10. o say, can you remember the words?

 

I’m back to writing today, trying to structure the theories presented in Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology as a framework for experimental learning.

I’m taking a lot from this:

In a way, the utterance “I can” points to the future only insofar as it inherits the past, as the accumulation of what the body has already done, as well as what is “behind” the body, the conditions of its arrival. The body emerges from this history of doing, which is also a history of not doing, of paths not taken, which also involves the loss, impossible to know or even register, of what might have followed from such paths. As such, the body is directed as a condition of its arrival, and as a direction that gives the body its line.

(
Ahmed, 2006)


I spend a lot of my practice cutting up small pieces of paper, gluing things together and typing things out painfully slowly on my typewriter. Sometimes I feel like this is more akin to a childish art project, I begin to question why I have arrived at this point.

Maybe something like this is the answer:

This is a product of care.

It is performative care.

It is care as a fuck you to capitalism.


So I hope that this is the place I have arrived at. I’m reorienting my own queerness to pursue care and intimacy in my practice. Even if queerness already is reorientation. Often I think my practice values things dearly that others might consider to be inelegant or lacking substance. But if deviation has become normative (within our field at least) - I’m finding desire to be a more fulfilling pursuit.

No to the heroic. 
No to the anti-heroic. 

(Rainer, 1964)


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O Say, Can You Remember the Words? - Hannah Montana, Season 1, Episode 10

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