Self contained, self-constructing breathing apparatus

There are lots of wrecks to dive into ….but in diving all wrecks begin to be approached

Experience, Economy

Iceland Tourism Board’s charming production with epic music and repeated, bizarre claims about “purity” and “radiant energy” as affective experiences available through Iceland.

Eating prayers from this old book I found

I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics (Bataille)

I may fall entirely on my face with this interpretation, but here goes. Odin learns to write via an extravagant sacrifice– nine days, hung up in a tree with no food or drink–and was rewarded with runes– the means of writing, certainly, but with a special charge that I gloss over sometimes: runes had power beyond just signification-in-the-service-of-telling-it-like-it-is. They had a sort of aura about them that predicted, even effected change. In “Voluspa”– Odin gives an eye for knowledge, at least so says the seer-ess. I like that the body is almost a currency of exchange in the myth– the immaterial for the material– suffering for the abstract.

Writing this blog has at times felt like being up in that tree.

Writing of the disaster ought to be attempted not because of any return we hope to gain– Blanchot notes that we can never tell how our work will be received and cannot, for example, know its political import before we send it out into the world–if political import is a kind of compensation or exchange one can enter into through writing.

A small girl cannot sleep and walks downstairs to find her father reading in the kitchen. Surprised to find her still awake, he attempts to entertain her what is apparently the best way he knows how: a puzzle in which there are no intrinsic rules, just intuitions– at least as he plays it: “So, let’s say you’re on a train and someone riding on the rear car with you slips off and is hanging from the rails. And you choose to do nothing. Are you responsible? [Yes. Of course you are. And responsiblity is larger than just a codex-- its practice of writing. ] Let’s say you fall into you’re neighbor’s pit on their property– are they responsible?” ["An Attractice Nuissance" was a term that captured my imagination with-- perhaps--a predictive intensity. I wanted that sort of non-sense. ] ….So perverse to ask a child to intuit civil statutes, in the hopes of tiring her mind out, perhaps. But what resulted was,  patience and watchfulness yoked to impulse.

Like writing (and in the same way that the quick of life has always already exceeded life), the cry tends to exceed all language, even if it lends itself to recuperation as language efect.  It is both sudden and patient; it has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already.  the patience of the cry: it does not simply come to a halt, reduced to nonsense, yet it does remain outside of sense– a meaning infinitely suspended, decried, decipherable, indecipherable (Blanchot 51).

The tradition of the oppressed teaches

us that the ’state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

We must attain to a conception of

history that is in keeping with this insight.

Then we shall clearly realize

that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve

our position in the struggle against

Fascism. One reason why Fascism

has a chance is that in the name

of progress its opponents treat it as a

historical norm. The current amazement

that the things we are experiencing are ’still’ possible

in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning

of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history

which gives rise to it is untenable.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”

(Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.

Foreground: Iceland’s Women’s Emergency Government

Background: abstractions for an ideal national subject?

Wonkabout: The D.C. Guide. : Viking Music For Your Foreclosed Soul

Wonkabout: The D.C. Guide. : Viking Music For Your Foreclosed Soul

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In need of new prescription or new optics?

Some women in Iceland have asserted that the banking meltdown is the result of male leadership.

Having training in both marxist and feminist theory is making watching the global economic meltdown like always having a single lens with a prescription that’s too weak–

  How to read the re-monumentalizing? Although the disaster is now, ongoing– still unfolding, actually– this image itself is both deeply of the moment and deeply anachronistic:

separatist feminist politics largely died with the second wave  after the eighties–lesbian separatism especially. 

the square that the statue is set is a typical urban assemblage of simultaneous chronologies— statue, modern architecture sutured onto slightly less contemporary architecture…and the previous posted anti IMF poster

the protestors wielding pink– the only bright color in the whole dreary, slightly out of focus affair– check the midground. 

 

This statue, of a male national hero of sorts, is now decked in drag– could he– is he being reclaimed or disciplined? Globalization inevitably shifts relations between and among men, women, families, the nation state such as it is— what’s up with the pink? 

 

Nicholas Kristoff, fwiw, agrees with the ladies, apparently:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/opinion/08kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

IMF: the only bidder

Wonkette : Iceland, The Country, Basically Gives Up

Wonkette : Iceland, The Country, Basically Gives Up

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World Economies are not as well marked as the Cliffs of Moher

Even metaphysics sneeze…

I have a terrible cold,

And everyone knows how terrible colds

Alter the whole system of the universe,

Set us against life,

And make even metaphysics sneeze.

– from a poem by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando,

Commit to allegorical snark– 

what would you say to the effects of a yellow fever on your metaphysics–an  infection spreads, leaking out of its host, dissolving what it depends on, mindless exacting replication–adaptation without will–What kind of body can i craft to stay well? To stay productively ill,  should i save my skin?