Prose Prunings

"We all repeat what we hear, and wonder where the echo begins. Resonance, after all, is the most personal kind of truth, which oscillates between our own present and past." - Patrick Monahan

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Kidlat Tahimik on film, time and capital

Kidlat Tahimik. Rockstar.

"Many professionals tell the beginning filmmaker, 'You should not take too long to finish a film, because too many changes happen within the individual filmmaker.' That is a great rule for time-efficient FTC fillmaking. But allowing oneself to be capsulized in the cocoon of time-is-money means closing out the cosmic offerings. ...

"Watching films or reading novels is a matter of habit. The visual excitement pumped and overstuffed into FTC films, which today is equated with quality in films, may in fact be a crutch to disguise the lack of any inner quality, any profundity of spirit.

"Formula films probably get the kinds of audiences they deserve, and even condition them to accept these as the only valid style of filmmaking. And I might add that the filmgoing public also deserves the kind of films they support."

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Crenshaw herself articulating how intersectionality is not about an Olympics of marginalized identities, and how an intersectional analytic cannot work on the level of mere abstraction, because which structures of power bear upon a specific situation to produce particular effects for particular persons or populations can only be apprehended in a situated manner.

On the "Celebrating Intersectionality?" conference held in Frankfurt in 2009:

"There were some really, you know, to the mat conversations about how many intersections are there, how many, and so one person would say, Well, there are 11, and another one would say something, you know, a different number, and I couldn't understand what the rules of the game were. Because in my view, you can't answer that question in the abstract. It's not a grand social theory that has predictive elements to it. It's a prism for reading concrete situations. So tell me the situation, and maybe we can debate how many different axes of power are coming together in that moment to create that particular problem, but it's not this sort of thing where you can debate in the abstract how many kinds of power, how many axes of power are there in the world. You know, you can't do it like that. And so I was curious about why they wanted to do that. Like, what was the imperative that answering the question in the abstract was meant to address?"

...

"...when you don't have the fuller political analysis of various forms of hierarchy, all you are left with is the identity signifiers. And I'll say ... the way intersectionality is received as an interrogation of identity, rather than as an interrogation of how structures of subordination actually interact, and [how] that interaction has distributional impact on people who, because of the structure, are positioned in a way to receive that, makes it that much easier to simply reduce intersectionality to being about identity rather than being about power."

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"archives do not reveal easy answers, for me they reveal that time can break apart and not quite fit back into one another." - Lebohang Kganye, qtd. in Mabaso and Moses, "Cite, Sight, Site: Notes in Citation as a Gesture of Reproducibility" (2023)

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Activism without definable fundamental goals and the corresponding theory of society is nothing. And criticism without active protest is an academic exercise without lasting value. Activists, therefore, have to become critics zealously studying present reality as it evolved from the past so that they may thoroughly understand the society they are trying to change. Academic critics have to make a study of both the present and the past in order to be able to guide activism. Thus, in a way, activists have to be scholars and scholars have to be activists.

Renato Constantino, “Intellectuals and Activists,” Graphic (20 August 1969), qtd. in István Mészáros, “Neo-colonial identity and counter-consciousness,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 30, no. 3 (2000), 308-321, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472330080000221

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One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you're wanting yourself to get better, you won't. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never relax into what you already have or already are. "One of the deepest habitual patterns we have is to feel that now is not good enough. ... We don't quite give ourselves full credit for who we are in the present. ... "[T]he basis of this whole teaching is that you're never going to get everything together. ... There isn't going to be some precious future time when all the loose ends will be tied up. ... One of the things that keep us unhappy is this continual searching for pleasure or security, searching for a little more comfortable situation, either at the domestic level or at the spiritual level or at the level of mental peace. ... "Many people feel wounded and are looking for something to heal them. To me it seems that at the root of healing, at the root of feeling like a fully adult person, is the premise that you're not going to try to make anything go away, that what you have is worth appreciating. But this is hard to swallow when what you have is pain. ... "If there's some sense of wanting to change yourself, then it comes from a place of feeling that you're not good enough. It comes from aggression toward yourself, dislike of your present mind, speech, or body ... giving up hope is the most important ingredient for developing sanity and healing. ... "As long as you're wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or whatever it might be, somehow you're always going to be approaching your problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you're not good enough. That's why the habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you're trying to improve, because you go about it in the same habitual style that caused all the pain to start. ... "If you're going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need to protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh. If you're going to grow up--which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation--it's because you will allow something that's already in you to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you allow it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried.

Pema Chödrön, “Abandon Any Hope of Fruition,” Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (Shambhala Publications, 1994), pp. 101-105. 

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The psychic interiority of broaching one’s own darkness is the mainstay of horror fiction, the genre to which these stories clearly belong. And yet Enriquez shifts this interiority outward into a landscape made ghastly by political and economic forces. ... Enriquez spent her childhood in Argentina during the years of the infamous Dirty War, which ended when she was ten. Tens of thousands were tortured, killed, or 'disappeared' under circumstances later nullified with a blanket amnesty. Clearly these acts, and the concomitant economic instability and corruption, provide the earth for Enriquez’s tales. ... "The protagonists in Enriquez’s stories are mostly aware of their privilege, if it’s a privilege to have a place to live, food to eat, a face that’s not grotesquely disfigured. The proximity of others without these basic amenities creates a fragility in the better-off. It’s not that her protagonists fear a slide into poverty, but that the niceness of their lives is so clearly perched on evil filth. This seems very different from the American horror trope, which often involves the comeuppance of someone blithely heedless of what lies beneath... In Enriquez’s world, no one is adequately shielded. The coddled suburbanite does not exist. Her narrators have to shrug past almost unbearable sights as part of their everyday routines. Thus the act of looking takes on enormous importance. These women have a choice in what they notice and what they flinch away from. The consequences are dire, but there’s nevertheless a sense of agency in directing one’s gaze.

Angela Woodward, “On Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez,” Kenyon Review.

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I’m a big fan of simplicity, I don’t like complicated plots. I would rather have one shot that lasts a while and tells you a lot of information over a long period of time, than have a lot of little pieces. Really it’s about whatever is right for the scene, but I do really enjoy having a shot that you’re able to get lost in, where you can let your mind wander and go some place else, and come back and the shot is still going on. The thing I love about film as an artform is that it’s entirely defined by time. It can be non-linear, you can speed things up, slow things down, you can use time however you like. But one of those usages is just letting time be its own thing, and when you hold on a single image for however long, to let real time play out, it starts to define how we’re processing the information, and I love letting that take precedence. "There’s at least one scene in the movie where the ghost is just sitting down and we’re holding on him for a solid minute, and nothing seems to be happening, but actually a lot of things are happening. We’re waiting for something to happen, and that’s all important, that’s all part of the story. On a lot of movies, you don’t have that chance, you have to tell a more traditional story and you need to keep everything moving along pretty quickly, but this was an opportunity to use time to its fullest extent.

”The Story of a Scene: David Lowery on A Ghost Story,” as told to Manuela Lazic, Little White Lies (8 August 2017).

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From Gramsci, Mouffe takes the concept of hegemony; from Schmitt, the concept of the political. Hegemony names the form of power that cannot be reduced to brute repression alone. Rather, a dominant social group attains hegemony when subaltern groups voluntarily submit to its rule, not under the barrel of a gun but through the force of 'common sense' and affective attachments to the existing order. As a corollary, any counter-hegemonic movement from below must contest the prevailing order and the class interests it serves by engaging not only the state but also civil society. Churches, schools, trade unions, sports teams, and all manner of voluntary associations are the battlegrounds of hegemonic struggle. Schmitt’s definition of 'the political' dovetails with hegemony’s expansive view of politics: any action is political insofar as it admits of the distinction between the collectivities of 'friend' and 'enemy.' This distinction is what renders the political the most extreme form of antagonism. Even when it does not reach the pitch of war or revolution, political conflict always pits two groups with not only opposing but incompatible worldviews, the full realization of which would involve the other’s annihilation. For Schmitt, politics is inherently zero-sum. Liberal notions of compromise and consensus are delusions belied by liberals’ own ruthless political maneuvers.

Thea Riofrancos, “Populism Without the People,” a review of Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018) in n+1

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The French gardener, botanist, and writer Gilles Clément, known for his design of public parks, writes: All management generates an abandoned area. Clément suggests that by choosing one area to manage we automatically lose the rest ... what gets left out? How many things can we manage at once? ...  In times when our lives feel unmanageable, what things must we abandon in order to manage? And: what would it be like not to manage? What would it be like to carefully choose what we can’t manage? ... "I’m a beginning gardener, and so I’m not sure exactly what to do. All I know is that I want to be in control of this garden bed. I listen to my meditation teachers reminding me to have a beginner’s mind, for the sake of openness, for the sake of joy. How can I succeed at being a beginner? "My first impulse when I notice my lack of mastery is to give in completely—to say, Forget it, let the grasses come in, let the wild mustards win, give in, give in, for I am no master of this space. To say, I cannot do this at all if I can’t manage it completely. "But I want to try, which is a foreign concept for those of us who love control. I want to put forth some effort and continue to try despite what already exists in my garden, to put forth effort even if I can’t control it all. "The celebrated Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein writes: Right effort creates energy. ... "if I could let go of the fantasy of control—let go as my body ages outside of my control, let go as the earth grows and fails and changes—could I then connect more to the body and the land? Could I then perceive more fully the agency of the garden, the agency of the body? "The poet Elizabeth Willis writes: to belong / to dirt, like a question. "Belonging like a question, being open to what is possible through me and what is possible outside of my control. A belonging that is also an abandoning: a belonging by release. I abandon, and so I open humbly to what could be. ... "To garden like an offering: only an attempt. To belong like a question belongs: only a door.

Leora Fridman, “Notes on Abandon,” in Tricycle Magazine (Fall 2016)

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A steadily more complex sense of the real creates its own compensatory fervors and simplifications, the most addictive of which is picture-taking. It is as if photographers, responding to an increasingly depleted sense of reality, were looking for a transfusion -- traveling to new experiences, refreshing the old ones. Their ubiquitous activities amount to the most radical, and the safest, version of mobility. The urge to have new experiences is translated into the urge to take photographs: experience seeking a crisis-proof form. "As the taking of photographs seems almost obligatory to those who travel about, the passionate collecting of them has special appeal for those confined -- either by choice, incapacity, or coercion -- to indoor space. Photograph collections can be used to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images. ... "At one end of the spectrum, photographs are objective data; at the other end, they are items of psychological science fiction.

Susan Sontag, "On Photography"

[metaphorformetaphor]

there’s a lighthouse / some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don’t know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt / the mind forgetting

Ocean Vuong, from “My Father Writes from Prison,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

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Mass demonstrations should be distinguished from riots or revolutionary uprisings although, under certain (now rare) circumstances, they may develop into either of the latter. The aims of a riot are usually immediate (the immediacy matching the desperation they express): the seizing of food, the release of prisoners, the destruction of property. The aims of a revolutionary uprising are long-term and comprehensive: they culminate in the taking over of State power. The aims of a demonstration, however, are symbolic ...    "Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist. ...The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness.  ...    "It is in the nature of a demonstration to provoke violence upon itself. Its provocation may also be violent. But in the end it is bound to suffer more than it inflicts. This is a tactical truth and an historical one. The historical role of demonstrations is to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority. Demonstrations are protests of innocence.

John Berger, “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” International Socialism (Autumn 1968). Retrieved from marxists.org

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Idea-economy has taken the lead. ...The media's supply keeps growing. What is thus expanding is not just their contribution to the national product, and their attention turnover. What is expanding is the aspect of reality especially produced to attract attention. ... What is clear is that a major part of socially perceived reality is highly synthetic, as it is especially produced for use in the fight for attention.    "Of course people know about the pre-structured and fiction-permeated share in what the media present to them. But it would be naive to believe that it is all that easy to distinguish between fact and fiction. For attentive beings like us, only that which retains our attention is real. This in turn does not mean that everything we imagine or think of is real for us. We are very well able to distinguish between perception, recollection and imagination. But we are not as easily able to stop some recollection acting like a real event, or to prevent an idea from exerting real power. Anybody in love knows about the unruliness of imaginative processes, any jealous person knows the relentlessness of recollections. It is in the stratum of such phenomena that the media are poaching for attention.   "There is nothing more real than images which stick to the mind. Nothing exerts greater power over us than that which forces us to take attentive note. Everything to which we inadvertently pay attention, inadvertently exerts some effect on us. And everything that captures our attention is real to a higher degree than the background. To be sure, there is little in the media which sticks to the mind. Luckily, there is no obligation to pay attention, either. But there is enough which attracts, which caters to laziness, which may be taken in on the side. And everything in which attention gets entangled becomes, first of all, real in a subjective sense.

Georg Franck, “The Economy of Attention,” Telepolis, December 7,1999, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Economy-of-Attention-3444929.html

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ressentiment ... is not content to denounce crimes and criminals, it wants sinners, people who are responsible. We can guess what the creature of ressentiment wants: he wants others to be evil, he needs others to be evil in order to be able to consider himself good. You are evil, therefore I am good; this is the slave's fundamental formula ... This formula must be compared with that of the master: I am good, therefore you are evil. The difference between the two measures the revolt of the slave and his triumph: 'This inversion of the value-positing eye ... is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile world' (GM 110 pp. 36-37). The slave needs, to set the other up as evil from the outset.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Continuum, 1986, p. 119.

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"memory is a crucial site where contestations between individuals and the state take place. The question of whether or not one is capable of remembering the site of one's trauma is directly linked to the question of whether one can achieve a salient form of subjectivity ... [P]ersonal remembrances found in many films ... are crucial to this overarching preoccupation with representing alternative histories that work against hegemonic, distorted representations of the state. Given that public history is at stake, these remembrances accompany an objective that reaches far beyond the realm of the individual. ... [For example,] personal remembrances cannot be dissociated from the public need for a witness who can narrate the truth about Gwangju and contest the official, state-authorized historiography, one which denies any civilian casualties." - Kyung Hyun Kim, "'Tell the Kitchen That There's Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling': Reading Park Chan-Wook's 'Unknowable' Oldboy," pp. 186-187, in Horror to the Extreme, eds. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

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I’m aware of my class, the languages I speak and fail to speak, I’m very aware of the absurdity of being a writer, I’m aware of my outrage and yet the stasis of my sense of injustice. I’m not a freedom fighter. I’m just a writer. This subject-position has always been my problem. And yet I remain true to my earliest sense as a child that reading, that writing, that art, is a way to take on power.

Gina Apostol, “A Doubling, Troubling Gaze,” talk presented at the Association of Writing Programs Conference, Portland, Oregon, 2019.

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I would not have worked so hard and so long at my poetry if it were primarily the production of well-made objects, just as I would not have sacrificed so much for love if love were mostly about pleasure. What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech.

Linda Gregg, “The Art of Finding,” American Poet (2006)