The Art of Tetman Callis

Some of the stories and poems may be inappropriate for persons under 16

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Entries from February 2019

The circuses part

February 28th, 2019 · No Comments

“The preponderance of the entertainment and desire market is one stage in the project of social pacification, in which this market has been given the function of obscuring, provisionally, the living contradictions that traverse every point of the fabric of imperial biopolitics.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

Not many a one

February 27th, 2019 · No Comments

“The world is pooped out: there isn’t a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for those existent governments, laws, codes, principle, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos?” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

The self-righteous set

February 26th, 2019 · No Comments

“There is no slave of semiocracy who does not also get a certain power out of it, the power of judgment, blame, or opinion.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The body politic

February 25th, 2019 · No Comments

“If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

We’re all screwed

February 24th, 2019 · No Comments

“In the final phase of the Spectacle, everything is sexually mediated, which is to say that coitus has been substituted as the ultimate goal of the utility of individual things. It is toward coitus that the existence of the world of the commodity now exclusively moves.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the […]

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Tags: Economics

Feeling free, are we

February 23rd, 2019 · No Comments

“As soon as the corporeal presence of the industrial slave has fully entered the composition of the assessable output of what she can produce—her physiognomy being inseparable from her labor—the distinction between the person and the activity of that person becomes specious. The corporeal presence is already a commodity, independently of and in addition to […]

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

How much for the lusty wench

February 22nd, 2019 · No Comments

“The vitrified aspect of the face of the Young-Girl must be explained by her status as commodity: She is the crystallization of a certain quantity of labor spent to put her in accordance with the norms of a certain type of exchange. And the form of the Young-Girl’s appearance, which is also that of a […]

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Tags: Economics

Squinting and crying out

February 21st, 2019 · No Comments

“One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The necessary work

February 20th, 2019 · No Comments

“For the man in the paddock, whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up horse turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood […]

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit

Es verdad, hombre

February 19th, 2019 · No Comments

“El dinero trae desgracia a la felicidad (Money brings disgrace to happiness).” – Yago, pasión morena

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit

I me me mine

February 18th, 2019 · No Comments

“When private property is emptied of all its metaphysical substance, it does not immediately die. It survives, but its content is then only negative: the right to deprive others of the use of our assets.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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Tags: Economics

And the mind hungers

February 17th, 2019 · No Comments

“Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Watching shadows on the wall

February 16th, 2019 · No Comments

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Giving the devil his due

February 15th, 2019 · No Comments

“Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Bow down

February 14th, 2019 · No Comments

“Seduction is not originally the spontaneous relation between men and women, but rather the dominant relation of men amongst themselves.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

One-party state

February 13th, 2019 · No Comments

“The ‘dictatorship of beauty’ is also the dictatorship of ugliness. It does not signify the brutal hegemony of a certain paradigm of beauty, but rather, more radically, the hegemony of the physical simulacrum as the form of the objectivity of beings. Understood as such, we can see that nothing prevents such a dictatorship from extending […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The adult dose

February 12th, 2019 · No Comments

“New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Could be a she

February 11th, 2019 · No Comments

“It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (emphasis in original)

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Turn-about and fair play

February 10th, 2019 · No Comments

“The rhetoric of the war of the sexes, and thus for now, of women’s revenge, operates as the ultimate ruse through which the logic of virility will have vanquished women without their knowledge: by enclosing them, at the price of a simple role reversal, in the submission/domination alternative, to the exclusion of all else.” – […]

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

Everybody’s watching

February 9th, 2019 · No Comments

“There is nothing in the Young-Girl’s life, even in the deepest zones of her intimacy, that escapes alienated reflexivity, that escapes the codification and the gaze of the Spectacle. This intimacy strewn with commodities yields entirely to advertising, and is entirely socialized as intimacy, which is to say that she is part-for-part subject to a […]

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Tags: Economics

A room of its own

February 8th, 2019 · No Comments

“One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Not as a possession

February 7th, 2019 · No Comments

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

A sanguinary folk

February 6th, 2019 · No Comments

“Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Farewell, my lovely

February 5th, 2019 · No Comments

“If in a common calamity, two persons are reduced to the dire alternative, that one or the other or both must certainly perish, as, where two shipwrecked persons are on one plank, which will not hold them both, and one thrusts the other from it, so that he is drowned, the survivor is excused.” – […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

Getting away with murder

February 4th, 2019 · No Comments

“Justifiable homicide is that which is committed either, 1st, by unavoidable necessity, without any will, intention or desire, or any inadvertence or negligence in the party killing, and therefore without blame; such as, by an officer, executing a criminal, pursuant to the death-warrant, and in strict conformity to the law, in every particular; or, 2dly, […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

Who’s there by your side

February 3rd, 2019 · No Comments

“Any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing—after a fashion. Any Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that ‘bourgeois’ liberty of […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

Let those who have eyes see

February 2nd, 2019 · No Comments

“When one looks back at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine famine—about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

The smart set

February 1st, 2019 · No Comments

“When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.” – George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”

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Tags: Lit & Crit