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At ZK/U, on 27.05.19.

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on the function of poems posted thus far

The infinity of this project rests in revisions. It is understood that an obligation exists which demands returning to what was posted. Be it only to pay the debt of easing, relieving the load, dropped in a fragmentary way as a genetic sample – to be eventually unpacked, and checked as a whole. The poems stand here as a scaffolding. The prose paragraphs should grow around them, feeding off the current summery phantasmagoria, lived-through, yet having also a root-access to the Orphic flow that cannot be accessed instrumentally, fixed on demand, but only along channels that are a straight rupture.

[Moabit, June 2019]

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notes on the project with Pablo

1. informative ground

There’s some dark history connected to the place. But how could we relate to it? Only indirectly. Not only railway tracks lead us here, not only the river, but also wires and Google searches. And by word of mouth, that’s how the secrets surface. On his blog “Nomadics”, Pierre Joris gives us vocabulary: “Plötzensee: the place where the conspirators of the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler were executed and hung on butcher hooks”. Go to the Spree, go to the Havel, / go to the butcher hooks, Celan would prompt us. Plötzensee, it’s just few crossings north from ZK/U. Cross the port, cross the railway tracks. And then, due east, when going shopping to Hellweg (where artists can find much of what's needed), one crosses Ellen-Epstein Straße and finds Gedenkort Güterbahnhof Moabit. And then it is a new trace, for a new search engine transport.

http://raumlabor.net/gedenkort-guterbahnhof-moabit-2/

https://www.visitberlin.de/en/gedenkort-guterbahnhof-moabit

http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/rosa-luxemburg-karl-liebknecht-murdered-100-years-ago-today-paul-celans-poem-you-lie/

2. aspiration exhibition

One needs a set of aspirations of another kind. They are sometimes called „the third way”. But it really means a true second one. For the first two are one and the same: the well known entanglement between the liberal and the conservative. And ZK/U provides: 1) beehives; a project about the urban honey, engaging children and a partner association; 2) an open access to benches and tables under the rooftop, with the view on the park; 3) Women’s World Cup screenings, under this very rooftop, and under the poetic banner of Fussballaballa; 4) the sci-fi feeling of the port infrastructure, moving parts, scale and lights like from the ‘80s paperback; 5) the actual futurity inscribed into ZK/Us inner developments, like the Silo, or the spaceship of Ständige Vertretung; 6) effervescence in the gaps of the resident’s projects, open ended on both sides; events, thoughts, launching.

https://www.zku-berlin.org/satellites/urban-bees/

http://refunc.nl/?p=3405

3. broader context

The broader context of ZK/U could be approached by rewriting Hausdorf and Goller’s „Superstructural Berlin”. The first thing to say being: there’s nothing nihilistic about ZK/U. In fact, believers in life and its minute meanings find here their refuge – without getting confined to a ghetto. ZK/U extends itself way beyond the site in Siemensstraße 27, it forms a wide capillary bed – providing flows, envigorating. Secondly, the addressee should also be redefined. It’s neither a Visitor nor a New Resident. It is a dynamic inscription of a project into the city’s fabric. Or, differently put, someone who stretches from here to there. So the broader context of ZK/U is the global context. That’s the very point. One of the knots of the four discourses that tie the place reads: post-migrant. A ZK/U resident is someone who comes with an archive and rhymes with the beehive.

http://www.zero-books.net/books/superstructural-berlin

http://kosmospalast.net/berlincubus/

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lime citrine

on that train, then sleep deprived, to the meeting place early in the morning, bartender’s 10 a.m. at U1 Hallesches Tor, here, over the canal one starts to exhaust, always only starts   inexhaustible mornings and one’s own exhaustion finds pleasurable when it points so dearly and in a stressed sobriety gives a means to the boundary-dissolving and then a milchkaffee and a cheese sandwich at a table in U Wittenbergplatz where that girl in a black shirt, running out won’t hear her name being shouted and now it’s seen in lime citrine through proseccoed eyes and August solstice   when anxiously trying to cuddle – to seize a drop of potion of leaves and a drop of poison of grasses [August 2018]

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at the gates of Moabit [Siegmunds Hof, June 2019] 

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lamella intro

What is poetry? To make love. We take Lacan at his word. In terms of Lacanian analysis, however, what is the use of the poetic, can poetry turn out to be a useful tool? Sounding depths of the concepts, for instance, traversing the fantasy, speaking with the obscure object? Surely, there is something indispensable about poetry, without which our understanding of the human would be incomplete. So maybe this could be folded upon itself, offering us a tool? The preliminary answer, inevitable one, reads: it couldn’t. Simply put, poetry is what turns all tools into intact things –  “unverbraucht – when they are not being used and used up by their use in the world”. But nonetheless, to make love is poetry. And if that’s but a small thing in the Lacanian universe? Well. There’s analysis, say, aware of poetry, and there’s poetry, one that looks at the analysis from a place we might term, after Blanchot, the space of literature. And even if psychoanalysis is not a text analysis, but has only a speaking being, the analysed, as its proper concern, a feedback is not out of question. We’re permeated by poetry just as well as by psychoanalytical concepts, and in the evolution of the anthropological type we make today there’s a hell of a lot of historicity – change in knowledge, change in expectations, change in investments – but there is also that Orphic voice we can tap into, which comes and goes, which demands from us our disappearance, which calls us to die more profoundly. And there’s the myth Lacan tells us about the lamella. An unbelievable outburst of poetic imagination, pulled down and harnessed for the purposes of psychoanalysis, its praxis. Permit us a montage here: “That is what my myth, like any other myth, strives to provide a symbolic articulation for, rather than an image” / “This organ must be called unreal, in the sense in which the unreal is not the imaginary and precedes the subjective realm it conditions, being in direct contact with the real” / “For it can be assumed that, since the Manlet has no sensory system, it has for guidance but the pure real; it thus has an advantage over us men who must always provide ourselves with a homunculus in our heads in order to turn that real into a reality” / “Represented here by a deadly being, it marks the relationship – in which the subject plays a part – between sexuality , specified in the individual, and his death” / “This organ must be called unreal” / “the part of a living being that is lost when that being is produced through the straits of sex” “Speaking subjects have the privilege of revealing the deadly meaning of this organ, and thereby its relation to sexuality. This is because the signifier as such, whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death. (The letter kills, but we learn this from the letter itself.)” Our quest would be henceforth to die more profoundly. When the membranes burst, and a phantom takes flight. [Friedrichshain/Neukölln, April 2019]

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this moment of the year, where the “Arabian Nights” are inscribed, for me “and passed the time in these diversions until asr, the beginning of the sun’s decline” [ZK/U, Moabit, June 2019]

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birds

birds, cutting through this flame a veiled rainforest burning with a volley [Moabit, June 2019]

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passim, a blurb from a network

“A coup d’état is sanctioned as it were in the opinion of the people if it is repeated” – says Hegel in the “Introduction to The Philosophy of History”. This opinion is a serious stake, for with the sanction in question the history leaps forward. “Thus, Napoleon was defeated twice and twice the Bourbons were driven out. Through repetition, what at the beginning seemed to be merely accidental and possible, becomes real and established”. Then we see Marx opening his “Eighteenth Brumaire” with famous “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. There’s a strong drive, in other words, in the world of the mortals to “get real” by means of caricature. The event is not enough, nor is the myth. A debasement is needed, be it only through a remark – found passim, with dignity of at most a gossip – which nonetheless points at something that's, seemingly, grounded and, apparently, operative. Con-firmed. Now – could we perhaps, in a provisionary way, take the psychoanalytical endeavour as means to flesh out our exaggerations? swarming, yet not palpable? Like a cartoonist who picks on the recognizable and leads it to the constatation “that’s true!”, and one that is palatable at that? Here’s a pick from the very discourse. Bracha Ettinger remarks somewhere that the deep model revealed in Lacan’s exposition of the lamella myth is the libidinal model of subject versus object – since the maternal in it, for a subject, is an object, and her body a partial object – a setup Ettinger aims to “shake a bit” with the matrixial approach. Neologisms are among the means put to the task. But also questions: is the basic human erotic tendency towards the object? or is it towards linking with objects? or is it perhaps towards the linkage itself? „What we miss is not an object but a type of linking”. This resounds with Aaron Schuster’s remark, made elsewhere, that what we’re lacking is not an object of desire but the very ground from which we could, finally, desire. The surplus value of these remarks lies, paradoxically, in grounding the elusive nature of that weird concept which is lamella, rendering an organ whose function is to go further than the body’s limit (through collapsing the boundaries of the individual autonomy). A closer inspection reveals a question that’s still, in its core, Lacanian – that is Freudian – only that now it is pushed – and pushed again, mind – into the farcical dimension. For the sake of the argument we use the term “caricature" in a non-partisan, if benevolent, colouring. Exaggeration of a model’s features buttons up our understanding, prepares us to embody the concept; to face it really. Ettinger is careful enough to prepare the ground before making us face her own exaggerations, like, say, „borderlinking”, or „borderspacing”. She takes heed of Freud’s lines in „Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, based on Plato/Aristophanes caricature, which Lacan will then himself caricaturize in his delicious man-omelette myth. It’s where Freud arises the case of death instinct and, being troubled by its discovery, he asks how could we possibly postulate this. He points at the „life instincts already operating in the simpliest organism” – this amoeboid which we will later find turned into lamella – speaking of a “conjugation, which works counter to the course of life and makes the task of ceasing to live more difficult” and about death instincts “associated from the very first with life instincts”, admission of which forces us to work upon an equation “with two unknown quantities”, addressing, as Freud himself does, science, philosophy and poetry simultaneously. Here we’re groping in “darkness into which not so much as a ray of a hypothesis has penetrated”. The darkness is called sexuality. Nothing more than a split in the unified being. Like, we may finally pronounce it, literature. “In quite a different region, it is true, we do meet with such a hypothesis; but it is of so fantastic a kind, a myth rather than a scientific explanation, that I should not venture to produce it here, were it not that it fulfils precisely the one condition whose fulfilment we desire. For it traces the origin of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of things". That’s it. The stage is all set now. Enters Plato. In the “Symposium” we find the split between the male and female, and the union of the two. That theory “which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes (...) deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with the most important of its variations in relation to its object”. So much for Freud. From here onwards Ettinger will lead us towards her border, introducing, by the way, new characters, inviting us to follow the hint given us by the poet-philosopher, and [still Freud] “venture upon the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart”, but [and now Ettinger] “not torn apart between male and female (and you see how lovely and Deleuzian this is)”, but [Freud again] “into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts”. What we have here are not two human beings trying to reunite, but the particles – and that’s very subrealistic, in Ettinger’s terms – those different underground particles – whose desire, moreover, to reunite, does not correspond to our desire to live our life in the world. “They’re doing their own thing and this is frightening – this lamella – you can find it everywhere doing its work, but it’s not my work”. And we’re finally in the psychoanalytical imperative, aren’t we. As Ettinger underscores, Freud doesn’t take it to the place where these particles would like to communicate between different figures. In his take the basic arrow would be the desire between different cells, of different amoeba, to become more amoeba, and then “create a border around them and, little by little, we have creatures that defend themselves through their boundaries; and we are the collection of these particles and so on”. The arrow that Ettinger offers is pointing to another level: “when I talk about the matrixial (...) these particles are sustaining their life instinct and so on, but [can the separate collections of these particles] be imagined [as not having to] fight one another in order to exist but already filtering the transconnectedness, the crossinscription”. But here, as Freud would put it, the moment has come for breaking off. Asking: was our primordial state a caricature of sex? We are repetition of amoeba and amoeba is tragedy of ours, forced to copulate. Let’s take a bypass here. „Real humanism”, says Marx, “has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which substitutes “self-consciousness” or the '”spirit” for the real individual man and with the evangelist teaches: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.” Needless to say, this incorporeal spirit is spiritual only in its imagination. What we are combating in Bauer's criticism is precisely speculation reproducing itself as a caricature. We see in it the most complete expression of the Christian-Germanic principle, which makes its last effort by transforming "criticism" itself into a transcendent power”. This excerpt from “The Holy Family” seem to admit another property of the blunt reproduction/repetition – the need to fight it. But maybe in a way a sculptor struggles with the material at hand. Thus “the more completely Critical Criticism (the criticism of the “Literatur-Zeitung”) distorts reality into an obvious comedy through philosophy, the more instructive it is”. The problem however arises with a strange inversion that may be observed in the course of analysis, that we could term “who caricaturizes whom?”. There’s change of vectors occurring when the caricature, the set of pronouncements on the face of the object, reveals the vital obsessions of the caricaturist. Rebecca Comay in her lecture “Hegel remarks somewhere...” speaks of Marx “outhegelianizing” Hegel, i.e. doing an even fancier dialectical maneuver than one normally attributed to Hegel. Marx reminds Hegel that repetition is not simply repetition, it is a farcical one (in  Hegel it is repetition of Caesar by cesarism), but then it is through Hegel we get an explication of what would a parody in Marx be: a crisis caused by hypertrophy of signification – via representation – like when the second revolution, masquerading as first, is stalling the motor of history, which then stutters in the empty repetition of simulacra. Marx: “If any section of history has been painted grey on grey, it is this. Men and events appear as Schlemihls in reverse, as shadows that have lost their bodies”. But then – the regime of parody as pure excessive signification without any ground, the condition of stasis, seems nonetheless the occasion for overcoming this stasis. Repetition deepened, exaggerated and prolonged, becomes prolegomena for a radical novelty. There’s difference looming. The wager of psychoanalysis, its concern with the speaking being, its definition of the subject and of experience as bound to the realm of signs, comes to haunt us as the lamella-like blobs, that cannot be properly signified. And this in turn appears to be shaping the language in a way that is not without a caricatural charm – psychoanalysis the lacanian psychoanalysis just like the swiss font also carries an excess of beauty that cannot be attributed only to and analysed in terms of rationalisation, the right/wrong dong but one is not mistaken who say that it rests wholly in its content Aren’t, in their analytical aspect, Ettinger’s elaborate neologisms but a pronouncement of Lacan’s own structuralist elaborations of Freud? Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the Lacanian orthodoxy shouldn’t fight back. Marx did, being a good Hegelian, against the Holy Family of the Bauer brothers and their supporters. The Freudian orthodoxy didn’t make it easy for Lacan either, though it was only “back to Freud” at stake at the beginning and “be Lacanians if you wish: I’m a Freudian” in the end. Our point lies, however, elsewhere. And it is a literary one, coming from a Lacanian affinity rather than from the Lacanian field. Namely, a certain degree of liking. (We could observe such in the recent Žižek-Peterson debate, where Peterson started with “The Communist Manifesto” and was disappointed that Žižek didn’t talk about Marxism that much). There’s a big risk that comes with any liking; but this is nonetheless supportive of the libido model and the Lacanian take on the lamella. “Libido is this lamella that the organism's being takes to its true limit, which goes further than the body's limit. Its radical function in animals is materialized in a certain ethology by the sudden decline [chute] in an animal's ability to intimidate other animals at the boundaries of its “territory”. This lamella is an organ”, lest we forget, “since it is the instrument of an organism”. And yet there is something not unlike liking that seems to permeate the matter. Take the affinity itself. Firstly, it names a natural liking for and understanding of someone or something. But then, in biochemistry, affinity stands for the degree to which a substance tends to combine with another. Dictionary seems an unruly beast sometimes. “It is sometimes almost palpable [comme sensible], as when an hysteric plays at testing its elasticity to the hilt”. This caricatural liking we bring to the table.

Yet, we remain careful. A self-debasement might be a power-move. Convictions? “(...) I am not convinced myself and (...) I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, (...) I do not know how far I believe in them. There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional factor of conviction should enter into this question at all. It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an advocatus diaboli, who is not on that account himself sold to the devil”. One can’t resist it. Liking drives in. It’s perhaps far-fetched to offer caricature as means of analysis. Neither tragedy nor farce, as one might put it, but history (i.e. desiring subject) remains here the main focus. But as a method of sharpening the tools these exaggerations may prove good enough. [Friedrichshain/Neukölln, April 2019]

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heat and warmth

Sweltering heat. One month melted away. And this excitement needs now to be inhabited. With the pandemonium of partial drives it has brought to us. The area of U Birkenstraße deserves here a mention. Which, during this weather, while the augmented reality is operative (podcast in my ears) is by itself – swarming. People-dogs-al fresco reefs. All under the pink neon of the Thai Massage brothel. Back to ZK/U. I’m sitting behind the desk, drinking beer (so many beers I drank) and revisiting my attitude to what is low. And the main partner in this conversation will be Gombrowicz, who would speak about the low but nevertheless rarely, if ever, reach it. Miłosz in his last installment of the answer to „Against the Poets” deals this final, post Gombro mortem, blow: he wasn’t nice. That people are talking he wasn’t. I would immediately pierce the nicey factor to reach to the warm one. [June, Wednesday, 2017]

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At ZK/U, on 27.06.19.

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field snap

And there’s a lot of working onsite. Like the impressionists, writers need to go out and start capturing the light. Not givens, but motion. It is one big blur from here, – and we’re always towards the blur. The half naked guy fixing a bike in front of the caf’ display, his bling dangling as he bends, holding the phone with ear against shoulder – that’s the idea in literature – and all the more so if we know of the flower shop, in the valley of blanched housing few steps down South, Richtung Turmstraße. And there’s always a plan ahead of us. The blur is inside the plan. A gallery awaits nextdoor, opening 12ve. That’s our first model for the site of re-engaging the indistinct. And we want to offer them cooperation.

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Techniques of the indistinct: inscription of repetitions. Minimal differences do not disturb the progressions. There are loops, and we expect to find them exactly where we left them.

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watering your plants

dark behind the curtain lit up by the wall I dress myself in this dear attention of a commie leader, sunshine of humanity turning towards the magnificent setting of a mellow star and the flowers silence me, once more tie me to the walls’ off-colour giving shelter to the slow progressions of the suddenly drowned off-world [Moabit, May 2019]

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night we hold on till the morning

it is invisible what moves your hand fingers on the terry towel pulling thread until your lips release, a red sharp bullet of the lipstick [Moabit, May 2019]

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didn’t we almost have it all

there was the reawakening trees outside, blue garden in the skylight white garden in the bathroom steep night in your eyes didn’t we almost find the path you turned around when it bulged and fell on your back and I was looking down [Moabit, May 2019]

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The exhibition posed few questions with the effect in the field of the indistinct. To assume a position amongst the interplay thus effectuated is a writerly task, part of which we will undertake in the forthcoming months. We always try to start small, and proceed through gesturing-towards, rather than pointing-at, where “towards” is sometimes bound to the unknown, in a way that is nonetheless felt as “the right way” for us. To cut to the chase, today it is somewhere between Arminiusmarkthalle and Tônis restaurant. Between the old Krimi stall and the poetry of the Vietnamese food descriptions.