soved up and left out

And speaking of abandon (which I am constantly thinking if not actually speaking) always confusing the duplex of abandonment and having to improvise but ecstatically accepting, but not fully, the bullying tone of catachresis and its logic/ law slap at hybridization, the advancing shadow of law crossing all, if not crossing out.

Another post which I can not abandon, even as it is progressivly abandoning me.
(Law is about nothing if is not the excoriation of abandonment and its relation to the various intoxications to which the soul is drawn and which the state must condemn).

Abandon

Abandon/pull-back
Leaving ahead the pulling together, the banding together leaves us in the tzum tsum, the kabbalistic Big Pullback, leaving us enough room to get our shit together, to dance the mess around w/o Big Daddy or Big Momma jammin’ on the brakes, def. Can’t get no satisfaction under those terms, when They’re around then all you got left is to blow yourself up, dig?

"If from now on being is not, if it has begun to be only its own abandonment, it is because this speaking in multiple ways is abandoned, is in abandonment, and it is abandon (which also to say openness). It so happens that 'abandon' can evoke 'abundance'" [6]. Abandoning the body politic not only means leaving behind -- or deserting -- the military foundations of politics, but it also means a radical opening of the body politic to its own abandon. When the body politic is in abandon, it opens onto notions of the common, the open, the distributed. "What is left is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks."
Jean-Luc Nancy in Birth to Presence


5 entries found for abandon.
A'·ban'·don tr.v. a'·ban'·doned, a'·ban'·don'·ing, a'·ban'·dons

1. To withdraw one's support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: abandon a friend in trouble.
2. To give up by leaving or ceasing to operate or inhabit, especially as a result of danger or other impending threat: abandoned the ship.
3. To surrender one's claim to, right to, or interest in; give up entirely. See Synonyms at relinquish.
4. To cease trying to continue; desist from: abandoned the search for the missing hiker.
5. To yield (oneself) completely, as to emotion.

n.

1. Unbounded enthusiasm; exuberance.
2. A complete surrender of inhibitions.


Improvisation is never about the impossibility of avoiding risk but the necessity of entanglement with possible catastrophe (another name for risk), another form of abandonment, a non-meticulous pre-shadowing of possibilities (it has to be non-meticulous because otherwise we are constricted again by the 'bandon', by the need for the levers, for the banding, the binding to pre-existence needs, like the need to band a refrigerator to a hand truck to get it over the threshold; like the need for these words, these grammars, to bind us all in place, safe for release later on. Given the choice between catastrophe (the always untimely risk of failure, of waiting to be pushed over the edge, a point beyond where decisions can be made, a hazy fork in the road where the paths ahead have been blown up) and abandon, don't we almost always 'choose' catastrophe (even our language begins to abandon us here: how could one CHOOSE catastrophe) over a kind of willing abandonment to alternative trails and forms and grammars and notes and routes and silences and forests and cities? Even the word 'abandon' itself fractures into an electrified jelly of ordinances resisting abundance, giving over to a sort of emptiness, but then into an object/noun world of overwhelming, even sublime abundance, beyond the banding restraints of the military body politic (yes, the 'military' as a strata which would stretch through all bodies, binding and furrowing and herding and planning) and over into an open shedding, into the commons, the radically distributed, an "irremediable scattering"

To improvise, the only route through any radical open scattering of possibilities, thin, invisibly thin path stretching between catastrophic emptying and ecstatic pleasure beyond measure. O precious speck of open time, momentary threshold enduring beyond, before, behind all reasonable expectations! 'Get on the good foot': the only need for getting on the good foot, not because we have found ourselves catastrophically condemned to march to/on the good foot but because the good foot abandons itself to itself, changing even all bad foots into the good one(s). To improvise is abandoned to dance this mess around...

catastrophic

Technically as a figure of speech, catatastrophe address the final event before (or as) the final plunge downward in a tragedy. Perhaps something comes that upsets the appecart of not only the principals in the play but the audience as well somehow suffers the Fall as they spectate (well, we sort of know how that works in a society of the spectacle, where we all become spectators in some ongoing sociopolitical plunges.)

Alas, here another post from another blog of mine:
(It would be funny he tought to continue the blog in this vein, or repeated posts from  my old abandoned blogs.)

Catastrophe

"Nature is constantly straining against its chains: probing for weak points, cracks, faults, even a speck of rust. The forces at its command are of course colossal as a hurricane and as invisible as a baccilli. At either end of the scale, natural energies are capable of opening breaches that
can quickly unravel the cultural order."
Mike Davis / Dead Cities

Catastrophe works like fingerprinting techniques at a crime scene. ‘Dusting for prints’ reveals that ‘absence’ is never absolute and that both the innocent and the guilty hover around every scene of misery and disaster, occasionally one being mistaken for the other. But in the end, they are all human prints and the grief is always contained and analyzed (‘triaged’ as they say, in the early accounting that medical emergencies require), and packed away as trauma requires. Or worked out as ‘just keeping going’ requires. The military draws a cordon around the diseased area and, eventually, rebuilding commences…

But natural catastrophes (if one were sufficiently scientific and objective, every catastrophe would be seen as ‘natural’) don’t really leave fingerprints. In fact, they are more like the dusting substance itself, revealing, as Mike Davis’s quote above alludes to, latent breaches and cracks in the social order, the cracks that underlie every human endeavor but which remain muted or covered over and which all human order is devoted to maintaining.

Our cities are monuments to this octopus like quest by humans to search out every exposable facet of natural potentiality and put it to work in the service of a human motivation. (Usually these days that exploration is in the service of capital acquisition; it has becomes hard to extricate that aspect of late modern life from any other aspect of life, some are ready to tell us there is no difference anymore—and, really, never was a difference).

But while the human agenda is always to quell the urgency of the natural (one suspects that the military is merely the outgrowth of this extremely long term human trend: ‘repelling the intruder’ covers much ground). ‘Global survival’ is merely shorthand for technical competence and engineering .. that is, more, but better, levees, earthquake predicative apparatuses, mid-ocean tsumnami sensors, satellite surveillance.

The Great Missoula Flood

On TV last night there was a special about an area in Washington state called the Scablands. The topography of the area is so strange that it took a few years before scientists think they discovered what caused these weird rock formations that covered an area hundreds of miles in length. Apparently 20, 000 years ago a gigantic glacier some 23 miles wide and 500 ft or more high formed in one of the valleys during a period of extreme glaciation. They theorize that the huge wall of ice stopped up the river going through the valley and caused a lake to form bigger than two of the Great Lakes. At great pressure, the case at the bottom of this immense frozen block, the water does not freeze at its normal 32 degrees Fahrenheit but manages to stay liquid till it is 31 or 30 degrees. There it slowly begins its regime of crackdom, slowly but surely bringing down the huge mass, its very size inculcating its demise. Nevertheless, the cracks don’t signal a permanent new regime since the old conditions are still present and the mass slowly begines to form and rise again.

Catastrophe of the south

I’ve written before about the apocalyptic mindset of the southerner. I recently came across a southern artist who had concentrated his large canvases on southern disasters and it made me realize the special relationship that the south has to catastrophe, all the way from it’s founding as a center of slave activity, to floods and hurricanes, to the fighting and subsequent defeat in the civil war, to economic collapse of king cotton and so on. No wonder the peculiar mind set of the old south, the feeling of being put-upon by outsiders, and the isolation that came before that, the inferiority complex and the aggression that often accompanies that state of mind.

The final end of catastrophe is often disappearance, perhaps not even all at once that ways of life succumb and transmute or just are destroyed. In fact, it would be unusual for catastrophe to have THAT much power. More often it’s simply the power to command abandonment, a small tricking away of power.

The Relation of the Extreme(s) to the (always coming) Disaster

The radical ends (primordial and eschatological) are always far before and far after. The current cultural fascination of the extreme in all areas is perhaps in its own way a recognition of those radical possibilities, but in an immanentized version of the old transcendental, the always present possibility of being un-homed and even the courting of the uncanny through the extreme, the possibility of strtetching the human to the limit of sensation, cognition, possibility even to the point of death, the only really firm extreme that anyone will experience. (Even then it’s problematic whether it could be called an experiencing of a limit.)

crossing the Great Divide...again

I have posted this on another blog but for some reason it seems neecessary to post again. I guess because myself and my family were forced to 'migrate' to a small town for financial reasons, the same as the reason my natal family had to move from here in the first place. And of course there are differing ecologies in smallness and largeness that have casulties due to mal-adaptation. As Marx realized, changes in quantity affects regions outside shear number (even though number now seems to trump all else or, as Fredric Jameson quipped, it's easier to consider the end of the worl than the end of capitalism, which is nothing but the hegemony of that dismal mathic, economy.)

here:
Crossing the Great Divide

A recent issue of National Geographic magazine has a feature on the great animal migrations all over the world, that single-minded travel by all sorts of animals. Their travel is intense and often spectacular, braving incredible odds to reach Someplace Else.

Biologist Hugh Dingle has identified five characteristics that apply to all migrations: "they are prolonged movements that carry animals outside familiar habitats; they tend to be linear, not zigzaggy; they involve special behaviors of preparation (such as overeating) and arrival; they demand special allocations of energy; [ ....and lastly] migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside."

I began to think about the article while I was sitting at a local coffee shop recently. I looked up from my conversation and noticed that all of the small tables had a laptop whose user was also plugged into headphones. I commented to those at my table that we were the only people actually present in the room in a way, all the others had vacated to some virtual space or other.

It often seems as if the whole culture is in a migratory mood, in some great hurry to get to some unspecified Other Place. And yet there is probably no one who would own up to such a feeling of necessity or urgency (or at least any sort of ontological urgency so to speak) -- not that testifying to a mood is equivalent to actually HAVING the mood. And in fact such urgencies as migrations can hardly be considered as a mood but more like a drive, in the psychoanalytic sense of BOTH sexual urgency as well as a more generally applied meaning to the term 'drive', i.e., a 'fervid attention to the greater mission,' albeit 'attention' that defers attention from itself. Perhaps it's the sort of drive which addiction brings, trance-like almost, to connecting actions and goal, a goal which is itself a rapturous, trance state, an emptying of self and filling by some foreign (although never really THAT foreign since it is very very close, so close as to be largely invisible, occluded, most of the time; David Punter writes very rapturously, attentively, addictively to all the phenomenological pendants to this whole complex).

Of course the most visible and blatant of such such raptic transport is waht might be broadly termed the religious impulse..or maybe spiritual impulse if the term 'religious' makes you wary.
But as a pure phenomena, and as such must remain hidden, it would seem to be omnipresent in everyday life, a utopic, in a strict sense of nowhere as well as another sense of everywhere, impulse/drive which must be continually policed, both by secular and religious authorities.

Certain;y this Great Migration is not a recent one for the human species. It seems to have first started with the migration of matter to life and then to consciousness. And who is to say that is the end? or what might be next? Our immediate experience of ANYthing is just far too short to make certain judgments and even our archives have certain flaws, as we are occasionally able to see through tears and abrasions in the surface of those collected memoires of ghosts and revenants, perhaps other flows and times, perhaps NEVER to be really available to this tarnished and tangled flesh. But who knows really? This flesh is still mysterious; I love this quote from a radio broadcast in 1966 from Michel Foucault. It leaves hope of a sempiternal salvation lying in wait somewhere in the folds of our fleshy being, something beyond the bounds (and binds) of our immediate being and experience but waiting, always waiting. Perhaps this will turn out to be the reason for our machines at the end of it all.

"The prestige of utopia--to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible, protected--always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body."