Category: landscape

A place to stand and unfurl all that we see

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Through both this developmental and this structural model, psychoanalysis enacts an unprecedented science of mediation: a study of how language and norms inform desires; how desires can only make themselves legible in the distortions of parapraxes, dreams, fumbles, and symptoms; how the self is not self-evident but rather a product of social relations. With its conviction that psychic experience is socially produced, psychoanalytic theory can help explore the ways that circulation impresses upon the psyche: an overemphasis on instantaneous fluid exchange, an overabundance of images, an overweighting of presence, and overvaluing of identity can all preclude or fore-close the functioning of the symbolic. Representation slackens, and an unintegrable real impends. Immersion in the imaginary initiates all kinds of psychic dischord, from fantasies of self-possession and delusions of wholeness, to refusals of the other and proliferating dualities, to paranoiac gusts and polarized fluctuation. Each of these disorders vividly characterizes contemporary media culture and contemporary algorithmic logic.

Anna Kornbluh

Private archive

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The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website, and whitehouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution. On February 7th, Trump sacked the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that maintains the official texts of the nation’s laws, and whose motto is “the written word endures.”

More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark

Julian Lucas, New Yorker

A guerrilla archiving movement has responded.

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https://www.tumblr.com/thunderstruck9/779371060151910400/hernan-bas-american-1978-private-bouquet

In this here place … love small

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In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon — everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother — a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.

Beloved, Toni Morrison

via The Marginalian.

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