[-empyre-] ml-vs-tl-rb-rs: relational aesthetics, catholic style, then agnostic ...

[David Chirot]

every question is an inquisition (or interrogation) -rb (attributed)

yes--"interrogation of the text"--

in an interrogation during/for torture for example:  what matters is not the
content, assumed to be "questionable," "of questionable use and
verity,"--but the fact that there is a spoken, shrieked, groaned, spat out
through broken bleeding teeth,  reply--
reply, a speaking that is forced--
a Russian artist wrote that "language is a fascism because it forces one to
speak"

i do not know if you accept attachments, but if so, this collage has a quote
relevant to the discussion from jean genet, coupled with one from St Paul,
the famous "For now we see, As Through a glass, darkly--"

inVermont, where i grew up, the older vermonters held to the tradition of
answering a question with another question--

that way the interroagtion is turned back on the interrogater as an
interrogating of him/her--

to refuse the role of being "subject to questioning"--
"le droit de refus" the right to refuse/of refusal--

"the Literature of the NO"--refusal to write by a writer--
(Rimbaud, Melville's Bartleby the Scriver, many others real and fictional in
works by hofmannstahl, Edgardo Villa-Matas, variations in Borges and Bolano
and in works by chirot)
in part becuase to do so means that one is "subject to interrogation" of the
text, the author--


read in french, genet works a lot with the role of masculine and feminine in
the naming of things persons actions ideas--
clusters of feminine nouns for example --will gather around a masculine
figure, a live man--

while the macusline and feminie may also change--or there wil take place a
fmininizing of a masculine noun or verb and vice versa--

the use of colors and their genders as names also plays  role--
does one wish to abolish or keep in ones lexicon, one's consiouness, the
colors of the French flag which are the colors of that State and country
which has condemned on its language?
to abolish from any part of one's being & lexicon the colors red, white,
blue?--

in genet's plays the relationships of Maids, The Blacks, etc are "subjects"
of interrogations of power relationships--
to overthrow a color or a social status is also in effect to change a coded
gendered relationship--

Genet, passionate suporter of the Black Panthers and Palestinian people,
remakred that he chose to support causes as long as they were not the
dominant-
not the State--the Flag--the Governement--the prison, etc-- (in french all
masculine nouns)

genet's "queer eye and ear and hand" so to speak, are continually
transforming and retransfroming the world via the names, the actions, the
colors, the races, the power relationshsips which can be shuffled back and
forth as gendered "le" or "la"--masucline/feminine--of the French language--

"the queering of the text" becomes "literalized'" in this activity, in this
often cry of love--"prisoner of love"--(title of his last book, on two years
spent living with the Palestinians in early 1970's)--

in an interview with Wm Burroughs about he, genet and terry Southern
covering the Democratic Convention in Chicao 1968, with the violent
confrontations which the police initaiated and wreaked on protestors and
reports--Burroughs noted that rather than being angry at the cops as
Burroughs was, genet was fascinated bywhat their boots represented, this
hard shiny masculine leather, odorsof leather-and what distrubing Burroughs
even further was that genet found the crotch areas as they stercthed
andmovedinside the unifroms something erotic--

everytime one things one has reached "an understanding" of and with the
genet text and vision--it shifts, moves, becomes again an elusive thief,
stealing the objectsof understanding and friendshipo, or "fellowship,
identitifcation" one as a reader he knows might find in his writing--

as he doesin ppolitics, being a suporter of the oppressed until they succeed
in their revolts-
so he does in the writing--when the moment of a "succesful enoucnter' has
occurred, or is thought be the reader to have occured, he fllesm and if
possible before theentirety of this understanding can occur, so that he
isnot theone subjected to ano other's domination--

even thoughas with the Chicgo cops, something crude and violent in cops as
muc as i crimanls turns him on

antoer aspects of genet's writing is that he writes in a very classical,
pure frnech, like that of racine for example--he uses this Hig Clasical
style to "queer it" via his subject matters and his shifting back and forth
of masculine and feminie words--so that within the very forml, "pure"
classical form, he is continually undoing it, yet wiihout breaking the
style--
not the from, whic he shaters frm withi and makes complete destabilized--
but the style--
as style isoneof the formenost concerns of genet i examining the world--andi
n style, what is stylish for example is made askew turned topsy turvy,
"punked" and "queered"

(see dick hebdige's excellent book Subculture: The Meaning of Style which
has lot re genet--and Barthes, TS Eliot and Punk)

the Catholic faith of France is also turned into literally and literaraly  a
"gay affair"' in the magnificent The Miracle of the Rose--

in the writings of Rimbaud and verlaine during and after their
relationshsip, there is also this shifting of the roles of each of the poets
via the languge used by the toher to delinate thri love, their rage, their
hate, their desire, their ridicule--al formsof emotion become destabilized
as the masculine and feminie not only as nouns change but also the way each
poet sees the oether--as man, woman, child--"the Virgin wife and the
Infernal husband" as one art of Rimbaud's A season in hell is called--

the use of classical French style which is shot through from inside with
everything that is the opposite of it in termsof contents, genering of
words, of vison--is aslo found earlier in Baudelaire's work, where it is
also an underming of a stable strucutre by at once "using it" and "abusing
it"
i hope this is useful--

in ap unning wway one might say thes works are "relational" in that they are
about "having relations" with an other (excepting Baudlelaire-) man and also
"having relations" with the uses/abuses of language as a form of love and
desire of the very word itself, its gendered name--
and from that play with the words genders, destabilizing stable structures
which are very "in place, centralized" in France--the State, the Prison, the
School, the Factory, the Land--
from with these solid structures there begins to be generated a swarm, a
swarming of "sex changed, transgendered words and ideas"--creating a Theater
(and in the Theater after al a run of a play is called "a season")--

in Deleuze's great book on Masochism, he reformalutes masochism  as
"somewhere a Father is being beaten"

that is, the masochist is beating that Father within themselves,, that super
ego that panopiiticon observing every sin, every vile act thought or words--
and "containing them, condmening them" to prisons,institutions, graveyards"
mascochism then as evinced in Rimbaud and geneet, who are very much beating
the fathers--becomes a form of Liberation in whcih again, the revrsal of
gendered roles andnames "upsets" "the way things are"--

by a swrming form of attack--on everything in
site/cite/site--language--colors--genders--everything is in flux--and at the
same theirony of the container remaining in the form of a classical
style--for genet
while Rimbaud is the opposite--he destroys and re-invenets "it needs to be
reinvented!"-

neither writer wanted ever to become so to speak aan "institution in
thesmlves"--hence the contiinual fleeing from writing in genet's later
decdes and rimbaud's flight into action and silence-
the desrie not to be imprisoned, or turned into a statue--a sybol of the
State--not to, in Franz Fanon's terms, "interiorize" the one who crushes
onself--andbegins to wear the mask one things the Master wants to
see--(Fanon: "Black Skin, White Masks")

in the sense of questioning as being continually used as a destabilizer and
rearranger, reinventor, a questioning which begins fro the very first words
one learns--of the words themsleves-one arrives also at a questioiniong of
questioning

who questions?
and why?
and--i have the right to refuse
and let losse the swarm of attacks and refuslas and silence which begin fro
the first instants, the first words--
agsint this monolithic "questioiner, questioning" of the "one presumed to
Know"--

(beat that father!)

to overthrow or disarm or dissasmble to destabilise and disabuse the
question and questioner thesmlves--
so as not be "framed " byway of an answering--as that answering in its mere
ly being utter aloud, is the caputuilation to the toture whcihf forcesone to
speak

with genet and rimabud--theyare not going to speak in reply
but swarm back on the attacks at every juncture of every word of the
question--via silence--and via ASKING BACK BETTER QUESTIONS IN BETTER
LANGAUGE--

the triumph of style-as a refual to speak in the same language as the
torturer--to over turn his langauge and turn him into anything--a little
gril, a flower, a house .

to turn aggression inside out andinto love. .






On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 6:09 AM, Marc Leger <leger.mj at gmail.com> wrote:

> a futurist-deconstructionist poem from robert!and there i was thinking
> that i am first of all the subject of a lack
>
>
>
>
> 2009/7/9 Robert Summers <robtsum at gmail.com>
>
> every question is an inquisition (or interrogation) -rb (attributed)
>>
>> ---
>>
>> ink stains: (s)tain(t)ed
>>
>> tainted ...
>>
>> ... love
>>
>> (desire): (     )
>>
>> "wayward landscape" -- md
>>
>> ---
>>
>> the baroness!
>>
>> (                                     !)
>>
>> ---
>>
>> every caress a blow
>> every love a hate
>> every tainting a cleansing
>>
>> ---
>>
>> the internal edges of the passe-partout framing the artwork (however
>> construed) are often beveled (jd) ...
>>
>> ... "sip my ocean" ... (i never said i didn't)
>>
>> the act of interpretation -- and the body and desire of s/he who
>> interprets are bound up in the process of framing, the frame ...
>>
>> beveled
>>
>> leak-ing
>>
>> tainted ... stained
>>
>> ---
>>
>> blood, feces, semen, vaginal secretions ... all ... none
>>
>> "bed" -rr
>>
>> wasit!
>>
>> ([not] reading desire in the exclamation point)  !
>>
>> ---
>>
>> so, then is art (history, criticism, viewing, etc.) always already
>> relational ("")
>>
>> over-determined
>>
>> some god will speak
>>
>> i though they were all dead ... especially him
>>
>> ---
>>
>> is philosophy relational or ...
>>
>> ---
>>
>> relational aesthetics is not just about art (traditionally understood)
>>
>> ---
>>
>> so, is art queer then?
>>
>> (reading the desire [the love] in the question mark)   ?
>>
>> ---
>>
>> i hear echos: is anybody there!
>>
>> (reading desire in the "anybody")
>>
>> ---
>>
>> and in the end must we prove how smart we really aren't?
>>
>>
>> ---
>>
>> there you go again ... not answering the question!
>>
>> i love you
>>
>> Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
>> Lecturer
>> Art History and Visual Culture
>> Otis College of Art and Design
>> e: rsummers at otis.edu
>> w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>
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