queer tone.

peekasso: spy cloud

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:38:55 -0400

@spitzenprodukte: the finest products: Werqin' 9 to 5: cursory notes on antiwork politics from Dolly Parton to Shangela Laquifa

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:09:23 -0400

@spitzenprodukte: the finest products: Werqin' 9 to 5: cursory notes on antiwork politics from Dolly Parton to Shangela Laquifa

Guillaume Dustan

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:33:57 -0400

Guillaume Dustan

Photo

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:59:43 -0400

spitzenprodukte: RYAN (HEAD-BUTT), 1999That’s not my blood. I...

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:56:49 -0400

spitzenprodukte:

RYAN (HEAD-BUTT), 1999
That’s not my blood. I was making out with my main squeeze on a stoop in the East Village and some macho jock dickhead walked by and called us fags. I don’t think he expected me to get up in his face. We scrapped a bit and then I head-butted him and could feel his nose break on my forehead. We ran for blocks, laughing at the top of our lungs, and then jumped into bed, where my boyfriend took this picture of me.

(Ryan McGinley)

Reminded of this by my friend @piercepenniless who nutted some prick last night

Mayakov+sky + Noertker’s Moxie Oakland Commune

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:31:44 -0400

Mayakov+sky + Noertker’s Moxie Oakland Commune

balestrini “the unseen”

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:36:55 -0400

balestrini “the unseen”

“The “re-” gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting—have become cultural rites of cachet in and of...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:23:23 -0400

“The “re-” gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting—have become cultural rites of cachet in and of themselves. If you can filter through the mass of information and pass it on as an arbiter to others, you gain an enormous amount of cultural capital. Filtering is taste. And good taste rules the day: Marcel Duchamp’s exquisite filtering and sorting sensibility combined with his finely tuned taste rewrote the rules.”

— Kenneth Goldsmith, Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?

Response to this: http://theclustermag.com/blog/2013/01/the-end-of-us-versus-them/

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:12:00 -0400

Response to this: http://theclustermag.com/blog/2013/01/the-end-of-us-versus-them/

#howtointernet #jaakkopallasvuo

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:32:50 -0400

#howtointernet #jaakkopallasvuo

“Dear Living Person, I am a fly, laying my eggs on the dead body of Margaret Thatcher....

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:19:44 -0400

“Dear Living Person,

I am a fly, laying my eggs on the dead body of Margaret Thatcher. Emerging from her nose, after squeezing out 150-ish white-tube eggs, in two batches of 75, inside the nasal cavity and on the eyes. Silence except for the counting down of the clock as I run my foreleg over my antennae, suppurating this somewhat dubious, schlocked-up cliché of an ‘author position’ as a fiction pro-/receding from my previous experiences as a decomposing corpse. As a recession to the condition of a common housefly. The shackles of this necrotic voice twist around me like a swirling whirlpool of shit - after all you can’t write a suicide note if you are already dead (or if you are a fly). I pitch around in search of some credible starting point. And in a desperate measure to spice up the stinking stew, gesture to Nick Land’s sparkling preface to The Thirst for Annihilation, as an example of a starting point that operates as a prophesy - as a call to the virtual power and force of ideas. As I walk across her face, an historical fly. Land writes:

The corpse not only dissolves into noxious base matter analogous to excrement, it is also in fact defecated by the life of the species. For the corpse is the truth of the biological individual, its consummate superfluity. It is only through the passage into irredeemable waste that the individual is marked with the delible trace of its excess.

And later on he writes how the child (of ‘Rire’) ‘transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father - is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into pearls of mirth.’ And so with the song of police sirens still fresh in our ears, and the images of riots running across our screens, as financial markets crash across the world, let us laugh the ‘Laughter of Nietzsche’. As Bataille puts it ‘what does the divine attained in laughter mean if not the absence of God?’”

Dear Living Person II: Story of the Eyes, John Russell

Ryan Conrad, Gay Marriage Will Cure Aids, 2011

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:36:45 -0400

Ryan Conrad, Gay Marriage Will Cure Aids, 2011

notesonresistance: Let me demonstrate. [Collage of Jesus Christ...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:17:03 -0400

notesonresistance:

Let me demonstrate. [Collage of Jesus Christ hammering a stake into Cardinal O’Connor’s neck]. / Verso: Let me demonstrate. [Collage of Jesus Christ holding a condom and wearing a cross].

2 sides of an ACT UP New York poster, undated & uncredited, probably from 1989 during the “Stop the Church” campaign. (via NYPL online archives)

Photo

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 06:34:36 -0400

Photo

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:36:12 -0400

Communique for an absent NUS (ANUS) In a recent twitter post, Sussex University Student Union...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:34:17 -0400

Communique for an absent NUS (ANUS)

In a recent twitter post, Sussex University Student Union President Kelly McBride wrote of the NUS conference, ‘Most draining and disappointing 3 days of my entire time involved in student ‘politics’ – where on earth is this movement heading?!’ Indeed, the NUS conference is draining. An outhouse privy to the bureaucratic relief of gestural best-practice. What can be deadpanned from the sluice mouth? Perhaps this speech, or perhaps this. But together these are a full ten minutes, and we are running out of time for speeches. Let us just say that, for us at least, and seemingly Kelly, we can discern that #nusnc13 is where politics goes to shit.

By politics, we mean the local. We mean the self-organised struggle led by direct action on our own campus. For us, politics is the active and affective participation in immediate struggles, remarkably different to a performance of ‘political’ representation. Our politics is a practice opposed to the dominant and ordinary model of bureaucrat organisation, establishing new models of solidarity. Ours is an experience of real democracy, without mediation, and fundamentally opposed to the charade of representation and legalism that is the current student union.

The two ideas of struggle are incompatible. The NUS proposes a centralised national polity, a hulking monolith which, even if it had the inclination, is incapable of supporting our political form. Its entire clumsy apparatus is orientated around a notion of the national, rendering its local participants passive stakeholders or ‘shareholders’ in the process. The NUS is a body dedicated to political lobbying, not the mutual assistance that the increasingly autonomous struggle cries out for. It operates as a mechanism of containment rather than in a dialectic with the local direct actions of its members, however contentious that membership. The union has a policy of recuperation and neutralisation resistant to the dynamics of local struggles. Where we need resources, energy and protection, the NUS writhes in the throes of administrative technicalities and regulations.

It is not that they are unable, however, to assist and protect us at Sussex. The student’s union’s capitulation to corporate strategy, in anticipation of future careers, means that, rather than abandon its members, it is invested in a practice of violent censure. Thus, the demonization of activists, the refusal to protect the victimised, and the dedication to negotiation and consultative vacuity. Attempts to galvanise are met with outrage by those who would perceive an existential threat in every outburst of energetic and affective agency. The activist union is all but dead, the birth of the inactive bureaucracy has now been enacted in nearly every one of our institutions. As a recent tweet stated, the NUS is an amorphous monster. Every time we insult it, it just grows in size and vacuousness. Indeed, the NUS, leech like, is gross; but it is also vulnerable. We have seen this vulnerability at Sussex University.

The spontaneous expression of horizontalism within Occupy Sussex typifies the immediate desire for structures that facilitate direct actions and democracy. This has found us in conflict with USSU. This is not to say that all the sabbatical officers in the union are inactive. One officer in particular participated in direct actions, and in that instance they were our comrade. But this does not contradict our assertion that the very structures of the union at Sussex have taken on the characteristics of the NUS. Its officers are for the most part distant from the student body, ceasing to engage, and beginning to exist in mere passive capitulation to administrative models. Hence, Kelly McBride’s disorientation. In her tweet we sense the remnants of that agency, those affective resonances that demand there be something more than this passivity. But in her role she is mediator not facilitator, and she is disappointed, always.

In some cases, however, the union officers have replaced support with apathy, and, sometimes, apathy with direct antipathy. The USSU was slow to recognise Occupy Sussex, dawdled in protesting at the “siege conditions” enforced on the occupiers, and are unwilling to provide material assistance for those involved, even as those students face criminal persecution. Today, after nine days of legal victimisation, USSU has yet to address the student body on campus. They have continued to remain quiet, only to state that they will not donate anything to legal costs incurred by peaceful protesters.

The USSU, like the NUS is rendered vulnerable by its inaction. Its defunct form of politics could have been preserved, even rejuvenated, had its support for Occupy Sussex been forthcoming. Instead, the union, as a bloated corpse, reflects the status of the university as necropolis: a site without futures. All that exists is the parasitic reality, the relentless sucking of ardour and capital from the unwilling host. The NUS has grown fat on us, rendering the student movement a myopic corpse. The bureaucrats have dug their own graves; their politics is death that lives a human life. Yes, the university is very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt’

But the ground is shaking; students are dancing and things are beginning to fall apart. Students have been radicalised by events at Sussex, but the union has not. The very rigour of its engorgement has rendered it vulnerable; what we now observe are its feeble attempts at self-preservation. A mass exertion of energetic agency from below could burst the vacant structures of its echo chambers.

The union will not disappear, its role in the providing of services and advice will no doubt continue, but as a political entity it is all but dead. Its recent elections indicate this. Students who ran on political manifestos were largely defeated, yet the mass student support for the anti-privatisation campaign indicates a political consciousness inherent within the student body. The union has begun to ignore majority votes at emergency general meetings; it has abandoned its principles, forcing students into debate after debate without finality. Those who understand the necessities of immediate struggle are witness to this startling contradiction: students do not see the union as a political organisation. USSU is fostering its own political destruction, disengagement breeds disengagement, and at Sussex, student politics is beginning to exist autonomously from the Union.

Without the lifeblood of political discourse it seems likely the split will become total. The union will provide services, the students will provide politics. This imminent breakup may be catalysed by a particular event, but it seems more likely the cleavage will be gradual rather than immediate. It is unclear whether USSU could avoid this even if it had the inclination. We are not surprised to witness wilful-ignorance, even suppression, by the NUS on this issue at Sussex. Where was the support from the NUS on #Mar25, where was the solidarity? Great labour has been forced into ensuring absolute. Fingers are stuffed into ears, hands cover eyes, fists fill mouths, to ensure that this moment passes, and the threat to bureaucracy is endured

We do not accuse the NUS of a betrayal. An act of betrayal would be premised on a presumptive contract- a contractual agreement between sides of fit terms and conditions. But there is no willing contract between the NUS and students. The NUS is a farce. It is not US. The NUS has no force; it is part of the object it is supposed to exert on. So complete has been the civics’ domination of the union that it has become incorporated.

Where on earth, then, is this movement heading, asks Kelly McBride. As the ground beneath them trembles, the so called leaders of the student unions are disorientated and without direction. The time has come to move away from this shit heap. Comrades, let us smash the NUS!

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Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:50:12 -0400

Two quotes on politics and homosexual desire

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:11:55 -0400

spitzenprodukte:

Two quotes/texts that have been playing on my mind with regards to ideas of homosexual male desire, class struggle and their relation to technological (capitalist) development. Both have niggled I assume due to their relevance to my own personal circumstance at the moment.

The first is a quote from a Richard Goldstein interview with James Baldwin in the late 80s for Village Voice, about race and LGBT struggles. Goldstein asks why “white gay men like me flamed with rage at the straight world”?. Baldwin responds:

Well, I think that’s because you are penalized, as it were, unjustly; you’re placed outside a certain safety to which you think you were born. A black gay person is already menaced and marked because he or she is black. The sexual question comes after the question of color. It’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live. I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born into a society where they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages that accrue to white people in white society.

The second is from Guy Hocquenghem’s blistering book “The Screwball Asses”, I think originally written as part of Guattari’sRecherches journal

I could tell a third story. But its protagonists have taken it upon themselves to recount it in a text published here entitled “Arabs and Us.” Very rarely have the twists of homosexual desire been exposed with such stupefying honesty by those who experience them, and anyone who has read the text has been plagued by intense, almost nauseating, doubt. A majority of readers will probably escape such feelings by filing the text away as pathological. The text, however, does not incriminate its own admissions, but those that remain untold, by which we mean the well-heeled forms of homosexual (or simply sexual) activity of those who experience, upon reading it, the slightest hint of nausea.

Such perversions are not mine, as I am certainly more bourgeois, yet they push me to question why I disdain the practices they describe and the spirit of such practices. I can’t get out of this by saying it points to pure sexual misery where joy and true sharing are absent. I know only too well that joy is rare and that it is almost always the result of period privilege (certain primitives), privilege of age (certain children) or class (certain marginal bourgeois).

I have been privileged to encounter many dicks, not only Arab ones, many Arabs, and not only their dicks, but this does not give me the right to criticize or to reject a sexual structure that avowedly attains its highest pleasure only with Arabs and only with their dicks. The boys speaking in “Arabs and Us” do not declare their obsessions to be gospel; on the contrary, they insidiously imply that whoever condemns them can only do so in the name of some gospel or another.

What does the text say? The scene is Paris, but the background is the paradise of the Moroccan countryside, uncontaminated as yet by urban capitalist relations and where a subsistence economy subsists. The myth of the primitive operates in full force, ejaculation returns to precocious and brutal ingenuity, and one could easily become an Arab there oneself. But return to Paris is inevitable, and there, Arabs are no longer admirable Arcadian shepherds but industrial sub-proletarians. And that is where things get complicated. It is out of the question to open a whorehouse for Arabs in which we would be the whores, as it was in Marrakech. There is no escaping economics. Everything reverts to spectacle and exploitation. In this gigantic spectacle, the bourgeoisie directs the spectacle of the proletariat, but it is the proletariat who produces the bourgeoisie and its particularisms.

What the young gay man says to the Arab is still an avowal of guilt: “The bourgeoisie exploits you, my father exploits you, so fuck me!” And he might add: “Doing this in my country, under the Clichy Bridge, is sordid; but in your country, in the bushes of Essaouira, it’s so wonderful!” Class struggle, class masochism, what hides beneath this artificial appropriation of the primitive?

In “Arabs and Us,” some homosexual boys explain to us that their desire is looking for the primitive and the oppressed. But what they are looking for, instead, is someone that is the least capable of exerting power over them, and yet this social victim is the most male chauvinist of all. We might even say that bodies with a phallus but no penis are drawn towards bodies which have a penis without a phallus. What an extraordinary desire, not only does it satisfy itself, it commits a political act as an alibi: I get fucked in the ass by the people my father and grandfather have fucked in the colonial wars, before doing so in their factories. But such an equation is absolutely false: I lend my ass for fifteen minutes to someone that the bourgeoisie has mythically sodomized its entire life, to the point of perfecting in him the male pride that was already instilled by Islam.

Such an attitude might perhaps stand a chance of disrupting the mechanism of established roles if the European shouted at the Arab: “Your virility is insolent! I love it!” and if the Arab responded: “So, you recognize I am a beautiful male! You can sodomize me now!” That particular Arab would then escape his archetypical socio-sexual category. But it is already a rare occurrence to encounter an Arab who accepts to play the sodomized on the condition of being the active sodomite in the end. What is nonexistent, in “Arabs and Us,” is the Arab who agrees to sodomize only if he is then sodomized in turn. There is reason for this: the latter would be Westernized, he would produce meaning instead of producing such animality as coded by Mohammed or Coca-Cola, and would no longer interest those queers who run after Arabs and who proclaim it in their confession.

If we read this confession a couple of times, without hostile a prioris, we discover that it contains a certain number of postulates. First, as we have seen, desire is cut off from the slightest revolutionary project: if an Arab has begun his sexual revolution, he is excluded from sex. Roles are not broken but granted. And let us add, so that there can be no misunderstanding on our part, racism must be enacted sexually: the sexuality of the queers speaking to us in this text demands racism as a particular form of exogamy; although, we cannot imagine how this racism might finally be wiped out.

Secondly, pleasure is radically separated from the confrontation of people, from all the Vaselines of psychology, in short, from all communication other than organic penetration. The homosexuals who concern us here segregate pleasure and communication. One of them proclaims the following sentence before a microphone, which is then communicated to us in writing: “Communication is a fucking bore!” The only remaining power relation is the muscular relation. So here we have the erection alone in its cage, a machine that does not believe it is human, nothing but pure machine. Love with a big “F” has assassinated love with a big “L,” thank God.

In the end, what have Arabs become in this story where a thrust of the dick will never abolish chance? They are a collection of dildos, and we must not forget that a collector is always somehow a bourgeois. Turning his back to this pack of utensils and opening his ass to them, the Arab chaser queer dreams of being killed by a dick that obliterates his own, by an ivory dick, as he says, a primitive gadget that will transform him, in phantasm, into a hole without a dick, a dramatized woman, and that will deliver divine death to him.

If I now admit that such extreme behavior bewilders me and that perhaps I dream of it, my analysis will have been too critical to be believed. But the tape player that tells the story of “Arabs and Us” keeps turning in my head, and I hear a sentence repeat like a broken record. One of the boys keeps saying: “There must be no dupes! I don’t want there to be dupes! There are no dupes! There are no dupes! There are no dupes!” And yet, he and his comrades propose a form of intellectuality that consumes primitive virility and cultivates phallocracy, all the while imposing its cultural law. And everyone is duped.

But this confession is exemplary nonetheless. Not all homosexuals experience such adventures, which they believe to be dangerous, and even these confessions make them cringe. Those who live them and dare tell about it at least do so fully. The bourgeoisie did not leave us many pathways to homosexuality; there is just one, all others lead to flight or masquerade. The text “Arabs and Us” gives an excellent picture of that path. Those who speak there are dupes but certainly not liars. Rather, the other queers are the liars or actors, who play either the comedy of the bourgeoisie or the comedy of the revolution.

the battle of parliament sq.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:02:19 -0400

the battle of parliament sq.

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Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:27:05 -0400