Saturday, September 04, 2004

Kathy Acker afslutter sit essay om kunstkritik ”Critical languages” som er at finde i samlingen ”Bodies of work” med at opstille 10 punkter, afsnittet hedder ”The languages of the body”:

1) The languages of flux. Of uncertainty in which the ’I’ (eye) constantly changes. For the self is ”as indefinite series of identities and transformations.”
2) The languages of wonder, not of judgement. The eye (I) is continously seeing new phenomena, for, like sailors, we travel through the world, through our selves, through worlds.
3) Languages which contradict themselves.
4) The languages of this maternal body: laughter, silence, screaming.
5) Scatology. That laughter.
6) The languages of play: poetry. Pier Paolo Pasolini decided to write in the Friulian dialect as ”a mystic act of love … the central idea … was … (that) of language of poetry as an absolute language.”
7) Language that announces itself as insufficient.
8) Above all: the languages of intensity. Since the body’s, our, end isn’t trancendence but excrement, the life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.
9) The only religions are scatology and intensity.
10) Language that forgets itself. For if we knew that chance governs us and this world, that would be absolute knowledge.

Then forget all of this. In the modes of silence: secrets, autism, forgettings, disavowals, even death. Let these be the languages of art criticism: to scream, to forget, to do anything except reduce radical difference, through representation, to identity, singularity, calculable and controlable. Let one art criticism’s languages be silence so that we can hear the sounds of the body: the winds and voices from far-off shores, the sounds of the unknown.

May we write, not in order to judge, but for and in (I quote George Bataille), ”the community of those who do not have a community.”

Lidt at tænke over for både mig og Erik Bjerck Hagen dér.