"this command to write is a command to save the ephemeral thing by committing it to memory, to word, to language. the poet instructs us to retain the last thing through a documentation of our loss, a retelling of our relationship to it. thus, her mother’s watch now exists, or perhaps has found an afterlife, in its transformation and current status as residue, as ephemera. it partially (re)lives in its documentation."

jose esteban munoz, cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. jose’s reading of elizabeth bishop’s “one art” is beautiful and has obvious resonance with feminist archiving tumblr posting practices. i am interested in the living, but even more in the (re)living, or the transformation. 

"[the archive] is the the general system of the formation and transformation of statements."

michel foucault, “the statement and the archive” in the archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. when andre described foucault’s archive to us in class he said, “it is dynamic, it is a tumblr.” aw. (#movement work.) he also said that foucault’s archive is a “machinic assemblage of statements…[it] allows subjectivity to emerge….[it] orients sense.” 

"

the omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere…

…the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior…one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds.

"

michel foucault, the history of sexuality, an introduction: volume I 

"affect to emotion to affect. it’s a speed thing."

patricia clough at the affect factory conference 

on the politics of gossip and the end of privacy

rgr-pop:

Spontaneous, decentered, and multivocal, gossip is antithetical to developmental narrative. It seizes details and hyperbolizes their importance; it defies the notion of information as property. Gossip exemplifies both antinarrative and antirepresentational strategies that dehierarchize linear narrative accounts, both orientalist and nationalist, with a popular, multiple record of very different kinds of activities and modes of social organization.
…
For those pragmatically in need of instruments with which to stay in power, gossip is acknowledged to be a more valuable discourse than a discourse of “truth.” Yet defying possession by a single owner and moving easily across the class boundaries that express the concept of property, gossip is always in circulation, without assignable source and without trajectory or closure. Mobile and promiscuous, it collects significance as it travels from site to site; orality and speed make it “common” and yet difficult to detect or trace.

Gossip often plagiarizes, and in so doing satirizes, official civil institutions: government, marriage, family, the law. Adultery, bastardy, homosexuality, criminality, intoxication, profanity—each corresponds to the tropological structure of gossip, which cites the official and yet is in excess of it; these affinities underline the location of gossip as the terrain of these activities. As it is parasitic on the details of “private” life, it derides the separation of public and private spheres, transgressing these separations symbolic of bourgeois order. Since gossip isun written, it does not respond to demands of linguistic purity; it deviates from the laws of national languages, as well as from the linguistic separations of proper “high” language and “low” colloquialisms.

- Lisa Lowe, “Decolonization, Displacement, and Disidentification,” in Immigrant Acts.

For Aria, but relevant to everyone and everything we do and say. I hope you guys like Lisa Lowe, ‘cause I’ve been really into Lisa Lowe. This chapter is way important to every #theory I work on.

"woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement."

helene cixous, the laugh of the medusa, 1975

(Source: feministquotes)

"historical dust is not simple metaphor. when taken literally, it reveals how historical forces penetrate deep into the inner layers of the body: dust sedimenting the body, operating to rigidify the smooth rotation of joints and articulations, fixing the subject within overly prescribed pathways and steps, fixating movement within a certain politics of time and place."

andre lepecki, exhausting dance: performance and the politics of movement 

"the body, in its most visceral activation, is not only a surface of inscription, as foucault noted, but an instrument of writing, an inassimilable agent that constantly rewrites history back."

andre lepecki, exhausting dance: performance and the politics of movement

“this project of perpetual agitation”