cottage cheese

Cottage cheese is edible.

Its inconsistency is deliberate.

There is a psychic trauma associated with our initial consumption of cottage cheese (similarly there is a 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 secular 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 later (and latent) 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 moves 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 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 turned arbitrary (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 via the transmission of his voice.

Without an audible 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 affected. 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 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 shifts in its moral depiction from one of productivity, education, and youth, to a dubious, precarious, and potentially destructive sign that provokes fear and anxiety.

Left alone, without being strapped to a subject to affirm its 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 involuntarily relates such contents 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 deployed in the name 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 that indicates 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.

A fear of form emptied out of identifiable content.

Its perversion (unlike the stapler for example) is not personal. It is instead a collective desire for this unknown to give birth to an evil, to give birth to an explosion that brings about our death.