Lately I’ve been sleeping naked. Waking up and pushing aside the blanket, revealing my nude
body, gives me crippling dysphoria. For some reason I keep doing it. Perhaps it’s a desire
accelerating the inevitability to initiate change. An opportunity for intensities, the jouissance
of the repetition of the same, the enjoyment of my own suffering so to say. I want to embrace
the validity of dysphoria as an individual emotion without acknowledging it as some sort of
mental illness to be treated from or the bs of getting to the root of some fucking symptom.
Language will keep mosh-pitting us into the four-cornered space of relations. The masters'
tools must be seized to dismantle their house, their magnificent wooden spiral-staircase from
which you can gaze through the spotless panoramic window not only at your own reflection,
when real close to it, but also right at the neatly stained white picket fence behind the
meticulously organized nuclear family dinner happening in the garden.
One morning I decide to take a step and shave off my arm hair. I listen to Scott Walkers “Tilt”.
I am shaking. Then, ecstasy. Each hair falling onto my mom's bathroom floor feels like a tiny
piece of masculinity being castrated from my body. Does this anxiety represent the fear of
becoming something separate for you? What are you so scared of? To be desired without
possessing that which you think you are desired for? Why the constant outcry towards the
appeal of twoness? Allegedly the “female” can never have, nor can the „male“ ever be the
phallus.
My ass!
Castration is in no way tied to losing one's masculinity or becoming more feminine, just as
moving away from masculinity does not necessarily mean wanting to move towards
femininity, or towards anything in particular, except in this case it does. I ask my mom to pluck
my eyebrows, to make my face look softer, I say, but what I actually wanted to say was: more
like a girl.
I fantasize about getting fucked into non-existence. Not actually getting fucked but fucked
the way the managerial parasite fucks the societal body, produces it by looking real hot and
making us crave its seduction, down on our knees begging for more, which makes its worst
habit enjoying getting blackout fucked. Fucked the way McKenzie Wark writes in “Reverse
Cowgirl”, the skin of the Other sticking onto you, wanting to be wanted as the Other. (the
word “fuck” appears about 250 times in the book).
The dissolution of the self, the eviscerating awareness of your physical body and all its cultural
burdens vanishing all at once. Watching your own body through the other person; perceiving
without being. Spin-drying the alienation of penetration; sublating its exploitive savagery.
Which silly little fantasy.
* Pearlescent water drops trickle off my silken perfumed skin onto wrinkly sugar-coated towel
folds. The amorphous seduction of crisis, about time it’s being managed they say, whilst
rolling up their white-collar sleeves, buttoning down their shiny black satin shirt and, now
stripped, a real clusterfuck of commerce, of repeated commercial suicide attempts, only
prevented in the pathetic last seconds of clinging onto life, holding ever so tightly onto it
through ad-blocked paywall spasms and the marketization of internalized kinship, I laugh at
my colleagues. Placebo cash flows of recreational sex, auto-erotic stimuli sustained over
extended periods of time, which must have some kind of long-term financial advantage or
symbolic exchange value equivalent to the patriarchal obsession with the phallus. A prognosis
of bliss, hard-fact investments in destabilization extract all resources from these so-called
assistants to the now unrecognizable face of disfigurement paid for by MasterCard, suck ‘em
dry and leave their rotting corpses behind as this subversive potential unfolds itself, turns
inside out and spreads like a disease, or more like a franchise, only for you to realize the inside
is in fact the same as the outside, yes, much to your surprise it is and always has been one
and the same, 1 and the same, nothing whilst simultaneously everything, needless to say that
these boundaries are of no use anymore, the words inside and outside made superfluous,
superstructure crumbling under the weight of reverse engineered saliva.
Your feverishly rose-tinted cheeks whisper a mere speculation of mutual interests spoken in
bureaucratic umbrella terms, a friendly reminder carefully phrased in corporate buzzword
mania converted into a global mother-tongue. Decentralize desire from all bare skin, the
insatiable thirst for expansion spreads symbiotically through soft-porn P2P connections onto
accumulated heaps of flesh, back to the corporeal, back to the corporal identity disorder these
strategists, or I should rather say: analysts, have fixated on, laid their eyes upon, fetishized to
the razor-sharp edge of perversion. What we need is a breach of contract, some kind of
desperate breakout move from this culture of feedback, to rug pull these fucking performance
improvement plans, liquidate all micro-managerial elegies, hijack the corrosive nature of
correspondence, seize the means of stimulation, co-opt to the board of surgical stagflation,
prohibit prohibition, undress the grayscaled whipsaw of ongoing workforce reductions,
dissolve the negligence of reproductive labor, whistle-blow up the sales division tech bros
spellbinding their executives into a fucking primordial trance, relive the privatization of
prenatal development, embrace tenderness the same way you used to treasure being a
symbol in a world of symbols, get all nice and comfy in this still, and maybe eternally
undefined terrain; notice your vocal chords now speaking in absence of surplus, without the
need for incestuous police worship or fully succumbing to cute little fantasies, which could be
called the courtship dance of fascism for all that I know.
Cover them in shrink wrap and dispose my phantom limbs, oh why must I obey to the
monochrome pleasure of the Other? Claustrophobic adoration. The death-drive is hooked up
to a public hotspot, working in favor of the tradition of male subjectivity. Downstream the
margins of diplomatic lust continue calling my name, machines proceed humming their sweet
love songs of now decoded intimacy, the market still tends to have a bullish sentiment to it.
Has nothing changed at all? I can feel the stones weighing me down, pushing me further from
the surface and closer towards the trenches of performative reiteration gently spilling over
into the fragility of being a body of multitudes. Sometimes it’s worse to reach the goal than
to be confused by your cold peroxide-soaked hands upon my face endorsing some kind of
measurable desire, a concrete taxonomy enumerating gelatinous statistics, a history of
excesses uttered by whispers of secrecy allow yourself to be undone.
Please just hold me tight and tell me everything will be alright as I come down from my post-melanin sleep deprivation melancholy-shopping mall-non-place-manically refreshing ig-no
signal-wired headphones on full volume-blasting this Italian percussionist-thinking about that
one angelic Dior Homme Fall/Winter 2006 round cropped blazer jacket, which looks like it has
all these tiny little glass mirror tiles attached to it and how cute it would look on me and how
Hedi Slimane fetishized androgyny and made it cool for guys to wear women's skinny jeans
and tight Rimbaud-core blouses with ruffles on them-soft drink addiction speedrun-self
checkout payment-considering if I should try to scan my coke and walk out with the rest of the
stuff in my bag but ending up not doing it cause I tell myself I’m already anxious enough-full
on dissociation-with slight hints of panic-attack-withdrawal. How I hate this feeling and even
though it rarely occurs anymore makes me so conscious of my being, either thinking everyone
must be fucking staring at me, thinking I’m tweaking or tending not to think about how others
perceive me at all or that I woke up feeling horrible about my genitals and how this
dissociating feeling can for these split seconds also be some sort of salvation, I guess, how I
feel ashamed to read all this critical theory and admit that this wet consumer-capitalist
alienation fever dream side quest invoked a feeling of liberation in me and maybe I am so
wrong about all of this.
That’s just the cartoonishly thin red line fiction operates in. Inserting passages here and there,
routing and rerouting the nodes of obedience, squishing itself into fragments of glamorized
abundance. So don’t worry my dear, my dearest interlocutor, this merciless state of affairs
will indeed keep regulating itself, no need to panic. Meaninglessness will sing in piercing
falsettos, touching even the most consolidated of demands.
Workers gather at McCormick Reaper Works on Blue Island Avenue to protest the creeping industrialization of the factory. They were to be replaced by machines. A horde of policemen chime in. Viciously swinging their batons, they are greeted by a shower of stones from the strikers, which in return prompt the police to draw their revolvers and fire into the crowd. The brutal slaughter results in two fatalities and many wounded.
A leaflet written by the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, labor activist and prominent Anarchist, August Spies, circulates:
To arms, we call you, to arms! Be ready to strike when the time comes. You cannot be worse off than you are now. You have to face it sooner or later; do so now before you are utterly unable to act.
Ruhe! (was the publication of Ruhe! meant to trigger an uprising?)
Haymarket, Randolph St., between Desplaines and Halsted, May 4, 8:15pm
August Spies: Is Parsons here? Is Parsons here?
Albert Parsons: I’m over here.
August Spies: Sorry, I’m late. I’ll begin my speech shortly.
Two to three thousand people have gathered on the square. Though many already left as the meeting was originally scheduled for 7:30pm.
Albert Parsons: You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have for years suffered the unmeasurable iniquities of wage-labor, you have for years worked yourself to death; you have for years endured the pangs of want and hunger. Just yesterday the bloodhounds shot down our comrades at McCormick! We must not give in to the compromise of the eight-hour-workday. For what is it worth to reduce working hours, when the revolution is on the horizon. And of that I am certain!
August Spies: You feign anxiety about their individuality; about the individuality of a class that has been degraded to machines—used each day for ten or twelve hours asappendages of the lifeless machines! About their individuality you are anxious! About your own individuality you are anxious! Just look at the great promise of modernity!
[relieving sigh]Which freedom!
At last, we can be a self. Ourselves. The flexible self. The productive self. The schizoid self. Atomic expropriation. Universal fatigue. Libidinal anesthesia.
Oh, how much I enjoy numbing the dreariness of day-to-day life by being your ideal commodity. Now, let me caress and fondle my meticulously assembled limbs. Let me swallow your fast-food, your vitamins and nutrients, your supplements, your painkillers, your prescribed anti-depressants, and get this lean, collapsing body some action!
The last speaker was Samuel Fielden. As the darkness of night approached, a stormy cloud formed over the skies of Chicago. There were apparently less than 300 people left for Fieldens speech.
Samuel Fielden: The skirmish lines have met. People have been shot. Men, women, and children have not been spared by the capitalists and minions of private capital. It has no mercy—so ought you. You are called upon to defend yourselves, your lives, your future. What matters it whether you kill yourselves with work to get a little relief, or die on the battlefield resisting the enemy? What is the difference? Any animal, however loathsome, will resist when stepped upon. Are we less than snails or worms? I have some resistance in me; I know that you have, too; you have been robbed, and you will be starved into a worse conditio-
As Fielden pronounces these words, without any indication, the police dauntingly march onto the Haymarket square through the surrounding layers of darkness like a herd of nocturnal animals. It was clear to anybody that they were up to no good.
Ruhe. (was the publication of Ruhe! meant to trigger an uprising?)
This silence was passed by a deafening bang, accompanied by a radiant blast of light, illuminating the startled figures of the crowd and, for a split second, tracing their shadows onto the cobblestone ground. Shards of falling glass particles and thick, cloying smoke fill up the air. The unsettling, suffocating smell of acid and burnt earth swiftly turns into a sweet, gritty scent, caused by the nitroglycerin mixtures of the explosive. Screams of pain and agony.
The crowd is in pure panic—a stampede under Chicago moonlight.
The police, once again, react by drawing their revolvers and aimlessly firing into the crowd of workers. The everlasting fire was kept up for several minutes. In the end, at least 4 civilians and 7 police officers were killed and about 60 people suffered severe injuries. Most of the injuries had in fact been caused by the bullets of the police and not by the bomb, which means that the police ended up unknowingly massacring their fellow officers.
This incident spawned an unparalleled wave of hatred and prejudice against not only the Anarchists but towards the whole labor movement in general. The first Red-Scare in American history. It did not matter who threw the bomb or if the speakers had any connection to them whatsoever—their “violent” ideology and the glorification of insurgent resistance surely must have been the cause of this tragedy. This threat to the predominant order was to be smothered in the cradle. There was not a single piece of evidence which could be tied to any of the Anarchists, some of them were not even present on the night of the explosion. On top of this, the majority of the candidates, including the judge, admitted to being biased towards the defendants and their anarchist beliefs.
The eight accused men of the trial were: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe.
Spies, Parsons, Fischer, Engel and Lingg were to be executed.
Cook County Criminal Court, Chicago, August 22, 1886
August Spies: Wenn ihr glaubt, dass ihr durch unsere Hinrichtung die Arbeiterbewegung auslöschen könnt—die Bewegung, von welcher die unterdrückten Millionen, die Millionen, die sich zum Tode schuften und in Not und Elend leben, ihre Erlösung erwarten—wenn das euer Urteil ist, dann hängt uns! Hier zerdrückt ihr bloß einen Funken, doch hier, und dort, und hinter euch, vor euch, überall werden die Flammen auflodern. Es ist ein unterirdisches Feuer. Ein unlöschbares Feuer. Der Boden, auf welchem ihr steht, brennt.
Louis Lingg:I repeat that I am the enemy of the 'order' of today, and I repeat that, with all my powers, so long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I am in favor of using force. Und nochmal, ich bin kein Freak. Ja, ich habe gesagt Dynamit wäre der beste Freund des Menschens. Ja, es ist wahr. Das hab ich nie geleugnet. Warum auch? Ich bin stolz darauf. Ja, ich weiß wie man Bomben baut und bin bekanntermaßen nicht abgeneigt diese zu verwenden, doch was in diesem Gerichtssaal geschieht, diese Zurschaustellung, ja diese grandiose, akribisch geprobte und einstudierte Aufführung der Repression durch den Staat, diese Affirmation des militärisch-industriellen Komplexes, in welcher wir doch nur als symbolisches Exempel, als entsubjektivierte Spielfiguren eines Spiels, welches bereits im Vorhinein als verloren deklariert werden müsste, als Substitut für die Gesamtheit der Arbeiter:innenklasse stehen, all dies zeigt doch die Tendenzen, übertrifft doch alle Verschwörungen, welche uns hier untergejubelt werden. Uns zugeschrieben werden. Und all die Wörter, die ich sagte, die ich nicht sagte. Die mir zugeschrieben werden. Die Wörter, die umgeschrieben werden, die umschrieben werden.
Das Schreiben als bewaffneter Widerstand.
If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you.
[Laughter in the courtroom]
Louis Lingg: You laugh! Perhaps you think, 'You'll throw no more bombs'; but let me assure you that I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember my words; and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, they will do the bomb throwing! In this hope I say to you: I despise you. I despise your order, your force propped authority, your unquenchable thirst, your lavish laws, your tedious treachery, your seductive surveillance, your drooling discipline, your molecular materialism.
Hang me for it!
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself.
M o m e n t s o f I n s t a b i l i t y
↓ destabilizes triggers ↑
D i s /o r d e r ←→ S t r u g g l e
↓ creates leads to ↑
R e i n f o r c e m e n t o f P o w e r
Cook County Jail, Chicago, November 10, 1887, 8:50am
Louis Lingg: Das Gefühl man verstummt—
Das Gefühl nicht gehört zu werden, obwohl man doch spricht—
Man kann die Bedeutung von Worten nicht mehr identifizieren, nur noch raten—
Beim Schreiben: Zwei Zeilen—man kann am Ende der zweiten Zeile den Anfang der ersten nicht behalten—
Das Schreiben als bewaffneter Widerstand, als semiotischer Krieg—
Das Gefühl der Trennung—
Das Gefühl der Abtrennung—
Die Spaltung von sich selbst, vom anderen, von der Gemeinschaft, vom Raum, von der Ordnung, vom Gesetz—
Der Sprache unterworfen—
Doch gleichzeitig die Differenz der Sprache—
Doch kein Außen möglich—
Das Gefühl man verstummt—
Lingg sits on the corner of his bed and lights a cigar. Gradually the accumulated haze fills up the cell like a nightclub. He puts down the half-smoked cigar and places a dynamite cartridge between his teeth, calmy lights the fuse, which only seconds after results in a piercing bang. The dull, off-white walls are now covered in scarlet. Lingg's deconstructed face, with his jaw blown to smithereens, whilst still attached to his motionless body, falls down on the cot. Shreds of flesh and bone are scattered throughout the cell.
Six hours after the explosion Louis Lingg is pronounced dead.
“WE DON’T BELIEVE IN SUICIDE” the headline of the Arbeiter-Zeitung reads.
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection.
Cook County Jail, November 11, 1887, 11:30am
Depression looms over the city like a storm.
Roadblocks, military-level policing, public anxiety,—the jail as a fortress.
The four hooded figures stand in front the gallows—nooses tightened around their necks. Fully draped in white cotton, the soft fabric tightly clings to their bodies—banishing their silhouettes into the abyss of spectral abstraction. There was no terrestrial presence left in the bodies of these condemned revenants—they will now roam the trenches of history from which they have been produced.
August Spies: The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!
Hurrah for Anarchy!
Albert Parsons: Hurrah for Anarchy!
Engel and Fischer repeat the same phrase.
The trap door opens and drops the bodies down below.
They twitch and jerk, before eventually becoming still.
[silence]
Epilogue
I overlook a vast field of green—vibrant, summery blades of grass—deep nourished hues saturated by sunlight. The wind ruffles your bangs, exposing your forehead.
You blush. The droning haze blurs my illusion into obscurity.
Julien Coupat (with a heavy French accent): The party is the central fiction.
Distant voices of playing children reverberate through humid air and slowly distort into layers of stacked noise. If I try hard enough, I can almost feel the heat of summer on my skin. Could almost reconstruct your face. I turn my eyes towards you, hopelessly longing for your gaze but cannot hold eye contact. If you only knew of your power over me, I fantasize.
I was taken by surprise by my initial reaction to the show.
Immediately as you enter the exhibition space, which is an apartment-turned-gallery, you start walking on wooden boards painted in a light greenish blue colour. One may not immediately think of them as paintings, but by crouching down and taking a closer look, you notice the lacquer that was used to paint them or the various flecks and stains on their surface. You might even leave your own traces just by stepping on them.
The boards spread through the gallery’s rooms like neatly snapped branches, which give you the impression that they were created specifically for this apartment. Though the idea of shifting one's perception through subtle interventions of the exhibition space, specifically using its seeming emptiness to your advantage, has been around for a while, it still makes an impact on me. Situational aesthetics at their best. But with a bit more emotion. A walk down the plank and that’s it. I bet the opening was funny. The only further artwork was a hair taped to the wall, right next to the stairs at the back entrance of the building. But there’s gotta be more to it, right?
Apparently, the space between the first exhibition location, the one featuring the turquoise catwalk paintings on the floor and the hair taped to the wall, and the second one, which is just a few minutes' walk from the first and inhabits benches with paper sculptures on them, a projection of manipulated video footage emulating a view through the wall and a few seating arrangements, is called the invisible sculpture (unsichtbare Skulptur). To be honest, I don’t remember much of my walk between the two. The lineup of the show featured a variety of activations from students of the HBK Braunschweig and the choir of the TU Braunschweig. Platforms as utopian spaces of community and visibility instead of monopolistic business giants seeking to annihilate their competitors.
We stroll past the avenue. Right hand clenched into a fist rest in my pocket, mohair tickling. Slight hints of anxiety signal themselves through increased awareness of my surrounding. Hunts of anxiety. I haven’t been able to relax around Emma for a while now and it’s stressing me out. She is one of those people who make you feel invisible when you’re around them. Or maybe that’s just me pitying myself.
Haven't been here in ages, Emma says. Oh-y-yeah, same, I say.
Haunts of anxiety.
Steamy hot raindrops corrode my skin; that’s why I always bring a hoodie made of silica fabric with me, I thought to myself. Not quite as good as Kevlar or Nomex, but a lot cheaper for sure.
Hurriedly, I try to throw it over but get my head stuck the first time. Silica is a natural compound derived from white sand or residual quartz. Mine is mint green with some stains on it. Emma’s is more of a poncho, wide mix-matched black and grey stripes with a kangaroo pouch on the belly. On top of it she wears a paper-thin, its weight probably being about 80g, larger than life silken embroidered floral scarf, covering most of the right half of her body. When dry it resembles a proud flag swaying in the wind but now embalms her body like wet strips of linen, making her look like a walking origami sculpture.
Oh, how I love this city. Yes, I love this city with a passion. Like a lover running their hands through your towel-dry hair. Toothpaste kisses. It’s always adapting, and so am I. It’s hard to do for sure. Had to learn it the hard way. Now that I think of it, Emma is kind of like the city. Or the city is kind of like Emma.
The breeze is icy cold — red-hot rain raising my body temp. Scents preserved through the gift of nostalgia. Soggy cardboard boxes on the sidewalk emanate metallic, light silverfish grey clouds of steam. As we wander around a back alley, a sudden voice rises through an open window overhead. A deep resonant bass. I start imagining a second voice. A soprano struggling to hit the high G notes. Polyphonic voices start harmonizing like a flock of birds, perpetual melodies gently repeat like hiccups.
A liturgy for the discreet.
Spanish man reportedly skips work for 6 years, maybe even as many as 14, without anyone noticing.
“So, you did absolutely no work”, the man says.
“I am in no position to explain myself. My absence went unnoticed, furthermore it emphasizes the idleness of my superiors. They should be the ones explaining themselves. I earn a modest salary, just enough to feed my family. A pitiful income. If I were to leave this company, I would not be able to find another job until my imminent retirement.” Joaquin replied.
He adds, “My colleagues were a bunch of bullies. They do their jobs with dignity. It’s what fills them with joy and purpose each day of their miserable lives. It’s their substance. Their deity. They despised me because of my family’s socialist views. When I told them during a lunch break some years ago, I immediately noticed them starting to treat me differently. That’s when I started coming to work irregularly and, yes, you are correct, did no work. I came into the office, sat down at my desk, and instead of doing any labour, read the works of Spinoza. In the end, I was paid for doing absolutely no work.”
“Ha! Which fine libertarian erotic fiction!”, the man laughs out loud.
“All those managers and bureaucrats are being paid to fuck around all day and do nothing. How are they any different? You’re the scrivener! The living refusal of ideology! Pure patient passivity! May it trickle right down to the roots of language itself."
After all, Spinoza was a lens maker. Rendering the once invisible, visible through the technological advancement of optics used in tele- and microscopes. One may wonder how this practice influenced his thought and vice versa. He died of a weakness related to tuberculosis, which was most likely caused by the inhalation of silica dust whilst grinding glass. Silicosis, they call it.
The spectator crouches down, eye close to the lens. A liturgy for the discreet.
for Matthias Holznagel's publication "das Stadt-Haar"