metonic showers/ long hours

let 'the incredible lightness of being' be your anthem to 'the time is out of joint'. there is a strange euphoria thats accomanies tramautic experiences. in this new millenium are we in some whatever place or cynical time cruxx...and what did the nineties give us? NAFTA!? SO do we give ourselves to a schitzophenic time siezure or constitute an new spectacular continuity? thinking about place is important, for one the situationist international was right to protest place commodities but in all their diagnostics they were looking for end to politics. the place and time to speak about it is right here obviously. but because we reflect on negtivity and absent centers doesnt require cynicism or the dadaist 'abolition of the future'. its enought in fact to be wise to our own semblenceness. peeling off the fantasy to reverse or alter something like 'american exceptionalism' is totally over shooting the mark. i for one would love to ceate a big fucking spectacle, and i wonder at a radical reorginization of common sense.

hallmark holiday

start from the beginning, take stock of your whole body and especially your breath, slowly bringing your attention to your toes. it is there you begin to relax completely, one organ to the next, you locate every ounce of tension paying particular attention to the little muscles like around the eyes for instance, the joints in your fingers, the tension held in the groin or thighs. and let it go. let it all disappear. if you find that something remains, if the tension or anxiety is twice vivid as before, you know that your dumb body is no longer bearing the grunt of it. healing our bodies cannot mend our emotions, only they reveal or obscure them further. eventually we can find the very bottom of it and take from this a sense of unbearable nothingness. i have found no use in trying to heal those wounds; same as the babe suckling for milk, we are unconsciously doing it anyway and at best, we can wizen ourselves to the fact of doing it. but does that mean these are so many empty gestures? we are wise to ourselves but must go about as if it were all the same, as if we didn't know... the pretense of meaning is its architect.

the first mistake; my prayers were all too earnest, my promises too sincere. i know that life is not experienced through observation, just as desire doesnt find a spark by any plea or prayer. and the words her mouth wouldnt dare to speak, my eyes were privy to them encrypted in text and told to the entire world. his face and hand would stain her image and engross the story even more than the irony which proceeded in its conception and rebirth. so that i played the central role in my own nightmare is only a small portion of it, but, just a day after their lips met for the last time and she gave her self to him, it was the very next christmas day her legs opened to meet my lips and tongue which were held neither sacred nor apart from any other, the christmas she wept when we met again. her contradictions are equaled only by her betrayal which are both illuminated only in part by her words 'we are nothing but bodies separated only by skin.' sharp shocks that exploded my world equally in opposite directions but into one indecipherable chasm from where the 'word' whore was never shouted like all the slaps to her face and a christmas with her parents was played out to a near perfect portrayal to each one another for some fucking 'ideal' situation in her life, a safe-keeping for all my torments which for my part was committed to out of a respect that had everything to do with them. and for admitting she was a coward by never telling me i am supposed to take her apology, and in the wake of her actions to be genuine or grounds for forgiveness. and to whom is this situation more of an embarresment? do these wounds ever heal or like so many promises instead become irrelevant? or do they constitute (if i continue with) a new beginning where we are merely the said bodies occupying a space that is itself a kind of body separated only by other spaces...and when does this become a stupid, masochistic waste of time (a certain somebody wispers "it already has")!!!??

pinnochio v. hasselhoff

It is not helpful for us dissect celebraties, to ruminate over a seperation of man and myth. But when we turn our attention towards the allure, the human condition that goads us into glory, we begin to illuminate our idols and construct their image conscoiusly. Many people do this on a daily basis in fact-publicicsts, PR firms, narraters, ideologogues. They speak to a body of yearning who can neither be seen or felt, but like a hungry ghost it is heard in echoes of adulation and wanting. Those who would trace its profiles draw the rainbow of desires and common sensibility; they illuminate the heavans and cast shadows upon everything in its horizon. But those who would dispell the world of ghosts like Marx, who would surrender ideology and aesthetics to a false consciousness, are haunted by a spectre of their own-indeed communism has been given this name..."A spectre is haunting europe, the spectre of communism." They are haunted by a spirit who would have nothing to do with spirits. The exorcists of desire erect souless buildings and mosaics that reflect nothing other than material necessity. Moses engaged in a similar project, but was scandalized by the fact that the 'One True' had no face that would not consume us, no voice that would not destroy us utterly. The 'thing' of our dangerous and disgusting desires is sublated and the 'Golden Calf' returnes in jahweh's 'lessor faces' -divine messengers and a holy ghost in that we may know his glory about the world. Our heros and villains are just like this; not individuals in the sense that we know them (not to you or I); they live in our gazing upon, as conjured object-images that move in the world as apparitions do (they walk through walls or appear suddenly in your sleep). All of this is explained in popular media and culture.The story of superman (uber-man) opens with the plight of villains who were nefarious enough to warrant a condemnation within mirrors indefinitely, who return via the folly of a desperate man seeking their power; he is consumed upon first contact. This is not only the price of opening a “Pandora’s Box” but a necccessary step for the narrative to complete itself, where the forces of evil come to face their epic conquest by powers of goodness. This is accurately depicted as powers discovered along the way (they were not given but conjured) who were administered by a single man, the phallic body of our precipitous adulation. But how did the uber-man find his way to earth? When the world is turned upside down a great mourning appears and a haunting is set forth. The thing of reconciliation is set just above the horizon and although we are forced to grasp at this as if it were a real body, as if Pinocchio were a real boy, the sun burns our fingers off. This is why Lois fell in love with Clark Kent only after she knew him as the heroic figure in the news. Were he to become real again his phallic appeal would vanish entirely (it was only when he sought to give up his special status, his Je ne sais quoi that the world became vulnerable to all the evils of the nether world). When in the film Brazil Sam Lowry escaped his captures and his liberator Harry Tuttle immediately falls under a fatal duress. Instead of running he comes to his to his rescue and he recognizes for the first time in this embrace the person who he had wish to become; that the entire time Tuttle was the the expression of all his most controversial desires. This is when Harry Tuttle disintegrates into a mass of worthless paper shards that blow about the cold cityscape untended and forgotten. This is because Lowry was a realist, an iconoclastic spoiler of illusions. Idols and graven images and all great ideas are Harry Tuttles. As ghosts, they are ethereal bodies of lacking in every aspect but name (the corporeality of being-in-names, its body of speech). Names are spoken in hauntings, invocations that carry with them the unfinished business of a world not quite at home with itself. Without its name it cannot be conjured, cannot appear to us in our sleep. When Hamlet proclaimed 'The time is out of joint' he was invoking the spirit of his dead father, who was the name for unspeakable horrors, foul crimes of a past made present who's only salvation lived in the promise of a future indulgence. The experience of the present is always consumed by a kind of spectral lacking, the shadow play of an impossible belonging that permeates the world like a holy ghost. Even though it eludes our grasp, that it has no voice that will not destroy us, no face that will not blind us; even though Harry Tuttle disapears the moment we think we've got him finally, the world moves about its whims, without this ghost, without its continual conjuration, we are merely the profane flesh bags attested to by the stoics, toiling about obscure mundanity. Just ask Mr. Hasselhoff.

>>>>>bbbbborn4pornnnnn<<<<<<<<<

recently ive been getting into broad appeal pop music that has more of a feel good vibes. for ever i was into stuff that had nothing to do with feeling good or crowd pleasing, non song music that took moments to disregard the audience and do something interesting or strange, like take a breK FROM PER4FUNCTORY NORMALNESS, THE 'NORMAL' SITUATION. Like adult. or suicide, black dice among others. at these shows i often wanted to take a break from my own normal situation, temporarily, emotionally, take a dive somewhere outside of formal communicatibility or more importantly the molds that we pour our energies into that they may be recieved by other human beings. the poets are endlessly looking for ways to evade the cliche' expression. but there is in language a tension which has not only to do with the obligation to represent our person through rigid structures that have nothing to do with our actual being, but also that they have everything to do with our experience of being (the form is defining content). the world is absolutely topsy turvey in this way and music offers itself as an energy that communicates on its own terms. AND MUSIC IS, having no neccessary body or rational discourse or reference to concept (tone and pitch are are different cases entirely; they are real objects or, or the superficial roadblocks to the form but not meaning) it is in itself an exceptional continuity or a sensing before words ....For this reason i have disdain for the person who says "i just love that song(the macarana)!!! and genre-centric musicians who buy into replication and precidence. worse yet is the music capitalist who empties out content into a product, or the opportunist that works any genre whatsoever to get listend too (i.e. black eyed peas). music movements and even genre defining artists are guilty of this lazyness. replication is fruitful in certain respects but i find the experience lackluster. the attitude which is genre-conscious but not genre-defined is commendable. glass candy is a good example of just such a band. they have a track called 'superficial roadblocks' on their album music dream which i imagine the themes to be stuttering over the sexual energies of music and dancing. it is in a later album where 'soft boundries/animal imgination' captures this energy perfectly. whats interesting in track 2 about 'ripe apples' is the name itself, it is a kind of metaphor to song. it is song that captures chaotic tendencies in pre-speech or noise music and coalesces it into a fleshy fruit. it is a cocoon of meaning, but like the poem it consists of the 'creature' that would leave it. an obsession with music that disregards its audience is something to do with a deisre for a real intimacy. pop appeal on the other hand is the stamp of a symbolic panopticon, a forboding figure of a kind of perpetual 'no' who smashes the mind and desire into a formal submission. because of this pop culture is the grooming grounds of disconnected bodies, the intimacy in personal aleination; virtual communication in its truest sense. it is a case of looking ffor love in all the wrong places.

Here's a link to it:
http://www.myspace.com/rockthetoy

http://www.myspace.com/glasscandy

horse boy v. saggers

in response to "dont publish that!"

the 60s generation subverted Decartes's axiom "i drift thereofre i am" and founded the self affirmation "i am therefore i drift." when vietnam shattered the few remaining illusions of a rationality american society, what rose in its wake was a sense of vulnerablity, all the more salient within a burgeoning global society and president Carters refutation of americsn exceptionslism. sense of world would construct this "i am." the laudable "i am loved therefore i drift " later fell victim to Ronald Reagan but it just-was as bankrupt as the american narcissist, "i am, therefore there is love (therefore love)." they shared a treading towards meaning in a world wholly devoid of substantive content; thanks to the nineties we can now admit that and the 'i am' just doesnt matter, we are but we wont. But we are frustrated and anxious by thye fact that "i am nothing therefore i drift" is a coded "i am no narcissist therefore pay attention to me" or a literal falling apart of self and world. What this phobia holds proof to is the priority of something, something uncertain which by virtue of ts uncertainty has the charecter of embodiment; sentient prey of bigger and more spectacular contingent certainties. Therefore i affirm the priority of desire even in the face-world of values and truth claims, the fact that truth has no claim upon love, only in that it may embody this force, or represent some obscure cornerstone of driftin apart together (together apart), lends me to take refuge in a whatever place, or this whatever in particular (in your heart not neccessarily). That the claims of drifting and world are overlapping has everything to do with the fact that meaning is an absent guest (like beetlejuice he is not invited but conjured) and we still set a place for him ath the table and set ourselves somewhere between the 'form is emptiness' and bodhidarmas left hand to forgive ourselves in secret not for what we have done, but for the fact that we are knowing it anyway. 'Namaste' is best expessed in irony and our generation can no longer associate itslef with broad conjuctions like 'i am self, i am world." and so i say "go about the world drifter, and love greatly"

The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (Review pt 3)

In Carl Scmitt in the Age of Post-Politics Slavoj Zizek takes the reader through Freudian themes that would strive to reveal some psychological and theosophical underpinnings behind Schmitt's decisionism and priority of the sovereign. First in Oedipus we explore the unconscious drive towards enjoyment through the parricide of the father, the figure of authority and monopolizer of enjoyment so that he may consummate his incestuous love with the maternal object. Oedipus is the exceptional figure, the one who casts aside the taboo, to only find in this fulfilling of desire his own destruction. The lesson would seem to suggest it is a permanent prolonging of enjoyment and the permanence of the prohibiting father which allows the maternal link to continue (albeit tension ridden). But according to Zizek the Oedipus story only partially describes the castration process and requires the supplement of yet two other myths, that of Judas and King Lear.

In Lear we uncover the kings personal impotence and discover that the strength we perceived in the man is actually the place he occupies in the symbolic order. In Judas we learn that the betrayal of the king is necessary if he is to occupy the status of symbolic prohibition as the agent of castration. For in killing the symbol we elevate him to the status of the symbolic matrix, or as Zizek says, 'he returns in the form of his name' (though his death he has risen to the glories of spirit). Thus the person of Judas is actually quite necessary to prevent the person of Oedipus from reappearing. Of course it is our being within culture (the rituals of distance/closeness with the maternal object) that has succeeded in always having had killed the father of prohibition, but this is not to deny that the passage from systems of brutality (domination) to systems of symbolic authority (civility) require the act of criminality (revolution) to ensure its progress.

Thus in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud describes the first form of society as the pact between brothers to murder their father and divide the spoils. But Zizek informs us it is not until the murder of Moses that we find the first appearance of Modernity. Because where oedipus's father was the name of a certain taboo, and thus the structure of a symbolic constellation, Moses was the father of monotheism that represented the nature of uncontaminated will. Through a god that is grounded in himself we experience the gap between order and content, where content losses any necessary quality. It is the omnipotent and deciding god who brings about the death of the many sexualized and human like gods of traditional philosophy and marks the beginning of theology. Zizek would have us meditate on the french mathematician Pascal who declared that 2+2 would equal 5 if god declared it so. It is the sovereign who creates the structure of the symbolic playing field, by means of his 'positive act of willing' who without which we would seem to be doomed to the fate of a million oedipistic murders for all time throughout all society. Thus the one god can rightfully command Abraham to murder his son, to contradict the religion he has set out for him, because to do so asserts his authority as the source of all normative content. It is as if god was mimicking Socrates who when wrongly condemned to death defended his sentence by asserting that the value of law is not found in any particular ruling but within obedience to the voice of law as such.

What Zizek takes from this narrative is the lessons of modernism, a political ontology that is grounded in decision, and the shutting out from standards of legitimacy any normative criteria. The historical potential in our liberal institutions is found for Zizek, in the experience of material/subjective excesses "a history of that for which no structure can account but without which no structure would exist" (Gorelick/Kerr). Sovereignty here is experienced as a status-quo, a discredited state from the standpoint of a potential infinitude of political outsiders. A post modern politics then would seem to consist in an opening of the gate to the small guy, the outside, or say if you will as Mouffe does, a deepening of democracy. Through the circuitous route from Schmitt via Frued, to Hegel and Ranciere, Zizek's solution to this predicament is the instituting of a permanent dimension of political antagonism, a dialectical struggle that is a permanent vying for the place of decision, and for which particular struggles are set upon the task of eternally positing their normative programmes as the universal benchmark. Through a critique of Schmitt's uber-politic (the hyper aggressive politics-as-war, or the eradication of other), while still asserting its own positive content. What he achieves is a way to engender and dignify a politics without having to rely on an ideal speech situation or revert to a pure decisionism. Simultaneously invoking the Rortian 'ironist', and a Gramscian 'war of position', what Zizek fails to do is depict a community that could forge the link between such forces of struggle. If a hope for politics is found with a privileged actor as Zizek would suggest, the fate of an inclusive politic seems rather dubious; conversely, for the actor he identifies the model politic would consist in a perpetual revision of sovereignty, and so we are lead back again to the dregs of Oedipus. What he seems to have forgotten is one of the very first lessons that Schmitt offers us: the unity of a state is found in a commonality that is prior to law and systems of governance, and is integral to the friend-enemy distinction where a common ground or shared language is never given. This is why universal concepts like democracy constitute no society or concrete culture, at best they still remain merely the language games that are played within it.

Themes of Carl Schmitt

The first contribution is given by Paul Hirst a professor of social theory at Birbeck College, a basic overview where he characterizes Schmitts ideas as decisionism and his major themes as taking issue with 20th century liberal democracies. Schmitt takes issue with parliamentarianism for mistaking politics for a kind of utopic ideal speech situation that doesn't exist because any political inside requires a political outside. He is equally contemptuous of liberal-constitutionalism for rendering the state impotent by a rule-bound legalism. These theories presuppose an already existing state but fail to recognize how the state arises and continues by means of political struggle and thus cannot comprehend the extra-legality of true state sovereignty. Because the construction of any inside presupposses and outside, politics is the relationship of enmity between freinds and enemies, and a process of statecraft cannot rely on any certain rational or legality but instead is dependent on the capacity of the sovereign to decide and uphold power. These are the dynamic tensions that Hirst seems to consider somewhat alien to internal workings of modern day democracies, but very relevant to Foreign policy relations especially in the field of nuclear proliferation.