Off Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Limits"

Re-Covery

“Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.”

-J.K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"

Rising Above a Passive Indifference

The great gold apples of night
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.

D.H. Lawewnce, "People"

Whilst Classical Liberals Painted Vortices...

Umberto Boccioni, "Visioni simultanee" (1912)

Did something homologous to the invention of the liberal psychological individual not take place in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s? The Russian avant-garde art of the early 1920s (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man — no longer the old man of sentimental passions and roots in traditions, but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial Machine. As such, it was subversive in its very “ultra-orthodoxy,” i.e. in its over-identification with the core of the official ideology: the image of man that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, etc., emphasizes the beauty of his/her mechanical movements, his/her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to “Taylorization,” to Fordist ribbon-work, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation: recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the “behaviorist” approach to acting — no longer emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing, but ruthless bodily training aimed at cold bodily discipline, at the ability of the actor to perform a series of mechanized movements . . .” THIS is what was unbearable to AND IN the official Stalinist ideology, so that the Stalinist “socialist realism” effectively WAS an attempt to reassert a “Socialism with a human face,” i.e. to reinscribe the process of industrialization within the constraints of the traditional psychological individual: in the Socialist Realist texts, paintings and films, individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global Machine, but as warm, passionate persons.

The obvious reproach that imposes itself here is, of course: is the basic characteristic of today’s “postmodern” subject not the exact opposite of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate, namely the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat — if the other smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he already hurts me; this logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment — recall the growing financial industry of paying damage claims, from the tobacco industry deal in the USA and the financial claims of the Holocaust victims and forced laborers in Nazi Germany, and the idea that the USA should pay the African-Americans hundreds of billions of dollars for all they were deprived of due to their past slavery ... This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is not the opposite, but, rather, the inherent supplement of the liberal free subject: in today’s predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

-Slavoj Zizek, "On Belief" (Leninist Freedom)
Tatlin's Tower (1919)Boris Vladimirski, "Roses for Stalin" (1949)

Addiction

h/t - Bill Paradis

--Isn’t She a Daughter of Oedipus?--

Isn’t she Antigone? In search of a fallen prince,
who roams in the battlefield where the corpses of
defeated warriors lie gruesomely in streams of blood.

Isn’t she Antigone? In search of a sibling who was
rejected by a sightless ruined old homeless man at Colonus,
who walks through the middle of a pack of hungry wild dogs
and a flock of huge winged covetous vultures
coming together for laying carrion.

Isn’t she Antigone? For sake of a brother Polyneices’ soul,
who kneels to the ground and moves the earth with her slender fingers,
dragging an armored corpse and covers it with dirt she removed with tears.

Isn’t she Antigone? who risked her own life because of sisterly fidelity,
and, now, thrown into a hole that is deeper than Oedipus’ eye-pits
to end her anguish, a miserable life; to close her abhorrent memories, the horrible ordeals; while hearing a tender, caring voice of a wandering soul from above

“mourn no more, my troubled child
weep no more, my beloved daughter”

- Su Ben, "Oedipus the King of Thebes, III"

Killing the Other Behind Our Desire...

...?

Beckett's literature tells us that there is something that cannot be named, that there is something suspended and empty at the heart of the relation that persons, speakers, hold with the world, with things and their bodies, with others. A hole in the community that makes it simultaneoulsy impossible and possible. A void that makes community intolerable and that nevertheless gives it the elasticity, the porosity, without which a community becomes panoptic, carceral, and totalitarian.

This something is in the language and is language, is the fact of language. To attempt to erase its trace, its blind spot, its remnant of obscurity (from the perspective of science, morality, politics, discourse, well-managed narrative) is the objective of positive discourses (without which the community would sink into barbarity without laws). To bring all of this obstinately in and through language is the objective of art and literature, without which the community would sink into the totalitarian barbarity of the Law.

In other words, the condition of being cut from the world nourishes in us a dolorous nostalgia. To be tied body and soul to the community of speakers could weigh us down to the point of throwing us in atop a schizophrenic state. We cannot dream of a happy and redemptive homecoming, of a community at once supple and solid, and of the quieting of our neurotic sufferings. We must dream of abolishing the rupture, of escaping the prison. But if it is language that isolates and incarcerates us then escaping this prison implies escaping language. In the end this... acting-out amounts to madness. This is why madness is our peculiar temptation (along with violence, bestial abjection, mystical exaltation...).

But one does not escape language without leaving behind one's being human. One does not withdraw oneself from the human (and barbarism is the horizon of this unspeakable exit). This, then, forms the dilemma, in the customary sense but also in the silhouetted cursive of fiction, in which the Becktian creatures operate. Does one remain in prison (cancel oneself out as a free subject by submitting to the norms of the community, become, as the unnamable says, "reduced to reason," live stupidity, dress oneself in neurosis, speak only with the cadaver of the mother in one's mouth) or does one escape, without any voice, in the direction of barbarism, criminality. Winnie's potted autism or Lucky's mournful and delirious logorrhea? It is not surprising that we look for more clement skies, even if we secularize them under the heading of a gratifying Utopia.

Beckett is one of those who reduce, desicate, these reveries. For him, the only solution is not only more modest, but it is no solution at all. One can only exit language from within, by intervening in it (as Michaux likewise believed), by opening within it a provisional space of freedom, by rattling it with style and laughter, by working within it this symbolic bound that stays in one place (but is nevertheless a leap, "out of the rank of murderers," as Kafka said), this perilous and clownlike leap that is named literature, "excess of language," or "scripted gibberish." Without a doubt, there is no other civic meaning to this activity wherein solitude, says Beckett, finds its "apotheosis."

Beckett was one... "resistant" to the catastrophic euphoria of an engaged and utopian humanism. This resistance had a footing in writing, art, in this kind of form of the experience and the work of language turned entirely toward negativity and a hopelessly sovereign laughter. And we can be certain that such resistance, while in modes certainly different but deriving from the same ethical and philosophphical bases, remains very much and more than ever, the order of the day.

Christian Prigent, "Engagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political"

Ready?