Tautology ~ Dialogues
With Jan Kunkel, Lydia McGlinchey and Stefa Govaart
Sunday, September 22nd
Performance at 3:30
Doors open at 3pm
Isn’t it the point of – – – – – – – –, – – – – – – – – – – – –, to proceed as an arrangement of accumulations; he – – – – – – –, clotted as strained yoghurt in a thong, – – – –, –, I promise
When approached by Carina and Marlena from au JUS after a reading by poet Ariana Reines at rile* (Brussels) with the question to textually respond to their Il/legal Fictions series (and artist Susan Ploetz’s Senses of Security specifically), I felt hesitant. I wasn’t doing well. It was October 28, 2023. Ariana had just read poems written in the wake of October 7. Addressing the problem of address, the subject’s functions and language’s part within said functionality, Ariana wrote in an email correspondence the week prior to the reading: “Actually an immense amount of violence and the stopping of thought is perpetuated by mantras that are pulsed into us by « the world ».” Mantras, by definition, are aids in concentration. Those pulsed into us engender a concentration on themselves, the wrong kind. This, we know well, but nonetheless…
I mean, of course, this is inward looking, of a scene, of a set of referents. But maybe those who come are in that too. I reckon most prefer when the concrete gives itself to abstraction, rather than the reverse. It seems to depend on how it is read, whether -good- or -bad- alienation, but that’s for an essay.
Whose is “writing”?
This is an event on the arrangements of computer-generated and digitalized language/dialogue. I take liberty, too. The actuality of “knowing” that one is not free, this barrier that cannot be faced, is transcendental. It would be amazing to have a ppt alongside this, even fast-moving slides of some of the phrasing, small font, oblique placement.
Late summer, investment is fraught, survey of benefits, Nora Fulton, the class relation, Jan Kunkel. Language has/has not worn out; there is “one’s” xyz “relation” to driving “one’s” parlêtric being. Is the internet of help? The authentic version not the performative. I use inverted comma’s, semi-colons, slashes of sorts. Suppose I were to postulate “No God, No Master”, one may postulate back “Hysteria as an afternoon’s basic plot”. I am not a fan of poeticizing directions/drink prices.
What is genres’ aesthetic expectancy; are “cramp mechanisms”? Who puts faith in nonsequiturs? Question: what does a dead fish displayed on its side on the crushed ice of a display window in an empty fish store see or know through its one open eye? I co-organize meetings on self-divestiture, thievery, etc., and believe that it is narcissistic not to deal with the self.
Who’s fucked, made, written as sexed thing––Eminian figures (& Murray-Wassink’s intelligence on said figures). Commit-moi to paper, brush stroke, to depression into atmosphere––penciled negatively. Lived experience is gaps, aloof. Bear and receive. All have sexually seen men. A transsexual can be charmed by Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. A woman can leave her lover for the revolution that doesn’t take place. The lesbian turn. There can be no remaking of material divisions without real material losses. We should all want it all. [line break]. A motto. [line break]. There is no all. Begin.
Wish I
Could see Eminian figure to-
Nite
Wan-
Ting to have had dick
In mouth
Why on earth rather
Sausage than
Cat
I was hoping to ask about praxes, the staging of -mind- and -theater-. Maybe thongs can be interesting: the ass is nice: I remember having one or two when I was in high school, that cum can be clotted as strained yoghurt. My affective live, a sense of security as habitual fear instincts / perceived fragmentation. One’s systemic enjoyment; safety referenced without nostalgia. I have taken on pedagogical roles. They need to find out for whom they write and how much they care about being understood.
I am a collector of pumps of (in some measure publically accessible) soap dispensers. Obsessed with cleanliness, I don’t know when to stop. The fantasy I cannot let go of: the-right-moment-of-pausing-whilst-amassing. Akin to how the real estate market functions, but for artists. Each time you push down on, or prime, the actuator [of concerning dispenser], the piston puts pressure on the spring and moves the ball upward, taking some soap product with it.
‘I am’ states -the- I am, reminding audiences that they are seeing plays, the fatal flaw being that they never forgot that they are seeing plays. More garment than costume. Of course, the relevant authorities and employees do not do such mediation for free and for nothing. The shifting of registers from the psychoanalytic structure to the genre of the theater is always off. Analogy, tautology, litotes, chiasmus: slushy critique is syntactically lived. I barely read novels. So I wear a veil of ambivalence till dying day. I want it both ways yet recently my psychoanalyst punctuates my story about a hand-written 9 looking like something in between a 9 and a g that “in-between” is not “both” (as I seemed to imply) but “neither-nor”. Lalangue. The desire for investment is fraught and so on then recursively hits the flesh.
Overcome I am received
Feel in the fur of hole SEEN I WAS
DONE
You made my shapes filth teaches filth WAS SEEN sexually by men why they be GONE I AM SLIT A
SLUR
It was a LATE-SUMMER such as when PUKE when
WRITTEN, referenced, writing as
I write, named BORNE
The Evil Queen, Cruella de Vil, Emily, committed to writing, PENCILED INSCRIBED. I said her howl
Wow I find this writing weird. It’s no longer an exception that artists write, varied.
The notion of noblesse oblige was part of the ethic of the country gentleman. Privilege entails responsibility. Privilege: privé. The capacity for narrativization is bound up with the precedings of disavowal. My brother is a gambler, I postpone meals. It is hard to kill property, be she Marx, or Trans.
This event is not a lived survey of benefits accruing to artists.
The flaunting of exploitation is the best way to obfuscate exploitation.
Digitalized capitalism troubles concentration; digitalized capitalism offers apps to digitally meet those who have trouble concentrating.
A niche-famous person’s practice of body shaming is publicized; images of anorexic-looking bodies announce said person’s next choreographic act.
I have theoretically learned that “cyclical” and “secular” crises/crisis dialectically engendering the accumulation of surplus value through the atypical commodity: labor power. Boom-bust-boom-bust plus “the class relation”.
The musician, poet, mathematician, and artist Catherine Christer Hennix, as recounted by poet and scholar Nora Fulton, says: “It is in the idea of an “outside” that humans have continually looked for non-tautological truth, ignoring the fact that truth must always be tautological.” I don’t understand what she means. Ich ahne, it is truthful.
The language used during this event comes from various -epistolary-, online, exchanges, I invest much time in. Language as found in or adapted from back-and-forth Venn-diagrammatic reference-sharing practices, is equally part of the script as presented today, as well as a practice of recursive deepl translation, mainly used as genre-enhancer, and for the sake of “entity-writing” (Gertrude Stein), or, “Coins/Cocks”.
Friendship is a resource of exceptional value. Jan Kunkel, a current resident at au JUS, and artist whose practice and future intention of collaboration across activist and artistic readership, I admire and wish to see thrive, and Lydia McGlinchey, an artist whose choreographic as well as scenographic work I have followed and who has been there whenever and always this past year, have given themselves to reading with me. I thank them. Some of the language comes from them. Writing is reading plus editing. Can Streit be scripted?
We welcome donations of any kind. All proceeds of donations and bar go to the readers, who thank au JUS, and Carina Erdmann specifically, for hosting.
/
Il/legal Fictions (October 23, 2023 – March 24, 2024) was a participatory event series exploring law as “a socially constituent and speculative force through somatic practices, relational protocols, social prototyping, embodied simulations and discussions”, held at project and artist-run space au JUS, located between Porte de Hal and Parvis de St. Gilles, Brussels. In this framework, artist and researcher Susan Ploetz hosted Senses of Security, two afternoons of somatic exercise and live-action role-play (LARP), as part of a residency. The work sessions on November 4 (The Dance of Boundaries and Values) and November 11 (The River, The Land // Hard Shell, Soft Seed), 2023, are socially held by no-shoe policy, soft blankets, home-made chicken/veggie broth, and foods like goji berries.
Au JUS is housed in an early 20th century terraced house. The space can be exited through a door that leads to a stairwell. The first floor is composed of a narrow hallway plus bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. A basement offers another site for experiment. The rent is largely offset by Airbnb revenues. 250 euros were set aside for writing this text and script. The trio extends into a group of affiliates who take on small tasks. “Motivated by the urgency and desire to prefigure actual transformations taking form beyond the realm of fiction”, au JUS hosted a group of Palestinians throughout the Winter, coordinated by artist Dimitri van den Wittenboer, in collaboration with a Brussels network of private hosts and squats. Collectively prepared meals with sourced groceries served on a daily base pointed to art’s potential use value, staging the abundance of modes in which artists produce, collaborate, distribute subjectivities and present work, remediating crisis ordinariness. Where LARP, game structures and aesthetically mediated political assemblies gesture towards art’s capacity to speak truth to power where other apparatuses (e.g., law, the police) fail, or worse, ignore or prohibit it, collectivity or group work might also be an opaque façade that conceals and protects art-world-savviness and undercover operations. The uses and abuses of art for life. No one is safe from the specter of complicity. How might art take responsibility for complicity without demanding it be useful per se? If, as Brussels-based artist and writer Evol writes, “All are truly more graceful than our paranoid profiles” [Telegram, October 25, 2023], then, who is prepared to abolish their self-fulfilling complacency? Can the graces of self-divestiture feel “real” on a daily base? Does this seem worth asking? Spaces are available for reading, always. We have to do the work––affectively undone before rationally held together. The nonmeritocratic relation of cause to effect implies seeking to be traversed by the social. The private has gone a long way ever since some white dudes have insisted things, including humans, be owned, unleashing an apparently unstoppable progression of capital accumulation destroying both planet earth as well as entire populations. Today, the spectacular crisis of the in Brussels and elsewhere “West” perversely mediated reality of Palestinians being genocidally slaughtered is one of the most pressing examples of how human-made late-late-late capitalism is fed by, what Sarah Brouillette and other scholars have called, “the intensified contradictions that follow from hegemonic decline”, by which they mean: “a capitalism gone spongey…saturated with too much capacity and too many goods and too many unemployed; with no ability to move and nowhere to go but still persistently, sluggishly slouching towards some far off Bethlehem”. Nadia Bou Ali writes: “The people of Palestine fighting against extermination are the very negation of life’s ugly enjoyment of itself, in its self-affirmation and disavowal of all negative value.” Negative capability, and decisive action, now.
When approached by Carina and Marlena from au JUS after a reading by poet Ariana Reines at rile* (Brussels) with the question to textually respond to their Il/legal Fictions series (and artist Susan Ploetz’s Senses of Security specifically), I felt hesitant. I wasn’t doing well. It was October 28, 2023. Ariana had just read poems written in the wake of October 7. Addressing the problem of address, the subject’s functions and language’s part within said functionality, Ariana wrote in an email correspondence the week prior to the reading: “Actually an immense amount of violence and the stopping of thought is perpetuated by mantras that are pulsed into us by « the world ».” Mantras, by definition, are aids in concentration. Those pulsed into us engender a concentration on themselves, the wrong kind. This, we know well, but nonetheless…
I mean, of course, this is inward looking, of a scene, of a set of referents. But maybe those who come are in that too. I reckon most prefer when the concrete gives itself to abstraction, rather than the reverse. It seems to depend on how it is read, whether -good- or -bad- alienation, but that’s for an essay.
Whose is “writing”?
This is an event on the arrangements of computer-generated and digitalized language/dialogue. I take liberty, too. The actuality of “knowing” that one is not free, this barrier that cannot be faced, is transcendental. It would be amazing to have a ppt alongside this, even fast-moving slides of some of the phrasing, small font, oblique placement.
Late summer, investment is fraught, survey of benefits, Nora Fulton, the class relation, Jan Kunkel. Language has/has not worn out; there is “one’s” xyz “relation” to driving “one’s” parlêtric being. Is the internet of help? The authentic version not the performative. I use inverted comma’s, semi-colons, slashes of sorts. Suppose I were to postulate “No God, No Master”, one may postulate back “Hysteria as an afternoon’s basic plot”. I am not a fan of poeticizing directions/drink prices.
What is genres’ aesthetic expectancy; are “cramp mechanisms”? Who puts faith in nonsequiturs? Question: what does a dead fish displayed on its side on the crushed ice of a display window in an empty fish store see or know through its one open eye? I co-organize meetings on self-divestiture, thievery, etc., and believe that it is narcissistic not to deal with the self.
Who’s fucked, made, written as sexed thing––Eminian figures (& Murray-Wassink’s intelligence on said figures). Commit-moi to paper, brush stroke, to depression into atmosphere––penciled negatively. Lived experience is gaps, aloof. Bear and receive. All have sexually seen men. A transsexual can be charmed by Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. A woman can leave her lover for the revolution that doesn’t take place. The lesbian turn. There can be no remaking of material divisions without real material losses. We should all want it all. [line break]. A motto. [line break]. There is no all. Begin.
Wish I
Could see Eminian figure to-
Nite
Wan-
Ting to have had dick
In mouth
Why on earth rather
Sausage than
Cat
I was hoping to ask about praxes, the staging of -mind- and -theater-. Maybe thongs can be interesting: the ass is nice: I remember having one or two when I was in high school, that cum can be clotted as strained yoghurt. My affective live, a sense of security as habitual fear instincts / perceived fragmentation. One’s systemic enjoyment; safety referenced without nostalgia. I have taken on pedagogical roles. They need to find out for whom they write and how much they care about being understood.
I am a collector of pumps of (in some measure publically accessible) soap dispensers. Obsessed with cleanliness, I don’t know when to stop. The fantasy I cannot let go of: the-right-moment-of-pausing-whilst-amassing. Akin to how the real estate market functions, but for artists. Each time you push down on, or prime, the actuator [of concerning dispenser], the piston puts pressure on the spring and moves the ball upward, taking some soap product with it.
‘I am’ states -the- I am, reminding audiences that they are seeing plays, the fatal flaw being that they never forgot that they are seeing plays. More garment than costume. Of course, the relevant authorities and employees do not do such mediation for free and for nothing. The shifting of registers from the psychoanalytic structure to the genre of the theater is always off. Analogy, tautology, litotes, chiasmus: slushy critique is syntactically lived. I barely read novels. So I wear a veil of ambivalence till dying day. I want it both ways yet recently my psychoanalyst punctuates my story about a hand-written 9 looking like something in between a 9 and a g that “in-between” is not “both” (as I seemed to imply) but “neither-nor”. Lalangue. The desire for investment is fraught and so on then recursively hits the flesh.
Overcome I am received
Feel in the fur of hole SEEN I WAS
DONE
You made my shapes filth teaches filth WAS SEEN sexually by men why they be GONE I AM SLIT A
SLUR
It was a LATE-SUMMER such as when PUKE when
WRITTEN, referenced, writing as
I write, named BORNE
The Evil Queen, Cruella de Vil, Emily, committed to writing, PENCILED INSCRIBED. I said her howl
Wow I find this writing weird. It’s no longer an exception that artists write, varied.
The notion of noblesse oblige was part of the ethic of the country gentleman. Privilege entails responsibility. Privilege: privé. The capacity for narrativization is bound up with the precedings of disavowal. My brother is a gambler, I postpone meals. It is hard to kill property, be she Marx, or Trans.
This event is not a lived survey of benefits accruing to artists.
The flaunting of exploitation is the best way to obfuscate exploitation.
Digitalized capitalism troubles concentration; digitalized capitalism offers apps to digitally meet those who have trouble concentrating.
A niche-famous person’s practice of body shaming is publicized; images of anorexic-looking bodies announce said person’s next choreographic act.
I have theoretically learned that “cyclical” and “secular” crises/crisis dialectically engendering the accumulation of surplus value through the atypical commodity: labor power. Boom-bust-boom-bust plus “the class relation”.
The musician, poet, mathematician, and artist Catherine Christer Hennix, as recounted by poet and scholar Nora Fulton, says: “It is in the idea of an “outside” that humans have continually looked for non-tautological truth, ignoring the fact that truth must always be tautological.” I don’t understand what she means. Ich ahne, it is truthful.
The language used during this event comes from various -epistolary-, online, exchanges, I invest much time in. Language as found in or adapted from back-and-forth Venn-diagrammatic reference-sharing practices, is equally part of the script as presented today, as well as a practice of recursive deepl translation, mainly used as genre-enhancer, and for the sake of “entity-writing” (Gertrude Stein), or, “Coins/Cocks”.
Friendship is a resource of exceptional value. Jan Kunkel, a current resident at au JUS, and artist whose practice and future intention of collaboration across activist and artistic readership, I admire and wish to see thrive, and Lydia McGlinchey, an artist whose choreographic as well as scenographic work I have followed and who has been there whenever and always this past year, have given themselves to reading with me. I thank them. Some of the language comes from them. Writing is reading plus editing. Can Streit be scripted?
We welcome donations of any kind. All proceeds of donations and bar go to the readers, who thank au JUS, and Carina Erdmann specifically, for hosting.
/
Il/legal Fictions (October 23, 2023 – March 24, 2024) was a participatory event series exploring law as “a socially constituent and speculative force through somatic practices, relational protocols, social prototyping, embodied simulations and discussions”, held at project and artist-run space au JUS, located between Porte de Hal and Parvis de St. Gilles, Brussels. In this framework, artist and researcher Susan Ploetz hosted Senses of Security, two afternoons of somatic exercise and live-action role-play (LARP), as part of a residency. The work sessions on November 4 (The Dance of Boundaries and Values) and November 11 (The River, The Land // Hard Shell, Soft Seed), 2023, are socially held by no-shoe policy, soft blankets, home-made chicken/veggie broth, and foods like goji berries.
Au JUS is housed in an early 20th century terraced house. The space can be exited through a door that leads to a stairwell. The first floor is composed of a narrow hallway plus bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. A basement offers another site for experiment. The rent is largely offset by Airbnb revenues. 250 euros were set aside for writing this text and script. The trio extends into a group of affiliates who take on small tasks. “Motivated by the urgency and desire to prefigure actual transformations taking form beyond the realm of fiction”, au JUS hosted a group of Palestinians throughout the Winter, coordinated by artist Dimitri van den Wittenboer, in collaboration with a Brussels network of private hosts and squats. Collectively prepared meals with sourced groceries served on a daily base pointed to art’s potential use value, staging the abundance of modes in which artists produce, collaborate, distribute subjectivities and present work, remediating crisis ordinariness. Where LARP, game structures and aesthetically mediated political assemblies gesture towards art’s capacity to speak truth to power where other apparatuses (e.g., law, the police) fail, or worse, ignore or prohibit it, collectivity or group work might also be an opaque façade that conceals and protects art-world-savviness and undercover operations. The uses and abuses of art for life. No one is safe from the specter of complicity. How might art take responsibility for complicity without demanding it be useful per se? If, as Brussels-based artist and writer Evol writes, “All are truly more graceful than our paranoid profiles” [Telegram, October 25, 2023], then, who is prepared to abolish their self-fulfilling complacency? Can the graces of self-divestiture feel “real” on a daily base? Does this seem worth asking? Spaces are available for reading, always. We have to do the work––affectively undone before rationally held together. The nonmeritocratic relation of cause to effect implies seeking to be traversed by the social. The private has gone a long way ever since some white dudes have insisted things, including humans, be owned, unleashing an apparently unstoppable progression of capital accumulation destroying both planet earth as well as entire populations. Today, the spectacular crisis of the in Brussels and elsewhere “West” perversely mediated reality of Palestinians being genocidally slaughtered is one of the most pressing examples of how human-made late-late-late capitalism is fed by, what Sarah Brouillette and other scholars have called, “the intensified contradictions that follow from hegemonic decline”, by which they mean: “a capitalism gone spongey…saturated with too much capacity and too many goods and too many unemployed; with no ability to move and nowhere to go but still persistently, sluggishly slouching towards some far off Bethlehem”. Nadia Bou Ali writes: “The people of Palestine fighting against extermination are the very negation of life’s ugly enjoyment of itself, in its self-affirmation and disavowal of all negative value.” Negative capability, and decisive action, now.