Author: dig

AG2020_1990581a or a certain liquidity

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AG2020_1990581a

“A certain liquidity suffused everything about the place” (JD, Miami)

Schubert: Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, Op. 100 D.929 – 4. Allegro moderato · Beaux Arts Trio

Schubert: The Piano Trios ? 1985 Universal International Music B.V.

Released on: 1986-01-01

Piano: Menahem Pressler, Violin: Isidore Cohen, Cello: Bernard Greenhouse

Recording Producer: Volker Straus

Recording Engineer: Cees Heijkoop

Composer: Franz Schubert

Fantasy parses ambivalence

dig

“fantasy parses ambivalence in such a way that the subject is not defeated by it.” (LB)

It is precisely this holding together of multiplicity and power—and of the different critical imperatives that follow from them—that leads to the productively ambivalent conundrum in much of Berlant’s work: the tension between ‘the productivity of never-mere-description beyond the fantasy of tying things down’ (Berlant, 2019b, p. 291) and the need for critical analyses of and alternatives to (extra)ordinary violence and precarity. Different people and projects will be differently drawn toward these imperatives; for us, it is appealing to remain with the questions that the conundrum of ambivalence open up rather than seeking their resolution, to stay a little longer in the realm of undecidability so as to not delimit a given affective relationship to an object, or not arrive at a settled point of (mis)recognition too early (Ruez & Cockayne, 2021). However, rather than inaction or indifference, maintaining such a position requires careful and uncertain work. This work is important precisely because of its (im)possibilities: we are never fully in control of our own psychic processes, the ‘we’ at work here is differentially and unevenly precarious, and the contingency of thinking and acting in common necessarily entails ambivalence. All of which are lessons that Berlant’s work can help us (un)learn. (Daniel Cockayne and Derek Ruez, Encountering Berlant part two.)

The otherwise and elsewhere

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“speculative knowledge of freedom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable within the prevailing terms of order.”

“everyday practices explored the possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of the otherwise and elsewhere”

“At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbors, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. It enabled them to conceive other ways of existing” (SH, Scenes of Subjection)

AG2023_1022710b

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AG2023_1022710b

“split open the dreary world to expose an enchanted one”

“It was the name that called forth the true him.”

“The other selves were like the words he spoke—fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect Son from harm and to secure that one reality at least.”

“There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank.”

“This is the place. Where you can take a choice.” (TM, Tar Baby)

AG2023_1120001a

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“cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens”

“absented itself from the art of the possible”

“Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery.” (JD)