Monday, August 11, 2014

reading diary not late oh it is late this is my late reading diary

--there are, of course, two types of people in this world, those who think in dualisms, and those who do not....
this, then, this, then, is a journey between trains, a journey in thought between trains, all the tracks connect, and the stops are clearly marked, but there is no way to know how the tracks are going to curve as we go--between one thinker one thought and another, this is a train ride, history and culture are train rides where tracks converge and some of them go to the same stops, the tracks cross, and usually the trains do not crash into each other, but sometimes they certainly do...
but first.
i have seen socially embedded art, and maybe even made some (not much), and have some contexts for having seen this kind of work that i think works, but.  most of the time, when there is an event where the people performing talk about conscience and social change, i try to find reasons to be out of town for a week or so, because, because, i couldn't articulate it very well before, but because, there is that sense of us and them, where we in these scenarios are part of something disenfranchised, and them is part of something that disenfranchises, and then we get to see work about how bad those people are who are disenfranchising, and it seems so very easy, and so very uncomfortable, and incomplete.
instead, thinking with the texts (rather than through them), there are some patterns emerging about the nature of discourse generally, this is very post-structural of course, but the subject object relations through language, and the impossibility of stepping outside the father's narrative, that help illuminate why the us and them cannot hope to undermine anything, and at best, someone in the crowd might be able to think a little more deeply, but probably not really.  so.
it seems as though it's necessary to consider how we might make not only an art of social practice, but a good art of social practice, and this means bringing the aesthetics along, and looking at the very structures of how we travel on the tracks are working.
so we have to travel, because we cannot stand still, we simply cannot stand still.
and next, the tracks:
they are, out of order:
they are out of order.
they are:
HARRISON's notion of dissonance enters through music in terms of structures of harmony, weaving into nazi degenerate art, kandinsky and others playing with harmony in new and unusual ways, the idea of harmony now upset, now something else, now something made to upset, this one and that one, the opposites do not play off each other so easily, or rather, that philosophy of difference, of the other the one that resists the either this or that, in favor of playing against harmony that is rooted somewhere in heraclitus, no, SCHMITT, no, they didn't invent dualisms, of course, but those are the tracks we have to travel on to find out how we got to here, this us, this them, and that question from Billy Bragg, wondering whether the 'man in the mask or the indian is an enemy or a friend of mine'.
and harmony finds its counter or its spherical doubling in coupling and the idea of divine love, in that heavenly spherical way, the union of perfect opposites, that thing called by some masculine and that thing called by some feminine and when they collide, that conflict (is that a conflict? is love a conflict? zizek on lacan, oh he's always on lacan, but that, that violent force that selects this one out of all the other ones? is that conflict?) is not safe, is not so heavenly, is not being treated well by marxist materialisms, that one that one we always see walking with sartre, what is her name? the metro stop named for her was, and it's name was, and her name was BEAUVOIR is running on similar tracks to HARRISON, the other, the feminine, the eternal feminine, the jew, any other who is not the us in the us-them of dis ding, her track is one that traces tracks and ends somewhere at the tip of the nose, that is, on the body, that unsuspecting body, that other in the dualism that negates the self, the mind negates the body in order to justify genocide, does it seem to anyone else that the self-other thing has to come into play after the nation state has committed an atrocity?  and does it seem as though what is also remarkably original about this time (aside from the surveillance, etc.) is that there was a time when the self-other thing was the beginning of the state building toward atrocity, whereas now they/we (we are them, we have met the enemy and he is us) commit the atrocity and then find the discourse, find the self-other thing, to talk about why we did what we had to do?  and it also seems as though there was a time when the nation-state believed the self-other discourse it speaks, and now the state uses the discourse to tell the people why we are at war, and everybody knows that no one representing the nation-state really believes their own words, that it is something else, and something perhaps much much worse? (i read too much zizek and i did not have the proper training in philosophy to put the arguments together correctly)
and there are tracks, there are metro stops going to tracks that are there to lay down foundations, to build structures, or reveal structures, in order that they be revealed as something more concrete than, than, um, in order that they be revealed as concrete.  useful foundations, such as.  KANT's metro car is built with good intentions and even feels a little charming these days, a little naive, but worth the time to admire the scenery and enjoy the company of ghosts who would rather be resting than rolling over in their graves.  and then we have to get off and switch back to BEAVOIR, again, building toward a philosophy of immanence, building toward a becoming not based on the conflict being won by one who is not the other.  MARX&ENGELS, the next stop, is where we will pause and get off and wait for the next train, because for some reason, on this subway line, this stop has the best snacks, but they're expensive (it's what happens when history runs into itself), but here we really should stop and sit on one of the benches and talked about what worked and what didn't work, because truly, they laid down some of the most solid and reasonable foundations, you start with the problem (the spectre) and then begin to build the opposing forces and offer a solution, that should be an angry gesture made with a fist, haha, something like that, something like a manifesto. and it would be good to nap for a very long time, most of the afternoon even, until the rush hour traffic starts to come and we would necessarily be inclined to move, even though perhaps it wouldn't be the worst thing to stop, to just lay for a little bit longer and see what we can build from this, what to build next from this. and only then would anyone in their right mind get up again and perhaps we are wishing by now that the next metro is a merry go round with horses and unicorns but instead there is AGAMBEN and we have to take that, he picks up the notion of state as providing security from SCHMITT and instigates a foucaultian revisiting where terror becomes a necessary ingredient in what might be a dialectic, this certainly sometimes usually often appears to be a dialectic, and if we forget why we were traveling here to begin with, there is the last stop LEDERACH who leads this back to art, this peaceful form, based on harmony and discord, based in a balancing that is never quite one thing against another thing and the collapse of those things into each other, or the towering of one thing over the other, but the balance of things where they talk to each other, is it really just about having a conversation? is this just about learning how to have a proper conversation? (and not a fight or an argument, but a real, civilized conversation)?
(this was not a civilized conversation this was just a monologue)
(out of order, but then perhaps we are out of order, the restaurant is all out of order, and instead of ordering more order, we are ordering something else instead, not chaos, either, something else instead.  the choices on the menu are order and chaos, but we are ordering something else instead)
aha