deepens relationship - the stronger the bond between the people or groups in collaboration, the more possibility you hold. In beginning this work, notice who you feel drawn to, and where you find ease. And notice who challenges you, who makes the edges of your ideas grow or fortify. I find that my best work has happened during my most challenging collaborations, because there are actual differences that are converging and creating more space, ways forward that serve more than one worldview.
– adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds
.
August 2, 2018
adrienne maree brown: "Never a failure, always a lesson."
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"In the study and practice of emergent strategy, there are core principles that have emerged and that guide me in learning and using this idea and method in the world. I gather them here with the expectation they will grow.
Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)
Change is constant. (Be like water.)
There is always enough time for the right work.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.
Never a failure, always a lesson.
Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.)
Move at the speed of trust. Focus on the critical connections more than critical mass - build the resilience by building the relationships.
Less prep, more presence.
What you pay attention to grows."
- adrienne maree brown, from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds
.
"In the study and practice of emergent strategy, there are core principles that have emerged and that guide me in learning and using this idea and method in the world. I gather them here with the expectation they will grow.
Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)
Change is constant. (Be like water.)
There is always enough time for the right work.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.
Never a failure, always a lesson.
Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.)
Move at the speed of trust. Focus on the critical connections more than critical mass - build the resilience by building the relationships.
Less prep, more presence.
What you pay attention to grows."
- adrienne maree brown, from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds
.
August 1, 2018
Myung Mi Kim Quote
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The undecidability of whether I am making a difference or not – that ambiguity is part of the answer. Part of the work of answering the question of social efficacy has to include the ambiguity. If you actually had an answer, you wouldn’t be taking in the whole full weight of the questions.
- Myung Mi Kim
[Taken from Generosity as Method: An Interview with Myung Mi Kim.]
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The undecidability of whether I am making a difference or not – that ambiguity is part of the answer. Part of the work of answering the question of social efficacy has to include the ambiguity. If you actually had an answer, you wouldn’t be taking in the whole full weight of the questions.
- Myung Mi Kim
[Taken from Generosity as Method: An Interview with Myung Mi Kim.]
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