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.