[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 56, Issue 10
Lessa Bouchard
lessabouchard at hotmail.com
Thu Jul 9 12:26:15 EST 2009
Hi! Posted SkeletonWoman:Dreaming on Vimeo today after a couple days of Herculean struggle with the slippery hydra-heads of OS platforms and sharptoothed compression settings. Now I can actually write some conversational stuff.
http://vimeo.com/5515223
password: Skeleton Woman
Let me know if you can't get to it!
> From: empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: empyre Digest, Vol 56, Issue 10
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 12:00:45 +1000
>
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on Queer
> M?sentente (Marc Leger)
> 2. Re: Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on Queer
> M?sentente (Christina McPhee)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:30:57 -0400
> From: Marc Leger <leger.mj at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on
> Queer M?sentente
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>, Christina
> McPhee <christina at christinamcphee.net>, Robert Summers
> <robtsum at gmail.com>, lotu5 at resist.ca, virginia.solomon at gmail.com
> Message-ID:
> <cac3b210907080830v33ea08d2jb149e9421345d4fb at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> hi, just to jump back in, not from the middle, but from a commanding height,
> like Murnau's Mephistopheles (sort of like the absent Baudelaire figure that
> sustains the imaginations of the technocratic managers of neoliberal
> cultural institutions - i.e. cultural attack on the system of bourgeois
> productivity/as bourgeois productivity)
> i would like to say a few things that may be helpful, but without
> reiterating some of the strong points of queer theory
>
> for me queer is relevant inasmuch as it takes us away from insisting on sex
> acts and sexual expression/experience/taste, especially as this becomes part
> of an identity politics (revealing norms through performativity), the
> symptom that is in me more than me but that makes me talk about it all the
> time so that no actual queering is possible. this is to keep in mind
> Lacan's "il n'y a pas de relation," which is supplanted by the plethora of
> perverisons, the matrixial, virtual "plague of fantasies" that are not only
> not prohibited by capitalism but encouraged as the obscene underside of the
> official "fill in the boxes male/female, married/single" - as Foucault
> already explained viz. the incitement to discourse. in this sense, we could
> say that queer is occupied, o-coup?, and pre-occupied, barred by the
> relations of intention, which are retroactive effects of meaning.
>
> in the Lacanian understanding the subject's desire is the desire of the
> Other. the Other's desire does not lead to my "solidification" as Virginia
> mentioned, but to my castration (in jouissance, which could in fact include
> Barthes' version of readerly bliss), as Lacan phrased it, "showing me my
> soft watch." if this castration is the solidification that you mean, then
> at least we're able to explain social formation - like the totemism of
> neocloneservative bald heads. so let's be clear, this is not what Bersani
> has in mind when he talks about the self-shattering that comes with having
> oneself sodomized (or penetrated in any other sexually ecstatic way - i.e.
> like being fired from a job or becoming the object of a public secret
> mediated by the net), if by this one assumes that this implies undermining
> bourgeois subjectivity
>
> we need to at least be able to define the bourgeoisie as yes, a product of
> ideology, which implies cultural meanings and incompleteness/alterability,
> but also as part of the development of the capitalist mode of production,
> the class that owns and controls the means of production. here, when we
> think of (micro) politics that are not oriented toward electoral politics,
> policy and the state, i think we should not lose sight of the state mode of
> production, which has been the case with people influenced, for example, by
> Ranci?re's distinction of politics (the political) and the police/policy (if
> I get these terms correctly). not only are there mega-corporations beyond
> the sign of state and electoral politics, but there are also plenty of ways
> that these companies encourage, demand experiences of self-shattering
> (moving in the direction of the work of Deleuze and Guattari,
> autonomists/post-operaists and also those who mistakenly take from this the
> idea that capitalism is friendlier than communism).
>
> footnote: Maurice Blanchot's writing on community has some interesting
> things to say about both unworking (? la Nancy) in relation to love - which
> is not far from the psychoanalytic definition of love as "giving something
> you don't have to somebody who doesn't want it" - the whatever subjectivity
> of lovers that dissolves social bonds.
>
> another note: the void would perhaps be a good start for understanding
> virology, which Lacan develops with the concept of the Real - Derrida also
> being greatly influenced by Freud's fort/da (the trauma that cannot be
> mastered, only repeated; the dangerous rem(a)inder)
>
> Micha's post makes a good point but also misses one crucial point; it is not
> the death of autonomy, but autonomy as a condition of living death (Hegel
> for today's creative labour). what aesthetic strategies could stop the
> vancouver olympics? my answer is that what we have here is a job for the
> perverted avant-garde - the relative autonomy of living death (i.e.
> traversing the fantasy) is the way to go and i am with you. my own approach
> is anti-capitalist organization, beyond affinity - a constituted form of
> power, mediated by fetishism and what i call "sinthomeopatic identification"
> (identification with the symptom). affinity will do for now but in my
> marxist/communist (critical of anarchism) opinion it is not enough.
>
> what is worth fantasizing about? good question, especially after the
> disappearance of the M.S. Fantasia (Madalena). also a good follow-up to
> Turbulence journal's "why is it that it's easier to imagine the end of the
> world than to change things?" fantasy actually addresses the problem of
> that very formulation
> (which, by the way, Turbulence left out of their issue, not liking Zizek and
> not, I would say, understanding critical dialectical realism enough - and
> assuming that these questions are behind us, which is, as i argued, the very
> form of today's concrete universal - which is where i disagree with Mouffe's
> agonism (c.f. the Lacanian split law) and Holloway & co's multiplicity,
> becoming animal and what have you)
>
> reimagining sex is one way that we ignore the (non)relations of fantasy that
> structure the field of cultural production, which by the way i do not, as V
> suggested, associate with a set style (did you mean set theory?). style is
> rather more like a response, an unintentional, symptomatic reaction to a
> situation
>
> sorry if this does not go in the direction of gay (art) world making. don't
> worry, i'll get mine.
> but am i getting fleshy ?
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 10:06:43 -0700
> From: Christina McPhee <christina at christinamcphee.net>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on
> Queer M?sentente
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Message-ID: <E1532FC5-CB96-4073-B818-ED42C9F4D677 at christinamcphee.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
> WHOA!!!! I had no idea one of our guests has been, all this time,
> actually above the -empyrean-.
>
> Is this a descent from Olympus (probably Vancouver--hey its a Left
> Coast kind of trip)? Feeling like Zeus, scamming around, looking
> for Leda? Or, as Baudelaire would dream, of Hermes at the crossroads?
>
> Warning: Hermes is the god of artists, wayfarers, thieves, left-handed
> people and psychotics.
>
>
> Like the author of Correspondances, I dream of metamorphs. Dear
> mortals: THIS week to write about actual works of art.
>
> Let's start with Virginia's "Tainted Love."
>
> And... while we are on the subject: Expose yourselves (sorry!) to some
> of the works of art that have been already introduced in this space.
> Skeleton Woman, Bromance, Tesserae. Meat Love. Tainted Love. Blood
> and Glass.
>
> I look forward especially to more on the exhibition 'Tainted Love,",
> specific works in it.
>
> Emily Roysdon, artist, editor, agent provocateur, arrives soon.
>
>
>
> -your moderator
>
>
> On Jul 8, 2009, at 8:30 AM, Marc Leger wrote:
>
> > hi, just to jump back in, not from the middle, but from a commanding
> > height, like Murnau's Mephistopheles (sort of like the absent
> > Baudelaire figure that sustains the imaginations of the technocratic
> > managers of neoliberal cultural institutions - i.e. cultural attack
> > on the system of bourgeois productivity/as bourgeois productivity)
> .....
> >
> > i would like to say a few things that may be helpful, but without
> > reiterating some of the strong points of queer theory
>
> ........
> >
> >
> > sorry if this does not go in the direction of gay (art) world
> > making. don't worry, i'll get mine.
> > but am i getting fleshy ?
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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> End of empyre Digest, Vol 56, Issue 10
> **************************************
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