Like an envelope, folded in
spent days in bed howling at walls
Drank and smoked and ruined my skin
named the liquids going through you
Waited
Punched the furniture full of holes
found God, then lost him at bus stops
Burnt my tongue on piping coffee
carved nonsense onto surfaces
Waited
Compared our scars to old paintings
called for revolution in Greece
Accepted soup and sympathy
became self absorbed and wrote verse
Caved in
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Attempt 1
I couldn't read this book until I realised I was fully out of love with you. Somehow I was horrified of associating you with mutilated locks and necromantic medics. Atypical, really, as it would be fruitless to try and count the times when I've been reading and wondered 'what would () think?'. Its probably something to do with names, referential signifiers, you'd know more about that than I would.
We appeared to grow up through those books: together? apart? It hardly seems worth wondering anymore. Our pathologies stretched in lines before us, a highway measured by our bookshelves. Look where they brought us to! To class war, to marching in the pouring rain down grey stained streets, to smoking outside coffee shops and arguing about situationism (much to the dismay of passing preppies) or drunken renditions of the red flag in crowded bars.
In short, through the annotations in each other's books, we can tell the stories of our lives, through what we felt it right to write on (or do squiggles around the margins of) you can tell affinities, projections, our post hoc interpretations of our younger selves.
But how did these words beget our deeds? In what perverse way did the traces left by dead (wo)men with tragic stories - Blake, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Marx, Wolstoncroft, Debord (to name a few who's insides bear your inscriptions: 'will to power as biology', 'race as veil of maya', 'utter bollocks') - set our living hearts and limbs alive? What force in these aged projected us forward into action.
You put your finger on the essence of it once in traffic, nonchalantly flicking through Ayer and biting your lips before looking up shraply and saying
'You can't live like that, can you?'
I've been trying to reach to the bottom of that profound statement since you said it. Our Fred gets you, as proved by your vigorous underlining in my '...Zarathustra', you both remain a mystery to me. Maybe that's because I live through these books whereas they live through you. I'm trying to understand us both.
The starting point has to be this radical deficiency we found with the world. That it made no sense. This huge swirling tornado, affectionately called 'life', was wont to rip the head off of anything in its way. To deny it was there, and that was what I think you were railing against, was impossible. You are it, you can't deny yourself. But to just accept it? To shrug and say 'that's life'? Why couldn't we have done that? Is Pathology the neccesarry precondition for philosophy and art? The answer to that question is probably 'yes'. How arrogant we must be to look at this glorious mess of a world and want to systematise it, explain it, represent it anew! I guess we needed those treatise and poems to make our lives bearable. It seems as if unless we can understand our relation to the world we are powerless against it, or, that through our intoxication with ideas we are somehow safe. So we picked up our texts like a soldier his rifle, or an alcoholic his bottle.
We appeared to grow up through those books: together? apart? It hardly seems worth wondering anymore. Our pathologies stretched in lines before us, a highway measured by our bookshelves. Look where they brought us to! To class war, to marching in the pouring rain down grey stained streets, to smoking outside coffee shops and arguing about situationism (much to the dismay of passing preppies) or drunken renditions of the red flag in crowded bars.
In short, through the annotations in each other's books, we can tell the stories of our lives, through what we felt it right to write on (or do squiggles around the margins of) you can tell affinities, projections, our post hoc interpretations of our younger selves.
But how did these words beget our deeds? In what perverse way did the traces left by dead (wo)men with tragic stories - Blake, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Marx, Wolstoncroft, Debord (to name a few who's insides bear your inscriptions: 'will to power as biology', 'race as veil of maya', 'utter bollocks') - set our living hearts and limbs alive? What force in these aged projected us forward into action.
You put your finger on the essence of it once in traffic, nonchalantly flicking through Ayer and biting your lips before looking up shraply and saying
'You can't live like that, can you?'
I've been trying to reach to the bottom of that profound statement since you said it. Our Fred gets you, as proved by your vigorous underlining in my '...Zarathustra', you both remain a mystery to me. Maybe that's because I live through these books whereas they live through you. I'm trying to understand us both.
The starting point has to be this radical deficiency we found with the world. That it made no sense. This huge swirling tornado, affectionately called 'life', was wont to rip the head off of anything in its way. To deny it was there, and that was what I think you were railing against, was impossible. You are it, you can't deny yourself. But to just accept it? To shrug and say 'that's life'? Why couldn't we have done that? Is Pathology the neccesarry precondition for philosophy and art? The answer to that question is probably 'yes'. How arrogant we must be to look at this glorious mess of a world and want to systematise it, explain it, represent it anew! I guess we needed those treatise and poems to make our lives bearable. It seems as if unless we can understand our relation to the world we are powerless against it, or, that through our intoxication with ideas we are somehow safe. So we picked up our texts like a soldier his rifle, or an alcoholic his bottle.
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Problemata: the question of absence
A friend of mine asked me to meet her today to talk about Marx' theory of commodity fetishism. We duly met up and had a really good chat about the labour metaphysics that led to that point and different interpretations of what the fetishm entailed. The last moment, as I see it, of the fetishisation of the commodity is the point where the consumer of a given product is socially drawn into a masochistic relation to their own needs. As Deleuze points out, in Coldness and Cruelty, the masochist gets his kicks (read 'has the same basic needs as') the non-masochist. He does, however, have the meta-need that his initial need requires its own deference as a neccesary precondition for the need's fulfilment. There is no point within Venus in Furs where we can legitimately suggest that Wanda is not sexually coveted, however, consumation cannot be achieved until the game of deference (which creates its own peaks and troughs of intensity and proximity to the desired body) reaches its own ultimate endgame, where an organised contract expires, leaving one free from the continuation of servitude but having exhuasted the qualitative possibilities of deference.In consumerist speak, then, X is unable to fulfil his basic need of getting from A to B without the deference of its fulfilment through the buying of a certain kind of car, without which the qualitative comfort of the fulfiled need is impossible.
What, then, if the contract never ends? In Marxian terms, what if we find ourselves with this created need but don't have the funds to afford the deference. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position of permanently being defered from our deference.How does such a state manifest itself?
Whilst I will not disagree for a second with the Marxist thesis that all our experiences are dictated by the material distrobutions we find ourselves under, the manifestations do not always occur in direct relation to our own roles within structures of production.
The deference of deference is absence or presence. in the positive case (where I say I'll stop smoking tommorrow while lighting up) it manifests itself as a continuing engagement, a presence, in the negative as intentionality/comportment towards a displaced thing in the world. But how does this show up for us? How can we comport ourselves towards something not there?
This 'something' is further complicated by the commodification of human beings themselves. When we anthopomorphise the object and objectify the human, we find ourselves in a position where we can claim no ontological difference between the deference of the commodity fetishism and, say, the practice in Masoch's novel. While no-one in their right mind can pretend that we've reached a point where we universally value things as much as people, we must recognise that in the dual movement shown above there is a worrying tendency that is difficult to characterise. The final question, then, is how we even distinguish the commodity deference from our longing for another human being?
What, then, if the contract never ends? In Marxian terms, what if we find ourselves with this created need but don't have the funds to afford the deference. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position of permanently being defered from our deference.How does such a state manifest itself?
Whilst I will not disagree for a second with the Marxist thesis that all our experiences are dictated by the material distrobutions we find ourselves under, the manifestations do not always occur in direct relation to our own roles within structures of production.
The deference of deference is absence or presence. in the positive case (where I say I'll stop smoking tommorrow while lighting up) it manifests itself as a continuing engagement, a presence, in the negative as intentionality/comportment towards a displaced thing in the world. But how does this show up for us? How can we comport ourselves towards something not there?
This 'something' is further complicated by the commodification of human beings themselves. When we anthopomorphise the object and objectify the human, we find ourselves in a position where we can claim no ontological difference between the deference of the commodity fetishism and, say, the practice in Masoch's novel. While no-one in their right mind can pretend that we've reached a point where we universally value things as much as people, we must recognise that in the dual movement shown above there is a worrying tendency that is difficult to characterise. The final question, then, is how we even distinguish the commodity deference from our longing for another human being?
Monday, 13 September 2010
Who was the invisible man?
It was one of those beautifully ironic pieces of fan jesting, no-one I've asked seems to know who's idea it was to give birth to him, he was, like so many gods and icons, proclaimed from the stands without his nature being disclosed, the difference was that those devotees did not even accept their own existence:
We are not,
We're not really here,
We are not,
We're not really here,
Just like the fans
Of the Invisible Man
We're not really here
Such postmodern epistemological theorising did, and still does, resound from the home end of Eastlands. Its announcement is the Nietzschean unity in the abnegation of the self. That blissful overcoming of the individual will. Here, it whispered to us, ye are no longer bus drivers, buskers, bakers or medical monstrosities. Here you are the faithful. Oh, sing, mine congregation, sing through thine mouthfulls of balti pies and cold tea.
A couple of years ago, I bought a t-shirt bearing an outline and the legend 'Man City Legends: The Invisible Man'. I am now able to, and often do, show my devotion to my translucent patron saint whilst going about my daily buisiness. But I am doing someone else's buisiness too. Unlike the church fathers I am not about my father's work, but, rather, the work of marketers, buying into the increased commodification of football. Taking the spontaneous outbursts of fans into items to be bought and sold. That moment of unity becomes a statement I can make if I have the cash. I did, in doing so I stuck my dagger into His ribs and sank my fangs into His jugular (this proved difficult as, being invisible, He was not easy to locate).
We are His murderers, you and I. How shall we atone for this sin of sins? What new chants must we create? What are these stadiums now but His tombs and sepulchers?
We are not,
We're not really here,
We are not,
We're not really here,
Just like the fans
Of the Invisible Man
We're not really here
Such postmodern epistemological theorising did, and still does, resound from the home end of Eastlands. Its announcement is the Nietzschean unity in the abnegation of the self. That blissful overcoming of the individual will. Here, it whispered to us, ye are no longer bus drivers, buskers, bakers or medical monstrosities. Here you are the faithful. Oh, sing, mine congregation, sing through thine mouthfulls of balti pies and cold tea.
A couple of years ago, I bought a t-shirt bearing an outline and the legend 'Man City Legends: The Invisible Man'. I am now able to, and often do, show my devotion to my translucent patron saint whilst going about my daily buisiness. But I am doing someone else's buisiness too. Unlike the church fathers I am not about my father's work, but, rather, the work of marketers, buying into the increased commodification of football. Taking the spontaneous outbursts of fans into items to be bought and sold. That moment of unity becomes a statement I can make if I have the cash. I did, in doing so I stuck my dagger into His ribs and sank my fangs into His jugular (this proved difficult as, being invisible, He was not easy to locate).
We are His murderers, you and I. How shall we atone for this sin of sins? What new chants must we create? What are these stadiums now but His tombs and sepulchers?
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