- Reading Julia Kristeva -- Black Sun -- frustratedly because the first four chapters (as far as I read until the weekend) address melancholia/loss/depression from such a psychoanalytically linguistic perspective that the communique was all but utterly obscured to a 'layperson' such as myself... reminding me of other linguistic frustrations (switzerland) but that this is supposedly my mother tongue. So - arguments for accessible theory - that isn't written like an AP address, either, but doesn't presume such elaborate prior education of the reader. Is that possible? It's a translative problem that I experience... psychoanalysis being both a rigorous academic discourse (and precise language) and a 'lingo' that has been extensively disseminated via pop-culture 'ensures' that terms such as autoeroticism / oedipal / narcissism / libidinal / neurotic / subject ... etc etc have double meanings, are actually unsure. And I have no patience to learn the true language of Freud and his readers - prefer summaries of Lacan to the man himself. (Much as I had no patience for German grammar... oh woe. Oh, failure.
- Talking to Joey from downtown to Division - his suggestion that one possible route (of all these many) to 'take' would be researching inhabiting the liminal - the divisions, as it were - the personal vs. the academic. the professor vs. the friend. the presentation vs. the conversation. acceptable vs. the invalid(ated). Meaning (I'm thinking) investigating the vs. itself - the ring time. When and where they meet and merge and how bloody fuckin emotional that space is - because we have no rules there, in the border (drag).
- I don't know if I can do this. There is no 'this' yet, really. I told our class today I was considering a leave of absence. I probably won't, I don't know what else I'd do. But I have no critical distance from my research now - to even call it research is ridiculous. I gag on Chris-lessness. I'm resisting my positioning because even though I wear the dark hair and Calaveras earrings / all in black I hate to be the poster girl for dead.
- The bartender tonight (sweet woman) thought I was her age. I knew she was older but propriety doesn't allow me to say that, does it? She's 35. I'm 27. She checked my ID and the joke was on her / on me - god I hate having a body these days.
Showing posts with label articulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label articulation. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
key concepts
Potential avenues of inquiry to travel
which may or may not merge further down the road
1. Languages of Loss
how do we communicate flux and loss with language?
how is the 'fixity' of language disrupted in narratives of death?
naming with euphemisms - the way our culture speaks of death (or doesn't)
unsaying - or speaking around something - suggestive language
language of desire - fragmentation and sequence - editing
the testimonial compulsion - personal narrative - function and form
speaking silence
breakdown and progress
2. The Death Mask
'facing' death through masquerade/identity play
the carnivalesque/burlesque/grotesque
methods towards identifying with the liminal
towards integrating/experience the 'knowledge' of death-of-self by being 'not-me'
history of ritual mask-and-dancing
halloween - danse macabre - dia de los muertos
the fashioning of death (skull n crossbones) as an american way of making absence present
Six Feet Under - embodying (giving form to) death/dying/etc through television (actors as masks)
goth commodification
wax works, automata, marionettes and the Uncanny
3. Eros and Thanatos
sex and death - the pleasure principle and the death drive
decadence, debauchery and decay
body modification - tattooing
externalization of pain
attraction - repulsion
jouissance
violence
4. Performing Mourning
grief tropes - the 'stages of grief'
putting the fun back in funeral
the memorial theatre
role-playing
ritualizing change
acceptable mourning - 'good grief' - vs unacceptable responses
discomfort and embarrassment
public grieving - community
inhibition and transgression
which may or may not merge further down the road
1. Languages of Loss
how do we communicate flux and loss with language?
how is the 'fixity' of language disrupted in narratives of death?
naming with euphemisms - the way our culture speaks of death (or doesn't)
unsaying - or speaking around something - suggestive language
language of desire - fragmentation and sequence - editing
the testimonial compulsion - personal narrative - function and form
speaking silence
breakdown and progress
2. The Death Mask
'facing' death through masquerade/identity play
the carnivalesque/burlesque/grotesque
methods towards identifying with the liminal
towards integrating/experience the 'knowledge' of death-of-self by being 'not-me'
history of ritual mask-and-dancing
halloween - danse macabre - dia de los muertos
the fashioning of death (skull n crossbones) as an american way of making absence present
Six Feet Under - embodying (giving form to) death/dying/etc through television (actors as masks)
goth commodification
wax works, automata, marionettes and the Uncanny
3. Eros and Thanatos
sex and death - the pleasure principle and the death drive
decadence, debauchery and decay
body modification - tattooing
externalization of pain
attraction - repulsion
jouissance
violence
4. Performing Mourning
grief tropes - the 'stages of grief'
putting the fun back in funeral
the memorial theatre
role-playing
ritualizing change
acceptable mourning - 'good grief' - vs unacceptable responses
discomfort and embarrassment
public grieving - community
inhibition and transgression
Abstract I
Thesis I: first thesis proposal
This project first attempts an opening of language :
death dances. (death does dancing)
death dances... (the plural of what death does)
morte balla: ballare (to dance)
ballin' (to ball...)
The Online Urban Dictionary offers this definition of a balla: "A pimp or player. Someone who makes alot of money and can got anyone or anything that they want with no problem."
Death's a player - 'he' got anyone. got me good...
How does 'personal narrative' function in a text, and to what aim? To what end?
I wrote the dissertation for my BFA on the use of comics (graphic narratives, sequential art) to communicate the fragmentation of self and memory that follows from trauma and loss ...because my sister Kelsey committed (to) suicide just before the end of the program's 3rd year. Having 'finally' reached a point, or a space (this last past year) from which I felt able to revisit the rupture of identity and history that that experience effected - to articulate loss - I decided to move sideways from the identity performances of Ambiconti (and the decadence of Exuberant Corpse) to explore the connections between masquerade, doubling, desire and death. Towards articulating the heretofore ambiguous contiguity therein...
Then oh God a murder occurred. Can those moments even be said to occur? Time stops. A shot in the dark - *
And language imploded
again
*
*
*
Re-begin.
Because I find it impossible to look death in the face - for death has no face - I create masks, doppelgängers, to stand-in for the space of lack and loss, in order to hold (onto) the conversations I'm impelled to imagine.
Conversation implies language. Absence has none. Absence (lack, loss, and desire) must be cloaked in the guise of a presence to even be spoken of.
Masks, doubles (alter egos) and guises have been donned since the dawn of history in order to enact rituals of communication with death, loss of identity, desire, alternate realities and all manner of other ineffable experiences that are intrinsic to the human experience but alienated by the imposition of language.
Language is insufficient: communication must be embodied.
Bodies of texts: books, tattoos. Television.
I'm trying to do too much. I don't have to do it all at once. This is one paper of many. A deadline does not mean I'm dying.
I feel like Death's whore. Keeps sending me out to get fucked. Waiting in the wings. Pay up.
How can I possibly propose? I'm spoken for. What is it I'm going to do? I'm gonna die. You're gonna die.
Let's dance it. >Ball it.
Morte Balla (at http://portablemortal.blogspot.com) begins as a hyper-space project, an online documentation of my (and others') processes of (in)articulating the 'presence' of death in contemporary and historical artistic/linguistic discourse. Locating the 'archive' in the digital realm enables the development of a rhizomatic methodolody - and allows meaning to be produced in the space between time and place. The narrative that the project produces is both fragmented and progressive - simultaneously moving forwards and backwards, as each new 'post' pushes the previous further into the ground of the project's inception.
How will Morte Balla end? What form will it have taken, then? Its days are (yours and mine are) numbered.
What would you do if you knew you had seven months to live?
I'd write it out. Tell stories. Ride it out. Dance, laugh, fuck and play. Rite it. Get down with Death. Learn to die.
What's the point, though? What's a thesis? According to my dashboard dictionary, it's a statement put forward to be maintained and proved.
Statement: this happened. this happens. this happens all the time.
Inquiry: Once (twice/...) it happens, what happens next? How do our visual cultures equip us to face the facelessness of absence? The impossible certitude of our own expiration date?
Statement: we are armed with bourbon and jolly rogers' skulls. we adorn our selves with masks and makeup. we search out and eat the loss of others in order to glimpse our own. we need narrative. desire continuity. and desire -- reaches for what isn't.
So: I propose: to reach into what has no interior. To grasp at the formless, to quote the ineffable, perform permutations of reality and fuck the abstract.
So to speak.
So: to speak.
This project first attempts an opening of language :
death dances. (death does dancing)
death dances... (the plural of what death does)
morte balla: ballare (to dance)
ballin' (to ball...)
The Online Urban Dictionary offers this definition of a balla: "A pimp or player. Someone who makes alot of money and can got anyone or anything that they want with no problem."
Death's a player - 'he' got anyone. got me good...
How does 'personal narrative' function in a text, and to what aim? To what end?
I wrote the dissertation for my BFA on the use of comics (graphic narratives, sequential art) to communicate the fragmentation of self and memory that follows from trauma and loss ...because my sister Kelsey committed (to) suicide just before the end of the program's 3rd year. Having 'finally' reached a point, or a space (this last past year) from which I felt able to revisit the rupture of identity and history that that experience effected - to articulate loss - I decided to move sideways from the identity performances of Ambiconti (and the decadence of Exuberant Corpse) to explore the connections between masquerade, doubling, desire and death. Towards articulating the heretofore ambiguous contiguity therein...
Then oh God a murder occurred. Can those moments even be said to occur? Time stops. A shot in the dark - *
And language imploded
again
*
*
*
Re-begin.
Because I find it impossible to look death in the face - for death has no face - I create masks, doppelgängers, to stand-in for the space of lack and loss, in order to hold (onto) the conversations I'm impelled to imagine.
Conversation implies language. Absence has none. Absence (lack, loss, and desire) must be cloaked in the guise of a presence to even be spoken of.
Masks, doubles (alter egos) and guises have been donned since the dawn of history in order to enact rituals of communication with death, loss of identity, desire, alternate realities and all manner of other ineffable experiences that are intrinsic to the human experience but alienated by the imposition of language.
Language is insufficient: communication must be embodied.
Bodies of texts: books, tattoos. Television.
I'm trying to do too much. I don't have to do it all at once. This is one paper of many. A deadline does not mean I'm dying.
I feel like Death's whore. Keeps sending me out to get fucked. Waiting in the wings. Pay up.
How can I possibly propose? I'm spoken for. What is it I'm going to do? I'm gonna die. You're gonna die.
Let's dance it. >Ball it.
Morte Balla (at http://portablemortal.blogspot.com) begins as a hyper-space project, an online documentation of my (and others') processes of (in)articulating the 'presence' of death in contemporary and historical artistic/linguistic discourse. Locating the 'archive' in the digital realm enables the development of a rhizomatic methodolody - and allows meaning to be produced in the space between time and place. The narrative that the project produces is both fragmented and progressive - simultaneously moving forwards and backwards, as each new 'post' pushes the previous further into the ground of the project's inception.
How will Morte Balla end? What form will it have taken, then? Its days are (yours and mine are) numbered.
What would you do if you knew you had seven months to live?
I'd write it out. Tell stories. Ride it out. Dance, laugh, fuck and play. Rite it. Get down with Death. Learn to die.
What's the point, though? What's a thesis? According to my dashboard dictionary, it's a statement put forward to be maintained and proved.
Statement: this happened. this happens. this happens all the time.
Inquiry: Once (twice/...) it happens, what happens next? How do our visual cultures equip us to face the facelessness of absence? The impossible certitude of our own expiration date?
Statement: we are armed with bourbon and jolly rogers' skulls. we adorn our selves with masks and makeup. we search out and eat the loss of others in order to glimpse our own. we need narrative. desire continuity. and desire -- reaches for what isn't.
So: I propose: to reach into what has no interior. To grasp at the formless, to quote the ineffable, perform permutations of reality and fuck the abstract.
So to speak.
So: to speak.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Bodies of Work
from 'Critical Languages' in Bodies of Work, by Kathy Acker
My ideas end in a void. There is no end - an end is something. No more nouning in that unplace.
I have been stricken of late with the utter unknowability of. The reach of the space beyond reach is unspeakable - quantum physical. The inability of the/my brain to even think about - much less write about - unbeing - dying, being born -
Why try? Afterall. Why not be one who writes after all without a disbelief of after or of all?
How can I write about death and loss if I cannot examine it within myself - the thing (unthing) that slips always out of one's vision. Glimpses and then gone.
I did not get over Kelsey's death - I learned not to look for it so hard.
I forgot. Incorporated.
That is what we do.
danzare con la tue morte: to dance with your death - to choose: the symbolic or the invisible.
This is (will be) a Thesis. I cannot, unfortunately, compose an invisible text of unknowing - (to dance alone). Must, instead, choose stand-ins. In (-its) stead. Embody the abstraction: give symbolic form. Create a language first...
To speak on death I cannot 'face' it.
To speak to death I must face it - give face.
To speak to the mask of death. Dance with Death's doppelgänger.
Arghhhhhh
1. The languages of flux. Of uncertainty in which the 'I' (eye) constantly changes. For the self is "an indefinite series of identities and transformations."
...3. Languages which contradict themselves.
4. The languages of this material body: laughter, silence, screaming.
...7. Language that announces itself as insufficient.
8. ...the languages of intensity. Since the body's, our, end isn't transcendence but excrement, the life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.
...10. Language that forgets itself.
My ideas end in a void. There is no end - an end is something. No more nouning in that unplace.
I have been stricken of late with the utter unknowability of. The reach of the space beyond reach is unspeakable - quantum physical. The inability of the/my brain to even think about - much less write about - unbeing - dying, being born -
Why try? Afterall. Why not be one who writes after all without a disbelief of after or of all?
How can I write about death and loss if I cannot examine it within myself - the thing (unthing) that slips always out of one's vision. Glimpses and then gone.
I did not get over Kelsey's death - I learned not to look for it so hard.
I forgot. Incorporated.
That is what we do.
danzare con la tue morte: to dance with your death - to choose: the symbolic or the invisible.
This is (will be) a Thesis. I cannot, unfortunately, compose an invisible text of unknowing - (to dance alone). Must, instead, choose stand-ins. In (-its) stead. Embody the abstraction: give symbolic form. Create a language first...
To speak on death I cannot 'face' it.
To speak to death I must face it - give face.
To speak to the mask of death. Dance with Death's doppelgänger.
Arghhhhhh
Thursday, October 4, 2007
dis/integration
over coffee / tea at the bleeding heart bakery this morning with N - amongst other things:
suicide texts - not suicide letters per se but what is written in the space before or in the buildUP/breakDOWN towards suicide (premeditated, accumulated, deliberate - liberate?) - and the breakDOWN therein - the clenching of the text, the spacelessness. the limit and the looming... wreaking / knelling --
and i was thinking -- for THESE ARE NOT SUICIDE TEXTS, but are of a nearness and companionship with ... yet also, essentially (for this too shall pass) ever a moving away from (the schismrupture gaping echo chamber of) the Otherdeath --
--about reversal: in one, a text builds towards, or through, its breakdown. in the other, it breaks down as it progresses (into the past - towards what has already passed on).
and i can't help it. i miss it: the nearness of the implosion and wax-working of him and/or her was also, of course, a proximity to her and/or him.
meaning... if i can articulate it, i can't articulate IT at all.
suicide texts - not suicide letters per se but what is written in the space before or in the buildUP/breakDOWN towards suicide (premeditated, accumulated, deliberate - liberate?) - and the breakDOWN therein - the clenching of the text, the spacelessness. the limit and the looming... wreaking / knelling --
and i was thinking -- for THESE ARE NOT SUICIDE TEXTS, but are of a nearness and companionship with ... yet also, essentially (for this too shall pass) ever a moving away from (the schismrupture gaping echo chamber of) the Otherdeath --
--about reversal: in one, a text builds towards, or through, its breakdown. in the other, it breaks down as it progresses (into the past - towards what has already passed on).
and i can't help it. i miss it: the nearness of the implosion and wax-working of him and/or her was also, of course, a proximity to her and/or him.
meaning... if i can articulate it, i can't articulate IT at all.
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