Wrong Tool

It's wrong
it's the wrong tool.
To reach for the magnifying glass to look for
something that resembles truth.

Circus Magic

The roadshow music they are blasting made you felt like a clown walking down the street, with balloons and at times, both feet above ground.

While you are listing out what to perform, you are also thinking how circus magic won’t bring her back, how circus magic won’t remove the impact - the impact of his actions.

The noises from trumpets and tin drums are nothing compared to a rustling plastic bag in the middle of the night.

Circus magic won’t absolve his sins. Circus magic won’t bring her back.

He looked again at his only audiences, the children. On the street, how they behaved like the insane. They have shrill sound for laughter, she is pulling up her skirt and he is pulling down his trouser for no reason. They can’t stand still, they need to jump and run, cry and shout, ask questions, suck and lick fingers.
Now he can’t remember how they are related, related to what he wanted to say when he has a nose so huge and red.

Woundows

Meaning too precise is sure
To void your dreamy literature.

- Mallarmé (Translated by A. S. Kline)

I could have had this rewritten with a pen
Four years ago but then

Made a note of these words:

Wind, the breeze
Wind, the crank I am winding
Wound, what have I turned, and a cut
Window, a cut on the wall

Woundow

To remember I owe you an explanation
of the window on the flesh of her wall
The view is coloured how
Wrong impressions were painted

Excerpt from 'Hegel, Zizek & Substance as Subject by Davie Maclean

Australia prides itself on the tolerance we practice towards difference within our multicultural society. Any cultural position is allowed, it is purely a personal matter, and no one should have to suffer for their ethnic, religious, sexual or cultural identity. But does this tolerance not have a blind spot ? Is there not one cultural position that simply will not be tolerated within our tolerant society?

What about the person whose cultural identity involves telling racist jokes? Or sexist jokes for that matter, or homophobic, or... or... We will tolerate anything — except intolerance. That we will not tolerate.

So to what extent are we really a tolerant society?

For the Left, of course, the question is not about the right to tell racist jokes. The real issue, however, becomes clearer once we begin to explore further what is excluded from our ‘tolerant’ society, from our democratic political process.

Let us begin with the obvious — Islamic fundamentalism, clearly not acceptable, One Nation populism, likewise. But just why are these political options beyond the pale? Is it because they seek to impose a social project on society as a whole? That they stand for a social order that would apply to all?

And as such are they not condemned as fascist? Fascist they may well be — but the problem for the Left does not lie with them, it lies with us. What about our social project, what about socialism, or communism, or more loosely a commitment to social justice, to the environment? Are these not caught in the same net? Are they not fascist too?

In other words, is any social project whatsoever not excluded in this way? Is it not defined in advance as fascist, or totalitarian, and unacceptable as such?

It is here we find the hole in the centre of Western democracy — anyone can hold any political position they like so long as the existing social order is left untouched.

Where does this leave the Left? Clearly it can not accept these limitations for its goal is precisely to transform the social order. Somehow a breach must be found, some way of changing what is politically possible and what is not. For Zizek the resistance of the excluded to their exclusion offers one such possibility. We can see how this works in the approach Zizek would adopt towards the refugee crisis. For Zizek, it is the soft liberal humanitarian approach to the boat people that the Left must reject above all, the position that argues as a tolerant, humane society we can not turn our backs on these poor people. To Zizek this is pure ideology.

Instead it is the right wing response to the refugee problem that should be the point of entry for the Left. For when the Right argue that the boat people represent the tip of the iceberg, that accepting them will open the floodgates and lead ultimately to the complete destruction of our way of life, Zizek’s response would be, ‘Yes, that’s exactly why we should accept them’.

Necessity and Contingency

This reversal is homologous to the one that characterizes the Hegelian dialectics of necessity and contingency. In a first approach, it appears that their encompassing unity is necessity, i.e., that necessity itself posits and mediates contingency as the external field in which it expresses – actualizes itself – contingency itself is necessary, the result of the self-externalization and self-mediation of the notional necessity. However, it is crucial to supplement this unity with the opposite one, with contingency as the encompassing unity of itself and necessity: the very elevation of a necessity into the structuring principle of the contingent field of multiplicity is a contingent act, one can almost say: the outcome of a contingent (“open”) struggle for hegemony. This shift corresponds to the shift from S to S, from Substance to Subject. The starting point is a contingent multitude; through its self-mediation (“spontaneous self-organization”), contingency engenders – posits its immanent necessity, in the same way that Essence is the result of the self-mediation of Being. Once Essence emerges, it retroactively “posits its own presupposition,” i.e., it sublates its presuppositions into subordinated moments of its self-reproduction (Being is transubstantiated into Appearance); this positing, however, is retroactive.

Slavoj Žižek

The Autistic Society: Individual Disorder and Collective Order

During lunch at Fortune Centre, I told a friend about your idea of this country as an ‘autistic’ society. This topic was raised after a security guard from the building came by and quibbled with the tenants, of mostly food businesses, occupying the ground floor. It was over how many inches beyond the yellow line, the tables and chairs are placed outside, along the sidewalk (you know, our version of al fresco). As if the day-to-day woes of having a low-budget lunch in town (the crowd, the uptight hunt for a table…) are not enough, this ‘lunchtime entertainment’ made it all the more pathetic – pathetic to even those who have to witness it, human beings fighting over problems marked by dirty yellow tapes on the floor

It does not really matter if the friend fully appreciated or understood it, but it was a good exercise for me to revisit our earlier conversation on autism. (I elaborated my point of view to him while we went through the usual process of what every supposed thinking person would do: seeing things from another angle [how else?] and picturing this problem in contrast to other scenarios [what else?]).

So, what were the similarities between autistic and bureaucratic behaviours that made you deployed the word ‘autistic’, as a metaphor to describe our society?

Could the reason be, like the bureaucrats, the autistics seem to possess certain rationale behind each of their act; that there is a sense of regularity or order – even though autism is classified as a form of psychological disorder? With the exception of God and James Dean, of course, is not every act, everything in existence, rooted in a cause, if not a reason? (This area is rather complex for me, such as the distinction between reason and cause, rational and irrational causes etc. – my logic is really weak.)

Or was it because despite having different motivations, causes, intentions or rationales, these two categories somehow produced the same effect of rigid and inflexible behaviours?

A fire safety officer would be able to justify, with sufficient practical reasons, the necessity of clear corridors in residential area because of the fire safety guidelines. The objects misplaced are fire safety hazards, disrupting emergency evacuation… An autistic person, have enough reasons to convince themselves to move from one point to another in a peculiar way. This perturbs us as much as the bureaucratic inconveniences we are tolerating on a daily basis. And we are just as much of a nuisance and the source of discomfort when we contradict the principles of these two groups. Forcing an autistic child to talk or walk the ‘normal’ way is fundamentally similar to not filling up a registration form properly.

Then what is the difference between the two? An obvious aspect would be their quantitative difference. Does it mean we can say the difference is solely a matter of degree and not type? In these two extreme cases of inflexibility we see the tension between the one and the multiple, of an individual against the collective, of Universal vs. Particular (Hegel)… sure they are numbers one/few against many etc. but the quantitative difference, here, has brought about qualitative changes. Therefore, this is rather a difference of type in the guise of degree, where we witness how subjective order (of the autistics) is classified as a disorder. And how the general will to have an ordered world is very much the source of many minor disorders in our lives – the situation where the railings along the road, for road safety, perhaps, obstructing the way of a wheelchair-bound person.

Two petty men had Fish ‘N’ chips for dinner

A revolution, because of the portion we were served
We talked about leaving the country
Our pettiness shamed us, over the portion of fish n’ chips we want to leave, over food we want to revolt
And Fish ‘N’ Chips is not even a local dish
Crazy and childish
But I remember Oliver Twist’s adventure only truly began when he asked for an extra serving

Talking: letting out gas

During an interview, Federico Fellini said that he does not to like talk about films in the process of making, or before it’s completed. It is a kind of superstition he prefers to keep. Whatever esoteric rationales he had for such a belief, I begin to relate it to the many times when ideas I had were not realised after they were said or discussed with too many people. This is especially true when the idea was mentioned to those not directly related it. By talking about it, the desire to produce the work somehow evaporates. We all know evaporation does not mean disappearance. In science, evaporation describes a change in the physical state of matter: dissolution not disappearance. But we seldom mind using it as a metaphorical substitution for the word ‘disappearance’, of what cease to exist.

Therefore, this is not necessarily because talking is an antithetical act to concrete production, rather it is an act of production in its most minimalist form: gas. It is a difference of degree, not type. The idea turned into a form of representation through our speech, by our talks and gestures, during conversations, is a form even more intangible and ephemeral than the idea itself. Letting others hear about your idea too soon, before anything is done at all, you will receive suggestions or comments that mutilate the idea like a premature review or a critique that would trigger a foetal death of the idea. This often is the case despite their good intentions, regardless if it was a good or bad review.

By associating talking to gas emitting, a fairly visceral analogy comes to mind – an inverted reflection, to be precise.

A person suffering from constipation, most of the time, seems no different to a person with a clear bowel, like the similarity between a failed writer and a loafer, they both share the similar effects of nothingness – which is to say that both of them didn’t shit. However, this similarity is only apparent. The former farts more often – be it loud or silent. Talking about an idea is very much like this physical symptom common to one suffering from constipation. You have an idea, you can’t concretise it yet, you talked about it instead. You have the urge to shit, but you couldn’t, you fart instead, the toilet bowl was as clean as before you sat on it, but you flushed it anyway.

For those, who disapprove this slightly scatological example, we can also think of it as opening a can of beer or Coke, letting the gas out and only to drink it three hours later. This instance was drawn by the plights of many fine art students and artists who have to keep talking about their proposal to too many people,. And when it is the time to do the work, they would feel like they are drinking stale beer and Coke without fizzle, but with taste diluted by the melted ice cubes.

Of course, apart from the above, there are many other reasons why we talk. We talk to impress, to brag about ourselves, the things we have, the things we know - our bank deposit, and mental capacity, respectively; we talk because it built us the bridge of intimate relationships; we talk because we are anxious or worried about something; we talk to others our problems to share it, thus to pass the burden, the problem, to another; and we talk about an idea for a painting or writing because we have been thinking about it; we talk because we couldn’t keep a secret, because gossiping is a past time.. But if only we could hold it, hold our breath for a moment. And let it sublimate or mediate to a more concrete form.

Weren’t we instructed to keep away from the concrete when it is still wet? I now read it as an instruction to keep one’s prolificacy. A reminder of the emptiness of almost every speech act. Talk is really cheap.