"Language is the effect of articulation, and so are bodies. The articulate are jointed animals; they are not smooth like the perfect spherical animals of Plato’s origin fantasy in the Timaeus. The articulate are cobbled together. It is the condition of being articulate. I rely on the articulate to breathe life into the artifactual cosmos of monsters that this essay inhabits. Nature may be speechless, without language, in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate. Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connections can be made. The surfaces of this kind of world are not frictionless curved planes. Unlike things can be joined-and like things can be broken apart- and vice versa. Full of sensory hairs, evaginations, invaginations, and indentations, the surfaces which interest me are dissected by joints. Segmented invertebrates, the articulate are insectoid and worm-like, and they inform the inflamed imaginations of SF filmmakers and biologists. In obsolete English, to articulate meant to make terms of agreement. Perhaps we should live in such an “obsolete,” amodern world again. To articulate is to signify. It is to put things together, scary things, risky things, contingent things. I want to live in an articulate world. We articulate; therefore, we are. Who “I” am is a very limited, in the endless perfection of (clear and distinct) Self- contemplation. Unfair as always, I think of it as the paradigmatic psychoanalytic question. “Who am I?” is about (always unrealizable) identity; always wobbling, it still pivots on the law of the father, the sacred image of the same. Since I am a moralist, the real question must have more virtue: who are “we”? That is an inherently more open question, one always ready for contingent, friction-generating articulations. It is a remonstrative question."
Donna Harraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” (via tynskychram)
"I’ve always thought it would be interesting to make maps of where everybody lived and where they showed and worked, who their friends were, who they were sleeping with … because our community was particularly important to me"
Lucy Lippard (via james-harper)
(Source: specialps)
"
1.all my ideas begin as part of the necessity for truth-telling in art practice;
2.not being entirely at home in the ordinary, dominant languages make this less than simple. At the same time, it gives me a wide range of options; and
3.the greatest self-betrayal for an artist is not indulging in anarchic or careless opposition to rational politics, but in fashioning acceptable SEMBLANCES of truth. (117)
"Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977-2007 (via sleep-period)
drawing by peep
(Source: badbitchbratbabe, via womenasobjects)
from the depths of my phone… A cyborg
still life with geranium by peep
