1. The modern is not opposed to the traditional. It never was. It never will be. ‘We’ have rituals and traditions, transgressions and taboos, magic, myths, sacred positions and miraculous events (all these have only become more pervasive and powerful, real and effective):

A definition functions as an incantation whose purpose is to ward off thinking…

Also: security, sovereignty, development, law, identity. All of which are only manifestations of our expectations and petty knowledges: those little assurances, common sense…the sun will rise tomorrow, you wont punch me in the face, it is good to be good and good to be honest, they wont break the law (it’s a performance for God’s sake).

Is it possible to send up the rules and rituals of theatre? (Is it possible to fail? Is it possible to avoid failure?). A stable platform from which to jump (you always need stability, you): entry fee, seats, a stage, a program, gallery, apparent centre of attention, unravelling ritual repetition…the performance space is obviously a ritual space, but is our irreverence or mockery of it also a ritual? A version of ‘our’ tradition?

2. What kind of affect does the ‘real world’ seek in order to continue its real fantasy? The affect of facts. Facts fitting for a newspaper report. The reality effect. The facts are nothing without affects. We want to dwell on these affects. We want to make our everyday world nothing but stranger. The ‘performance’ makes an accusation – the ‘real world’ is performed! The ‘artwork’ might flirt with, fight with, the void; hence its apparent idleness and its potentially revolutionary powers.

It is perhaps the very notion of the ‘real world’ that stands in the way of a truly radical thought.

Once upon a time we were all so sad, because there were people who thought we wanted to be practical, to deal with the ‘real world.’ What a pitiful misunderstanding. The only way is to be violently un-practical, highly ‘abstract.’ Only when people say ‘this has no use value!’ will it be possible to finally getting past such demands, to encourage something really exciting.

3. We hoped against all hope to disrupt, to confront with all the loving care of one who knows the importance of discomfort. We wanted to invoke other senses. Sound and smell penetrate. Perhaps we wanted to penetrate you, because this speaks of sharing and respect.

We wished for little shocks and slight weariness, a possibly awkward discomfort. Were we hoping for too much? We assumed that performance had this power. But can performance really stupefy? It has been said that performance borrows these affective powers from art. Now one wonders. We received nervous laughter, but laughter none the less, for our efforts. And so we wanted to explore this, let it go to its limits. Rather masochistically, we wished to be laughed at and ridiculed. For someone to say “this is shit!” and for us to agree.

After all there could never have not been an affect (it’s class, there’s attendance, once you enter you must be there). There is and always will be affects. This is some consolation.

4. Perhaps action happens at a distance - seduction or laughter. Maybe if you try to make everything explicit you will block up the pathways that you have tried to open. If you try to tell the whole story you will do violence to chance, you will forget that stories are games of selection - narrative, myth, principled or active forgetting. A complicity, a conspiracy. Maybe this is why we are interested in pursuing performance – the mythic operation (distance) instead of the naïve myth of the pure and explicit. Action as distance, not the story of comfortable attention (a-tension).

--- {The explicit is too familiar, you already know it, nothing to do, it is just information, easily placed. Learning or thinking – this means: encounters, not knowing how or if they will cut you; bruises, tension. Which is sharing, which compels sharing}

5. Don’t expect these categories to hold their integrity (don’t expect these categories to correspond to our ‘main themes’). We can barely hold our lines together:

1. What is the directive – ‘Perform!’? What does it mean to issue such a command?

c.1300, "carry into effect, fulfill, discharge," via Anglo-Fr. performir, altered (by infl. of O.Fr. forme "form") from O.Fr. parfornir "to do, carry out, finish, accomplish," from par- "completely" + fornir "to provide" (see furnish). Theatrical/musical sense is from 1610.

Such a dictate demands accomplishment, completion. Par - completely + fornir (to fornicate) - to form. So, to perform is to produce a completely formed product/ion, a little child or a paper doll, just as one produces any other product.

The inadequacies of this definition are so obvious that they almost bore us. To demand accomplishment and fulfilment – to define - is to be insensitive to performance and to desensitize yourself to it. Definitions are never complete and it is the tension between definitions that produces ‘the game’. That is, tension produces the present moment, the present we have given you and you to us.

To present: to gift. What fails in the directive – “Perform!” is its (lack of) style and not the inevitable failure of expectations (performance enjoys expectation and failure). It is the tone of the demand that strikes us as a colonialist’s ruse. One cannot explicitly demand a gift. Gifting compels only insofar as it is a ceremony, a ritual, a practice. A practice (never the ‘real’ thing).

We therefore prefer to call this exhibition, execution and display because they also gesture to a holding out, to show.

To display: despleier “unfold, spread out,”, displicare “to scatter,” dis (un-, apart) + plicare “to fold”.

We also prefer (to call to this as) a show. For this does not have the indignant sovereignty of demand.

c.1300, "act of exhibiting to view," from show (v.). Sense of "appearance put on with intention to deceive" is recorded from c.1526. Meaning "display, spectacle" is first recorded 1561

‘For appearance sake’! Ahh! This is insightful. To act for the sake of appearance is profound. Appearance is profound. Deception is profound. Masks and mirrors are profound. Appearance is seductive, it does not demand.

EDITOR'S INTERJECTION

The "show" of 1561, while being the source of our modern word, is also the conclusion of a much older story. Here's the descent:

Modern English "show"
from Early Modern "shew"
from Middle English "schewen"
from Old English "scēawian".

Sweet defines scēawian as : see / scrutinize / reconnitre
/ regard (favorably) / seek out / select / provide / grant

But note also the etymological proximity in Old English of:

1. sceatt - property / money / sum / payment / tribute / rent
2. sceat - cloth / cloak / garment / lap / bosom / surface / region /
quarter / district / inlet / corner / projection

On the one hand, the power to reveal and conceal, as encoded in the history of clothing;
and on the other, the power to grant and deny access to land, to sea, to experiences ... D.R.

It is by interpretation that the artwork has come to achieve the mark of humanism. The artwork now retires on the psychoanalysts couch; it goes on a chat show. Subjected to invasive procedures, art is tortured in order to create a false depth (psychology?) that bypasses (and answers for) the intricate workings upon its surface. We want the surface to speak. We want appearance to speak. It is the surface that matters. It is the surface that retains the mystery.

2. The directive ‘Perform’ is a visual demand, a demand for visual representation. The gaze.

"center of the eye," 1670 (in L. form from 1398), from O.Fr. pupille (14c.), from L. pupilla, originally "little girl-doll," dim. of pupa "girl, doll" (see pupil (1)), so called from the tiny image one sees of himself reflected in the eye of another. Gk. is said also to have used the same word, kore (lit. "girl"), to mean both "doll" and "pupil of the eye;" and cf. obsolete baby "small image of oneself in another's pupil" (1593)

The real insight is that eyes are not much like windows after all and much more like mirrors. Relations and interactions happen first. Only by being seen, being watched (by others, by oneself), does one fix interiority. And to do so is always to make ‘a little girl doll’, a caricature. Paul Carter is concerned with ‘outwardness, relations as opposed to inwardness;’ thus his suspicion of psycho-analysis. Thus our suspicion: reflections, not windows.

3. Why perform this ridiculous etymological theatre (theatre of performance)? What does any of this have to do with the post-colonial? You see, we all need a certain amount of illusion and reassurance in order to believe. One needs to believe in order to translate. Translation is playful; there is nothing more serious than play. It requires a certain type of belief.

1. Theatre is what Imperial History does in The Road to Botany Bay¹ – it tells the one and only official straight story –

a story is a fragment, a figment; it becomes dangerous when it poses, plastic smile, as the whole – (the metnoymic monster)

Theatre-goers and consumers of imperial history are an audience. They sit outside the story and watch from an illusory, objective, Gods-eyes perspective: the stage of the international, the stage of the theatre, the stage of the viewer. Linear story, linear time, linear experience, discernible ‘Historical Events’, ATTENTION. But we have no time for these myths (there are better ones).

More to the point: you recognise theatre. You know that it is Art. You expect everything about it (no surprise, chance, shock, randomness, improvisation, coincidence). You consume it like any other delicious piece of capital-shit (wine, cars, tobacco, sex, university degrees, Australian Idol), with one exception: those who consume Art believe that they participate in ‘high culture’ (a myth loved by colonists). You congratulate your profundity so comfortably that Art does not produce even the tiniest shock.

It has been said that the political ceases to be so as soon it is called political and taken up by parliamentary politicians.² We agree absolutely, and we add that the same must be said for Art, for Theatre, for Performance. Stage it, frame it, stratify it, neutralise:

This is why we insist that there is no such thing as Aboriginal Australian Art or Aboriginal Australian Performance. Why would we degrade such practices by stratifying them, by colonising them thus?

So. We will continue to repeat - we do not understand, we cannot recognise ‘the other’ (it is neither subject nor object, it is not ‘Aboriginal Art’). Our gesture of respect, admission of incompetence: we do not yet know how to approach such practices; we certainly cannot do so in a ‘class performance’ except by the most indirect pathways.

Further, this ‘other’ (whatever it ‘is,’ if it ‘is’ at all) subsists in ‘our culture’ as much as it does in ‘Aboriginal culture’ – to not see this is to naively fetishise a ‘cultural other,’ and thus ignorantly participate in a colonial violence (we see this possibility in Todorov, we saw it manifest in the classroom)³ -

How they are loved, these exteriorities! Hence voyages, ethnology, psychiatry, pediatrics, pedagogy, the love of the excluded: enter, beautiful Negresses, charming Indians, enigmatic Orientals, dreamers, children, enter my work and the spaces of my concepts. All this is theatre; it is the white innocence of the West in expansion, base cannibalistic imperialism.⁴

Incidentally, Paul Carter works with these thoughts in Dark Writing – he insists that we must look to

the practical precedent Indigenous cultures set, in which geography, performance and design are different expressions of one constantly renewed act of self-becoming at that place. But it is clear that profound cultural differences cannot be dissolved…Such advances as we make in reintegrating theory and practice, rehabilitating the movement forms buried in our habits of thinking and drawing, will depend on looking for precedents within our own cultural background.⁵

--- {An indirection which shall continue to present itself: intensity in tension. A tension, the tension of our position: the undecidability of a certain inadequate but indispensable opposition: indigenous/modern. We must guard against both a choice between terms and a denial of the opposition. The choice: nostalgic (read: fucked) stories of an impossible ‘return’ to the ‘non-modern’ or the exclusive strategies of ‘the modern’ – in this latter case, ‘indigenous peoples’ simply become an economic class (the final touches of a comprehensive cruelty). This latter outcome would also hold in the denial of the opposition of indigenous to modern (ie: the world would only have room for the ‘modern’).⁶ None of these make possible some sort of politics (‘our’ politics). The energy, the movement, the contraction – all these occur in the tension, the movement, the in-between, the charged step which propels forward, the unresolved. This is where politics happens, we must learn to stretch - only tension generates action, thinking, life}.

2. We must be careful here; what we are calling Art or politics has some sort of relationship to that which cracks the frame and slips off the stage. We need the frame in order to trace the in-between, the gap, the becoming. Carter cites Prynne, “The nomad is perfect/but the pure motion which has no track is/utterly lost.”⁷ ‘Art’ and ‘politics,’ words and concepts - these structure our attempts to restructure.

But in all this we must not believe that it is we who ‘do’ the slipping and cracking - Art fails already and without our help, attention and the line will always ultimately fail.

The fixity, indeed the territory of Art (the gallery, the city, the market, the conceptual context…) on the one hand. On the other: the exploitation or subversion of this territory. This would be an approximation of our strategy - but we should not be so simple as to choose between territory and movement (ie: territory good, movement bad). Our world is also the result of movement: colonialists move and the market moves – they need to do so in order for the civilised stability of sedentary city life to become possible. From this perspective, the world (good, bad, both, neither…) is always composed of combinations of fixity and fluidity. Our evaluations must therefore address complex mixtures - we need to look at particular combinations of movement and territoriality.

In any given context we need to ask: in what context is movement considered proper? In what context is stability legitimised? What is our position such that we are capable of evaluating this (positively, negatively, both, neither…)? These questions apply at every level – the international, the everyday, the economic, the artistic-subjective-asubjective (discursive, visual, rhythmic, tactile, haptical, olfactory)...we would discover different answers at each level, but also discover that these different perspectives require one another and must be considered together.

But this task should not be taken as the whole story. Considered alone, it does not leave enough room for something, anything, nebulous (and this something, anything, cannot be ignored if we are to avoid the repetition of an imperial stupidity). Maybe evaluation-politics-art, should be concerned with this nebulous whatever, with finding ways of touching it - without trying to own it.

The play of expectations: the intensity of seduction cannot be counted; laughter surprises from behind; anxiety becomes inextricable from joy.

3. Never trust common sense. There is no such thing as empty space or full space. Space is not a container. It is made - by knowledge, by expectations, by bodies; rhythmically.

This means: a stage (class performance or Malthouse Theatre) can neither be empty nor full. It is simply shared space, pulsing expectations and exclusions (representation is also participation). What we already know about space and the stage has a life of its own – our expectations (our common sense) hold a cruel certainty which must be shaken if anything is to happen. This can become apparent with deferral, with shock, with an indirect and intense use of the stage. With the failure of the stage (...maybe the most important events are happening off the stage…).⁸

1. Maybe you need to ask what it means, maybe this is important. But we want to expose ourselves to the operations which make meaning possible - in order to make possible other ways of meaning (how do you know ‘the other’ of knowledge?).

2. Rather than theatre (or even Performance, Art) we shall participate with pornography. Not because the theatre is absent in porn but because it manifests differently (one does not wear one’s best suit in order to consume porn).

The theatre does not overdetermine porn as it does ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ In porn, the tension between Theatre (Art) and participation unfolds differently, it brings this tension to the fore, it allows tension to be ‘experienced.’ This elastic buoyancy will allow our performance to be more (or less) than a ‘performance.’ A rumination upon performance, complicity, conspiracy. Chewing, digesting, transforming.

"actress whose role is decorative rather than histrionic" [OED], 1836, from show (v.) + girl.

4. Our relations to sexuality are complex and multiple (what is it about ‘sexuality’ that makes ‘sexual violence’ possible?); there will be many different responses to pornography. We are sensitive to multiplying nuances, and others in the class will be sensitive in other ways. Intense responses (discomfort, turn-on, outrage, anxiety, boredom). It is an entire language – we know that everyone will speak it. We need to invite participation, not representation.

Don’t rush; participation is not opposed to representation. Participation (sharing) is what makes representation possible. Better: representing is a way of participating, but a limited and exclusive one. We would look to tension (the tension between representation and participation) as a more open and perspectival style of participation. This does not mean that we will succeed, only that we are struggling to find pathways.

5. To dismiss the politics of heroes is to go beyond the porn-actor divide (softcore, hardcore etc): it's to sleep in the beyond of the entire pornophysics of the system.

1. ‘Ways of knowing:’ this also means ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of not knowing.’ Ways of encountering the most disparate of signs –

The connection of practices, their pulsations and rhythms, their permeabilities; the directions and emphases of material thought; the discovery of necessity. We need to create new sensitivities (new ways of knowing).

Perhaps “to transfer attention from the footfall to the track in-between?”⁹ Flesh this out – we are incapable of forgetting the footfall and, in any case, there is no sensitivity without the interaction of the footfall with the in-between. Really, sensitivity is an encounter with the gap between these two tendencies (the ‘experience’ of tension). We have used many names: movement and territoriality, fixity and fluidity, Art and that which cracks the frame and slips off the stage; “the gap between being and becoming, between origin and orientation, in the problematic drama of (literally) growing up and away.”¹⁰

3. Of course there are many ways of knowing. But this was often interpreted as: “there are as many ways of interpreting as there are people, as there are cultures”. This is not how to interpret. We think knowing before we think people, even if we don’t know it. We think knowing before we think culture, even if we don’t know it.

4. It is not what you can do with writing, performance, ideas, theory; not what you can do, as if one expects from it a nutritional discovery or technical invention. But be honest, this is not really what you want. These things have use-value, which already means that they are buy-able, sellable. If the task is really to think thinking otherwise than no amount of product, programs and procedures will produce ‘results’. No, it is not about what we can do with writings, performance, ideas, theory, but the possibility that they may do something to us.

5. Do not think that you can manage to not objectify. Subjects and objects are objectifications. You know me – objectification. I know myself – objectification. All our little stories. (In any case, sometimes we want it, sometimes you want it, sometimes it feels good to be little girl dolls).

That said; we hoped to unfold, scatter out, follow, so that you did not know what you wanted or desired. What object? What subject? To tell you that you never could control the little births or suicides that happen at any and every second. The foldings and unfoldings.

6. Attention. Attend-tion, A-tension. Perhaps all that we want to show is the impossibility of pure attention (or: you cannot attend unequivocally); to create some sort of a knowledge (not simply a representation, maybe an insight?) in which experience is understood as tension. You won’t see or experience tension ‘itself’ because it is not a thing, it exists in-between. It could be another name for ‘dark writing’.

--- {There is a rubber band which holds together frustration, terrified contact, ‘consummation,’ covetousness, duplicities…energy…these can only be loved (?) together, on the band}

A rubber band is a way of storing energy, facilitating movement. Stretch it, create tension, maybe expend the tension (this expenditure will create new tension – for instance your outrage when I flick you with the rubber band). But don’t let the rubber band snap.

--- {…you will never know beforehand how far we can stretch…and you will not remember afterwards…abyss…this is a way of knowing …}

1. We spoke, at length, about the need for failure, because we knew we needed to fail. ‘How can we fail adequately?’ ‘What constitutes failing well? For a moment or two we desired to fail so well that others would know that we had really succeeded in failing! How arrogant! How amusing! We knew we could do nothing else but fail. What else can one do, but fail! – ‘How wonderful!’ we savoured the thought amongst ourselves!

2. “We will do this!” One would say, bravely. Then we would all provide the anecdote.

And we (we are not simply battling against syntax; we say ‘we’ meaning ‘the events of we’…and perhaps we fail in this), yes, we have used the word ‘one’ occasionally. This is meant to read as many, a mixture of some bits of this and then that, sometimes all at once. ‘One’ should be read as gesturing toward the impression of an event, not as ‘one of us’, our ‘proper names’, our ‘unified egos’. This is not the failure we are after. We want a subtle and profound failure, a failure that knows it is-about-to-perhaps-of-course-already-has failed. This is why we do not let on what (who?) we mean by ‘one’. So you (we mean many too) are not subdued by this little silly success.¹¹

3. Symbolism is an ‘example’ of failure. But this is not the joyous or devastating failure of the ‘not-yet’ and ‘already-past’. This is the failure of failure to show, dark writing. The symbolic happens necessarily after performance (the myth of the symbol). It is not performance’s tool, but its antithesis. The symbolic is the tool of the colonizer, it is the only way to silence and castrate the poet, mystic or myth-teller. ‘This is what it means…’

4. Our ‘intention’? Certainly not to transmit information. Leave that to computers and capital. We wish to participate in mis-understanding, performative illegibility, translation, PROVOCATIONS, encounters, confrontations – that is to say, impressions. Even if it is the modest impression of the failure of information. The failure of ‘knowledge transfer.’ The failure of Art. The failure of certainty. The failure of our ‘modern’ ways of knowing. Everything that is excluded or rebuked or stupidly translated.

These impressions are intended (but can we control this?) as multiple little shocks, not monstrous ‘Events.’ These little shocks are the first step, the experience of tension:

It is only in the shock of not knowing, at the limits of knowledge, from the perspective of knowledge, that thinking happens. Border-work, everything happens at the limit, at the point of tension which must not be resolved (inside or outside?). It is only in this inconceivable ‘position’ that new ways of knowing become possible (if you already know then you have nothing to do). For something else to be possible we must learn to learn, to expose ourselves: we must see the world as strange, inexplicable. We must together, as a group, create the conditions in which learning becomes possible. Even if we know that we cannot control or determine the direction or the success of such learning. This is, perhaps, the ‘intention’ of our performance, a celebration of our failure, our insecurity.

However and but: we are wary of a certain sort of massive shock, September 11’s etc. Such ‘Events’ take the stage, they become the stuff of imperial history, they are easily recognised (overwhelmed, we sometimes recoil instead of stretching – made sense of, there can be minimal tension in such ‘events’; even if recoil is derivative and tension is never completely overcome).

5. Elastic buoyancy, tension, the gap. These will resonate as we take every precaution to ensure that our ‘performance’ will have no fixed stage, no set frame, no certain beginning, no determinate end, no protagonists. But we will fail: despite our efforts it will nonetheless remain an Event with which we are complicit - ‘class performance’ (this is the problem with ‘Art’). It will be taken up and made sense of with ease. Recoil or ridicule, our failure is inevitable; it is therefore part of our task to make this explicit, to share our limits and insecurities with the class. Failure as affirmative participation. Perhaps the class will take the presentation somewhere unexpected (we will never know, shock is always deferred; we are not privy to the endless echoes, folds, and responses which will follow; there are so many people in this class and people are so many even when considered alone).

Affirmative participation is another name for collaboration, the opening of another perspective on tension, the tightrope between sharing and control: this is apparently a ‘group performance,’ however we few are in the privileged (?) position of ‘planning’ it. We must negotiate our need to control the direction of the ‘performance’ but in such a manner as to allow for indirection, chance, coincidence. We must negotiate our different positions, struggle of wills, in an improvised affair (clandestine communication and mis-communication). This means relinquishing certain elements and styles of control without abandoning it completely.

We must CREATE CONDITIONS, and not a script; we must create tools with which to implicate chance and coincidence. We must generate intensity with mistakes. And we must abandon ourselves to it all (retrospectively: this means, learning to deal with frustration, negativity and annoyance, with necessity, with the real constraints which we have created for ourselves in collaboration).

We cannot overcome or supersede these tensions, neither can we deny them. And we certainly cannot give up and write separate essays instead. We must allow the tension of the in-between to take us somewhere (we don’t know where).

6. All this; this is why failure is not the only perspective to take. Failure is also what happens to those who wish to know the facts and be done with life. The failure of the line and the stage is also the success of movement, divergence, disjunction. Proliferating perspectives, material thinking: our material is the classroom, our selves, this institution, knowledge formations, power relations, space, time etc.

In reality, our performance has been echoing for years and it will continue to echo.

Bodily knowledge, resonating intimacy, the impurity of solidarity, impressions, a spell and it’s leaky failure. Deferred shock or immediate anxiety, this is our performance: the hope of an illegible situation. Confrontation or encounter, it is irreducible to the classroom, the stage, a beginning or an end. It cannot be neutralised by being called Art, we cannot value it by selling it. It is only an experiment. It never comes except as the everyday, every single day…ven, todos los dias!¹²

To perform, To transform, To experiment, To execute: “sometimes it is almost putting it to death; sometimes dragging it out, sometimes embalming it, sometimes bringing it to climax, but one never knows before beginning whether one’s luck will be good or bad, whether this is birth or suicide.”¹³

1. Act 97, Scene 7: classroom. Someone said; “of course people want things (washing machines?)”, another responded, sincerely; “look at cargo cults”. One of us laughed and then grimaced at the statements overheard.

Hypothesis: condescending laughter at silly ‘primitives’ happens in cults. To laugh at ignorant ‘primitive’ ‘wants’ is cult-like. As is the belief in wanting; subjects wanting objects and all that…how is such a belief not cultish? One discovered such a snickering article on cargo cults in The Christian Science Monitor (The Christian Science Monitor = CULT x 3).

1657, from Sp. cargo "burden," from cargar "to load, impose taxes," from L.L. carricare "to load on a cart" (see charge). South Pacific cargo cult is from 1949.

1617, "worship," also "a particular form of worship," from Fr. culte, from L. cultus "care, cultivation, worship," originally "tended, cultivated,"

1440, "the tilling of land," from L. cultura, from pp. stem of colere "tend, guard, cultivate, till" (see cult).

So. A cargo cult is a particular way in which to care for and cultivate (cultus) necessary but imposed burdens (cargo).

Another hypothesis: ‘Cargo Cult’ is a possibility of the sacred. The sacred has nothing to do with a want, wish or demand, but rather with need. ‘But how can need not be about subjects or objects?’ we hear you ask. Let us proceed slowly and stupidly, let us return to etymology, but selectively,

O.E. nied (W.Saxon), "necessity, compulsion, duty," originally "violence, force," from nedza "misery, distress," from PIE *nau- "death, to be exhausted." Common in O.E. compounds, e.g. niedfaru "compulsory journey," a euphemism for "death;" niedhæmed "rape," the second element being an O.E. word meaning "sexual intercourse;" niedling "slave." Meaning "extreme poverty, destitution" is from c.1200. The verb is O.E. neodian "be necessary," from the noun. Phrase the needful "money" is attested from 1774.

Need is libidinal and equivocal (is it rape or sexual intercourse?). Aside from this, it is also employed as a euphemism for death. Death, the necessary exhaustion of infinity (there is no experience without this exhaustion, there is no experience without death, we need death in order to experience - experience is exhaustion, the closure of chance, relative recoil of tension). But we are not yet exhausted, we continue: this euphemism for death, the need of death, is a journey. On this journey we discover compulsion (death is, after all, a ‘compulsory journey’). An experiment. We would call this journey the experience of the sacred, the discovery of necessity (is this what John Von Sturmer means?).

2. “Of course people want things! Of course people want! Of course, people! Of course people want fruit out of season! Of course people have the right to chose, to desire, to have. Of course people, human people, have these rights. They should want things. They must.

We should be the most cautious, perhaps we should be at our most violent, when we preface with ‘of course’.

1. “The movement image, the dance figure, the metaphor are equally malleable. What counts is not their obvious sensory and cognitive heterogeneity but their predisposition to movement, change, inter-penetration and transformation.”¹⁴

We are not against metaphors, we love metaphors, provided that they abyssal, without ground. Provided that we can be sensitive to their movement, change, inter-penetration and transformation. Metransformo – quien?

But we are against the metaphor, the meaning, the truth. We are against these myths, even if we can’t live without believing in them to some extent. O, tension again! We are learning to stretch! Soon we will become able to do the splits.

2. Don’t believe that it is only bad people who manipulate. Before people there is manipulation - struggle is the other side of sharing and collaborating. You are made of manipulation, you survive through manipulation, you love it.

Manipulation is not a bad thing (manipulation is not a good thing), however it is certainly violent (which is not a bad thing, not a good thing) – there is no non-manipulative position, there is no non-violent space -

The violence of a choice (giving a choice on the one hand and taking a choice on the other – taking a choice in such a manner as to experience it, as a choice): the eruption of the sacred, the play of necessities. A choice involves intense compulsions in struggling directions, a certain implication in power relations (between appearing genuine to someone you want to impress and keeping safe, for instance). With a choice there is intensity, the opening of a style of tension, anxiety or joy. With the decision comes undecidability (contrast: there is a certain security in not knowing other possibilities – sit in the theatre and watch the play in your best expensive suit).

The choice exposes us, it is vulnerability - shared, collaborative (you are never alone); perhaps this insecurity forces some sort of stability, an orientation maybe (should we still call it security?). Movement and fixity, insecurity and security: we need to evaluate the ways in which these enter into relation.

An ‘example:’ with tension and vulnerability (insecurity), negotiation (skill, learning, stability, security) becomes necessary. Cuts and bruises. But how will you learn, what will you learn?

We did not introduce stench as a metaphor for the filth of the international, the pervasive smell of shanty towns and the infected wounds of the peasant and other such tropes (are we introducing this metaphor now?).

…to build a possible soul, a soul whose head will not devour its own tail, the law commands that one uses only what is patently alive. And the law commands that whoever partakes of the imund,¹⁵must do so without knowing; for, he who partakes of the imund knowing that it is imund, must also come to know that the imund is not imund.¹⁶

Clarise Lispector is making reference to Leviticus (the rules given to Moses about what can and cannot be eaten). She tells the story of G.H. (a woman with no name) who discovers that eating a live cockroach is not a sin, but a joy. This is G.H.’s account of metamorphosis:

I opened my mouth with fright to ask for help. Why? Because I did not want to be imund like the cockroach. What ideal held me from the sensing of an idea? Why should I not make myself imund?...What was I afraid of? Being imund? With what?

Unclean with joy! What powers devouring has! Incorporation! Let us embark on eating all that is repugnant!¹⁷

3. When one of us still thinks about ‘bodies’ and ‘minds’ s/he finds this rather uncomfortable. Such strange metaphors.

And then this comes out, as if from nowhere: between humans, bodies and lives, one could expect to mess with nothing else than with life, an entire sense of life, the entire mess of life. Bodies, lives; falling and trembling on their extensions and exhibitions. Tracings of executions. This game on the bodies of affects: pupil, doll, representation, existence, thought, discourse, pornography, performance, cargo-cults, para-sites, etymology, culture, failure, chance, expectations, impressions, manipulation, choices, violence, tension, tension, politics, liberation, the ‘real’, the other…

4. Para-site (as in, para-llel or para-legal): another site existing to the side of the perceived essential site. The parasite has two related characteristics. It sucks the life from a self-sufficient body and it contributes nothing to this body in return (the parasite has no respect for the laws of exchange, apparently).

Translation: ‘you are living off someone’s productive work – you take, but you contribute nothing, it disgusts me.’

Who employs this ridiculous moralism? Who accuses others of being parasites? No doubt someone who considers himself to be a spokesperson for the dominant order, for the apparently self-sufficient body proper (self-sufficient organism, self-sufficient person, self-sufficient society, self-sufficient family, self-sufficient culture…a string of myths too funny and powerful to laugh at).

No simple reversal, we do not want to simply suggest that parasites are ‘good’ because they apparently do not ‘contribute’ to a dominant order of which we are critical. Our point is more fundamental: once you admit the judgment ‘parasite,’ a non-parasitic position becomes impossible - there is no ‘body’ which does not play the role of parasite in some sense (the productive worker [apparently the non-parasite par excellence] is a parasite – he leeches off ecologies that do not require him but that he helps to destroy; similarly, the colonial power is a parasite upon its colonies. But I am also a parasite on our great nation, Dawes and Patyegarang entered into a relationship which was parasitic upon the order of the colony,¹⁸ fiction is [stupidly] said to be parasitic upon reality…).¹⁹

From a certain perspective, then, we are all parasites, we are all made of parasitism. But, from another perspective, nothing can be considered a parasite; it is impossible to take without giving, even if the gift is that of destruction or intense cruelty…even if the discharge of debt is not directed towards the initial creditor (eg, the ‘dominant order’) –

the gift may not be ‘reciprocal’ (giving back to that which gave to you). It may be the gift of a new ‘space;’ a para-site within which something else becomes possible. Yet this new ‘space’ is a gift, it will always transform that which it enters into relation with, it cannot but participate in a deferred, illegible and misunderstood reciprocity (for better, worse, both, neither…recoil, ridicule, collaboration, thought, listening, shock…).²⁰

Really, if we are going to judge on these terms (but maybe we should find other tools), we should not measure degrees of self-sufficiency or economic ‘independence’ – we must instead look at the nature of our apparent parasitism, the ways in which our dependences and independences relate. What they make possible and impossible. But, above all, we must recognise that the status of the parasite is undecidable once you insist upon its reality; like everything else, it subsists in tension, nebulous seduction. Tinkering with the sacred, this is why evaluation – the decision, the choice - is urgent, necessary and impossible to secure.

5. Another organic metaphor: we think like a cow ruminates. It chews, digests, transforms, chews again, digests again, transforms again…eventually it shits (shit is a waste product, but shit is also food for the soil, for microbes).

This could be a way of thinking memory. It is also a way of thinking the ‘artistic process’ - the relation between memory and art is not insignificant (intensity, tension, fixity, movement, failure, affirmative participation, expectations, chance, coincidence). Such ruminations are also a way of thinking through the ways in which things hold together and fall apart.

Memory would be the game of impressions and shocks – of thinking. An impression takes days, it transforms, and in the process it transforms you. You perceive the ‘event’ again and differently.

– another question: ‘what is this doing to me?’ (we prefer this not because meaning is irrelevant but because meaning is only meaning if it does something to you; the ruminations of memory and consciousness, of material thinking, of sensory confusion).

Do not believe that you can stop asking this question. Do not believe that you will know the answer (we are searching for ways of knowing that do not know answers).

2. No doubt this is exhausting…starting over again, over again, over again…diverging from the line…but you must try to pay attention, there is along way to go.

3. Only sharing makes possible expectations, actions, security/insecurity, reactions, faces, masks, seduction, tension, people, the discovery of necessity…struggling/laughing – there is no non-collaborative position….

Memory, deferred shock: self-conscious boredom later reveals itself as a mask for intensity. You discover this five hours later, or the next day - only afterwards are you are there for the first time. Initially insignificant little events return to haunt you.

Seeing them through a magic veil, much like the day after an awkward sexual encounter.

Violence: We have stripped you of your liberty. You cannot control your relation to onions (but you never could). Visceral reactions; raw, chopped, we have made sure that the smell will take you to us.

Provocations: your positions, our positions. This space leaks, it only works because it is not autonomous. You arrive with yourself, you encounter some sort of disjunction, you are offered a choice which torments you; yourself in a bind.

The sacred discovery of necessity: I could have spoken (ie: shaken off this accumulated filth) as much as you could have stripped naked and done a cartwheel. As much as you could have whipped me.

Confrontations, the discovery of necessity: ‘I did not know how to act, whether to act.’ Needing to deal with not knowing, with tension (needing to think)

Struggles: the compulsion to participate, even if you also don’t want to (one compulsion dominates another). War of magic spells.

Thus the discovery of necessity: sickened by onions, you cut them nonetheless. You can’t not…

The discovery of necessity: the normalisation of the space, you begin to know how to act, you recoil in the face if thinking; the need to fight this ------------------

Shock, struggles, the discovery of necessity: the sudden (?) realisation that nobody was in control, the invisible battle of wills within and between dear friends (the ‘performers’). Frustration also at a lack of control (so much so that one became frustration, anger, intensity).

Perhaps this is mere avoidance, perhaps we are mute and ineffectual – we are colonized.

Heat, onions, rotten meat, interruptive music, dumpstered dough, squashed tomatoes, vinegar, eggs, saturated walls, play of languages, exclamations, explosions, repetition, regulation, indifference, strange bodies, queer hetero porn, boredom, love (of course you laughed, of course you missed so much)

Infectious African beats and other such nonsense. What homesickness and what pornography!

The dangerous myth of resolution (re-solution), reconciliation (re-conciliation);

One said to the other, already guilty and thinking of necessity, should we talk about psycho-analysis now? The other responded –

Good writing does not demand that we become more human, but that we become (finally and perhaps too late) dehumanized.

We did not create art (no one ever does). One only means to say something about it.

What must you do in order to ‘sleep at night’? In order to ‘live with yourself’? Is this is what you must do in order to ‘sleep with yourself?’ I love sleeping with myself, on account of the fact that I am never alone.

My sincere hope is that you are finding this uncomfortable and exhausting. What a wonderful gift we would have given you! If not – we have failed – oh, well, we can all rejoice in that!

Here is the whole story: we are never going to get ‘the real story.’ And “of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories…”²¹

In the above text we (which of us? Both of us? One of us? You will never know, we will never know) insist that the gesture of offering a choice is inescapably violent and manipulative. Thank you for demonstrating this (implicitly, no doubt, without even knowing it, because this is where things happen…this is one of the things that we wish for you to learn from us. We, your teachers, your students, your whores, your assessors).

Thank you again for demonstrating this. But, we can hear you ask - ‘How have I demonstrated this?’ We will risk our positions and answer directly…not in order to make everything explicit, but in order to learn with you (to teach?).

You, Phillip: the teacher, the pedagogue who wishes to subvert the stratified teacher-student relation…wonderful.

You, Phillip: the marker, the assessor who cites the constraints of the ‘real’ world of marks and scholarships. Not so wonderful (but even so, we understand, even if we are confused by our understanding…we, too, live in the ‘real’ world). To what extent can you subvert this stratification? To what extent will you? To what extent should you? To what extend have you? To what extent do you need to?

You, Phillip: the friend. The teacher-friend-assessor sincerely acts the friend on this little stage (we have no doubt of his sincerity), but he does so as the teacher-assessor (this official role lurks in the background, as ominously as the ‘real’ world).

Taking on these multiple roles (thus compromising them all) is doubtless subversive; this is precisely why it is dangerous and wonderful. And so we repeat: thank you for unknowingly allowing us to experience our thoughts. ‘What thoughts?’ You, teacher-friend-assessor, have offered us a choice; you have committed a complex violence which has shuddered through us. ‘What choice?’ you ask (we are not being quite as direct as we promised, but the scene has now been set, we shall defer no longer). The choice, officially offered unofficially, late in the day, equivocally: ‘if you avoid collaboration you will achieve a better mark, Ohad…such is the nature of the ‘real’ world, but either way I will be understanding.’

(How could Ohad not have discussed this choice with Sherah? – there was no choice in the ‘communication’ of this choice, Ohad once again discovered necessity. We cite necessity, but not simply a moralistic necessity, not simply a moral or mythic belief in the goodness of goddess honesty. Rather, we evaluate and act on the basis of context, sensitivity, the sacred - to the extent that this is possible. We have repeated this so many times. Context, evaluation, the discovery of necessity)

In what capacity does the ‘real’ world fit in to all this? Are you (justifiably?) wary of the peril of the double marker and the constraints of the bell curve? Are you troubled by not being able to decide who is who (who ‘deserves’ which marks? who does worse at the expense of the other?)? How could you not ‘know’ Sherah? How could you ‘know’ her? Do you ‘know’ Ohad? Why did you ‘try’ to get to ‘know’ Ohad and not Sherah?²³

No doubt we are being violent, perhaps unfair. But this is our hyperbolic and ill-considered reaction to your violence, to the choice which you tardily offered us as teacher-friend-assessor (‘good intentions’ have apparently done some terrible things…but of course, intentions are never clear and transparent: what were your intentions in saying what you did, when you did?).

But don’t get too worried, we are yet to have evaluated your violence (or our violence) conclusively. That said, we currently rather appreciate how things are going: the insecurity of this choice has given us new perspectives, new positions, new strategies. Hence our numerous thank-yous (maybe you are coming to understand our claims about the complexity of evaluation).

Don’t get too worried, our violence reflects upon us: we are angry at ourselves for being tempted by this choice. We are angry at being duped, angry at our passionate belief in the ‘practical’ and instrumental’ world of marks and scholarships. O the ‘real’ world of international fame and honorary positions…we just heard that Homi Bhabha will be making a whirlwind tour of Australia. The tickets are very expensive.

Don’t get too worried, stop us from worrying, why not make everyone happy? Why not award us both (those of us who are being assessed) with a mark of 95? You should reward us amply, together, for our daring. You should reward us for questioning the ‘real’ world, for inviting you to help us. You should reward us for trying (no doubt failing) to defy a massive suffocating institutional machine.

But why should you reward us with a good mark if we have such contempt for these suffocating institutional numbers? Maybe we get off on being suffocated, maybe contempt betrays complicity, maybe this whole diatribe is an attempt to work with tension, to learn to stretch…either that or our reward should be a mark of 55.

We are trying to learn and teach, which is dangerous and painful – trying to do this, to explore our myths, to show ourselves that there is only sharing and collaboration. Our ‘performance,’ our ‘ideas,’ our collaborations – these cannot be split in half because we do not know where to cut or how to cut. But even if we knew how and where to cut, we wouldn’t…and for good reason: if we submitted our work separately we would be given separate marks – and we would compete, we would be staged opposite one another, insecurely building our little armies, attempting to secure our-selves on an ugly stage. So many stupid myths of the ‘real’ world would take hold, we would become people that we hate. We cannot avoid the stage of assessment, but we are trying to deal with it (we are trying to make a worthwhile para-site).

All this would be politics, shock, tension, failure and all that. Moreover, this would be us testing you, assessing you, daring you to whip us and fuck us (how far can collaboration go? When does it become conspiracy?). We cannot thank you enough for this opportunity.

Being cruel can be nice, being nice can be cruel. Yes, yes, the performance continues…

Pornography. Karl Frutzingangerbad is deeply impressed by a tour de force of avant garde heterosexual pornography.

Virtual Suck ‘n’ Fuck is a profound investigation of the dissimulatory erotics of straight porn. Indeed this film stares the libidinal intersection of sex and anxiety in the face.

Act 1, Scene 1. A naked woman and a black background – she is speaking to you as she touches herself. There are no men around to distract your enjoyment. She wants you.

Scene 2. The camera retains this first person perspective. Your head is looking down at a body. Your body. She is sucking a cock. Your cock. She is still talking to you, she is giving you a blow job.

Scene 3. You are fucking her. And she is fucking you (translation for the wilfully naive amongst us: fucking = penis-vagina penetration).

A profound opening Act; visible echoes of an intensely leaky operation. The sight of a man’s body remains, but I don’t see his face. I instead see through his eyes. Or he sees through mine. Indeed, which normal articulate honest straight man has not uttered a variation of the following anxious exclamation? – ‘I am straight but I have nothing against gay people don’t get me wrong when I watch porn I like to watch men fucking women I don’t get off on seeing the man – really I imagine that I am him.’

Such sincere honesty always entails failure. As I identify, I cannot avoid noticing that he has a bigger cock than me and, to top it off, a foreskin. Alas (but maybe I do not mourn the fact), I cannot avoid it - his body, that body, is not my body. Leakage! A most commendable perversion, a sort of double operation. For the erotics to work, his body must remain, even if only in the extreme form of a Virtual Suck ‘n’ Fuck.

As director and Melbourne University philosopher John Dough tells us in his audio commentary, “that which is necessary and pivotal to the system can only operate if it appears to be marginal. We do our best to make it seem that the other man (not you) is effaced – but the entire game would fall apart if we actually did remove him.”

Dough’s leaky constructions become increasingly complex and elaborate. My personal favourite is,

Act 4, ‘Virtual Gangbang.’ Six penises, a black background, a woman’s face and your perspective. You hold your cock while the camera takes fleeting glances at their bodies and penises. Resist the urge to touch your mates! Do your failed best to focus upon the impending ‘facial’!

Anxiety, dissimulation, violence, jouissance – never again will we consume this delicious shit of capital in the same way. We commend the production houses of Melbourne University for their courage in supporting a truly revolutionary artwork. Indeed, the perversion starts here.

The pornographic categories are set through an envisioning that inflate the picture, the video, the image, the experience. That is the only economic inflation. Thus, categories are the sexual spaces that create a view, a sight, a reality more expected than whatever could be (?).

I  Indian Pics | Movies  Innocent Pics | Movies  Interracial Pics | Movies

J  Japanese Pics | Movies  Jizz Pics | Movies  Juggs Pics | Movies  Juicy Pics | Movies

K  Kinky Pics | Movies  Kissing Pics | Movies  Kitchen Pics | Movies  Knockers Pics | Movies

U  Underwear Pics | Movies  Undressing Pics | Movies  Uniform Pics | Movies  Upskirt Pics | Movies

Barucha, R., Collision of Cultures: Some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre?, in Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, Routledge, 1990

Carter, P., The Road To Botany Bay: An Essay In Spatial History, London & Boston, Faber and Faber, 1987

Chatterjee, P., The Politics of the Governed: reflections on popular protest in most of the world, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004

Darby, P., A Disabling Discipline?, The Oxford Handbook Of IR, Rus-Smit & Snidal, (eds.), forthcoming 2008

Esteva, G., Regenerating People’s Space, in Mendelovitz, SH and Walker, RBJ (eds) Towards a Just World Peace, London: Butterworths, 1987

Hage, G., Nation-building Dwelling Being, in Hage & Johnson (eds), Identity, Community, Change, Communal Plural, 1993

Shaw, K., Indigeneity and the International, Millenium, Vol 131, No. 1, pp: 55-81

Todorov, T., The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Howard (trans.), New York, Harper & Row, 1982

Lispector, C. The Passion According to G.H, trans. R. Sousa. Minnesota U.P. Mineapolis. 1988

8“I could see the dancers waiting in the wings for their entrances. Before they entered, I saw them touch the ground with their hands to invoke the blessing of the gods. This gesture, which prefigured the earthy sanctity of the performance, was ignored by the horde of American and European photographers in front of the stage.”

Barucha, R., Collision of Cultures: Some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre?, in Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, Routledge, 1990, pp:38

17This little section perhaps has its provisional origins in Sherah’s grandmother’s unconscious condition. It skipped a generation. Many little Sherahs then responded with a fear of all things that ‘come inside’ (food, smell), some Sherahs did not. Some Sherahs finally told her mothers that she did not exist. Her mothers agreed. Ohads and Sherahs have had many discussions about Sherah’s story because it is the kind of story one enjoys telling as though it were one’s own. There was a Sherah that was an Ohad before the story began, otherwise it would not have been told. He started telling it, because Sherah’s style is not to tell, not to speak.

But whose story is this now? It has a life of its own. Let us try and help in your investigation! Well…Alberto and Sherah know Clarice Lispector, Ohad does not. Ohad and Sherah have participated in previous performances (they are ‘experienced collaborators’). Alberto and Ohad speak Spanish. Ohad tends to live in accordance with the rules of time and space, this means that his body (supposedly) can only be at one place at one time. HOW RIDICULUS! Some of Ohad’s brain molecules got dispersed across the hairs of Sherah’s forearm, they do not exist in time and take regular journeys across continuums. This will be hard to track! They jump onto the keyboard between her sips of wine. Her brain molecules die and regenerate in a far off land in 2060. Alberto flicks them off the sole of his shoe after they have inspired from him a little dance. Such things should be brought to their final absurdity. With all these conversations, over all these years, we are not sure whose brain molecule leads us along the path it now takes. This is because the story is primary. So we can only say it was many. More than all of us – neither. Not just many of us, but a certain nothing circled by the landscape, Brazilian literature and foreign dishes, 1926, drunk Afrikaans men, rape, misfortune and half a Singaporean pig’s ear, the corner of a sheet and knowing its safer not to breathe, a vacant man. Certainly it was no-one’s ‘brain molecules’. It was the encroaching eradication of all these myths.

23So that you might get to know (or not know) something else of us all, but really because we love stories, because you love stories…we offer another story in another style: for most of a semester, an Ohad believed that ‘Phillip’ was happy with the idea of a collaborative piece. No doubts, no worries (‘Phillip’ expressed no other position). This Ohad thought that ‘he’ knew; he believed this so strongly that he dominated all of the Ohads and all of the Sherahs. A certain Sherah was a bit more wary, ‘she’ saw traces of unease in ‘Phillips’ affirmations and agreements. Not a single Ohad would listen, these Ohads were too loud, amps cranked up to 11. Consequently certain Sherahs stopped listening as well (it therefore reached a point in which their writings became more inextricable than normal). There was an army of Albertos getting stoned, or working, or battling syntax - we don’t quite know. Whatever the case, it was these intense Sherahs who were equipped with a prodigious sensitivity, intelligence, openness. And these beautiful qualities were crushed by certain Ohad-fools who were too manic to listen (so manic…until ‘the choice’ was made explicit). Manic and violent like the missionary or the development expert or the teacher-friend-assessor – all of whom feel compelled to distribute their ‘good intentions’ without a second thought. But all this has been such fun, such anxiety, such intensity, such intimacy - can you begin to see why we cannot condemn or praise violence outright?