February 02, 2015

Coney Island
1945
Theodoros Stamos
d. February 2, 1997

Terrorists Speak in Strange Languages
Asef Hossaini
translated from the Persian Dari by Farzana Marie
guernica

Time burst and we emerged
to begin our lives,
we tied our shoes and ran away.
The street was full of worried eyes,
we
were full of the street—
our hands have been cobblestoned
and our heart valves opened
like cheap cabarets.

(....)

My darling,
the weather is cold
and many babies are being aborted
and we,
standing in a line
of one hundred and twenty thousand prophets
are still thirsty, still hungry…but we voted.
We cannot change the world,
sing songs, and be happy;
just let me squeeze the map
into the space of a cage
so that our lands will mate.

The police say: terrorists
speak in strange languages.
I lock my tongue
even though I’ve prayed
in Persian for a thousand years.
In solitary confinement
I continually confess
and at night
when I stretch out my bones in the corner
I pray your name
seventy two times and no more.

You sit in far-off longing
and all of my roads to your arms
are blocked today
—They say an explosion happened out your way—
Do you remember
Venice, where the Mediterranean came up
and pulled your ankle to the ocean?
I said: this is enough for the sea fairies
to find their lost way.
You laughed, what a pity
how quickly we have been lost.

My longing is so deep
that three hundred and sixty five miners
have died in it.

...(more)

The Sacrifice
Theodoros Stamos
1946

(....)

... many of detrimental consequences of psychology’s identification with certain features of the natural sciences are subtler in nature. Building on Foucault’s writing on governmentality, British sociologist, Nikolas Rose has published a series of books outlining the way in which psychology and affiliated disciplines (referred to generically by Rose as the psy disciplines) have come to play a central organizing role in our culture by contributing toward the construction of a particular form of subjectivity — the psychological self. The contemporary psychological self organizes subjectivity in a way that internalizes the principles of a neo-liberal culture, so that we all engage in a form of self-governance that perpetuates an advanced capitalist consumer culture, and maintains a power structure that privileges the wealthy elite at the expense of a growing proportion of the population that is disadvantaged. Consistent with Foucault’s general analysis of the way power operates in society, this model does not posit the existence of an active conspiracy of the elite. Instead it involves a self-perpetuating intersection of cultural, sociological and psychological forces that lead to the shaping of a particular from of subjectivity through the implementation of what Foucault terms, technologies of the self — principles of self-regulation and self-construction derived from our psychological culture that lead to the production of ourselves as commodities in a consumer culture.

The contemporary self is autonomous, agentic, and capable of making and breaking emotional bonds easily (What Zygmunt Bauman refers to as liquid love). We are predisposed toward looking inward for the source of our problems and have learned to regulate emotional expression in order to get along with others in the workplace. Problems in living are understood as stemming from personal failures or chemical imbalances, rather than as reflecting social and cultural problems. People have become increasingly accustomed to viewing themselves as commodities in the social marketplace. Happiness and contentment become goals in and of themselves, rather than byproducts of a life that is well lived. Therapists, life coaches and self-help books offer a range of different prescriptions for achieving happiness, and if psychotherapy is viewed as too ambiguous or labor intensive, mood enhancing prescription medications are readily available. These psychotropic medications are marketed to the public on television, just like cereals, shampoo, deodorant and mouthwash. Both Prozac and personal hygiene products hold out the promise of transforming the self into a more marketable commodity.

...(more)

1. Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it’s the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. “Being yourself” is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing “self-expression” and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control. The more that individuals express through these codified, networked, formatted means to construct a “personal brand” identity, the more they self-assimilate, adopting the incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own. (The machinations of Big Data make this more obvious. The more data you supply, the more the algorithms can determine your reality.) Expunge the seriality built into these platforms, embrace a more radical form of difference.

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Ancient Land
Theodoros Stamos
1947

(....)

"What transfixes us is the vision, present before our very eyes, of all that is most remote. Of our presence in the real world."

The paradox in the words of the caption that being close to ourselves in proximity to what is most remote is explained here as the "strong and intimate emotion" of religion or, better, "the sacred", to which the cave paintings are "more solidly attached to than it has ever been since". This is not religion as one more additional theory but as the catalyst of humankind, when the creature wandering the icy plains descended into the caves and, in the remove of darkness and solitude, set itself apart from the animal kingdom and discovered itself, codifying the cosmos with paint. As Richard White puts it, this is "not the sacred as the beyond, another realm of being that exists in opposition to this one—but the sacred as the deep reality of this life that we are typically alienated from". So we shouldn't include these moments perusing the book with the usual "Oh I like that" pleasures of the art gallery but as the kindling of the effects of art was it when born; that is, when we were born, perhaps the deeper feeling we have in galleries we have since been socialised to restrain. Whatever, the miracle is foundational.

Bataille says that in looking at the cave paintings in Lascaux "we are left painfully in suspense by this incomparable beauty and the sympathy it awakens in us", and something close to this is what I experience looking at the book, if this can be called an experience. One is not transported in awe towards fantastical otherness but toward a fog-bound interior, as comforting as it is alien. "It is as though paradoxically our essential self clung to the nostalgia of attaining what our reasoning self had judged unattainable, impossible." This is where I ask: what can be done with this suspense and sympathy if our reasoning self is how we measure experience?

...(more)

The Rock
Theodoros Stamos
1944