AAB Issue 1, Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate! (Summer 2012)

7/30/2019 AAB Issue 1, Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate! (Summer 2012)

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AAB about a bicycle

Concatenate,Concatenate,Concatenate!

Danielle LaFrance & Anahita Jamali Rad, Editors

Vancouver | Coast Salish Territory | 2012


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AAB issue 1, Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate!

Edited by Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad

Cover printed by The Future

Typesetting by Danielle LaFrance

Cover image by Anahita Jamali Rad

Coast Salish Territory, Vancouver, Canada

Summer 2012


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Contents

Reflections in Introduction 5

ANAHITA JAMALI RADThe Machinic 7All the words in this poem in alphabetical order 8This Poem 10

JACQUELYN ROSSA model for creating an open text using feedback loops 11

MEGAN HEPBURNwhat is lost but what is gained? 12

SASHA LANGFORD

Notes on Touch 17

DANIELLE LAFRANCEThe Precariat 19REASONABLE DURESS AND THE END OF TIES 21

MARIE-HLNE TESSIERNeo-Modernisms Death Valley 25

DOROTHY TRUJILLO LUSKfrom Cunta Breccia 30Letter to Cunta Breccia 31


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5

Reflections in Introduction

During the course of the summer, About a Bicycle (AAB) developed a womens

critical reading and discussion series that addressed the gradual transformation

of postmodernity on knowledge production and the manner in which this process

has shaped social subjects within the institution, the State, the psycho sphere, andthe imagistics of society (aesthetics). We returned to Lyotards The Postmodern

Condition, a contradictory historicity of postmodernism that discusses how new

modes of narrativity change institutional frameworks and performances. We see

Lyotard as speaking to the current moments inability to slow down, the paradox

of anxiously keeping up with capital accumulation in the digital age, and the

determination of scientic research and cultural activity by potential prots. In

this sense, the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity afterit, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative

capacity.

The transition works twofold: the meta-relationship and capacity to negotiate

our bodies, enter different avatars, be post-human, on the one hand opens up

the potential for alternative sociability, while on the other hand de-emphasizes

competency and gives the State full reign over what remains, namely language

(signs, signication, semiotics, codication, cyphers, etc). Here we ask, how

does the machinic affect our interactions with letters and words? How does the

rhizomatic relay our reading and writing practices?


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6

The battle over the image of society is bound with permissions what we say,

dont say, show, dont show. As cognitive capitalism depoliticizes the social agentby moving her further and further from her body, through the mediation of her

desires and their determination by the imperative of cultural capital, the social

subject nds herself competing in an immeasurable way. The precaritization

of the labourforce is only possible in a time of desiring machines in Lyotards

postmodern society. Here the postmodern condition becomes visceral: how do

we negotiate the input/output of environment/society/individual when agency

is removed from discourse, and the grand narrative of the cogito is reducedto the physiological and historical processes to which it is subject? How does

the precariat, a post-human who both recoils from commitment and desires the

commodity, take to the streets? How does one disrupt the feedback loops of the

system of society through criticality? Through engaged and engaging reading and

discussion, we addressed transitions in communication, knowledge productions,

aesthetics, and capital put design-makers (who are often ourselves), experts

(who are now all of us), artists, statesmen, and our relationships on trial.


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Anahita Jamali Rad

The Machinic

The language of the machinic

The beginning of any

discussion prescribes an

explication of communication:

the groupings of words, the

thoroughfare of signal and

noise, the signification of signs.

Conjunction is an escape from

the problematics ofconnection:

of the connecting nodes, the

connection lines, the message

sent, the abstractions of

financial capital. Conjunction is

in the imagined outside, which

predates metadata and persists,

in which human relationships

are soft(ware) and fluid:

conjunction is a becoming

other (Bifo), the ambiguities

in meaning, analog

communication. Conjunction

refuses to be embodied in

databases.

Amorphous matter

Conjunction is union,

communion, community;

simultaneity, joining, together.

Conjunction is the site of the

formation of the liberal subject:

hylomorphic individuation is

the conjunction of a form and

some matter (Simondon). The

potential, or passive principle,

is matter, and the actual,

determining principle is form.

Here, Aristotelian metaphysics

(which is the only way to locate

the becoming-other of

conjunction) allows for the

extrication of the real, for

becomingis possible only if the

material is subordinate to the

structural confines of form, but

conjunction wants matter

without form.

Conjunction, thus, finds itself

in the throes of ruling ideology,

disengaged from the real

conditions of class relations,

resulting from a disavowal of

its structural determinations.

The streets rendered visible

When capital determines our

desires, when our desires

determine our thoughts, when

language is determined by

technological devices

determined by the military,

there is no outside of ideology.

There is only space for a

perceived outside.

The technologies of

perspectival geometry, the

camera obscura and its

ancestors (e.g. the zograscope,

etc.) and offspring (e.g. Google

Earth, etc.), allow for a

seemingly objective perception

of urban space. It is these

machines that make the streets

into forms outside of lived

experience and create a space

in which one can imagine

mobilization, in which

communication is the relations

of signifier-to-signifier, in

which financial capital

determines who lives and who

dies. The universalized

perception of space and the

imagined outside of the totality

are correlative, and made

possible by the technologies

that determine thought and

perception.

The machines have taken

over, right? said Patrick

Healy, the chief executive of

the Issuer Advisory Group, a

capital markets consulting

firm.


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8

All the words in this poem in alphabetical order

Anahita Jamali Rad

a

a

a

aleatory

all

all

altogether

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

as

assault

bereft

between

between

between

bodies

bodies

bodies

bodies

body

body

capital

capital

collective

content

content

disguised

distancedivert

dust

enigmatic

external

external

eld

gural

lled

at

at

form

fragments

fragments

fragments

gilt

heaps

identies

identify

identity

impulse

in

in

incapable

individual

industrial

into

itsitself

labour

leave

logic

logistics

limbs

limber

lumber

make

makes

object


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object

object

objects

objects

of

ofof

of

of

of

organs

ought

parts

post-industrialprivate

produce

products

reduced

resolve

resolve

rift

rifts

separations

space

standing

spatiality

staying

staying

suggests

system

temporal

that

that

that

that

that

the

the

thethe

the

the

the

the

the

to

to

to

to

toto

up

up

vanish

walk

walkingwhole

with

with


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10

Industrial bodies that leaveenigmatic labour products

produce rifts identity that

identies itself as object

to object a content

content with aleatory logic

and logistics giltand distance lled with bodies bereft

of at resolve

of capital that suggests assault

of the gural that bodies divert

of the vanish between incapable

and the system between capital

and the resolve that ought

object objects, heaps of objects

external to separations

external to staying up standing

fragments of staying up

to eld the temporal

to at the space in reduced spatiality.

Walking all organs and all

post-industrial bodies altogether

identify dust in fragments

and impulse makes limber limbs into lumber.

To form a rift fragments

a disguised body.

Make private the body

the whole and its parts

the walk between collective

and individual.

Anahita Jamali Rad

This Poem


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Jacquelyn Ross

A model for creating an open text using feedback loops

A looping subjectivitycreates a space that is bothSMOOTH andHETEROGENEOUS

Like a tumbleweed, a subject continues to expressitself while maintaining an essentialbeing-of the landscape

The rhizome strikes a balance between conjunction andconnection, between language and communication

Input

conjunction

conjunction

connection

(space for enunciation, creation, writing)

thinkin

gbeing

acting

be

ing

Formation of language /slippage of language

Subject andpoint of conjunction


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Megan Hepburn

ARISTOTLE: HOW DOES THE MACHINIC AFFECT

OUR INTERACTIONS WITH LETTERS AND WORDS?

what is lost but what is gained?


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COPERNICUS:


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ARISTOTLE: HOW DOES RHIZOMATIC THINKING

AFFECT OUR READING AND WRITING PRACTICES?

COPERNICUS:


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ARISTOTLE: HOW DO WE REMAIN IN LANGUAGE

WITHOUT LINEAR NARRATIVE?

COPERNICUS:


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ARISTOTLE: HOW DO WE NEGOTIATE THE INPUT/

OUTPUT OF ENVIRONMENT/SOCIETY/INDIVIDUAL

WHEN AGENCY IS REMOVED FROM DISCOURSE, AND

THE GRAND NARRATIVE OF THE COGITO IS

REDUCED TO THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICALPROCESSES TO WHICH IT IS SUBJECT?

COPERNICUS:

THIS IS NOT A DIALOGUE


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Sasha Langford

Notes on Touch

As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the

older anomie of the centred subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a

liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do

the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid

of feeling, but rather that such feelingswhich it may be better and more accurate to call

intensitiesare now free-oating and impersonali.

i. In everyday English the concept of touch has two main meanings. Feeling something equally

refers to coming into tactile contact as it does with an affected mental state. Touch affects

unlike other senses: it leaves behind microscopic bacteria, a change in body temperature, an

impression.

ii. Modernism has a long history of attaching feeling to place. Certainly, our ability to feel

is materially, and architecturally determined. In our current conditions, where 2,626 units of

residential housing were demolished in 2011 in Vancouverii and the internet is expanding by

7.5 million bytes of data per day, a concept of feeling can no longer be linearly and uncritically

bound to lived objects.

iii. The closures of community centres and art galleries continue to be justied by the endless

expansion of online social worldsiii. This movement has a distinct intimacy with feeling.

The design codes, web templates, and text boxes of virtual space create new borders beyondthose imposed by literacy to desensorialize the exchange of information. Breath, intrinsically

penetrative and felt as close to the body as a mouth can go, is displaced for vision, which relies

on distance for the eyes to remain in focus. And yet it is also the impossibility of the control

over distance that characterizes the isolating claustrophobia of online spaceiv. Community

gentried to the virtual meets edges aesthetic and ideological, material and economic: the same

negative space of late capital that interrupts the contact amongst the disaffected to

commiserate, to strategize, to revolt.

iv. Resistance cannot take the form of defending place as it has been accepted, when in somany instances nostalgia is nothing but the disavowal of a violent history. What used to be

here? It is not change of the familiar that is of concern so much as the ability to retain

remembrance alongside memory.

v. Resistance can neither take the form of the eugenic attempt to distill the body from the

techno-commodied. For those abject bodies excluded politically and architecturally, the

virtual can offer a site far more emancipatory than the fascist philanthropy of the city. But

at once, the claims of accessibility of the virtual require a response of the same form: just as

bodies to which stairs have no relevance should not be forced to include them in their conceptof walking, no body should be forced to accommodate the eld of sight of the virtual when it

does not reect their ability to see. Far from ensuring liberal notions of choice, the defense

against the displacement of affect into images is simply the assertion of the full antagonism of

the senses to which all bodies have a stake.


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vi. Where is the affect in disaffection? In the 1930s, Russian feminist communist

Alexandra Kollontai proposed that love offers a basis for community radically hostile to

private propertyv. Desire is that which manages social networks and collaborations,

which creates its own forms for convergence. What Kollontai had in mind was the way

in which the bourgeois couple could extend outside of the boundaries of the private

home and use the strength of their affections to organize alternative cooperative forms.At a time when property consists of the immaterial as much as the material--the

corporate patents on indigenous plant life, the invisible assets of nance, the pixellated

villages of Second Life online worlds--a concept of feeling adequately

discursive for this task is necessary.

vii. When does the impersonal become the common? Only when place is appropriated

from property, when free-oating feeling nds points to settle without settlement,

when touch is brought back to its true meaning and through extension and itinerance we

leave impressions to be felt, to be shared--everywhere.

i Jameson, F. (1990).Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke

University Press, p. 64.ii Metro Vancouver. (2010. Metro Vancouver Housing Data Book. Retrieved September

7, 2012,

from http://www.metrovancouver.org.iiiboyd, d. (2008) Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked

Publics in Youth Social Life. In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, Buckingham,

D [Ed.]. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital

Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 119144iv Virlio, P. (1997). Open Sky. London: Verso.v Kollontai, A. (1932).Free Love. London: J.M. Dent and Sons.


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Danielle LaFrance

The Precariat

How does the precariat, a

posthuman who both

recoils from commitment

and desires the

commodity, take to the

streets?

First, the question must be

broken down to its parts.

The precariat, as a labourer

within postmodern late

capitalism, is subject to

new responsibilities and

sensibilities that attributes

to this state of hesitation.

These duties involve the

generation of wealth and

surplus capital through

activities that use signs and

symbols [...] which

includes anything that

relates to work but does not

deliver in the form of an

hourly wage (LaFrance

and Nathan). The

precariats occupational

identity manifests inmultiple trajectories, has

minimum stable protection

and regulations, and will

freely volunteer her labour

time often in the name of

cultural production. From

the upwardly mobile cyber

coolies (Spivak) to the

gentrifying creative

activist.

The valorization of

semiotics within late

capitalism (or as Berardi

defines as

semiocapitalism) finds its

demand by way of

temporal organization the

social subject must act

immediately in order to

stay afloat in this new

market economy and

maintain her social capital.

Even if we cant be

bothered to recognize the

affective response to the

ordering of information by

technology, the

transmutation of the body

in society is still the a priori

condition of thesemediations, to various

intensities. Let us be

mindful of pervasive

techniques by corporations

that monitor not only the

simple click on the screen,

but the very motion, the

gesture, the swipe of this

subtle action.

As critics we are paralyzed

by our current situation,

have a tendency to be

combative, desperately

seeking immediate results

and/or reduce affect to a

lesser, generational waning.

Lately Ive been alienated

within the confines of my

bedroom, jobbing the

work right out of me

(Lusk), cushioned between

the end and start of work.

My other left foot is my

computer, the source of

endless, brain numbing

entertainment; a nostalgic

trajectory to a past I never

posted and a future with no

future.

The social demands of the

precarious labourer have

and will long remain in

scarcity: 24/7 labour time


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(i.e., my father sending

emails at 3am to a client,

the blogosphere quoting my

poetry on a soda bottle),

temporal competition and a

total lack of competence,mouse surveillance as a

form of predictive data

mining. The quest ion

cannot be asked as how

does, but rather how can

the precariat take to the

streets? This alteration

should be considered

before brandishing the

s o c i a l s u b j e c t w i t h

t r e p i d a t i o n t o w a r d s

commitment to an action.

Otherwise, her eyes fall

victim to pepper spray

while linked arm-in- arm

with her comrades. It is not

apathetic or fatalistic in the

least to say there is no

outside to this mess, but it

is a question of the current

conditions of the precarious

labourer that allow for us toeven speak of a taking to

the streets.

Speed continues to aid the

c o r p o r a t i o n s , t h e

institutions, the protectors

of capital (the police), as

t h e y a r e a d e p t a t

appropriating techniques

and defending themselves

against social agitators.

Even within the context of

revolution we must think of

temporal organization as a

fo rm of s t r a t egy by

outwitting the management

of time, and, at the same

time, learn to reconcile this

logic with desires apart

f rom and wi th in the

commodity. There can be

m o m e n t s o f p u r ecommunion, where social

relations are not reduced

down to the exchange of

commodities; however,

fantastic forms in fantastic

social relationships should

b e c r i t i c i z e d , i f n o t

transla ted into gui l ty

conscience. Guilt, echoing

Deleuze, is a metaphor for

pain that distances us from

our bodies and life and is

therefore the real source of

apathy, mortification, and

taking to our beds.


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Danielle LaFrance

REASONABLE DURESS AND THE END OF TIES

This reconciliation (between sisters). It is when we nd ourselves outside of bodies,

communicating as though we mean it. Where the reication of objects replaces the

amnesiac pace of production. Disintegration of every work of ne art and, perhaps,

every book of poetry. As in Nietzsches theory of aesthetics, these words are made for

walking, and thats just what theyll do, one of these days these words are gonna walk

all over you.

What if, Pygaar (I will only name you once this time), we could make a tiny house

and it could represent scenes from a marriage? Natural faces, vacated lips and eyes.O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow! When coffee suppliers, or sugar cane, are

photographed the image of labour forms a reied sociality. We connect (proper) with

the representation of hard earned drinkable work. This is a photograph of my wife.

Shes wallet sized and kisses my monies. cette jouissance soit meme possible.

the fantastic form of a relation between things

or discourage over promotion. Contradictionsbetween history and life, as if the work of the poet

were one or the other. We switch it around

offer growth. Do they talk about this in school?


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What today means in Japan

kyou wa muri

muddy surrogate self slave

til turned heads lie and roll into noiseexists not between ourselves. well-organized and less sincere

while anew fever hits bovine strokes.

Is knowledge a desperate form of acceptance?

Lets egree it will never happen. Between this affect and that poem

Suffer here in a peculiar kind of disruption

Lets remember a time when your eyes were blue and no one else remembered.

He asks, is knowledge a desperate form of acceptance?

like a teenage allusion, no way outside of yourself

so far in their heads toes know more than not

some magisterial voice projected onto the table

where we put all our baggage

where we baggaged our baggage

or American urgency, or give me an hour and

Pygaar (again), I'll tell you how urgent I am


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Barely a creatures eye, a hydra of new properties

wanes depthlessness is not seeing things at their conception.

my house, my husband, my sleep

Must close eyes again.

My friends are my experts

My friends are my philosophers.

This person says something in this particular manner

Now I speak like the expert.

Now I am soft spoken and admired for my soft-spoken capabilities.

Now I am a sensitive man who can love all the beautiful women

What does today mean?

does a fade contra stability?

we dont need no polymorphic transcendentalism.

this is something new for me.

coalescing in the body of one is splintered

touch now and love one another more than before.


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I believe we will never be on the same page

This couple has a jar of money on a piece of wood

she will learn to braid her hair herself

schizophrenic channeling. Together, theyteach each other how to be right.

Everyone else is wrong. They are right.

They said so, and when someone says so itmeans so.

Finds strength and legitimation in the ground, or television.

In no way do I want to represent them as non-contributors:

thats just the way it is

There is no recovery from language. It is not only language.

documentation is derivitive of other creatures eyes.

the jar of money indicates one step

further from the Truth.

charcoal inside. deliver me onto her brous tissue

there is no duality of thought and being.

the table the wood the money the jar

the ring the braids the laugh the baggage

this cannot be the sum. Someone else to give

long speeches to you after you leave me.

Bashar, depart from here.

I beg of you.


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Marie-Hlne Tessier

Neo-Modernisms Death Valley

By intuition, in art school, I was interested in the aesthetics of politics and the politics

of aesthetics, until the whole city exploded, the whole world collapsed into one big

Pollock action painting, with the important added elements of pop. The closest image of

this experience was the penultimate scene inZabriskie Point; not the will-to-power-act

of the explosion of the late-modern house in itself, but the result of the explosion, the

things you could see inside the chaos : fragments of domestic appliances, clothes,

fabrics, technology, perfume bottles, glass, plastic, vanilla wall-paper, stainless steel, all

in tiny tiny pieces, grey stones, white, pink marble, sand, wood, granite, slate, rubber, a

beach towel, a silk scarf, gold specks, beige, brown, baby blue, black, half a Corbuchaise lounge, the foot of a Gio Ponti console, rare reading lamps, ripped modern art,

Jacobsens egg-chair, and then books, you see books, lots of books, ying in the air.

Contrary to common belief, the explosion is not the last scene. The lms ends following

that hallucination. The young woman protagonist, a rare non-passive female role

Antonioni gave us, the only character that is free from context, (all of Antonionis

oeuvre shows us how destinies are directly linked to context; the context as a prison,

and beings as moving objects in space. In his lms, modern architecture looks like it is

from outer space), (I keep forgetting we are terrestrials. I keep forgetting that the earth

is a planet. Only vast empty space reminds me of the inherent science-ction of ourexistence; only Antonioni reminds me of my end, in the present tense, like the desert, an

empty island, an empty house, the ocean as the bottom of the sky), (The desert gives the

distinct feeling that we are walking on the moon, especially when we understand that

we are actually walking at the bottom of dry oceans). Antonioni likes to push the

existential void of his characters against empty, abstract and minimal, therefore loaded

and charged landscapes. Antonioni is obsessed with limit-situations without actions; the

possibility for inner life and the impossibility of it. Like how the Japanese took

everything from China and made it better, the French took everything from Italy, yet

Italians are always more eccentric, enigmatic, agile in ambiguity, moving inside

subtlety like a natural environment, speaking about love with a rich complexity the

French will never have. French are advanced in abstract thought, but Italians succeed in

marrying abstraction with daily life. (When I told my Neo-Marxist friend about this, he

accused me of being a racist). The celebration of cultural differences is a post-modern

experience as modernism wants a universal truth and one song for everyone to sing all

in the same time (religion), (The forces of order); One simple way to live without a

life-style. (If the world goes out of business, I do not want to be here). Antonionis

discovery of the American desert must have been ineffable.Zabriskie Point(despite the

airplane/car irt scene that kills all irt scenes in the history of cinema), is not a love

story at all. Antonionis lms are about the impossibility of communication, the

impossibility of love, the impossibility to converge with oneself, the impossibility of

freedom. But inZabriskie Point, he brings his philosophical research to another level:

the impossibility of Revolution. That is a turning point in his curve (I have not seen his

early documentaries) (I am not a specialist on Antonioni) (I am not a lm critic), (I am a

writer who has seen several of Antonionis lms, so I can say whatever I want and you


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can think whatever you want), (Postmodernism is about the end of imposed meta-

narratives, a multiplicity of points of view, no nal solution, no big revolution, no

promising guidelines), (Neo-Neo-Marxism of today comes up as a critique of

Postmodernism). (While Postmodernism freed us from ideology and the search for

truth, it introduced multiple narratives, multiple realities, and the construction/

deconstruction of meaning). (Neo-Modernism of today, which Neo-Marxism stemsfrom, is imposing a modernist reading of postmodernism, trying to map it all out, as if

you can dene the eeing nature of meaning in one single book). (Modernism and

neo-modernism suggest we void the world of an excess of cultural references, the

attening out of unpredictable forces, praying for the return of the mechanistic, the

equality of all things, the erasure of history, the tabula rasa of social justice). (A love

story without desire, a night without dreams).Zabriskie Pointdenes Antonionis

position about Politics and Poetry. Unlike Godard, Antonioni never leaves art.

Throughout the entire lm, the young woman is dressed with an army green mini dress,

a thin vaguely Navajo macram belt around her waist and the simplest roman sandals(she refuses the red dress the handsome boy throws at her as a present from his airplane,

telling him that it does not look good on her, neither the colour, nor the style; its a bad

cut, she says with a smile). Que es mas macho: Army Green or Red? Antonioni fell in

love with the New American Woman; candid, invulnerable, independent,

adventuresome, free spirited, an active thinker, a ower child. A very different character

from Monica Vitti, who is smart and intense but does not know what to do with herself:

am I a model? Am I an actress? Am I beautiful? Am I a quiet version of Barbara

Streisand? The last scene, (how often we forget how a lm starts and ends), (memory is

all about the deleted scenes). It is good to have the right fashion for every occasion,

especially when you cross the desert. Her name is Daria (both in the lm and in life).

Daria is a name from Persian origins which means wealth. His name is Mark (both in

the lm and in life). Marx. Mars. The Warrior.Zabriskie Pointis about the war between

wealth and poverty, between politics and poetry, between the one and the multiple.

After she processes the notion of revolution (all revolutions) (she is in the desert

because, as she says, she wants to get some thinking done) along her wanderings and

the vague half-discussions she has with the young fugitive who is not even a prince of

darkness, vapid like he invented the word (he is cute, but there something deranged in

his gaze. A concrete lack of identity. He does not know who he is), Daria has several

visions. The desert light is conducive to that and only fools think that mirages are not

real. Modernism and Neo-Modernism are against imagination. Most people remember

the lm for the multiple love-making scene in open-air. Although it is an impressive

scene, it is often misinterpreted as stemming from the protagonists continued utopian

desires. Lets make it clear here once more, that the two young characters are not lovers

at all. They do make love of course, but they do not fall in love. In fact, there is no love

story whatsoever inZabriskie Point. It is the portrait of an impossible encounter, the

portrait of a non-meeting space between a Neo-Marxist and a Free Spirit. When she

imagines the angelic orgy scene, she is thinking things through about her generation.

What they want, what they are looking for, so as to nd her own position; Antonioniuses the notion of generations as the context and the desert as a lled nihilism, the space

for new thoughts to emerge. The two protagonists live in a totally different mindset and

that there is no meeting of their minds at all, like they are from different narratives. The

young woman is all about active thinking and movement, driving her old rusty car; a

1952 Buick, her inacurate map (how are we supposed to map the desert, impossible), (A


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3000 piece puzzle of a Pollock painting). She is thinking things through by herself,

without relying on texts, thinking things through, until she has a rumour of an answer,

which brings another question. She is free, and the desert is not for her a refuge but a

place to bounce off from. She is collecting some truths, or half-truths, while he, on the

other hand, is eeing himself and the desert harbours him in pathetic captivity. He

wants to forget while she wants to remember. She represents the inside, the privaterealm, the individual, while he is all about an outside, the collective, the out-of-frame

that pursues him. She mentions multiple realities in a candid way and she feels sorry for

his lack of imagination. (Neo-Marxism is against imagination, there is only one dream,

one plan, one way, one typology, one future).The very last scene is when she leaves the

premise and consciously decides to keep going, back in the role of a wonderer in the

desert where she feels strangely at home. The last scene illustrates her position about

the Revolution. She turns her back to it, as she turns her back to high capitalism. She

leaves both sides of the war. The whole lm is about Antonionis position about the

politics of the time, in a timeless way, always with a wider angle (than Godard) aboutreality in general and what is behind it, around and under. Multiple truths and doubt are

not enemies of a free regime, they are pals. Antonioni succeeds in being political

without sacricing poetry. That is the whole challenge of art, the danger to kill it with

politics; art has to have the last word; that is why it is a very difcult thing to achieve;

like grace, which makes it rare, but rare is not a democratic adjective. Mark, a young

and mindless revolutionary, deambulating the road from his parents house, nally

having a goal in his life, a purpose, a cause to believe in and tell him what to do when

he gets up, a reason to get up even, down the upper middle-class mountain he goes,

driving fast, in his pick up truck, towards the street, the street he never walked on, and

from the truck descending in the street there he goes, down, down, street level, in one

movement, without thinking, he is propelled, he gets a gun, he is excited, he is a

revolutionary, a real one, he is inspired, motivated, from the last revolutionary talk he

attended, about the Blacks, about the War, about the Poor, about Injustice, about Single

Mothers, about Social Housing Evictions, about Cops Killing Blacks, about his

Meaningless Bourgeois University Life, he does not process his new thoughts and feels

called to action, he takes arms in a one plan-squence, a long take where many different

movements take place in a single shot with no edits, off he goes, Kills a Cop Killing a

Black and ees. In one line of ight, in a single revolutionary one-liner, Antonioni

succeeds in making something unclear so clear, and unclear again. The need for clarity

is against thought. Clarity is fascist. Postmodernism, in the best light, was iconoclastic;

new views, no centre, cynical in a productive way, cultural relativism, fantastical

deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, the playful. No Meta-Narratives to

depend on. The Modernist Dream is a wave frozen in mid air.


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Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

from Cunta Breccia

One learns to lose fear; that fear is a sickness.

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

that these narrative are not anhialate

dis entangled yet extant

motile and schizophreniant

Transistive propertys insistant

and sprawling:

as when one cannot remember how

to spell anhialate or

when ones respirations

are so fractive

that one forgets that word hyperventilate

WITHIN

do not contain

Devout/r displacement

live differ

must come to

rent upon

imprecistant mercy corrects

upon:

to seek striationsin an reexive placements

of me, that this now

varies an episodic akathesia

to loosen symbiotic fusion.

Who

says that everything died for uswhen our eyes broke?

Everything awakened, everything began.

Paul Celan


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Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

Letter to Cunta Breccia

I imagined this as a dialogue of anarcho exstasis (a refusal of stagnant resilience

convenant), and nihilist worldview/self-sense, writing out from anguish.

I dont have a printer. I write long-hand, and read aloud over and over. I write aloud

over and over.

I keyed the redactive fragments, (breccia), onto/into? my cuntputre, always allowing

and giving consent to any errors of transcription.

My technomachiniccapacity is limited: couldnt work out how to send this

electronically. My email is web-based and does not exist, as such, nella machina, as I

understand.

So again, as Ive always done before, I transcribe by hand from the screen onto paper.

Welcome to the 13th Century, Dorothy.

Michael Barnholden


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Acknowledgements

About a Bicycle would like to give thanks to all contributors and a

special acknowledgement to the attendees throughout the summer

session: Milena Varzonovtseva, Stefanie Ratjen, our friends on

Chatroulette, Maria Wallstam, Andrea Javor, Christine Leclerc, AdaSmailbegovic, Susan Steudel, Megan Hepburn, Sasha Langford,

Marie-Hlne Tessier, and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. Thanks to Jeff

Khonsary from the Future for printing the cover and to Aja and

Gabriel from the STAG for hosting our launch.

AAB Issue 1, Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate! (Summer 2012)

Documents

Transcript of AAB Issue 1, Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate! (Summer 2012)