Extreme

Extreme
1. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?
You just put yours lips together and - blow"
Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and To Have Not

Any extreme has to have the leavening agent of the in-between, that which is not extreme but holds the extreme(s) open. The lips of the extreme ARE the extremes, opening and closing around the great void that, though not present allows every bit of presence to form, spittle clustered around the lips and given form by the lips, another form of extremity which, unlike say the arms or legs, interfaces with the most abstract of the verging on the outside (always the place of the extreme): language, food, the sexual other, and the other generally. In other words, all the places to go without moving, all the invaginated uncanny extremes that mark thresholds and boundaries, all the hard things to grasp, pluck, tow, caress, stick through the lips or caress their external membranes...oh baby, that's where it starts and ends, starting THROUGH it's ends, and startling through it's ends. You want to eximprovise ()tremely, it starts at the ends of the flesh, but doesn't come back to itslef, doesn't touch itself...only in the NON-extreme form, where the lips meet, where the flesh returns to it's own, touches it's own or what looks like it's own, do you have regular improv. The other form is more or less like death, waving wanly from beyond the tips of the fingers, waving though the inferno, through the scrim of flesh: matter, noise, silence moving out, at the antipodes.

"It is the opening that incommensurabalizes - there where it spaces itself out. The mouth is at the same time place and non-place, it is the locus of a dis-location, the gaping place of the 'quasi permixtio' between soul and body, which is to say the incommensurable extension between them and common to both, since the mouth - any mouth, before any orality - opens an opening. On Touching, J. Derrida, from chapter 2: Spacings - The Incommensurable, Syncope and Words Beginning with 'ex-' p 29

'... mouthing the ring of the contracture around the noise 'I'"
J-L Nancy quoted in On Touching

2. Extremophiles
The two 'lips'' of 'im' 'provisation' form around the bolus of a habitable - loosely speaking - structure, of negating the extemes (and those membranes can be Noise and Silence, both rounding into the other as they verge into a catastrophic totality, pointing to the final two extremes of Total Order and Total Disorder: having to choose between frigid total stasis, no movement whatsoever, and the total freedom of heat death, no possibility of formation of bonds or foundations: small choice of heaven and hell) by negotiating the extreme into a navigable point of arrival, nothing having been provided before hand, the foresight of having seen beforehand and provided for not possible: the very nature of the extreme, the inability (and yet, at a certain point, necessity) for it to be contracted around the provisions, the composures left on the shore, no, im-provisation is always condemned to be left adrift between the two shore-lips of the river, forming the spittle between the lips, in advertent lubrications which nevertheless can never bond or fuse the lips of the extreme into a total contracture (forming the noisy silence into the 'I' or anything else), instead always - this is the inelegant fiction improvisation is always relegated to forming a 'jumping off' place where it will then solidify itself into something real and non-negotiable, non-perishable: the composition, the state, shit, spit: some total form of life/non-life, the moment of not-providing leading to the 'real' feast of provisions at the end of the journey, set asides, hard-tack, ticky tacky. wishy washy ...

Abandon...again

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...

gimmick...and kitsch?!

the dualities below being part and parcel of marginal creatures every where, and para--.

from Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai ,Critical Enquirer, winter 43

"The gimmick saves us labor. The gimmick does not save labor (in fact, it inteansifies or  even eliminates it).
The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too hard. The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too little.
The gimmick is outdated, backwards. The gimmick is newfangled, futuristic.
The gimmick is a dynamic event. The gimmick is a static thing.
The gimmick is an unrepeatable “one-time invention” (Jameson’s singularity) The gimmick is a device used “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times” (Twain’s joke).
The gimmick makes something about capitalist production transparent. The gimmick makes something about capitalist production obscure"

and then this note:

" It might be tempting here to collapse the gimmick into the broader concept of kitsch to which it is undeniably related, and into which so many other equivocal aesthetic categories have been for so long subsumed. Yet to do so would be to lose sight of the gimmick’s fascinating specificity. Certainly the commodity aesthetic of kitsch is as much a product of the capitalist mode of production. Yet its concept does not encompass the connotations of labor-saving technology that the gimmick does. The paradigmatic kitsch object that is the tchotchke, bibelot, or collectible—snow globes, cookie jars, fuzzy dice—makes no promise to save anyone time or effort; in fact, often just the opposite, signifying dilatory pleasures, a utopia of luxurious purposelessness or affordable waste. Most significantly, kitsch is an aesthetic of consumerism and does not call up the image of production or draw it into reception in the direct way that the gimmick qua technique or device does."