Such bad little boys and girlsSuch bad little boys and girls
“On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” – George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”
Author: Tetman Callis
Hanging the court jesterHanging the court jester
“Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of Fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.” – George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”
A policeman knew my nameA policeman knew my name
“The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.” – George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”
Not with a whimperNot with a whimper
“It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentations! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (emphasis in original)
So that’s where they left itSo that’s where they left it
“In the world of authoritarian commodities, the living recognize within themselves, in their alienated desires, the enemy’s demonstration of power.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
They’re not from around hereThey’re not from around here
“Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
They are sometimes put to that purposeThey are sometimes put to that purpose
“The violence with which femininitude is administered in the world of authoritarian commodities recalls the way the dominant power feels free to manhandle its slaves, when in fact it needs them to ensure its own reproduction.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
Will get fooled againWill get fooled again
“When the Spectacle attempts to ‘praise femininity’ or remarks fawningly on the ‘feminization of the world,’ one can only expect the cunning promotion of all manners of servitudes, the promotion of the constellation of ‘values’ that slaves always pretend to espouse.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
Setting the record straightSetting the record straight
“The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoop-la that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster?” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
The circuses partThe circuses part
“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
Not many a oneNot many a one
“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
The self-righteous setThe self-righteous set
“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
The body politicThe body politic
“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 festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
We’re all screwedWe’re all screwed
“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 Young-Girl
Feeling free, are weFeeling free, are we
“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 the commodity this presence contributes to producing. Henceforth industrial slaves either establish an intimate relation between their corporeal presence and the money this presence brings in, or else they substitute themselves for the function of money, being money themselves: at once the equivalent of wealth and the wealth itself.” – Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency
How much for the lusty wenchHow much for the lusty wench
“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 commodity, is characterized by the obscuring, if not the voluntary forgetting, of this concrete labor.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphases in original)
Squinting and crying outSquinting and crying out
“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 exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
The necessary workThe necessary work
“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 depends on it, if his happiness is involved.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Es verdad, hombreEs verdad, hombre
“El dinero trae desgracia a la felicidad (Money brings disgrace to happiness).” – Yago, pasión morena
I me me mineI me me mine
“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
And the mind hungersAnd the mind hungers
“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, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Watching shadows on the wallWatching shadows on the wall
“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 that men have created roses out of this dung-heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured, disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (emphasis in original)
Giving the devil his dueGiving the devil his due
“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
Bow downBow down
“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)
One-party stateOne-party state
“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 over everyone—the beautiful, the ugly, and the indifferent.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
The adult doseThe adult dose
“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 test-tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Could be a sheCould be a she
“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)
Turn-about and fair playTurn-about and fair play
“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.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
Everybody’s watchingEverybody’s watching
“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 fallacious commonality that does not allow her to express herself.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
A room of its ownA room of its own
“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