EXHAUSTION
This is a call for material for PERFORATIONS 34.
Perforations is Public Domain Inc.’s journal of static,
imbalance, aleatoric theory, neodata, the community which has no community,
technique which is performed in every movement, and a general poetized listless
disregard, often due to EXHAUSTION. The previous (hardcopy) issue #33 is
entitled “Manifestations & Materializations: UFO Drag Queen::Delirium” and may be examined here: http://close-to-impenetrable.blogspot.com/
. Previous online issues may be examined here: http://www.pd.org/HTML/perforations-index.html
.
PERFORATIONS #34: EXHAUSTION.
We’ve all been there. All cultures have been there or no
doubt will be there at sometime in their finite life span: a sense of an
emptying out or a fraying of energies. Perhaps the stamina and mental,
physical, cultural resources will come again. Perhaps not and there will be other
beginnings IF the exhaustion was indeed a pouring out into a larval form. And
just as likely to be a form leading in a different direction, a different less
leaden body, a more glorious spirit, an invigorated brain.
Exhaustion can be a paradoxical affect. It is at one and the
same time physiological and also conceptual, encompassing fatigue, depression,
boredom, mania, confusion. Marina
van Zaylen believes that “exhaustion [….] has a curious way of eradicating more
complex signs of weariness, one of which being the indeterminate state we call
fatigue.” Perhaps that is so. However the adjective ‘curious’ may indicate a
wider gyre for exhaustion as it fights–-by collapsing into a syncope—for larger
beginnings rather than only individual physiologies and pathologies, although
they can both indicate the beginning of resistances). Exhaustion is about fatigue as well as elation. Anyone who
has ever observed small children at play at the end of day can see the register
of exhaustion switch to manic energy before collapse and sudden rehabilitative
sleep. Once could perhaps even say that the unconscious is more often summoned
by the collapse of exhaustion. Depression, worry, failure, violence, fatigue,
mania and all the other affective eddies which exhaustion drags in its wake can
lead to either a quiescent amor fati or
revolution or revelation.
Nevertheless to even concentrate on exhaustion seems like a
grinding propaedeutic, a waylaying and perpetual beginning of legitimate
topics—which intensifies the feeling of exhaustion for all who might work in
such tenebrous and infrathin margins. Various net searches only begin to draw
more gloom, not because of the net’s own darkness (does it have any properly
speaking?) but because it has none. Or because it is in the process of
enclosure of its darkness by light, the wavering line where information becomes
noise and vice versa.
THE SECRET DREAM OF EXHAUSTION
Exhaustion exists mostly in its macerated by-productions,
like when we speak of the exhaust of a car, a generator where the real work is
a going forward while the exhaust/ion pushes out behind, falling into more
decay, formlessness. But perhaps the ‘curious way’ of van Zaylen’s overarching
concept of exhaustion, it’s inclusion of all other sites of breakdown, physical
and mental, DOES function as the larger dream of the earth, an un-noticed
Bataillean excess, a shapeless geochthonic mass always escaping—and undermining—our most precious
productions and predictions. Whether it be our own body’s waste material, or the
negentropic outlier of our machinic culture, an uncountable and largely
invisible excess, produced by exhaustion and leading to more exhaustion, piles
up behind us, under us, all around us, the true aspect of Walter Benjamin’s
Angel of History being blown backward into the future (perhaps for the
diaphanous sempiternal Realm of Angels, production and its exhaust are all the
same in their effects/affects/special effects; inasmuch as they exist as bits
of etheric desoeuvrement, workless,
community-less forms much like exhaust itself –which we can never own nor WANT to own, it is
always our past and our future but never, not now anyway, our NOW. Much like
our Coming Selves in fact, perhaps composed of nothing but exhaust and
exhaustion, folded back into earth processes. But then perhaps the dream of
exhaustion is not simply an emptying out, creating a husk, a shell, a semblance
mimicking life/death, work/not, but a supersaturation, reversing the relations
where what is valuable is the precipitate from exhaust, the non/thing which is
larger than life, than work, than art, a dark matter/energy which can only be
sketched in its absence, in its wish to come. Perhaps the dream of exhaust is
to be equilibrated with the exhaustion of its production, stranding us again in
the dark zero of the angels.)
So there you have it. If you are not too exhausted, if I am
not too exhausted, if the world does not become nothing but exhaust too soon,
send something that defies or defines exhaustion, perhaps only your exhaust, of
the exhaustion of an idea/place/world or its ex/rehumation, or on the dividing
line, the solidus between those states, a wave through the flames:
Runne barefoote up and downe,
threatning the flames
With Bison rehume, a clout upon
that head
Where late the Diadem stood…
From Hamlet
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Public Domain Inc is a non-affiliated 501-c-3 not-for-profit
organization existing mostly as netware. See more here:
The not-quite-but-almost-fully-exhausted editor of perforations and FORT!/da? Effects can be reached here:
orbcheatham@gmail.org
