Death in the bingo parlor of discontented anchorites
Erudite musings seldom substitute for a fist to the face, so far as capturing attention of a nemesis goes. A theory of the nemesis doesn’t need to be grounded in Hegel to gain traction. Every schoolboy feels the pull of its praxis, knows its impregnable truths. Bloody noses and black eyes can go far in mapping out the allegiances of a small town. Acquiring a nemesis can be an inheritance, to the point where the relation is part of a larger structure which we still sometimes call a feud. As against a stranger, my neighbor; as against a neighbor, my kin; as against a cousin, my brother; as against my brother, myself. This is not each circle outpacing itself and drawing another, the oversoul skipping across a placid pond. This is viscera and cramped hothouse violence, contained as against an outer enemy until the next line collapses and the Schmittian political dyad snakes in devouring itself. The lines in towns big and small are often drawn in bright red bold, abiding by this set of vectors, which hold fast until they don’t.
Elsewhere, from another journey, homo vocalis is pinned to the wall, another specimen aching with shame at the tongue and the lips and the larynx as this supposed mechanism by which meaning may spout forth like a decrepit misengineered fountain:
When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. The corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth which screws itself up to a whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth—how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It’s not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of fetid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment … Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state—that’s the unconscionable torture.
You'd either meet an optimism that no violence could unconvince or a cynicism that would eat itself empty every day and then turn, hungry and malignant, on whatever it could for a bite, friendly or hostile, it didn't matter.
Out there, where the jar was planted . . .
In any case, art’s cozy rapport with capital means that its potential role as a political agent was compromised long before such basic questions of transmission and circulation could even begin to be addressed. When we talk about the art world, after all, we are always implicitly talking about the art market — or otherwise, those fringe aesthetics and grassroots communities that operate outside of its primary value index and are therefore obsolete within its organizing discursive framework. Today, the sort of dissenting viewpoints rewarded by this discourse are those that are unlikely to deviate from polite bourgeois opinion.
Catch-as-catch-can