Colonial curio’s

I suspect I might be posting a bit (more) associatively over the next couple of months as I process the trip back to Australia to visit my father who has been diagnosed with a pretty tough batch of cancer. I assume I don’t have that many readers that aren’t already aware of this. But anyway, the point would not be to broadcast or dramatize or even ‘ reflect’ on the situation in public, but more to understand and observe certain scenes and philosophies under stress and on the move.

Colonial curio’s (with that additional apostrophe) is the name of the major craft shop in my home town shopping centre where I used to buy my mother weird tiny plug-in waterfountains for her birthday (at her request) to ease the sound of stress in her muscles. I promise any posts will be more interesting than this.

what my father couldn’t quite explain he delivered through the cd player

I have been pulling up his favourites on youtube all weekend. Reciting all the lyrics now, I think that he ended up delivering quite a lot. Even if he often got them wrong, those lyrics, himself, he always found the right music for the message I think.

EMDR – Description

Note to self: One of the best description of EMDR that I have read so far, is actually in the prologue to Silvan Tompkins ‘Affect Imagery Consciousness’: 

…The trained EMDR therapist asks the patient to concentrate on a specific target image, usually the noxious scene (stimulus-affect-response sequence) that has either precipitated the request for treatment or is considered by the patient most representative of that person’s dysphoria; one is instructed to allow into consciousness all of the negative affects associated with this scene. Next, the patient is instructed to….

now-cultural-poesy

This interview (intro below) with Joan Retallack gets almost exactly at the certain familiarity, (excitement, and confusion) I experience reading certain affect-theoretical poetics as/via/through a whole range and history of mostly forgotten (by me, by you?) experimental (modern and post-) literary practices, as consciousnesses of bounds of the literary. How to think about this? And why am I so interested in wondering this how? It seems to cut across so many of my supposed theoretical and aesthetic interests, or more accurately, my “i” seems to cut across all or a lot of “this” in rather vague and unconscious ways. She says as she spends the weekend downloading Phd history/theory and MFA applications concurrently.

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RO: In the introduction to your interviews with John Cage you say that there came a time in your life when you no longer wanted literature to be a fictive time machine that would whisk you away. I wonder if you could say something about that change in your attitude to reading?

JR: That comment actually had a couple of sources, the major one being the use to which I put literature as a child and teenager. I read fiction heavily as escape, to have some rest from the pressures of the world but I also thought I was learning a lot about the world from it. I started in my mid-twenties to discover that I wasn’t learning much at all about how to live from novels, that I was instead learning a lot about characters locked in a very closed system. I realized that what I was experiencing was one person’s mind, the mind of the author. So at some point—I didn’t frame it this way early on—I really began to see that kind of work as having to do with a vanishing point perspective, that everything was moving toward the last punctum where the conflict—the conflict that had been artificially imported in the first place—would be resolved, would disappear. It seemed to me that all this existed outside of real time in some consequential way.

ridiculousness and politics.

1. Why hasn’t someone kept alive a deconstructionist alternative to dating?

2. Hilarity: the apparent anarchartistic developmental lifespan seen from the completely random and fictious Liberal party-political point of view.

Hegel, ptsd, and brain plasticity

The shelved project. But interesting link here, with Hegelian absolutes, I think/thought/suspect, kicking in around step 3….

Enough flagellating

This is awesome.

ethical self-presentation, sensibility, and unreliable cognition

My ex here always have this thin layer of moisture shimmering across his large eyes, as if he’s always hovering between laughing and crying, being so attached to the sensory world. He has heaps of friends (someone like me would say “too many” to manage), sees them alot, and makes sense of the pervasiveness of himself through american fiction, and architectural and design problems; a kind of way of being that makes him happy, and that works for at least 81/2 months of the year. He also suffers from a rare form of bipolar 2 that like clockwork, affects him for the whole three months of every summer. For those 3 months he has trouble getting out of bed, feels the need to sleep and rest most of the time, can’t handle very much stimulation of any kind, can’t even walk past the outside of a nice book or CD shop without his mood rapidly swinging to hopelessness/aversion/alarm, about how much information it contains that he can’t cognize. He can’t stay in for too long, or it gets worse, so he has to make decisions about when/how to go out, where his strategy is just to ‘follow’: his friends, a flow, whatever will have him brush up against external energy without risking too much of his own.

Schechner, Kraus for Anna

“In 1973, in the pages of the avant-garde theater journal TDR, the well-known theorist and director of the New York-based Performance Group Richard Schechner called for an increased use of the theories and methods of the social sciences to understand the nature of performance. “I believe that the convergence of the social sciences and the performing arts and the creation of performance theory is an antecedent to an avant-garde movement just taking shape. This movement will be more iconographic that iconoclastic; more conservative than prodigal; and more based on sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling. The movement will be radical not in the political sense of the late sixties but in the manner in which it attempts to go to the roots.” (Schechner 1973, p. 4). (from article attached). PerformativeTurn_brief

Anna: I have had a copy of Schechner’s Performance Theory on my shelf for the past 2 months, given to me as part of a bag of stuff during the cleaning dump/move out from the student containers, from a girl whose only relation to me before the dumping-exchange was that I once admired her combo of second hand getups on the driveway. Re-(re-)reading Kraus’ Aliens again and there he is – the traumatizing NY performance teacher. Of course he’s everywhere, still, I can’t help but consider it one more coincidence relating to the horizonal (i wrote horizontal, which it probably is at this time) kraus project.

We’ll have to read him, or at least I will be – a kind of out of control new age structuralist, thinking performance from the neuron to Indian Dance (which I must say he gets pretty right, both. Which is not to say there aren’t whole chapters that aren’t irksome). Such a gesture to write him off, among so many others, and so key to thinking through Kraus’ “writing” as performance theory doubled back upon theorist.

Ranciere’s emancipated spectator

Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination that it presupposes disturbs the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations. What it produces is no rhetoric persuasion about what has to be done. Nor is it the framing of a collective body. It is a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relation between bodies, the world where they live and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting it. It is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation. Now this political effect operates under the condition of an original disjunction, of an original effect, which is the suspension of any straight cause-effect relationship. The aesthetic effect first is an effect of des-identification. The aesthetic community is a community of des-identified persons. As such, it is political since a political subjectivization goes through a process of des-identification. An emancipated proletarian is a des-identified worker. Now there is no measure of the des-identifying effect. On the one hand, the effect escapes the strategy of the artist; on the other hand, the artistic strategy completes the process of des-identification beyond the point of political subjectivization toward the ‘song of the earth’, that is to say toward the construction of new forms of individuation – the Deleuzian haecceities- that cancel any form of political subjectivization. …The Deleuzian identification analogy between the torsion of the work, the cry of men and the song of earth both evinces and neutralises itself that tension between the aesthetic effect of des-identification and its own neutralisation. The same reason that makes the aesthetic ‘political’ forbid any strategy of ‘politicization of art’.