I am determined to start up this blog again. and so... keep reading.
august 23
somehow, its friday again. makes me think about virilio. makes me want things to slow down or maybe, just maybe, for me to move faster through everything. its getting so that i can see these deterritorialised flows in everything ... and I feel like I'm rushing to catch up, running behind the events in my life, pushing the limits of my corporeality, thinking cyborgs and speed; I just trained like an utter bastard, and now I type, hands shaking and all my muscles sore, tight. but somehow, this relentless pace is bothering me a little less.
az tells me that i am notorious for spunk, toughness, excellence. Big Academic Dude and Hero of mine tells me my project is 'spectacularly interesting'. People love me and are good to me and sometimes its just scary. maybe this is what i am running from...
august 16
from the kids at nettime comes this article . The nettime list member who provided the article introduced it with this Virilio quote: ""endo-colonization happens when a
political power turns against its own people ... [when] totalitarian
societies colonize their own people ... that is, to force upon [their] own
population the fate that the British -- or the French -- had forced upon
the Aboriginals in Australia or the blacks in South Africa ..." Other
examples include Nazi Germany, what a role model for Bush's America ..."
Yesterday I had a conversation with an academic in the department who talked to me about his phd thesis, about his use of the term 'stateless persons' because, apparently, in cultural geography, this is what refugees and dispossed peoples are referred to as; but, as a cultural geographer, '[he doesn't] write maps'. We talked about the heritage of the term, mechanisms of identity community sovereignty, and he told me about flailing with language, about writing cogent explanations for why he used the term in the first place, about the lack of syntax for this stuff. This worries me.
[ for anyone who's interested apparently the CERC is having a conference on immigration and human rights ]
august 14
of course, the community is fucked . beyond any kinda debates about belonging and language - which i could begin here but don't have time to do so today - we keep coming back to these logics of inclusion and exclusion. outside, inside. games to play and fuckovers to negotiate. I'm thinking community, and nation/nation-state, and processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, all again. and rosa's comments about community and autonomism seem to flag that, of course, the desert is ever-expanding. so many spaces and so many invisibilities and impossibilities. reminds me of that thing de certau wrote, somewhere, about how the only political group worth affiliating oneself with is the most corrupt one...
[ nonetheless, i can see myself at this discussion on autonomism, trying to just shut the fuck up about all of this, cos, really, does it matter anyway? ]
so, i stark thinking about suture, metynomy, impossibility and the insistence upon making something like 'community' concrete and [uber]real. how the border repeats itself everywhere.
but i don't have time to be here. I have a meeting with Big Cool Person from ANU next week about supervision. I have a week to grapple with all the stuff I'm thinking about, pasting together and ripping up.
august 9 [later]
yep. I'm bored. but here is what the spark gender test said: 'You are definitely a man'. Then...
You know, for every question, we track very carefully what
each gender answers. This allows us to guess with the utmost
accuracy what you are. And in the rare case where we guess
incorrectly (like now), we have the opportunity to learn from
nature's mistake. You.
People like you, who walk the scary line between man and
woman, are *very* helpful in understanding exactly what it
means to be human. Thanks, and good luck.
august 9
The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing
its all about the rhizome, suddenly. possibilities branching out. i've been talking direction and i remember that a map fosters connections which multiply and confuse; it is, after all,
open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of moutning, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation ... A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same"...
espresso after espresso in the sun on lygon street, in the baillieu to collect a nancy book, and some kymlicka. still thinking communities, space, possibility.
and i'm wondering how to relate to myself, to these strangelands and, sometimes, badlands i'm kinda lost in. tomorrow further adventures in heterosexual love hell; the boy and i are heading for birthday celebrations at the parental ranch. its been a cause of dilemma and argument and weirdness. i'm resisting feeling like i'm selling out by insisting on more kink. by asserting some kinda queerness on the margins of going to the supermarket, hanging out, drinking and loving. i'm holding on to the fragments of something i can't really lay claim to, but i'm holding on, fast.
... deterritorialising and imagining ...
august 7
i keep thinking i should set up another blog where i can just rant without feeling this imperative to intellectualise stuff, to frame it in some kinda smart way; strutting it, even, maybe, flaneuring it, a little.
the thing is, i'm roaming in strange lands. i'm tutoring, reading for my phd, making hard decisions about asking my flatmate to leave for all kinds of reasons [ toxins and all ], fighting against all these narratives proliferating around me about growing up and love and work. I feel like i'm faking it, of course. in a few hours, i'll be sitting across a desk from my therapist, talking, weaving new maps and languages, hopefully. i have this stoopid need to feel in control of my direction right now; i want to know all the contingencies, all the options, i want to know know know. this is fear.
i'm listening to wu tang clan loudly - somehow, lots of bass makes things seem like they slow down lately - and my cat is curled up behind me on the computer chair. sun streams through the window and i'm aware that, really, i'm kinda happy, behind the recalcitrance and the habit of fear.
july 30
rosa references the kinda problematic which informs the thesis i'm about to begin researching. reading this assures me that this is all worthwhile. reminds me of the importance of linking these kinda deleuzian and foucauldian notions of the functioning of disciplinary societies through which "initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure" and which remind us that "The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own law" with broader issues of community and the negotiation of borders, or of being borderless. that the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate is, somehow, suddenly important; if only to illustrate the impossibility of nailing down this problem of borders and movement and community [ which makes me think about disunity]. and particularly, in ir, this problem of identity is a huge one; identity is always deployed in the social-scientific literatures as being something which flags the other, which maps and makes legible the other. and "our" own identity is somehow naturalised and erased. I am so aware, lately, of the responsibility I have in writing all of this stuff; how these key concepts of refugee, sovereignty, borders, community, difference, which hold together my work, mandate what my supervisor is calling some kinda normative framework.
somehow, these last 3 nights of complete and utter debauchery and decadence have erased my ability to argue this cogently....
july 29
I am beginning to think that the narrative function of blogs is way more complex than I may have previously been prepared to admit. And that this is why I've been finding it so difficult to write anything, here. Or maybe I'm just scared of the sound of my own voice; and frightened by the realisation I had upon waking up this morning ( admiring the traces of last night's debauchery ) that today is the first day of my phd candidature, which I have taken to blurring into some kind of hybrid of too many consonants in protest at the seriousness and earnestness of it all.
nonetheless, its time to go to the library, get a key for the postgraduate space in the political science department, find a quiet space to sit and start reading: paul james, kymlicka, mollie cochrane, andrew linklater, michael walzer. time for some disciplined departures from the comforts of autonomia and french poststructuralism.
[ there's another incentive, of course: if I leave the house, I manage to elude the visitation by the downstairs neighbour, who this morning banged viciously and repetitively on my floor, again ... concretising my determination to resist, thinking about public sex, laughing with the boy about the impossibilities of kink with the abiding harrassment of the moral police ]
july 22
I read and write and think and its almost as if I can see the lines of connection/flight between it all. maybe its a bad metaphor but what's happening is i'm feeling energised again. almost, maybe, capable again. I'm remembering the power of language, remembering how good it is to write and speak and think.
I had decided I was not very smart, that maybe, after all, I had nothing to offer to anyone or anything. so I stayed home and tried to not think. did all kinds of things to distract myself, made half-hearted plans for hanging out in corporate land and making money. talking relationships, having sex, cooking. its been months since I wrote more than a couple of sentences, anywhere, in any medium. and now I'm hungry for more. scared as all fuck about candidature but doing it anyway. I met with my supervisor this morning, who amazed me and inspired me, authors I haven't read, ideas I'm yet to roll around in my head.
and in the meantime, the world gets more fucked up. of course. today I was told about a certain university who has put in a multi-million-dollar funding application for educating the kids at woomera. someone described it to me today as cleaning the dragon's teeth. that one of the left-wing academics who is part of the application has made all kinds of excuses and arguments otherwise. nonetheless, I'm thinking of it as validating the very existence of the place, of the practice and politics of this kinda policing, this kinda politics of control. and it reminds me that I need to be doing this.
july 20 2002
i read a may 21 blog entry by mimi who gestures towards this feeling of debt that i have about my own blog: "Wow, did I ever lie about being back more often", and I feel a little better about my own silence. there's been crazy, urban and perhaps urbane adventures to be had and I don't know where to begin. maybe nowhere. but as a yet-to-be-released-but-brilliant zine i had the privilege of glancing at the other day introduced itself with a fuck you to the praxis of the confessional, i have no time to apologise for where i've been or where i'm going. instead, i have new preoccupations: the cat, the boy, the - aaaargh - phd candidature for which i have *finally* been given moula. and a million other situations through which to pursue autonomist kinda adventures and stories. let's see where they take me. right now, i'm mildly drunk in the country, retreating - nothing much changes - from everything. so, hello.
july 17
I've spent the last six months kinda scared of thinking talking writing. loving and needing other people's words and stories. and maybe its time to start again. no retrospectives ... thinking theorybitching and writing something which slides underneath it all. nothing to offer now but this very tentative indication of something, some time.