I am so exhausted of bodies and women's parts blown up like balloons or cut into pieces so that they are adequately tiny or adequately round and their skin is sufficiently smooth so that we can reinscribe meanings and our own desire or fear of desire or inability to desire on to their available surfaces. I feel that public sexuality is such a stupid farce; as much as I want people to be comfortable with their bodies and sexuality, what has become so called 'sexual liberation' is the opposite of comfort - it is the putting-on of sexuality as a hard, impenetrable shell so that all we are given to jerk off to is that - those shapes and listless eyes. I don't want sex to have "meaning" in that old, stilted, oppressive way, but I want it to be relational and an exchange between people rather than spectacle, images.

the world is literally falling apart and I'm just sitting here reading Badiou. I feel so humbled and sad and fearful and helpless. Its been a tough year, Earth. I don't know what I can do.

I went to New York City for the first time last weekend with a group of friends. We rented a big and disgusting SUV to go to a conference on oil and slime and geotrauma inspired by Reza Negarestani's text Cyclonopedia, which you should check out sometime if you're in the mood for disconcerting speculative realism. I learned a few important things while I was there. It is disconcerting to be with someone you love, but rarely see, and come to terms with changes - that is, changes in them, and the changes in yourself that become visible in that exchange. I only realize how I change when I witness old friends' responses to me in new settings and new times. It is not a negative experience so much as humbling. And it requires a period of grace - to recognize that this is what it means to love someone - to take things as they are. When you love, you are capable of doing that, I think. It is too big a burden if you don't. Don't love, that is. I also realized that my boyfriend is extremely important to me. In the moment - on a rooftop patio overlooking midtown Manhattan and the Empire State building, surrounded by drunk people - that I realized our paths wouldn't line up that night, I just felt such a pain and loss that I haven't felt in a long time. New York is one of those places that needs to be experienced with the people you love, or else it is just exhausting and anxiety inducing, at least for someone like myself. I am blessed to have spent most of my time with one person I love, but lacking my better half during a time at which I so needed him made me realize the extent to which I have found something profound in another person.
I also realized that I am very happy with my life now, to the point at which even such glamorous alternatives as NYC in the springtime are relatively unnecessary in comparison. I love being invested so deeply in work I love, I love being out from under the burden of unfriendly thinkers (i.e. Lacan) and in the arms of those who want me there (i.e. Deleuze).
I don't really have the time or desire to blog anymore, but sometimes it is cathartic. That was the original intent. I don't really have the outlet anymore, except maybe in my working-through theory and philosophy. In any case, followers - drift away, float away, slowly dwindle. I am happy with a whimper and not a bang for an ending.

Today's women's studies' seminar - "Technology, Gender, Embodiment" - dealt with male fluids, the male abject, and the (white, able-bodied, heterosexual) male discomfort with their own leakiness. Of course we had to speak in generalizations for the sake of clarity; I know and have known men who are more or less comfortable with such things. But this is a topic that, in my opinion, is vastly under-theorized and extremely important - not only because it provides a more rich understanding of how female bodies are typically signified as "abject," but because it allows a certain queering of the "male." This is one reason I shirk away from programs entitled things like "women's studies" rather than "gender studies" - both binary stereotypes should be reassessed and re-theorized. Why not? The title "women's studies" also suggests that it is primarily the role/interest of women to redefine or challenge gender - and I don't think that this is the case anymore. Nor should it be supposed that only women or "othered" sexualities have a stake in these topics. Everybody does, or should.
In any case - one of the main topics brought up in the readings is the fear of contamination between men, of seminal fluids, and others - [heterosexual] men didn't want to talk about their semen or come into contact with other men's semen, and the possibility sparked tons of "humorous" comments not-so-subtly tinged with homophobia. When I refer to "the men" here, I'm specifically referring to the men who were interviewed for a series of case studies conducted by scholar Robyn Longhurst, particularly in her book "Fluid Bodies." In any case - men were only comfortable talking about solid excretions (shit, shaving), and not fluid excretions, unless of course the latter was either 1) sexualized, made to demonstrate virility in some way or 2) made into a joke. Heaven forbid the tightly sealed universal subject becomes obscured by its own (particular) decay, by its own proclivity to "leaking." Leaks, excretions, anything "abject" produces anxiety in [heterosexual] men because male bodies are produced as functional, social bodies, rather than as sites of pleasure. The desire to control these flows suggests a desire to maintain control over one's body, social position, as well as ones own desire - leaks are "feminized" - and therefore, must be suppressed.
One of the more interesting theories (Elizabeth Grosz's) is that straight men see themselves as active "givers" of fluid, rather than as passive "receptacles." Thus, flows between men are terrifying, not only because they threaten the self-contained "hardness" of the masculine, but because the vertical hierarchy of giver/receiver, passive/active is obstructed and replaced by circuitous flows (or what Deleuze and Guattari or Kristeva call heterogeneous flows). Desire is "queered" when it is transferred from a Deleuzian "striated space" to that of a "smooth space," or plateau.
In any case - interesting topic, and one that I will probably return to while researching for my thesis.
I've kind of abandoned this blog because it feels trivial, and I am busy. I've been in a good place. My brain feels full and I have come to terms with where I'm going - for my thesis I'm probably going to focus on virtual and material (sexual/gendered) prostheses, particularly in relation to queering desire and subjectivity. I have a shit-ton of Deleuze to read, basically.
Back to reading - Shopenhauer (sp?) and Schelling, McLuhan and Baudrillard.

MY ELDER KINSMEN UNLIVING
by Rebecca Farivar

When a thing may

or may not be

real, you sense

it as a half-

presence, a source,

a back-story

you’ve hidden, thrown

into the trough

between two waves.

Now monsters crawl

to you, stalk you,

leave the bogs and

meres for you. A

whole line died to

kill you, but you’re

here still. And yet

you can’t break a-

way. You are full

of dark matter.

That comes from your

fathers, mothers,

your brothers, your

unnamed sister.

Think about what

haunts you, think of

the waves, the meres,

the monster-strewn

shores of somewhere

else, and then ask

again what haunts.


/
from here.

Capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape are not just difficulties that arise, they are the very conditions of its operation. Capitalism is founded on a generalized decoding of every flow: flows of wealth, flows of labor, flows of language, flows of art, etc. It did not create any code, it created a kind of accounting, an axiomatics of decoded flows, as the basis of its economy. It ligatures the points of escape and moves ahead. It is always expanding its own borders, and always finds itself in a situation where it must close off new escape routes at its borders, pushing them back once more...It is endlessly crossing its own limits which keep reappearing farther out. It puts itself in alarming situations with respect to its own production, its social life, its demographics, its periphery in the Third World, its interior regions, etc. The system is leaking all over the place. They spring from the constantly displaced limits of the system. And certainly, the revolutionary escape is not the same thing as other kinds of escape, the schizo-escape, the drug-escape. This is precisely the problem facing marginal groups: to make all the lines of escape connect up on a revolutionary plane. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on a new character, and a new kind of revolutionary potential. So, you see, there is hope.

Gilles Deleuze from Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, pg. 270

“i try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses i can in order to show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced. when i study the mechanisms of power, i try to study their specificity… i admit neither the notion of a master nor the universality of his law. on the contrary, i set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and i do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit to them. and if i do not say what ought to be done, it is not because i believe there is nothing to be done. quite on the contrary, i think there are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be forged, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. from this point of view, my entire research rests upon the postulate of an absolute optimism. i do not undertake my analyses to say: look how things are, you are all trapped. i do not say such things except insofar as i consider this to permit some transformation of things. everything i do, i do in order that it may be of use.”

-Michel Foucault, dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. ii, 1976–1988 edited by daniel defert and françois ewald, pp. 911-912

Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up
again, but differently.

-Jean Cocteau

(just realized a good half of the photos on my computer right now consist of stormy seas or abandoned looking houses, why do some images haunt people and not others?)

Pretty songs! Yeah!

Life has been pretty busy, the weather is horrible, school is picking up in pace and I'm feeling motivated for once. I watched two films by Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev on Monday and now I'm writing my final paper on the reappropriation of marxist "sexual liberation" discourses into capitalism, and the dangerous pitfalls of representing the female body in a so-called sexual/"revolutionary" context. Basically, repressive desublimation (Marcuse and Zizek), as well as Sontag and Bataille (taboo, the distinctions made between erotica/art and pornography as similar to the distinctions made between documentary/essay films/fiction or surrealist films). I have a lot of thinking and writing to do, obviously, but this is the crux.
As for the films themselves - "Sweet Movie" is an insane parody, pornographic, semi-fictional, semi-documentary Brechtian montage of insanity. It is one of the only films I have ever seen that truly provokes severe, visceral physiological responses: disgust, physical discomfort, arousal, etc. Much like reading a Bataille novel, except more fun(ny). If you can summon a copy and are into perversion and heavy handed Marxist/political critique and gratuitous sexuality - watch it! I dare not say too much for fear of scaring people away from a brilliant and revolutionary film.
On that note, I feel conflicted about what the fuck I'm doing in grad school. Big surprise. I've become disillusioned and angry with Lacan and basically want nothing to do with psychoanalysis right now. I want to do work in film studies but I feel that if I write an MA thesis on film it will narrow down my options for applying to PhD programs. And I'm not even sure if I want to do a PhD, because I am a little bit tired of theory and the usual philosophy suspects. Not scared, per se - just not as interested anymore. I just want to watch awesome movies all day.
So yeah. That's that. Apologies for the whining.

scooters, vacation, fall

I feel incredibly guilty and sad today. And disappointed in myself, I guess. For not having any Marxist pep this morning and doodling horrific looking bodies instead of watching Santiago Alvarez films in my Brechtian cinema class. For being someone I would be afraid to be with. For having little motivation to write about Deleuze and modified bodies, and little confidence. I wish I wasn't so scattered and sad all the time.
Of course, I write here pretty much only when I get into these moods, so I am in no way trying to say that my life is bad or that I have any reason to mope. Everyone has certain thresholds that they come up against. When I get here there is nothing left to do but scale down my self-created wall of shame and pool up at the bottom until the feelings pass. Wait it out wait it out wait it out.
I've been meaning to write this quote here for a while. Blake Butler told me to read Zeroville so I did, and it is amazing. And each section functions like a vignette, usually unrelated and readable in its own right.

'In America you have this idea that anything about sex is acceptable only if it absolutely is not, under any circumstances, sexy. The Americans are too romantic to make such a film. They are in love with shame.'
'The French are romantic.'
Maria dismisses this with the flick of her fingers.
'Quelle mythe! No one ever said in a French film, 'We'll always have Paris.' Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysees as the Nazis march in? The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with what the characters are. The man does not pay me for the sex, he pays me to leave afterward. For the lack of consequences.'
'He pays you to leave?'
'This is what Brando thinks will save him in Dernier Tango...sex without consequences.'
'You are paid to leave?'
'This is what destroys him, because there is no sex without consequence.'
'Perhaps last Tango in Paris isn't just about sex.'
'Cheri,' she laughs, 'sex is never just about sex.'

Images:
3. Georges Rousse
2. Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus
1. Room O (I think) by Yves G. Noir