theemirrorstage

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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Anne Carson, in the preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (via theclassicsreader)

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Forms of life disappear every day, plant or animal species, human experiences and countless relationships between them all. But our feeling of urgency is linked less to the speed of these extinctions than to their irreversibility, and even more to our inability to repopulate the desert.  Activists mobilise themselves against the catastrophe. But only prolong it. Their haste consumes the little world that is left. The answer of the activist to urgency remains itself within the regime of urgency, with no hope of getting out of it or interrupting it. The activist wants to be everywhere. She goes everywhere the rhythm of the breakdown of the machine leads her. Everywhere she brings her pragmatic inventiveness, the festive energy of her opposition to the catastrophe. Without fail, the activist mobilises. But she never gives herself the means to understand how it is to be done. How to hinder in concrete terms the progress of the desert, in order to establish inhabitable worlds here and now. We desert activism. Without forgetting what gives it strength: a certain presence to the situation. An ease of movement within it. A way to apprehend the struggle, not from a moral or ideological angle, but from a technical and tactical one.

Call - TIQQUN (via transmisogynists)

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Tiqqun - SONOGRAM OF A POTENTIAL (2002)

Fantastic text on Italian feminism and the human strike. Start a reading group and destroy the enemy inside of you. 

Formatted to be printed on US Legal size paper (8.5x14). 

READ / PRINT (color) /  PRINT (black & white) 

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Abject Criticism By Deborah Caslav Covino

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The crisis of whiteness bears with it a set of unique opportunities, but also a set of crippling limitations. The limits: Those who are recovering from middle class delusions can be seen en masse concerning themselves with what brand of tape to use so as not to hurt the walls of the capitol building, or thanking the armed police officers about to arrest them, or believing that the police and the union leadership is on their side, or having a whole range of absurd ideas that the problems they face can be fixed by a recall election. Never mind a whole mythology of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Some rather large pushes, activists, if you wish to become dangerous. The opportunity: Those for whom any event was always experienced as something that happened to other people are beginning to see themselves as the people they read about in the news: unemployed, homeless. Those for whom history was thought to have ended have found themselves the victims (and agents) of its ceaseless progression (and potentially its explosion). Divorced from a past, from any means to reproduce themselves, from any of the fictions promised to them as children, people are beginning to call into question all the assumptions and narratives upon which our social order is based. Those who months ago could never have seen themselves occupying buildings or sabotaging their workplaces have begun to find new ways to act together. To a certain degree, people are positioned to see that their own survival will be predicated on their own self-activity to destroy the conditions that have shaped their abysmal future. The collapse of traditional subject positions begets the emergence of new class positions of exclusion: on the one hand total abjection and unwaged labor and on the other a diffusion of technologies-of-the-self constituting a global petite bourgeoisie. More realistically there will be a complete indistinction and oscillation between these positions. The grim reality is that each individual will have to bring continually-innovated and newly-commodified aspects of her existence to sell on the market, or else starve.

Identity in Crisis -Baedan (via johnbrownsbodyy)

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The new middle class is a class divorced from the promise of steady employment, of stable home-ownership, burdened with ever-increasing debt and the ever-increasing necessity (since nothing can be taken for granted any longer) for self-upgrades in order to have a chance at continued employment. A middle class for whom the self becomes a zero-capital enterprise, a class of individuals who are at once utterly proletarianized (dispossessed, thrown into the street) and yet the pettiest of the bourgeoisie, managing their own beings as little businesses. This new disposition replaces the structural role of the older forms of middle-class subjectivity (namely, the suppression of class struggle through the bonding of workers’ survival to the survival of capitalism, and the intensification of the necessity of work through enormous quantities of debt) by positioning the individual in conflict with himself. Class war becomes something that is waged internally between one’s proletarian interests and one’s “better interests,” between self-management and unmanageability, between the refusal of work, the scarcity of work, and the impetus to work more and more… The struggle in Wisconsin saw slogans such as “save the middle class” — which meant to save its structural form — but what the current struggles are effecting (because of their positive character) is a restructuring of capitalism toward the global, virtual middle class. We can give the name real subsumption to the process by which a world created and operated through our muscles becomes a world operated through energy in the form of fuel. Real subsumption marks the ability of dead labor to dominate the living. When we say dead labor, we mean a vast array of machines and apparatuses, produced by the living activity of humans that is taken from them and comes to mediate their relationship to their own survival. This is the ultimate achievement of capital: total alienation. The shift to privatized and commodified homes (made possible by the increasing centrality of machinery in our daily lives) marked the onset of what can be called the real subsumption of life under capital. While the real subsumption of life under capital is taken for granted by many, we believe with the advent of a whole new set of machines and apparatuses, that we are now experiencing what could be called the real subsumption of subjectivity. By this we mean the colonization and economization of what it means to be alive at all — the totality of our features, looks, interests, relationships, dispositions, inclinations, sexuality, gender, tastes, body parts, physique, etc.

Identity in Crisis -Baedan (via johnbrownsbodyy)

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I want to write a little bit more on this entire like “pussygate 2k17” situation re: the Women’s March, because like I honestly think it really sucks to be entering into a new ear of growing Reactionary and Fascist government and have to begin in the second day with like legitimately knowing that cis women and many cafab trans people are not going to have my back.

Like I’ve said in some of my previous posts, I’m actually very aware of the ways in which vaginas are constituted in our society, and the ways that denigration and the control of women’s bodies is enacted on certain bodily forms (some of which effect even people who aren’t women, via cissexism).

In a better world, I think that this would be an area that trans women would be able to have a lot of productive dialog with cis women. However, as it is, I think that a lot of cis women and cafab people aren’t willing to actually have to take trans women into account for their understandings of sexism and misogyny in our world, and have mostly been skating by on adding us to their movement as some sort of add-on 24/7 drag queen group who they can spend some time on when they are free.

So i guess what I will say is that, much like my feelings on abortion in general, I think that the ways that we discuss genitalia in our society is based on denigrating and controlling women, using language that controls things associated w women. Vaginas aren’t denigrated and uteri aren’t controlled because of their own sake, but because of their association with women (including via cissexism).

But the way people mostly talk about it, and how it gets betrayed that they talk about it when a trans woman talks at all, is that they think that the embodiment is what comes first (that is, a pre-social ‘sex’ caste) and that’s where the control goes. But I wuold argue that while I totally agree that cis women have their bodies regulated and attacked in specific ways, that this is because their bodies are seen as *womens* bodies. In this way, it makes sense that trans women’s bodies, seen in some sense as women’s bodies, also have similar oppressions; the main failing of these conversations on the part of non trans women, is that the people talking frequently act as if trans women’s bodies are treated socially as ‘male bodies’ when in fact, trans women’s bodies are treated in similar ways to cis women’s bodies.

So I’ve read posts abt this entire deal where the cis woman posits some major issues as if trans women don’t also face those issuess. Like, acting as if trans women have no skin in the game for reproductive justice is just asinine; we have to frequently be medically sterilized to change our legal documentation, let alone the social pressures of like ‘the surgery’ being a focus of society’s acknowledgement of our gendered reality.

And yes, of course there is a lack of information or like knowledge around cis women’s bodies that comes from society shame and stigma. But acting as if this isn’t the same for trans women is absurd! I have *no fucking clue* how my body is supposed to work; no one really studies that, and like no one knows what ways my body is supposed to end up working. And if we are talking about stigma around genitalia, I mean, most cis women I know do not have to crush their genitals every day simply to not get assaulted on the street or be looked down upon, which is a very real situation for trans women.

Like, I think trans women’s bodies are incredibly regulated and controlled unnecessarily, our embodiment is ridiculed many times by both men and women; our genitals were basically a v. common joke for decades in this country! Trans women understand what societal control and stigma that focuses on genitalia can feel like; many of us just happen to know that it comes from our embodiment’s proximity to a social category of womanhood, rather than womanhood coming from the oppressed embodiment.

And the ubiquity and complete misunderstanding of that nature of misogyny is what makes us wary, because it makes a clear signal as to what you *actually* think our situation wrt misogyny and patriarchy is (ie. ‘male’). The fact that so many people who make tremendous efforts to hide their essentialist ideas drop the facade when they start talking about 'female genitalia’ or 'females’ is all too unsurprising, because the fact that these signs were so everpresent shows that most non trans women think that the body creates the oppression, rather than the oppression creating the social mistreatment of the body.

As usual, the actual event was dispiriting, but the conversation had around it was worse. Any idea that trans women are 'silencing’ cis women and 'taking away their movement’ is absolute conspiracy theory and really doesn’t make any sense. Trans women are going on 40 years of activism and the Women’s March was still basically Vaginapalooza; we clearly don’t have the social status or means to truly silence anyone who wants to ignore us and continue on their essentialist way. The fact that you see our intervention as trying to take away yr oppression, vs. to add our experience in a way that adds understanding of how women’s bodies are *all* demeaned and regulated, shows that you truly didn’t think we were experiencing the same system of misogyny in the first place. We were always invitees that could be kicked out if we got too mouthy; and that seems to be what we might always be to feminism.

#the body

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…the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor…. the body can be for women both a source of identity and at the same time a prison, and why it is so important for feminists and, at the same time, so problematic to valorize it.

Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch (via xanaxfem)

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[An analytical fallacy] consists in passing from the detachable partial object to the position of a complete object as the thing detached (phallus). This passage implies a subject, defined as a fixed ego of one sex or the other, who necessarily experiences as a lack his subordination to the tyrannical complete object. This is perhaps no longer the case when the partial object is posited for itself on the body without organs, with—as its sole subject—not an “ego,” but the drive that forms the desiring-machine along with it, and that enters into relationships of connection, disjunction, and conjunction with other partial objects, at the core of the corresponding multiplicity whose every element can only be defined positively. […] castration designates the operation by which psychoanalysis castrates the unconscious, injects castration into the unconscious. Castration as a practical operation on the unconscious is achieved when the thousand breaks-flows of desiring-machines—all positive, all productive—are projected into the same mythical space, the unary stroke of the signifier

Anti-Oedipus

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📕📖

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Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness.

Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh: The Suicide Provoked by Society (via scrapsfromtheattic)

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Selections from the archive of Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework New York.

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We have seen the way in which the order of language with its formed units comes about - that is, with denotations and their fulfillment in things, manifestations and their actualizations in persons, significations and their accomplishment in concepts

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (241)

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We live by tunneling for we are people buried / alive.

Anne Carson, On Orchids (via bellsinwinter)

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The problem with the analysis of drag as only misogyny is, of course, that it figures male-to-female transsexuality cross-dressing, and drag as male homosexual activiries-which they are not always-and it further diagnoses male homosexuality as rooted in misogyny. The feminist analysis thus makes male homosexuality about women’ and one might argue that at its extreme, this kind of analysis is in fact a colonization in reverse, a way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity (and thus to reinscribe the heterosexual matrix, paradoxically, at the heart of the radical feminist position). Such an accusation follows the same kind of logic as those homophobic remarks that often follow upon the discovery that one is a lesbian: a lesbian is one who must have had a bad experience with men, of who has not yet found the right one

Judith Butler, Gender is Burning, 1993 (via resist-revisionism-rejoice)

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Anne Carson !!! 

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Amy Tan