Academic Notes + Writing
A ten-week temporary workspace for the exploration of generative practices in contemporary experimental writing. The goal of the space is two-fold: 1. To read, discuss and debate contemporary approaches to experimental writing. 2. To produce new work in innovative ways that engage with contemporary strategies of appropriation, erasure, recycling, remixing, framing, stealing, copying, pasting, recovery, documentation, …
I thoroughly enjoyed Vija Celmin’s artist talk at the Menil last Friday. Celmins was joined by Menil curators Franklin Sirmans and Michelle White to lead a discussion about the latest exhibit at the Menil: Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-66. I would have wanted to write about it earlier, while it was still fresh on …
Again I did my yearly pilgrammage to BAM for the New Wave Festival. This time seeing Pina Bausch’s Vollmond. I’ve been thinking about how to write about it since we took the train back. It was a beautiful performance, but that’s expected. What else was it? I keep asking myself this. I tried to talk to …
“Explain to us what you want from us, so we know what to abide by. You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling.” Editorial in El Diario de Juárez published in Sept. 2010 Helen, Mark and I …
kré puc te kré Everything must puk te pek be arranged li le kre to a hair pek ti le e in a fulminating kruk pte order. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – I learned yesterday (I …
I mistakenly went to Andrei Codrescu‘s reading at the Menil last night. While some might call doodling during a lecture rude, I say I was keeping it real yo.
Richard Tuttle, what a puddle a greenhouse you sound like a piece of putty you talk to plants the opening of ears is green the rain is green way too understudied way home way I loved Richard Tuttle’s lecture Tuesday night at the Menil. He didn’t really lecture as much as he just said some …
POEMS WRITTEN AFTER STUDYING SCHIZOPHRENIA Before this picture, both people hated each other. They were accidentally thrown together for it. But a miraculous change took place. In the picture, they feel as if they are a picture, a complete thing. They’re aware of all the edges of picture and they accept them. Right after the …
This is all twisted up. It’s not. Actually the BwO is an intensification of all feeling… However, achieving these intensities is delicate. In fact, D&G warn readers of the “ever-present dangers of that empty their BwO’s instead of filling them.” (ATP 152) Creating a BwO is a task that must be attacked with caution, `since …
What’s with the masochism? D&G are using this kind of program to reveal the way that desiring machines attach themselves to the BwO. Sewing the body shut, as the paranoid body does, and flogging the body (attaching “waves of pain” to the body). This pain is like an intensity (remember?). Now here’s where it gets …
So what’s a BwO this time? Hypochondriac body: “The organs are destroyed, the damage has already been done, nothing happens anymore. ‘Miss X claims that she no longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her words:’” (ATP, 150) …
In A Thousand Plateaus (ATP), the BwO is depicted as productive – independent of goal-directed workings of the capitalist political economy, and irreducible to the Freudian mommy-daddy-me triangle. Invoking the BwO, D&G offer a different way of thinking about the body that contrasts with the notion of the organism. What do they mean by organism? …
So the celibate machine is a good thing? Well, sort of. Again. D&G don’t exactly like the categories of good and bad. But they do explicitly describe the residuum of the celibate machine as positive. A celibate machine takes on all kinds of different desiring-machines (thinking that these machines are his /her “true” subjectivity). However, these …
Capital is a body without organs of the capitalist (or the capitalist being), and labor is a productive machine. Recording: Capital is thus the unproductive surface on which the production of labor is recorded. “Recording” means that the value of labor/production is determined on capital. For the miraculous aspect they refer to Marx’s concept of …
If a BwO doesn’t produce anything, how does it function? The two aspects of the BwO that most interest D&G are its function of recording and its apparent miraculous form, that is, the appearance of miracles. “The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process …
What is a desiring machine? For D&G, there is no such thing as desire, only desiring-machines. It’s not a thing, but a process. Roland Bogue describes desiring machines by way of an infant feeding a the mother’s breast. Here the “mouth-machine” of the infant and the “breast machine” enter into an circuit (through the flow of …
Give me an example of a BwO: “eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up” (pp. 37-38). Why is the BwO closed off? D&G define the BwO as a paranoid machine: a machine of primary repression. This paranoiac is hypersensitive, it suffers from desiring-machines, and wishes it could turn them all off. Desiring-machines are …
But how can something be full, when it is emptied out? “The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty. Teeming with emptiness. Knotted with emptiness. Immodest in its emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful. “I am not here. I am not here and never will be.” …
What is a body without organs? D&G say that the BwO is full—full in the sense that it is a blank surface without the interconnected functions or parts that organs would be. It is full precisely because it lacks any depth or differentiation. D&G claim that the body suffers from being organized in a triangulated …
Artaud was constantly trying to separate the voice from the body… finding a way for the voice to speak outside of the body… What is so radical about crooning: it’s romantic and relies upon microphone… you can here more of the breath… a microphone allows you to hear the insides of people’s mouths… a new form …