graucats

in night
                           all cats are gray
                  all dreaming generalizations
                                        are equally guilty
in dark   in time
                           all cats are becoming
                                        gray
zones of dark times, eventuating
and we are all equally guilty
                                        in night
                                        in dark times
by night all cats look gray
(to me?) I    to you     to he/she/it
to we       you all       they
they are gray, indiscriminate
                         plucked from the sea of shade
for posterity.

is this what the big party is all about?
                         returning them in their little parts
(P.A.R.T.S.) to the sea
                                         to shades
of gray cats

[the red square, the concrete plaza
            (the grass will not do
            ) the closet will not do
felt. wares.
the little red felt square
wears the gray
cat
                                         by night.



reference: Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, gray cat/Marx, most recently.

aectivity

Of the several panels and talks that I attended last weekend as part of the University of Minnesota`s graduate student conference in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Aesthetics/Class/Worlds, many explicitly addressed the question of aesthetics, perhaps even explicitly formulated in this way: as the question of aesthetics, and much of what I heard seemed to be invested in insisting on aesthetics, as if it was in some danger of being lost, or revoked, or done away with. Such projects are perhaps easy to understand, if we consider, for example, that it is perhaps not so much a matter of aesthetics disappearing, but the problem of reconciling the political and aesthetic, which is perhaps a rough way of phrasing the problem of Marxist literary and cultural theory. It is not really surprising then that aesthetics would seem to be the object that might be lost, since insistence upon the priority of the political almost always takes the place of further examinations about how exactly these things are related, except that they are.

In the panel, ``Marxism Today,`` my observation about the occurrence of the above coincided with the pointed tendency of each paper to discuss through its own theoretical apparatus, the problem of conceptualizing (much less inhabiting, if this was a part of it) the point of resistance. It seems to me that this resistance is an aesthetic matter. But I may need to be more descriptive about what this aesthetics is, because my thinking about aesthetics derives from Freud`s observations about the principle of fore-pleasure, and ideas about the relative indeterminency, or the ambivalence of activity and passivity that pertains to thinking about how the role of the observer or spectator can be acted out. There is a moment--or at times, a series of moments--when these roles of activity and inactivity become articulated with one another and the ability to identify with fictional entities, or the ability to see oneself in this position of another--and to mistake one`s movements for another`s--becomes possible. This is the gist of what Freud writes about in also writing about seduction in ``Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,`` but his observations about the function of this principle also extend to the function of the economics of movement that govern his later writing on pain and pleasure and the dynamics of these principles. In this regard, aesthetics is more fundamentally about the politics of identification, and this conceptualization of two interdependent but antagonistic spheres has as much to do with taste as beauty, qualifying such notions about the qualities by which we judge aesthetic work with the fact of our own perception of that work. Pleasure, as much about fore-pleasure, and the non-teleological, non-normative implications of the concept. Taste, I think works on beauty in much a similar way, always undermining its seeming obduracy or self-evidence.

picture: Franklin Bridge, Minneapolis

post-industrial

At Marx Farm, there are lines everywhere between industrial production and self-production. The lines that I am referring to are not connectives, I come to think, but more like those produced by somewhat randomly connecting a series of points on a plane. They signal layers and multiply. There are ruins, recycleds, and growth. Behind everything are the finely scripted and worn pages of notes that are part of the elaborate eco-system. The farm is a block of land with rows of vegetables—eggplant, kale, purple and green cabbage, corn, cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, carrots, celery, peas, broccoli—and herbs. Upcoming, a chicken coop. The fields that surround it, then, are owned by the people who let Mark keep up his plot. They are corn fields and berry fields, from all appearances, heavily doused with pesticide in the evening, which clouds up and over in light plumes. The smell of the pesticide is noxious and invasive. Greenhouses, low and white peaked. Beyond the immediate fields that surround, there are signs of another complex, a tractored, leveled hill , construction at work, trees, more green, and then further beyond, barely peaking from the trees, the three skyscrapers of downtown Cleveland. Train tracks where trains often pass in both directions. The gravel parking lot, upon which sit some seedlings and the tables where the produce is collected, is also home to a computer- and medical equipment recycling warehouse. The field itself is littered with china, cracked bits and pieces from some former dish factory. Mark is weed tolerant, and thistles adorn.

Purple star thistle, red clover. The cantaloupe looks like a weed, trampled upon at the edge of the herbs. It is a place on the edge, it’s easy to feel on the edge of many things there, not of the world perhaps, but of several different ones, whose common factors are more like collisions.

flight

is something that works, seemingly, because otherwise you would fall. i think that my fear of flying is related to the idea that flying is merely not falling. animal spirits of flight or fight are among the associations i am having (especially now that beatrice the kitten is, along with choco the dog, one of the inhabitants of our house). but i am also thinking of a decisive moment in the film Journey to Kafiristan in which the choice must be made to travel on to India or to return to Switzerland at the outbreak of World War II. The one journeyer (and National Geographic Society journalist) continues, and wants the other, Annemarie, to continue with her. Annemarie replies that she thinks that they should return, to where they could be useful during the war. She asks the other woman, "But what if you don't know it's you who is turning the wheel?" But flight is clearly the choice of the other woman, who doesn't want to be "useful." I often wonder about the fantasy involved in such a choice. The idea that if you don't do either you would fall is not necessarily elaborated, since flight is, in one way or another, generally synonymous with fall. But not falling presents another question. Marx, for example, in "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation" (Chapter 26 of Capital I), makes an analogy between primitive accumulation and the original sin. The fall of original sin is supposed to account for the division of the world into good and bad, in the same way that primitive accumulation is supposed to account for the division of the world into lazy rascals and the frugal elite. Marx's insight is that primitive accumulation is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production, not its consequence. As "primitive," it is the pre-history of capital. The analogy with original sin is not played out, but Marx's critique of it implies that the myth of the fall (as with the myth of primitive accumulation) involves the type of certain uncertaintly that riddles the presentation of anything that, like flight or fight, seems necessary.