The seductive sparkle of the thing, the quiet work of the generative matrix:

hi fellow learners and sharers and doers,

a bit of thoughts on form, thinking about form, and it's analysis.

the discussions on form yesterday was quite exciting for me, especially when nasrin shared how nourbeSe's 'interview' was actually composed by the writer herself. The dialectic questioning of the 'interviewer' (see: supposedly objective and evenhanded) revealed to me nourbeSe's  masterful understanding and manipulation of the form we recognize as the 'published interview' and the imbalances attached to that form: The relative power and control of interviewer and interviewee in the 'published interview', and perhaps more importantly, the discursive and content control held by publishers.

i was agog for a moment as the gears turned in my tiny head. i've been rererererererereading this text, called "Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition" (very opaque title amirite?) for my thesis, and have slowly started to understand some of what the authors are saying. I wanted to share some quotes that i puzzled over for the last months as i tried to wrap my head around all the....well forms that cultural/social forms can take, and the value of trying to recognize the edges and interactions of various forms, the forces and powers they draw on and lend too, and the circulatory flows via which we come in contact with them. i think the writers, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli, would describe this as a form sensitive analysis. the work i did to understand this text feels like it's pushing back into me now and thickening my grey matter, many months, in fact a year, after I first read it. 


i've added emphasis to some of the quotes. i hope these aren't to cryptic to be affecting.

"In a given culture of circulation, it is more important to track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/cultural forms in all their mobility and mutability than to attempt a delineation of their fragile autonomy and specificity." (391)

"circulatory fields are populated by myriad forms, sometimes hierarchically arranged and laminated but mostly undulating as an ensemble, as a melange, going about their daily reproductive labor of mediating psychosocial praxis. Certainly somewhat paranoid, this analytic bifocality is method as much as theory. It insists on an almost neurotic attentiveness to the edges of forms as they circulate so that we can see what is motivating their movement across global social space and thus what is attached to them as both cause and excess. If this sounds like the pursuit of the hidden hand, it is. But this hand is simply how the local conditions of the entire assemblage are experienced and manifested. For example, if the public sphere, the citizen state, and the market are to work with minimal disruption, the worlds of people, things, and values must appear attached to nothing more than their fragile skins, and the drama of the survival of these orphaned singularities and nomadisms must be riveting." (392)

"but whether demanding environments are built to make one’s life easier or harder to negotiate, one’s body seem smoother or more jagged, they entail, demand, seduce, intoxicate, and materialize rather than simply mean." (395)

"social life is understood to be composed of interlocking, multifunctional diagrams that act as demanding environments on subjects, texts, and practices." (395)

"what are the generative matrices that demand that things— including “meaning” as a captivating orientation and phantasmatic object— appear in a decisive form in order for them to be recognized as value-bearing as they traverse the gaps of two or more cultures, habitations, imaginaries, and forms of life? " (395)


one of the authors, Elizabeth Povinelli, popped into my awarness again recently, after Denise posted about this rad looking exhibit that Povinelli is taking part in at somerset house in London.
i was also intrigued by Erin's reminder, and the admission by these authors of the "somewhat paranoid/neurotic" tendencies of 'form sensitive analysis', of the possibility of paranoia and psychosis that can be involved in significantly shifting the ground on which we think, structure and orient ourselves, but more importantly, the forms of community care that can be engaged in to buttress and reinforce against these possibilities. could we talk further about this?

s