Edward Burtynsky, SOCAR Oil Fields #6, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006

Brazen, Raqs Medisa Collective, 2008

Chris, by Pieter Hugo

You're my favorite kind of American, Luis Gispert

Transformations. Issue No. 17 2009 — Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics

--Mounir Fatmi, 2007

The summer 2009 run is underway...

The literary may be an "event," that is something that cannot be fully understood theoretically but must be engaged in its specific performance (word by word or line by line in the unfolding text). It may even, on occasion, be capable of transforming the conventions of understanding which make up its initial readability....At issue in reading a literary text, however gently, is the force of a possible discontinuity, that the understanding achieved by the minute discipline of following its terms is not a kind of continuous progression of insight, but -- somewhere -- a jump. In other words, such "understanding" (if that is still the best word) is not the modification or enhancement of an underlying consciousness or identity that would end the text as it began it, bar a little increase in its mental stores, but a becoming-other of that consciousness itself, whether minutely or significantly.

from The Poetics of Singularity, by Timothy Clark

hart!, by Eileen Myles

Anthony Madrid at WebConjunctions

Coming Soon:

Lucy Ives's Anamnesis, winner of the Slope prize

Felix, 2008-09, Fernando Mastrangelo

Like Poe's orangutan, Zarathustra's animals do not belong at home, in homes--they are unheimlich. The "speech" of animals is uncanny because, even if it is only "jabbering," it manages to produce in Zarathustra the semblance of a world, of a full exteriority within which language circulates. Heidegger explains that "after such solitude the world is like a garden, even when it is invoked by mere empty talk, in the sheer play of words and phrases." The discourse of animals thus provokes a deep sense of solitude, an abundance of emptiness. It is in this sense that those animals are uncanny: Zarathustra feels alone in their company. For Heidegger, Zarathustra's exchange with the animals portrays the "loneliest loneliness," an experience of solitude that reveals, for an instant (the shadowless moment of a suspended midday), the animal world....

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes: "Indeed perhaps there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics." The fear and pain that accompany Zarathustra's entry into the abyss of an animal world arise from the depths of memory, or as Nietzsche phrases it, from the prehistory of man." By engaging the animals, Zarathustra--and by inference, humanity--plummets from the edifice of world (language and memory) into the immemorial open of a time before world. And this time before world, this prehistory of man, returns to humanity as the figure of the animal. Animal being forces humanity to acknowledge the finitude of world: that is, animals tear humanity away from the imagined totality of world. In this way, the Nietzschean and Heideggerian animal meet at a point beyond language, world, and memory--at a point beyond mortality. The point beyond world is marked for Nietzsche by forgetting, for Heidegger by erasure; and for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the beyond is recalled by the figure of the animal. For Nietzsche, however, the world beyond represents a "robust health," and the possibility of a new beginning, a "new promise," whereas for Heidegger it is a saddened and darkened affair.

Akira Lippit, from Electric Animal

The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation

Daniel Heller-Roazen

Chu Yun, Unspeakable Happiness.02-b, Installation, 2003

You Are Nothing



I Am Jubilant

--David Thorpe (b. 1972)

It's not that, in the Marxist sense, things really are social relations which have become opaque; they both are and affect social relations, they are a partner in them, and all 'social' relations mix together chains of humans and nonhumans. Latour's exemplary objects--a speed bump, a hotel key with a weight attached to it, a door closer, a camera--are inscribed and programmed by human will and in turn, as nonhuman delegates, require humans to behave in certain ways. The speed bump 'is not made of matter, ultimately; it is full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers, commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and standard calculation.' Matter and persons connect and intermingle in a zone 'where some, though not all, of the characteristics of concrete become policemen, and some, though not all, of the characteristics of policemen become speed bumps.'

John Frow, from "A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole"

"Void Space of Gardens and Fields" for The Great Pyramid, Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo

God Forgives Lucifer, Ryan Ford

Comme des Garçons fall 2008

The winter 2009 run is underway...

Brian Howe on Jon Leon's Alexandra

He reminded them that in the time of the Great Inflation (1922) the process of dissolution became so rapid the workers had to be paid twice a day to survive. At this point an ingenious government minister invented the "agricultural mark"; Germany was saved and the Nazis began to prepare for their take over. "Agricultural mark" meant that you anchored the value of paper money to products of the earth (crops). Suddenly the farmers were rich. Germany was powerful again and was driven to a thirst for even more by this superior new philosophy, which had been quickly obtained by making a few small manipulations of "ordinary" philosophy. But people didn't make these connections then. An indelible photo has remained printed on my mind: the image of wheelbarrows full of paper money needed to buy a kilogram of bread. Again and again, every time I tallied up my daily expenses, the image of the wheelbarrows leaped forward in my mind. You can get along without a car, and I got along without one, but bread at ten thousand lira had to have been the beginning of the last phase of the catastrophe.

Antonio Porta, from The King of the Storeroom, 1978 (trans. Lawrence R. Smith)

Ange Mlinko on Simone dos Anjos's Comedies at the Poetry Foundation blog

Cosa Nostra's spring 2008 run reviewed at Isola di Rifiuti

Splash, Ai Weiwei.

20 Dollar - M.I.A.

Wardrobe, Anna Barriball

Being is blinding and anywhere is blinder. I try to keep going, to stay nowhere, to see. Movement is blind. Soaring is illumination which blinds. Where there's no logic left, there's life, logic's opposite. Inanimate is not the opposite of logic. The song's tune was logic or mourning; a tune whose even flying is a burial: one of life's practice-deaths. Any cleaning or cleaving is also practice-death. Everything shows that. What you can't see in the sky is the sky. Seeing is everywhere b's enemy.

I am reading (in Pussy): "As if to find out was simply to see...To see equaled to accept, because the object of my sight was exactly what I was now forced to accept." And on the same page I'm reading: "I couldn't tell which one I was. I kept looking and looking, but I could no longer find myself. I realized that I'd escaped my death because I no longer knew who I was."

Stacy Doris, from Conference

Overman, Fernando Mastrangelo

[click to enlarge]




Handset and letter-pressed by M.H. in an edition of 125.

I could say as much for what we call the "work of art." How do we recognize such a work? Only by the following: That faced with it, we do not stay faced, but we meet, we strike, we are struck, we lose our envelope just as this thing, this work, loses its own--its forms, its mannerisms. We develop within it as it does within us. We enter and exit. We are always in this in-between of it and us. Rather quickly we understand there is about as much of an "it" as there is an "us" (or "me"). There is--There is only reality that neither immanates nor transcends: that's the obstacle--the good-obstacle or the bad-obstacle, but the chock, the chocking obstacle against what is neither within nor without, but an erected barrier: death, birth, love, spoken word. There we strike, we are struck. We do not remain in ourselves, we do not leave ourselves. Just in between: we get a bump, a bruise, a blood clot. Being gets out of there swollen, tumescent, distended. Neither fluid such as water immanent to water, nor leaping such as a dolphin transcending waves. Rather dull, dingy and uncertain like a Medusa between two waters. Admittedly, that Medusa terrifies the philosopher.

Jean-Luc Nancy, from "Imm/Trans"

Becoming everybody/everything is to world, to make a world. By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible....Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout its own proximity, as the presence of one hacceity in other, the prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movements.

--D&G

Art is the most genuine and profound will to semblance, namely, to the scintillation of what transfigures, in which the supreme lawfulness of Dasien becomes visible. In contrast, truth is any given fixed apparition that allows life to rest firmly on a particular perspective and to preserve itself. As such fixation, "truth" is an immobilizing of life, and hence its inhibition and dissolution.

Heidegger, from "The New Interpretation of Sensuousness" in Nietzsche I

Bethany Wright will read in Seattle on 5/7/08 in the Subtext Reading Series at the Good Shepherd Center. She will also appear in Portland on 6/19/08 at the Mizpah Church through the Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia.

Jon Leon will be reading this Friday March 21 at 6pm with Ben Mazer. Ada Books will host. Providence Rhode Island.

The other side of thought, the place where metaphysics shatters the surfaces of metaphor, appears in the animal's visage--a countenance that, for Giorgio Agamben, "always seems to be on the verge of uttering words." On the verge of words, the animal emits instead a stream of cries, affects, spirits, and magnetic fluids. What flows from the animal touches language without entering it, dissolving memory, like the unconscious, into a timeless present. The animal is magnetic because it draws the world-building subject toward an impossible convergence with the limits of world, toward a metaphysics of metaphor. The magnetic animal erases the limits of the metaphor, effecting an economy of the figure that is metamorphic rather than metaphoric. It forces a transformation of the figure. For Deleuze and Guattari, all "becomings" are animal becomings: "Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not."

The magnetic property of the animetaphor does not simply sway language but actively transforms it, assailing logos with the catachrestic force of affect. Defined as the capacity to effect concrete changes in the material world through an immaterial or phantastic medium, magnetic power, like that of dreams, transforms the traditional rapport between action and reaction. With magnetism, reactions, in the sense of affective responses, can be said to cause actions. In the animal, the magnetic capacity appears both destructive and generative. Montaigne, for example, claims that "[t]ortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs just by looking at them, a sign that their sight has some ejaculative value." Montaigne's psycho-sexual economy is not too far from the idea of mesmerism and its place in psychoanalysis. Through hypnosis, the animal trace infiltrates thought, instituting a pathic communicability that, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues, evolves into transference. From metaphor to metamorphosis, transference to transformation and back again, the animetaphor conducts a magnetic trade into and out of language. What is transferred magnetically, moreover, speaks to and from the originary animal topology, the animal den, ethos.

--Akira Lippit, from "Magnetic Animal: Derrida, Wildlife, Animetaphor"

One of the problems raised by globalization is the fact that by definition it has no locationor site, making its metaphoric representation difficult. Movements of capital, labor, and information do not conform to national boundaries, languages, or cultural traditions, and thus assume the shape of whatever interest is being served at that moment. What models might we use to access the shape-shifting and rhizomatic qualities of global forces? One early attempt to frame the problem is Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” which he describes as the affective registration of social experiences “still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating...” (132). Although Williams is speaking of national formations (Britain specifically), his concept applies to the way that within a global context, art and literature “are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming” (133). Williams’ formulation has been adapted by a number of recent social theorists to the globalization debate as a way of locating social processes evident not in material reality but in affective and emotional states that live, as he says, “at the edge of semantic availability....”

--Michael Davidson, from "Reading Around the Cosmo"

Formatting for the spring releases has begun...