Dicks and cunts and fucking is not subversive art. It’s what got us all here. It’s not immoral or moral, just base. From where we began. Now what? Our obsession with normalizing the taboo, the fringe, the freaks. What’s left for the artists, what’s left for the adults? To legitimize is to call upon the force of father capital, mass cries of either extinction or erasure, what’s the difference? We need the edges, the exiles, the extraordinaires. There is no safety in the arms of institutions. Do not look for credit in the straight world. We’ve become a society policing each other to make sure we all ‘feel well’ instead of making sure we are all thinking well. Hurt feelings hurt feeling. Perception has hurt thinking. We should aim to be as radical in our thinking as we are in our surgical corporeality. The uniformity it takes to “be your authentic self.” We can’t be cured by belonging. We are imprisoning the mind as we are freeing the body. What might Surgical Thinking look like? A new way to get off. I’m imploring Svetlana Boym’s Slow Thinking.
What is beyond our dated notions of utopian/dystopian futures and nostalgia’s need for a U-turn? Looking for a slower prefix. When ‘post’ has become passé we must go off. An Off_Modern Detour: The ‘What If’ Present of Svetlana Boym
The modern symptom of nostalgia is a reaction to modern time. What’s the antidote to nostalgia? Boym asks. Thinking takes time but contemporary life does not allow for time. We are longing for another rhythm of free. Not immediate but purposeful knowledge. Expand the possibility. Habituation devours. Hyphenated-energy of anger has taken over. The Freedom Cliché We must confuse our sense of direction, as Boym explores in her idea of Off-Modern. Like the knight that zig-zags across the chess board, the detours we take to no particular destination. Our errors of paths.
Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001)