A tune upon the blue guitar

tiresias 1

2007-04-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

tiresias the theban prohet never slept alone. sleep meant two eyes closed and myriad opened on the life stages of every theatre ever dreamt. that is what it meant to be a prophet and so he slept infrequently. awake, he had the defenses of language to hold back the current. asleep, the microtides blasted his corporeal form to less than plasma. tiresias grasped his beard when he felt his eyes unable to fight the weight of weeks of sleeplessness. asked to explain, which he wasn't, tiresias would reflect upon this gesture as a dogged attempt to keep hold of his self. damn. he could explain each hair on his beard as a relationship to a distinct dimension of corporeality. ha. not many people said he hadn't earned the distinction prophet, but little did they know that the depth to which he had explored his beard offered template upon template surpassing palm reading and enlightened astrology. if the musee del homme could only anticipate, his preserved head would without a doubt occupy a basement locker of its very own--beside whom? tiresias made a mental note to bring the filing system in the basement of the musee del homme to the surface of the sleep current. alright.

temporary like achilles

2007-04-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

the clack cklack cclack of heels piercing screaming linoleum mottlemarked by eczema skin grafts and cancer ground below aging lips distracts me, sir. if you lay on the ground and put your face next to hers, ears on the linoleum, see, nine year olds in stilettos sound like the end of the world. worse than desks slamming and clk clk clk of gum slapping and desk hinges. worse than the graduation to lockers slamming, really. i hope they learn balance before middle school, really.

"no direction home" or on cartology

2005-11-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

this morning pure chaos, like a movie on fast forward, threw structural logics into relief.

cartography: i drove in circles to a home i've driven to more times than i can count and then got lost on my way home.

if you haven't, you should see the scorsesi documentary "no direction home" or at the very least consider the potential ignited by registering bob's contestation of both "direction" and "home." to indict "direction" is to acknowlege contingency. to indict "home," at just one level, calls into question the potential for overdetermination in originary narratives.

on a more practical applicable level an indictment of "home" allows for the following: if home is not a monolithic space for which we are ever in search and likely never to find an inhabit in the most perfect of senses that describes and conditions longing, then the task is not to find "the" way "home" or even "a" way "home," but rather to register and pursue home spaces constantly. the task: not to find the space that will fulfill the longing for home, but rather to recognize the space between the who and contingency, to acknowledge what is real and uncompromisable (although not static) and the ways in which the contingencies of space, time, obligation both discipline and allow space to cultivate the who. if the contingency is bullshit, change it, leave or fucking make it work.

"Servile Copies of Reality:" An engagement with the recent Installation of Cruelty

2005-11-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

“If the theater, like dreams, is bloody and inhuman, it is... to manifest and unforgettably root within us the idea of a perpetual conflict, a spasm in which life is continually lacerated, in which everything in creation rises up and exerts itself against our appointed rank... [T]his naked language of the theater must permit, by its use of man’s nervous magnetism, the transgression of the ordinary limits of art and speech, in order to realize actively... a kind of total creation in which man must reassume his place between dream and events.” - Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)”

Truth is: I heard about the Installation of Cruelty and thought that it was odd to ask people to perform caricatures of—at the very least—projections of sick selves: video pornographer, sex slave, leg-shaver, leg-waxer, eyebrow-plucker, sedentarian, television appreciator, drug dealer, JAP, Atkins dieter, workaholic, Splenda consumer. Odd because casting, rehearsal, performance at the very least risks projecting said sickness upon the performer; at the most basic level (and I wasn’t asked to do so), I would not agree to perform bulimic, compulsive, psychophant. My initial reservation established a deficit of discomfort—one i recognize as originating in projections of my own—from which the show would have to recover; if it did something, anything, then I was down. Following the show: I thought many of the individual performances were compelling; I appreciated the cellist. On just one of many levels of discomfort provoked, I was unimpressed by the invocation of Arataud as the theoretical grounding for a performance that failed to make the crucial link between violent disruption and unleashed moments of revolutionary potential—the most visceral of calls “in which everything in creation rises up and exertss itself against our appointed rank.” I write then, to (1) distance my friend Artaud from the spectacle enacted and (2) share a reading strategy that retroactively inscribes potential for disruption in a move that makes the time I spent attending and discussing the show worth more than an annoyance.

(1)
In “The Theater and Its Double,” Antonin Artaud attempts to overcome thepsychological theater that diverts attention from the metaphysical anguish of contemporary man. “In the anguished, catastrophic period we live in,” he argues, “we feel an urgent need for a theater which events do not exceed, whose resonance is deep within us, dominating the sensibility of the times” (Artaud, 84). Artaud is concerned with waking the senses and unearthing sublimated desires; he locates desire in dreams:"In the same way that our dreams have an effect upon us and reality has an effect upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the public will believe in the theater’s dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty." (84-5)Artaud invisions a theater in which the “images of thought” (or the performance) can inhabit the influential realm of dreams and “create a passionate equation between Man, Society, Nature, and objects” (90). The performance will be successful in this endeavour if the spectator believes the dreams of the theater to be “true dreams” and not “servile copies of reality.” To this end, he argues, the performance must be projected with the necessary violence to convey the substance of dreams: ideas of a “cosmic order,” ideas which touch on “Creation, Becoming and Chaos,” ideas which “by their very nature cannot be formally depicted” (Artaud, 90). The Installation of Cruelty did nothing to either “wake the senses” or “uneart[h] sublimated desires.” A playing out of Yale Students playing and displaying manifestations of the space where neurotic self-doubt meets a compulsion to “glorify one’s self on the axiomatic chain of verticality” while succumbing in exhaustion to the disciplinary apparati and modes of decorum that make acceptable and desirable bodily and sensual regimentation does nothing to advance the theatre as a space of “true dreams” that transcend “servile copes of reality;” instead, the Installation of Cruelty produced such “servile copies of reality” without igniting the disruptive potentials of refiguring “a passionate equation between Man, Society, Nature and objects.” Where Artaud calls for ideas of a “cosmic order” that touch on “Creation, Becoming and Chaos,” the Installation of Cruelty reproduced undesirable caricatures of the real that negate the very process of “Creation, Becoming and Chaos.” The effect: rather than conjuring dreams of what it means to be human, the Installation of Cruelty reenforced by caricature dehumanizing slots and scripts of subjugation.Artaud advocates a departure from the sphere of analyzable passions; “a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators” (86). The spectator should be so consumed by the spectacle that they should consider the “true dreams” of the theater to be their own. Artaud is “unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our nervous sensibility” to “furnis[h] the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which... his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter... pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior” (92). Although the Installation of Cruelty gestured toward a disruption between stage and auditorium as closed worlds by creating an interactive space where the spectator moved through the various scenes in the “post-modern haunted house”—I also question the deployment of an undefined, undeveloped evocation of the “post-modern”—the effect was not to provide a channel of participatory communication between the worlds of spectator and performance, but rather to reproduce the alienation and isolation of the “servile copies of reality” depicted: largely a function of the deployment of caricature, the performances were static and formally enacted processes of repetition without the potential for rearticulation, leaving the spectator to move through a world governed by disciplinary apparati they were powerless to affect.

(2)
In Althusser’s account of subject formation, the subject is both recognized and constituted by interpellation: in responding to a call—“Hey, you there!”—the hailed individual becomes the subject of the address and is occupied by the terms of the address. The call demands compliance with the hegemonic terms or forms of power. Judith Butler considers the subject hailed in injurious terms and the possibility of resisting or refusing the terms by which and with which they are hailed and occupied. According to Butler, uniform compliance to the terms of address is not the only response to interpellation. She argues for the repetition and rearticulation of injurious terms in directions that reverse and displace the violation experienced by the subject:"Where the behavorial conformity of the subject is commanded, there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of the parodic inhabiting of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it." (Butler, 122)Parody, hyperbolic repetition and rearticulation of the terms of addresss enable the subject to occupy the terms by which and to which they are subjected in opposition to the injurious signification. In the playing out of Yale Students playing and displaying manifestations of the aforementioned space where neurosis and compulsion meet demands of vertical ascension as a mode of self actualization, there is certainly a dimension of parodic inhabitation of conformity. I am concerned, then, with the following question: did the Installation of Cruelty comply with or oppose the injurious terms by which and to which the participants are subjected?

jeff dreams of superheroes

2005-11-17T09:25:00.000-08:00

Following a much-needed ten hour, restful night following a two-week accommodation of the spinning double-helix of near simultaneous chaos and frenetic lucidity, I was greeted in the morning by the following observation from my dear friend jeff: “baby, you can’t be a superhero if you don’t take care of your alter-ego.”(1) I find the superhero/alter-ego frame to be both charming and apt in both the priority it affords superhero moves and the register that the superhero is ultimately delimited and dependent upon the health and stability of the alter ego; (2) a recent deployment of said frame: my superhero conceptualizes and maps projects so burdened by deficits carved by self-doubting perfectionism that I end up just flying all over the place at warp speed without fixing text to page; conceptualizing the superhero against the alter ego [the functional self that pays rent and groceries, fulfills tedious practical obligations: sleeps] I am able to approach the page as alter-ego without demanding the performance of the superhero—my superhero prefers to copy-edit (3) two days after the aforementioned exchange, I thanked jeff over toast for the superhero/alter-ego frame and he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.