Books are forever mine, and I am no one. They are objects that bespeak an immutable presence. They float above their form. Above a flame, which, upon burning them retains the outline of their image as ashes simulating the original copy. They are the most difficult to write about, precisely because their of-or-about-ness relates to the endless possibility of writing, to the metalanguage of interpretation. The text lays in the book. Yet, the book lays not in the text, but in the figureless ways the text emanates from without the contours of its cover. Therefore, the true bibliophile cannot be the one who wholly admires the book for its mode of presentation or production, but for its mode of reoccurring in the heterogeneous domain of a disjointed memory, for its phantasmagoric resonance in the collective manifold of dreams and waking life. A book is already beyond its objectivity, beyond its bookness, whether written or read. While it is deceptively turned-object-under-one-cover, and its binding works to ensure the organization of ideas in a way similar to the fascist function of the stapler (preserving an ordered aggregate of information with a decisive pounding of the fist), the book’s presentation would coincide more closely with its ontology if there were no binding. If, unhinged, it lay precariously aligned with the top of a monument along which the wind gracefully blew. So that, in revealing their impossibility as forever numbered, the pages would separately spread over the expanse and fall to the ground like the seeds of a plentiful harvest. Their flight would not follow the horizon, but recede into it, towards the orient, defying, at the same time, the horizontality of the occident. The chronology of thought as linear. The horizontality of the text. This text. To read a book is never to read across its content. It is to read into its a-historicity, while simultaneously becoming an ever-present-part-of-it.
book
tie
The tie is a noose turned upside down. It tightens around the neck. However, the closing force producing this tension is not caused by a premeditated collapse-of-the-body-beneath-the-weight-of-the-world, but a willfully auspicious and determined yank of the arm towards it. The tie indexes the ground; pointing to where the bones it beguiles will eventually disclose the arbitrary gesture of tying a tie. Its determining motion parallels an invisible but pervasive potency, the active effort against which, brings about the cessation of life. It does not defy gravity, it harmonizes with it. The final tie follows the blind force of the boulder, and contradicts the slipping but never seizing fight of Sisyphus. In this way, the tie deceptively reverses the dialogue between productivity and death, between power and the power to decide, between business and game. While Sisyphus struggles against a rolling rock for an eternity, it is only because he cannot evade his own immortality. He yanks his tie towards the earth, and is forced to work against the sky; cursed by his inability to make the single choice that validates other less profound ones: To turn the tie around, towards those who punish. To let the boulder roll, towards the punished. To be the object of choice. To be the object that choses. Tie, when spelled with a capital (T), starts with a letter that structurally, as written sign, resembles the object to which the word it begins refers. (T) looks like a tie. Just as the shape of Apollinaire’s calligrams often refer to a theme contextualized by the graphic poem itself, so the shape of the letter can reference the meaning for which it is the guiding principle, the first symbol if you will. The (T) therefore exhibits the same calligramatic affinity to tie, that (O) shares with orange, and (S) with snake. At the same time, (T), as traditionally employed in symbolic logic, refers to a logical truth (becoming a function of gravity). Whereas (T) turned on its head (⊥), refers to a formal contradiction (opposing the function of gravity). The logical inversion of separately chosen conclusions. The cessation of an absurd argument, of a listless life. The tie is a noose turned upside down.
johnny
A johnny reveals vulnerability. It leaves the spinal chord exposed, and allows for the rest of the body to be accessed easily. It is simple. It is deceptively light, whimsical. It lies about the chronology of a trauma. A johnny makes one a poet, passionate about death and war and all of the ideals that make rotting away a fiction. A johnny asks for the arrival of a floating woman, in the hospital halls, a Presbyterian possibly, with her ancient harp, to play a song, in gratitude, as a volunteer, to the gaping hole the johnny so unabashedly ifantilizes. The johnny reduces limitations. It expands the world in the eyes of the recently injured, while at the same time reducing their world, and its uncertainty, to the tying of a knot, behind the neck, intersecting the point at which the spinal chord meets the cerebellum. The johnny blindly humiliates. It is at once carnivalesque and ignominious. The old mole mocks the eagle and defecating your pants is no longer a peril. At once a gown and a cape, the johnny is pantless. It makes the immoral organic. A state of ghost like grace, where the involuntary expulsion of material, lack of cognizance, severing of a limb, all disappear into the serial world of hospital patients lining up for the same finality, the same burning, the same buzzards eating us whole that Geechie Wiley spoke of in her Last Kind Word Blues. The johnny is cotton. It is an open field for the patient. It is patience on an assembly line.
i-phone
The i-phone blurs boundaries. It eradicates abstract barriers interfacing the flow of information between different dominions of commerce, exchange, and identity; it capitalizes upon convergence. It is eternal recurrence, mise en abyme, a multitude of assemblages reflecting upon one another contemporarily. It turns Zeus’s sky to blood and Zeno’s river to brass. A picture of the world, upon a picture of the world learning of its own conditions, upon a picture of the world devising its own outcome. Repetition unto death. Again-and-again. It is the second apparatus (following the camera in its relation to light) responsible for totalizing the organization of the first regime of madness: an unending system of signs perpetuated by their inherent interconnectedness. It denies the teleology of a prime-mover, and co-opts the responsibility for universal motion based on a stratagem of machinic desires that surpass design. The fall of the Holy Roman Empire was the result of idolatry, of the inversion of the dualism between subjectivity and images, so that man, following a historically grandiose and romantic preoccupation with representation, himself became a function of the images produced. Images began to haunt their audience, specters against spectators, autonomizing their symbolic efficacy to the point of destruction. The images themselves, as Vilem Flusser notes, were also destroyed. Man tore “the elements of the image from the surface and arranged them into lines,” into texts, reconstituting the moving forward of history as linear, as a chronology of thought inching fearfully away from the idols of a ruinous past. Writing, however, continued calling out to the sky. The sun speaking to the sun. Occulted by the deliberate and literal systematization of the event, the epitaphs of images once eclipsed have returned again to organize themselves in an apparatus that localizes a transcendent efficacy; a dispositif that compartmentalizes our relationship to an eternal empire.
mirror
In “Production of Space” Henri Lefebvre states: “In and through the mirror, the traits of other objects in relationship to their spatial environment are brought together; the mirror is an object in space which informs us about space, which speaks of space. In some ways a kind of ‘picture,’ the mirror too has a frame which specifies it, a frame that can be either empty or filled.” Yet, can we imagine a mirror without a frame? One that has no set peripheral limits, the contours of which escape into the expanse it embodies? Inquiries into the nature of the mirror have always amounted to the recognition of its elusive character, its resistance to language, to luminescence based on boundaries. For light, in its totality, emanates without impedement, unless refracted by the contours of its mimetic mirage (the mirror specified by its frame) or by a centre of efferent actions (the blank screen). Perhaps the totality is this very mirror without a center or a periphery, the reflection within which language and idealism find their tension, the apotheosis of their dialectic, their mutual insurmountability. Discourse is never sufficient when grappling with the absolute opposite of depth. How can we project representation into a reflection? The mirror spits back at us, our eyes shatter before its illumination. The fate of Narcissus was not caused by vanity and auto-attraction. It was caused by a deliberate attempt at countering a perpetual rebound; at diving into depth-lessness.
cottage cheese
Cottage cheese is edible. Its inconsistency is deliberate. There is a particular psychic trauma associated with our initial consumption of cottage cheese (similarly there is an initial physical trauma associated with the ingestion of cola, caused by carbonation’s momentary burning of the throat which in turn becomes the precondition for its satisfactory quality; the displacement of pain and pleasure) caused by the unfamiliar presence of bodily like elements in a viscous base. This trauma is further complicated by the secularized analogy between the perishable product, and the thighs of unfortunately overgrown women with the disposition to a certain sort of carnal inconsistency in the legs. One which renders the fragmentation of fat apparent. Fat in pieces. A plateau of excess corrupted by craters. The dystopic antinome of Renaissance corpulence. In your mouth. However (unlike the immediate attraction to the smell of our own feces), through a prolonged process of perversion, this initial trauma motivates what follows as a desire to endure the same trauma again to the point of enjoyment. To the point where history erases its affects. We indulge in cottage cheese. Fill our filthy mouths with a filthy reminder of what it may be to revel in the glutinous mass of our mother’s stomach, breasts and ass. Cottage cheese allows us to eat what the totem denied modern man. It is cannibal. When left to spoil, rotting under the sun, stinking of putrid histories and the body of Antigone’s brother, it figures further into the foreground the reality of our own flesh: its dedication to deterioration, its materialist recession into the bowels of the earth, where matter is indiscriminate and putrefaction is process. Fertilizing, from out of its stench, an entirely new era of morality.
telephone
In “Telephones,” a short film by Christian Marclay, we are inundated with the repetition of scenes in which characters answer a telephone throughout the course of Hollywood’s cinematic history. The film, like most of Marclay’s work, explores the relationship between the audible and the visible, but also historicizes the development of an object of communication by tracing its aesthetic and functional lineage over an approximately 30 year period. We watch the form of the phone, as it traverses through a sequence of moderations, change from an ornamental object dressed up with the distinguished features of a Victorian household (emphasizing the phones initial function as predominantly dramatic, relaying information about the death of loved ones or the arrival of a storm) to the stark Bauhaus aesthetic of rotary telephones in the 80’s. Corresponding with the deprecation of its beauty as an object, the urgency of information relayed between two telephones, or loci of communication, gradually attenuated into arbitrariness (together with the increased facility by which phones were produced, and service providers were provided). Its essential role, however, as the illusory reduction of the propinquity between two individuals, remained the same. This is why spoken intercourse (phone sex) successfully stimulates its participants. The ringing of a telephone produces a tension which finds its resolution in it’s being answered, in it’s closing the space of uncertainty between the caller and the called. Preceding the invention of telephones that identify the caller before we are required to respond, the ring signaled the arrival of a message from amongst a number of possible people: the mother, the stalker, the collection agency, the friend from before. A certain anxiety permeated through the sound of the signal. For, the interlocutor is on our side invisible, but we create an acoustic-image of his presence through the transmission of his voice. Without the proper auditory response to supplant the invisible with an image, we are left with a phone call from nothing, from no one. It is before the effectiveness of nothing that our attunement of anxiety is actualized. With the invention of caller identification however, the telephone, like many post-capitalist products, minimizes our discomfort in relation to the object and , by eliminating the chord anchoring the head in the body, maximizes our illusory idea of space as collapsing into the immediacy of the communicative.
backpack
The backpack exports and imports. It conceals, It hides. Under the assumption that its purpose was primarily academic (prior to acts of terrorism that took advantage of the backpack as the parcel by way of which the perspicacity of its potential use, as an implement of revolt, was rendered opaque because of its preconceived interpretation as educational and therefore innocuous) its undisclosed contents were rarely put into question. In a contemporary context, however, the content of a backpack has instead become the most questionable of the quotidian unknown. The backpack has shifted in its moral depiction from one of productivity, education, and youth, to a dubious, precarious, and potentially destructive image that provokes fear and anxiety. Left alone, without being strapped to a subject to affirm its positive use-value, the backpack turns terrifying. No object, other than an isolated, unidentified, backpack tucked into the corner of a crowded train station can create the same sentiment of unresolved terror in a passerby. One questions its alienation. One questions its contents. One immediately infers the likelihood of those contents as relating to the worst of suspicions. A backpack can carry an entire crowd astray, into confusion, delirium and chaos. The backpack is a pouch of paranoia. It compartmentalizes fear. Prior to its use as a weapon facilitating the efforts of terrorism, it organized and categorized other utilities of education. It has now become the locus around which our insecurities in regard to an idealized war, and the potential for those insecurities to materialize in a real world, are organized. The backpack is infected. It participates, amongst all other forms of packaging which enclose and hide, in a contagion relating to the fundamental nature of our world as plagued and paranoiac, and the consistent possibility of its affirmation as such. It is the realization of a ubiquitous fear of the unknown. Its flirtation with perversity is not established (unlike the stapler for example) by the individual subject. It is instead established as a collective desire for this unknown to give birth to an evil, to give birth to an explosion that brings about our death.
mortar and pestle
The mortar and pestle are displaced eroticism, sexuality by proxy. Their combinatory power is both alchemical and reproductive. The etymological background of the constituent terms supports this notion. Pestle derives from the classical Latin term “pistillum,” meaning “pounder,” connoting the aggressive action of a phallic member. Its complimentary counterpart, the mortar, refers to “moratorium,” or the “receptacle for pounding.” Together, they do not collapse sexual difference, (the way Man Ray’s photographic image of the fedora in Minotaure contraposes the progressive swelling of the cap, with a final folding in on itself, creating a labial laceration above the rim) but accentuate sexual difference through an effectively symbolic function. The pestle penetrates the mortar with the objective of synthesizing at least two disparate elements, giving birth to a third element from out of their transubstantiation. The sperm inseminates the egg. The mortar and pestle are the utility of apothecary. By displacing the magic motion of coitus, which is necessarily concatenated with the motion of the cosmos, upon two mutually dependent products (one passive and one active), the alchemical potential of sexual exchange becomes realized outside of the human body as medicinal. As such, the mortar and pestle are also a set of objects through which desire and libidinal energy are sublimated into a form of production that replaces the regulatory outlet for libidinal impulses. Their combination realizes the antidotal possibilities of eroticism. Independently of one another, their aesthetic value remains the same, phallic and vaginal, however their use-value is transformed for both objects into an impotent one. The mortar becomes a reservoir, whereas the pestle remains silent, unless, by way of masturbation, it animates the heart of Venus and becomes a pleasurable “pounder.”
soap
In a film from 1986 entitled “Bashoo”, Iranian director Beauzai depicts the journey of a dark clandestine child, displaced from the southern regions of Iran as a result of the war with Iraq, across the country into the distant villages of predominately fair skinned northern Iranians. Upon his arrival, apart from being terrorized by the local groups of rat-faced Iranian farm children, he is welcomed by a concerned-country-cattle-cooking woman who attempts, desperately, to wash him of his naturally dark skin with a bar of soap. His skin color worries the woman about the peril of sin. Soap rids us of our immorality. Soap is the super-ego of hygienic supplies. Soap is repression. It is the temptress that seduces taboo. This is made apparent in its most explicit form, when acknowledging its use as a physical censor for transgressive language. A punitive measure applied by the common house-wife against the non-complacent child. The soap is shoved into the mouth for extended periods of time. In such an instance, however, soap mediates morality not through a positive sensation bubbling from the deceptive dissolution (washing away) of guilt, but establishes the limitations of guilt itself, by manipulating the memory of the child's misfortune in relation to a disagreeable impression. The oral drive (and therefore the ethos of our existence) is dominated by the Mother. Vis-à-vis the breast. Vis-à-vis the soap. Soap, therefore dissolves the internal dissatisfaction stemming originally from the boundaries blurred by the morality of our mothers, the accumulation of dirt, and the bastardization of black. It is the alchemical ingredient which makes water white and holy, the ritualistic application of which, confuses our notions of interiority (sin/idealism) and exteriority (soil/materialism).
stapler
The stapler binds. It gathers. It silences. It is a primitive implement of the archive. Its power is use-value functional, unless corrupted by perversities relating to genital entrapment, pre-pubescent attempts at acts of sadism or masochism (generally performed in front of other pre-pubescent spectators), latent discoveries in office cubicles associating the accidental puncturing of one finger with the possibility of fucking the secretary upon the managers desk, (as fantasized through office pornography starting in the early seventies, often with a stapler in the periphery of the filmic frame), and artistic modes of expression. Traditionally the stapler gathers information. It does not organize it, it entrenches it firmly in its already established mode of organization. The will to preserve the organization of each set, is materialized through the staple itself, which participates in an intimate relationship with the mechanical support (the body) of the stapler, requiring a certain amount of labor on the part of agency that, again, derives its potency from a trajectory initially rooted in the will to preserve the organization of knowledge. Following the advent of electric staplers, the labor required to manifest this will was substituted with the autonomy of an electronic stapler body. The stapler therefore became the implement through which the will of the subject is granted power independently of action. The coalescence of intentionality and movement. This same phenomenon can be observed (on a larger scale industrially) in the genealogy of pencil sharpeners, bottle openers, egg-beaters, and other electro-domestic products that are second-order extensions of more primitive products.
