The Line Between Mocking Meditating in Parking Lots and Mocking Those Mocking Meditating in Parking Lots
These projects confirm [Moten and Harney’s] argument in [The Undercommons] that critiques of the [university] and demands for “better [universities]” dating back to the 1960s have been “absorbed…comfortably into the warp and woof of contemporary [university] discourses,” such that “programs presented under the rubric of [academic] enrichment are also methods of [academic exploitation].” In order to reverse the “bad dialectic” in which “quality becomes quantity as the call for better [teaching] is translated into a requirement for more [teaching], [their] book argues for a politics oriented around demands for “[stealing from the university]” that might then allow people to seek out [each other in and] beyond [the classroom].
pg. 762, Bernes, “Art, Work, and Endlessness”
Are All Flarf Artists White?
[Empire] allows for [racism] to become an infrastructure rather than a personal, face-to-face relationship. Recognizing this history should lead us to be skeptical in the face of claims about the emancipatory possibilities of [any] technology. [The idea of Humanity], as my narrative has it, was the fruit of a counter[Black] turn from the very beginning. Attention to this history can show us how many of the values attached to [subjectivity] have their roots in the defeat [of the colonized people’s] resistance.
pg. 766, Bernes, “Art, Work, And Endlessness”
Too Real
“A [post] like [mine] demonstrates, through its tedious unreadability, how utterly menial, mind-numbing, and uncreative [critical] work really is while, on the other hand, revealing how little it takes to make such routines seem [important]. The most charitable reading of the “[theoretical] turn” in [literary criticism] is that it marks a moment when the aura of fun, fulfillment, and creativity suddenly vanishes, and what remains is the endlessness of the [White male thinkers] and [their] technicized cognitions. Refusing the supplemental enjoyment of [life], [theorists] of the sort we’ve examined render visible the exhaustion, boredom, and inanity of much of what we do for [class], but [they] also mark, at the same time, the cynical zero degree of resistance to [Empire].”
pg 779, Bernes, “Art, Work, And Endlessness”
Or Sol
Title [it] Artwork Endless, poetry among jasper.
Note, here! There are pictures of baby ducks
on the other end of words. A saint,
holding up one side of the blind.
Nostalgia was so revolutionary! Art now is the world
it once opposed.
Takeaway weeks–
we should not demand less.
How long pages,
how many pages
after the return.
Note of explanation: I took what I wanted, made words to fit inside the words. Ensuring none of it was truer than that, I printed it on paper made 68% of joy and 39% bluster. Questions of empire I left to the troll under the bridge who waits for children who are already afraid. Like a good girl, I wrote what I was told. Like a good girl, I used my fun for nothing. How to ask, “Why doesn’t this feel good?” when “feel” is a dirty word, how to wonder not-alone in this only world. Of course I googled it:
how not to be
how not to be shy
how not to be nervous
how not to be depressed
how not to be awkward
how not to be jealous
how not to be a tool of exploitation in an exploitative world
