A passage from Majestrum by Matthew Hughes

This entry is only sort of for the class and may perhaps be a way into continuing with this blog.

From page 98 of Majestrum

I spoke to my inner companion, "Were you listening to my conversation with Warhanny?"
"No," he said, "I was clumping."
His answer disturbed me slightly. I was not sure I like the idea of half of my mind being engaged in activities I had never heard of. "And what is clumping?" I said.
"An intuitive exercise. I throw a scattering of facts before me and then look to see which ones attract each other and which repel."
"By what rules?" I said.
"If I had rules for it, it wouldn't be intuitive. It would be analytical, and I would be you."
"Have you always done this, this clumping?"
"I suppose I must have," he said. "It seems a familiar exercise."
Which meant that through all the years that I had prided myself on the precision of my intellect, the portion of it that had operated out of sight, in the rear pastures of my mind, had been playing an entirely different game."

The Happy (Hungry) Phantom

Happy Waterfalls

I woke up this morning with Tori Amos's song Happy Phantom running through my head. One verse captures of the flavor of something I want

so if i die today
i'll be the HAPPY phantom
and i'll go wearin'
my NAUGHTIES like a jewel
they'll be my ticket
to the universal opera
there's judy garland
taking buddha by the hand
and then these seven little men
get up to dance
they say confucius
does his crossword with a pen
i'm still the angel
to a girl who hates to SIN

And then I read an e-flux email about an upcoming "multidisciplinary event" inspired by Marcel Duchamp's last major work that has viewers look through a peep hole in a wooden door at an landscape, Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage in which what I presume must be a quote from Duchamp is used a the title for of an exhibition, I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina. 


I then went in search of a definition for bachelor machine and found a section of an essay by Nell Tenhaaf in a book called Feminism Art Theory that talks about bachelor machines, Duchamp, Deleuze & Guattari and ends with a fluid image. 

To speak from this fragmentary and fluid feminine place is to see that the strange conjuncture of technological mastery, autoerotic pleasure and nihilism of the masculine machines might be thought of differently. It might be thought of as a mythical territory to be reclaimed by the desiring bride.

Granted, these words/images resonate with me for reasons beyond this project, this Part II. Yet there is some reason that I think they belong in my blog. They somehow are part of my rehearsal. One of the things that I think Dean's discussion of the rehearsal does not show well is the ways that multiple threads of associative appropriations, that may seem off topic, that are not bound directly up in Dean's first story/second story, set up/punch schtick, add some oomph to a routine. 

Some rehearsing: A bit (not) to taste

While taking notes on the essays in Appropriation (I worked from later sections to earlier sections in reverse order), I came across an image in Breton and Eluard's essay The Object of a ball.

"Objects with symbolic functions were envisaged following the mobile and silent objects: Giacometti's suspended ball which reunited all the essential principles of the preceding definition, but still retained the methods proper to sculpture." (A, 31).

I have been thinking about mouths open and closed, and ways they might be forcefully opened or closed, as a central image for my routine. The image of Giacometti's ball made me think of ball gags, which are an intense way for mouths to be forcefully open and yet blocked. The item is question can help elicit many different moods- it can be used to make a scene tragic, dangerous, sexy or comedic. 

Image from t-shirt found online of ball gag and a slogan of sorts.

More often than not images of ball gags are used for comedic effect. Episodes of the recently canceled Ugly Betty had a "love dungeon" stocked with clothing and sex toys associated with S&M sex culture. Paddles, whips, ball gags are all props that poke fun at the excesses of two magazine tycoons, Fay Summers and Bradford Meade. The audience is supposed to find this funny because Fay and Bradford are powerful and because they were old and still "getting it" on this non-normative way. Part of the humor comes from the transgressions of implied "shoulds." The powerful should be in more control of themselves (S&M despite being all about control tends to symbolize lack of control/excess when used comedically). The old should not be getting it on.   I think this is similar to how fat people are used in our popular media- they are often used for comedic effect, and it involves all sorts of shoulds.

This is important because our policy issues boil down to arguments about what we should and shouldn't do. 

Giacometti's ball lead to me to ball gags. The image of the mouth forced open but blocked is potent. I began searching for images of ball gags. I specifically wanted images of men's mouths opened and blocked with the ball gag. It is surprising to me, especially considering the ration of submissive men in S&M culture, that a Google image search did not turn up many images of men with ball gags in their mouths in the first few pages- and I was specifically querying "men with ball gags in their mouths." But it did turn op the image of the t-shirt that I inserted above (I'm not sure if every one will see this as I laid it out due to folks email programs).

And it turned up an image labeled "The Fat Man's Ball."

I decided to try to put them together in some way. The Fat Daddy Capitalists- here a figure of satire- with the sly, slightly witty slogan professing membership in a S&M sex culture. But first I wanted to be about both food and speech.

And then I wanted the slogan to be like a cummerbund on one of the "fat daddy" figures which I made into a melting mass- sort of a homage to Cadmus's images of Gluttony. Obviously, my photoshop skills are limited, but it gets a bit of the effect I want. 

A Kruger like experiment

In the mode of comedic unhinging to crack up critical thinking, in the manner of a Barbara Kruger piece.

Routine Movements

Two quotes from  Weighing the Evidence on Exercise by Gretchen Reynolds with just a twist of lime to flavor them.

"Exercise “re-established the homeostatic steady state between intake and expenditure to defend a lower body weight,” the study authors concluded. Running had remade the rats’ bodies so that they ate less."
A hopefully productive reworking: Routine remakes our thoughts' bodies so that they eat/taste more.

"Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. 'Just get rid of your chair.'"

To twist our thought, we may not need grand gestures, it may be as simple as getting pulling the seat from under our own thoughts.

A short post on Appropriation

Some quotes that I find interesting.


Richard Prince: you have to play the picture, you can't play yourself.


Kruger: I am prone to a kind of lascivious optimism. I want to question the notions of heroism and skew the conventions which loiter around depiction. 


Yve Lomax as quoted by Tickner: she knocked some metaphors off the table.


Stezaker: What is hidden in that surplus, that excess [of images], is what interested me, because it's clear that it is the tension between the world of excess and the world of everyday reality governed by its rationalist forces


Aragon quoting Ducasse: a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed.


Debord and Wolman: Detournement is less effective the more it approaches rational reply.  


Duchamp: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. 


Warhol: when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect


Retort: Empire and "Jihad", two virulent mutations of the Right.

Topics overlapping: obesity dances with health insurance

There is much to chew on in An Insurer's New Approach to Diabetes, whether one is focused on my public policy issue obesity or Wendy's policy issue heath care/insurance.  

Both UnitedHealth and the C.D.C. want to expand on the success of a clinically proved program that has been offered by the Y. Based on evidence drawn from that program, people who are pre-diabetic and lose just 5 percent of their body weight can reduce their chances of developing the disease by almost 60 percent. The C.D.C. is also considering ways to encourage organizations beside the Y to develop similar programs.

What is most interesting to me is that this program's success is founded on a regular (weekly) routine of social gatherings as well as solo work. This is a stretch, but I want to connect the idea of this social routine with what it means to think the event.

Unhinging productivity

Barbara Kruger in interview tells us, "I think the 'C word' [criticism] can still be operational, can still work to put into place certain procedures and ways of looking, which have a tumultuously unhinging relationship to the etiquettes of power" (A, 115).

We should be unhinged, productively. I propose a Mad Hatter move in which as we rehearse our routines we remember that "detournment is less effective the more it approaches rationale reply" (A, 35). The "plane of immanence . . . implies a groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rationale or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess" (WIP?, 41). We are to give, for our own work, "witness to the abrupt coming together of unrelated, even incoherent thoughts" and "shameless transgression" (M, 130 and 131) "Proper grammar and syntax have nothing with making a joke funny" or a joke-machine run (SUC, 60).

I thought I wanted to use the understated overstatement as the tone for the voice of my stand up conceptual persona. My obsession with the idea of restraint (rules, norms, systems to pull meaning out of chaos) in the texts leads to its opposite. I do not wire my jaw shut to lose weight. 

To create meaty work, worth its weight, as I weigh these matters, as I am way laid by my manners, I, as the mad fool, have to unhinge my jaw. I gorge and vomit. 

I will be The Biggest Loser. To lose the weight, to lose my way, to lose my preconceptions, to loose my trek. 

This is in the mode of the Brazilian film/literature/art that uses anthropophagy as a tactic. (http://www.lorenzogunn.com/tropicalia.pdf). I try to ingest and transform some of the power of, take the strength of theory and popular culture.  

And to bring it back to image, we should let our images consume us. To quote Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, "It is the image that devours the spectator." I want to unhinge the jaws of my images so they eat my thinking, digest and transform it. 

bit=byte=bite

routine=diet (die it, dye it, dial it, deal it)

twist=unhinge

A bit rehearsed in an email now with some images and links

A phrase I have turning in my head is "It's all over until the fat lady does not sing." An stereotypically large opera diva as the statue of liberty stands on on side of a set of scales- the other scale is weighted down with books and studies and facts and tables and laws and arguments about obesity. She weighs less than these weighty tomes. The scale is made of a distorted image of the logo for The Biggest Loser.  The opera diva's mouth is sewn shut yet things are sliding in and out of her mouth at the seams.

The scale with the tomes is the hungry maw, the hungry ghost, the figure of gluttony (referencing Paul Cadmus).

Her scale is a bridle- she stands on the mouth piece, the leather straps forming a cage around her- leading to reins, some in her hand, some in the "hands" of the tomes. Some strap down the books/laws/agruments/facts/tables/studies. All of this is set on a plate, as if the viewer is a diner about to dig in.

Fat tax: a taxing diet

Quote from Health Official Willing to go the Mat Over Obesity and Sugared Sodas.

A response to the "crusading" Dr. Richard Daines, who is trying to get a penny-an-ounce tax on sugared sodas passed in New York State, from supermarket owner Mr. Nelson Eusebio:

“Educating people helps them more than taxing them,” Mr. Eusebio said. “If taxation was a form of diet, New Yorkers would be the healthiest people on the planet because we are the most overtaxed people on the planet.”

I like this image of taxation as a form of diet. In my mind it links to the larger dyad of restraint/lack of restraint that seems to be threading through my understanding of not only my target but most of CATTt.

A minor textual detournement of Lifeload and Multitude

Kind of sort of of a cut up of a passage from Lifeload, a fantasy novel by Jo Walton, (p. 1) and a passage of Multitude by Paol Virno (pp. 52-53 and 61).

If you go far enough to the defect of semanticity, they say, you come to the lands where people are like statues, going through a defined series of monotonous signals each day out of pure routine. The world dries up. Acts are without power.

Contrariwise, if you set off to the excess of semanticity, people become feyer and stranger, more powerful maybe, but less able to remember who they are from moment to moment, until at last they run together and separate as fast as rainbows, an unstable and contained continuum, and only the gods can keep themselves whole. Power is without acts.

Between these extremes falls the katechon, where folks have wit and will enough to oscillate between the negative and the positive, to restrain but not remove the regression to the infinite.

Linguistic games with a scrap of an email

Virno uses the joke as a model for how human creativity, how innovation, works/is possible. "Jokes are the diagram for innovative action" (Virno, 74). Jokes make use of fallacy. At the end a section, he asks what it means that creativity is structured around faulty reasoning, around error. I'd like to suggest that all our linguistic games, all our communication is in some senses rooted in error. I quote an email I wrote in the character of Bishop Bishop in response to someone asking her whether or not it was possible to communicate with an image.

It isn't a consolation, but we misunderstand each other almost as often as we understand each other. Human communication (text, speech, body language, images, etc) is full of errors, gaps, glitches, misunderstandings.

There is a whole tradition of theater (the absurdists) that deal with the inability of humans to communicate. The work of Ionesco, Beckett, even Albee to some extent, are good examples of how a form predicated on dialogue paradoxically uses that form to emphasize how difficult or even impossible communication is. Yet, the paradox is even deeper because we understand what they saying, the meaning of their work is fairly clear, something is communicated.

Watching a young child who is in the process of learning how to speak- we might suppose that we learn to communicate orally by trying out different combinations of sounds and having people reinforce certain of those combinations in specific ways. The child says ba, often just for the pure pleasure of forcing lips and vocal chords to move and make noise, and the parent responds, "Bottle? Do you see your bottle?" So in some ways, misunderstanding is rooted in the our ability to understand. It is bedrock to it. Without those initial misunderstandings, misinterpretations of the child's vocalizations, the parent wouldn't make an emphasis that channels that sound towards specific words. I find the idea that misunderstanding might be required for eventual understanding to be glorious. But then, admittedly, I am perverse.

A page from my thesis paper that is pretty much on topic

[text in red is from writing by Bishop Bishop]

The joke-like delivery can be a powerful bait and switch, hiding deadly earnest ideas. A playful delivery can make a serious idea “pop.” Some of it is that the surprise, the novelty, of the joke opens us up. Comedian and teacher Greg Dean tells us, “In order to work, a joke has to surprise you.”

 Some of it is that my generation (Generation X) and following generations, for better and worse, is disposed to prefer irony. Some of it is that the stark contrast between a comedic style of delivery and serious content helps us see things more clearly. 

I suppose I should not expect a well rounded definition of the erotic from the author of Story of the Eye a freak fest of disturbing porn. Bad boys like Bataille really are romantics at heart. Instead of romanticizing flowers and chocolates and communion and warm fuzzy feelings, they romanticize shit and death and pain and isolation and deviance. I may have mentioned it before, but I’m suspicious of romantics- whether they are the happy-happy-joy-joy kind or the wallow-in-their-own-excrement kind.

In Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Paolo Virno tells us that a  “joke is an action that undermines and contradicts the prevalent belief-system of a community (endoxa), thus revealing the transformability of the contemporary form of life.”

I playfully, gleefully race back and forth across the boundaries between the comedic and the non-comedic because it seems a way to underscore one of the central tenets of Bishop Bishop’s Mission, which is to not put our faith in fixed meanings but to learn how commit just enough to get something done but not so much that we shatter as our understandings of what those things ought to be shift (and shake). 

In a piece like Cant of Can’t, small bits of humor- the punning title, an unsubtle emphasis on “the Not So Good Words” of  “the Good (and Not So Good Words),” the sarcastic recasting of Nike’s slogan and the oblique wink at how popular understandings of religion overemphasize the power of “positive thinking”- leads not to a laugh but to what some of my audience said was a powerful and useful confrontation with the limits of our lives.