I took a needed break from reading over the last week and bit.
In between trying to finish Their Eyes Were Watching God, rereading Lose Your Mother, and keeping up with texts about anime and manga for another class, I was starting to lose track of what I was reading, and even worse, how I was feeling about all of these pieces. I suppose this is mainly because the last week has been one of not feeling and not wanting to feel. And usually in those moments, books fill that void and help me feel something. This time, they were actually starting to make that pain worse.
So I stopped.
And I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.
I don't really have a commentary on my pause.
I do wonder, though, how many times in the past I pushed through a book and never stopped to care how it was affecting me. Reading without pause until the book was done and not thinking about how I felt or should be feeling. I don't really know if it's ever even crossed my mind before now. So I suppose I'm grappling with the thoughts of:
Why do I care now?
Why am I now focused on the importance of allowing a text to grab hold of you, and being aware when you are not experiencing that process?
In a way, I want to attribute these thoughts to what I've been consuming over the last few months, which is a mixture of Black studies texts, poetry, and theory about movement and stillness in anime (I'm only realizing now how disparate these all are - though im sure there is some overlap).
It could be that.
It could be that reading through Wynter and Moten has simultaneously engendered a thirst to feel, and in turn created feelings that are too much to bear. Because even after several weeks of readings their texts, I am still trying to understand how Wynter's spelling out of "what it means to be human" functions in relation to Moten when he says that blackness is both a "performance of the object and the performance of humanity".
The humanization of the object?
The objectification of the human?
The question of what does it mean to be human, then also asks: what does(did) it mean(meant) to be object.
It could be all of that.
Perhaps, there are too many feelings buzzing around or I have yet to learn how to react/manage/live with these feelings. I guess it's a question now of how do I continue reading without being overwhelmed by affect? Is that even possible now? And, would I even want it?
In between trying to finish Their Eyes Were Watching God, rereading Lose Your Mother, and keeping up with texts about anime and manga for another class, I was starting to lose track of what I was reading, and even worse, how I was feeling about all of these pieces. I suppose this is mainly because the last week has been one of not feeling and not wanting to feel. And usually in those moments, books fill that void and help me feel something. This time, they were actually starting to make that pain worse.
So I stopped.
And I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.
I don't really have a commentary on my pause.
I do wonder, though, how many times in the past I pushed through a book and never stopped to care how it was affecting me. Reading without pause until the book was done and not thinking about how I felt or should be feeling. I don't really know if it's ever even crossed my mind before now. So I suppose I'm grappling with the thoughts of:
Why do I care now?
Why am I now focused on the importance of allowing a text to grab hold of you, and being aware when you are not experiencing that process?
In a way, I want to attribute these thoughts to what I've been consuming over the last few months, which is a mixture of Black studies texts, poetry, and theory about movement and stillness in anime (I'm only realizing now how disparate these all are - though im sure there is some overlap).
It could be that.
It could be that reading through Wynter and Moten has simultaneously engendered a thirst to feel, and in turn created feelings that are too much to bear. Because even after several weeks of readings their texts, I am still trying to understand how Wynter's spelling out of "what it means to be human" functions in relation to Moten when he says that blackness is both a "performance of the object and the performance of humanity".
The humanization of the object?
The objectification of the human?
The question of what does it mean to be human, then also asks: what does(did) it mean(meant) to be object.
It could be all of that.
Perhaps, there are too many feelings buzzing around or I have yet to learn how to react/manage/live with these feelings. I guess it's a question now of how do I continue reading without being overwhelmed by affect? Is that even possible now? And, would I even want it?
I remember clearly the day I had to stop studying literature. I was doing an interdisciplinary degree (english, film studies, philosophy) and I had to read James Joyce's Ulysses in one week. That was just one class. And I was still reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, and was several weeks late on that. The words swam on the page. I was reading them but not letting them touch me. Moving through, getting through. Losing sight of what was Morrison and what was Joyce. For another class I was reading William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Literature had always been at the centre of my life and now I resented it. I couldn't read for pleasure anymore. I couldn't feel the text.
ReplyDeleteAnd so I stopped studying it and started reading it again. And then I was always very careful to read only the amount I can really feel. The problem, as you say, is that university generally overburdens us with reading, teaching us to get through it rather than to feel it.
That's why I suggested in my other post that we always bring the texts with us to our class, so we can take the time to be in the reading together, so we can share the moment of a text's feeling.
I think the materiality of words, be they literary, poetic or philosophical, deserve that care.
On the more-than human:
The way I read it is not that blackness is object (not in a literal sense) but that blackness touches on the outside that always exceeds form-taking, whether that form is that of the human or of the object. Blackness is the more-than of experience, the quality in excess of form or structure.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaewfajlweeeoooo jijijji. ja ja ja. allofthethings. (also, having to post in multiple comments bc of word-count limit : P
ReplyDelete(disclaimer: there is no order/priority implied in this listing - the first thing never came ‘first’. its always in the middle and everything everything. i posted about throat singing, because i wish i could write in such a way that there could be 5 different space-times for all the wording/thinking to exist simultaneously. poets do this, but i’m not a poet so i have to stumble through my surplus and lack of ability to parse and subtract out any ‘one’ from the everything everything. eeee. TANGENT. but i’m saying this only because this to emphasize that below is just a clumbsy sandwiching of thoughts that were forcefully pretended into a this then this, when it was really just a tumbling of forces. which is to say i entirely know the forces that make feeling-with impossible or inhospitable in a text, in the world, TANGENT).
1) What is legible as ‘Study’, within University institutions, often subtracts out all that is needed for learning to occur, because it wants to imply enforce the idea that learning only happens within these wall, with these institutionally legible bodies and methedologies, at the start time of when the teacher enters, the assigned text is read, and the budgeted knowledge prescribed for that class, is reproduced. They want to ‘call the class to order’ as if learning wasn’t already happening, that the sociality of study, the commons of knowledge generation, wasn’t already in the world, while you were walking down the street, or chatting on the porch with a neighbor. Tangent. Moten Moten Moten and Stefano Harney! in the Undercommons (which i know isn’t what we’re reading for the class, but i can’t recommend enough) — as it addresses Study very specifically.
“Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded in what Harney calls “the with and for” and allows you to spend less time an-tagonized and antagonizing. “
(Insert 10 more highly vital paragraphs i wish i could paste here, but know will exhaust)
The reason i’m bringing this up is because ‘not reading’ is as much a part of Studying as ‘reading’. The difference between then come from Academic/institutional/neurotypical/White evaluations of what study ‘looks like, which involves subtracting out all the other knowledge-generating, dissonant and disorganized, everyday movements of the world. The idea that ‘not reading’ is equal to ‘not doing your homework’ because it is not engaging in the institutional idea that ‘labor’ that is replete with what ‘learning looks like’, has just been heavily normalized. But ‘not reading’ does not mean Study isn’t happening — it is a ‘no’ that still has affirmative capacities through it’s unsettling of the conditions as given, through its creation of a vacuole in the narrative, through the creation a space from which to re-orient the ground and fly - from which to activate fugitivity, from which a different kind of sociality with the study and knowledge generating, can enter and repopulate the field.
Or…. ‘not reading’ can also be because the forces are already forcefully felt - even at a glance, even at a brush. - and felt in excess of the page, very acutely in the world, and reading risks attaching words, namings to things that make entering the world only harder - or risk putting a singular narrative, a linear cartesian time-scale on ‘what is’ what is happening’ (which often means reiterating and orienting around institutional/white/patriarchical/neurotypical power structures) when what is needed is fabulation and flight, across many multiplicities and polyphonies of what is ‘going on’. *Cue ‘What’s going on’ or better yet, ‘Right On’ by Marvin Gaye. or better better yet ‘This is not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or the Establishment Blues’ by Rodriguez.
But also, maybe, sometimes not reading may is not be about the text ‘itself’, but the inhospitality of normative conditions for engaging it - which is why a class like this where we can experiment i forms of listening, reading, being-with the forces of a text, collectively, is so exciting - and rare. Why having opportunities to write on google docs or blogs or skyping in all allow for more-than-one-way to enter and be with, without having to perform participation solely through a raising of hands, and who-ever speaks loudest and first. Tangent.
ReplyDeleteBut the reason i’m bring up the conditions around the being with of a text, rather then solely the reading of it, is because of some of the work we’ve been doing in the senselab space / the practice of the thingies, ecologies, mini societies and creaturings. Although i can’t fix the world, take down institutional forces, racism, sexism, colonialism, neurotypicality in a frontal way, i can work on techniques to re-orient the inhospitable conditions, so that the ground from which they emerge feels/fields differently.
Or. we've been working with 'textual feelers' as a way to enter in the middle and be with texts, differently — kind of like a sideways listening and hanging out with - or non frontal encounter that is no less full in its feeling, but needs a polyphony and middling of potentialities for ‘how’, and the ways of thinking with and listening with. tendencies not ‘our own’ or the institutions. more-than and more-than human. tangent. sorry. flying too much. but rewind. Textual-feelers … one example for what this would sometimes look like is using a particular rock to hold open and anchor a middling page of a book, a paragraph, in such a way that the book is just always open, in the field - but not obligating an engagement. It’s just already open — and in this kind of mini sociality of more-than-human activators, that don’t necessitate a human, before beginning their conversation between them. So a kind of vacuole is created where the person is always supposed to stand, for something else. And that starts some of the work of re-orienting the reading-with, or the how for entering. The the rock can act a lure, or the plant beside it, or that the book is just already open and you sat down and without even ‘deciding’ your gaze is already brushing with page, a line, a word. But then you aren’t obligated to continue, unless you are already in the midst of the call to read more, or a curiosity of parsed. But even then, you are starting from the beginning - you are in the middle, and in that middle sometimes more is possible. more hospitable conditions are possible. because you aren’t weighted with the obligation or understanding all that has come before, before continuing. or also, just the words that pinch, their duration is less, and you can stand up at any time. or the pinch, it’s pinching, but its not just pinching you, it’s pinching the rock, and the rock is very good at rebuffing the pinches, at exhausting their forces — because of its rockness, its weight, its ability to work with gravity and durations of time that far exceed the life-span of the page. but also maybe it’s color, its shape, the texture, its minerality, its hand-holdability. its comfort as a non-human tonality to land with, a tonality that is less demanding or noisy.
and ok. i know it’s too much. but this idea of ‘how else’ in the reading, how else in the being-with of texts that aren’t immediately hospitable, emerged from already existing tendencies many of us were already using in our daily practices - this idea didn’t emerge from some kind of art-based choreography of complimentary objects. it emerged from already existing tendencies that needed to have a rock on their knee or in their pocket, while reading a text, or suffering a bureucratic meeting.
ReplyDeleteor the very necessary row of succulants on a desk, or a cat sleeping in the corner, to make thesis writing possible.
or what mashing some colored clay could do - not just when reading something quite unlivable, but when walking down the street. Or reading-on-the-bus as wayZ to zigzag and cut (as a re-orienation of the ground) the reading process with all the interceding intercessing sounds and textures and tonalities that can thicken the topology for fugitivity and lines of flight, amongst readings that were very sharp and difficult in not just their content but even the impersonal violence of the linearity of their language, or a lack of poetics and artful more-than in their citational or academic or bureaucratic methods.
Or, just how else to do the reading-with as an affirmative refusal of ‘obligation and labor’ as the sole ‘reason’ to activate a way of moving through. How to refuse, and by refusal inviting a different form of sociality, collectivity and commons that emerges from not-knowing and fabulation.
Or just. What is legible as ‘Study’, within University institutions, often subtracts out all that is needed for learning to occur, because it wants to call the class to order, it wants the multiplicity and the dissonance and the more-then-one and more-than-human to stop making all that noise, stop producing all that un-categoriazible un-citable knowledge production that is not legible or parsable outside of its imminent experience. So 'not-reading', is? can? be generative in its refusal of a 'settling in' or settlement of thought, of feeling, even colonization of that which is already too acutely felt. or, and although i know this is not how this post originally meant it — but this is what has emerged in my own work, and in a recent inability to 'read’, the wholeness of a body of texts for a journal issue i had to design for - because to submerge myself in the wholeness of the material as i usually would, reading every piece, moving with the fullness of its tendencies — i knew it would undo my ability to Believe in the world, or move, or think, or make artful in the everyday. the risks were too high to let it touch fully. so another way of thinking alongside while designing for (non-discretely), had to be invented. Tangent. Continuous movements that re-oriented the ground on which the text and thinking-with for their design, could emerge —ways to feel their tendencies sideways, brushing the edges of their weight, through creatures and textual feeler-outers - but not in a way that submerged the entire field with any 'one' - or ‘me’. Feeling their forces but not consenting to their narratives or their world through the continuous intercessor-ing power of collective practices and process that were not my own, or oriented around the singular needs of that design work. rewilding rewilding with popfabradped. tangent.