poetry: rose red

She never wanted the troll,

though, when freeing his beard
trapped in the bill of a circling bird,
when sliding her scissors through the soft
hairs at the nub of his chin, she did
think the shadow dropping from the gull's
wings lent his face a certain ugly interest.

She never wanted the prince's brother,

second prize to the elder, but just as vain,
with a woman's soft hips and hands,
surrounding himself with mirrors and liking
her sister better anyway, her indiscriminate
sweetness: an ordinary fruit ripening
in a bowl displayed on a public table.

And she did not want the bear

their mother invited next to the fire,
though his stinking fur could make
her eyes and mouth water. Once, she devised
a way to lie beside him, innocently
at first, then not so, curled behind him,
running her thumbnail down his spine.

What she wanted, of course, was her own place in the forest,

where she would take the flowering trees
that grew outside her mother's bedroom window -
one white, buxom with albino blossoms,

one red, smaller, with delicate, hooked thorns -
and plant them on opposite sides of her cottage,
watching each bloom fall as summer spoiled them.

- Erin Belieu, "Rose Red"

elegy in the making

It’s around that time, you know, that I began to write, that is: to die a little.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on history (unlinkable)

Lives don’t make sense in reality, they come and go and often, like tsunamis, with the same crash, and they sweep away the dregs stagnating in your head like they were relics, which are treasures to you but don’t stand still. What a necropolis of sensations! … these heart throbs of which there’s nothing left… these smiles remembered by a simple wrinkle… what’s the use of all these people one meets and who go by and are no more? … and why forget those it would be pleasant not to forget, these beings with a heart in your image, and who go away from you… transient zombies, how to keep you inside?

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 310, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on withering away

... she was losing her footing. The light in her eyes wavered. She looked like the oil flame of a candle ring in the wind. She had found her cane bearings again, her mechanical movements to fend off their blades, her rags rolled up to the round of her shoulder, the old hat which pitilessly grated her temples under the heated sun. This badly watered life was hurling her every day down the bottom of the cliffs of her heart of hearts for good. My Esternome would make sure to be there when she came back home. She would come back like a withered flower. Month after month. Ninon was alighting from the world. She was beginning to look like ... her mother, no point in talking more about her. Soon she looked at what he brought her back (a glossy turtle shell, a small steel knife, some yellow scarves that she loved so much, a clear eau de cologne) with indifference. It made him so sick; he thought he could see her slow descent into an echoless depth.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 116, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on patience, stoicism, joy

But I never had these bad thoughts. With so many rags to launder in misery’s rivers, I’ve never had time for melancholy. What’s more, in the few moments life has left me, I learned to let my heart gallop on the saddle of intense feelings, to live life, as they say, to let her be. And note if you please that neither laughter nor smiles have ever tired the skin of my lips.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 33, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

violence, urbanity

Urbanity is a violence. The town spreads with one violence after another. Its equilibrium is violence. In the Creole city, the violence hits harder than elsewhere. First, because around her, murder (slavery, colonialism, racism) prevails, but especially because this city, without the factories, without the industries with which to absorb the new influx, is empty. It attracts without proposing anything besides its resistance -- like Fort-de-France did after Saint-Pierre was wiped out. The Quarter of Texaco is born of violence. So why be astonished at its scars, its warpaint?

THE URBAN PLANNER’S NOTES TO THE WORD SCRATCHER
FILE NO. 6. SHEET XVIII.
1987. SCHOELCHER LIBRARY.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 148, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the magic of words

… I skimmed many books, read lots of poems, bits of paragraphs, spellbinding moments. … For me, each book released an aroma, a voice, a time, a moment, a pain, a presence; each book cast a light or burdened me with its shadow; I was terrified feeling these souls, tied up in one hum, crackling under my fingers.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 218, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the wild

If he gave her his distaste for the sea, he taught her that his sacred wonder before the smallest shiver that ran through nature. Since then she became obsessed with evoking for the world that beauty available to whoever would look. Such a philosophy brought her the misfortune of spending her miserable old age lying in the weeds, eyes vulnerable to the anthills which she always found beautiful. The little beasts chewed her eyelids until, giving in to sleep, they fell. She had too keep them open with her fingers in order to take care of the day’s tasks.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 40f, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the urban planner

The angel of destruction had come that morning to familiarize himself with the setting for his future exploits.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 26, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the heroine

She was able to look at the world with great astonishment and see what no one else saw. She could decipher the murkiest eye and link a quivering lip to a broken heart. … Through her, we learned for example that a bright and early morning departure with a small suitcase and eyes too downcast announced the shipwreck of a Catholic love on the abortionist’s table. In other words, with her in our Quarter of Texaco, a life without witnesses, like life downtown, was a difficult wish. All was known of all. Miseries shouldered miseries. Commiseration intervened to fight despair and no one lived in the anxiety of extreme loneliness.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 19, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

o fortuna

Fate is like that. It often comes drumming in without ringing. You don’t see it coming.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 141, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on innocence

When we spoke of such things, I did not understand and that was just fine: the spirit fascinated too early by the coming mystery of death is not a clear spirit.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 25, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

Paradox, woman

She’d shed seven stages of loveliness to blossom into a beauty.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 64, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

The Looping Effect and Expectations

Times change, and so do people. People in trouble are not more constant than anyone else. But there is more to the change in the lifestyle of multiples than the passage of time. We tend to behave in ways that are expected of us, especially by authority figures -- doctors, for example. Some physicians had multiples among their patients in the 1840s, but their picture of the disorder was very different from the one that is common in the 1990s. The doctors’ vision was different because the patients were different; but the patients were different because the doctors’ expectations were different. That is an example of a very general phenomenon: the looping effect of human kinds. People classified in certain ways tend to conform or grow into the ways they are described; but they also evolve in their own ways, so that the classifications and descriptions have to be constantly revised.

- Hacking, I. 1995. Pg 21. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press

on authenticity and categorizations

To begin with, the question “It is real?” is not of itself a clear one. The classic examination of the word “real” is due to the doyen of ordinary language philosophers, J. L. Austin. As he insisted, you have to ask, “A real what?” Moreover, “a definite sense attaches to the assertion that something is real, a real such-and-such, only in the light of a specific way in which it might be, or might have been not real.” Something may fail to be real cream because the butterfat content is too low, or because it is synthetic creamer. A man may not be a real constable because he is impersonating a police officer, or because he has not yet been sworn in, or because he is a military policeman, not a civil one. A painting may fail to be a real Constable because it is a forgery, or because it is a copy, or because it is an honest work by one of John Constable’s students, or simply because it is an inferior work of the master. The moral is, if you ask, “Is it real?” you must supply a noun. You have to ask, “Is it a real N?” (or, “Is it real N?”). Then you have to indicate how it might fail to be a real N, “a real N as opposed to what?” Even that is no guarantee that a question about what’s real will make sense. Even with a noun and an alternative, we may not have a real anything: there is no such thing as the “real” color of a deep-sea fish.

- Hacking, I. 1995. Pg 11. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press

the social sciences in competition

The psychotherapist seeks to intervene; the anthropologist wishes to observe and to interfere as little as possible in the lives of the people she is studying.

- Erika Bourguignon, pg. 374, "Multiple personality, possession trance, and the psychic unity of mankind," Ethos vol. 17, issue 3, 1989

on sensitivity (not)

Humanitarianism is found only in a small minority of highly sensitive people…. Such humanitarianism is too easily confused with a somewhat different sentiment, that of prudence…. But it is one thing to condemn pornographic films because they are immoral and sully the viewer’s soul; it is quite another to condemn them because they turn the human persons who are their actors into objects.
[Gladiators] … aroused ambivalent feelings, both attraction and a prudent repulsion. On the one hand there was the taste for watching people suffer, the fascination with death, the pleasure of seeing corpses; on the other hand there was the anguish of seeing that within the very confines of public order it was legal to murder not only enemies or criminals but others as well. Society no longer provided a bulwark against the law of the jungle.

- pg. 148, “Foucault Revolutionizes History” - Paul Veyne, transl. Catherine Porter - 1978

on technology and weakening

As their telescope and microscopes, their tapes and radios become more sensitive, individuals become blinder, more hard of hearing, less responsive.

- Martin Heidegger, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969, pg 162

on spreading behavior

The history of [female bulimia] suggests that, in a mass society such as that of the United States, various widespread disorders may exist “underground” as long as they do not catch the public eye, so that when they are “discovered” they constitute an epidemic, a national problem, a newsworthy event. This is related to the way in which news is produced, as well as to the manner in which pathological behaviors of individuals, given appropriate publicity, can serve as models for other.

- Erika Bourguignon, pg. 373 "Multiple personality, possession trance, and the psychic unity of mankind," Ethos vol. 17, issue 3, 1989

on being experienced

I’ve known about living different men in similar ways. Always with the same number of pleasures and tears, burns and mysteries… the illusion always brand new… Love dresses life, colors survival, disperses all the gathered-up grime. Love is a heart accelerated, a beating on the heart. With him, I rolled into the deep gutters inside myself, sipped some very bitter vinegar, sucked on some fierce peppers. With him, I knew pain of the dead belly, the desire for little ones which grows like mushrooms on the ruins of ovaries. I’ve tasted the abandonments, I made some people suffer, they made me suffer everything. I learned to write letters, to make myself sweet for a fellow who wasn’t worth it, to make myself sweet anyway without knowing why…..

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 312, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

poetry: “Names You Can’t Pronounce”

I
Another summer in a town you know
like the backs of your knees and just
as sweaty. Nights aren’t much cooler.

Sometimes, when you walk out late to think
or just stare at your hands swinging
next to you, the green smells

of the Russian olive surrounding
the synagogue push at the back of your throat. Too big a mouthful,

so you stare at your hands which are
swinging soft and pale at the end
of your wrists and listen to cicadas
chorus their unknown tragedy.

II

You have two lovers. One knows you best
but his hands are soft, pale, female
like your own. The other tastes the back

of your knees, but won’t make love
to you. You stare at his knuckles
when he works, square and browned

from summer jobs. With the first
you take long walks past the synagogue
to a park with a war memorial.

The names there are thin, tragedy
chipped into black marble: Cassavettes,
Beacom, a Russian name you can’t pronounce,
all of these men, to you, unknown.

III

You can see the synagogue from
the window of your bedroom, wake
to the sign: FREEDOM FOR SOVIET JEWS.

The women downstairs have made love
and now they fight. It’s a tragedy,
they were friends before

they were lovers. The man living in
the basement is old, a veteran. Says
he hates Krauts, likes Russians.

The summer mornings are soft and pale
and when you wake from sleep
your hands flutter against the sheet;
the backs of your knees ache.

- Erin Belieu, "Names You Can't Pronounce"

on pretty things and being not quite there

…the Lady of the Big Hutch (an ex-strumpet from the Salpetriere who walked not with her legs but with her whole body), having taken an interest in her, entrusted her with her secret lingerie. Dresses made of cotton clouds, blouses made of wonders, lace mantillas which seemed like steam. The Lady had a childish laugh. The naivete in her eyes protected her from this horrible plantation. She floated in an unreal innocence contracted during a trip to the islands when her schooner was shipwrecked, despite the fact that the wreck had caused more fright than harm. Since then she moved like the clouds and filled the world with perfume and flowers.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 39, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on authorial tangents

I could tell the love story (in Cinemascope) between the instructed layman and the lady Etoilus who was ignorant even of the blank spaces between the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, but a detour would be risky.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 14, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

On the dangers of the gladiators versus that of the stage

While the pleasure of seeing blood flow brings intrinsic satisfaction, the pleasure of onstage indecency inciters spectators to lascivious conduct in their daily lives.

- “Foucault Revolutionizes History” - Paul Veyne, pg. 147 (of Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Davison) transl. Catherine Porter - 1978

poetry: false starts?

The ripped girl gathers herself,
draws into the recess of a downtown
highrise, then cries as if alone into
the body of an indifferent building.

The black feathers of her party dress
forsake her, dead flutter falling round
her arms. Having flown through many autumns,
in other clear, martini dusks, their circles

kept growing smaller till they settled
at nothing, save decoration. Now currents
are senseless and wild, still sweeping warm
across the public ponds, just wind.

Around the corner a man in a tuxedo looks
bored, always waiting. She's borrowed
his handkerchief. Profile of the Napoleonic
sphinx, yes. Yet something struggles

beneath the dial of his face. He craves
the crowd, its wandering breach and flow,
hears a genuine laugh bob up and wants
to follow it home, all the way through

the city, to any lit place beyond him. Night
is pending. Its tributaries flow, spilling
fast onto the sidewalk; something wet and plumed
to catch him. Like feathers raining. Like wings.

- Erin Belieu, "Outside the Hotel Ritz"

poetry: everything she asks of me

So, I’m dating Marilyn Monroe. We’re living together, actually. Right now, she’s sitting on the white couch with the black stains, watching me write this. What are you writing? she wants to know. A love letter, I say.

She’s eating grapes. She’s really into them right now. One by one, she sucks them into her mouth with a little pop, crushes them between the whitest of teeth with the gentlest of violence. What’s the opposite of fruit? she wants to know.

I don’t know, I say. Meat? She purses her lips, considering. No, she says. I don’t think there is an opposite of fruit.

We are both girls, true, but it’s like saying that a nectarine and a watermelon are both fruit. She’s a little tart rolling over the tongue, creamy; I crumble in the mouth, wet and rough.

She skips over to the bed, almost invisible with her cream skin on cream satin, hair the color of headlights at night. Do these sheets make me look fat? she asks. She’s serious. How do you know if you’re beautiful? Are you only beautiful if someone else thinks you are? And what does it cost? She almost only ever speaks in questions.

Last week, she was obsessed with cantaloupe and Eartha Kitt. As I got ready for work, she jumped up and down on the bed, singing, I Wanna Be Evil. When I came home, she’d tried to dye her hair black. The dye was spattered on the walls, the couch, the floor, sticking to everything but her hair, which shone like a canary in a coal mine. It didn’t work right, huh, she asks. Do you hate it? Her face crumples. I hate it, she says. I rubbed toothpaste on her hair until it was back to blonde, and we ate cantaloupe in bed, gently scooping the calm flesh into our mouths.

Stop writing. Come talk to me, she says.

Okay.

It’s hard being dead, she says. I never look any older. I want to know what I really look like.

I can’t fix it for you, I tell her. I think that this is love but it feels just like helplessness, I say.

What is the opposite of helplessness? she asks. What is the cost of death? She takes the phone off the hook. A recording plays: If you’d like to make a call, please — she wants to know, if you leave a phone off the hook, how long does the busy signal play for before the line goes dead? She drops the phone receiver on the bed. Is there a time limit to how long you can be happy for? The phone blares its staccato call through the twilight. This is always the last thing I ever hear, she says, as we taste the fruit and meat of each other’s mouths, as I dissolve into her kiss.

- "everything she asks of me," Daphne Gottle

a perfect night of carnivory

Since it was the season, he took her to the mouth of the Roxelane where the sea came to suck on fresh water. They went there at night, camping right there, under lit shelters, among other water enthusiasts, drinking, singing, telling jokes. While he held her fingers, Oh Ninon I am happy about your existence, they waited for the wonderful return of the titiri fish. Magnetized by the moon, thousands of minnows deserted the ocean to wriggle up the river. Scintillating waves of them shook the fresh water or washed up on the sand. The other campers raked about with buckets, bags, nets, basins, sheets, or other things. The night was but phosphorescent lightning, milky glow, sparks. The silver commas spurted out of all the containers, jumped around ankles, glued frenzied mirrors everywhere. These living lights enchanted Ninon. You could size them and free them in a luminous broth.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 107, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

more inadequacy of the static (language)

…writing is to be fought: in it the inexpressible becomes indecency.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 202, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on being locked into words

The feeling of death became even more present when I began to write about myself, and about Texaco. It was like petrifying the tatters of my flesh. I was emptying my memory into immobile notebooks without having brought back the quivering of the living life which at each moment modifies what’s just happened. Texaco was dying in my notebooks though it wasn’t finished. And I myself was dying there though I felt the person I was now (pledged to what I was going to be) still elaborating. Oiseau Cham, is there such a thing as writing informed by the word, and by the silences, and which remains a living thing, moving in a circle, and wandering all the time, ceaselessly irrigating with life the things written before, and which reinvents the circle each time like a spiral which at any moment is in the future, ahead, each loop modifying the other, nonstop, without losing a unity difficult to put into words?

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

the triumph (danger) of the city

But the city is danger; she becomes a megalopolis and doesn't ever stop; she petrifies the countryside into silence like Empires used to smother everything around them; on the ruins of the Nation-state, she rises monstrously, multi-national, transnational, supranational, cosmopolitan... and becomes the sole dehumanized structure of the human species.

NOTES OF THE URBAN PLANNER TO THE WORD SCRATCHER.
FILE NO. 20. SHEET XVI.
1988. SCHOELCHER LIBRARY.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 356, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on mobility, degrees of aloneness

Roads uncover solitude and suggest other lives. They bring you up to City. They sweep all of the hutches along in an anonymous dance and destroy the Quarters. A road is good neither too early nor too late. If you get it right, consider yourself lucky.

We learned to love solitude. ... To be too alone in the hills was to offer one's spine to the zombie's dirty hands. Helping each other was the law, a helping hand to do what was possible, working together for the immediate needs: in the hills, solitude must fight isolation. Many of the first colonists failed in their adventure because they did not know that. Solitude is a relative of freedom. Isolation is snake food.... (131)

- Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

more reification

It also presents the most sophisticated Marxist case for considering an object free of its systematic attachments:
It is only infatuation (with the object contemplated), the unjust disregard for the claims of every existing thing, that does justice to what exists…. The existent’s one-sidedness is comprehended as its being, and reconciled. (76)
Adorno’s praise for the “sabbath eyes… that save in their object something of the calm of the day of its creation” (76) is beautiful. But it is also influenced, indeed fatally compromised, by the existentialism that he elsewhere denounces. To speak of toy trains climbing free of the exchange-value system and its compulsions is to posit that the linguistic system, and the taxonomic ordering of the world, are cognate with a system of political oppression-- a system from which escape is possible. Similarly, in most modernist writing, there remains an assumption that objects are able somehow to gain “freedom” from systematic classification, just as the autonomous human in existentialist accounts is said to rise clear of an obligatory world to gain a life in the moment of choice. In such accounts, the negative space from which a three-dimensional animate object springs erect -- is either ignored or (systematically) trivialized to the point of nonexistence.

- John Plotz, “Objects of Abjection: The Animation of Difference in Jean Genet’s Novels,” 103, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1, (Spring 1998)

toys, like klee

…Adorno’s Minima Moralia ascribes a splendid life to children’s toys only insofar as they step out of the system of exchange-values and return to a purely purposeless use-value.
The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that levels down that destiny, but instead abides as allegories of what they are specifically for.

- John Plotz, pg 228, “Objects of Abjection: The Animation of Difference in Jean Genet’s Novels,” 103, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1, (Spring 1998)

Abstaining from false speech

Lying is disruptive to social cohesion. People can live together in society only in an atmosphere of mutual trust, where they have reason to believe that others will speak the truth; by destroying the grounds for trust and inducing mass suspicion, widespread lying becomes the harbinger signaling the fall from social solidarity to chaos. But lying has other consequences of a deeply personal nature at least equally disastrous. By their very nature lies tend too proliferate. Lying once and finding our word suspect, we feel compelled to lie again to defend our credibility, to paint a consistent picture of events. So the process repeats itself: the lies stretch, multiply and connect until they lock us into a cage of falsehoods from which it is difficult to escape. The life is thus a miniature paradigm for the whole process of subjective illusion. In each case the self-assured creator, sucked in by his own deceptions, eventually winds up a victim.

- Bhikku Bodhi, “RIGHT SPEECH (SAMMA VACA),” Parabola Vol. 33 #1 (Spring 08)

on time, stasis, revolution

Revolutionary time finally marks our escape from prison time into a full mode of living, unforeseeable, exposed, open to desire. This mode of living is at all times constituent of our new, revolutionary time. Prison time, however, will always return as soon as that revolutionary time is closed down, as soon as rebels allow the revolt to congeal, as soon as a constituted power is erected. We do not break out of prison once and then remain free; our alternative existence must be a continuous project in perpetual motion. Revolutionary time is a never-ending means without an end. Any end would destroy it.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 78

on history (diffuse)

History is thus now recognized as the chaos of a multitude of desires become coherent, temporarily in constituent groups, patterns, or movements -- in a procession of encounters. This constituent history, in contrast to a constituted history, is the extended elaboration of the ceremonials that animate the time of Genet's writing.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 77

on ceremony and stasis

The ceremonial must be performed precisely because it is the repetition of our desire - you have no right to change anything unless you intensify our desire. We will it to return.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 76

outside of linear time

The ceremonies, as they gather a collective mass and repetition, create a new temporality that is not limited to the few hours of performance but expands into a new time of living.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 75

Genet's theater

How silly it would be for Genet to follow the classical dictate about the unity of time in his theater. What sense would it make to create drama if we were only to repeat in it the time of the world we had been living, the empty prison time of our society?

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 75

return of joyful encounters

How can we make our joyful encounters return? How can we constitute a new mode of living, a new world, out of these joyful encounters? An event may intervene in our life and give rise to a joyful encounter, but we cannot guarantee that joy will return since the cause of the encounter comes from outside, unknown to us. The fortuitous joyful encounter, however, is a gift-- it presents us with a certain opportunity. If we recognize what is common to that body and our own, if we discover the body that body agrees with our own and how our bodies together compose a new body, we can ourselves cause that joyful encounter to return. This is how Spinoza conceives our active constitution of a joyful mode of living. And love is the driving force in this constitution. The organization of joyful encounters is the increase in our power, our power to act and our power to exist-- that is a Spinozian notion of love. The eternal return of the joyful encounter is a constitution of being, not in the sense that it fixes an immobile identity (far from it), but rather in that it defines a movement, a becoming, a trajectory of encounters, always open and unforeseeable, continuously susceptible to the intervention of the new events.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 73 - 74

what is an event? (not)

It may be more clear, then, to recognize the event as pure virtuality; real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. The event is the pure immanence of the virtual that is not actualized.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 72

exposure, pt 5

We should be careful to distinguish events from encounters here. Encounters are provoked by events that come from the outside; in fact, it would be more proper to say that the event itself transports us outside time. The event has no time of its own, it is never present, it has no duration. It strikes like a bolt of lightning, or arrives as a herald from far away announcing the abolition of time. In the passionate event, for an infinite and infinitesimal moment, we escape the tedium and emptiness of prison time.... purely virtual. The event is thus not properly understood as a state of things. It may be actualized in a state of things or an encounter-- an arrangement of bodies, affects and so forth-- but it always remains distinct, outside that actualization, that state.... The event never occurs in time. It ruptures time, defies destiny-- time turns to dust.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 71

exposure, pt 4

The force of God is nothing other than the force of things, the material surfaces of existence..... Saintliness is, then, precisely our openness to the force of things, our exposure to the world.... Exposure actualizes the divinity of the flesh.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 69

exposure, pt 3

Exposure is a sort of sublime passivity, a joyful abjection.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 69

exposure, pt 2

... acceptance of the reality of material forces, the acceptance of fate. Exposure to the world is not the search for an essence elsewhere, but the full dwelling in this world, the belief in this world. The unexposed might construct an interior world, a separate realm of depths and abysses; exposure, in contrast, lays all of being equally on the surface, in the flesh. Exposed being is univocal; being is said always and everywhere in the same voice. It is not defined by being different in itself. When we expose ourselves to the force of things we realize this ontological condition, the immanence of being in existence. we merge with the destiny we are living and are swept along in its powerful flux.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 68

exposure, pt 1

Like that of the thief, the body of the inmate is exposed, open to the world. In this exposure the bodies are fully realized and they shine in all their gestures.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 68

On Genet's characters' proclamations of love for prison, the ultimate efficacy of revolution

A response to social mores and common notions aimed only at violating public opinion
would be a mere reactive gesture, confirming the norms in their transgression.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 67

the grass is always greener: prison

Those who are free, outside of prison looking in, might imagine their own freedom defined and reinforced in opposition to prison time. When you get close to prison, however, you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the world. Prison is our society in its most realized form. That is why, when you come into contact with the existential questions and ontological preoccupations of inmates, you cannot but doubt the quality of your own existence. If I am living that elsewhere of full being that inmates dream of, is my time really so full?
Is my life really not wasted?

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 67

time & incarceration

Prison time is the obvious form of punishment in our world. Freedom, that is, the control of our time, is conceived as the keystone and the most coveted possession in modern society, equal to all. By an indubitable logic, then, the paradigm for punishment is the loss of this most precious asset that all possess equally: time. Prison takes our time in precisely determined quantities. Like the equations between labor-time and value, our society sets up an elaborate calculus familiar to all of us between crime and prison-time. Theft of a car equals six months; sale of illegal drugs equals five years; murder equals ten years. The concrete crime is abstracted, multiplied by a mysterious variable, then made concrete again as punishment in a precise quantity of time. The calculations are utterly arbitrary (they do not even have the horrible metonymic correlation of cutting off a hand for theft), but, while we may often question relative values on the two sides of the equation, we seldom doubt the viability of the calculus itself.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 64-65

on drawing large generalizations, terrifying universality of prisons

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its "useful" object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under "observation" is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 485-486

on disciplinary comparison

If a historical equivalent or at least a point of comparison had to be found for [disciplinary techniques], it would be rather in the "inquisitorial" technique.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 484

how the new state emerged

It is a double process, then: an epistemological "thaw" through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 483

on discipline

In short, to substitute for a power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty.
- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 481

on master controls

That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions -- anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 480

on panopticonism and the state of the self

It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 478

consumers: on mall-logic

To survive profitably, it must operate within the enormous disjuncture created between the objective economic logic necessary for the profitable circulation of goods and the unstable subjectivity of the messages exchanged between consumers and commodities, between the limited goods permitted by this logic and the unlimited desires released by this exchange.

- Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," 13, Variations on a Theme Park

buildings: on disparate pieces

What's missing in this city is not a matter of any particular building or place; it's the places in between, the connections that make sense of forms.

- Michael Sorkin, xii, Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park

consumers: on browsing

By extending the period of "just looking," the imaginative prelude to buying, the mall encourages "cognitive acquisition" as shoppers mentally acquire commodities by familiarizing themselves with a commodity's actual and imagined qualities. Mentally "trying on" products teaches shoppers not only what they want and what they can buy, but, more importantly, what they don't have, and what they therefore need. Armed with this knowledge, shoppers not only realize what they are but also imagine what they might become. Identity is momentarily stabilized even while the image of a future identity begins to take shape, but the endless variation of objects means that satisfaction always remains just out of reach.

- Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," 13, Variations on a Theme Park

buildings: on differentiation

The new city replaces the anamoly and delight of such places with a universal particular, a generic urbanism inflected only by applique. (xiii)

- Michael Sorkin, Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park