1
What do I enjoy here? You see, something inside me curbed my concern's cause. Or holding onto its cause became weakening. What is knowing how to act/produce/want/compete, close tabs, how to continue to commit/concentrate/love? I did buy donuts. Is this working? While thinking about photography and what is not, why something is available, what is unphotographable, fame, and displacing holes in texts, I misplace my phone twice. Or is this fatigue, something Emanuel Levinas included in the states that resist work? Fatigue can sound somehow similar to Fuck!, when tired, or to some.
And there you go (away).
I, and slowly, unknew my concern or concern's cause; maybe some of me, too. This is a sentence from last year protruding into this one. At least some of it seems to insist. Or some of me still hangs/plays/moves in last year patches. I lost something, maybe there. Something got lost in me, was forlorn, unknown in me. I vacuumed. I wish. Technically, there is nothing on the floor. No floor nor cake. I didn't buy flour, and I didn't buy flowers. This is the first time in my life, or politically, that I wanted to be part of an institution came as a full sentence to me, was at once in my mind, kept lingering, and became this. And is somehow part of Say Nothing, a loose collection of texts that are written in regard to and following She knows nothing about clouds. Whereas the clouds referred to are the clouds of Lacan's mention that psychoanalysis takes place by listening between clouds. What is the nothing she knows? How dusty? What does it limit? Despite her clouded listening, despite listening to your/their/the other's jouissance. What does it attend to? Why is it on the floor? This text began when I again forgot how to go on, continue. I like the word vacuum, how it sounds and looks. I really like Sara Deraedt's vacuum cleaner pictures and how the e's and a's are placed in her name. Plus, the relationship between a hole and a vacuum cleaner seems complicatedly interesting. Anyway, the problem is the floor more often than the ceiling, or first.
I fell twice when walking to the cash machine recently, like a drunk, my legs breaking away flawed, not understanding the floor, or how to be a pedestrian. Cause means bottom, too. When I forget how to continue (is it forgetting?) I become one with the background or fall floorless, fade, am hardly here, or invisible, more off, don’t see much, won't say anything, won't say anything, or “... ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance, an ignorance so characteristic of all progress in thought that occurs in the way constituted by philosophical research.” From the first ignorance on, this last sentence is borrowed from Lacan's Seminar 11, when he talks about the gaze that holds the object (a) where the subject falls. The object (a) or the object cause of desire. And a bit before, he explains that this fall “always remains unperceived.” I flail.
The wish/fear to disappear is really the wish not to be destroyed, which, although I knew to be true I learned from Simone White via Trisha Donnelly via Kerstin Stakemeier via Mousse Magazine via the preparation of the second iteration of the exhibition How to Move and Respond that I first conceived of and thought about to counter events in my life as a woman/artist, disenchantment with art, or really the reception of art and/or response to what I do and/or don’t do, and what I had not fully understood yet. Which means to defy, to be destroyed.
There is something wrong here, or maybe two or more reasons for an impotence concerning continuation are haplessly blended, clumsily glued together. What are fugues? And then again, I like glueing; it needs courage. See impossibility in a bit.
When one tries to listen and/or bring words to things, seeing limits and what’s not there or not visible or only liminal and maybe beyond is a beautiful, tangible side effect. Confusing, strange, unphotographable. And language has effects on the body. There is jouissance which is something alive and enwrapped in signifiers. Jouissance one might enjoy or be overwhelmed, disgusted by. And something happens on the level of the body. Or jouissance is always in play, plays one, hence one's (fragile) singularity.
You get closer to things when you head in their direction. Even while driving away disappointment like unattended promises. Reality is made up/backed merely or barely by fantasy. How one is present in writing really is impossible. And then you are here somehow, and at once, and surprisingly and independently of us, our bodies coalesce knowing everything, wordless. Not us, or me. Or maybe not yet. It is winter in Berlin.
Also
There is no full picture but impossibility, or better a possibility for a sense of the impossible concerning the subject in its singularity. And it's not for nothing. One pays for everything (including the floor). Snow flakes don't work as holes in reality only in pictures or with fantasy, and if it snows. Or what something is not. Or where something is not.
I need to become less corny, really develop a coatless and coherent correlation to disorganization, without losing sensitivity, or rather in order to remain sensitive to the impossible, which one must. What is the work that art does?
You get closer to things when you head in their direction. According to Jamieson Webster, there is something psychotic in language. There is too much language. And it is coated. And it gets complicated—clowning at best, fucking overwhelming mostly. All in relation to desire is complicated. All is related to desire. We have a body, and there is language. And there is you. “For Lacan,” Joan Copjec explains in her essay May '68, The Emotional Month, and after referring to Lacan's ending his Seminar 17 by telling the protesting students that they lack shame, “For Lacan, shame is the subject's ethical relation towards being, his own and the other's.” I think about poetry and unending paragraphs that have uncombed, slightly oily fringes, dripping with something barely like shame. There you go, something slips away again. There is the dignity of the signifier or a slippery self slipping. What slips ignorance?
What would I want to hear?
2
When my son was little, he loved to eat round things like donuts or bagels. He used to eat around them first, mark their outside, their rim by biting carefully around their hole not to destroy their inside. Aiming to keep them whole. Aiming to hold on to something seemingly whole as long as possible. Something all in all more complete. How do you hold a hole without (holding) a donut? Similar and not to a lap, which always disappears when you get up. Or here I suggest a rough relation. Like you cannot pick up raindrops. How is the role of holding a hole (pure) possibility? And why/when is photography? To picture clouds? As if he wanted to show to me orally, innocently (drooly) the psychoanalytical, structural, and developmental importance of holes, that is desire. We have a body, and there is language. And somehow it reminds me of how you give what you don’t have to someone who does not want it or love. And reminds me somewhat obliquely of Lacan’s definition of love: to give what you don’t have to someone who does not want it. I don’t see what you see. And this is an asset, you see? And one needs to be careful with absence. What is meaningful? And what one fulfills or feels. Or stuffs (don't stuff!). What are openings? Where plays ignorance? Where does one place oneself and within art, and what is a place? There is no inside, as Calla Henkel mentioned when talking about the art world at one of her book presentations last year. And she would know. To play on the side of fragility where art moves demands caution. One will keep feeling in want of withholding and a repose (for this bending photographing/or otherwise spent body). I love taking pictures of my son eating, even if I do not show them. When I was little, my father liked taking pictures by deliberately not loading a film into the camera. I only keep trying to activate links on the screenshots I make when I look at them later again.
Because that's not it.
3
There is no full picture. Whether you vacuumed or not. Being immobilized is a sign of anxiety. I am not a particularly anxious person (maybe that's not true), but now I sometimes sense how things are closing in, or I am close(r) to some limiting threshold. There is more no, now, or it's nearer. As if my eyes could almost lick it. I know, eventually, they will. Other people's affects (and/or abject, deadening fears). Or is this only me all over the place, and I am closer to nothing? Ashamed? Or closer to change? You? To a connection, containment, or an exposure? An approach? Do I only see something like my own deferral? “For Lacan, shame is the subject's ethical relation towards being, his own and the other's.” This is about complicity as well as sensuality.
You can buy donut holes, I think, I heard. Which means before there was something where there is now a hole you can hold. Or an inside that is out of place.
Photography describes a relation between light and delay. Both do not make good or tangible partners. It can be read as a figure of negativity or a medium for Aufhebung. Sublation and/or sublimation, or merely less. Listening is descended to a minor activity on phones. Less means a wish to be more free. To not know. To come closer to some impossible and maybe be, or even if, ashamed. Photography too concerns holes. Functions because of holes. Though a smartphone despite being a camera (with holes) might be an inverse or other of a hole or its limit, its real. It knows/concentrates infinite content or everything, which is too much and deliberately so. And we are part of this too much; that keeps us apart more than we know, structurally. A smartphone can perform as access to almost anything or block one and knows everything about its performance or blockage. One only limps behind. Structured largely for distraction, it breaks one's relationship to time, makes one thin, and functions as destruction on the soul when one’s concentration wanes. And for a while now, it helps to facilitate a political backlash one would have not wanted to believe possible, or worse. Phones weigh nothing or less and less. My phone’s camera has a higher resolution than any camera I ever held. Still, it works best in the sun. Though working best might not be what one wants, as imperfection carries more (if a question). And you don’t ignore the body. Photography can brace senses when one allows for it, as it facilitates learning to listen to eyes or to feel the other’s blush. It can be a humble gesture of affection or a sublime reaction to one’s every singular view of what surrounds/looks at you. What do you see when no one watches? What is a picture (taken with a phone)? Because what constitutes a picture is a question. What does a picture know? What is its limit? And what when it’s raining? And now it is, out of clouds. Listen.
A smartphone doesn't understand rain but knows that it rains before it does. No cherry; nothing holds all of it together. You cannot not, and you don’t know how, is how art marks a place close to where love sits in a Lacanian sense, you give what you don’t have and probably to someone who does not want it. Which inevitably means that how to continue keeps being a question that can’t just simply be ignored or negated but must be negotiated again and again. That is working as an artist (with nothing). An artist who wants something/everything, or simply a response/to respond, which is an impossible desire that, like all desires, came from an other via language. What is potency?
This is the first time in my life, or politically, that I wanted to be part of an institution. Or today I wish I had more of a say which must include remaining sensitive when being unsure and to the impossible, fumbling with unanswerable questions, learning to listen, listening, leaving and coming back, and leaving space for clowning/nonsense or indeterminacy, something impossible, understanding that our singularity is what unites us as human beings, that it is this, our singularity above all that unites us (something we could already know since Freud btw), and handling shame as an asset, officially and publicly, and in poetry (that is art). This might take more time or adults, or better, certain maturity. Maybe this is a teenage fantasy falling. Maybe you are a possibility.
An early, much shorter version of this text was part of an application for an assignment at an institution.
I am interested in what literally might come or fall out of pictures and/or texts like this, enjoy their possible porousness. And because I like redundancy and non-performances, performances that are mundane, mere gestures, or, very boring, here are some donuts and that is holes. And I'm sorry there might not be enough for everyone. Read them as something that came/fell out of this text. Enjoy!*
Please help yourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMOAXm94VWo
*Donuts were available after the first reading of This is the first time in my life, or politically, that I wanted to be part of an institution at How to Move and respond at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, May 2025.