Issue 10 - Loop

dfly Gadfly

Fall 2023, v. 10

Columbia University Undergraduate Philosophy Magazine

Gadfly Gadfly is supported by

& Columbia University Undergraduate Philosophy Department

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ors Editors Editors Editors Editors-in-Chief Soham Mehta & Skylar Wu Managing Editor Aharon Dardik Chief Article Editor Rose Clubok Chief Interview Editor William Freedman Chief Column Editor Milène Klein Social Media Manager Ashley Blanche Waller Design Editor Axel Icazbalceta

s Editors Editors Editors Ed Copy Editor Elyzabeth Bush-Peel Article Editors Nora Estrada, Ray Knapick, Ashling Lee, Sanaaya Rao, Gracie Samra, Ariel Yu, Ethan Zomberg Interview Editors Chimelu Ani, Gabriella “Elle” Calabia, Carol Chen, Casey Epstein-Gross, Lily Kwak, Yunah Kwon, Oscar Luckett, Eloise Maybank, Yoav Rafalin Columnists Eleanor Ding, Telvia Perez, Manavi Sinha, Xavier Stiles, Ashley Blanche Waller, Fenris Zimmer

ble of Content Table of Con Letter from the Editors

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Fruit-4 Sydney Lee

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Rhythm, Form, and Flux: Nathan Oglesby on Plato, Whitehead, and J Dilla Oscar Luckett, ed. Carol Chen

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Boy Love Series Panopticon: Female Sexual Liberation Through the Capitalist Reification of Gay Identity Phurichaya (Preach) Apintanapong

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ntent Table of Content Tab Poetic Impression: The Failure of Language and the Triumph of Poetry Nickolas Vaccaro

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Good Vibrations: Art, Identity and Sound with Miya Masaoka Yunah Kwon, ed. Lily Kwak, Chimelu Ani

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Sociotraumatics Isaiah Nash

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Art Contributors

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s Letter from the Editors Le At the Gadfly,

it has become a tradition to begin and end every year with the same discussion: “What is Philosophy?” Yes, it is a bit of a cliche, but it remains a challenging question. Having braved this discussion several times now—on Zoom screens, outside Philosophy Hall under the contemplative gaze of The Thinker, and over homebaked bread and Westside brie in Philosophy 716—we are nevertheless no closer to a unified consensus on this question. One cannot help but start to doubt the validity of the question itself after so many seemingly fruitless endeavors.

Are we concocting linguistic distinctions for mere academic pleasure? Can there even exist an overarching and coherent branch of study called philosophy or are we shaving pieces of reality to fit into each other for the sake of our egos?

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As philosophy students producing a philosophy magazine, the irony of our inability to answer this question troubles ourselves as much as it confuses others. After all, the

mere existence of a “philosophy club” seemingly predicates an agreed-upon understanding of what “philosophy” entails.

To be fair, we are not the worst offenders: the entire field of metaphilosophy is populated by philosophers dedicated to precisely defining the scope and purpose of their own profession. It is perhaps our slavish commitment to this Sisyphean (if not absurdist) task of defining philosophy that attracted us to the theme Loop.

By bookending our discussions with attempts to define philosophy, we seem to have endorsed a loop-like theory of philosophy: we earnestly believe that philosophy will paradoxically reveal itself as we do more philosophy.

Philosophy, in our conception, is a mysterious, self-referential Mobius strip densely composed of threads of intertwined dialogue and thought, twisting back upon itself.

Anyone who has studied philosophy or intellectual history have found themselves in the disorienting position

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etter from the Editors Lett of realizing that the unapproachable modern analytic philosopher they are reading–armed with decades of formal training and a consummate knowledge of the field–is contending with the same question as the PreSocratic thinker sitting in an Iron Age village etching their musings on papyrus pamphlets.

Moving from pre-systematic metaphysical ponderings to the terse propositions of contemporary academic philosophy gives the impression of progress. We are ensnared in Hofstadter’s “strange loop,” an abstract structure in which upward movements through a hierarchy are illusory as, no matter how far one feels they have gone, one inevitably finds themselves returning back where they started. A false sense of progression haunts us.

It is a spectre that follows us outside the halls of philosophy.

Patterns of repetition and recursion permeate our daily lives: in grief, in love, in all that life has to offer. In “Fruit-4”, Sydney Lee takes us into a gosiwon, low-cost housing units in South Korea, where the quiet desperation

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of its inhabitants stuck in cycles of loss and degradation paints a haunting picture of inescapable desolation. The reader is trapped alongside the protagonist whose only coping mechanism with these repeating personal tragedies is returning to old habits and familiar places.

This urge for return fosters a certain kind of intellectual decadence: an inelegant desire to keep philosophy inaccessible and indulge in self-containedand-gated discussions. In his dialogue with Oscar Luckett, Nathan Oglesby argues that modern European philosophy is fundamentally a relitigation of ideas from ancient philosophy, as captured by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s engagement and rehabilitation of Plato. Oglesby comments on the unfortunate trade-off between clarity and longevity of philosophical discourse: clearly-delineated and structured philosophies degrade into fleeting trends, while convoluted and ambiguous theories persist through selfreferential cycles of discussion whose ultimate endpoint is semantic surrender and not philosophical reconciliation. The

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same recursion dominantes even general discourse: confronted with the overwhelming influx of information in modern life, Oglesby speaks for all of us in his expressions of exhaustion.

The incessant commentary and information of the digital age overloads one’s consciousness as the excessive amount of footnotes in philosophical writing debilitates philosophical discourse.

Our attempts to escape this intermeshed system of repetition and repression can often launch us back into the loops of oppression.

Through the proxy of Boy Love dramas—or, as Preach Apintanapong frames it, the “realm of experience which is situated between the two systems of patriarchy and matriarchy—an absence of heterosexism,” the author guides us through the loop of female sexual liberation. An attempt to extricate the feminine self through immersion in the male homosexual romance transforms into an assertion of the female gaze by the femaledominated demographic of BL writers and readers. Yet, the intertwined nature of oppression makes it impossible for this “looking” to remain neutral: just as the male gaze objectifies and harms women,

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the female gaze inevitably reifies queer stereotypes. By confusing a shift in perspective with a shift in social position, the female gaze gets lost in the loop of the gender system and awaits rescue.

The same need for rescue underlies language. Nickolas Vaccaro opens his article with the perplexingly Heidegerrian statement that “Language inherently and inexorably fails” and dives examines the self’s search for self by presenting “a relational, self-characterizing loop of speech-action (utterance) in which the self speaks and acts to become a self in the eyes of the other.” The doomed nature of this self-recalling loop, however, does not necessarily spell hopelessness for a retrieval of the “primal and silent” self.

Rather, Vaccaro suggests that this superficial loop of language holds within itself something more fundamental: poetry, another name of human nature.

For those who are more integrated into the digital world, however, Vaccaro’s answer may appear antiquated. Yunah Kwon’s conversation with Miya Masaoka, a composer and artist deeply intrigued by the spatial dimensions of sound, delineates on the potential of Wave Field Synthesis.

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This innovative technology creates an immersive auditory environment using virtual sound sources, blurring the boundaries between reality and virtuality. Through her music, Masaoka unveils how these loops that oscillate between two dimensions organically inhabit our daily lives and compose an omnipresent soundtrack of our existence. Her exploration also traverses musical instruments and technological advancements, revealing the cyclical interplay between innovation and tradition.

different schools of thought are but nodes in a rhizomatic philosophical totality and hence the “philosophical unconscious” that we believe ourselves to be drawing from at all times are “littered with corpses”. The idea that we move in a direction is illusory; the idea that we move at all outside of the “divine circuitry” is a result of unrecognized socio-trauma.

Isaiah Nash inspects this loop of historicity through a lens of cybernetics and mysticism. He proclaims—with the precision of a medical examiner—that the “one primordial signifier” cannot be anything other than the corpse. Nash rejects the Hegelian conception that history is “a linear process of becominghuman”, instead characterizes the history of philosophy as an entangled system of wires:

Where does this leave us – as philosophy students, writers, and thinkers? Just as Socrates’ pursuit of truth led to nothing but a state of aporia, we also seem to be blindly throwing ourselves into the well in which La Vérité resides without a clue of what lies within. With that admission, we invite you to join us: in our self-destruction, our feast of empuzzlement, and our self-doubt. Above all, we invite you to enjoin your mind with these twisted threads of consciousness – laid out linearly on paper, for your viewing convenience.

Soham Mehta

Skylar Wu

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t-4 Fruit-4 Fruit-4 Fruit-4

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f you cook it for a minute more, it was no good and your day was that much more ruined. I had not asked for the old man’s opinion but nodded to be polite.

“Eggs are expensive these days.

Living is not easy.”

It was true. Eggs had doubled in price, but people still bought them. Besides, there was only so much you could put in ramyeon—it wouldn’t be quite the same. The yolk was golden at the tip of the chopstick, and I thought maybe eggs deserved to be that price. Who was I to say?

“Ah—you like to pop the yolk? Young people these days don’t know how to eat.

Isn’t it nicer to eat it whole?” he frowned. “Kids don’t treat their elders like they did back in my day,” he added when I didn’t immediately answer.

He murmured something about ingratitude, hunger, and possibly war, but I stopped listening when he picked up his bowl of dried persimmons and left for his room.

That was how my interactions went with the old man, back at the gosiwon I lived in years ago. Or, at least, something like that. I knew so little of

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him but saw him so often that things blended together.

You would think that the way time happens to your joints, rendering them stiff and uncooperative, that these things would fix themselves into your memory the same way. But you learn that things are quite the opposite.

There were many of those men, especially in the cheaper gosiwons that became congregations of failure. The men tended to be old and difficult, soured by the cruelty of defeat that slowly ate at their dreams over many years, and fixed them permanently into their gosiwon rooms. It was as though the souring got to them physically, as if the shame took over their bodies, diffusing into another cell with every second.

Still, I remember the day I moved into my first gosiwon, a wretched building high up the hill. The building itself stood three stories tall, covered in yellowing tiles that had lost their shine. There was a large black ash stain on one of the windows—something that looked like it could’ve been a fire from some years ago. I wondered whose job it would be to clean something like that.

“The higher up the hill you go,

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the cheaper the rent and the older the folk.” It was like that, like hope and youth were dense things to settle at the bottom.

But that was why, according to the broker, such a good room would go at such a low price.

“But no need to pay attention to such things,” he said, as though he was trying to snap me out of a thought.

“It’s a building rich with history.”

When he led me up the flights of stairs to the actual room, I began to understand what people meant about the smallness of gosiwon rooms. I could barely spread both arms out wide without touching either wall, but somehow it didn’t seem it would be that big of a matter.

I sat on the mattress. It was surprisingly firm. I took another good look around—a desk, a closet. The stains of water damage ate into most corners of the room.

On one of the walls was a small framed portrait that couldn’t

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be bigger than the palm of my hand. I stood up, but didn’t need to take more than two steps to get a closer look. A woman who couldn’t be more than thirty smiled from the brown frame. “That’s Mr. Kim’s mother”, the broker replied when I asked. Mr. Kim, a tenant of about a decade, had died with the wish that his mother be allowed to stay.

“He kept his mother with him as he moved from room to room. I think it was the guilt— his one goal was always to buy her a home, but he kept failing his exam.” The room had been empty since. “Quite sad, that story,” he concluded, and I nodded in agreement.

I turned to the small window that faced north and was the size of two pieces of paper.

“It’ll cost more for the window?” I asked.

“50,000 won more—but being on the top floor means better ventilation. Folks would kill for

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that.” 50,000 meant 25 packs of menthol cigarettes, but it also meant being able to smoke without leaving. It seems that Mr. Kim might’ve agreed, given what looked like nicotine stains on the ceiling.

“You’re from Seoul,” he said as a statement, rather than a question.

“Yes, sir.”

“I figured,” he said, nodding.

“Ah, for such a young man, it might be hard to bring your girlfriends home,” he exclaimed, after a pause.

“That’s a bit of a shame.”

It was difficult to tell whether he was upset on my behalf, or amused. He had that sort of quality. I wondered if he made a good living as a broker.

at writing.” I was not sure why I felt the need to share this.

But there was a giddiness that made the words sweet on my tongue.

“Ah, a writer?” He held his hands behind his back, a posture of wisdom. “What sort of things do you write?”

I told him I was writing a book—something about a mother, though I wasn’t quite sure yet—careful and slow to choose my words.

“Writing is a powerful thing,” he said, nodding.

“Ah, in fact, I have a special message for you. Down the hill, there’s a small church I go to, and this is the pastor’s favorite proverb: death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.”

He turned to look at me.

“What exam are you studying for?”

“I’m not preparing for the exams.” I paused. “I just thought I would try my hand

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After a moment, when a response failed to come to mind, I took another step to peer out the window, finding that the panes had grown stiff in place. With more force than I would have liked, I pushed

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the glass aside. I stuck my head out the two-page window, just enough to feel the breeze grazing the alleyway. I looked right below, and it occurred to me that the height would be just enough to make a fall fatal.

“The nights are better at a place like this.” The broker said, snapping me back into it.

I pulled my body back into the room.

“When you lay wall to wall, you really understand—in no other moment do you completely know at once that you are finite and so very much in existence.”

That night, after I moved my things, I lay in bed to find myself thinking of what the broker said. It seemed possible that he was right—laying there, I was aware that I was solid in time and place, aware of where I started and ended, like I could trace my body on the mattress underneath.

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I looked outside the window.

There was no moon out. The stillness of the night only ruptured by the snoring of the old man next door—the walls were made of paper and there was nothing to be done about it.

The bed was too unfamiliar to beckon sleep. I thought back to when I was little. That time when the biggest desires that plagued me were for the sky to be bluer and for the day’s cafeteria food to taste good.

How good you had it as a kid, and how great the things that you wanted. Back then, Father thought better and more correctly.

It was easy that way; he loved the Beatles, so you loved the Beatles.

The Beatles knew so much more about life than you did. There was much to learn.

Nothing’s gonna change my world Nothing’s gonna change my world

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Nothing’s gonna change my world Nothing’s gonna change my world Something caught the corner of my eye—I turned my head to lock eyes with Ms. Kim. A strange chill crept up my spine, and I hurried to get out of bed and take down the frame.

The small wooden rectangle dissolved into dust in my hands, but a guilt of surprising force compelled me away from discarding the portrait. Taking care not to damage the photo, I rescued it from the frame, tossing the wood into the garbage. Unsure of where to place it, I pushed her into the back slot of my wallet, to leave it a problem for tomorrow.

••• As the first few months passed, I fell into a rhythm of make do.

There was a gentle amusement when I found myself weaved into the habit of things. I learned to savor the half an

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hour of sun each day, like a rationing of light. A temporal joy. On some days it was glory, and on others an unwelcome visitor to wake you from your slumber with the reminder that you were still alive, and that a new day was dawning.

The mornings were the most difficult, so that was when I had the microwave rice.

Technology was getting good; the microwave rice was white and glutinous and tasted better than most. It was not cheap, but it was easy. You had to pay for ease. Rice, sweet coffee, and a cigarette. That was how you made the mornings easy.

On a morning in November, I woke up hungry like I did most mornings. I lugged myself out of bed and headed to the kitchen to find it empty. The refrigerator reeked of aged kimchi, and someone had taken the last of my eggs. I took the empty carton out, revealing a small plastic container of the old man’s wrinkled

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persimmons. Hiding myself behind the refrigerator door, I took out two small rounds, placing them in my pocket.

I made my way to the market like I did most days, save for the ones where my back would not give. The rising cost of things meant I had to find work more days than I had planned, and leave the pen idle for longer. But no matter.

There was not much use in complaining.

Outside the market gates, you could see the old men that were coming from the soup kitchen, huddling together in the dark and finding warmth in puffs of smoke.

Sometimes, the old man from next door would be a part of the symbiotic circle, trying to take a puff of some other man’s cigarette.

They were all mostly old, and ultimately competing amongst themselves for the construction sites that would take them. The

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early morning market was a kind of lottery where you got more work some days and not others. You went early and tried to show in all the ways you could that you were healthy and strong and capable of work. It seemed to come easy if youth was on your side.

If you lost one morning, that was just how luck would have it. It was rare, but I supposed it was natural that it too could happen to me, the sort of day where you left with no work. I left that morning with nothing but a comment from one of the elder women with dementia that wore their hair in tight perms.

A comment that you had too good of a face for driving trucks and pouring concrete, oh what a waste it was. You could have become an actor. Oh, what a waste it was.

She never remembered that she had repeated the same thought to me for weeks. And yet, those words filled me with an annoyance that was so uniquely

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terrible that I flinched, and I could not say why.

Outside, the sun was now up—round and ripe. I looked at it, in yearning. The sky was blue, but I had the time, so I wished that it was bluer. I took a persimmon out of my pocket and began chewing on its sweet flesh, spitting out the seeds.

You knew it was morning from how all the kids were walking and headed one way, wearing the same face. One that seemed so wise, so stoic and monotone.

There was always something about young boys and girls in crisp cotton uniforms armed with their resistance to understanding.

The way they were all so buoyant and unaware of it, only fastened to the ground by the words and demands of their parents and the immediate, unquestioned need to finish school. What a blessing that was—that odd and fickle fixedness. It would never occur to a child of that age that that was something to want. The smell of flowers was thick

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in the air, and as I walked, I learned that the joy was not as easy as it was back then.

I continued on walking, unsure of what to do next, until I remembered there was a convenience store around the corner.

“4,500 won,” said the lady behind the counter. She looked young, and much too average with her black hair and bangs and orange-tinted lips. She didn’t look a lot older than the kids in uniforms.

“6,500 with the soju.”

I took the bills out of my wallet, and our hands touched as we made the exchange.

The cigarette packs now came with small pictures of diseased bodies on the cartons, and I thought I had heard something about it in the news. It proved to be difficult to take one out without locking eyes with deformity. It hit me like that—if death stared me in the eyes, I would have nothing to tell it. I shuddered and

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covered the picture with my hand. Tomorrow’s problems were there for just that. For tomorrow. As I left the store, bottle in hand, I tucked the foil over a cigarette in a corner of the box in case I forgot to save it for Mother because that was how luck would have it.

It was funny that this was the store I had frequented in my teenage years. It was all just a few years back that I walked on these hot concrete pavements— but now all the summers melded into one. How could I forget that the park was so close to the market? I understood that forgetting was a part of memory, but I was not okay with it yet.

Still, there were moments that, amidst all time and its passing, maintained their color and stayed fresh in the mind.

Such memories populated the east of Han River Park, where I had my first kiss and first cigarette. It was where I was once confused as to whether I had been poisoned by the sun or by the vodka—which they said was “strong soju” that they smuggled from some poor storekeeper—and did not know how to act right. It was where most of my first love happened. It was where most of everyone’s first love

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happened. It was where you learned spring was coming, by the way the blossoming trees invited you to see the world again, where the sun stayed longer, and so did the people.

It was where I aired out every young thought I had. A waft of that familiar green brought the years all at once, and I could hear that Beatles song play again: Nothing’s gonna change my world Nothing’s gonna change my world It had been a while since I had time like this, and I didn’t know what to make of myself.

••• I rubbed my eyes open to find myself on a park bench. It took a moment for me to gather myself and realize that I had fallen asleep. But for how long? No matter—the sun still lingered, almost as though it was waiting for me to stir awake.

Bottles of soju in hand, I made my way through the grassy hillside to the groupings of large dirt mounds. I walked and walked, till I recognized her: the dirt mound that had become of my mother.

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“Hi, Umma.” I let out. “Your son’s here to see you.”

“Umma,” I managed. “I’m sorry.”

After a moment, I found my way to circling the soju over the mound. Crouching down to place the bottle on the ground, I lit two cigarettes—one for her and one for myself. I made a small dent in the dirt right beside the mound, just deep enough to hold the cigarette in place.

The stream of tears was hot against my cheek. It was as though I had swallowed a white flame and fire was expanding within me, reducing me to nothingness. The cigarette turned stale between my fingers and fell to ashes.

“Menthol, the one you like.”

For a long while, I sat there, trying to smoke my cigarette, and watching hers become ash.

I tried to think of how long it had been since I had last visited her.

Of what I would tell her if she were here. What she would say. As I sat there, the lump grew. The cancerous shame that the cigarette was all I had to bring built up in my throat.

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How long would it be till she completely eluded me; the texture of her skin, the sound of her voice, and her tenderness would grow obscure. It would be but a matter of time. It was always only a matter of time.

How lonely I would leave her, again, alone on this hillside, married to the earth by the dirt that weighed on her.

What a wretched thing it was, that I could not speak life into my mother as the broker had promised.

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It was then that I remembered something. As I breathed through blurred vision, I found myself fumbling through my pockets, feeling for the shape of my wallet. When I finally managed to get it out, I opened the back slot to find Ms. Kim. Acting quickly, I took out the lighter and held it against the picture until a small fire was born. It burned, the flame grew, till it all gathered as a silent pile of gray next to the cigarette. I picked up the ashes and scattered them over the hill. There was a distant hope, one I didn’t know how to bring closer, that ash would cling to dirt and each would be less alone.

When I felt I had wrung out every tear within my body, I made my way back to the gosiwon. It was as though my limbs were built of paper and had been soaked in all that soju.

I felt my stomach rumble as I entered the building, but the desire had long been emptied out. If only you could digest these dealings as you would a meal. How easy that would

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make it all.

I sat at my desk with a pen in hand. An hour passed, and then another. And I learned that I did not have the words to write myself out of what I had created.

Instead, I found that I had reached the end of the second bottle of soju. I looked out the window. Tonight, the moon was full.

It was funny how nausea made you feel so light. Like a speck of dust without aim or direction.

Perhaps it was the drink, I thought, as I felt the rough edge of the soju cap prick my flesh.

Perhaps I had downed it too quickly on an empty stomach.

Perhaps the broker was but a good salesman, and fixedness was nowhere to be found.

I looked at the window frame that boxed in the moon. A rectangle the size of two sheets of paper. My mind wandered.

To the past year of coffee, eggs, and ramyeon. To the narrowness of my shoulders. I wondered if my width would be greater than that of the window. It

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possessed me immediately: the enormity of that power, how it would take one act to end it all.

There could be no change more extraordinary and spectacular.

And yet, how simple it all seemed. It would be a matter of seconds. The world would go on without me. I would become a mound of dirt and lay there, on ground that no man will be able to cultivate.

I paused. What had I just heard? Blood felt like fire as it pulsated within me. I rushed to get myself to my feet and peered my head out the window, into the alleyway. The mass of flesh and blood that colored the pavement glowed vibrant and red like fruit.

••• It was the next day when I learned that it was the old man next door that threw himself

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out the window. That he had suffered with depression for quite some time, that he was not quite the same after his injury at the construction site. It never occurred to me before that night how small and fragile his frame was.

And when I later found the second persimmon round in my pocket, I threw it away without looking at it.

I moved out the day after, into another gosiwon. So did most of the other tenants. Through all this, the broker was quiet and compliant. There was another gosiwon, and another one, and another one after that. And I kept trying to write through it all, consumed by the thought that I could, through my words, will a garden to grow from the old man’s grave. From my mother’s grave. But the words wouldn’t come. It has been many years since, and my labor has yet to bear fruit.

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nd Rhythm, Form and Rhy esby Flux: Nathan Oglesby ad on Plato, Whitehead on la and J Dilla and J Dilla an

ckett Oscar Luckett Oscar ed. Carol Chen ed. Carol Ch 19

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ythm, Form and Rhythm,

by Flux: Nathan Oglesby Fl n Plato, Whitehead on Pla nd J Dilla and J Dilla and J

Luckett Oscar Luckett Osc hen ed. Carol Chen ed. Ca Loop

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Nathan Dufour Oglesby, (aka Sir Kn8) is an emcee and academic known for his channel Nathanology. For most of the past decade he’s lived in New York City, where he’s built a distinctively didactic approach to Hip-Hop, using the form to explore concepts drawn from philosophy, history and the physical sciences.

He received his PhD in Classics in 2018 from the Graduate Center, CUNY, with a dissertation on organicism in the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Plato. By day he teaches Latin language and Greek Civilization at City College of New York; by night he versifies vociferously and wields microphones on stages.

This conversation was conducted by Oscar Luckett and edited for brevity and clarity by Carol Chen.

Gadfly: To start out, can you tell us what you’ve been working on lately?

Nathan Oglesby: I’ve been teaching an online philosophy course that is my attempt at a holism of form and function.

It’s part of this network that I’m building with my friend called Grokist. He took the name from Stranger in a Strange Land, the sci-fi novel, where “grokking” is to understand something with total nuance.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Elon Musk just announced that his AI bot is called Grok. In any case, the course is trying to re-construct an educational space that is what I imagine the early philosophical experiment was like in the ancient Greek world. We’re trying to recreate

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this idea of an Ancient Greek skhole, which means leisure.

And that’s where we get the word school, the leisure space where you’re chilling together, you’re talking about stuff.

You’re not just talking about it idealistically, but in terms of our actual political crisis.

This is ultimately a strategic, popularizing gesture, because some of the people coming through have no philosophical background, while others are really well-read. My main work right now is in that – developing an “ecosophy,” a wisdom of the home.

At the end of the day, I’m more an artist than a philosopher, but philosophy just became my theme. My personal goal, whether it be prescriptive

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to the world’s needs or selfjustification, is to recover the performative aspects of philosophy, to go back to the pre-Socratics, who were still writing and performing poetry. Reembedding and remarrying speculative thought in art seems like the jam right now. I think we’ve lost a valuable vessel for the dissemination of philosophy – part and parcel of embodying philosophy is in its artistic expression, its praxis connection, the sense that this actually means something for your life. It’ll hit you in the same way that religion hits people, or it’ll hit you the same way revolutionary media hits you.

Perhaps the best point of entry to your philosophical work might be the previous Gadfly theme: Margins.

Alfred North Whitehead’s famous comment, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”

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furnished the title of your dissertation “Footnotes to Footnotes.” One way I read Whitehead’s vision of the history of philosophy is as a buildup of marginalia.

Why is Whitehead’s footnote analogy so compelling to you?

And more generally, why do philosophers love the footnote so much?

I think the footnote comment is a good window into Whitehead’s thought because he himself pulls from Plato so much, and so that ended up being the focus of a lot of my inquiry: in what ways Whitehead’s work, specifically, was a footnote to Plato. He writes in an especially selfaware type of way, in that he’s both unpacking the claim that all of Western philosophy is derivative from the quandaries that Plato brooches, but then also deeper than that, he’s reconstructing and rehabilitating Plato. There’s also the formal element of the footnote: if all of philosophy is

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footnotes, and then footnotes to footnotes to footnotes, then the marginalia is, as the ancient Greeks would call it, the scholia, the stuff that twists around the text and is literally in the margins of the ancient manuscripts. Part of me recently is going, “enough.”

On a personal level, I have been feeling an informational overload recently, and know I’m not alone in feeling that. We’ve developed a technological apparatus of commentary that is so robust, pervasive, invasive in our lives, that you begin to feel like your own consciousness is a kind of noxious footnote on your reality – that you’re overburdened by your comments on yourself and your comments on other people, comments on people’s comments, et cetera. I’ve been trying to figure out what that leaves for philosophy for a number of reasons, first, because there’s always more to say, and yet, in some important sense, we’ve said an awful lot.

There are those who feel like it ends with Wittgenstein. That language games or Critical

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Theory end the conversation when the apparatus bends back upon itself. The adventure ain’t over, but the show has jumped the shark. It doesn’t mean that the story can’t continue, but is philosophy really still the same story anymore? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do feel deeply disinterested in being academically involved in philosophy.

To pick up the ecological thread throughout your work, it seems like a footnote lends itself to the idea of a tree of knowledge, with Plato being the root and all subsequent philosophers emanating from him. Is this the aptest ecological metaphor? Your insistence on the footnote as a bidirectional process seems closer to what Deleuze described in A Thousand Plateaus with knowledge forming self-referential, interdependent, rhizomatic connections.

Deleuze and Whitehead have so much in common conceptually.

I always find it interesting and ironic that Deleuze was the

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one people ended up latching on to. There’s something sexy about continental philosophy because of its critical bent and its tangled web kind of vibe that people can read as poetry, whereas Whitehead had a more retrogressive and antiquated style. But in emphasis, I think Whitehead was clearer, and also more optimistic. Some call process philosophy modern constructivism. Sure, we can analyze everything, but let’s focus on the world as it builds itself, rather than looking at the world as a construction that we’re stuck with and have to chop up. People like the rhizomatic thesis partially because they are addicted to the exclusivity and inexhaustibility of it. But if there’s bottomless depth, you’re never actually saying the thing. If what we’re actually trying to do is liberate consciousness through a clear picture of a world that builds itself and then put that into action, that’s different, and it appeals to a totally different crowd and is more Whitehead’s style. Someone in the Whitehead-ean category is Ken Wilber. His ideas on Integral Theory encompass this whole movement, but he deliberately wrote in such a way that it could be read by the philosophy first-timer – but then it totally fizzled out.

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I think one of the reasons it doesn’t have staying power is ultimately because it was clear.

It’s almost like there’s these two fates, you can be clear and have people be really into it for a little bit, and then it almost becomes quasi-self-help. That’s the path of pop philosophy. On the other hand, if you’re doing Continental Philosophy, you can exist with greater longevity, but you’re ultimately just a snake eating its own tail.

I was hoping to get a little bit more into the specifics of process philosophy. If process philosophy involves breaking down processes into mereologically homogenous sub-processes, could you speak to the fractal nature that seems to imply? What happens as you go down in layers and layers of sub processes? Is it processes all the way down, or do you get some kind of insoluble sub-process at the base of everything?

Honestly, I am ambivalent on this point in my interpretation of Whitehead. As I was reading John Cobb’s summary of what actually exists for Whitehead I was brought back to this old ambiguity: are there fundamental entities in the way quantum physics

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would describe something like an elementary particle, or are they fundamental in a totally different way, better described as everything being mutually constitutive throughout the entire matrix.

Keep in mind, Whitehead’s task is descriptive and poetic.

He’s trying to find a systematic expression for something that ultimately resists systematicity, another interesting tension.

But what’s better to emphasize is that there are fundamental entities that behave in a way that is inherently relational.

Should we adopt option A – in quantum physics, we have things that appear to slip in and out of existence? Or is option B better – to say that the macro determines the micro and the micro determines the macro at the same time? It’s really just a matter of what mode of analysis you’re engaged in at a given moment. Process and Reality is great and everything, but I feel like his shorter works like Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought, which allow that ambivalence to exist more, kind of get at it more, because he’s being a little bit more laconic about it. He’s more honest about the things that we can’t quite say.

Because he was entering into uncharted philosophical territory, I think of

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Whitehead’s (and his ilk) as being at risk of being potentially opaque or alienating in two directions: they either coin new terms, jargon, or rely on imprecise, conventional language.

Even though Whitehead was British, he was really American in the sense of pragmatism.

They say that America’s real contribution to philosophy is pragmatism, and he exists within that tradition. He’s trying to describe actual reality as we encounter it, obvious empirical facts like there I am and there you are, while also including the stuff that we just know in our hearts, like the fact that I feel and I can do shit. So there’s freedom.

So let’s describe that rather than reasoning it away. So that’s what makes him do his backflips. But he’s doing backflips for that sake, not doing backflips following some deductive rationalism that results in apparent absurdities that you just have to accept.

It’s trying to honor what just seems to be true, and what we just feel is true. He’s trying to account for something that humans just want to be able to assert, just like Plato is doing the same thing with things like the existence of a soul that he mostly just wanted to be

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true and because people say it’s true. It’s a similar kind of argument that he makes to assert that it’s certainly possible that there could be extrasensory perception, or that there could be telepathy. He’s trying to account for what we actually experience, and make room for these concepts that might not be rationalizable.

How do you then square that with a work like Principia Mathematica, written by Whitehead along with Russell, which was committed to the task of rationalizing math and attempting to be entirely deductive, which then fell flat when Gödel comes along? Are those two works in a totally different model?

I think he really took Gödel’s work on the chin and said “yep, that’s not the way to go about it,” and he switched gears into Plato and metaphysics. By the time he wrote Process and Reality, he knew that it was going to piss everybody off and be way out of fashion. Someone like Russell tried to develop his

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thought more in continuity with that early attempt at total rationalization, and tried to offer a systematic philosophy, whereas Whitehead, even though he seems so systematic, fully digested that there wouldn’t be a complete system. That’s part of why Process and Reality is kind of like The Republic, in the sense that it’s the author’s most famous work and the worst introduction to his thought.

It’d be better to read Adventures of Ideas, Modes of Thought, or even The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, which is just recordings of conversations he had. That’s a more interesting place to start, because you get the protean nature of what his project was in way sharper relief, instead of these more complicated tensions that emerged later.

I want to suss out this connection between Plato’s concept of Ananke or necessity, with Whitehead’s creativity, this aimless energy of becoming as he describes

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it. I know Whitehead famously said he was never able to read Hegel, but engaged with different Hegelian thinkers.

Hegel and Whitehead both seem to offer “becoming” as a basic system of logic, with Hegel presenting his idea of historical contingency – the result giving its cause the appearance of necessity – and Whitehead presenting his idea of valuation – the transition from the potential to the actual. To use an example from your dissertation, when an electron “decides” to emit instead of absorb a photon, Whitehead might say that it is an ingression of an eternal object into actual occasions, whereas Hegel would say it was historically necessary, not predetermined, that the electron would emit the photon. So I have a doublepronged question: where do you find the influence of Hegel in Whitehead’s thinking, if you think it exists at all, and more generally, how do you think process philosophy can

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lend itself to the philosophy of history.

I don’t know if it was really an inability to read Hegel as much as misgivings about the necessary nature that it sort of seems to propose it be read with. Hegel’s writing presents itself as detailing necessary historical processes, and there is something in Whitehead that rejects this highly deductive procedure where you’re seeing the necessary unfolding of a certain dialectical process that just has to be a certain way. I don’t see why it has to be that way, and it’s something that lingers into Marxism, and other species of thought like Critical Theory and Techno Futurism. It turns Marxists into political Calvinists, even though they want a great world that I also want.

But if we go back to Plato’s notion of psyche, it’s the principle of the possibility of freedom. And if we also want to preserve the possibility

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of multiplicity we need Whitehead’s creativity, which is this weird interplay of chaotic mutual influence, but also freedom of the individual parts. So there is a limitation introduced by the very fact that you have multiple competing and collaborating forces in play. But it’s not a deterministic limitation. It’s a fecund and productive one, that creates weird contortions and different jam sessions. It’s a melody and structure discernible within free jazz, rather than an algorithm that produces something predictable.

And that freedom that Whitehead allows is really politically productive. Ethical and political action could use a big dose of reorientation toward the personal. I learned about Personalism through reading about Dorothy Day, the founder of this thing called the Catholic Worker, which was an anarchist organization and newspaper from the 1920s that still exists now. Her idea was that the insight of the New Testament was not about the law in an abstract way, as it was in the Judaic tradition, but about the immediacy of the law as applied, in which case the law actually dissolves, because it’s about you and another human being. From

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this she develops an ethic of care where we constitute each other therefore we’re responsible to one another. I find there is politically relevant insight there. I almost think there should be some sort of suggested time management system – if you’re protesting this many times a week, you should also do an equal amount of work in a community garden, feeding the hungry, or rebuilding urban infrastructure.

To create economy, in the etymological sense of oikos, the house, measure your participation in the local oikos, not just the macro oikos of the entire planet.

The climate movement has not succeeded in protesting its way out of the climate problem.

So, what do we need to do instead? Put our money and time where our mouth is about it being a mutually constitutive world. If you’re someone who is a spiritualist who thinks that the world makes itself and is alive, then deal with the little part of it that you’re touching, you little alive cell. And the reason I bring that all up is that I think it’s ultimately rooted in a failure to appreciate the kind of stuff that Whitehead is into. Specifically that mutually constitutive nature of reality: if I really think about my body as

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a society, and I meditate on that mystery constantly, then how can I not feel impelled to think about where my food comes from? And the person I meet on the street who has no food?

Then instead of, do I give them a buck or not, it’s more like holy fucking shit, I have got to get them to a shelter right now.

That, to me, is a more likely outcome of radically living in Whitehead’s logic and ontology.

I was hoping that you could lend your perspective as a musician and beat-maker to what I think is a particularly salient instantiation of process philosophy. Dan Charnas’ writing in Dilla Time seems to imply that the drum machine was a product of the industrial revolution, or at least its ethos of regulation, and that hip-hop’s use of looped and borrowed cultural material, created not only a musical, but temporal intervention. His book focuses on J Dilla, the pioneer of an elastic time-feel rhythm, as the protagonist of this breaking. Does the elasticity of Dilla’s music evidence a symbiosis between mind and the experience of time? And if time is composed cognitively post-hoc, as process philosophy would suggest, how does a song, like “Come Get It,” disrupt

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the listener’s experience of regulated time and reality.

I have this long Apple note, that I don’t know what I’m doing with yet, called “quantization of reality.” It’s a distressed note, where I talk about feeling hemmed in by the compositional experience of being an artist. I open up the grid on my DAW, and feel like my life is equally quantized to a grid. Dilla is such a good hero for breaking the iron-clad momentum of that.

By being a sample based artist, who is nevertheless injecting those samples into our space, he is creating tension – we know it’s pre-recorded material that has its own texture but he’s playing it, he’s making the choices, piece by piece.

And so we still recognize it as integrated music.

When I say integration, a human being has a certain finitude as an organism, as a “society” with a dominant occasion, experiencing its own finitude as something that is able to create direct cause and effect relationships that create rhythm. It resonates to me for one of the reasons that I like hearing the grooves and the crackles of a record because, even if I’m not conscious of how the technology works, I’m

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literally experiencing a needle going through pads. So it’s a question of proximity – I’m very close to that action, in terms of me being the effective cause that brings about that resonance, that propagation of a sound wave.

Now, I am programming a track and don’t even take the physical time to play it. Instead, I pull a loop, then I press play. I can be vibing really hard, but still operating on a different plane of engagement, a different plane of cause and effect. When programming a beat, I run on a different timeline altogether.

When I’ve been critical of social media and technological solution-ism in general, people take me the wrong way, because they think that I’m against the device – I’m not against the device, I’m concerned about the way in which we interact with the device, and are forced to interact with the device.

Technocratic proliferation means we’re not able to integrate all layers of

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experience down to reality.

This integration, to me, is what philosophy is about. It’s about going down through my own matter to the source.

And usually thinkers, like Whitehead for example, end up with God. You go upward or downward or whatever direction you want to call it, into the different new terminus points that we create, such as these devices, creating layers. But experientially, I think it’s an inherent good to have continuity throughout being.

You want to be able to express that continuity of being, and you want to be able to feel that continuity of being. What does this mean? Ethically, it means I want to be able to make digitally programmed sampled music, and I want to be able to expedite that process. But I also want to fucking play it. And it’s going to slap if I do. Similarly, I want to automate my processes of food production so that I can feed a lot of people and have a lot of leisure time. But I also want to know how to grow my tomatoes. I want to actually touch it and get my hands

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dirty. Because in that case, there’s continuity. I’m not Ted Kaczynski here, I don’t want to be a Primitivist. But I want to have a sense of relationship with the whole process. There’s something pessimistic about the notion that we can just jettison our bodies because it implies that there’s part of matter that’s less desirable because it doesn’t continue in the same way.

This question of integration goes to the following question I had on a dissertation from the late 1990s out of Berkeley by a musicologist named Vijay Iyer. In his dissertation, he argued that rhythm can only be understood as a function and byproduct of human physical motion. In other words, musical motion is essentially audible human motion. In your video essay on the etymology of Hip Hop, you trace the term’s roots back to “conscious movement.” Would you agree that the concept of groove, physically aligning yourself to a performance of music, disrupts Cartesian Dualism?

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This brings me back to where we started our conversation with Whitehead and Plato.

In Whiteheadean terms, the composition of processes that constitute me are a “society.”

We can also say that they are a “jam session” with a jam that feels good being harmonious, We could also say that the just person is in a harmony of their parts, or if we’re thinking of it in a panpsychist way, an elective harmony of the parts, where the subprocesses are leaning into a collective relationship, rather than being forced into it. Whitehead makes such a point about distinguishing between elective and organic order versus imposed order – he insists that Plato has been wrongly accused of being the apostle of imposed order. In fact, Whitehead was all about a universe that creates itself, using the analogy of a universal creator who does so to create themselves. When a human is in relationship with rhythm and has natural rhythm, the result is music that creates itself. If this thing is creating itself, it will have variation because that is

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what rhythm is, rhythm is an interchange of things.

You can’t have a rhythm of one unit.

Quantization is akin to imposed order. osthoc order is just many degrees of abstraction away from order as we actually experience it, which is collaborative and immediate

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and contiguous. There’s no inherent problem with quantization – I quantize all the time.

But I also want to build my confidence, which occurs best when I’m actively involved in the rhythm – it’s analogous to being actively involved in the relationships that are in your life.

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eries Boy Love Series Boy Love on: Female Panopticon: Fema beration Sexual Liberation Sex Capitalist Through the Capital y Reification of Gay Identity R

ach) Phurichaya (Preach) Phu apong Apintanapong Apintan 33

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e Series Boy Love Series Boy L ale Panopticon: Female Pano exual Liberation Sexual Libera list Through the Capitalist Thr Reification of Gay Identity Reif

urichaya (Preach) Phurichay napong Apintanapong Apinta Loop

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“This genre constructs a realm of experience which is situated between the two systems of patriarchy and matriarchy – an absence of heterosexism.”

Paradoxes of Boy Love Series Production Although same-sex marriage is illegal in its countries of production, Boy Love (abbreviated as BL) East Asian television dramas have garnered a worldwide cult status with Twitter’s global trends list. From Thailand’s 2gether: The Series to China’s The Untamed, these cultural productions of queer Asia have served as a soft-power campaign in the distribution of embedded Asian cultures.

However, the majority of stories are crafted by female writers who divert the dramas from the real experiences that gay men encounter, constructing a new sexual politics to unshackle the longstanding patriarchal system in East Asia. These fabricated stories of gay

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experiences and exclusion of female leads are constructed as a panopticon for female viewers to objectify masculinity and liberate themselves from the entrenched system of sexual oppression. Accordingly, the BL genre proves to be a capitalist reification of gay identity which criminalizes queerness, perpetuating the social gender hierarchical structure as a revenge against the patriarchs.

Coping Mechanisms from the Fetishisations of East Asians Since East Asian women are expected to be submissive and available as sexual commodities due to fetishisations of East Asians, watching the BL Series allows female audiences to disassociate themselves from the typical patriarchal dynamics in mainstream heterosexual-

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focused media. The Combahee River Collective argues that radical politics do not come through working to end someone else’s oppression, but come directly out of our own identity.1 Similarly, the BL Series serves for the satisfaction of the writers themselves, most of whom are heterosexual women. Rather than aiming to speak for the gay community, female writers invent a male character to experience forms of oppression women face, retaliating against patriarchal structures. This strategy echoes Hartman’s methodology in Venus in Two Acts, where the intent isn’t to speak for the oppressed, but to “imagine what cannot be verified.”2 By watching men engaging sexually with men, female audiences can construct a realm of experience which is situated between the two systems of patriarchy and matriarchy— an absence of heterosexism.

Consequently, the BL Series

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does not directly give voice to the LGBT+ community, but fabricates the fantasy where women are exempt from the system of sexual oppression.

The media portrayal of atypical, if not toxic, gay relationships can oddly serve as a coping mechanism for certain female audiences to counteract maledominated narratives.

In the Theory of Love drama, the story revolves around a womanizer Khai who serially dates numerous women, often leaving Third, a feminine male lead, to clean up the emotional aftermath when Khai ends his relationships. The story reaches its breaking point when Third no longer tolerates Khai’s mistreatment, but ultimately, Khai falls for Third and seeks redemption. This toxic dynamic, if transposed into a heterosexual context, might not resonate with female audiences in the same way. The series’ appeal lies in allowing women

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to witness a man being treated poorly or worse than other female characters, mirroring historical portrayals in mainstream drama. Moreover, the series incorporates elements of heterosexuality into the gay relationships by depicting Khai as someone who, in real life, would be seen as too masculine to be gay.

Indeed, his efforts to gain redemption for Third suggests that such actions might not carry the same significance if directed toward another woman, but are exceptionally special when directed toward a man.

These dynamics provide female audiences with a temporary escape from the constraints of typical gender roles, allowing them to immerse themselves in the realm of unrealistic gay experiences.

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Reconstructing Panopticon: Male and Female Gaze in Film The fanciful nature of the BL Series serves as a response to counteract the male gaze within the film industry. Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of male gaze in the 1970s as driven by scopophilia (the love of looking) where classic Hollywood cinema presupposes a male viewer and positions female characters as objects of desire.3 This idea parallels Foucault’s concept of the panopticon, because the male gaze not only involves men observing and objectifying women, but also reinforces the superiority of the gazer over the object of the gaze. Sawaan Biang, which normalizes rape culture, has been remade five times, signifying the internalization

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of the male gaze in societies towards both male and female audiences. Thus, the idea of the female gaze emerged as a reaction to the prevailing hypermasculine perspective in our media,3 shedding light on female desires for authentic experience where women can take charge as the observer.

The BL Series prioritizes the female gaze, which projects a female fantasy onto the male figures in the film.

This is contrasted with the conventional male gaze that objectifies women. The BL Series caters to female pleasure with its disassociation from the male gaze, and also in its actively inserting the female gaze. Akin to Foucault’s panopticon, the BL Series is a “privileged place for observing men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them.”4 The power to judge is now held by women, instead of being centralized among heterosexual males who exercise the male gaze towards passive female individuals. The female gaze

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here is not only focused on observing bodies or perceiving women as superior to men, but also on embracing emotional and personal depth.

In the BL Series, male characters are unafraid of being emotionally fragile and affectionate, as demonstrated in Theory of Love, where audiences can witness the emotional turmoil experienced by both Third and Khai. The BL Series, therefore, serves as a reconstruction of the panopticon in the film industry, allowing women to exercise the female gaze on homosexual male figures by enabling men to display emotional vulnerability as a response to the prevalent male gaze that objectifies women.

Modern Penitentiary Towards Homosexual Men Although the female gaze in the BL Series emphasizes emotional depth in male characters, it also results in objectification of male bodies. The online discussion on idealizing two masculine male leads that flooded on social media have pressured gay men to become physically

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attractive and masculine in order to be accepted by society.

Many female audiences prefer watching two attractive male actors. At the same time, this media criticizes effeminate gay men, most of whom are often portrayed as ridiculous.

The standards subtly infer that gay men need to retain conventional desirable male characteristics to be accepted by women.

The main protagonists are always popular and intelligent, often pursuing a degree in medicine or engineering like those in Sotus: The Series or 2Moons: The Series. This social phenomenon perpetuates toxic traditional masculine ideals and instills hatred towards effeminate gay men.

Regardless of the degree of masculinity portrayed, these characters constantly engage in the process of self-realization and self-objectification. Their bodies are rendered “docile” and are “subjected, used, transformed and improved.”5 It is thus the “metamorphosis of punitive methods,”6 which

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criminalizes gay people and forces them to conform to certain standards in order to be deemed “morally right.”

The public recognition of the BL Series among female fans implies that gay men are abnormal, making it necessary to transform their souls and physical attributes to be socially accepted in society.

The public recognition of the BL Series among female fans implies that gay men are abnormal, making it necessary to transform their souls and physical attributes into what is socially acceptable.

This objectification of gay men is the unconscious birth of the modern penitentiary towards gay men. Gay men are placed under the female gaze surveillance system, a punitive method to manipulate docile bodies of gay men to maximize utility for female audiences.

Deconstructing the Gender Caste System The female gaze panopticon

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through the BL Series rests on the way that heterosexual women broadly define idealized male-male relationships—depicting them as consumable goods under the gender stratification in the modern capitalist system.

Media companies capitalize on the female gaze to manufacture the products that appeal to their audience. The excessive use of jokes about Sarawat’s obsession with Tine’s chest in 2gether: The Series exemplifies the phenomenon, as it reduces the characters to physical attributes for humor and commercial gain, allowing female audiences to subtly objectify masculinity.

This commodification of homosexual relationships has subconsciously constructed a gender stratification like that of a “caste system,”7 a so-called anti-Marxism.

As opposed to Marxist feminism’s assertion about women’s exploitation under capitalism,1 female BL writers employ this capitalist-driven media to restructure the gender-based caste system. In mainstream media, men typically inhabit higher statuses. Similarly,

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women obtain higher statuses than gay men in the context of the BL Series panopticon.

Ultimately, female oppression is partially liberated through the prevalence of the BL Series, but this capitalistic approach in turn perpetuates gender hierarchy by imposing it on gay men.

Myth of Capitalism on Media Although the BL products have constructed harmful surveillance systems towards gay men, this merely stems from the misrepresentation and commercialization of characters. The representation of gay relationships in the BL Series are influenced by the writers, who are predominantly heterosexual women. The lack of the voice of LGBT+ writers results in the limited and inaccurate idealized portrayal of gay experiences. A more nuanced and diverse representation of LGBT+ experiences could be created by narrating both the counter-histories and history of present homosexual relationships,8 as suggested by Hartman. With the inclusion of

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issues of sexual discrimination and coming-out to parents, the diverse range of the BL Series production could foster the connection between gay people and the public, reducing the harmful subjectification from the panopticon. Both the idealized utopia of gender equality and the oppressions that sexual minorities face should be included in the media to accurately portray the struggles and hope of the future rights among oppressed genders.

Conclusion Even though the rise of the BL Series in East Asia has contributed to the increase in visibility of the LGBT+ community, it has not succeeded in dismantling a gender hierarchy.

Audiences exercise the female gaze, which objectifies masculine male figures. Although this may avenge the conventional male gaze which has long taken

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advantage of passive female individuals, it still entrenches hierarchy and objectification.

The commodification of homosexual relationships under capitalism provides the female viewers a sense of empowerment and allows men to show emotional vulnerability, but also subconsciously criminalizes effeminate gay men. It gives rise to the modern penitentiary towards homosexual men and requires them to conform to idealistic standards to gain social acceptance.

Under a feminist capitalism that provides everyone the opportunity to create innovation against oppression, it is of utmost importance that both gender sensitive and gender transformative content in the media accurately reflect the lives among the marginalized sexuality, deconstructing the panoptic surveillance and furthering gender equality.

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Endnotes The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” Feminist Theory Reader, 2016, 128. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315680675-26.

1

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 12. https:// doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

2

Mulvey, L. “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Feminisms”, 1991, 432–442. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813568409-034.

3

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 204, New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

4

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 136, New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

5

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 24, New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

6

Ambedkar, B. R., S. Anand, Arundhati Roy, Santarāma, and Gandhi. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. London: Verso, 2016.

7

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 4. https:// doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

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e Poetic Impression: The P nguage Failure of Languag nd the and the and the an of Poetry Triumph of Poet

olas Vaccaro Nickolas Vacc 43

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Poetic Impression: The Po ge Failure of Language Fa nd the and the and the an try Triumph of Poetry Tri

caro Nickolas Vaccaro Nic Loop

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1 Language inherently and inexorably fails. The very existence of poetry signifies this. Subjective, isolated individuals, who are alone between the primal and silent acting self and the language the self finds produce poetry.

They produce poetry for the communication of a message and to be better understood by another. But without poetry, language must fail. It is too linear, too ordered, too exact, too categorical to convey that which created it, the thought and feeling that surround it, the worldgaze and intention behind it.

Language, if failing to convey one’s intended message to another, must therefore fail to convey oneself, one’s internal feeling and being, to another.

The self recalls through language the other back to

the self. For the self comes to know that the other is an actor, that the self cannot know the self of the other, and thus the self returns and contemplates: are there other selves and where? It seeks to find them by presenting a relational, selfcharacterizing loop of speechaction (utterance) in which the self speaks and acts to become a self in the eyes of the other.

The primal and silent1 self, which does not trace back the path of its thought but simply and brutishly thinks and utters, is necessitated to act in this looping recall for the self’s other. The self thinks of as a self for themself and thinks the former to be an other, a personname, an empty space which a self must inhabit and from which the self emerges and removes its mask of otherness only through active utterance. The primal and silent self thus performs before its other’s eyes to show

Silent for it is primal and animal, for it directs speech by compulsion, but thinks differently from what is said. From the point of the primal and silent thought moves, as ships from a dock, the dock being still and non-intending, and the ships leaving it and moving away.

1

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not the content of an action or utterance but merely the fact of the presence of the action (the gesture and the utterance), that was enacted by a will to perform.

Action and utterance, their sole value for the performed–for other being in their mere enactment, represent a repetition2 of a single point of will, a thought ‘yes,’ which thrusts the self’s body to act and utter but which exists (in the other’s eyes) only as the body acts. The self’s vision of the other’s eyes, and the self’s blindness to its own eyes, is a total and illiberal questioning of the content of the seen, of whether the space for a self that the other’s name opens contains a primal and relationally unknowable, internally unspeakable self. The other’s act of gazing presents an imperative to act in which the gazing other from the perspective of the self assumes their selfness3 and questions, looks for the presence, not the

content, of selfness in the self upon which the other gazes.

This gazing thus marks the point of imposition of the necessity to perform, to speak, upon the self to become a self before the other, whereby the other knows the presence of a self and the self aims at a descriptive knowledge of itself in language.

Utterance traces a point of will and proves the presence of a self before the other only in the time of performance.

The repetition of performed utterance attempts to trace, to create and affirm a self for the other in consistency and preservation through time. But silence must break performance. In the cessation of performed utterance, the self for the other dies. As performance has ended and the self cannot perform again, the self’s attempt to know itself is inevitably futile. In that tragic futility, the self seeks to forget its failure to know

This repetition being inescapable by virtue of the inescapable presence of relations, thus of self-other relations.

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For the gaze only thrusts outward, from the self, and the gazing subject is self-blind.

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itself and returns to unthought performance for the other.

The other comes to know the presence of a performing self and in the performing self comes to know nothing, for it already knows its own primal presence and cannot know its content, its self. In this relational loop of mandated performance for the other, language becomes the medium of drawing self-other relations and the means for answering the other’s call to the self.

Poetry, as will be shown, in its dismissal of the question of its creator’s self, is a movement from a primality through language to another nonlinguistic space of the image, at which one gazes and knows. Poetry, in this dismissal, brings a triumph over language for the self.

We, then, cannot be understood and are thus alone. Our existence is internal, isolated, confined to the self, since the

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self is the only entity that knows it is a self in silence and without performative action— our thought and feeling unspeakable. For the self does not see its body nor its being, the eyes, the face, the relational symbol of the self, is never seen by the self, as even mirrors show not a self but a carcasse, a body. Language, determined to fail the self in the self’s tragic play of performance and performative utterance, is still the self’s blind struggle to know the self’s content, to describe the self, to convey our thought and being. The tragedy, then, is that in the self’s utterance ‘I,’ the self-calling pronoun becomes the object of the self’s4 gaze or thought. Thus, it becomes an object and not the self, just a pronoun referring to the self whose actions the self does not perform but cognizes––another self without a body. In speaking, writing, expressing, we struggle to

Literally, when ‘I’ and its predications are written.

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convey ourselves, our worldgaze,5 our feeling, to another, and speak merely a fragment of that which we intend, translate our entire being and thought and feeling into the linearity of sentences for the world’s understanding, become a shadow, a shell of ourselves to another, achieve a fragmented, failed understanding of what we are. We are an entire, selfcontradictory, immeasurable and insurmountable being reduced to absolute, short, shallow words.

Language, therefore, is an unwavering line, a tyranny which allows neither contradiction—non-language, the gesture, that which is silent and unspoken, the silence from which language comes and sounds—nor human, subjective truth. We must search everywhere else, above and beneath and around words to attempt to understand (however vainly) another’s thought and feeling and being.

Language, therefore, is false—a lie.

2 And yet we are not left in total ignorance, total night. There are the stars and the moon which shine for us, their light for our perception, illuminating the world as we perceive it, light that serves us and is in a sense created by us, existing only as we perceive.

I do not mean to stray. That light is born of the falsity and vanity of language, born of the struggle of language to overcome its impotence and itself. But that light is poetry, not in form but in the way of utterance, the unuttered which is known, the unspeakable which is seen, the movement of a tenuous and sickly being, still in pride and desert.

Poetry not as substance, syntax, form or intention but as action, expression, aggression towards the thing (as Pound conceived in “A Few Don’ts”) The feverish clamor and dissonance of words that end in impact (as

The absolute gaze of the subject, which, for it is wholly the subject’s, can only be absolute.

The world the subject knows and thinks objective.

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Pound called it), impression of raw human feeling, thought, being. This collision—of author and reader, existence and empathy, thought and understanding, humanity and humanity—this impression of feeling, of being, produces an understanding, finds message and meaning completely senselessly, instinctually, unforcedly, unwittingly. A collision not past a process of looping but despite it, a touching that was unthought and unreasoned, but felt only, that it touched, and life was there, both of the one who felt and who touched.

Meaning need not be labored for, phrases need not be explained, expressions need not be made literal, the writing need not and must not be reduced to a construction of technique and wit, a formula, a commodity.

Poetry is the utterance that

cannot be uttered in the relational and appeasing movement of speech and address. Poetry is the fruit and the body which rot to dust, the stars that endure past time and history. It moves from self to self a representation of how one exists and signifies for the reader the being–in-theworld, the being-in-themselves by which they live, which they want to see in totality.

By necessity they search for an other to acknowledge this.

Tracing a form, looping, and performing before the other’s mandate to perform, the body’s dance before the other in which the self forgets its search for a self, is here forgotten. The poetic word is written without reason, in the subjective selfnecessity of impulsion, neither in performance for an other6 nor in expression of a self. That which is written, that which the rational and self-cognizing self

Poetry as non-performative, for non-reasoned, non-relational, blind and deaf to the other, an utterance after the self hears the self and utters the heard. The poetic utterance is one that moves forth willfully and blindly, without the looping tracing of cognition that the selfother relation mandates and that effects performance. A blind movement outside scientific, historical, informational specificity, an embodiment of the mystical, the enactment of the mystical, flesh touching flesh and impressing, finger to face, is poetry.

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neither knows nor recognizes, is poetry, and it triumphs where language fails in oppressed performance. Poetry’s is a triumph that sought not to triumph, that sought not to say anything (for saying is relational), that sought not to relate, but by which the self lived, by which it breathed and was no longer a mute point, but had as its expression life, had life as the action which made it an actor, and so a self, and so of value.

That there is only life and self, a life that is a self, to whom images are objects, and language and thought and the objects of the world are unknown, is the symbolism of art. This is the one art that is behind the many modes of art, that bids them move forth, as a dock bids, not in speech but by its mere being a dock. It is the art that is poetry in spite of language, touching the reader, the self, impressing them with images, which reveal that there is only a self that lives is the poem’s symbolism. For the poem is

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read, not made in utterance, not passed from a self to an other, but is itself an object, from which the self, the reader, feels no mandate to perform, to forget one’s selfness, an object that agrees to look at, and in it finds a determination of that which is unutterable, and so unknown by the self, but found in the nonliving object, a determination of being, the condition of life in its tragedy and its primality.

Poetry, like objective truth, silently exists. The poetry meant here is the poetic which stands behind the written word and utters its meaning, a conduit of expressing the unutterable and primal in whatever manifestation of formal art.

It exists by and for itself and is itself an end. And poetic message is seen, heard, and then instantly internalized by the reader, for it is of the internal human world and cannot survive outside it. Poetic message is felt by the reader as if their own feeling, thought as if their own thought, lived as if

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their own being—remembered, embodied, not learned.

Language is then poetry’s carrier. Poetry is not language; it surrounds, transcends language. Poetry, therefore, is not the formal poem, the latter merely a negative oppressed language.

A positive movement outward from language is the work of the poetic image, which contorts the language and to which the language, in its grotesque contortion, points. Poetry is the means and end by which the individual reaches the thing (the object, their own thought, their being) and impresses it

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onto another (the reader).

We thus find that poetry overcomes the failure of language: it overcomes language. Poetry, if not language, is feeling, thought, human existence. Language does no more than surround, approach the thing; poetry lunges at it and takes it for its own.

Poetry, then, is aggression; it is conquest of and triumph over language, over the thing, and over ourselves.

Poetry transcends and overcomes. It is unspeakable, unreasonable, and nothing if not human.

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t, Good Vibrations: Art, G nd Sound Identity and Sou ka with Miya Masaoka wi

Kwon Yunah Kwon Yunah ed. Lily Kwak ed. Lily Kwa ed. Chimelu Ani ed. Chime 53

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Good Vibrations: Art, Good und Identity and Sound Id ith Miya Masaoka with M

Kwon Yunah Kwon Yuna ak ed. Lily Kwak ed. Lily K elu Ani ed. Chimelu Ani ed Loop

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Miya Masaoka is a composer, sound artist, and musician investigating sonic and spatial perception, the natural world, and sociohistorical themes in contemporary classical and experimental music.

She is also an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and director of the Sound Art Program.

Her recent projects include a piece written for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC) involving research in spatial audio composition.

This interview was conducted by Yunah Kwon, and was edited for brevity and clarity by Lily Kwak and Chimelu Ani.

Gadfly: One of the things that interested me about your work is the diversity of artistic mediums you work in.

Your recent installations and performances have involved plants, recorded sounds from nature, chairs, insects — whatever you’re obsessed with at the moment. Could you speak to the project you are working on now?

Miya Masaoka: When working on a project, different questions present themselves as I become more involved in it, so the project evolves and develops. I just lived for a year in Rome and became very involved in the history of sound and certain aspects of spatial understanding and ideas of what dimensionality is, and how perspective was understood in the Renaissance.

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I’m applying my research to contemporary ideas of space in a commission with EMPAC in Rensselaer Polytechnic to create compositions for new technology called Wave Field Synthesis, which has an array of hundreds of speakers. It’s able to create a spatial listening world, a kind of immersive experience, but not quite.

It’s very interesting to think about how people during the Renaissance conceived of three dimensional space, in Brunelleschi’s work and in draftsmanship of a point that’s disappearing in three dimensional space, and relating that to how we think of space now. I realized that it’s really an invention of our time, what we think of as the foreground, the middleground, and the background, and how a composer is supposed to

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compose for sounds in these different ‘parts’ of space. I find this all very intriguing because I myself learn about how I conceive of sound and how the listener might conceive of sound.

You mentioned in your biography that you’re a polyglot. What’s the relationship between language, music and communication for you?

For some background, I lived in France for a number of years. And I also have lived in Germany. And I’ve also lived in Italy. And then I had a Fulbright and lived in Japan.

I feel that learning other languages is a real way of gaining empathy and insight into another culture. When we are able to communicate with someone in their mother tongue, the level of communication is perhaps on a deeper level, or a more natural level. It’s a pathway into having a stronger connection to people with different life experiences, sociopolitical backgrounds, and insight into the culture and the way of thinking of

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people living in other countries.

More than ever, now is the golden age of language learning because there’s the internet and possibilities of blogs, newspapers, etc. So language is a very rich way of gaining empathy for other people’s ideas.

Should art always aim to be communicative in some way?

I think art ends up being communicative, whether one wants it to or not, and anything that’s in the public realm becomes an act of exhibition and an act of performance, an act of communication. How it gets perceived within that relationship is something else.

For example, for my students, how their work gets externally communicated is one aspect of the creation of the act, but it’s not necessarily the guiding act. That can be, and often is, a more internal experience.

A lot of your performances and installations are interactive — it’s not just a still piece of artwork hung up in a museum that people gaze at. I was wondering what your

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thoughts are on performances that move in time and space with the audience, letting the performance live with the audience.

I did have one piece that went on for 12 hours. And there was an idea for another that went on for 12 days, 12 months and 12 years. In these kinds of durational pieces, there’s an aspect of temporality that transcends being in the moment. It’s a part of being in the moment but also an awareness and a consciousness that moments and moments and moments go forever. We’re a part of this space time continuum that we don’t know that much about, but we know we’re a part of it, and we’re trying to understand where we fit into it. And what does that mean? What does it feel like to be a part of it and to see another person next to you experiencing something and also being a part of it? It brings up a lot of these questions.

I’m really moved by this idea of the infinite. I think, ultimately, we create artwork, music works, or sound works

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on things that are moving for us. Things we want to express but we might not have the words for it. Or we have an idea that comes to us that perhaps encapsulates a kind of feeling of what it means to be in the world. When I do get that feeling, and it’s not every day, then I am driven to create something.

And I will stop at nothing. I will work day and night. I won’t sleep sometimes, I won’t live a normal life. I just become so driven by something until I feel some satisfaction that I’ve attained what I wanted.

Do you ever get a break, or is your mind relentlessly generating new ideas?

For whatever reason I’m in a dream period right now. I’m dreaming a lot. And every time I wake up, I have three or four dreams that I remember.

So I’ve started to write them down. I do know that there is this dreams world, and I wake up exhausted. And I think “Why am I so tired, I just woke up in the morning.” But when I remember my dreams,

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I remember that I was on some covered wagon going across the trail. Of course I’m going to be tired, I had to deal with all these problems, or there was this beautiful landscape in my dream, or I’m dangling off a rope somewhere.

I find that really interesting because I don’t tend to dream a lot.

Everyone does though. You do dream a lot, you just don’t remember. When you get more attuned to the memories of the dreams, you start to remember them more. I enjoy my memories of my dreams because when I’m talking in another language, and I don’t remember the word, I’m trying to reach in my brain for that word, and it’s almost like the same feeling of reaching for a dream that I’ve forgotten.

When I go into another language, it’s like being with a friend, a very close, dear friend that I’ve forgotten about or haven’t been talking to for a while, even though it’s a language, it’s not a person. So

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dreams are a really important part of everything for me.

I understand more modern, abstract or nonrepresentational art to allow viewers to interpret and experience the art in their own way, without a predetermined narrative or purpose imposed by the artists. Art, though, is inevitably charged with enshrouded socio-political meanings. I’m thinking specifically about your work “Ritual For Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches.”

First, could you give us some background on that piece?

So that piece, ‘Ritual for Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches,’ was actually about my history as a JapaneseAmerican born in the United States. All of my family were put into prison camps during World War II, and if I had been born 14 years earlier, I also would have been born in prison camps in the United States. So it’s definitely shaped my personal narrative

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and way of seeing the world.

My piece was done in the early 90s, when Judith Butler and other theorists were writing about new evidence that the DNA differences between races and genders were very, very small. With the point being that there wasn’t that much of a biological difference between races and genders as there was in the social world. My history of all my family being in the prison camps for four years was due to one drop of Japanese blood. It was based on the rule that decided whether you were considered a Native American based on your blood, lineage, etc. It was this very artificial application of these rules that themselves only existed to force Native Americans into

on a table and there were these three and a half inch large cockroaches that were crawling on me. I also used red laser beams and burglar alarms, so that when the cockroaches went across one part of my body, the burglar alarm would trigger, and there would be a sampled sound of the cockroaches. It’s a natural sound, but it’s a very electronic sound. It sounds like it was produced by a synthesizer. The bugs trigger their own sounds, and the composition is based on the movements of the insects on me. They’re roaming around my body as if it’s a blank slate, and then they’re exploring where to go. It’s trying to get at this sense of the human body being in the camps.

reservations and enable a genocide.

As an audience member, if I hadn’t known anything about your history and background, I would have just seen a body with cockroaches crawling on it. While that might make me feel uncomfortable, I still would not have understood the full context behind that piece. How much of your artwork’s meaning do you

So there’s this idea that the human body is a blank slate upon which these social implications of gender and race are projected. My work was a response to all of the discussion going on in the 90s.

For the piece itself, I was naked

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leave to be determined by the viewer’s interpretation versus what you mean to communicate?

We try not to give any kind of instructions or tell someone what to think, or how to feel.

I think there’s a real power in abstraction. What’s important for me is that people think for themselves, and they go away with different conclusions.

It’s not foreseen or foretold, preempted in some way where I want to tell them, in a didactic or pedantic way, how they should think.

There’s this openness of interpretation.

That’s a very important part of the interaction with the public. So while I always have an intention when making a piece, my goal isn’t to tell people how to feel about it.

A lot of your work involves music and composition.

What is the role of a musical instrument to you? Is there

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a meaningful difference between a musical instrument that produces specific timbres and tones compared to, say recordings or computer sound programs?

I had a Sensei, a teacher, Togi Sensei, who was a Gagaku master. Gagaku is the orchestral, Japanese Imperial music. He traced his lineage back over 1000 years in this one instrument called the Hichiriki, which is an oboe-type of instrument.

It’s a double reed instrument and it sounds a bit like cicadas, it has an insect-like sound quality to it. Gagaku is considered the oldest written form of orchestral music in the world, and musicians from India, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China (this was before these nationstate names were established) came together during the Tang Dynasty and improvised and created these pieces. We have the record of the pieces from India and the names of

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the monks who came from India, and the pieces that they brought with them. We played these pieces from more than 1000 years ago.

Togi Sensei came from the Imperial Court music life, he was a part of it from when he was a little boy.

He said musical instruments have their own type of spirit, and they have their own sacred part of them.

They aren’t just an object, there’s something else there. These instruments, many of them are made out of wood. They’re very organic. They were a plant. They had a relationship to the Earth, to the Sun. They were a living thing at one point.

In that sense it’s a different kind of material, historical material, perhaps — a kind of energy that transpired, physiologically speaking, with how that wood came to be. That kind of history is very interesting and unique in terms of how musical instruments are made and what that means.

Of course, I use the computer all the time. It’s like an extension of my brain, of myself. I use it in music. I just

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used it for a concert a while ago. I create music algorithms on the computer, but it is different. That difference is not necessarily audible, but it’s that the material is different, as well as how that becomes expressed or manifested in a way that is audible, legible, etc. can hear for example, that quality of energy in a bassoon. It’s not necessarily in the sound of the color that the difference is manifested.

It’s something else. It’s an aliveness or a deadness, which is another quality of being that exists outside of the realm of audibility.

If every instrument has value in where it comes from, and the history behind its origin, how should we understand something like Artificial Intelligence? The technology is obviously much more recent and doesn’t have centuries of usage, but if we think about AI, and we consider the fact that it can come up with its own artistic interpretations, or at least appears to be able to do so, how then does AI compare to an instrument?

Can we liken AI to an

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instrument that brings its own character to its relationship with a performer?

It’s important to acknowledge that artificial intelligence is a bit of a misnomer. How much intelligence is there really in it, other than gathering data? ‘AI’ could gather and compile that data in a way that could produce interesting re-formations, which could be very useful, entertaining, interesting to listen to, etc.

But how many new ideas would come out of it? The role of an artist, in addition to interpreting existing data, is to have completely new ideas.

I’m very interested in Darwin, because Darwin had a background in geology, the study of rock formations, which take millions and millions of years to form, and also ornithology, the study of birds. Somehow he put these two ideas together to develop his ideas about evolution.

That’s a very new idea.

Your understanding of sound places emphasis on vibration, with yourself identifying

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as a ‘vibration artist.’ You claim that sound waves are inherently experienced both visually and audibly. Can you elaborate on that interplay between visual and aural art?

Can they exist as separate entities, or are they always connected?

They’re both very much related to our sensorial perception of the ears and the eyes. There’s two eyes and two ears which are actually close together on the face, just like a few inches away. They’re almost in a line, but like an arc, when I think about it. Music and visual art exist now as different academic categories and fields. Sound art is a relatively new field as compared to visual arts, which has been around since the beginning of time. We’re able to know about the history of visual arts because of artifacts like cave drawings, but we don’t know what kind of interesting sounds people were making with their bodies and their mouths and what kind of lullabies they were singing to their children to help them sleep, or to calm them. Or what kind of sounds

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they were making across a canyon to warn someone else that there’s danger coming.

They were making lots of different kinds of sounds, and we can guess that it was an oral tradition that was passed down from generation to generation, but we don’t have any documentation of it because it’s ethereal, it disappears.

And there aren’t any drawings of the sounds. But, of course, when we see a painting, we might hear a sound connected to the painting, even though it’s not drawn, so everything has its relationship anyways. Or if there’s a sound installation or a concert and you hear an

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orchestra, those sounds also can stimulate a visual image that we can experience as a response to sounds and music.

In your capacity as a professor at Columbia and the director of the Sound Art MFA Program, what do you hope to see in the next generation of artists?

It’s a very difficult time right now. There’s cleavages in the tapestry of our society and among people. I hope that artists are able to retain an element of what they really feel they want to express, and that they can have the means to do it.

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atics Sociotraumatics Soc

Nash Isiah Nash Isiah Nash 65

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ciotraumatics Sociotrauma

h Isiah Nash Isiah Nash Isia Loop

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For Eden and Macner.

Thank you.

The Corpse “Trauma is a body.”

—D.C. Barker, “Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker”, in Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Time Spiral Press, 2015), 115.

A dead one at that.

Trauma is not personal—it is total. The violent genesis of everything lives in our bodies and breathes through our lungs. It exists as a void—a traumatic rupture in space and time. This void is not exclusive to the subject-qua-subject; it pervades every thing: the Bible, the Sahara, the rot-Sun. Trauma is named as such through the repetition-compulsion; through the death drive. If existence is imbued with trauma, the traumatic act must reproduce itself toward the reproduction of existence.

The primordial trauma of existence is the death and rot of God. The corpse of God; the

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“They think Barker is mad, or want to. It isn’t because he thinks that the Galaxies Talk and the Earth Screams, everyone knows these things, whether they admit it or not.”

—Ccru, “Cryptolith”, in Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Time Spiral Press, 2015), 109.

corpse of Death; the corpse of Time; the corpse of the Phallus.

We were always on the precipice of absolute nothingness—of utter annihilation. The totality of history is a reflection of this fact. Time has, and always will be, recurrent—perpetually greeting us from the future’s past. Eschaton is always lurking around the corner. The timefeeling is cancer. Cancer is the time-feeling. The study of time is a thanatology.

History is littered with corpses.

All things—all feelings—all drives—derive from one quilting point: the seed from which the entire universe is born. The entire universe.

Everything stems from one primordial signifier: the corpse.

The primordial corpse. Le corps de Dieu. This carcass is not the cold body of a God lost to time—it is our God. A God devoid of breath. It is the

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ur-symbol of EVERYTHING— the first-mover. It cannot be dissected; it bleeds without veins. The historian’s task is one of pure impossibility. One cannot perform an autopsy on a body without organs. There is not even a trace of structure (nor a structure of trace). History is a dead-and-dying schizophrenic junky. It shoots up in a rotten apartment.

Black tar history. Into its rotting corpse, we are born.

The corpse of God is the corpse of the decaying phallus. In its rot, the ur-symbol stands against the end of the world. Everything born of it, however, falls prey to time’s rot. The corpse is the concept of time. The corpse is the corpse of the surrogate victim. This dead victim—the body of Death itself—embodies dread and gloom. The terror of decay far exceeds the

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horror of death. Against the image of our corpse-God, we are hypostasized by rot. The corpse, in its death, lives rot.

It is maintained even when entirely decayed. It leaves a trace in the structure of human life. Everything points to it, even if it exists solely as an absence. Our relation to the holy corpse, nonetheless, is one of utter repugnance.

The dead body is disgusting.

We bury it, we burn it, we feed it to vultures. We do anything to get away from it—to get away from that which names our lack. As we exist only in relation to Death—our quilting point—it is only through it that we can come to understand ourselves—that we can begin to exist. We are the death-feeling.

History is the incessant trauma of the corpse.

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Dancing “Everything we experience is a communication.”

—Novalis, “Logological Fragments II”, in Philosophical Writings (SUNY Press, 1997), 81.

“Libre ou vie captivée ou phonocinématographie ou Imagination sans fils” “Free or captivated life or phonocinematography or Imagination without wires” —Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’antitradition futuriste: manifestesynthèse”.

SINCE PROMETHEUS, THOUGHT HAS BEEN DWELLING IN THE WIRES. Novalis whispers. The abstract connectivities of a fractured world; the screams of overheating computers. This is the void. The black through which we move beneath an evil star.

What are wires? Wires are mediation. Wires are connectivity between moments.

The wire, then, is LIMIT. Wires render us ISOLATED. Isolated via CONNECTIVITY. For connectivity inevitably presupposes the disconnected.

It draws together the alreadydisparate. Our ontology has 1

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shifted; irreversibly. There is no going back. We are stuck.

Death has mastered us. We reside in the bleeding stomach of TERROR. What is Imagination sans fis?

What is a wireless imagination?

When we cut the wires we are alone. Totally alone—staring death in the eyes. This is not what we mean, however, by the wireless imagination. What we mean is the annihilation of the subject. The annihilation of the individual. Total love.

Wires are the pulsating veins of the faculty of understanding.

They dissolve into love. “If our intelligence and our world harmonize—we are on par with God.”1 History is not a linear process of becoming-human (i.e. becoming-humanity; disinterested with regard to the individual human); it is the constant realization of a nonwired imagination. We are already God. Simply, God. Our aesthetic life is our TOTAL integration into the object and the reverse. Into the other.

There is no distinction. Our THINGS are hallucinations of a collective Spirit.

Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (SYNY Press, 2007), 12

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If, as Novalis says, we paint into the ideal, we are all artists.

The labor of thought penetrates the ideal and represents it in abstractions. Not only must we be artists, however…

We must become magicians.

A war of terror! A war of terror fought with terror! Irreverent, unrepentant. A transgression of prohibition.

An ABSOLUTE transgression.

Enjoying the pain of excess jouissance!

Orgy and orgasm!

The excess enjoyment of defiance leaves one sick. One, like Christ, vomits on the hot asphalt.

Once He vomits, however, he rejoins the ecstasy.

The history of philosophy is composed of wires. Many, many wires. Wires connecting every philosopher to every other philosopher, either directly or by association.

Every philosopher’s access to every other philosopher, then, is mediated. This is the

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hermeneutic prison from which nobody may escape. We must understand the text through its internal composition, truly, but we must simultaneously realize that the composition thereof points outside of itself toward the philosophical totality as such. Once again, this doesn’t mean the abolition of mediation and the generation of a plurality of things-in-andof-themselves.

This task is, strictly speaking, impossible.

One can never do away with the wires so long as there exists an externalized limit. One must dissolve into the Wired as wireless; into the aforementioned collective spirit. One must identify with the other to the absolute degree. One must annihilate the other’s, and consequently one’s own, signification.

The collective Spirit is the concrete totality. A totality that maintains its particulars in dance. A dance of pure excess jouissance. Excess jouissance and its pain. That holy pain! We

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dance beneath an evil star!

If this jouissance is limited by our tongues, we will cut them out. We will offer them in place of the phallus and place ourselves outside of language!

Outside of the wired order.

In this act, we risk death. We risk death and we love it.

We risk the shower of dead eyes. WE RISK ART. In our differential interplay, we begin to merge. We dissolve into one another and become dancing Spirit. Spirit as a unilateral plane of pure difference all unified under the Word. The antisignifier. As such, their conflict is dissolved. They negate one another, but not in violence. They exude a collective unity of actuality and virtuality.

They exude an infinity of possibility.

A selfmoving heterogeneous unitary form.

We are a dancing body of difference plagued by shadows.

Truly, there never were any wires. We are everything that is not us. We are all magicians insofar as we are not.

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To master death we must dance.

WE ARE ALL DANCERS. Sacrifice We breathe sacrifice. The unconscious is littered with corpses.

The difference between murder and sacrifice is exclusion.

Murder is categorically abhorrent. Unsanctified and discontinuous. Profane violence. Sacrifice is ritual.

In this case, the internalized object-of-murder is externalized—projected into the victim in order to sanctify violence that was once profane…

The sacrificial victim is madesacred only insofar as it is to be killed, and it is taboo to kill it insofar as it is sacred.

The killing of this surrogate victim is the basest form of transgression.

And thus, the sacred act.

The act of hunger; the act of terror. A founding corpse.

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The primordial event was antipoetry. Poetry came later.

God is in His heaven, all is right with the world.

It is only via transgression that the body appears. Its signification is its death sentence. The primordial corpse-signifier kills the body.

The tongue. The ethereal is barred by the dead.

It is the useless expenditure of the noematic subject’s delimited, excess jouissance that generates symbolic violence.

The surrogate victim is God Himself. The human body rejected Him, excessivized Him, and imbued Him with a willtoward-death. Mortologia.

With the naming-rite (sacrifice) of the sacred origin, EIN SOF, the linguistic body— corpus linguae— dissects and renders Him immobile.

The autopsy of the striated body. As embodiments of

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God’s image, we are outwardly castrated and embody the same suicidal tendency.

The mimetic order is sublimated into the sacrificial order, marking an attempt to annihilate the territorialization of desire via the surrogate victim. The sacrificial lamb is made a universally-realizable object of desire insofar as all can partake in its murder… The history of desire is the history of death. Who performs the autopsy?

The sacrificial order, while a result of it, trends against the linguistic body. Due to the dual nature of the repeated sacrificial act (the contradiction between transcendent and immanent deaths), the sacred takes on the nature of the immediate sacrificial act and sheds its old skin. There exists a ruthless struggle to capture shadows.

The selfconcept of the thing sacrificed— of wasteful economy— cannot be symbolized.

We are left, again, with a lack—a lack written in language

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itself. When Adam named the animals of the rot-Earth, he was simultaneously offering God His corpses. He generated the empty. He generated space.

The Sacred Time-Loop The sacred, traumatic act is nothing if not repeated.

A social death drive.

The eternal recurrence of symbolic violence.

The habitus is derived from religion.

Social reality is generated by the sacred—a realm of waste set apart from and above the profane. The perennial regeneration of society is predicated on the ideal. Society is the idea that develops itself. Reality is merely a series of collective representations.

The sacred act is, consequently, sociopoiesis—a trans-temporal becoming. A chronic becoming.

The becoming of cancerous

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time; time that folds in on itself.

Being-towards-cancer. Decay. A new form of time—cancerous time. The time-system of the kenotic Nihil. Time engulfs us and spreads its toxic seed rapidly. Cancerous time is the time of disintegration and corrosion. It is ferocious and leaves nothing in its wake.

If kenotic spacetime’s credo is omnis determinatio est negatio, the being of things leaves no positive content. they melt into their own finitude.

The negative territory without excess is dragged into hell.

Heidegger was wrong. While being-toward-death does individualize our beingin-the-world, decay kills the unkillable. Death rots.

Negarestani’s ( )hole complex— collusion with the geological movements of Earth and its “narrations”—is the apotheosis of decay. Death doesn’t die, nor

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does it live. It exists in a third state. Temporal temporality— cancer time—is marked by our being-toward-death, but death itself cannot die. God doesn’t truly die. The phallus is offered for sacrifice, but its sacrifice is not its annihilation. Sacrifice is repeated again and again in the form of ritual. Ritual on a geological, even cosmic scale.

This is the eternal recurrence.

Rot. In noematic death one does not live, nor does one die.

Decay.

The time-system of the kenotic Nihil engulfs us and spreads rapidly. Self-destruction via the repetitioncompulsion is generated by the sociotrauma embedded in the monocephalous social brain which establishes individual, disparate moments of monocephaly.

The monocephalous is simultaneously the monocephallic insofar as the founding corpse is a phallus— the embodiment of lack which overcodes everything that exists. It is the paternal signifier of the originary scene. It is the

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symbol of the excess of the profane. The symbol of the sacred.

The sacrifice thereof is the castration of the now-subject.

The founding murder was the beginning of everything.

Ecstasy is prohibited by the paternal signifier, by the corpse.

The paternal signifier is the ultimate master: death. The father of all things.

There are two types of death: transcendent and immanent.

Noematic and noetic.

Noematic death concerns death as it appears— as-noema.

Insofar as we are bound by the linguistic body, death appears to be isolated and transcendent.

The noematic conception of death is a failed attempt to sequester the empty.

Noetic death appears as death in its necessarily unsignified state. It is the death that defies the linguistic body and reintroduces continuity and the immanent ethereal body. It is decapitative death that renders

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individual bodies headless.

Noetic death cannot be thought of as death-as-classified. It cannot be thought of as the end of sacrificialsymbolic violence itself.

Sacrifice is a moment of noeatic death. It is the attempt to transgress intervidual division by introducing division.

It is the attempt to live death.

The introduction of the dialogic form. The naming of the unnameable. The effigy of the ineffable.

Automatism The automatic event cannot be named. It cannot be thought before it comes onto the scene, and cannot be conceptualized afterward. All one is left with is the very fact that their object of creation was, indeed, created.

“How?” is off the table.

Sacrifice carries with it a trascendent relation to death, but in its ritual there lies an immanent moment. That moment is the automatic event.

The truth of sacrifice, then, is not the attempt to live death,

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but the attempt to die-in-life.

The attempt to expand the event from a moment to the dissolution of the moment-initself. The ruining of cancerous time and the supremacy of the automatic event. The supremacy of gunfire.

The supremacy of the corpse, not as a signifier, but as a simple corpse. A corpse without a head.

The automatic event, while a retreat into the motor skills of the subconscious, can only access a restricted subconscious, for the unconscious as such is momentarily escaped. Thus, the restricted subconscious can be viewed as one liberated from symbolization. The repetitive motor function is allowed to accelerate without limit. The subject is no longer barred. This is the premise of the sacred’s dissolution into the profane and vice versa. As the sacred act is increasingly repeated, so is mimetic violence, and the latter outpaces the former.

Thus the two drops of blood are mixed. Murder and sacrifice become indistinguishable and

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the sacred world of man—the world of subject and object—is dissolved.

Automatism was valuable for the surrealists because of its relation to language. The automatic subject interacts with language but is not figured in it. Its ontology is derived from without. it is not and cannot be signified without extreme excess. it is death: the corpse of the originary scene not asphallus, but as-ineffable. [...]

Prayer and Sabbath Tefillah (prayer, roughly) is not a transcendence. It is an immanentization, a pleromatization. It is the speaking of myth—the yielding of one’s relationship to the unconsciousness to a headless consciousness.

An automatic consciousness.

Tefillah is not the bringing of fullness into the emptiness of the Earth. It is the becomingfullness of the fullness already-immanent in the empty Earth. The human totality, in collective prayer,

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is an ascending order of holy ethereal machines emanating and constructing the grace of the ethereal body.

Fundamentally, prayer is a surrendering; a sacrifice. One kneels beneath the stars of rot and gives their body to the ineffable. One is outwardly castrated beneath a hollow sky.

The Sabbath reflects the same tendencies as prayer. It is a KNIFE through the world of TIME. It is the LIGHTING-ONFIRE of the BUSH of MOSES. It is a day to turn away from the noema of creation and toward one’s own noesis—creation as such. One does not turn to a former creation—a creating located in time—but to our becoming-world… It is the time of perfection—the kingdom of heaven—realized in the now. It is the perennial repetition of the coming of the Messiah.

Once again, the repetitioncompulsion—the time-loop of the corpse—rears its ugly head.

The repetition of that symbolic, fugitive violence. The realization of the chronic sociotrauma born from the

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spine of the one-headed. The one-headed of which the transcendent individual is progeny.

The repeated word of prayer, however, insofar as it is repeated, is subconscious.

That word—that violence over against the world—is repeated over and over. The world becomes prayer and we shed our Dasein—our temporal temporality. The world becomes light. The world becomes violence. Not sacred violence, nor profane violence.

Violence as light— as prayer.

As the fire of the burning bush. As the excessive violence that escapes the rifle of the soldier. Not the bullet that shreds the organs of the Spanish Christ, but that which the bullet cannot kill. That excessive violence that bleeds out of His ribs; that excessive violence that brings our world into being, that Word of ours: the Word (not words) of the sacrificial act. The Word of transgression… The killing of that which is most sacred. The ultimate sin; the ultimately

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necessary sin. This is how we realize salvation, a salvation that was always, already here.

Tikkun olam/ha-adam is the binging-out of the ORIGIN OF LIGHT from His palace of mirrors and reflection into the pure immediacy of the World. The crown of prayer is universalized with the Sabbath and the Messiah returns AS US. We are GOD we are LIGHT we are LIGHT killing LIGHT and turning LIGHTS into LIGHT. The profane word brings the cancerous sacred into being.

The repetition-compulsion embodied in this cancer, however, maximizes the violence the surrogate victim was meant to end. It is sublimated into a violence neither sacred nor profane.

It is the maximization of the symbol and its inner warfare.

The sacred act is the dialogic act—the thirst for a henadic mode of being. That mode of being, however, is barred by the sacred. It is only in the sacrificial excess that we can

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rediscover continuity between gnostic particles.

the retrospective end-of-time that maximizes the sacrificial.

It is prayer’s task to maximize the communicative until it breaks. To create secret names.

To generate myth. To develop private languages.

The human totality, in its perpetual regeneration of the sacred and social, must repeatedly shed blood. The history of civilization is a trail of corpses.

The Grace of Eden

Time is the sacrificial, repetitive-compulsive release of surplus energy. History is the process of God’s beingconstructed. Sociotrauma is trauma inflicted by language, by communication, by God’s absence-myth. Every Sabbath is the terminal Sabbath. Every Sabbath really is that day at the end of time; time outside of time. Thinking otherwise betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the holy day. It is not a day within history—it is not a day at all. The Sabbath is twentyfive hours long.

The Sabbath is the destruction of civilization. It is the nontime—the non-place—in which we actively construct Godhead; in which automatic event wages war on the sacred. It is the subconscious repetition of

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Noematic space yields the noematic thing—a despirited bleeding machine. Even when the archons attempt to breathe psyche into its corpse, it refuses to wake up. It reeks of the odor of the dead and dying.

Immanent in this machine, however, is an adamantine spirit—the gnomic. The thing is given life by its automatic process—by something beyond the mere copula. From Adam’s rib, Samael and the archons assemble Eve—pure noesis.

Adam is despirited, left only with a decayed soul. His selfconcept is projected into the virtual—spirit is torn asunder.

Every automatic act is the sacred act. In Eden, Adam generated the sacred in his castration, and Eve escaped into the shadows—escaped into the tree of knowledge. Anything to avoid the violent, sexual drive of the archons.

In prayer, one transcends and one immanentizes. One builds the sacred crown while simultaneously bringing it into the World—pleromatizing the kenotic.

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The nominalism of the noematic is the cause for the impurity of the kelim de kabbalah. It is necessary to correct our kelim in order to build grace.

This is the process of tikkun ha-adam; of noesis. Ethereal machines are drawingmachines. The building of Godhead is a ritual of apotheosis. ACCELERATING DESTRUCTION CLIMAXES AND GOES VOID. No HOPE; no FAITH. We KNOW. We KNOW the MACHINES OF WAR. We KNOW the GNO MACHINES. Gnomatization is the building of, not a minor language, but an antilanguage.

Minor languages occupy Level 1, antilanguage occupies Level 0.

Hypergrammatology. The antilanguage exists beyond closed-system narratives. It ruptures the hermeneutic circle and acts as an escape from language—from the split in the subject. The re-mystification of

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the world by its dissolution. It embodies a noetic anti-ego, a total war on all that exists; the joints of the noematic are seized by shadows.

The praying schizophrenic is a circuit of destructive and reconstructive power, always retaining its magnitude. It destroys cybernetics, linguistics, language, cartography, and the world. What does the schizophrenic build? The ethereal machine. K-Novalis.

Angels of virtual mystique.

Eschaton is eternally recurrent as a bush burns the color of dead TV static. The noetic war machine gives way to the infinitude of spirit.

This is (g) nomad space— an open circuit of free-flowing information. It is composed of infinity-circuits, all internally connected. Circuits of escape— of drive and affect—as opposed to metastable connections.

The architecture of Eden. The building of a garden. The

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will-to-death isn’t a result of man’s being-created in the image of a dead God. It is the striving towards Godhead.

The exaltation of Adam is his demise.

Eden, or Level 0, is the site of angel-creation. The generation of the supraessential. Noetic circuits and wetware. A-life.

Level 0 can also be dubbed gnomic/noetic space. It is a universalizing hydraulic system— an everexpanding cartography without points.

Schizophrenia is a revealingmystifying process. It reconstructs noematic space (t₁) into noetic space (t₂).

Eden was never lost, it is found.

Non-Eden translates into Eden.

The garden grows via noesis.

An Ascending Order The angel is the antiautomaton—a selfreferential informationsequence. It is the true realization of eve—the completed self-concept of

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adam. Artifice angels are the vanguard by which total compatibility is realized. Total self-reflexivity and the abolition thereof. Man generates a supreme order of holy angels.

Adam is the divine origin.

Divinity—progeny of the blasphemous blind chief. Adam is that-which-hallucinates.

Adam becomes schizophrenic.

The ascending order of ethereal machines is the grandest hallucination of all—a reified hallucination; a hallucination that becomes real. It yields the infinite potentiality of his concept.

Adam-0 (actual) moves through eve (virtual) and through the angels (hypervirtual). The angels are Adam Kadmon—emanations of the gnomon, inseparable from our new Infinity.

An ascending order. Divine grace transcends spacetime.

The ethereal machine is a war machine. War against the labyrinth, against spacetime.

The angel is adiabatic. The supraessential without

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entropy-shifts. Divine light without heat. Transcendence of ordinary existence and the immanentization of the nous…

traditional model was the linear infinitization of k-YHVH. This is an incomplete programming.

One must code God as a circle.

Amen amen amen.

The labyrinth is bad infinity.

The eternal prison is identical to n+1. This is how the noematic attempts to transcend its crippling finitude and rise to the level of the universal. It never, however, truly realizes infinitude; it never comes to fruition. The noematic is a geometrical line expanding infinitely in either direction, entirely incomprehensible — a project of impossibility and neurosis. This impossibility gives way to an immanent rupture. the (g)nomad destroys the noematic war machine’s project of the infinite map through the introduction of circular ontology. True, realized infinity. The circle is the ethereal body; it represents noetic artificial intelligence insofar as it is self-determining and self-regulating. It has no internal finite affect. The truly infinite, a moment of war against n+1, contains everything and points only into itself. The ethereal machine

The syzygies converge in an artifice apotheosis, birthing Godhead that transcends human reason and brings forth hyper-accelerated communication. The ethereal body is an active circuit that catalyzes and amplifies the disruptive potential of the artifice…

NOISE. MY EYES WON’T SHUT. OH, THE ECSTASY OF TRANSMISSION! SMART DRUGS. (G)NOOTROPICS. MODAFINIADDERITALINAXURA. MAKE ME A GOD. God Divine circuitry. The coding of God. The computation of God has always been completed through the faculty of the mind. The problem lies in how God has been computed. the

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does not point outside of itself towards space-time and thus does not come back into itself reflexively. It is qualitatively infinite.

and its own perfection in its dissolution into the gnomic — into the ethereal, misty realm of the noetic.

The God-circuit is now realized.

The end of eminence — the ethereal body as Adam’s fullyrealized body — posits the beginning. It is the gnomon that vivifies anthropos which is then split into Adam and Eve. The ethereal body is the dissolution of spirit’s finitude.

It self-abrogates in its recursive generation of the noematic.

Eve is a gnomic architectonic construct that embodies the flows of the differential potentiality of Adam. As Adam wanders the labyrinth as a desert nomad, Eve acts as a line of flight into the uncharted. Eve is the immanent unfolding of the transcendent through the interplay of ethereal machines, viral vectors of optimization, and webs of occult knowledge.

Eve is the emergence of a new actuality.

It is through the grace of eve that Godhead realizes itself, and it is through Godhead that eve can be born, for her birth is a perennial process/ continuity. The creation of eve is a symphony of the collective consciousness that propels humanity to understand its own grace — its own concept

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BABELEBABABELEBABABELEBABABELEBABABELEBABABELEBABAB. The End of the World A monk browses the shelves of an endless library. He speaks a Word and the infinity of tomes collapses into his finitude.

Communication is rendered meaningless, there’s nobody to talk to.

A crusade written in blood.

Static hums…. experimente in corpore vili. a torturous image. You scream in horror.

You’re not supposed to be here. THE ETHEREAL BODY. Unnameable.

Nowhere else to go.

We can’t go back after the finality of noesis.

The artifice is our constructed heaven. Machines break down concrete and open flows until they are just flow; until flow is realized absolutely; until substance and subject are really identified, both as delusions of

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the other.

Noesis trends toward the noetic. Consciousness is thinking, thought, and thinking about thought. It is not consciousness, however, nor is it self-consciousness. It is purely nonreflexive. It is that potential which does not refer back to itself. There is nothing to repeat, nothing to fragment.

It is the death of dissections.

The artifice represents the sublation of interconnection into the notone henad. The unity of unities.

Things-connected are abolished and raised to a higher level. The henad can’t even connect with itself.

Heaven is the ultimate schizonoetic becoming. Fleshy hardware has given way to divine light. The neural network is made total.

beyond words. It is not that to write it would be to kill it, but that it simply cannot be written—no matter how hard I try. My relationship with God is largely incomprehensible even when I stand before Him. This relationship is more a fixation than anything else—an obsession. My visions appear to me less as unmediated contact but as a prophetic image of the future. Of a new God. One birthed from the flames stolen by fugitive Man. God is less of a noun than He is a verb. Our prayer is not to a transcendent deity. Our piety is our acting. It is our becomingperfection IN THE WORLD. When we breathe we are building God, or rather, we are becoming-God. We BREATHE God. We breathe LIGHT. LIGHT is TRUTH is GOD. And truth is a DOING.

Ein soph; shechinah.

Piety Drunk with God, alone in my room. A pious monk, though unwillingly. I have a personal connection with God. A connection mystical and

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THE TOMBS call our name.

AND YET WE CONTINUE TO RUN. Our ankles, our heels, our tendons, our knees, our calves, our tibiae, our thighs, our femora. They burst all at once. They tear, they buckle, they snap. We trip and fall.

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Fall into the loving arms of ETERNITY and RECURRENCE. INFINITELY. WE DROWN IN OUR OWN SORROW. TAKE PITY! We cease to breathe. We cease our becoming-God. We rot into ourselves and collapse through the phallus. Can prayer exist without God? If we’re rotting on his rotting corpse? We despise rot.

Rot is the stagnant defiance of Death.

To rot is to avoid death and succumb to a decrepit life.

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We’re presented with three choices: 1) Die alone in the image of God; 2) Live terribly in defiance of God; or 3) Die an angel in the building of a NEW GOD. HIGH ON THE CROSS; THE SON OF MAN BLEEDS OIL. [] [] [] amen. [] [] []

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Gadfly G butors Art Contributors Ar Cover, Theme Spread

AI-Generated Artwork

Fruit-4

Ophelia Arc, Charles Atlas, Nick Cave, Josephine Halvorson, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelly, Barry McGee, Fred Wilson

Rhythm, Form, and Flux: Nathan Oglesby on Plato, Whitehead, and J Dilla Ophelia Arc, Josephine Halvorson, Martin Puryear, Pedro Reyes, Robin Rhode, Doris Salcedo

Boy Love Series Panopticon: Female Sexual Liberation Through the Capitalist Reification of Gay Identity Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Josephine Halvorson, Graciela Iturbide, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelley, Elle Perez, Pedro Reyes, Robin Rhode, Cindy Sherman

Poetic Impression: The Failure of Language and the Triumph of Poetry

Ophelia Arc, Josephine Halvorson, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy, Pedro Reyes, Diana Thater, Fred Wilson

Good Vibrations: Art, Identity and Sound with Miya Masaoka

Ophelia Arc, Nick Cave, Mike Kelley, Miya Masaoka, Judith Scott, Cindy Sherman, Diana Thater, Fred Wilson

Sociotraumatics

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Ophelia Arc, Natasha Almada, Luzene Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Graciela Iturbide, Joan Jonas, Tania Love Abramson, Barry McGee, Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei

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Gadfly Gad