ft. bragg, california, december.

why does he project his own shadow outside himself?

At the café in the lobby of the central library there is a TCBY. There was a man sitting near the door with a laptop wearing a black t-shirt. His hair had flecks of grey in its wooly cut. He was wearing round wire-rimmed glasses like he had been raised in an orphanage abroad. A full page of writing was on the screen largely illegible from a distance. As I passed, I tried to read the last sentence, which was the beginning of a new paragraph. It read, full stop, the world is for peanuts.

The man sitting across from me is quite old, and wears the silence of a mad priest. He is reading intently in a chair by the information desk, where two dark haired librarians are chatting in the obscene tones of frustrated coworkers. One is in her fifties, and the other is just beginning her thirties. When I came in the room, the younger one was on the phone, clearly patient in the face of an un-spooled tangle of requests. The calls that public libraries receive from that infinite portal of the telephone are beyond the pale. Who out there finds the number of the public library, in what book, from what garden? The older man is still reading. He has one, and only one part, on his otherwise smooth rosy head. One wave of fronds like weeds clutched on a mountain bald, a part perfectly aligned in the middle, turned to one side like a flag in the wind, one perfect square shaved into the void. He is not wearing socks and his corduroy pants are frayed at the cuffs of a cut hem above his black, well-laced athletic shoes, the kind of shoes one used to find at a large department store. There were brands like Voit and Cuga, and they often featured Velcro straps. The children who wore these were marked by poverty—that is until such stores began re-branding these lines with updated, more derivative features. This shift is most likely the result of manufacturing lines being consolidated, and higher niche players such as Nike moving overseas. A cheap, Nike-like sneaker was available for retail manufacture. Yet, in what only appears as irony, the children who had always worn Nike shoes discovered a melancholy kitsch value in these Velcro shoes, which were called bobo shoes, and they bought them to wear to themed frat parties or to go fishing. If anything, Sketchers is the vanishing mediator here, despite whatever new york writers have to say about tipping points.

The empirical/finite I depends on external objectivity, on the non-I opposed to him, yet the absolute I is defined by the very fact that he transcends this opposition. Kant’s problem, on the contrary, is how and why the transcendental object qua intelligible entity is a necessary correlative not to the empirical I but to the I of pure apperception.

The transcendental object—this empty form of the object’s unity, a reference to which converts the multitude of sensible affections into a determinate and self-identical object—is possible only against the background of the unity of apperception of the pure-I: the transcendental object is identical to the I, it is the I itself—the primordial synthesis that ‘is’ the I—in its externality, in the guise of the objectivity opposed to the I, or as Hegel would put it, in its otherness.

Why does the I oppose himself to himself in the guise of an external object, why does he project his own shadow outside himself?

Uli Kunkel, Hans Gruber, and Martin Heidegger. What is Metaphysics? (1929)

Every metaphysical question ‘always encompasses’ the whole range. Each question is itself always the whole. As such, what question, if indeed thinking, escapes being embedded within this question: What is metaphysics? “The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics.” In the spirit of this reading of Heidegger, I would like to emphasize the next sentence down to the word. That is, Heidegger defers the question of metaphysics, he says that the very question is held under standard interrogation, the awakened expectations that any question presupposes. Yet, Heidegger claims that ‘we’ will ‘forgo’ a ‘discussion’ about metaphysics. For this moment, let us naively give the question of translation over and rely upon at least one meaning of the word. To forgo is to give up, to forsake. Thus, to forsake, to give up upon the discussion of metaphysics is to admit an alternative that a-waits in negation of the desired thing.

Finite knowledge is noncreative intuition.

“Might not chora mean: that which separates itself from every particular, that which with draws, and in this way admits and ‘makes room’ precisely for something else?”

I love the preppy old Chinese men that I see along my block: their prim nautical selves, the crew of Ulysses. The trope of the figure standing-against time, an adventure of the lonely, lovely signifier: the mechanic at Far East motors; the easily affable paternal figure who is somehow exempt from the seduction of mother, from the production of the couple that so easily dominates a kind of post-mythic curvature (the artist formally known as narrative, or writing, or text in those uninformed genetic terms available for mixed or popular use). Like that phantom automaton that prostitutes systemic control with individual jouissance, like a video game (without a hero, there is no event) that offers its re-payment over a duration of investment; the video game sanctions its reward via a subjective exchange of control. The player inserts his subjectivity like a coin at the very sli(t)p of formal identification where mortality is effaced and exchanged in the docile embrace of an object-commodity. The civility of the commodity implies the highest good and organization of the state. While this statement lacks immodesty, it is merely the transcendental imagination that consists the horizon of democracy, and what lies beyond some immentionable meridian of terror, of hymenic puncturing, of utter irruption of the total horizon of the world.

How far out does the horizon sound? What are the tidal moments of one’s knowing?

Ideally isolated system

But it is the extreme naked weirdness of the past, the residue of history as itself a process of becoming, that in turn demands the appreciation of the equally extreme possibilities of becoming in the here and now.   

A standard object is an arrangement of variations in proximity to some set of qualities that are understood to be an object sharing a number of functional characteristics. Each standard object is the result of what Whitehead called an ‘ideally isolated system.”  

 

Behavioral psychology considers the individual as a system connected to the world whose evolution is determined by his environment, which acts on him through the messages that he receives from the inert world or from other individuals, who, according to the existential thesis, remain as alien to him as the external world.

Critique of Judgment

He who imitates a model shows skill, but only shows taste in so far as he can judge of this model itself. Thus, the highest model, the archetype of taste, is a mere Idea, which every one must produce in himself; and according to which he must judge every Object of taste, every example of judgment by taste, and even the taste of everyone.

Idea properly means a rational concept, and Ideal the representation of an individual being, regarded as adequate to an Idea. The archetype of taste, which rests on the indeterminate Idea that Reason has of a maximum, but which cannot be represented by concepts, but only in individual presentation, is better called the Ideal of the beautiful. Although we are not in possession of this, we yet strive to produce it in ourselves. It can only be an Ideal of the imagination, because it rests on a presentation and not on concepts, and the Imagination is the faculty of presentation.

Animales! Asquerosos! Asesinos!

Critiques of the most general sort state that the country is depressed.

Our bright, competent ones nearly swoon over the idea of a country before the counter-culture, before the appropriation that almost ruined us. It was a war. Everyone seems to say. There is a particular interest in those moments of the early sixties, so our writerly television shows seem to argue. Before we would even think to claim that television would have no part in the revolution.

Hillary Clinton rises in the polls, while anecdotes emerge of her reading the Methodist theologian Carl Olgafi, a man who gave all to the new Left before it was simply a style to defend.

Many of the philosophy books I regard here in Claremont have been systematically marked. The title page of many books features a similar system of notation: accent marks on the relevant words of the title, along with smaller slashes that would be like quotation marks misplaced below the relevant spaces of the name, as if to include in clear penciled script the full name and the time of death. Henri /// Louis Bergson, 1859-1941.

I left the house later than usual on this Monday. The weather here is gray, which makes the whole town swell in bloated prison tones. No city wears its gloom like los angeles. Sullen trash frames the boulevard dullness of something gone completely wrong. Dwarf hedges and casket plywood cover the plumbing that emerges from the dank, catpiss soaked earth. In the night, an owl pursued its low notes of reed and organ. Another animal screeches in some mode of touching, which causes the dog to awaken in consternation, a sybaritic breeching recalled from some unneutered consciousness. I watch as she sorts the blackness beyond the biled streetlight, her prim diaphragm contracting in the symmetry of a taste for mucus, pheromone, and all those things that reveal what cannot be opened without movement. In the evening, teenage chemistry will have come to the block to leave desperate, puerile writings on the wall outside. Some father will have moved a purple sofa onto the sidewalk nearly beneath the graffiti. In such moments time collapses under the sign of a mediocrity that the youths will try to violence with their scowling features and their blighted obscene voices. The Sunday father is told to take the couch to the trash, and now sufficiently drunk, he moves the loveseat down the street, just past the building with all the gringo punta. What wild, embarrassed thoughts he must have, for who the fuck is really going to say anything. Punta. Vagrants will come to take the cushions, and leave the carcass of the couch to rot on the sidewalk. The writers will pass by like rapists to seize the opportunity of something exposed: meca, uek, aimeo. These boys have no taste for blood or bureaucracy, which is why they paint in fast food designs. They will write their resistance to the fate of the father, who is never allowed to snort methamphetamine off a marble notepad filled with practice in the lighter light of the park to lose nine hours of the night in the animal perfection of transcendent purpose.

august snohomish washington

I do not care for puzzles, but they are capable of teaching the sophistocation of work, and the essences delved from its construction.

There is no thought to labor, except as labor, by what is necessary to the straits of conditions. What is won is repetition, but this is not to say that stakes do no occur and turn and congeal and find themselves swelling into further entailments that wait to be called forth and named as strategies. Create a puzzle that takes twice as long to complete as to make, or so the movie's dialogue reminds us. You have one minute, six months, forty hours, etc.

What is the difference we can examine between privilege and prerogative? How are they not interchangeable, or in what ways might they be kin? No one cares for this style until they discover it themselves, even as themselves. One can be said to possess privilege but not prerogative. From here, one can imagine many unhappy souls who imagine those less fortunate, yet. And one can, on the other hand, imagine still many others that take the prerogative without privilege. Such would be the happy shame.

City and the idea of the south

Points made to reckon with excess and expansion. Opportunity arises from excess, a foamy piece without part, without the manic fold of interior belonging, which de facto forms a portal to the outside, which in fact is the possibility of the outside. This would be a violence.

The city is made to be a place of a diversity that we could call cosmopolitan: the birthplace of a certain comparitive naturalism. I say birthplace because the unionization of contigency, or the thinking of multitude as the multiple modes of tourist, civilian, and immigration control--is almost always a certificate of seeming.

You only care about today. Yesterday,
not so much. And then you lie to define anything, at all.

azusa pacifiic--aaron young

azusa pacifiic--white light

Towards a Metaphysics of the Tag: New Perspectives on Graffiti Practices

Street art, that reasonably appropriate, yet volatile signifier, has experienced a rather explosive growth in the past decade, particularly in such cities as Berlin, Paris, and Los Angeles. In Echo Park, which is on the border of LA’s downtown, the artist Shepard Fairey has established Studio One, which houses his corporate design and advertising offices as well as a first floor gallery space. Soon after Studio One was opened, a neighborhood blog published a story revealing the various anti-graffiti technologies the company has employed to prevent tagging, such as a graffiti-resistant coating on the building exterior up to a series of cameras that are emblazoned with Fairey’s trademark ‘Obey’ insignia. With obvious relish, the article noted the irony of a world-famous graffiti/street artist endeavoring to protect his private property from the vandalism of tagging. The insinuation that Fairey was a corporate NIMBY drew a scathing response from the artist, who accused the blog of trite sensationalism, arguing that if he wanted to keep his building free of graffiti ‘writing,’ such was his business. Furthermore, as Fairey asserted that he had been arrested all over the world for vandalism, he acknowledged that erasure, defacement, and transgression were essential aspects of the practice and ethos of street art. If his building were ‘bombed,’ then he (or presumably one of his employees) would merely paint over the writing, such is the ephemeral, marginalized aspect of the art form.

This exchange illustrates the rather twisted and contentious nature of the phenomenon of graffiti/street art. Whether we examine the practice at the corporate, professional level of Fairey and other such proper ‘street artists’ such as Banksy, or whether we merely turn our gaze upon the countless, anonymous tags that are etched upon our lived environment, the practice consistently involves a dialectical exchange of obscenity and illicitness. That is to say, the various practices of street art are typically illegal, and thus the form derives so much of its ideological power from the idea of transgression. Yet, as much recent work in Cultural Studies has shown, transgression is an over-determined concept, one easily seduced by the platitudes of resistance. Indeed, much published work on graffiti and street art reproduces the tired clichés of resistance and subversion of the ‘mainstream’ through the guerilla practices of tagging and bombing. The line here between hagiographic self-promotion and the articulation of relevant aesthetic principles is rather thin. At its worst, it recedes into a destructive boy’s club of dumb antics and nihilistic coolness.  

As such, this essay attempts to move beyond the accepted terms of the practice, and to examine the phenomena of graffiti from a philosophically-inflected perspective. For all of the volatility of the practice, and its issues of legitimacy and profit, issues that truly amount to a critical aporia in regards to defining, sorting out, and stabilizing the major players, there is a multitude of unknown, anonymous writers that are tagging the everyday spaces of their own worlds. This sense of property is the animus of youth as it extends ever outward in its attempts to define the boundaries of its prerogative. Pissing on fences, tearing down trees, skateboarding over stairs, spray-painting one’s tag on the walls of everything reachable, all this ecstatic synergy of the hormonal mind upon the wraught world is spent like so many games of domination and territory. This world of shit, of bizarre sub/urban rituals, the world merely multiplies the surface of what can be defaced, of the interface of the public and the private. Tagging antagonizes this interface, pulling the flat surface of the environment into an abysmal point of singularity. A hieroglyphic signature, a writing of scratched, pigeon translation that speaks to a dialogic economy of waste, excess, and dissemination: trees, curbs, trash cans, windows, doors, sidewalks, walls. What reading can be culled from these encounters? What kind of metaphysics arises from such a rigid formalism nearly devoid of content? Baudrillard suggested that our last chance for transcendence in a saturated, over-signified world is the Pure (fatal) Object, which seduces by virtue of its ‘fatal’ unintelligibility or meaninglessness, but its total resistance to interpretation and representation. Through graffiti, we encounter a metaphysics revived as a thinking pertaining to impersonal forces much more than to the subject, a thinking concerned with pure memory, imagination, event, origin, time, destiny, fatality, with the conditions of possibility for subjectivity (the pre-reflective, the pure, the impersonal, the inhuman) rather than with subjectivity itself. 

celebrity sunglasses

The limits of my language are the limits of my world, as every reasonable and cultured person knows.

My education—which feels so inadequate, yet whose exorbitant costs are still yet to be reckoned by some future debt—has taken the better part of a young adulthood. As I recently overheard upon leaving a lecture by the philosopher Alain Badiou in Westwood, it is good to know that little has changed since this study began some time ago. The names of the theorists, philosophers, professors, and writers have remained but shadows on the walls of the cave. There must be, he thinks, after years spent lost in this shadow metaphysics, some fire to make the shapes animate. It is difficult to express one’s participation in this ritual, and not wanting to reveal my ignorance, which churns ever softly beneath a film of laziness and self-medication, I have lost touch with the institution and whatever network of peers I once had the opportunity to create. Graduate students are meant to feel this way I have read, and the acuteness of my circumstances, however distinct to this particular school, is nothing new. Yet, in driving along the ugly white interstate from Echo Park to Claremont, and arriving here at this summer quiet library, I am filled with a kind of sadness that is responsive to the frame of pine and mountain the windows create. The time has not been wasted, but it is as if an opportunity has been spent. Alone, with no master and no students, and with only these books I cannot comprehend to read. Must philosophy grow in the cunning silence of a natural theology?

“I want to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

We watched the pilot for Studio 60 on Sunset Strip last night, the cancelled show conspicuously written by Aaron Sorkin. Having read a Vanity Fair article on Sorkin in the wake of The Social Network's release, it is easy to remained convinced that this man is a Writer. This is perhaps not the space to consider exactly what major television and film writing means, or to contrast any of Sorkin's production to say, Chuck Lorre's gifts, but one does note the contrasts, even if one is never quite convinced that there is a real difference. 

the modern apology, the apology for complexity, of the complexity, of the world is really nothing but a but a generalized desire for atony

Abstract: -How would we ask the question of "Basic services" in a term like "Syria:" compare to Zizek's reading of Adorno, and his subsequent critique of "nature" as a "signifier." This historicization of the individual's submission to society bears further resemblances to the Lacanian notion of the symbolic, which (as articulated by Zizek in his self-interview) is critiqued by Derrida for the metaphysical gesture of expanding the symbolic to cover everything, or in the words of the cliché, that a letter always reaches its destination. The people’s need for basic services refers to a fundamental metaphysical antagonism, how the world is imagined in relation to the subject of time. At the level of saying, of worlding, the horizon of sense and non-sense, the needs of the Syrian people demand a degree of basic services, and these civil matters are subject to the temporality of a global time, a schematic subsumed under several names: capitalism, modernity, globalisization, phallogocentrism, the destiny of the West, The Base and Superstructure problem for the Marxists. Displeasure will nominate the negative of the world, rendering Evil as Event of Totally Administrated World. 


Quote: "Art treats a point of thought. The space-time it moves in, surfaces, supports, speed of execution, references, all this is the envelope in which the point of thought is both exhibited and subtracted. It is the locus of the point. The construction of the locus is toil, but this is so on order for the point to fulgurate. This critical point is the visitation of the idea in its contemporary artistic form. Art is pure idea. It is not, as in vitalism, cprporal energy establishing the embrace of percepts and affects. It is not the continuous and projective passage from the experienced jouissance of becoming to living thought. It is on the contrary the establishment of a locus, of course, material, spatial- temporal, but at which the separation of the idea is experienced, and the fact that it can only touch the surface, like a bird skims the sea." 
                                                            --Alain Badiou, Some Remarks on Duchamp

                                                             I

From time to time, I find myself reading about music online. Whatever sweet fetish we may be said to possess regarding carburetor dung and 'zines would seem to be a tepid precursor to the generation of online discourse re: music production. True to form, the administration of production codes has been internalized by the 'populist' rhetoric of a spontaneous journalism known as media blogging, which by its playlists and highly adaptable dissemination platforms target consumers in highly-refined zones of saturation. 

This ideology of 'new music,' which operates under a strategy of sharing residual to the 

technologies that first facilitated the marketization of network, is strongly tied to consumptive models of superego enjoyment. Briefly stated, the notion of superego enjoyment, as formulated by S. Zizek, relies upon an effacement of the ego's role as mediator between the "raw" demands of the Id, and the metaphysical injunctions of the Superego. Without the ego, as such, the short-circuit between the Id and the Superego results in the injunction to 'Enjoy!', an injunction whose repeated failure aligns itself with the standards of post-liberal consumer capitalism, or so the argument would go.

the level of saying

David

jasper

memorial

Glyph

Pattern Recognition

Hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside. . . . Phenomenological reduction is a scene, a theater stage. It is only with a certain precision that we can proceed with information and data analysis. On Wednesday, May 10 2011 I was walking the dog for her morning constitutional. We walked up Douglas, and she pissed on a thin strip of grass before rooting around the plywood planks that bailey bridge the broken sidewalk where a clutch of older Chinese women live in small squares. The dog likes to stop here because the women put out cereal and noodles for the birds, cats, or whatever may feed upon such ruined spills of grain.

We took a left up on Alison, and I thought about the ways in which this neighborhood, and indeed the east side as such, was cast as too dangerous to venture. Back when the barrio was clad in blood and darkness, or as the story goes in fifteen hundred word travel articles. With change, the character has changed says the chol-Ostalgie. Brunettes with college degrees don’t look one in the eye as they pass on the street. Protestant settlers who have eyes only for the housing stock have supplanted the good old days of the Catholic index; these new shepherds have come to live among us, unlike the Wilshire landlords who came only to stucco and bar the animals from re-stealing our rental electronics. Yet these hills, restored beyond the needs of children, stir some sense of their original investment. A house in the hills has always been something above the fray in this city. But origins are always impure, and access to anything, especially dusky jewels, is an expression of occluded negotiations: something auto-immune.

Walking down Alison, I paused as Bonnie shat, observing a stupid design ‘car,’ some funky subsidiary of Toyota or Korea, pull up and wait outside the rather large HUD building on the corner. The car running, the young man was using his hand-held device, presumably sending a text to someone inside. After picking up the dog shit, I looked up Alison and saw that it was clear to cross. There was a man on a bike coming down the hill, but we would likely be across the street by the time he reached our X-axis. The calculation was correct to a degree, as he made a shallow parabola into the negative space of the street. He was a darkly complexioned man with strong cheekbones wearing faded black jeans and several layers of equally grey tops. At the nadir of his swerve, he cupped his hand and yelled for someone at the HUD building. It was a deep and purposeful call, nearly perfect in its execution. The kind of call anyone would wish to make from a bike on the street. I scanned the building, my eyes traveling up the four stories of narrow balconies set in queasy yellow and purple stucco, but no screen parted before I turned back up Sunset. 

Two gentlemen calling on the same building nearly at once, and me there walking along as an interloper in their drama; I could say something more about the building, how it seems like a safe house for the witness protection program. How it occasionally releases these two young black dudes who walk over to the Leo market wearing several pairs of oversized pajamas, long mesh shorts, white socks and slippers. The combinations and layers of cozy plaid, heather grey, black, and blue are bewilderingly eccentric, yet imbued with a kind of teenage utility. This nothing that distinguishes the parallels, this nothing without which precisely no explication, that is, no language, could be freely developed in the service of truth without being deformed by some real contact, this nothing without which no transcendental (that is, philosophical) question could be opened, this nothing arises, so to speak, when the totality of the world is neutralized in its existence and is reduced to phenomenal being.

there are no pictures to picture the picture: only reference

Just because you have forged the mark, does not mean that you have the capacity of minting value.

FOR ANNE,

                        Haru no iro

For some time I have searched for a particular way to state my ideas. Often, when I am off the clock, or as it were—not in front of any recording device, be it microphone, computer, sheet of paper, boyfriend, or any other capacity for inscription save the body itself. [1] I find myself taken by the question of style, however naïve and unproductive that may sound. Within this context, that is, writing tends to be troubled by the necessities of production—the high volume, mediocre quality of promise and apprenticeship. It is not all bad across the board, as it does play the margins quite well and manage a negative quality within its readings. It achieves a style, perhaps only of parody, which it almost always misrecognizes, but misrecognizes with a kind of honesty that appears as untrue, and in truth, is untested.    

This search is of course my own, although any writer worth their salt knows that private languages are lonely and unrewarding. What is the point, rather, of writing anything down if you don’t want to? Or worse, if you have nothing to say?

But I say that any tongue with which one cannot make oneself understood to the people is a slavish tongue. It is impossible for a people to remain free and speak that tongue.

Emotion is a universalized abstraction. It is the sensibility of metaphysics: the supplementary origin of its empirical readiness. Emotion is to feel one’s place in the world.

The gesture that seeks to find draws itself away from itself. We should be able to formulate the law of this insurmountable separation. It is a game I always play. Identification is a difference from oneself, a difference with oneself. Therefore, with, without, and except oneself. It’s an experience of forgetting, but the forgetting of forgetting, the forgetting of which nothing remains.  The soft maternal voice contrasts with the pitiless voice of writing. The social shift towards evil comes from a catastrophic moment, a simple and barely perceptible inaugural displacement. “He who willed man to be social, by a touch of the finger, shifted the globe’s axis into line with the axis of the universe. I see such a slight movement changing the face of the earth and deciding the vocation of mankind.” This subtle movement, the divine trace, opened the age of society, and with it the prohibition of incest: “before the festival, there was no incest because there was no prohibition of incest…after the festival, there is no longer any incest because it is forbidden.”

The mythological discourse should itself be mytho-morphic. It should have the shape of what it speaks of. As there would seem have to be some difference between being and thought: for example, physical pain (or the very idea of natural and unnatural death) presents a very specific paradox for thought and thinking; can one, and in what cases, would it be possible, for one to feel another’s pain? Is there not some difference between being-there and not being-there? As such, the difference itself would necessarily be marked by some spatial characteristic. From what space---space being the opening towards the conditions of coordination--would be the truth of pain, its legitimation as a point of reality.   

Although total history was banished to the illusory role of myth and error, it could nonetheless be perceived as plural and partial histories: “there is not one single history, a general history, but rather histories different in their type, rhythm, mode of inscription, intervallic, differentiated histories.” This multidimensional history made it possible to transcribe a conception of writing and to let movement filter into structure. But the wrinkles of time that unfold this knowledge in fact lead to its disappearance. Deconstructed history led to a foreclosed future. It was nothing more than the unfolding of the simulacrum of a slack and ungraspable present.

Phenobarbital

To conserve Power, if not some portion of the fiscal budget, the central library was dimly lit to a warm mucousy grey. The bold patterns of the carpet, newly laid in a nineties remodel of the Neutra design, were upon closer inspection video-game blobs of crochet flowers broken in pieced halves atop dull yellow ziz-zag lines. A perverse egyptian queerness for the madre was preserved in glass and fixture and desk, and combined with the plastic whimsy of graves-inspired design, the entire library made spectacularly apparent the penal barbarism of colonial revival.

February Third

A deep nervousness set in this afternoon, perhaps, if only, as the reaction to caffeine, although I am doubtful that this would be the case. A deep plagiarism of the day without true work, only the attempt to paraphrase the wicked movements of the dead letter. To breathe life into time as the path through a resolute whiteness, unremarked with a layer of woolen stares. Lead, or the absence of the graph, is the catalyst for a deep gloomy viscosity: to hold together against a better technology of vision.

Haphazard lovers visit the city to escape the demise of the organ, of the hold that may delay the expression of saints, holy and shaved, who may believe in a true alchemy of earthly peace through the negation of senses and the transcendence of slow time. We drink, they say, the cured blood of order to hasten the conjugation of the transcendental verb; our infinitive of grace and absolute sorrow. Fucked. Something to numb the machinery of the body's pleasure and its abused patterns.

An education can help you feel good about your day. The television, and the novelist who copies its sentiments, is emboldened and trusted by the sheer volume of its persistence. The idea that it can continue indefinitely, and that it will not leave. Television is the maternal instrument of a social force greater than the phallic signifier of lack, or so belief would begin to frame a subjectivity capable of such doubts: the child.

Weird subjectivites, storms of misogynated decision, are the virtual manifold of a time we feel so personally. Our respect shall be something that insures the safe tendency of a future time capable, however the machine, of being a boredom worthy of stable comfort.

This decision, we feel, was made behind closed doors, and we--in the exercise of our democratic assembly--feel that we should have a say in this matter, if indeed the matter sustains the name of that which we have birthed.

There are no women, as such: only girlfriends who are asking other servers for the menu.

new york messenger bag company

The thing is with these commercial guys is that they love to tell a story.

Sickness, or the burden of the object (marriage, gender, friend) is identity. Have Deleuze explain this away...got to keep it interesting after 18 years, the man with cane says, after insinuating that his german girlfriend from brooklyn puts on jackboots when they fuck: the preemptive defense of failure by distance and sickness. If laughter is communicative comprehension, then irony is what young people consider social security.

It is almost impossible to be without some distraction in the world. Whether it be some purpose or technological appendage. The heroin addicts, so strong willed before, attempt to show how committed they have become to sobriety. This pantomime of routine and health cannot hide their failure to truly have become one with their addiction in death. Even sickness, it seems, is a reason to tell others that you are alive, still. Sickness is a brand and an identity. It compels the system, as it were, to send its brightest  police in response and accommodation. Like waves breaking along a coastline, sickness shapes our resources in stable erosions. How many worlds could be contained within the frailest bodies, bodies that have absorbed the reckoned excess of anterior systems?

The proletariat has long been plagued by hackneyed images of labor and the bullshit  protestant efforts of the unlucky and the honest. The proletariat is the form that sustains identity, and therefore can have no presence, for it is a structural deficit. But the Real is at the same time the product, remainder, leftover, scrap of this process of symbolization, the remnants, the excess which escapes symbolization and is as such produced by the symbolization itself.

Stories from Citi, in edit: the silver-haired bourgeois couple regally travel to laugh and to enjoy the colorful performances of traditional cultures. Back home in some version of manhattan, the good wife buys the perfect object: stadium seats from the recently destroyed stadium. If I had world enough and time to squeeze the universe into a ball.

Immigrant stories from Toyota: the embarrassment of the child when being picked up from school. The libidinal market for automobiles is to be sought in the child.

New york in the 90's was the time to be young and poor, and it didn't matter.

Allergies are organs that respond to environmental antagonisms, or symbolic blockages.

permanent transfer

I once read that philosophy is a work of creative non-fiction. Writing suffers by its own, by its own modes of production and the arts by which it achieves its succession. That is to say, it is affected by the things it uses to represent itself, or the things it uses to represent itself affect it. It is wounded by an object and the wound is cured by the object of the wounding.

We are used to, almost conditioned to a certain distinction or correlation

between the real and the imaginary. All of our thought maintains a dialectical

play between these two notions. Even when classical philosophy speaks of pure

intelligence or understanding, it is still a matter of a faculty defined by its apti-

tude to grasp the depths of the real (le reel en son fond), the real "in truth," the

real as such, in opposition to, but also in relation to the power of imagination.

These are the guys trying to limit video games, limit who can be a citizen, redefining what the word rape means, making it illegal for a patient and a doctor to decide the best medical procedure for themselves, letting oil companies and banks dictate policy, trying to ban freedom on the internet for individuals (but not corporations) and tell us that people in far off lands are our enemies. It’s this guy and all the other hypocrite Republican yesmen. These guys. Read this, say you’re proud of the party of NO.

ninety-six

small female with visible keys bikes through blighted urban landscape

In the absence of a secure, pensioned position, or perhaps being only temporally employed (the en-viability or logistics of such as scheme being subject to factors and demographics of age), bicycle riding in urban environments is known as a spirited and adventurous activity that attracts a number of hobbyists annually, and promotes the vigorous allegiances of sub-cultural identities. We give our bildungs the testing of possible enjoyments and fetishes: can you displace maternal desire for rockets?

President Obama was born in what state? Or so read the screen on the bus. I think I am going to be late. The train to Claremont is at 1:20 and its 1:06 (i think) right now. I couldn't quite leave the house because we had just done laundry and I didn't want it to appear as if I had not considered her return before leaving myself, as if I had done so.

Towards a theory of metaphysics

There is a division inherent to the notion of the middle-class. The pandering of the West--or, the infallibility of the term 'working families' across the political spectrum--to the 'citizen' is a response to the dignified and racist anger of those citizens who work for a living contra those who do not have regular employment. Political allegiance is the phantasmic comprehension of this reversal in possibility: a fetish.

Daytime television retains the traces of what was known as a broadcast, a less fractured landscape of reruns and serials. Older americans sit on public furniture and watch bonanza between commercials about medicare  supplements, mobility scooters, and other demographically appropriate devices of infirmity and recognition.

The eastside italian deli is staffed by diffident post-young latino males. It has a surprisingly open interior with new paint and several flat screen televisions. The overall sensibility is catholic masculine, a unnecessary gruffness bordering on pomp and some obsession with the realities of character, as would befit  a mexi-talian deli frequented by cops.

There are families eating sandwiches so large they require a fork, a value of meat portions. Families who themselves have nephews incarcerated and nieces pregnant just beyond the decade. These are families who believe they are keeping some great calamity at bay, that credit and insurance will run interference against the void that stalks the bodies of children and organs. Everyday a love begins again inside a cluttered house of demands. Everyday a love returns with the long expectations of the name.

The true question of value for our age is how do we meet people.

Here was a man who had long sought vintage objects by which he sought to style his home, or oikos. It was a minimal style, which signifies taste.

It was against this precise background of existentialism, or rather the genre's populist appreciation that made deconstruction unable to publicly take root here in america. Rather, it took a batch of cellular networking commercials for americans to begin to think in deconstructive imaginaries, to begin the style of a global, cosmopolitan thinking. Our popular culture, so often the seedbed for primitive accumulation, is full of references to existentialism, well through the nineties  and into the millennium, which often functioned as a kind of 'shorthand' or 'reference' for a kind of pretentious academic yuppie whose impotence is a briefly alluring and fascinating foil: they who think they are somebody, and they who have the totem power of the prince, that reviled figure of strange perversion: the devil entertains your freedom. You are a thing that don't get to see what you are. You are so natural and nasty. The law is the law.

This master signifier of the bus. The boy along the city street gave the bus driver a knowing look as he backed onto the curb again. The look of one who knows how to catch the ball.

formal concerns

The difficulty of the grapheme, or the gramme as a means to escape the metaphysics of the sign. The gramme and not the trace.

Representation: american bars have jukeboxes full of bare nostalgia, of its patron's parents. We are left only with sliders.

The stability of a historical reference is the problem of the sign. As in Heidegger, the thing only emerges against a background of objects.

Like Kant, Hegel is concerned with knowledge, although not necessarily with a theory of knowledge as we understand it.

Opening

The first thing--under the guise of an offer, an officer, or finally a gift-- that a writing should be is an apology: an appeal against or for the time to smooth the necessity of its theft. A moment to ask what this is for and how long it should take. The greatest advantage of the printed word is its ability to graph this desire for efficiency in an appealing format. Draft, design, and the curious ability to compress depth and pleasure into the comfort of appeal.

I was slow and daft when my aunt ask me what I was doing in california. My absolute inability to answer must have produced a pause that blossomed into an honesty, which is perhaps only a means of deterrence. We had gathered for a holiday. And there among us, the stupefaction of such annual questions gives the very gathering its meaning, as if we decorate our houses with chains of small lights to signify this very evasion. Yet, in the moment my silence was long enough to indicate some break in this formality, and with teenage words I began to speak of the mytho-theology of everyday consciousness, and when this offer began to lightly bruise our compromise, I caved and said that I wanted to see god in the event, in the providence of the sparrow.

One resents changing registers, and to bend the capacity of the offer, I write this against the defense of typology and the speed of a relevant design. One day we will write here to prove that we are healthy, and to ease the insurance of our well-being. The image is obtuse, and you may believe it false, but my thought moves slowly--the pace is glacial.

January 25

The state of the union speech, expectedly, emphasized the importance of science and math.

listen to swordsman by gza

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary: spelling disaster.

“It is pointless to argue that the Opposition between the One and the Multiple is ‘static,’ and counter this claim with an assertion of multiplicities “supposed to nourish the unimaginable ‘wealth’ of the movement of thought, the experience of immanence, the quality of the virtual, or the infinite speed of intuition…I consider this vitalist terrorism.” Deleuze, as quoted in Badiou’s The Clamor of Being.

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Any advice the writer may give the reader about writing should be submitted in writing before hand. Yet, from time to time, the writer may wish to purge herself of frivolous and constipated ideas, to stake in the starkest terms the bare notions of an identifying set of beliefs. To put aside the partisan colors of the players in the game, for all belief seems compromised to a partisan, whose irony always wants a sharp and committed perspective.

All intellectuals are public intellectuals. Just recently, the Brooklyn based literary journal N + 1 published an article considering the difference between professional, or New York, writers and the multitude of writers who earn their primary income as an M.F.A professor. This thin homely of professor and professional would seem to name the difference between demographics, class, talent, and commodity production. Contemporary business thinking terms this difference creativity, enterprise, innovation, and most importantly, leadership.

From Restricted to General Economy

This essay is about the possibility of holes. Whether appropriation is total, whether the general economy is an affirmation of the virtual. I am want to say that the point at which sense disseminates solicits or shakes—yet why not say tortures, torsions the expression of the system at such. Perhaps we can say it is the tension between the figures (how to call them as such, we should no doubt question) of Lacan qua Lacanian castration is notoriously an Aufhebung, in which what is lost is really gained: “the physical event (circumcision as a substitute for castration) does not happen as such, but the threat—the Aufhebung of physical into spiritual—allows the phallus to come into being as such, and with it the virile function; just as primal repression is the precondition for the psychic system to function in the first place.”