hola!

tip this tot

posh halo host
(pity tosh hostility)
a sop toast//shot spilt,
spit sip pay pal sap
spy pita split lisp,
say hip hop hit list
stilt pithy sith styl

sit potty pail top
shitty                        (the nth gift)
sat shat splat at
total hospital soap to
it toy shop

plato thot path lay
shit
pi stat ploy spay
post-italy lit

~

i plait
posit pli polity
toil thy oat soil plot so
soy patty lips
salt, ail, oil . . .
ah, (d)'lish                        (digest this)

hail tap lash his
pho pasty tips postal
hot pot hospitality

~

lost ails shalt
lop asp tail

shoal slip
ship sail.

ttyl,
hatt

ooo

inter face
brilliant bubbbles burn
.
bleeding film real
fleeting, co-fade feeding
.
feed forward facing
and freed facial feeling
.
burn baby burn
and bleed spatial tweening

~

oh
say
can
you

  (bub)
(bub)       (bub)
  (bub)   (bub)
    (bub)
(bub)   (bub)

see.
a staid ceiling

~

i know you've got a lot of bleed
going on right now.

(say'd stealing)

~

bleed all over the thing, that document
you meant
documentational, die dread
dessertating
.
did as if one were
some verb could come ending
instead of verbing forward
before one did ate dessert
(-ing)

~

dyed red
burned bubbbling

_____

(for the cottage university thought bubbblers…)

it's an odd relationality that constitutes this place we call time.
a memory, or fading inscription . . .

sexualization, where only sexual overproduction and heteronormativity hold sway.

from a hip synchronization of gesture emanating at the world cup in africa, to its remainder, which circulates across continents as the diasporal memetic flows of leisure tourism, a contagion in those sites of spectacular consumption, confinement and hygiene. a young teenage girl more or less mimics the hips of the slightly older latina woman leading the dance and glimpses what a body can do.

all for a football tournament, that motor of integrated world capitalism.

On the unbearable likeness of being; or who the fuck is Alice?

by Jeremy Fernando (sb rmx)

The question that haunts all modern society is that of the individual. It takes the form of either "who am I" (the question of identity) or "what is my place in society" (the question of relative value). Even though they may seem to be unrelated they are actually the same question, for the notion of individuality is meaningless without a point of reference, an externality: in other words, there is no self without another, the other, all others.

And here, if we listen carefully, we can hear an echo of Jean-Luc Nancy's beautiful phrase, singular-plural. In order for any singularity, we have to take into account plurality: which also means that the selection of any singular version, meaning, act, is always already a moment of violence against all other existing possibilities. For if every act is but one of the potentially infinite possibilities (since they are possibilities, one cannot know in advance how many variations there are) there is no way to know if the decision made is a good or bad one till it happens; more than that, there is no way to legitimately choose one over any — every — other. Hence decisions, acts, choices, are always already made in blindness; all one can know is that one is choosing.

But as Milan Kundera so aptly points out, the fact that each decision is made "in an instant of madness" (Kierkegaard) does not make it any easier: the "lightness" is indeed rather unbearable. For the lightness of each decision does not refer to us, but rather to the fact that there is no grund: thus, the onus, and hence responsibility, for each decision falls squarely on our shoulders.

This, though, merely exacerbates the paradoxical situation of individuality: in order to be responsible one has to be able to take responsibility, which would entail a certain notion of the self, and more precisely a self that is independent of all the other factors affecting that same self. Otherwise we would be able to escape this responsibility by pulling an Adolf Eichmann: "I was merely following orders."

But if the notion of a self is meaningless without correspondence to other(s), where would this singular notion be located?

We can hear echoes of this very same question in blogs; where the very notion of the self and its relation to the other, every other, is being addressed. For in order to be a 'blog' it has to be a singular object (even if two, or more, blogs share the same name, each blog is a singular entity onto itself and no other); however, in order for its existence to be known it has to be acknowledged by another, some entity other than itself. Even if the blog was the work of a single person, and (s)he was the only other that referenced it, it would still, and only, be known if that referencing happened in another venue, platform, site.

Hence, what is crucial is that there are two separate situations in place, and more importantly, there is an exchange between them. One must never forget that an exchange can only take place when there is a ground of similarity; whether real or simulated (even if there was a difference) is irrelevant. Even in their difference (for, there would be no need for any exchange if they were exactly the same), there has to be a certain sameness, likeness. Perhaps it is in the very paradox of similarity and difference that the true profundity of likeness comes to light: the alikeness of the exchange must first be liked before the differences that allow this very exchange come into play. And what is being exchanged is nothing other than data.

Here, we must not forget all data bears echoes of datum (thing given). More specifically, the situation of this giving is one where the parties involved are of an unequal standing (for instance, a master to a slave): hence, there is no expected reciprocation of this gift. This is opposed to munus which is a ritualised gift, and where exchange is the order of the day. Since a datum is an unexchangeable gift, this suggests that it can also be objectless: in other words, what remains important is that the gift is in the giving. And it is this aspect of the gift that Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Derrida, focus on when they explicate their notions of a pure gift. And if the giving of the gift is the gift itself, perhaps one can argue that the reception is equally important. This suggests that what truly matters in this notion of giving is time itself: what is sacrificed (for, in giving, something is given even if there is no object), a sacrifice that is objectless, "that doesn’t have to be consumed by fire" (Bataille), is the time taken to both give, and receive.

In the context of blogs, it is the time taken to link, share, give, and the time taken to read, re-post, re-link.

Which brings us back to the question that we were attempting to meditate on. The singularity of the self is not located in some notion of self, but rather in that moment of decision, choice, where the self has no choice but to reify momentarily in making that choice. In this moment of absolute blindness — where one is choosing despite lacking any legitimacy — the self is doing nothing but exposing its own unknowability, its own otherness.

At the moment of sharing a blog, the blog is exposed as nothing but the moment of sharing. In other words, all blogs only are singular, are itself, at the point of being shared — sent, read, spoken about, written on.

Swapped.

And it is in this spirit that I am sharing a dear friend’s blog. I present to you, one of my favourite thinkers, writers, photographers: http://alicereneztay.com/

And if you’re still wanting to know who Alice is, surely you’re missing the point . . .

_____

Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media; and is the author of 5 books, the most recent being Writing Death. Exploring other media has led him to film, art, and music; and his work has been exhibited in Seoul, Vienna, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He is the general editor of both Delere Press and the thematic magazine One Imperative; and is a Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore.

the other day i'm in the local cycle repair shop getting my ride worked on when i overhear a sales guy refer to one of the bikes as "she." the customer responds in kind. breathed into existence, as with the great ocean-going vessels of yore or the sleek sports cars of today (or the internet of tomorrow?), "she" becomes that amorphous yet political name of the fetishized vehicular object. gender is there where we are looking for it, no doubt.

(one suspects this is not what nietzsche had in mind when he suggested that one must ride woman like a horse to push through the other side of a western patriarchy.)

but our technologies do not have a gender, at least not one that we can identify as inherently "stable" over time. they rather become gendered precisely in "how" they approach and engage the contexts and contingencies of relation. though there are always material considerations to these contexts and contingencies, gender, too, is amorphous, always outflowing that she-name attempting its capture.

shall we at least play the game? if there is in fact a gender to be located in these objects, it is not in their being-ness as static artefacts but rather in their possibilities for becoming — of literally making explicit the setting forth of change in which we are always already emerging. frances willard, for example, might have also thought of her bike as somewhat of a "she" but this she-name was an expression of collective empowerment and contemporary feminity, of attitude and dirty hands. she wanted to go as fast as the boys, and she did.

do not confuse this with the question of absolute speed, however. it is instead a question of passage. while the biking artefact has changed little over the past century, the choice to bike, like the choice to travel by ocean-going vessel today — the choice to "she" — has now become one of slowness.

_____

"she alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. she lets the other languages speak — the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. to life she refuses nothing" (cixous, 'laugh of the medusa').

(how to make love while dancing on a mondrian)

___

"global village basketball is the line of flight. it ruptures the existing hierarchy by networking together the molecular pickup games that exist around the world into one meta-game. it is a collective, yet distributed, net performance of improvised pickup basketball located on a smooth patchwork of hardwood, asphault, terrazzo, concrete and dirt; the backboard is syncretic plexiglass, aluminum and wood; the rims iron, milk crate and peach basket; the mesh nylon and chain-link. the virtual setting of the meta-game becomes the means of deterritorializing the basketball court space" (june 2009).

___

[Aside] The third Global Village Basketball game took place on June 8, 2011. A few baskets were scored, robustly. Fun was had, muscles were strained. Art was created — a performance piece of sorts.

Autonomously.

Like the aching/aging muscles themselves, however, the Global Village Basketball machine is also showing its wear. It is most certainly fatigued.

The "me" that is the "I" that is the "we" that signs ets name to this recurrent event, this flexible set of relations — this machine — is most responsible. I have not sufficiently spoken or performed the machine into existence.

The performativity of the event proper is not in its spoken character, though, but rather in its gesture — its movement — co-emergent with teammates and opponents alike. The "me" that is the "I" that is the "we" that signs ets name to this recurrent event have gestured the machine into existence in declining number.

Do we speak of a machine that is at its physically largest size at natality (1182-1121) — one that perpetually shrinks until it dies, a sort of Benjamin Button of athletic poiesis and process philosophy? Or do we speak of a machine that grows, that changes, that coagulates or fragments off and becomes something elsewhere and when, that surfs the thin line between freedom and fascism — indeed, by literally speaking its growth?

Et is fatigued. Et is fatigued by the very weight of ets relational basketball meshes. But this weight — the weight of communication — is also a weight we enjoy bearing from time to time — in all its aesthetic, political, and ethical senses. It is a tactile burden we willingly choose to engage (and even submit to) in fulfilling our desiring-common of and through relation.

When does one put the effort — the work — into communicating this relation and when does one remain quiet? When does speaking fatigue the relation? When is gesture sufficient? When is flux insufficient?

Does the "me" that is the "I" that is the "we" that signs ets name to this recurrent event still have the right to kill the machine?

When is finitude?

Virilio might say halfway, but et is not so sure.

[Exit]