collaborationism

opening out some office-tones hushy-grey
hard/soft metaphors & back-to-ham radios
, thwarting military commands glitching
some new masculine intimacies or love-talks
I’d order less milk for more tea and insist on
‘or’ as a consequential joining word suspending
two things in lateral flow attuning and framed

your code metaphor is very late-nineties
we’re yoking an idea of the body with one of
not-the-body, as if we ever got rid of ourselves
as if we ever felt that the body’s betrayal
was other than us. knitting circles aside newness
clots and curds, nouns set up suggestively as some-
thing more interesting, less servile

meta-sex talk tsk-tsk-ing, the chills / pink frost:
to collaborate is always already evident crumbing
against an Auckland dusk-light. it’s girlfriend in
a coma but without the irony. across the street cats
lope into themselves, into liquid ambers, as though
their limbs were patterning an ominous index
the easy analogy is this – there are bones in a

battlefield, settled into the seams of the soil &
all the conscientious post-bloodshed grasscover
– and the bones tell us a list of things about the
battle or any number of potential battles. brownian
motion (the path of a drunken bird; measured in
units of exquisite likeliness) and ordering peking
duck (quantities jotted on the underside of a napkin)

come to mind. our love, to put it crassly, is indexical.

notes for an essay

Prawns hung like small hooks on the edge of crystal. “Geraniums are an eighties flower,” and “dry-hump” turning up in a poem, then edited out. Macau as the egg-tart capital of the world, a nice in-folding of Chinese and Portuguese imperialisms. When I say composting is not a metaphor I mean it. It is not a metaphor. Yet when Fred says metaphor is a metaphor you ought to believe it is the truth. I am still in agony over whether your couch is the shade of avocado or honeydew. There is always a temptation to say something more abstract, like “mint julep.” “This is a grammatical rule and states a logical impossibility.” There are many things we could do with the book nearest to us – playful or otherwise – but the question of distance and the problem of equidistance means it will never happen. Swimming to edge of the pool, would you crack your nose or not, and if so, does that change physics forever?

Suspended in the sky like so much venison: moving towards a body without organs in Henry Miller’s Sexus

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me – or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brain, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed – doomed to be mine forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I am a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours. Show me your father, with his kites, his race horses, his free passes for the opera: I will eat them all, swallow them alive. Where is the chair you sit in, where is your favourite comb, your toothbrush, your nail file? Trot them out that I may devour them at one gulp. You have a sister more beautiful than yourself, you say. Show her to me – I want to lick the flesh from her bones.

Deleuze and Guattari, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, speak of a ‘body without organs’. A phrase on loan from Artaud, the body without organs refers to a limit, never reached but always desired, at which all things in flow (that is, all matter and all energy of all bodies) would flow freely into each other, without distinction. The body without organs is described as a set of practices or a collection of intensities, rather than a notion or concept. It is an exercise in continual experimentation, a site of production, distribution, crossing, passing, slipping, becoming and unbecoming, decaying and failing. “The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels,” write Deleuze and Guattari. The body is circumstantial matter, dying at once as living, shedding and shrivelling and bloating.

In imagining the body without organs, we can begin to surrender the idea of the organism, a whole bounded by an identity and a destiny. We can surrender the notion of the psychoanalytical inner-spirit. We can even surrender freedom, because we recognise that freedom is unconstrained flow in the same way that capitalism is unconstrained flow. What is left is desire. “Desire is revolutionary.”

At the beginning of Sexus, Henry Miller falls in love with Mara, a woman soon to be renamed Mona – rather inexplicably – and elsewhere called Hildred or Sabina. In Miller’s life, this woman was June, born Judith, his second wife. Throughout Miller’s writing, she is not only nominally schizophrenic but is slippery, variable and painfully unknowable as an object of desire. She is seductive. She is a series of surfaces, a cinematic image, a pathogen. When Miller meets her, he is so sickened by seduction that he renounces ownership of his body. Any romantic notion of the heart as the central organ of love is abandoned. The heart, yes, but only if the heart is seized from the ribcage, torn from its ventricles and then butchered. The heart, but only if the heart is one organ amongst every organ: the kidney and liver, spleen and gallbladder, brain and eyes. Love is disembowelment, love is taxidermy. Total ownership: I love you, therefore I need you to embalm me, marinate me, swaddle me, push me through cheesecloth and collect my curds.

Miller’s self-mutilation moves towards the body without organs. By refusing himself a functional or autonomous body, he becomes a discordant collection of intensities. He is no longer skeleton and muscle, nervous system and blood. He is now just sex-thought and misery, desire and bitterness. He is the memory of a body, patched together with the meagre sustenance of discarded proteins, shed from his lover: ear wax, dead skin, dried follicles and clots. This is true dependence. This is what we mean when we tell someone we need them. This is what happens when give ourselves up, unconditionally, irreversibly, with the full thrust of our surrender.

Miller’s renouncement occurs at the beginning of Sexus, and so we can imagine that for the rest of the book, he is sniffing around the limits of this non-bodily threshold. Fucking, eating and sleeping are intermittent occasions of intense sensation. Here and there, Miller is fed plates of pickled herrings and black rye bread, honey and figs, sweet brandy, cold sausages and hunks of cheese. The meals appear and then disappear. Sex, too, appears and disappears. For all the indefatigable rock-hard-prickness, there lacks a definable consciousness to Miller’s sexuality. And yet, it is not unproblematic. Miller’s synecdochic refrain of cunt-as-woman reeks of classically misogynistic objectification.  Elsewhere, the woman as an unpredictable and terrifying force of seduction reminds us of the abject feminine so over-represented as a cultural archetype and so feared by men.

In every sexual encounter, Henry brings his lover – whoever she may be – to climax at least once, often three or four times. Afterwards, the postcoital euphoria inevitably descends into hungry, hysterical demands for more: “Where do you live?” asks one lover, Elsie, after their first encounter. “Where can I see you alone? Write me tomorrow … tell me where to meet you. I want a fuck everyday … do you hear? Don’t come yet, please. I want it last forever.” It’s easy to get weary of Miller’s interminable sex, his non-committal and flukey ability to push lovers right up to the edge of their sanity. But there is something attractive, at least in terms of language, of his ability write deftly both the absurdity and the banality of sex. Take for example, the paragraph that follows a chance liaison with the wife of a friend:

I had a strange taste in my mouth, of fish glue and Chanel 976½. My cock looked like a bruised rubber hose; it hung between my legs, extended an inch or two beyond its normal length and swollen beyond recognition. When I got into the street I felt weak in the knees. I went to the drug store and swallowed a couple of malted milks. A royal bit of fucking, I thought to myself.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about the “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter” of the body without organs. “The matrix of intensity,” they say, is “intensity = 0”. Zero here is not a quantifiable nothing; it is simply energy, neither positive nor negative. Kinetic energy. Movement. A composition of intensities. The paradox of Miller’s sexuality is that his model of the body without organs is fundamentally impotent. In dis-possessing his organs, in unclaiming bodily autonomy, Miller is merely a collection of senses, each transmitting and transmitted across the membranes of his clumsy protein-hybrid. His love for Mona is an electric current, a feedback loop. It literally holds him together, yet it is corrosive, liable to drop out or skip, unsustainable. He is both masochist and sadist and fulfils neither role particularly well. At the end of the book, Miller becomes a dog. It is both a hallucination and the final transformation of his body without organs. Love has made him delirious, and poverty – a kind of chronic poverty of the body – has made him useless as a man. His only chance of survival is metamorphosis, a becoming-animal, the transformation to skulking mangy cur.

This bodily poverty is of course corollary to a broader poverty experienced by Miller in the solidification and acceleration of industrial capitalism. Food, sex and art have been absorbed into a cultural economy, and Miller is, in every sense of the word, indebted. In the following section from Sexus, Miller returns to New York after a picnic with his first wife and their child. He is on a train, watching as the city-grid starts to appear ahead:

Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan with their offspring. Hobbled and fettered. Suspended in the sky like so much venison. A pair of every kind hanging by the hocks. At one end of the line starvation; at the other end, bankruptcy. Between stations the pawnbroker, with three golden balls to signify the triune God of birth, buggery and blight. Happy days. … Every now and then the doors open and shut: freshes batches of meat for the slaughterhouse. Little scraps of conversation, like the twittering of tit-mice. Who would think that the chubby little youngster beside you will in ten or fifteen years be shitting his brains out with fright on a foreign field? All day long you make innocent little gadgets; at night you sit in a dark hall and watch phantoms move across a silver screen. Maybe the realest moments you know are when you sit alone in the toilet and make caca. That doesn’t cost anything or commit you in any way. Not like eating or fucking, or making works of art. You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty. Even when it’s wrapped in cellophane the smell is still there. Caca! The philosopher’s stone of the industrial age. Death and transfiguration – into shit! The department store life – with flimsy silks on one counter and bombs on the other counter. No matter what interpretation you put on it, every thought, every deed, is cash-registered. You’re fucked from the moment you draw your first breath. One grand international business machine corporation. Logistics, as they say.

“All writing is PIG SHIT,” says Artaud, and Deleuze elaborates: “that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noise, alimentary, and excremental bits.” Language, as waste matter, as intensities passed through the body. Composed and decomposed. To shit, to speak. Language as excrement is language as process, rather than language as a device or act of expression. A process that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “ploughs the crap out of being and its language.” Continuing, D and G suggest that

The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content.

Certainly, Miller’s writing ploughs the crap out of being and its language. For Miller, the excremental experience is peaceful and productive. Time alone, passing waste, acknowledging the organic processes of energy transformation. Shitting is not just a quotidian pleasure; it is a consciously non-capitalised act, a counterfeit currency. The material exchange of shitting produces no profits. It is a form of self-gifting. For Miller, an oppositional engagement – we might say, in the form of “immaculate defecation”– with capitalised flow is the only possible engagement. He is a failure as a capitalist (not least for his decision to become a writer).

Shitting is the last point of active contact, the threshold from which all connections pass through a final connection. The rectum as event horizon. All nutritious encounters that the body has experienced are archived in this process, even if only momentarily. For the body without organs, shitting is the seasonal practice of surrendering jetsam overboard.  Miller’s model of the body is a bounty of rot: the gassy and the stinky, the sex-funk and the sweat-drip. His language is a scalpel, an agent of fermentation, colonic irrigation, purge and squeeze.

on miller, and lust, and aimlessness

It’s certainly not the same as sitting at a rough notebook in Paris, but in all truth I do not believe in nostalgia so I won’t dwell in some non-memory. I am sitting at a desk as I do every day, opened to the office-tones of a soft document, typing, erasing and retyping words.

There’s a few things I need to write: a progress report, most pressingly, though my sense of ‘progress’ is unsuitably abstract at the moment. A redraft of an article that has been deemed ‘inappropriate’ to its readership (a task unappealing, to say the least). A skeleton of a chapter, most likely on the relationship between experience and experimentalism. Perhaps some more notes on Stein, or science, or sense-perception. Or perhaps a weighty missive to my friends now living in Port Moresby.

Yet my overwhelming desire is to sit in this space and write aimlessly.

I also need to write a piece about Henry Miller. I am uncertain what the piece will look or sound like. I am, by no means, a performance poet. A collage is what appeals to me, but they have uncertain rhythms. You cannot anticipate a collage. Miller spent a lot of time sitting and writing, and it seemed to make him angry. I could sit here for several hours and think enough to get angry, too. Most things make me angry if I pay enough attention to them.

But Miller was a man of three things: a brain, a groin and a gut. In his language, philosophy (it’s actually quite close to Bergson’s metaphysics, or ‘intuition’) fulfils similar bodily desires as food and sex. And food and sex – one often following the other – are talked about as sudden and wonderful gifts, rather than mundane quotidian expectations. A meal must never be taken for granted, nor a passionate encounter. Likewise, lucid thought is a precious gift to oneself. I have a deep sense of empathy for Miller’s triangular sensual materialism. It makes sense that letter-writing is so attractive to him: letters are the place to try out ideas, to describe lovingly the details of meals eaten and longed for, and to extrapolate lust. When written in a letter, a compendium of bodily pleasure is a noble, good thing.

critical animals

the full this is not art program is live here

& critical animals events are listed here

& it will be a wonderful weekend

please do come!

algebra with whitehead & stein

one, the invariableness of the basic terms of interconnection
— the connectives — (or manage or arrange or value)
two, the invariableness of the unspecified entities indicated
by the symbols for ‘real variables’ (or relieve or better like)
three, the meaningfulness of the patterns of real variables
thus connected (or not at all as nearly once compared)
four, the irrelevance to the argument of the completion of
meaning infused into the basic connectives by the unspecified
real variables thus connected (or made it to be gained).
namely, the meaning as in assumption one is not in fact
invariable but the variation is irrelevant (or finally as lost).

uttering

a stocktake of things to say, listed on newly sheafed piles
‘it is my right, my rite, my desire to speak like a goat’
there are few reasons rather than this one to need to use a noun
i’m thinking here of the german language, and childhood.
there are many very impressive ways to groan a point across
like to say, ‘yeah, but… i just… but…’, that last word like a drummy
punctuation, a thing that was always discouraged in language,
putting it on the end like a plug or a soapstone book-end, shaped
like a pelican – one inverted leftwards and one rightwards – and
then falling into someone’s arms and speaking right up into
their throat (as if you were their voice box) and saying very unusual
and untruthful things, like ‘no!’ and ‘i didn’t!’ and ‘i don’t know!’

new solipsism

as many of you know, on the twenty-fourth
of this eleventh month
my role as myself will be up for re-election.
i hereby pledge the following election promises:
to my lover, i promise to be forty-percent more sassy.
i will add a further fifteen minutes to
our weekly love-making time,
i will be twice as effective in quashing anxieties,
and i will be less abrasive in respects
to your sleeping habits.
to my cat i promise to begin a ‘pet revolution’,
to my neighbour i declare the beginning
of a ‘ladder of witty greetings’,
to my flatmates i will impose a zero-
tolerance approach to floating
poos left in the toilet bowl, and to
cat hair and loud noise and crumbs.
to my parents i promise thirty more
phonecalls per house per annum
and downward pressure on surliness and
childishness.

or a thousand tiny wires, or hairs

i’m remembering a time when i had thought the words
but had never said them aloud – on the subject of these
things that should be said from time to time, or never –
and then it came the time to say it and the words were
a texture i couldn’t understand – like okra or fibreglass –
and you were very quick to laugh at the performance of
me – mouth crawling with hairy grubs – trying to say small
so-and-so things to you

how many fingers am i holding up?

i’m typing this with dully blurred eyes.
maybe it’s better this way, not to focus
like blades on words and their form and
the way they knit tightly into permanent
positions. this way, they are light and grey,
shifting imperceptibly and making sluttish
geometry.

(i don’t know whether i’d consider last night’s
dinner a real dinner. it’s a classification that
troubles me greatly.)