Issue 40: Caption
(1) Homonyms are words that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings.
One that I particularly love is the grappling between visibility and invisibility in the word Transparent:
A. Allowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen: transparent blue water
B . An Easiness to perceive or detect - having thoughts or feelings that are easily perceived: you'd be no good at poker—you're too transparent.
(2) Magic here being: safety, clarity, meaning, double-meaning, identification, open-endedness? Counter-publics and re-readings. Many voices, or maybe just your voice? Yesterday my co-star astrology app told me that “clarity is the same as transcendence.”
( 3) I think this quote was by a Jasbir Puar but I can’t find it anywhere in my notes 😢
Holding hands at the intersection of magic + language "spell" becomes a cute pun about subjectivity. Words, like magic, stir feeling out of air.
Spell can be defined along the following lines:
1. Write or name the letters that form (a word) in correct sequence: Dolly spelled her name
2. Mean or have as a result: this summer would spell the start of a wonderful new beginning.
3. A verbal formula believed to have magical force: he whispered a spell as he moved his hands
Letters arranged in correct sequence make our bodies weep.
See also:
Charm which speaks to:
1. the power or quality of delighting, attracting, or fascinating others
2. an object, act, or saying believed to have magic power
3. a small ornament worn on a necklace or bracelet.
Spells and homonyms (1), along with other alcoves of text, give words over to magic (2). Maybe in words; unending readings can emerge. Double meanings unfold, making space for voices and bodies and ‘becomings beyond beings.’ (3)
With spells, we can locate affect & magic in the words that we say/read/write/ingest/do/live. If text is a spell, the verb for engaging in writing could be cast.
Cast:
1. to throw (something) in a specified direction
2. cause (light or shadow) to appear on a surface
3. discard
4. shape (metal or other material) by pouring it into a mould while molten.
5. register (a vote)
6. cause (a magic spell) to take effect
7. calculate and record details
8. (in country dancing) change one's position by moving a certain number of places in a certain direction along the outside of the line in which one is dancing.
9. (of a dog) search in different directions for a lost scent
Can anyone cast magic?
(4) Tompkins, A. Asterisk. TSQ 1 May 2014; 1 (1-2): 26–27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2399497
(5) lived experience
(6) Interjects!
(7) A choir of voices, running commentaries, borderline tangents which don’t fit into the body-text (saving the word limit), personal opinions from the author, personal opinions from the editor, personal opinions from the translator, apologies, glossaries, definitions, *, being held by those who’ve come before us, proof, a community of friends who’ve also thought about this*, ✨, 💖, 💔, maps, keys, guesstimations, body-text support, critical distance from the body-text, suggestions, directions, a place 2 find friends, a home, a library, tips, tricks, treats, appraisals, affirmations etc.
(here etc. functions like *)
Recently I cast an essay about the asterisk (*) as an internet suffix. The symbol, a ‘wildcard character,’ Sevan Bussell explains, ‘[tells] your computer to search for whatever you typed, plus any characters after.’ (4)
Often used to discuss queer* and trans* experiences, * allows for a multiplicity of suffix-results—the textual ‘wildcard’ here allows for mutable, unfixed and fluid responses. The google search becomes generative—guessing or suggesting or feeling lucky about potential results. Static findings become open*
(open ended, open universities, open knowledge, open office, open source initiative etc.)
Rather than prescribing a single thing, (5)* allows text to transactionally read into us, as we read our lives into it.
like *, the footnote usurps the singularity of text, allowing new voices, readings and orientations to emerge. The footnote (6)
They acknowledge, gives thanks, points of clarification, suggestions for further reading… (7)
(8) Vuong, O. (2017). How I did it: forward first collection special - Ocean Vuong on 'seventh circle of earth' • Poetry School. [online] Poetry School. Available at: https://poetryschool.com/how-i-did-it/i-forward-first-collection-special-ocean-vuong-seventh-circle-earth/?fbclid=IwAR1S8ypDSV-6y1J2WbV2tbAUzBkOJiH9vsc2A3s_Yqkk7O4tT1ceAAIQjX8
(9) Preciado, P. (2013) Testo junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at CUNY, pp. 11
I cast the final chapter the morning after my grandfather passed away. The chapter is called Eternal Life – I think I’ll take a lot of comfort away from it for a long time. Thanks Paul
(on my own authority, I’m on first name basis with all the writers I care about, because I know they care about me too)
(10) Spence Messih
(11) Significantly, there is a gentle, touching, overlap of lives in theory. The writer’s life echoes that of the reader, which mirrors my life, which plays out in proximity to yours. Feelings of isolation are quickly replaced with a spectacular closeness
In the definitions of margin, we find a hopeful poem;
The furthest limit of possibility… /… provide[d] with an edge… /… an amount by which something is won… /… to annotate or summarize…
(12) Eleanor Zurowski
Where * and homonyms allow a multiplicity of meanings to exist within a singular text, the footnote becomes an alcove in which an abundance of voices can have their say.
Footnoting is a practice of locating community across time & space & texts.
Importantly also it’s a space many voices find themselves relegated to:
‘for those in the margins who are perennially silenced,
the footnote can be a place one gets to tell one’s story’ (8)
Recently I read Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie which self-identifies as a ‘body-essay.’ (9) One of my tutors at uni (10) described queer theory as ‘lived theory’—writing that speaks directly to the lived experiences of the author-reader-subject. (11) My friend Eleanor (12) mentioned feeling ‘held’ by a book they were reading. Deleuze wrote of Spinoza: “he gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch's broom which he makes you mount.” (13)
(13) Deleuze, G, Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II. Columbia University Press, New York. P. 15
(14) Marcus Whale
(15) Getsy, D. Capacity. TSQ 1 May 2014; 1 (1-2): 47-49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2399497
Maybe text allows us to envision worlds that can’t quite exist for us yet? A significant part of casting is imagining. A hopeful incantation
Here text articulates paths forward, offers support, and locates community –
I find this incredibly comforting when addressing, and being addressed as, a queer* subject.
(a subject-hood which can feel isolating and forsaken.)
In a Facebook message my friend Marcus (14) wrote about ‘transforming your forsakenness into a source of potential power and of rebirth,’ ‘a foundation.’
Text has an incredible potential to articulate a capacity. Without ever coming into the world, theory is like a body, touching as itself is touched upon. It provides comfort in knowing that others feel* like you* do, it creates the ‘foundation’ Marcus talks of.
David Getsy writes:
‘A capacity manifests its power as potentiality, incipience, and imminence. Only when exercised do capacities become fully apparent, and they may lie in wait to be activated.’ (15)
Text, and the community it nestles, can perjaps be some illustrious start to a grand world-making project. The open-ended script allows us all to cast our parts into the world.
(16) Deleuze, G, Guattari, F. (2005) Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming- imperceptible in a thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 11th ed. p 240
(17) Rosenberg, J. (2018). p.255
(18) William Sayers (2005) The etymology of queer, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 18:2, 17-19, DOI: 10.3200/ANQQ.18.2.17-19
(19) On reading a draft of this text, my friend Audrey Pfister cast a connection to the ‘slant step,’ an ambiguous found sculptural form, whose apparent lack of function invites open-ended engagements. ‘The slant step speaks of bodies without being able to name them.’ (a)
a Hall, G. (2016) Reading Things. Walker art. Available at: https://walkerart.org/magazine/gordon-hall-transgender-hb2-bathroom-bill (Audrey linked me this rly nice essay)
(20) Into and out of the world
For some, ‘writing is traversed by strange becomings,’ (16) and so:
‘in that inimitably queer way, we found languages, words to bridge the gulf between our bodies.’ (17)
~~~
The etymology of ‘queer’ seems to originate from an early sixteenth century Indo-European word for ‘cross, oblique, squint, perverse, wrongheaded.’ It describes a ‘crookedness’ a ‘state of being bent or hollow.’ Before referring explicitly to bodies and orientations, it was often applied to ‘weapons and implements, physical features (both human and topographical), in nominal form as ‘something twisted.’ (18)
I’m interested in the potentials of text as oblique.
Oblique: neither parallel nor at right angles to a specified or implied line; slanting (19)
Departing from understandings of prescriptive straightness and not-straightness, text as oblique, as open-ended, as a spell or a ‘wildcard,’ allows us to move towards a liberatingly unfettered capacity for new readings. (20) Language has comforting alcoves which allow text to be non-committal,
( 21) This is what it is to cast
(22) Deleuze, G, Parnet, C. (2007). P. 15
(23) ‘The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are [] performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition.’ (b)
b Ahmed, S. Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 12 no. 4, 2006, p. 543-574. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/202832.
(24) Green, N, Crasnow, S. J. (2019) Artifacts from the Future. TSQ volume 6, number 3. p 404. Doi: 10.1215/23289252-7549512
(25) Deleuze, G, Parnet, C. (2007). P. 26
(26) Anna-May Kirk
creating spaces for agential self-definition, non-normative re-re-re-readings, and the comforts of lying comfortably oblique. (21) Open-ended text is a queer* practice – a dance of proximities and spells,
Writing inscribed onto (or maybe found floating atop) ‘an abstract and broken line, a zigzag which glides “between,”’ (22)
There are strategies for reading, or inviting readings, which become ways for meaning to go off-the-line. (23) Maybe to cast, is a practice of locating, fortifying and de/re-mystifying the non-normative community structures which lie in bodies of text?
Sometimes the discomforts of becoming exist in the exhaustion not being there. Maybe, for now, our intermediacies can be liberating, exciting and beautiful. ✨
Rather than the resolutions of futurity, or comforts of nostalgia, we can find being in a temporal ‘“otherwise” - an alternative time and space outside the normative one.’ (24)
Open-ended text invites many voices into a process of ‘populating without ever specifying’ (25) the self. My friend Anna(26) said something about how I write like a collagist. Foraging and moving and copy-pasting myself into being.
(27) Rosenberg, J. (2018) The daddy dialectic. Los Angeles Review of Books. Available at; https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-daddy-dialectic/
‘I’m speaking to you – to us – to those of us who learned at a young age never to turn around, never to look back at the nothing that’s there to catch us when we fall.’(c)
c Rosenberg, J. (2018). Confessions of the fox. New York: Atlantic Books, p.166.
(28) Carson, A. (2013). The autobiography of red. New York: Random House US, p.6.
(29) Muñoz, J. (2019). Cruising utopia, 10th anniversary edition. New York: New York University Press, p.6.
(30) Puar, J. (2005). Queer times, queer assemblages. Social Text, [online] 23(3-4), pp.121-139. Available at: http://jasbirkpuar.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Queer-Times-Queer-Assemblages-1.pdf
(31) Barthes, R. (1977) The grain of the voice. In: Image – Music – Text, trans. Heath S. London: Fontana, p 179–189.
(32) Sara Ahmed; An Affinity of hammers. TSQ 1 May 2016; 3 (1-2): 22–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334151
(33) Vallee, M. (2017). Technology, Embodiment, and Affect in Voice Sciences. Body & Society, 23(2), pp.83-105.
Meanings, don’t cancel out when multiplied or distributed. The footnoted voice doesn’t de-legitimate the body-text. Instead, they co-exist—text has remarkable ways of making space for multiple modes of reading, each legitimating the others.
‘writing the self is, at its root, a question of marking with language the places where history touches us. And Reader, it touches us everywhere.’ (27)
‘The history of a text is like a long caress.’ (28)
Theory articulates ‘a restructured sociality,’ (29) a ‘relay of affective information between and amid beings,’ (30) ‘a vibrating intermediary between the body’s first-order physical presence and second-order representational presence,’ (31) ‘from where a world unfolds’ (32) ‘embodied and moving between bodies,’ (33) ‘linking together matter and beings through time and space in
(34) Kanngieser, A (2015) Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Five propositions for sound, GeoHumanities, 1:1, 80-85, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1075360
(35) Massumi, B. (2005) ‘Translators foreword: Pleasures of philosophy’ in a thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 11th ed. xiii
(36) Davis, H. (2015). Toxic progeny: The Plastisphere and other queer futures. philoSOPHIA 5(2), 231-250. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/608469
(37) Lei, D. (2018) Queer reproduction revisited and why race, class and citizenship still matters: A response to Cristina Richie Bioethics, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 138-144, 2018. Available at SSRN: or http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12416
(38) Stark, H. (2017) Deleuze, subjectivity and nonhuman becomings in the Anthropocene, Dialogues in Human Geography, 7,
(39) Special mention must go to my friends + direct influences; the artist duo Two Leaves, and Eleanor Zurowski – Both of their practices have an affinity for quotations and my quote-poem above is a direct cast to their texts. Find their work here: https://www.instagram.com/twoleav.es/ , https://eleanorzurowski.hotglue.me/
unanticipated ways,’ (34) ‘synthesiz[ing] a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging.’ (35)Text, ‘a magical substance, seemingly without essence,’ (36) ‘enables the possibility of collective futures’(37)‘its temporality determines that it is perpetually engaged in the process of becoming different.’ (38) (39)
The author-reader-subject’s very existence becomes a testament to text. Or maybe text becomes a testament to the author-reader-subject*?
Yes,
I like this better. Writing (and in due course reading) is like a hug, a spell, an affirmation.
~~~
I wear my bracelet everyday, adorned with an angel charm that you gave me. My cheap jewelry has started to oxidize from contact with my sweat, I like to think it’s rubbing off on me. I wear your ring around my neck, and when we hug, I feel its edge prodding into my chest. I walk in the footsteps of giants, or maybe, many-headed, nimble shape shifters. Likewise, when I read your words (arranged in correct sequence,) I cast my place in this world. It’s hard to write about ways of knowing, but when you know, you know.
thanks
...
*
Learns and makes work on Gadigal land, and is studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW School of Art and Design on Bidjigal land.
De Lacy’s practice is interested in non-committal systems of knowledge, and ways of approaching counter-publics, futures and self-definitions. Dipping its toes into sculpture, coding, image-making and performance, De Lacy’s work finds its bread and butter in text. They’re interested in finding comforting ways to locate community, feeling and (collective) identity in images and language. They’re particularly interested in aesthetics and materials which privilege double-meanings, open-endedness and abstracted outcomes.
Selected recent exhibitions include One Past Liverpool at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Becoming With at Tributary Projects and SUPERVIS at Kudos Gallery. De Lacy is also on the advisory board at Concordia Gallery, and is a member of the Kudos gallery committee.
De Lacy does not have a website, but their dad says they should make one—‘so that people can find you.’ If Jack could have one super power, it would be invisibility. If they had more free time, they’d spend it reading with friends.
Issue 40: Caption
Holding hands at the intersection of magic + language "spell" becomes a cute pun about subjectivity. Words, like magic, stir feeling out of air.
Spell can be defined along the following lines:
1. Write or name the letters that form (a word) in correct sequence: Dolly spelled her name
2. Mean or have as a result: this summer would spell the start of a wonderful new beginning.
3. A verbal formula believed to have magical force: he whispered a spell as he moved his hands
Letters arranged in correct sequence make our bodies weep.
See also:
Charm which speaks to:
1. the power or quality of delighting, attracting, or fascinating others
2. an object, act, or saying believed to have magic power
3. a small ornament worn on a necklace or bracelet.
Spells and homonyms (1), along with other alcoves of text, give words over to magic (2). Maybe in words; unending readings can emerge. Double meanings unfold, making space for voices and bodies and ‘becomings beyond beings.’ (3)
With spells, we can locate affect & magic in the words that we say/read/write/ingest/do/live. If text is a spell, the verb for engaging in writing could be cast.
Cast:
1. to throw (something) in a specified direction
2. cause (light or shadow) to appear on a surface
3. discard
4. shape (metal or other material) by pouring it into a mould while molten.
5. register (a vote)
6. cause (a magic spell) to take effect
7. calculate and record details
8. (in country dancing) change one's position by moving a certain number of places in a certain direction along the outside of the line in which one is dancing.
9. (of a dog) search in different directions for a lost scent
Can anyone cast magic?
(1) Homonyms are words that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings.
One that I particularly love is the grappling between visibility and invisibility in the word Transparent:
A. Allowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen: transparent blue water
B . An Easiness to perceive or detect - having thoughts or feelings that are easily perceived: you'd be no good at poker—you're too transparent.
(2) Magic here being: safety, clarity, meaning, double-meaning, identification, open-endedness? Counter-publics and re-readings. Many voices, or maybe just your voice? Yesterday my co-star astrology app told me that “clarity is the same as transcendence.”
( 3) I think this quote was by a Jasbir Puar but I can’t find it anywhere in my notes 😢
Recently I cast an essay about the asterisk (*) as an internet suffix. The symbol, a ‘wildcard character,’ Sevan Bussell explains, ‘[tells] your computer to search for whatever you typed, plus any characters after.’ (4)
Often used to discuss queer* and trans* experiences, * allows for a multiplicity of suffix-results—the textual ‘wildcard’ here allows for mutable, unfixed and fluid responses. The google search becomes generative—guessing or suggesting or feeling lucky about potential results. Static findings become open*
(open ended, open universities, open knowledge, open office, open source initiative etc.)
Rather than prescribing a single thing, (5)* allows text to transactionally read into us, as we read our lives into it.
like *, the footnote usurps the singularity of text, allowing new voices, readings and orientations to emerge. The footnote (6)
They acknowledge, gives thanks, points of clarification, suggestions for further reading… (7)
(4) Tompkins, A. Asterisk. TSQ 1 May 2014; 1 (1-2): 26–27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2399497
(5) lived experience
(6) Interjects!
(7) A choir of voices, running commentaries, borderline tangents which don’t fit into the body-text (saving the word limit), personal opinions from the author, personal opinions from the editor, personal opinions from the translator, apologies, glossaries, definitions, *, being held by those who’ve come before us, proof, a community of friends who’ve also thought about this*, ✨, 💖, 💔, maps, keys, guesstimations, body-text support, critical distance from the body-text, suggestions, directions, a place 2 find friends, a home, a library, tips, tricks, treats, appraisals, affirmations etc.
(here etc. functions like *)
Where * and homonyms allow a multiplicity of meanings to exist within a singular text, the footnote becomes an alcove in which an abundance of voices can have their say.
Footnoting is a practice of locating community across time & space & texts.
Importantly also it’s a space many voices find themselves relegated to:
‘for those in the margins who are perennially silenced,
the footnote can be a place one gets to tell one’s story’ (8)
Recently I read Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie which self-identifies as a ‘body-essay.’ (9) One of my tutors at uni (10) described queer theory as ‘lived theory’—writing that speaks directly to the lived experiences of the author-reader-subject. (11) My friend Eleanor (12) mentioned feeling ‘held’ by a book they were reading. Deleuze wrote of Spinoza: “he gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch's broom which he makes you mount.” (13)
(8) Vuong, O. (2017). How I did it: forward first collection special - Ocean Vuong on 'seventh circle of earth' • Poetry School. [online] Poetry School. Available at: https://poetryschool.com/how-i-did-it/i-forward-first-collection-special-ocean-vuong-seventh-circle-earth/?fbclid=IwAR1S8ypDSV-6y1J2WbV2tbAUzBkOJiH9vsc2A3s_Yqkk7O4tT1ceAAIQjX8
(9) Preciado, P. (2013) Testo junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at CUNY, pp. 11
I cast the final chapter the morning after my grandfather passed away. The chapter is called Eternal Life – I think I’ll take a lot of comfort away from it for a long time. Thanks Paul
(on my own authority, I’m on first name basis with all the writers I care about, because I know they care about me too)
(10) Spence Messih
(11) Significantly, there is a gentle, touching, overlap of lives in theory. The writer’s life echoes that of the reader, which mirrors my life, which plays out in proximity to yours. Feelings of isolation are quickly replaced with a spectacular closeness
In the definitions of margin, we find a hopeful poem;
The furthest limit of possibility… /… provide[d] with an edge… /… an amount by which something is won… /… to annotate or summarize…
(12) Eleanor Zurowski
Here text articulates paths forward, offers support, and locates community –
I find this incredibly comforting when addressing, and being addressed as, a queer* subject.
(a subject-hood which can feel isolating and forsaken.)
In a Facebook message my friend Marcus (14) wrote about ‘transforming your forsakenness into a source of potential power and of rebirth,’ ‘a foundation.’
Text has an incredible potential to articulate a capacity. Without ever coming into the world, theory is like a body, touching as itself is touched upon. It provides comfort in knowing that others feel* like you* do, it creates the ‘foundation’ Marcus talks of.
David Getsy writes:
‘A capacity manifests its power as potentiality, incipience, and imminence. Only when exercised do capacities become fully apparent, and they may lie in wait to be activated.’ (15)
Text, and the community it nestles, can perjaps be some illustrious start to a grand world-making project. The open-ended script allows us all to cast our parts into the world.
(13) Deleuze, G, Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II. Columbia University Press, New York. P. 15
(14) Marcus Whale
(15) Getsy, D. Capacity. TSQ 1 May 2014; 1 (1-2): 47-49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2399497
Maybe text allows us to envision worlds that can’t quite exist for us yet? A significant part of casting is imagining. A hopeful incantation
For some, ‘writing is traversed by strange becomings,’ (16) and so:
‘in that inimitably queer way, we found languages, words to bridge the gulf between our bodies.’ (17)
~~~
The etymology of ‘queer’ seems to originate from an early sixteenth century Indo-European word for ‘cross, oblique, squint, perverse, wrongheaded.’ It describes a ‘crookedness’ a ‘state of being bent or hollow.’ Before referring explicitly to bodies and orientations, it was often applied to ‘weapons and implements, physical features (both human and topographical), in nominal form as ‘something twisted.’ (18)
I’m interested in the potentials of text as oblique.
Oblique: neither parallel nor at right angles to a specified or implied line; slanting (19)
Departing from understandings of prescriptive straightness and not-straightness, text as oblique, as open-ended, as a spell or a ‘wildcard,’ allows us to move towards a liberatingly unfettered capacity for new readings. (20) Language has comforting alcoves which allow text to be non-committal,
(16) Deleuze, G, Guattari, F. (2005) Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming- imperceptible in a thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 11th ed. p 240
(17) Rosenberg, J. (2018). p.255
(18) William Sayers (2005) The etymology of queer, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 18:2, 17-19, DOI: 10.3200/ANQQ.18.2.17-19
(19) On reading a draft of this text, my friend Audrey Pfister cast a connection to the ‘slant step,’ an ambiguous found sculptural form, whose apparent lack of function invites open-ended engagements. ‘The slant step speaks of bodies without being able to name them.’ (a)
a Hall, G. (2016) Reading Things. Walker art. Available at: https://walkerart.org/magazine/gordon-hall-transgender-hb2-bathroom-bill (Audrey linked me this rly nice essay)
(20) Into and out of the world
creating spaces for agential self-definition, non-normative re-re-re-readings, and the comforts of lying comfortably oblique. (21) Open-ended text is a queer* practice – a dance of proximities and spells,
Writing inscribed onto (or maybe found floating atop) ‘an abstract and broken line, a zigzag which glides “between,”’ (22)
There are strategies for reading, or inviting readings, which become ways for meaning to go off-the-line. (23) Maybe to cast, is a practice of locating, fortifying and de/re-mystifying the non-normative community structures which lie in bodies of text?
Sometimes the discomforts of becoming exist in the exhaustion not being there. Maybe, for now, our intermediacies can be liberating, exciting and beautiful. ✨
Rather than the resolutions of futurity, or comforts of nostalgia, we can find being in a temporal ‘“otherwise” - an alternative time and space outside the normative one.’ (24)
Open-ended text invites many voices into a process of ‘populating without ever specifying’ (25) the self. My friend Anna(26) said something about how I write like a collagist. Foraging and moving and copy-pasting myself into being.
( 21) This is what it is to cast
(22) Deleuze, G, Parnet, C. (2007). P. 15
(23) ‘The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are [] performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition.’ (b)
b Ahmed, S. Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 12 no. 4, 2006, p. 543-574. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/202832.
(24) Green, N, Crasnow, S. J. (2019) Artifacts from the Future. TSQ volume 6, number 3. p 404. Doi: 10.1215/23289252-7549512
(25) Deleuze, G, Parnet, C. (2007). P. 26
(26) Anna-May Kirk
Meanings, don’t cancel out when multiplied or distributed. The footnoted voice doesn’t de-legitimate the body-text. Instead, they co-exist—text has remarkable ways of making space for multiple modes of reading, each legitimating the others.
‘writing the self is, at its root, a question of marking with language the places where history touches us. And Reader, it touches us everywhere.’ (27)
‘The history of a text is like a long caress.’ (28)
Theory articulates ‘a restructured sociality,’ (29) a ‘relay of affective information between and amid beings,’ (30) ‘a vibrating intermediary between the body’s first-order physical presence and second-order representational presence,’ (31) ‘from where a world unfolds’ (32) ‘embodied and moving between bodies,’ (33) ‘linking together matter and beings through time and space in
(27) Rosenberg, J. (2018) The daddy dialectic. Los Angeles Review of Books. Available at; https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-daddy-dialectic/
‘I’m speaking to you – to us – to those of us who learned at a young age never to turn around, never to look back at the nothing that’s there to catch us when we fall.’(c)
c Rosenberg, J. (2018). Confessions of the fox. New York: Atlantic Books, p.166.
(28) Carson, A. (2013). The autobiography of red. New York: Random House US, p.6.
(29) Muñoz, J. (2019). Cruising utopia, 10th anniversary edition. New York: New York University Press, p.6.
(30) Puar, J. (2005). Queer times, queer assemblages. Social Text, [online] 23(3-4), pp.121-139. Available at: http://jasbirkpuar.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Queer-Times-Queer-Assemblages-1.pdf
(31) Barthes, R. (1977) The grain of the voice. In: Image – Music – Text, trans. Heath S. London: Fontana, p 179–189.
(32) Sara Ahmed; An Affinity of hammers. TSQ 1 May 2016; 3 (1-2): 22–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334151
(33) Vallee, M. (2017). Technology, Embodiment, and Affect in Voice Sciences. Body & Society, 23(2), pp.83-105.
unanticipated ways,’ (34) ‘synthesiz[ing] a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging.’ (35)Text, ‘a magical substance, seemingly without essence,’ (36) ‘enables the possibility of collective futures’(37)‘its temporality determines that it is perpetually engaged in the process of becoming different.’ (38) (39)
The author-reader-subject’s very existence becomes a testament to text. Or maybe text becomes a testament to the author-reader-subject*?
Yes,
I like this better. Writing (and in due course reading) is like a hug, a spell, an affirmation.
~~~
(34) Kanngieser, A (2015) Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Five propositions for sound, GeoHumanities, 1:1, 80-85, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1075360
(35) Massumi, B. (2005) ‘Translators foreword: Pleasures of philosophy’ in a thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 11th ed. xiii
(36) Davis, H. (2015). Toxic progeny: The Plastisphere and other queer futures. philoSOPHIA 5(2), 231-250. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/608469
(37) Lei, D. (2018) Queer reproduction revisited and why race, class and citizenship still matters: A response to Cristina Richie Bioethics, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 138-144, 2018. Available at SSRN: or http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12416
(38) Stark, H. (2017) Deleuze, subjectivity and nonhuman becomings in the Anthropocene, Dialogues in Human Geography, 7,
(39) Special mention must go to my friends + direct influences; the artist duo Two Leaves, and Eleanor Zurowski – Both of their practices have an affinity for quotations and my quote-poem above is a direct cast to their texts. Find their work here: https://www.instagram.com/twoleav.es/ , https://eleanorzurowski.hotglue.me/
I wear my bracelet everyday, adorned with an angel charm that you gave me. My cheap jewelry has started to oxidize from contact with my sweat, I like to think it’s rubbing off on me. I wear your ring around my neck, and when we hug, I feel its edge prodding into my chest. I walk in the footsteps of giants, or maybe, many-headed, nimble shape shifters. Likewise, when I read your words (arranged in correct sequence,) I cast my place in this world. It’s hard to write about ways of knowing, but when you know, you know.
thanks
...
*
Learns and makes work on Gadigal land, and is studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW School of Art and Design on Bidjigal land.
De Lacy’s practice is interested in non-committal systems of knowledge, and ways of approaching counter-publics, futures and self-definitions. Dipping its toes into sculpture, coding, image-making and performance, De Lacy’s work finds its bread and butter in text. They’re interested in finding comforting ways to locate community, feeling and (collective) identity in images and language. They’re particularly interested in aesthetics and materials which privilege double-meanings, open-endedness and abstracted outcomes.
Selected recent exhibitions include One Past Liverpool at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Becoming With at Tributary Projects and SUPERVIS at Kudos Gallery. De Lacy is also on the advisory board at Concordia Gallery, and is a member of the Kudos gallery committee.
De Lacy does not have a website, but their dad says they should make one—‘so that people can find you.’ If Jack could have one super power, it would be invisibility. If they had more free time, they’d spend it reading with friends.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.