What’s a good gig without an encore?
I’m feeling totally devastated that DESASTRES is over so thank something the seeming sun has made a rare appearance and I might just sit in the hammock and get vitamin D-tuned all day whilst at ASCP online, avoid drowning in a hole of tears. I can’t say I’ve ever felt remotely sad about an exhibition closing before and it’s not without a touch of sadism – you stay over there and keep playing guitar so the world doesn’t all fall down! I’m grumpy a.f.. My kitchen is covered with toxic aluminium flakes that I try not to get into the school lunch and, when, my son asks why there’s gaffa tape stuck all over the kitchen counter, I retort, “it’s fucking DUCT tape”. But, as Guy Debord said back in 1971: “Revolution makes the sunshine“.
I put on my headphones on and Spotify randomly chooses to play Revolution by Spacemen Three, from the album Playing with Fire, the song that permeates through the holes of my review of DESASTRES. Yet another impossible freak show – I haven’t played it for ages and yet there it comes, slicing a diagonal through all the Chicks on Speed.
And in the midst of a super restless sleep where I became increasingly convinced that the last moments vibration from DESASTRES were coming right through the geological substratum/ increasingly unconvinced of my sanity, I awake and sit bolt upright wanting to vomit about half an hour before it finished, after having a dream. In the dream I’m sitting around with the members of Sonic Youth discussing song lyrics, teasing out the lines. I ask Kim Gordon,“do you remember the time you came over to my place in Hobart?” and she says, “Yeah, I remember”.
It reminds me of a recurring dream I’d have whilst I was in analysis of being in books by various philosophers. One night it would be Aristotle, next it would be Derrida, then Heidegger and so on and on and on. I was just in the book, in the lines, nothing else.
My analyst (d.a.f.! The only clever thing I ever said to my analyst was “what would you know?”) would ask “so, you were just about to get it, and then you wake up?”
No! I’d protest, I wasn’t trying to “get it”, I was just in the book. That’s all. Not grasping at anything, no phallus, no meaning, just in the book.
So whilst I’m writing this in the middle of fucking nowhere in my ugg boots, feeling like the Invisible Committee of the one woman, I am not speaking in anyway from outside of discourse. This is not an imaginary battlefield demanding a new master, but a revolution on the side of the real. As Spacemen Three sing, it only takes five minutes [edit…5 seconds actually ey’ves open your ears!] to start thinking about a revolution. But, as I correct them in the review, it’s not time to start thinking about it, it’s time to do it. Pathologically, passionately; in the bonds that always already tie us, including each one of us, in an operation of infinitude within the finite. We are each already in the book.
Capitalism wants you to believe that you only count if you have a name. No name, you are not in the book. An event only bears a name, that is produces a name out of crisis, retroactively, and at best this can only ever be a nom indistinct. There is no proper name that can come to the name ‘Revolution’ that contains within it its traumatic (troumatic) kernal that Capitalism insists is covered over. For Lacan, Joyce’s name was his symptom. The only name each one real-ly bears.
In contradistinction to the logic behind an altercation I had years ago with a psychotherapeutic psychoanalyst who ‘splained to me, in no uncertain terms, that I must be very careful putting the exception on the side of the not-all – one that cost me my membership in a particular “circle”– with the disorder in the real and the absence of the name of the father, that is precisely where exception much be located, in the remnants of non-negativisable jouissance, beyond the traversal of the fantasy, that belong to each one, that refuse sublimation, that force us to shine a little less brighly. At the time this same therapist also suggested that lathouses (devices) like playing Pokemon Go, might be good sinthomes for patients, a way of making a social link. This approach must be refused. There is no escape from the Master’s Discourse; no escape from Capitalism and Biopolitics except through the difficult, traumatic and painful path of the pas-tout. And the pas-tout, one by one, is no solipsism. It’s pas-tout not pas (you) too. Homophony is the social link to which analysis must be oriented. Homophony saves lives, it includes, equally, each one. It is on the side of the not-all.
So whilst not everyone will be able to represent Australia in Denton, Corker, Marshall’s giant black Pavlova, Marco (re)Fusinato has taken a 200 day long hit for each one of us. I’ve been the Australian Representative before, at a United World College (of all un-Lacanian named institutions). In fact, I was passing through Venice on my way to my “re-union” (don’t forget the metal scourer) and it’s not easy being the Australian Representative! It’s not a job I’d wish upon anyone! What am as a second generation migrant born in Australia? The coloniser or the colonised? It’s fucked – all the guilt and trauma. At the end of the day the only representative is (my dad) Ligozzi’s maggoty skull, the death that represents each of us and of which takes its equal share, nemini parco.
So why am I spilling my guts and telling you far too many things that I should keep hidden, clandestine, as I prance about in my fancy shoes and not unmasked and in my pjs and ugg boots? There is no such thing as a coincidence, it arises from the sonorous bedrock of the collective, just need to clean out your ears until you can hear it. Representation gets us nowhere, except into all sorts of imaginary confrontations that riddle us with anxiety (he’s so good/look how much he knows/she’s so shit/I’m worthless, etc) that refuse to allow something new to emerge in the world. Better to all fail better by becoming a little more unrepresentative; that is, more filled with more holes.
I haven’t used that dumb pun yet, but yes, as you can tell by now DESASTRES really struck a chord; cords that bind us in a sedimented alluvium of collectivity that, importantly (and I thank Scott for emphasising this absolutely crucial point) is not the collective unconscious à la Jung (don’t forget the metal scourer), but one that is productive, being producing, riffing off one-another and the new songs we compose together, one by one.
Updated drinks list:
Clear, sharper, louder:
these ancient writings were only missing one thing…you got it, finally,
THE METAL SCOURER!
[sādṛśya is one of many Sanskrit words for mimesis with an obscure resonance; never occurred to me until now that no one had a clue what ey’ves was trying to say. Obvious isn’t it? sādṛśya? obviously, ey’ves]
Coil up hoses and tidy up mess. Exit.
THANK YOU DESASTRES / NO APOLOGIES
