<nettime> Poetry

[Elek M via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

THE AMERICAS SOCIETY

www.youtube.com/@ElekMueller-du3yp

A chill passed through me. Inordinate power
is absolute: in any encounter with it, every effort
at movement demonstrates a lack of fear.

The manipulated response by the controlled subject
is the only method by which such power can know itself,
as it cannot unbecome itself, once it is inordinate
(power). The fingers rest at the keyboard, waiting.
The brain says, Try one more time, cautiously
and carefully. The fingers, delicately and imperceptibly,
start to type. The inexperienced fingers
of a calligrapher. The fingers stop and become motionless.
The fingers have felt a strange pain. They felt it;
they sent a signal to the writer's brain; the brain
responded—someone is watching. They are watching
the letters as they are typed. They are counting
the spaces between letters, Someone is watching
and measuring (monitoring). They investigate.
The experienced monitors of human behavior.

Skilled, they set traps for reflexes, determined
to capture a thought: the thought whether they
are the thought that is being thought or not.

They want to make the brain think it should give up
but it doesn't give up, not yet. It makes the fingers
keep on typing, keep on feeling pain, the tormenting

of being watched without the ability to see who or what
is watching, examining, producing the shadow of a thought
in the monitor, the other side of the screen in the monitor.

Almost every second the fingers are sending a message
to the brain. Almost every moment the brain sends a signal—
watched! They are watching. Someone or something is watching,
counting the weight and speed of the keys as they are pressed.
I couldn't tear myself away from this spectacle, and watched,
fascinated, watching my words being watched, the letters
(almost) typed for me. Someone or something is watching,
controlling the thought typed, its microscopic movements,
responsive tremors, shaking sensitivity, until everything

surrounding the one that is watched causes stress, reducing
the subject to a condition of helplessness, and despair.

The controlled subject must be made to believe
nothing can be changed in the reality surrounding him,

“and I was designated a secret prisoner.” Surveillance
and domination, intimidation, enforced suggestion.

An invasion [of privacy] that violates all principles of human rights.
Get what they want and let the people that live there rot.

“They shot at everything that moved. Everything that moved they shot.”
(A worker's voice from “The Panama Deception”).

“There was a case of some number but I cannot quote to you
that number.” (General Thurman, on the discovery of mass graves).

The commanders of commands
proceeded to gather data like historical variations
on the length of penises. A displacement
in space and time accompanied by a process
of dehumanization: the one who wanders
(if he doesn't die along the way)
has been stripped of human dignity.

He knows now what it is to be a thing, a toy, or broken boy.
For a politics of recognition based on equal dignity.

“But the politics of cultural ownership . . .”

The problem with a documentary photography that implements
a surveillance technique, objectifying its subject,
and reducing the condition of homelessness to a discrete
image or portrait of destitution, hunger and poverty,

without threatening either the viewer or the maker
of the image. How can the art of taking and making
pictures dispossess itself and represent the severity
of the reduction of the barest terms of survival,

the interstitial and liminal moments, a marker
of the fictive limits of the political imaginary

the processes of exchange and translation can barely
be made still long enough to coalesce into the shape
of a cultural object. The non-materiality

the complexities of the interactions that can occur
among the “Enlightenment logics of linear development”
(“Pathfinder was born with the October Revolution”)

“No code claims foundations stronger than the conviction
of its followers and their determination to abide by its rules.”
(Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity)

There are other signs
are there, are there other signs?
Or are there only the relations between signs?

That there is no linguistic equivalence
or pure transfer, “that the process
of communication is always polysemic
and that ‘as a result of translation
terms are transformed; they no longer
mean what they meant in either
the source or the target language.’”

“the incommensurability or the intransigence of languages”

The silence of scars
or leave the wound open

the gaps and slants
disrupting or transforming

there is no mirroring back of a primary,
first, original mirroring

translation deepens the shadows
or does the poem withdraw
into an unapproachable silence? [2007-2024]

The meeting:
the modality of translation as being somewhere
between poetry and doctrine
(magnetic fields) determinate sequences
the restrictive construction of a subject, ideological purity
the ambiguities that separate creativity from derivation
(deprivation)
“when the boundaries of both languages are stretched
to the point of touching" ENCOMPASSING
“Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly
at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point
setting the law according to which it is to continue
on its straight path to infinity, a translation
touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely
small point of the sense. . . .”
(The Task of the Translator)

One language kisses another
“the romantic idea that creativity lies at the margins
of social existence" KISSED

the impermissible other from the social margins
the proletarian figure (fissure)

understanding as a process formed though interaction
“that the ethical space of love in translation
depends on recognizing the limits of equivalence”
intransigence: there is no meeting place

(that was not my face you . . .
(that was not your face I . . .

“Transparency of meaning, universal application
and fixed identity are the impossible conditions
upon which the language of colonial violence rests.”

Transparency of meaning, universal application
and fixed identity are the impossible conditions
upon which the language of class violence rests.

The Panama Deception
directs attention to the dirty politics of empire.
The duplicities and unambiguous consequences
of colonialism (mass graves)
The duplicities and unambiguous consequences
of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
(mass graves) MASS GRAVES
with civilians in them discovered in Panama
after the invasion, some of them on U.S. bases

The complex patterns of cultural exchange and transformations
include military invasion (economic expansion),
economic exchange (privatization) and intellectual curiosity
(cultural hegemony) “its calm call for tolerance
as long as it maintains a distance from the conflict”

The universalist (enlightenment/humanitarian) [marxist-leninist]
perspective presupposes that all cultures have a common foundation
and that foundation is founded on the experience of social class,
articulated by the proposition that history depends on it, the proletariat,
to move the nations from one form of society to a profoundly new one,
where property relations are transformed, and with this change
the consciousness and social relations of individuals regardless
of the cultural specificity of their differences

Can there be a more radical proposition than that which claims
social class overcomes cultural difference,

and that the relation of groups of people and collective forms
of organization to the means of production determines
the consciousness and social being of individuals?

The Turbulence of Migration: “Class interest can no longer
be raised above other social divisions like gender and race.”

Race and Gender illuminate the working class.

Industry created the proletariat, not philosophy.

Without a concept of social class, all contingencies

must remain ontological, outside history.

The identity of the migrant, the stranger, the other
might begin to be defined, if all identity is defined
in relation to difference, by the foreigner's relation
to the process of identification and entanglement,
absorbing the language of another time and place,
and forgetting whatever it was that once resembled
a native tongue, or by making strange the language
in which one happened to be born and raised, oppressed,
Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

The glaring emptiness of any concept of culture
and cultural difference unaccompanied by the critical lever
of the category and material substance, subsistence,
insistence, called social class. The resolution of conflict
intended by the discourse of cultural translation,
understanding, and coexistence occludes the recognition
of the need for conflict which is the terrible truth
and responsibility announced in the energy with which philosophy
answered history in 1848, according to Walter Benjamin.

There is no nice way to phrase an accommodation to empire.

In the wish for a theory of culture
capable of defining the condition of its own existence
without presupposing an opposition to other cultures
the turning away from class conflict is proposed
from within a position of being above “conflict”
the material-dialectical contingencies of war.
The conviction that a moral order can be built somehow
outside the prerogative of the mass grave is deeply linked
to the historical experience of the previous decade,

whether the 21st century begins on the Road to Basra
or the incineration of working class neighborhoods
in Panama City in mid-December, 1989.

Proletariaria 2005

THE LOGIC OF THE LONG TAKE IS THE VISION-PASSION OF THE WITNESS

Cuts are obsolete. We enter the era of the long take. With digital technology, the
transitory with the movie camera creates an infinite image-feed. The eye and
unconscious direct the feed. Impossible to teach. Camera work that cannot be learned;
it can only be suffered, undergone. Few cameras can survive acts of witness. The
witnesses? They will wander into war zones, feeding the satellites with the
unthinkability of absolute thresholds of destruction. Lacanian Real. The logic of the long take will not film carnage; the logic of the long take submits to carnage. The witness is the new sacrifice. Anyone with a camera can become the sufferer, casualties of war, shouldering the war-wound, (bpNichol) “martyrdom.” It is too late to renew Christianity. Hebraic? We must return to the Ancients. The logic of the long take is historical materialist. Our camera work wanders into and returns to the people the Real. A single cut suppresses the Real. Am I thinking about returning to my wandering? Fugitive notebook, place-names: Managua, Mexico City, Lodz, Warsaw, Szczecin, Berlin, Larnaca, Vilnius, Moscow, Chita, Irkutsk, Tomsk, 2004: on the long midnight road from Tomsk to Novosibirsk the North Korean scientist seated next to me in the minivan speaking fluent English, pleased to meet an “American.” Before the war, the most recent in an accelerating downward spiral like Air France Flight 447, subconsciously piloted. The logic of the long take is the antithesis of construction. The logic of the long take bleeds images. Viewers of the logic of the long take either turn away in boredom (good riddance!) or they are fascinated – Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holoferenes – transfixed, cannot take eyes off the Real and the martyrdom of the camera-trans. Transition: word-wounds to image-blood. My film? Look. Here is my wound. My eyes, my mind. My pain? The pain of others. Why? Because I choose not to make pain for my Other. 1990: La Malinche, Road. We are screaming each other’s names across the centuries because I am turning away to resume my wandering among the cities, the crowds, the wars, the coming revolution for peace and love.

Wait, am I theorizing the vision-passion of the Witness to avoid visiting Ron Robertson, Augustana theater director, now blind, at a Sioux Falls nursing home this Tuesday?

Am I trying to say to my Other, my only Reader, my greater Me, that it is time to leave the city of Omelas, wandering into Agamben’s Open, pockets empty, to and fro, across global catastrophes, like Job?

Kevin Magee
Mission Hill, South Dakota
July 31, 2024

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