Frank O’Hara

(Source: thatgiantdoodie)

Time Immemorial.: Where’s it all going, this clatter, this wonder, this rant against...

timeimmemorial:

Where’s it all going, this clatter, this wonder,
this rant against anguish? I tell myself to stay calm. I tell
myself to step back and take a breath. I twist and shift in my
tall black chair. I can hear the city coming in through the kitchen’s
window-screens. Night birds, crickets in the…

(Source: fluttering-slips)

bartleby-company:

Fernando Pessoa wrote under at least seventy-five pseudonyms. Here in his papers, digitized by Portugal’s Biblioteca Nacional, he’s crossed out his name. A moment of authorial disguise? abnegation?

(thank you, triplecanopy)

Freud first guessed that anxiety signals some danger in reality, but then quickly pointed out that anxiety primarily has to do with expectation of a danger. In this context, anxiety does seem to be without an object and is thus different from fear.

Consumerist society seems to thrive on a particular feeling of inadequacy that people commonly experience today. To grasp the power of this feeling we need only look at any women’s magazine or the ‘style’ section of a daily newspaper. What we find in such publications, apart from advertising and reports on the latest fashion, cosmetics and celebrities, is advice. We live in times characterized by survival. Therefore it is not untypical to come across articles on subjects such as the single girl’s guide to survival; a mother’s secret diary on how to survive childbirth (since ‘having babies does terrible damage, especially to the fashionably fortyish mother’); advice on how to survive being in or out of a relationship; advice on diet and exercise, etc. Of course, such advice radically changes over time, so that, as one typical column claims, until recently ‘we have become neurotic about getting enough sleep, but the new research now suggests that the less we have, the longer we’ll live’.

Freud speculated that anxiety in adulthood is linked to guilt, which is why anxiety has an important connection with the superego. Lacan also stressed this connection and pointed out that the superego functions as the voice that commands the subject to enjoy yet at the same time mockingly predicts that he or she will fail in this pursuit of enjoyment. While it is easy to conclude that anxiety relates to this feeling of guilt linked to the superego’s command, one could invert this concept and thus produce a fresh insight whereby, paradoxically, it is not the possibility of failure but rather the possibility of success which produces anxiety. Here we need to remember two well-known Lacanian points about anxiety, analysed in the previous chapter: first, that anxiety is not incited by the lack of the object but rather by the lack of the lack, i.e. the emergence of an object in the place of lack; and second, that anxiety is a median between desire and jouissance.

The guess is that in the new era, people will purchase their very existence in small commercial segments, since their lives will be modelled on the movies so that ‘each consumer’s life experience will be commodified and transformed into an unending series of theatrical moments, dramatic events, and personal transformations’.15 Rifkin summarizes these new trends by pointing out that: In the new network economy what is really being bought and sold are ideas and images. The physical embodiment of these ideas and images becomes increasingly secondary to the economic process. If the industrial marketplace was characterized by the exchange of things, the network economy is characterized by access to concepts, carried inside physical forms.

In sum, we are witnessing a transformation in the nature of commerce from the selling of things to the selling of images and creation of communities. The idea behind this change is that people above all want to appear likeable to others and to themselves and also want very much to ‘belong’. Now that old types of communities (families, cultural groups) are in decline, by becoming subscribers, members, and clients, people acquire access to a new type of community.

Why does freedom of choice not bring us closer to happiness? One answer lies in the Lacanian description of jouissance as being something very much alien to ourselves (i.e. we do not ‘choose’ it in a rational way); which is why it is often when we are trying to be ourselves that we encounter something that is most traumatic and horrifying. The media create pressure on us to enjoy in the best possible way —to achieve the best possible orgasm, to be the best parent, spouse, worker, etc. The advice on how to come close to this jouissance then follows the logic expressed in one of the titles in Cosmopolitan magazine: ‘Become yourself, only a better one.’ But despite all this media advice on how one can become oneself there seems to be a lack of demand coming from the Other and the subject appears to be entirely free to find enjoyment that brings him or her satisfaction. As a result, the subject’s anxiety increases because he or she has to face another demand in his or her inner self—the demand of the superego. Anxiety then becomes coupled with guilt.

Lacan’s famous saying about love is: ‘I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you.’19

In some way, every act of falling in love has a touch of delusion. The first moments of infatuation are often experienced as a kind of delirium in which the subject aggrandizes the Other and perceives him or her as someone possessing the object a. For the neurotic however this delirious state will be coupled with questions like ‘How does the other perceive me?’ or ‘Who am I for him?’—but a psychotic continues to have a special relation precisely with the object a in the Other. This object, which in psychosis returns because it has not been excluded from the symbolic, then becomes the psychotic’s partner. In the psychotic delirium, the Other in the meaning of the symbolic order or another human being loses its identity and takes on a spectral image of the persecuting voice or gaze. The persecutor is then simply an image or another with whom the only possible relationship is aggression or eroticism, without the mediation of the symbolic.

- “On Anxiety” by Renata Salecl

"You write so that the life you have around you, and outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life which is not much fun, but annoying and full of worries, exposed to others, can melt into the little rectangle before you and of which you are the master."

Michel Foucault, from an interview with Claude Bonnefoy, 1969 (via proustitute)

“As neoliberalism converts every political or social problem into market terms, it converts them to individual problems with market solutions. Examples in the United States are legion: bottled water as a response to contamination of the water table; private schools, charter schools, and voucher systems as a response to the collapse of quality public education; anti-theft devices, private security guards, and gated communities (and nations) as a response to the production of a throwaway class and intensifying economic inequality; boutique medicine as a response to crumbling health care provision; “V-chips” as a response to the explosion of violent and pornographic material on every type of household screen; ergonomic tools and technologies as a response to the work conditions of information capitalism; and, of course, finely differentiated and titrated pharmaceutical antidepressants as a response to lives of meaninglessness or despair amidst wealth and freedom. This conversion of socially, economically, and politically produced problems into consumer items depoliticizes what has been historically produced, and it especially depoliticizes capitalism itself. Moreover, as neoliberal political rationality devolves both political problems and solutions from public to private, it further dissipates political or public life: the project of navigating the social becomes entirely one of discerning, affording, and procuring a personal solution to every socially produced problem. This is depoliticization on an unprecedented level: the economy is tailored to it, citizenship is organized by it, the media are dominated by it, and the political rationality of neoliberalism frames and endorses it.”
-Wendy Brown

(Source: bastarddaddy)

"There is another and more brutal way of saying the same thing.  In fact there are hundreds of ways: he could spend the rest of his life listing them.  But the most brutal way is to say that he is afraid: afraid of writing, afraid of women.  He may pull faces at the poems he reads in Ambit and Agenda, but at least they are there, in print, in the world.  How is he to know that the men who wrote them did not spend years squirming as fastidiously as he in front of the blank page?  They squirmed, but then finally they pulled themselves together and wrote as best they could what had to be written, and mailed it out, and suffered the humiliation of rejection or the equal humiliation of seeing their effusions in cold print, in all their poverty.  In the same way these men would have found an excuse, however lame, for speaking to some or other beautiful girl in the Underground, and if she turned her head away or passed a scornful remark in Italian to a friend, well, they would have found a way of suffering the rebuff in silence and the next day would have tried again with another girl.  That is how it is done, that how the world works.  And one day they, these men, these poets, these lovers, would be lucky: the girl, no matter how exaltedly beautiful, would speak back, and one thing would lead to another and their lives would be transformed, both their lives, and that would be that.  What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again? What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail. He wants an A or an alpha or one hundred per cent for his every attempt, and a big Excellent! in the margin. Ludicrous! Childish!  He does not have to be told so: he can see it for himself.  Nevertheless.  Nevertheless he cannot do it.  Not today.  Perhaps tomorrow.  Perhaps tomorrow he will be in the mood, have the courage. If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry.  But warmth is not in his nature.  Poetry is not written out of warmth anyway.  Rimbaud was not warm. Baudelaire was not warm.  Hot, indeed, yes, when it was needed — hot in life, hot in love — but not warm.  He too is capable of being hot, he has not ceased to believe that.  But for the present, the present indefinite, he is cold: cold, frozen. And what is the upshot of this lack of heat, this lack of heart? The upshot is that he is sitting alone on a Sunday afternoon in an upstairs room in a house in the depths of the Berkshire countryside, with crows cawing in the fields and a grey mist hanging overhead, playing chess with himself, growing old, waiting for evening to fall so that he can with a good conscience fry his sausages and bread for supper.  At eighteen he might have been a poet.  Now he is not a poet, not a writer, not an artist."

Coetzee, “Youth”

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living."

Anaïs Nin  (via bartleby-company)

(Source: stickyeyelids)

"Why are you not here to overpower me with your

      tense and urgent love?"

Amy Lowell, from “Vernal Equinox” (via proustitute)