What is a victim?

"A victim, for Lyotard, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong. This disempowerment can occur in several ways: it may quite literally be a silencing; the victim may be threatened into silence or in some other way disallowed to speak. Alternatively, the victim may be able to speak, but that speech is unable to present the wrong done in the discourse of the rule of judgement. The victim may not be believed, may be thought to be mad, or not be understood. The discourse of the rule of judgement may be such that the victim’s wrong cannot be translated into its terms; the wrong may not be presentable as a wrong."

Memory & perspectives on the repetition compulsion

Memories reside in our ego, in a part of our psyche where it is pre-conscious, that is, available to consciousness.  From cognitive psychology, we know that it is not the 'full story' which is remembered, but certain, skeletalized moments.  Remembrance is an act of construction which brings those few pivotal moments into consciousness overlaying it with schema or filtering it through our current object relations and narrativizing it into a fully-bodied story, image, memory.  Our ego is, in part, a great narrator, a great story-teller.

One important question about memory is why it is unable to inflect our future behaviour to be more adaptive: for example, the classic case of the individual who narrowly escapes an abusive relationship... only to immediately trap them-self within another.

Libidinal
 While memories reside in systems of consciousness, our behaviour and (re-)enactment may act as the place-holder of forgotten traumas which do not, because they cannot, reside in consciousness, to give a silent voice to pain.  An attempt at bringing it into the realm of the Real.  Phantasies, related to secret and repressed desires, seek their fulfillment and our ego is left to narrate the why in a consciously-acceptable mode.

Object Relational
 Individuals keep elaborating on the same object relations, each and every time.  A few basic transactional styles, primarily inherited in the earliest conflicts and introjected objects, continue to function for the individual, finding objects with which to reproduce the same.

Semanalytic
 The subject is repeating an early feeling state from the pre-symbolic world of the chora and the vocalics, kinesthetics, and chromatics of the semiotic pulsional network and the earliest worlds of representation.  The return to the chora is unconsciously desired after castration into the Symbolic and the only point of return, which gives a subtle kind of pleasure and feeling of 'home' even if it is a movement into terror, is in behavioural and interpersonal repetitions.

A Critique of Intuition

"Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories but to phantasies erected on the basis of memories." -Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pg. 491

Though both fantasies and phantasies are "all those representations, beliefs, or bodily states that gravitate toward [...] the preservation of the status quo" (Abraham & Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, pg. 125), phantasies are not fantasies. 

Whereas fantasizing is conscious wish-fulfilling thought-activity which is known to be untrue, phantasies are fantasies which are unacceptable to consciousness and have been split off to the unconscious, where they are not subject to reality-testing and no longer known to be untrue.  Sufficiently intensified but traumatic phantasies can circulate--"proliferate in the dark"--to become complexes ('counter-ego nuclei') which figure into the moment of re-creation in 'remembering'. 

The viewing of the self and its memories as concrete, stable, essential, grounded figures denies the ways in which desires, experiences, behaviours, and orientations are subject to and moderated by complexes and phantasies.  'Intuition'--as a pre-reflective rush of emotions and sentiments--have been valorized by a number of movements as the most important way to avoid self-deception and make the right decisions: 'trust your gut feeling'; 'listen to your heart'; or, worse, that intuition zooms the mind past barriers of time and space into the realm of occult clarivoyance which knows the future... At any rate, respect for intuition is important for articulating the complexities of the mental and emotional lives of humans, but unbridled valorization effaces the origin of intuitions.

What we intuit should be significant fodder for how we orient ourselves and make decisions, but is not the 'correct answer' ever.  We can slowly learn about our own complexes as we deal with the affects in our intuitions, but only if we recognize that what we don't want to talk about is exactly what we should talk about, that what we hate is what we love, and where our intuitions are steering us may be precisely what is holding us back. 

Fenêtres: II

[Quotes from Jean-Bertrand Pontalis' Windows, part 2]

"You assume he is our father. No, he's mine, I am his daughter. I'm the one he loved.
— How do parents go about convincing each of their children that they were the favorite one? And how can one be satisfied with the conventional statement, "I love you both the same"?
— J. slams the door when her husband, who had not concealed his affair with B. from her, declares, thinking it would placate her, "But I love you. I love you both, one as much as the other," making his case worse by adding, "in different ways." " (62 - 63)

"Hypermnesia, this hypertrophy of recording memory, all this energy concentrated in order to forget nothing. [...]
— Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time, to access perceptive time. This test of mourning, of loss, of the separation with one's self is what frees us from reproducing sameness. A memory that would desire no loss is a dead memory. A living memory demands forgetting. Dead memory recorded everything except the living moments of today, which cannot be recorded.
— Hypermnesia, insomnia: they are sisters. Memory is what is asleep in us, our still waters." (69)

"Trying day, tiring, session after session, they all look alike, they all keep endlessly repeating themselves, I've heard it a hundred times [...]
— At night, to distract me from this day that doesn't end, I pick up a novel [...] It often happens, said Therese, that one invents sicknesses for oneself after a death. It's a way of feeling less alone. You split in half if you will. You take care of yourself as if you were an other. You are two again: myself and the one I"m taking care of. [...]
— A monad without doors or windows. Hostile in front of everything that would disturb self-reliance.

Analysis is, perhaps, along with love, the only experience that takes you "out of yourself." " (81 - 83) 

"Clearings: light, fragile rays of sun through the leaves, opening, but opening through a crack that for so long was not visible. [...]

— In my clearings, I am never alone." (113 - 114)

Mourning the Memory of a Streetcorner

"[E]verything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss.  Swallowed and preserved.  Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject."



The ramp down to the river ... the butter chicken place, for international calling cards; the gay coffee shop, where C. saw R. through the window; the lemongrass chicken vermicelli bowls with D.; the bad date with N. at the hipster restaurant; the Italian place where A. showed off her girlfriend; the art-house theatre, with every ghost ...  "Rest assured, your love is pure" ... a flute refrain, an ascent, a stolen past ... turning everything into salt ... I have to pretend you aren't there or anywhere.

Fenêtres: I

[Quotes from Jean-Bertrand Pontalis' Windows, part 1]

"Geography: The sunken part of the earth's surface, situated below sea level and generally filled in with water.
— These depressions have always been of unequal depth, which allows the following distinctions: a neritic zone or all marine waters that lie at depths of less than 3,000 meters, a pelagic zone that extends from 3,000 to 5,000 meters deep and an abyssal zone that includes large marine craters beyond 5,000 meters deep. [...]
— The abyssal mother at the very bottom of depression?" (26 - 27)

"I can only trust signs and no sign is reliable. [...]
— Hypochondria: my organs persecute me. My organs: so many objects inside of me became my present and potential adversaries, merciless attackers. I am now their prey.
— Jealous passion: she is hiding something from me, she lies, she has a life of her own and that's it -- I have nothing left in me except this "object," I am conflated with it. I am possessed [...]
— When the woman he thought he loved left him -- she was his, he was hers -- this man became a hypochondriac." (38 - 39)

"Meaning is not the opposite of nonsense. If you work at it, if you "rack your brains," you can always find some meaning in nonsense. Meaning is opposed to the formless, to the meaningless." (55)

"[The sensitive] quickly transform their perceptions, or rather their impressions, into signs, or rather into clues. They extend the empire of uncertain signs well beyond its definite borders [...]
— The jealous type is sensitive, always on the lookout for clues proving that he has been duped -- he isn't always mistaken; the lover also, about signs that would assure him that he is loved -- he is often mistaken." (56 - 57)

"[A]ll our efforts to master what we aren't assured of grasping or retaining, [...] the whole game of representations, which suffer from the lack of presence and that however tireless those representations are as well, they look for it, demand it, this presence.
— All this thread, as fragile as it is, is what connects us to the other, to life. Should it break -- existence is held only by a thread -- then it's death." (60)

Newsomce

Swayves of Love

A delineation of love into three streams:

i) Love as Amatory Crisis of Predilection

Herein, love is a predilection based on love of a singularity or particularity, a preference of a distinct one: I love this person, his face, his voice, his laughter, and none others.  Elaborated upon by Kristeva in Tales of Love where it is a subjective crisis which remakes boundaries of ipseity and threatens self-containment, where an ideal-image of an Other is idealized, fetishized and symbolic effort is spent in an attempted merging with the subjectivity of the other.

ii) Love as Sharing Impossibility (Micrology)

Drawing on Nancy's mini-lecture on "Love and Community," love is giving what one does not have: 

"[T]o give something that doesn’t belong to the realm of give–able things, neither that nor to give myself [which] means that love consists in giving something which is nothing. Nothing has to do with what is not a thing, not at all a thing — then what is not a thing, what is not an object? If you want, this is a subject. But this doesn’t really mean to give the subject, as the subject would be once again some thing that I would be. Love consists in my giving from me what is not mine in any sense of a possible possession of mine, not even my person. So to love means to give what is behind or beyond any subject, any self. It is precisely a giving of nothing, a giving of the fact that I cannot possess myself. [...] To give is to give up [...] To love is to share the impossibility of being a self."

 

iii) Love as Command of the Commune (Macrology)

Love of the community, in the community, 'loving thy neighbour' and a 'love' which extends to unknown others of the 'community' we have to live with (and not the individualistic loves of (i) and (ii) above).  Community is never simply geographical, but is some sort of being with; there is a community of Christians, of Edmontonians, of gay men, etc.  In dealing with the question of 'We', Nancy configures a collective version of his 'love as sharing impossibility' where the community shares the impossibility of common being.  The community is a being-in-common without common being. The crux is the "with" of "being-with" others which offers proximity (a closeness creating 'community') and distance where that distance is "precisely the distance of the impossibility to come together in a common being," to have a common substance.  Instead, community love is sharing the "with", sharing the no-thing (no substance, no property) in common, sharing just the being-in-common, the nothing, the space in-between.   

"This night, this empty nothing"

Lack - void - emptiness...

Partially--but also an incalculable flow of forces, affections, and perceptions unable to be accurately demarcated or delimited.

This is where idealization, that faith vital to the amatory subject, fails.  When Roland Barthes examines the discursive configuration of "altération" in a lover's discourse--the 'tip of the nose' figure--, he finds:

"Abrupt production, within the amorous field, of a counter-image of the loved object. According to minor incidents or tenuous features, the subject suddenly sees the good Image alter and capsize."

Doubtless, because the loved object is no object, but a false history we've narrativized and a becoming's anomalous we've essentialized--the limit movements of his skin, the Loner, or the temporary governance, the Power, of his modalities.

The deception is already alive without any need to accuse internal forces of contagion or external powers of transformation, any affective becoming-Other or shift in ideological apparatuses or intersubjective crisis which refigures or reframes the white wall or multiplies or nullifies black holes producing faciality traits unrecognizable...

The lover we've known is already unknown.  He is already a stranger, his being and love a phantasm, a ghost.

Here she comes

"People who kissed, kissed and hugged one last time
Surprise me like a monster ...
A rape in the meadow, a fornicating fellow.
A flea on the fur of a shaggy old sheep,
All tangled up like winter ...
Cut the very life of her blood bank that billows up
from below her skirt and sunlit blouses ...
A hollycaust.  A pussy, wussy willow.
Marshmallow, a mantra.  A temper tantric tantrum ...
Watch out, here I come."

Who can bear witness to unknowing?  Who can speak (about) rape?  Can its memory, regressions, or ressentiment be spoken?

Displace the ghost with god

I wonder where I am now:  Not stoic, or sensitive, or some whore to take every fucking strike across the face he can.  Now: some panoply of forgotten emotional crises aaaaand walls crumbling, night setting in around my eyes, but offering no comfort of disappearance as salvation.  Now, a hauntology with a resonance which lets the incoherence and void of dynamism and becoming linger into consciousness, as an absent presence, present and not present: tracings from the past which rupture (in haunting) the present to re-orient futural experience as a destructive return of the Same, a traumatic moto perpetuo, ever understanding present freedom as nothing more than a phantomic irruption producing projectural finitude because it is grounded in what was.  Causality as trauma?  An internal secret, not to be discovered because it is undiscoverable, unconcealable: uncovering, never presenting a naked truth but a Moebius strip hall of mirrors or, in short, spectrality.  Heidegger exorcised it with onto-theology: to acknowledge, at base, the 'Mystery', wherein we displace the ghost with god.

May I suggest a Sun Prince?

The Petty King: The Masturbatory Divine

The petty king endlessly reads, decrees, and passes laws; in decadence and boredom, he forgets the martial caste, but sublimates their blood into semen, finding the masturbatory divine, alone in his granite fortress.  He, too (no, most of all), must pay the price for transgressing the law: his body lynched (by his own hand), to be eaten by domestic animals. 

'Little hope, little home of heavenly, come save us from this ugly truth ...
Little ghost, so innocent and carefree, they would never stop hunting you.
Little voice, life got the best of me, and, in time, that's what awaits you, too.
Little hope, sing a song of fire; I don't know how to be just like that ...
I've seen the truth and it's nothing like you said.
I've seen the picture of a perfect world ...
So many questions; so many things unsaid.'

These Ghosts of You

I've been intrigued, lately, on the figure of the ghost/spectre/phantom ... a first subtle (early) attempt at a mapping of the figure(s) of hauntology...

a) The Phantom as Liar
-The phantom is a ghost of concealment which lies, terrifies, and misguides to keep hidden its secrets.  Its exorcism is in superegoic challenge, in symbolization, in deciphering and interpreting (the shameful, the hidden, the prohibited) in order to dispel the apparition's hold on traumatic knots of occlusion. 

b) The Revenant of Temporality
- The revenants/spooks of past haunt the present in a non-presence which, regardless, leaves fragments and mementos in the material, affective, and representational realms which interrupt presence with absence rupturing the present and folding time to leave the passed-by and futural more suffocating and pivotal than the now.  This figure is a more experiential re-figuration of the effects of thrown facticity and projection on our concerned engagement with existence.

c) The Fantasm as Trace of the Plane of Consistency
- The enigma of material self-incoherence harkening the originary lack which birthed the text.  The fantasm/apparition is the non-present presence always haunting the symbolic with secrets of doxy and repression and the threat of (Kristevan) semiotization. This ghost is exorcized (improperly) by ontology. 

d) Spectrality as Masking
- This figure suggests a mode of being and sociality in which identity becomes dispersed, pluralized, elided, proliferated, and inconsistent (in pseudonymy, heteronymy, and anonymity).  Herein, the Real and corporeal fade into echoes, eclipsing social prohibitions, immobility and identification.

'That Story he Told'

<<< that story he told >>>
of course we are probably all introduced into the symbolic world at that same time but the difference is that most (or perhaps there is the lie) are without that tactility of an other embodiment, living instead in a experiential egonomy of our corporeality -- defining those contours in the mirror (stage) perhaps --  in a production of our (imagined) haecceity.  the first hierarchies are to be in ego-domination over food, faeces, inanimate playthings, and the naming of our flesh, we might think (in order to fine tune politico-erotics into our culturally privileged kinesthetic mimetics of healthy "passion" and "intimacy").  or, is it all blind trauma either way?

his resonance with my objects is so multiplicitous that he has become an upright river of such unintelligibility that even the dim light allows his face to melt into my past. "how do you say your full name?"

Rape Culture & SK Slutsauce

Saskatoon ConsentFest & SlutWalk happening May 28th, 2011: Facebook

The greatest response to this event comes in the form of the film, Irreversible (2002), which provides voyeuristic looks into notions of choice, dress, non-rape intercourse, women's pleasure in relation to men, and, most importantly, dares the audience to imagine shifting blame from the victim to the rapist and, still further, to a violent environment of sexism, classism, and heterosexism (homophobia and transphobia) which fosters and supports a rape culture and its acts of sexual assault. 

Fæg Robotics

Expansion upon Distention:
whereas, Science produces Functives (predictabilities in a becoming-useful on a plane of reference), Philosophy creates Concepts (consistency in a becoming-thought on a plane of immanence), and Art composes Works (sensation in a becoming-other on a plane of composition), as their respective modes of response to the provocations and problematics of existence and enhoming in chaos, we wonder at the enclosing of this discourse in political sovereignty; what of the warriors and labourers in chaos.

Philosopher-gods: one-eyed, celeritas, magician-emperors, signs that capture, tying knots at a distance, encasting nets, the bind/bond, making moves 'once and for all'.

Scientist-kings: one-armed, gravitas, jurist-priest-kings, law and technology, giving laws, making a pact, alliances, laying out a field, organizing, principling and disciplining, appropriating, starting all over again each and every move.

Artist-barbarians: not the warriors appropriated by the State maschine with their dō and honour codes.  (No more magic violence of the emperor; no more military institution of the king)  Instead, the divine law-destroying violence and terror of barbarians flooding out of the desert and cutting intense nomad lines through cities and forests, burning as they go.  Against State gravity disciplining art into craftspersons of paint, clay, and so on, or into principles of art theory (and interpretosis proper) and history (and the hysteria of artistic periods/movements/collectives), the pure aesthete is the intensifier of the outside, the scapegoat turned queer, turned into the goat's anus demanding a new anti-logic of anilingus, the guerrilla whose secrecy and spying form a War maschine against.  Simply: counter.

This leaves the martial class of warriors: the engineers and applied scientists who protect the Law and harvest technocratics with reason.  And, the caste of fecundity: the varieties of proles.  But, among the fecund, the applied theorists, or theorists for short, who finally make use of the conceptual universes of philosophers, turning these dusty grave-stones into homes, into centripetal eco-nomies of (dis)contact, and whose activity becomes the social.  Not sign-making, but sign-working: semiurgy. 

We each are already malfunctioning, wounded, blinded, maimed techno-bodies, patchwork circuits, who have to stop pretending.  The signs that control us, the signs we emit, the signs we hope to dominate, or eat; stop rooting in the filth, becoming a petty king or prophet to a false god, or burning our lips and praying without praying for psychosis.  Labour in the signs, rustle up their ghosts, and set them to work; become conjurors and sorcerors.  We must learn to be semiurgists, ready to speak the tongues our gods have taught us then forbid us to use.

Construction is complete...

...a fagborg is 'born.'