Agency's Complement : Notes from Thom's Talk, 7/23/2008

At Rob & Lee's house.
1248 Treat, after stapling Try!
at Cyber Copy, at 16th, then
taking the BART to 24th,
taking 14 books out from the
library & walking down.

Ro Taylor, Rob, Eleni, Lee,
Jocelyn, John Sakkis, Jen Hofer,
A (Chris?), Amber, (a
woman to whom I was introduced but
whose name I forget), (Chris =
a man who the same), Chris
(actually Chris), Stephen Vincent,
Rob (not Halpern but with another
last name I forget), Amy Balkin,
Thom Donovan, Robin Tremblay-
McGaw, me.
All these
sitting in a circle in the
living room, with the sounds of

***

kids in the pool outside coming through
the the window. Light & light
wind on the trees outside.
(Simonides, before
the palace collapse, whether this is
in Quintilian or Ad Herennium,
I dont know, I forget.)

Poetics of disability.
Amber & Eleni. Health &
fitness. Pasta, beans, salad,
a piece of cheese on bread,
glasses of wine, a cookie
Amy Balkin called 'solid'.
(And it was.)

Patrick Durgin chiming in on
an internet conversation.
(apropos of Hannah Weiner
read through the filter of
disability studies -- not limited to
body)

"how to not cause further harm"
--Kocik

***

"epiphenomena of the unmade" --Kocik
(look at notes on Nonsite site)

disability & fitness.
reorient myself to
heed Thom.

"forms can serve scial struggle or
ethical / political dilemmas"

potential bodies.

"the body as a proof that I
was there" *
"parse the body" *

voice & autoaffection.

* Vito Acconci

* (cf. Spinoza :
the body proving to itself that it
exists)

"the performance of the body
mediated by the immediate
threat of harm"
--Martha Rosler

***

"violence was being conveyed"

BRING THE WAR HOME
(Rosler's photos -- cf.
Tyrone Williams' Aggression talk)

"I'll lock it to itself"
--Rob [name] re: his bike

* [Oliveros, Conrad, Sherrits,
Living Theatre (Dionysus '68)] *

*autoaffection

"the body under threat"

* re : Taggart Vietnam poem as
both medieval round &
minimalist music a la Reich

"Reversible Destiny Architecture
Project"

-Arakawa & Gins

"I'm just looking for some water."

***

"the caesura of subject & object"

art after Vietnam.

photography as prosthesis for
cellular memory.
we fall into the
future backward,

the body as a measure or an
index.

"Is there measure on this earth?"
--Holderlin

"The way a person might talk to
himself in the dark"
--Acconci

Echolocation & proprioception.

the persistence of information
about the body.

(a map of the history of
autoaffection : Spinoza,
Kant, Heidegger, Derrida,

***

Heller-Roazen, Nancy, Borch-Jacobsen.)

[insert slides of Arakawa's
paintings here]

They command the viewer to
perform impossible sensory acts.

synesthesia = seeing out of
one's ears -- Arthur Russell
(Jen Hofer

"blessedness overcomes fitness" --

"Woe to the rich,
for they have already
got everything they're
every ever going to get" --

"Thomas Munzer caught
cannonballs with his bare
hands" --Kocik
(cf. Engels' "Peasant War")

***

"to show how something works
by how it doesnt" --Thom

positedness.

"If only they had found a use for t
he world without using it"
--Augustine in Kocik

disablement as the inoperative.
-------------
Taylor: "what news do you have
of god & how can you prove
it to me" (Genet on George Jackson)

"Think difference"

"capitalize on our fallen condition"

Kocik, Arakawa & Gins,
Joel & Suzanne --
"imaginary politics" (Rob)
--------

my pen dies.
I wait for

***

caesura (direction to handout)
before asking Rob for a pen
or any stylus that's to hand.

dialogic consciousness created by
punctuation & diacritical marks --
heteroglossia
(in Leslie
Scalapino's & Brenda's writing)

Weiner & Larry Eigner.

trees, birds, windows.

common nouns.

"the marks are what make
this conveyance possible"

It was Joel Kuszai who told me
I should look at Hannah Weiner
but why?

The cries of animals.
The cries of us.

***

What is the cry, how does it
relate to the voice?

Mirror neurons -- isnt
this discourse (Virno & a pop
book I've seen across the
counter at Moe's) just a
biological reification of sympathy
as staged in TMS or
wherever?
Doesnt it just
give a ground which is to
say to put a stop to
inquiry --

Does the cry
insofar as it fails to pass into
the voice,
fail also to possess
the right?
(cf. Agamben
obviously --



phone : logos :: zoe : bios

***

Eleni : chiasmus / synesthesia
in Arakawa & Gins --

Thom : the hand having to
think about itself
(Kocik -- again
autoaffection)

* Merleau-Ponty (& flesh)

-- Visible & Invisible --

Taylor : intention --
grammatical subjects

* second to ourselves --
interruption --
(this text on Nonsite site)
(& texts on the hand)

Tallis, Heidegger, Leroi-Gourhan,
Canetti.
---------
Thom :
"not what one aims for,
but what one gets regardless"

[always trying to remember my
sources, not that I have to
hoard them -- more trying to
make some progress --
via the
labor of remembering --
another form of the
second, insofar as it is an
intermittent appearance rather
than 'eternal possession'
(Thucydides via
Lacan -- in 'Function
& Field')

Taylor : "the body as
transhistorical ground"
as a version of bad Foucault
via American epigones.

can you listen-transcribe &
listen-think at the same
time?
(probably not)

Jen: "Taylor Brady,
San Francisco fluffer"

***

John Sakkis : Hannah Weiner &
disability studies?

Thom : Jerome Rothenberg
at the HW memorial
on Hannah Weiner & LSD

HW's only precedent --
kabbalism & shamanism.

Jen : visible & nonvisible
disabilities.

HW : critique of local
community, gender politics,
careerism ---

disability as dis-ability,
oestranie --
distantiation --
unemployed negativity

Artaud as precursor to HW
(talking through the
smoke or storm)

***

Dodie's reading STIGMA on acct. of
my mention of it in
connection with Larsen,
when Dodie & Kevin gave us
a ride to Yerba Buena.
The stigmatized &
the stigmatizable.
(What's on
your face & whats a secret
that can be disclosed (e.g.
excons, the mentally
ill, etc.)

Chris : if you're not virtuosic
you're disabled -- so
minimalist composers made
music they could play --
(cf. Virno in 'Grammar'
in the virtuoso)

'disability' throws into relief *
the problem of the postulate
of the 'normal body'

Lorraine Daston.

Norma Cola, post-stroke / *belief

***

The production of voice visible as
production, i.e. as
labor, -- not effortless --

what have I the right to write?

Norma in Kevin's "Three on a Match"

"a body entering language
or a body being entered
by language" --Taylor

different terrains of possibility of
acquisition, of language
for example,

as just another kind of
capital, to which we have a
differential right

what right --

"the problems & the
contents of their
lives" --Thom

***

Thom refers to Bhanu's book.
Politics of friendship

"before the body is a question
* ...
because the body is a question"
--Amber

*the question is a form.

form & question.
what's a question.

form & transformation.
stability of form &
the passage between them.

RH: "very intense dental surgery"

"My sense of community began
to take on the limitation of
real bodies"
--Bruce Boone, Century of Cluds

To make a problem out of
any body.
Some body.
Some one. Any body.

***

Any one.
The last page. Economy.
kicks in. How many squares
abide within these books --
Simonides, stoicheon,
procrustean bred.

"thought which materializes always
through restricted forms" --Rob

"the defiles of the signifier" --Lacam

"that hardwires dead
[labor] language to our
bodies" --RH

"If you cant see it in the
color youre nowhere" --Stephen Vincent

indigenous sign language on
Marthas Vineyard --Rob [not Halpern]

All day long I priced books.
[Quanta of judgment.] Then to the city.

"mail myself a care package" --Eleni *

* autoaffection one more time

"care as agency's complement" --Eleni