frog k here, trans shitposter & weirdo. i hate to do this again but a bunch of bills came out at once and i’m broke and hungry and my car’s brakes are going to shit, please help me if you can
Despite moments of infatuation on both sides, these were not love relationships. The few hustlers excepted, they were not business relationships. They were encounters whose most important aspect was that mutual pleasure was exchanged—an aspect that, yes, colored all their other aspects, but that did not involve any sort of life commitment. Most were affable but brief because, beyond pleasure, these were people you had little in common with. Yet what greater field and force than pleasure can human beings share? More than half were single encounters. But some lasted over weeks; others for months; still others went on a couple of years. And enough endured a decade or more to give them their own flavor, form, and characteristic aspects. You learned something about these people (though not necessarily their name, or where they lived, or what their job or income was); and they learned something about you. The relationships were not (necessarily) consecutive. They braided. They interwove. They were simultaneous. These relationships did not annoy or in any way distress the man I was living with—because they had their limits. They were not the central relationships of my life. They made that central relationship richer, however, by relieving it of many anxieties.
—Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
“In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1848: “The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity.” Less than a century later, Weber says of the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (as if he were talking about the results of a car crash) that “they called to the streets, and the streets killed them.” The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passersby. The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed. For the mass of unemployed, demobilized workers without an occupation, Paris is a tapestry of trajectories, a series of streets and avenues in which they roam, for the most part, with neither goal nor destination, subject to a police repression intended to control their wanderings. For the various revolutionary groups… it will be less a matter, when the time comes, of occupying a given building than of holding the streets. In 1931, during the National Socialists’ struggle against the Marxist parties in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels notes, “Whoever can conquer the streets also conquers the State!” Can asphalt be a political territory? Is the bourgeois State and its power the street, or *in* the street? Are its potential force and expanse in the places of intense circulation, on the path of rapid transportation?”
— Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio (via morphodyke)
“You ask whether societies of control or communication would give rise to forms of resistance capable of giving a new chance for a communism conceived as a ‘transverse organization of free individuals.’ I don’t know; perhaps. But this would be impossible if minorities got back hold of the megaphone. Maybe words, communication, are rotten. They’re entirely penetrated by money: not by accident, but by their nature. We have to detourn/misuse words. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The important thing is maybe to create vacuoles of non-communication, interrupters who escape control.”
— Gilles Deleuze, responding to Antonio Negri (via tiqqun)
Simultaneously a premise and hypothesis, at the centre of
this project is a claim about what aesthetic experience can do for feminist
critique. I take aesthetic experience to name not only the generative,
thought-producing process of “the expression of the imagination,” as Percy
Shelley defended the “vitally metaphorical” poetic language that “marks the
before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension,”
but also—and more significantly, according to the terms of the discussion to
come—the dialectical modes of perception and aesthetic judgement that Theodor
Adorno describes in Aesthetic Theory
and Notes to Literature. Speaking
about the aesthetic concept of interpretive understanding, Adorno maintains
that
if that concept is
meant to indicate something adequate, something appropriate for the matter at
hand, then today it needs to be imagined more as a kind of following along
afterward [Nachfahren]; as the
co-execution [Mitvollzug] of the
tensions sedimented in the work of art, the processes that have congealed and
become objectified in it. One does not understand a work of art when one
translates it into concepts—if one simply does that, one misunderstands the
work from the outset— but rather when one is immersed in its immanent movement;
I should almost say, when it is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its
own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along
with it.
The power of “the ‘cognitive yet nonconceptual character’ of
poetry” to draw the subject into its internal dynamics is not missed by Ngai,
who, drawing on Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s reading of Adorno, underlines that
“the enigmatic ‘muteness’ of poetry is thus linked not just to its refusal of
communicative language, but to its turn toward a mimesis that involves the
subject, in a ‘silent internal tracing of the work’s articulations,’
assimilating herself to the object’s form.” Because the poetic works that
comprise the focus of this study emerge from experiences of simultaneously
abstract and material relations, they not only tell us about the formal
characteristics of gender relations as they are lived and felt on both highly
personal and all-too-disinterested scales, but do so in a way that allows us
“extra-conceptual” access to a perceptible world understood in dialectical
relation to the abstractions that both emerge from it and in turn define it.
Thus, I aim to show how what Vishmidt has called, “a rationality premised on
sensuous non-knowledge,” or a form of experience beyond the concept, is made
possible in these works, as well as how this “non-knowledge” may help to show,
often with painful specificity, how gender oppression is inextricably bound up
in racial oppression and the reproduction of class relations.
Amy De’Ath, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in
Contemporary Feminized Poetics
Marx’s argument with empiricist models of political economy,
which took as their starting point the observable concrete world, is that in
order to understand capitalist totality, it is necessary to move analytically
from the abstract and towards the concrete. As he writes in the Grundrisse, “the concrete is concrete
because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the
diverse.” The following passage by Tony Smith not only helps to clarify why
Marx’s theory begins with abstract labour in order to think about abstraction,
but underlines how capitalist abstractions, emerging from the material actions
of individuals, have an objective reality:
The notion of abstract
labor is not won through a formal cognitive process of abstracting a common
feature shared by all commodities. It emerges instead from the social
process of commodity exchange, a real
process that is independent of the subjective cognitive acts of the theorist.
And abstract labor is an abstraction that uncovers the essential determination
of the object realm under investigation. It captures the intrinsic specificity
of a particular form of social production. For both of these reasons labor must
be considered as a “real abstraction” rather than a merely formal abstraction.
… it is important to remember how abstract labour—and
subsequently, all capitalist abstractions, “independent of the cognitive acts
of the theorist,” emerge from a real process. As the inaugural analyst of real
abstraction, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, puts it:
Abstraction is therefore
the effect of the action of men, and not of their thought. In reality, it takes
place “behind their backs,” at the blind spot, so to speak, of human
consciousness, that is there where the thinking and efforts of men are absorbed
by their acts of exchange.
Emphasizing the reality of capitalist abstractions as a
palpable force, this dissertation is intended as a contribution to the effort
to recover an understanding of materialism as the analysis of real, social
abstractions, to borrow Alberto Toscano’s words; a materialism fundamentally
opposed, among other things, to the recent emergence of feminist new
materialisms, whose understandings of particulate matter as a vital,
transhistorical force— matter whose agency preexists and extends beyond the human
subject—are already coming to bear on critical interpretations of feminized
poetry and ecopoetics.
Amy De’Ath, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in
Contemporary Feminized Poetics
