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…how life can be understood as a path or a trajectory. There are points you should reach, points that become like punctuation: how we stopd and start, how we measure our progression. We proceed in a direction through reaching certain points. A path gives life a certain shape, a direction, a sequence ( birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death). How we begin , how we end, what happens along the way.
Sara Ahmed: living a feminist life
When we share a direction, the traffic flows. (…) Traffic is organized. There are rules that enable us to travel more safely, rules that help us to avoid bumping into each other;rules intended to eease our progression. Some of these rules are formal or written down; other rules are more informal; they are habits, ways of acting and being in relation to others that have become second nature over time. When you are a stranger-maybe you are a tourist, or just newly arrived, and you don’t know these unwritten rules ( How can you? There is nothing to consult)- you can become quite an imposition, a burden, a thing. You feel awkward, as locals frown at you as they bump into you because you are not going the right way, or because you pause or hesitate when they are busy, or because you stop to ask directions, they are hurrying, going the way they are going, getting somewhere. (…) something can be revealed in these moments of distrection. (…) A crowd i soften directed by the machinery of man-made geography, as well as timetables, by the political economies that render life and work more sperated for more; transportation becomes necessary for work. There is congestion because there is a pattern. A pattern ist he generalization of tendency. (…) a crowd is directed. Once a crowd is directed a crowd becomes directive“
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SF is a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures. Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth. String figures require holding still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship and politics are like that too—passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching.
( aus Staying with the trouble – Donna Harraway)
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Foucault writes that as the dispositif of subjectivisation (i.e. the manner in which the subject is established and its singularity articulated), confession entered Western culture already in the nineteenth century, when it replaced the classical disposition of remorse by new forms of power and ruling. „We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday live, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell.
Bojana Kunst: Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism
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Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality: Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizinfg rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.
José Esteban Munoz: cruising Utopia
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A person presents her/himself at the boarding gate of an airport, or at a border, or at a hotel reception, or at the counter of a car rental agency … S/he shows her/his passport and the hostess, the salesperson, the receptionist, the administrator or the customs officer looks at the document, then looks at the body that is before her/him and declares: “This is not you!” A systemic rupture is thereby produced in all of the legal and administrative conventions that construct the living political fictions. The social apparatus of the construction of identity breaks down then, as if in slow motion, and its techniques (photographs, documents, enunciations …) fall one after the other, like the dazzling, blinking game over sign on the screen of a video game. In the space of an instant reigns a glacial silence, Wittgensteinian. The sense of being off-side in the language game: the terror of having exceeded the limits of social intelligibility; the fascination of being able to observe from the exterior, or more exactly from the threshold, even if only for an instant, the apparatus that constructs us as subject. It could be a scene from a nightmare, or the paroxysmal moment of a pataphysical fiction. It is however a banal event in the everyday life of a transgender person waiting for the legal change of their identity. To the exclamation “This is not you”, I sometimes wish to respond “Of course that is not me! Show me your passport and tell me if it is you or not.” But here we are riveted, the officer and I, re-playing the central scene in Hegel: “Independence and subjection: domination and servitude.” I don’t get smart. I know very well that in this scene the role that falls to me is that of the slave and not the master. I return to the fold of recognition: the frontiers of the language game are full of institutions, of incarceration and punishment. I deny what queer deconstruction has taught me and I reaffirm the apparatus of gender social reproduction: I explain, in waving a letter from my lawyer, that I was mistakenly assigned at birth the female sex and that my request for the recognition of male identity is the object of a legal procedure before a judge of the Spanish State. I am in transition. I am in the waiting room between two systems of exclusive representation. Transition is the name given to the process that supposedly allows one to pass from femininity to masculinity (or vice versa) via the legal-medical protocol of the re-assignment of gender identity. In general, this is announced as: “I am in the process of going through my transition.” And in Spanish, this is expressed in the gerund. The two expresssions seek to describe the transformation from one state to another, and at the same time, they accentuate the temporary and thus provisional character of the process. However, the process of transition does not refer to the passage from femininity to masculinity (these two genders are not ontological entities, they are only biopolitical and performative), but rather to the passage from one apparatus of the production of truth to another. The trans person is represented as a sort of exiled person, someone who has left behind the gender that was assigned to her/him at birth (as someone would abandon their country) and who henceforth would seek recognition as a potential citizen of another gender. In legal-political terms, the status of the trans person is comparable to that of the migrant, the exiled and the refugee. They all find themselves in a temporary process of suspension of their political condition. In the case of trans persons, as with that of the bodies of migrants, what is asked for is a biopolitical refuge: to be the subject of a system of semiotic assemblage that gives meaning to life. The absence of legal recognition and biocultural support denies sovereignty to the bodies of trans persons and migrants, and places them in a position of very high social vulnerability. In other words: the ontological-political density of a trans body or of a migrant body is inferior to that of a citizen whose gender and nationality are recognised by the administrative conventions of the Nation States which s/he inhabits. To use Althusser’s terms, we could state that trans persons and migrants are placed in the parodic situation of asking to be recognised as subjects by the same apparatuses of the State that exclude them. We asked to be recognised (and thereby to submit) to be able to invent forms of free social subjection. What trans persons and migrants solicit, in asking for a change of gender or asylum, are administrative (names, right of residence, documents, passports …) and biocultural (foods, medicines, biochemical elements, refuge, language, self-representation …) prostheses necessary to be able to construct oneself as living political fictions. What is called the refugee “crisis”, or the so called “problem” of trans people, will not be resolved by building refugee camps or clinics for sexual re-assignment. What is in crisis are the systems of the production of truth, of political citizenship and the technologies of the Nation State, as well as the epistemology of the sex-gender binary. Consequently, it is the political space as a whole that should enter into transition.
Identity in Transit Paul B. Preciado
Don’t produce anything. Change your sex. Become your professors teacher. Be the disciple of your student. Be your leaders lover. Be your dog’s pet. Anything that walks on two legs is an enemy. Take care of your nurse. Go into a prisoner replay the main scene in Animal Farm. Become your secretary’s assistant. Go clean the cleaners house. Prepare a cocktail to the bartender. Close the clinic. Cry and laugh. Renounce the religion that was given to you. Dance on the graves in your secret cemetery. Change your name. Change your ancestors. Don’t try to please. Don’t buy anything you seen advertised on a screen or any other visual prompt. Bury the statue of Apollo. Don’t try to please. Pack up your things without knowing where you’re moving. Abandon your children. Stop working. Go into a refugee camp and play the main seen in Animal Farm. Sell your father as a prostitute. Cross a border. Exhume Diogenes’s body. Shut down your Facebook account. Don’t smile when your photo is taken. Close your google account. Go into a museum and replay the main scene in Animal Farm. Leave your husband for a woman 10 years younger than you. Anything that walks on and four legs and anything that has wings is a friend. Close your bank account. Shave your head. Don’t search for success. Leave your husband for a dog.
aus ‚packup your things‘ by Paul B. Preciado
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l. CIRCULATION AND RESPIRATION For more than two thousand years medical science accepted the ancient principles of body heat which governed Perikles‘ Athens. Sanctified by the weight of long tradition, it seemed certain that innate heat of the body explained the differences between men and women, as well as between human beings and animals, With the appearance of William Harvey’s De motu cordis in 1628, this certainty began to change. Through discoveries he made about the circulation of the blood, Harvey launched a scientific revolution in the understanding of the body: its structure, its healthy state, and its relation to the soul. A new master image of the body took form, The new understandings of the body coincided with the birth of modern capitalism, and helped bring into being the great social transformation we call individualism. The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being. (…) Adam Smith imagined the free market of labor and goods operating much like freely circulating blood within the body and with similar life-giving consequences. Smith, in observing the frantic business behavior of his contemporaries, recognized a design. Circulation of goods and money proved more profitable than fixed and stable possession. Ownership served as the prelude to exchange, at least for those who improved their lot in life. Yet for people to benefit from the virtues of a circulating economy, Smith knew, they would be obliged to cut themselves free from old allegiances. This mobile economic actor would moreover have to learn specialized, individualized tasks, in order to have something distinctive to offer. Cut loose, specialized Homo economicus could move around in society, exploit possessions and skills as the market offered, but all at a price. Moving around freely diminishes sensory awareness, arousal by places or the people in those places. Any strong visceral connection to the environment threatens to tie the individual down. (…) The city breathes The links between the city and the new science of the body began when the heirs of Harvey and Willis applied their discoveries to the skin. We owe to the eighteenth-century doctor Ernst Platner the first clear analogy of circulation within the body to the body’s environmental experience. Air, Platner said, is like blood: it must circulate through the body, and the skin is the membrane which allows the body to breathe air in and out. (…) Enlightened planners wanted the city in its very design to function like a healthy body, freely flowing as well as possessed of clean skin. Since the beginnings of the Baroque era, urban planners had thought about making cities in terms of efficient circulation of people on the city’s main streets. In the remaking of Rome, for instance, Pope Sixtus V connected the principal Christian shrines of the city by a series of great, straight roads on which pilgrims could travel. The medical imagery of life-giving circulation gave a new meaning to the Baroque emphasis on motion. Instead of planning streets for the sake of ceremonies of movement toward an object, as did the Baroque planner, the Enlightenment planner made motion an end in itself. The Baroque planner emphasized progress toward a monumental destInation, the Enlightened planner emphasized the journey itself. The street was an important urban space, in this Enlightened conception, whether it ran through a residential neighborhood or through the city’s ceremonial center. Thus were the words „artery“ and „veins“ applied to city streets in the eighteenth century by designers who sought to model ~raffic systems on the blood system of the body. French urbanlSts hke ChtlStian Parte used the imagery of arteries and veins to justify the principle of one-way streets. In both German and French urban maps based on the blood system, the prince’s castle forms the heart of the design, but the streets often bypassed connection to the urban heart, and instead were directly connected to each other. Though bad anatomy, the planners practiced sanguine mechanics: they though that if motion through the city becomes blocked anywhere, the collective body suffers a crisis of circulation like that an individual body suffers during a stroke when an artery becomes blocked.
Exerpts from FLESH AND STONE The Body and the City in Western Civilization RICHARD SENNETT