about a bicycle

AAB

Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate!

Danielle LaFrance & Anahita Jamali Rad, Editors

Vancouver | Coast Salish Territory | 2012

AAB issue 1, Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate! Edited by Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad Cover printed by The Future Typesetting by Danielle LaFrance Cover image by Anahita Jamali Rad Coast Salish Territory, Vancouver, Canada Summer 2012

Contents
Reflections in Introduction 5

ANAHITA JAMALI RAD

The Machinic All the words in this poem in alphabetical order This Poem 7 8 10

JACQUELYN ROSS
A model for creating an open text using feedback loops 11

MEGAN HEPBURN
what is lost but what is gained? 12

SASHA LANGFORD
Notes on Touch 17

DANIELLE LAFRANCE
The Precariat REASONABLE DURESS AND THE END OF TIES 19 21

MARIE-HLNE TESSIER

Neo-Modernisms Death Valley

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DOROTHY TRUJILLO LUSK

from Cunta Breccia Letter to Cunta Breccia 30 31

Reflections in Introduction

During the course of the summer, About a Bicycle (AAB) developed a womens critical reading and discussion series that addressed the gradual transformation of postmodernity on knowledge production and the manner in which this process has shaped social subjects within the institution, the State, the psycho sphere, and the imagistics of society (aesthetics). We returned to Lyotards The Postmodern Condition, a contradictory historicity of postmodernism that discusses how new modes of narrativity change institutional frameworks and performances. We see Lyotard as speaking to the current moments inability to slow down, the paradox of anxiously keeping up with capital accumulation in the digital age, and the determination of scientific research and cultural activity by potential profits. In this sense, the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity. The transition works twofold: the meta-relationship and capacity to negotiate our bodies, enter different avatars, be post-human, on the one hand opens up the potential for alternative sociability, while on the other hand de-emphasizes competency and gives the State full reign over what remains, namely language (signs, signification, semiotics, codification, cyphers, etc). Here we ask, how does the machinic affect our interactions with letters and words? How does the rhizomatic relay our reading and writing practices?

The battle over the image of society is bound with permissions what we say, dont say, show, dont show. As cognitive capitalism depoliticizes the social agent by moving her further and further from her body, through the mediation of her desires and their determination by the imperative of cultural capital, the social subject finds herself competing in an immeasurable way. The precaritization of the labourforce is only possible in a time of desiring machines in Lyotards postmodern society. Here the postmodern condition becomes visceral: how do we negotiate the input/output of environment/society/individual when agency is removed from discourse, and the grand narrative of the cogito is reduced to the physiological and historical processes to which it is subject? How does the precariat, a post-human who both recoils from commitment and desires the commodity, take to the streets? How does one disrupt the feedback loops of the system of society through criticality? Through engaged and engaging reading and discussion, we addressed transitions in communication, knowledge productions, aesthetics, and capital put design-makers (who are often ourselves), experts (who are now all of us), artists, statesmen, and our relationships on trial.

Anahita Jamali Rad

The Machinic
The language of the machinic the conjunction of a form and some matter (Simondon). The The beginning of any an potential, or passive principle, is matter, and the actual, The technologies geometry, and of the its perceived outside.

discussion

prescribes

perspectival camera

explication of communication: the groupings of words, the thoroughfare of signal and

determining principle is form. Here, Aristotelian metaphysics (which is the only way to locate the becoming-other of

obscura

ancestors (e.g. the zograscope, etc.) and offspring (e.g. Google Earth, etc.), allow for a

noise, the signification of signs. Conjunction is an escape from the problematics of connection: of the connecting nodes, the connection lines, the message sent, the abstractions of

conjunction) allows for the extrication of the real, for becoming is possible only if the material is subordinate to the structural confines of form, but conjunction without form. wants matter

seemingly objective perception of urban space. It is these

machines that make the streets into forms outside of lived experience and create a space in which one can imagine mobilization, in which

financial capital. Conjunction is in the imagined outside, which predates metadata and persists, in which human relationships are soft(ware) and fluid:

communication is the relations Conjunction, thus, finds itself in the throes of ruling ideology, disengaged from the real of signifier-to-signifier, financial in

which

capital

conjunction is a becoming other (Bifo), the ambiguities in meaning, analog Conjunction

determines who lives and who dies. The universalized

conditions of class relations, resulting from a disavowal of its structural determinations.

perception of space and the imagined outside of the totality are correlative, and made

communication.

refuses to be embodied in databases. The streets rendered visible

possible by the technologies that determine thought and

Amorphous matter

When capital determines our desires, when our desires

perception.

Conjunction communion,

is

union, community;

determine our thoughts, when language is determined by

The machines have taken over, right? said Patrick Healy, the chief executive of the Issuer Advisory Group, a capital firm. markets consulting

simultaneity, joining, together. Conjunction is the site of the formation of the liberal subject: hylomorphic individuation is

technological

devices

determined by the military, there is no outside of ideology. There is only space for a

Anahita Jamali Rad

All the words in this poem in alphabetical order

a a a aleatory all all altogether and and and and and and and and as assault bereft between between between bodies bodies bodies bodies body body capital capital collective content content disguised distance divert dust enigmatic external external field figural filled flat flat form fragments fragments fragments gilt heaps identifies identify identity impulse in in incapable individual industrial into its itself labour leave logic logistics limbs limber lumber make makes object

object object objects objects of of of of of of organs ought parts post-industrial private produce products reduced resolve resolve rift rifts separations space standing spatiality staying staying suggests system temporal that that that that that the the the the the the the the

the to to to to to to up up vanish walk walking whole with with

Anahita Jamali Rad

This Poem
Industrial bodies that leave enigmatic labour products produce rifts identity that identifies itself as object to object a content content with aleatory logic and logistics gilt and distance filled with bodies bereft of flat resolve of capital that suggests assault of the figural that bodies divert of the vanish between incapable and the system between capital and the resolve that ought object objects, heaps of objects external to separations external to staying up standing fragments of staying up to field the temporal to flat the space in reduced spatiality. Walking all organs and all post-industrial bodies altogether identify dust in fragments and impulse makes limber limbs into lumber. To form a rift fragments a disguised body. Make private the body the whole and its parts the walk between and individual. collective

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Jacquelyn Ross

A model for creating an open text using feedback loops

A model for creating an open text using feedback loops

Input

Subject and point of conjunction

t h i n k
a c ti

ei n b g in

(space for enunciation, creation, writing)

n g

ng bei

Formation of language / slippage of language

conjunction

conjunction connection A looping subjectivity creates a space that is both SMOOTH and HETEROGENEOUS Like a tumbleweed, a subject continues to express itself while maintaining an essential being-of the landscape The rhizome strikes a balance between conjunction and connection, between language and communication

Megan Hepburn

what is lost but what is gained?

ARISTOTLE: HOW DOES THE MACHINIC AFFECT OUR INTERACTIONS WITH LETTERS AND WORDS?

COPERNICUS:

ARISTOTLE: HOW DOES RHIZOMATIC THINKING AFFECT OUR READING AND WRITING PRACTICES?

COPERNICUS:

ARISTOTLE: HOW DO WE REMAIN IN LANGUAGE WITHOUT LINEAR NARRATIVE?

COPERNICUS:

ARISTOTLE: HOW DO WE NEGOTIATE THE INPUT/ OUTPUT OF ENVIRONMENT/SOCIETY/INDIVIDUAL WHEN AGENCY IS REMOVED FROM DISCOURSE, AND THE GRAND NARRATIVE OF THE COGITO IS REDUCED TO THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL PROCESSES TO WHICH IT IS SUBJECT?

COPERNICUS:

THIS IS NOT A DIALOGUE

Sasha Langford

Notes on Touch
As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centred subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelingswhich it may be better and more accurate to call intensitiesare now free-floating and impersonali. i. In everyday English the concept of touch has two main meanings. Feeling something equally refers to coming into tactile contact as it does with an affected mental state. Touch affects unlike other senses: it leaves behind microscopic bacteria, a change in body temperature, an impression. ii. Modernism has a long history of attaching feeling to place. Certainly, our ability to feel is materially, and architecturally determined. In our current conditions, where 2,626 units of residential housing were demolished in 2011 in Vancouverii and the internet is expanding by 7.5 million bytes of data per day, a concept of feeling can no longer be linearly and uncritically bound to lived objects. iii. The closures of community centres and art galleries continue to be justified by the endless expansion of online social worldsiii. This movement has a distinct intimacy with feeling. The design codes, web templates, and text boxes of virtual space create new borders beyond those imposed by literacy to desensorialize the exchange of information. Breath, intrinsically penetrative and felt as close to the body as a mouth can go, is displaced for vision, which relies on distance for the eyes to remain in focus. And yet it is also the impossibility of the control over distance that characterizes the isolating claustrophobia of online spaceiv. Community gentrified to the virtual meets edges aesthetic and ideological, material and economic: the same negative space of late capital that interrupts the contact amongst the disaffected to commiserate, to strategize, to revolt. iv. Resistance cannot take the form of defending place as it has been accepted, when in so many instances nostalgia is nothing but the disavowal of a violent history. What used to be here? It is not change of the familiar that is of concern so much as the ability to retain remembrance alongside memory. v. Resistance can neither take the form of the eugenic attempt to distill the body from the techno-commodified. For those abject bodies excluded politically and architecturally, the virtual can offer a site far more emancipatory than the fascist philanthropy of the city. But at once, the claims of accessibility of the virtual require a response of the same form: just as bodies to which stairs have no relevance should not be forced to include them in their concept of walking, no body should be forced to accommodate the field of sight of the virtual when it does not reflect their ability to see. Far from ensuring liberal notions of choice, the defense against the displacement of affect into images is simply the assertion of the full antagonism of the senses to which all bodies have a stake.

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vi. Where is the affect in disaffection? In the 1930s, Russian feminist communist Alexandra Kollontai proposed that love offers a basis for community radically hostile to private propertyv. Desire is that which manages social networks and collaborations, which creates its own forms for convergence. What Kollontai had in mind was the way in which the bourgeois couple could extend outside of the boundaries of the private home and use the strength of their affections to organize alternative cooperative forms. At a time when property consists of the immaterial as much as the material--the corporate patents on indigenous plant life, the invisible assets of finance, the pixellated villages of Second Life online worlds--a concept of feeling adequately discursive for this task is necessary. vii. When does the impersonal become the common? Only when place is appropriated from property, when free-floating feeling finds points to settle without settlement, when touch is brought back to its true meaning and through extension and itinerance we leave impressions to be felt, to be shared--everywhere.

Jameson, F. (1990). Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, p. 64. ii Metro Vancouver. (2010. Metro Vancouver Housing Data Book. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from http://www.metrovancouver.org. iii boyd, d. (2008) Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Youth Social Life. In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, Buckingham, D [Ed.]. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 119144 iv Virlio, P. (1997). Open Sky. London: Verso. v Kollontai, A. (1932). Free Love. London: J.M. Dent and Sons.
i

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Danielle LaFrance

The Precariat
How does the precariat, a posthuman who both time often in the name of cultural production. From the upwardly mobile cyber coolies (Spivak) to the gentrifying activist. As critics we are paralyzed First, the question must be broken down to its parts. The precariat, as a labourer within postmodern late The valorization within of late by our current situation, to be creative that monitor not only the simple click on the screen, but the very motion, the gesture, the swipe of this subtle action.

recoils from commitment and desires the

commodity, take to the streets?

semiotics

have a tendency combative,

capitalism (or as Berardi defines as

desperately

seeking immediate results and/or reduce affect to a lesser, generational waning. Lately Ive been alienated within the confines of my bedroom, jobbing the

capitalism, is subject to new responsibilities and sensibilities that attributes to this state of hesitation. These duties involve the generation of wealth and surplus capital through

semiocapitalism) finds its demand by way of

temporal organization the social subject must act immediately stay in order to

afloat in this new econom y and

work right out of me (Lusk), cushioned between the end and start of work. My other left foot is my computer, the source of endless, brain numbing

market

activities that use signs and symbols includes [...] anything which that

maintain her social capital. Even if we cant be

bothered to recognize the affective response to the ordering of information by technology, the

relates to work but does not deliver in the form of an hourly and wage (LaFrance Nathan). The

entertainment; a nostalgic trajectory to a past I never posted and a future with no future.

transmutation of the body in society is still the a priori condition mediations, intensities. mindful of to Let of these various us be

precariats identit y

occupational manifests in

multiple trajectories, has minimum stable protection and regulations, and will freely volunteer her labour

The social demands of the precarious labourer have and will long remain in scarcity: 24/7 labour time

pervasive

techniques by corporations

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(i.e., my father sending emails at 3am to a client, the blogosphere quoting my poetry on a soda bottle), temporal competition and a total lack of competence, mouse surveillance as a form of predictive data mining. The question cannot be asked as how does, but rather how can the precariat take to the streets? This alteration should be considered before brandishing the social subject with trepidation towards commitment to an action. Otherwise, her eyes fall victim to pepper spray while linked arm-in- arm with her comrades. It is not

apathetic or fatalistic in the least to say there is no outside to this mess, but it is a question of the current conditions of the precarious labourer that allow for us to even speak of a taking to the streets.

of time, and, at the same time, learn to reconcile this logic with desires apart from and within the commodity. There can be moments of pure

communion, where social relations are not reduced down to the exchange of

Speed continues to aid the corporations, the institutions, the protectors of capital (the police), as they are adept at appropriating techniques and defending themselves against social agitators. Even within the context of revolution we must think of temporal organization as a form of strategy by outwitting the management

commodities; however, fantastic forms in fantastic social relationships should be criticized, if not translated into guilty conscience. Guilt, echoing Deleuze, is a metaphor for pain that distances us from our bodies and life and is therefore the real source of apathy, mortification, and taking to our beds.

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Danielle LaFrance

REASONABLE DURESS AND THE END OF TIES

This reconciliation (between sisters). It is when we find ourselves outside of bodies, communicating as though we mean it. Where the reification of objects replaces the amnesiac pace of production. Disintegration of every work of fine art and, perhaps, every book of poetry. As in Nietzsches theory of aesthetics, these words are made for walking, and thats just what theyll do, one of these days these words are gonna walk all over you. What if, Pygaar (I will only name you once this time), we could make a tiny house and it could represent scenes from a marriage? Natural faces, vacated lips and eyes. O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow! When coffee suppliers, or sugar cane, are photographed the image of labour forms a reified sociality. We connect (proper) with the representation of hard earned drinkable work. This is a photograph of my wife. Shes wallet sized and kisses my monies. cette jouissance soit meme possible.

the fantastic form of a relation between things or discourage over promotion. Contradictions between history and life, as if the work of the poet were one or the other. We switch it around offer growth. Do they talk about this in school?

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What today means in Japan kyou wa muri muddy surrogate self slave til turned heads lie and roll into noise exists not between ourselves. well-organized and less sincere while anew fever hits bovine strokes. Is knowledge a desperate form of acceptance? Lets egree it will never happen. Between this affect and that poem Suffer here in a peculiar kind of disruption Lets remember a time when your eyes were blue and no one else remembered. He asks, is knowledge a desperate form of acceptance? like a teenage allusion, no way outside of yourself so far in their heads toes know more than not some magisterial voice projected onto the table where we put all our baggage where we baggaged our baggage or American urgency, or give me an hour and Pygaar (again), I'll tell you how urgent I am

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Barely a creatures eye, a hydra of new properties wanes depthlessness is not seeing things at their conception. my house, my husband, my sleep Must close eyes again. My friends are my experts My friends are my philosophers. This person says something in this particular manner Now I speak like the expert. Now I am soft spoken and admired for my soft-spoken capabilities. Now I am a sensitive man who can love all the beautiful women What does today mean? does a fade contra stability? we dont need no polymorphic transcendentalism. this is something new for me. coalescing in the body of one is splintered touch now and love one another more than before.

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I believe we will never be on the same page This couple has a jar of money on a piece of wood she will learn to braid her hair herself schizophrenic channeling. Together, they teach each other how to be right. Everyone else is wrong. They are right. They said so, and when someone says so it means so. Finds strength and legitimation in the ground, or television. In no way do I want to represent them as non-contributors: thats just the way it is There is no recovery from language. It is not only language. documentation is derivitive of other creatures eyes. the jar of money indicates one step further from the Truth. charcoal inside. deliver me onto her fibrous tissue there is no duality of thought and being. the table the ring the wood the braids the money the jar the laugh the baggage

this cannot be the sum. Someone else to give long speeches to you after you leave me. Bashar, depart from here. I beg of you.

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Marie-Hlne Tessier

Neo-Modernisms Death Valley

By intuition, in art school, I was interested in the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics, until the whole city exploded, the whole world collapsed into one big Pollock action painting, with the important added elements of pop. The closest image of this experience was the penultimate scene in Zabriskie Point; not the will-to-power-act of the explosion of the late-modern house in itself, but the result of the explosion, the things you could see inside the chaos : fragments of domestic appliances, clothes, fabrics, technology, perfume bottles, glass, plastic, vanilla wall-paper, stainless steel, all in tiny tiny pieces, grey stones, white, pink marble, sand, wood, granite, slate, rubber, a beach towel, a silk scarf, gold specks, beige, brown, baby blue, black, half a Corbu chaise lounge, the foot of a Gio Ponti console, rare reading lamps, ripped modern art, Jacobsens egg-chair, and then books, you see books, lots of books, flying in the air. Contrary to common belief, the explosion is not the last scene. The films ends following that hallucination. The young woman protagonist, a rare non-passive female role Antonioni gave us, the only character that is free from context, (all of Antonionis oeuvre shows us how destinies are directly linked to context; the context as a prison, and beings as moving objects in space. In his films, modern architecture looks like it is from outer space), (I keep forgetting we are terrestrials. I keep forgetting that the earth is a planet. Only vast empty space reminds me of the inherent science-fiction of our existence; only Antonioni reminds me of my end, in the present tense, like the desert, an empty island, an empty house, the ocean as the bottom of the sky), (The desert gives the distinct feeling that we are walking on the moon, especially when we understand that we are actually walking at the bottom of dry oceans). Antonioni likes to push the existential void of his characters against empty, abstract and minimal, therefore loaded and charged landscapes. Antonioni is obsessed with limit-situations without actions; the possibility for inner life and the impossibility of it. Like how the Japanese took everything from China and made it better, the French took everything from Italy, yet Italians are always more eccentric, enigmatic, agile in ambiguity, moving inside subtlety like a natural environment, speaking about love with a rich complexity the French will never have. French are advanced in abstract thought, but Italians succeed in marrying abstraction with daily life. (When I told my Neo-Marxist friend about this, he accused me of being a racist). The celebration of cultural differences is a post-modern experience as modernism wants a universal truth and one song for everyone to sing all in the same time (religion), (The forces of order); One simple way to live without a life-style. (If the world goes out of business, I do not want to be here). Antonionis discovery of the American desert must have been ineffable. Zabriskie Point (despite the airplane/car flirt scene that kills all flirt scenes in the history of cinema), is not a love story at all. Antonionis films are about the impossibility of communication, the impossibility of love, the impossibility to converge with oneself, the impossibility of freedom. But in Zabriskie Point, he brings his philosophical research to another level: the impossibility of Revolution. That is a turning point in his curve (I have not seen his early documentaries) (I am not a specialist on Antonioni) (I am not a film critic), (I am a writer who has seen several of Antonionis films, so I can say whatever I want and you

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can think whatever you want), (Postmodernism is about the end of imposed metanarratives, a multiplicity of points of view, no final solution, no big revolution, no promising guidelines), (Neo-Neo-Marxism of today comes up as a critique of Postmodernism). (While Postmodernism freed us from ideology and the search for truth, it introduced multiple narratives, multiple realities, and the construction/ deconstruction of meaning). (Neo-Modernism of today, which Neo-Marxism stems from, is imposing a modernist reading of postmodernism, trying to map it all out, as if you can define the fleeing nature of meaning in one single book). (Modernism and neo-modernism suggest we void the world of an excess of cultural references, the flattening out of unpredictable forces, praying for the return of the mechanistic, the equality of all things, the erasure of history, the tabula rasa of social justice). (A love story without desire, a night without dreams). Zabriskie Point defines Antonionis position about Politics and Poetry. Unlike Godard, Antonioni never leaves art. Throughout the entire film, the young woman is dressed with an army green mini dress, a thin vaguely Navajo macram belt around her waist and the simplest roman sandals (she refuses the red dress the handsome boy throws at her as a present from his airplane, telling him that it does not look good on her, neither the colour, nor the style; its a bad cut, she says with a smile). Que es mas macho: Army Green or Red? Antonioni fell in love with the New American Woman; candid, invulnerable, independent, adventuresome, free spirited, an active thinker, a flower child. A very different character from Monica Vitti, who is smart and intense but does not know what to do with herself: am I a model? Am I an actress? Am I beautiful? Am I a quiet version of Barbara Streisand? The last scene, (how often we forget how a film starts and ends), (memory is all about the deleted scenes). It is good to have the right fashion for every occasion, especially when you cross the desert. Her name is Daria (both in the film and in life). Daria is a name from Persian origins which means wealth. His name is Mark (both in the film and in life). Marx. Mars. The Warrior. Zabriskie Point is about the war between wealth and poverty, between politics and poetry, between the one and the multiple. After she processes the notion of revolution (all revolutions) (she is in the desert because, as she says, she wants to get some thinking done) along her wanderings and the vague half-discussions she has with the young fugitive who is not even a prince of darkness, vapid like he invented the word (he is cute, but there something deranged in his gaze. A concrete lack of identity. He does not know who he is), Daria has several visions. The desert light is conducive to that and only fools think that mirages are not real. Modernism and Neo-Modernism are against imagination. Most people remember the film for the multiple love-making scene in open-air. Although it is an impressive scene, it is often misinterpreted as stemming from the protagonists continued utopian desires. Lets make it clear here once more, that the two young characters are not lovers at all. They do make love of course, but they do not fall in love. In fact, there is no love story whatsoever in Zabriskie Point. It is the portrait of an impossible encounter, the portrait of a non-meeting space between a Neo-Marxist and a Free Spirit. When she imagines the angelic orgy scene, she is thinking things through about her generation. What they want, what they are looking for, so as to find her own position; Antonioni uses the notion of generations as the context and the desert as a filled nihilism, the space for new thoughts to emerge. The two protagonists live in a totally different mindset and that there is no meeting of their minds at all, like they are from different narratives. The young woman is all about active thinking and movement, driving her old rusty car; a 1952 Buick, her inacurate map (how are we supposed to map the desert, impossible), (A

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3000 piece puzzle of a Pollock painting). She is thinking things through by herself, without relying on texts, thinking things through, until she has a rumour of an answer, which brings another question. She is free, and the desert is not for her a refuge but a place to bounce off from. She is collecting some truths, or half-truths, while he, on the other hand, is fleeing himself and the desert harbours him in pathetic captivity. He wants to forget while she wants to remember. She represents the inside, the private realm, the individual, while he is all about an outside, the collective, the out-of-frame that pursues him. She mentions multiple realities in a candid way and she feels sorry for his lack of imagination. (Neo-Marxism is against imagination, there is only one dream, one plan, one way, one typology, one future).The very last scene is when she leaves the premise and consciously decides to keep going, back in the role of a wonderer in the desert where she feels strangely at home. The last scene illustrates her position about the Revolution. She turns her back to it, as she turns her back to high capitalism. She leaves both sides of the war. The whole film is about Antonionis position about the politics of the time, in a timeless way, always with a wider angle (than Godard) about reality in general and what is behind it, around and under. Multiple truths and doubt are not enemies of a free regime, they are pals. Antonioni succeeds in being political without sacrificing poetry. That is the whole challenge of art, the danger to kill it with politics; art has to have the last word; that is why it is a very difficult thing to achieve; like grace, which makes it rare, but rare is not a democratic adjective. Mark, a young and mindless revolutionary, deambulating the road from his parents house, finally having a goal in his life, a purpose, a cause to believe in and tell him what to do when he gets up, a reason to get up even, down the upper middle-class mountain he goes, driving fast, in his pick up truck, towards the street, the street he never walked on, and from the truck descending in the street there he goes, down, down, street level, in one movement, without thinking, he is propelled, he gets a gun, he is excited, he is a revolutionary, a real one, he is inspired, motivated, from the last revolutionary talk he attended, about the Blacks, about the War, about the Poor, about Injustice, about Single Mothers, about Social Housing Evictions, about Cops Killing Blacks, about his Meaningless Bourgeois University Life, he does not process his new thoughts and feels called to action, he takes arms in a one plan-squence, a long take where many different movements take place in a single shot with no edits, off he goes, Kills a Cop Killing a Black and flees. In one line of flight, in a single revolutionary one-liner, Antonioni succeeds in making something unclear so clear, and unclear again. The need for clarity is against thought. Clarity is fascist. Postmodernism, in the best light, was iconoclastic; new views, no centre, cynical in a productive way, cultural relativism, fantastical deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, the playful. No Meta-Narratives to depend on. The Modernist Dream is a wave frozen in mid air.

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Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

from Cunta Breccia

One learns to lose fear; that fear is a sickness. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community that these narrative are not anhialate dis entangled yet extant motile and schizophreniant Transistive propertys insistant and sprawling: as when one cannot remember how to spell anhialate or when ones respirations are so fractive that one forgets that word hyperventilate WITHIN do not contain Devout/r displacement live differ must come to rent upon imprecistant mercy corrects upon: to seek striations in an reflexive placements of me, that this now varies an episodic akathesia to loosen symbiotic fusion. Who says that everything died for us when our eyes broke? Everything awakened, everything began. Paul Celan

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Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

Letter to Cunta Breccia

I imagined this as a dialogue of anarcho exstasis (a refusal of stagnant resilience convenant), and nihilist worldview/self-sense, writing out from anguish. I dont have a printer. I write long-hand, and read aloud over and over. I write aloud over and over. I keyed the redactive fragments, (breccia), onto/into? my cuntputre, always allowing and giving consent to any errors of transcription. My technomachiniccapacity is limited: couldnt work out how to send this electronically. My email is web-based and does not exist, as such, nella machina, as I understand. So again, as Ive always done before, I transcribe by hand from the screen onto paper. Welcome to the 13th Century, Dorothy. Michael Barnholden

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Acknowledgements About a Bicycle would like to give thanks to all contributors and a special acknowledgement to the attendees throughout the summer session: Milena Varzonovtseva, Stefanie Ratjen, our friends on Chatroulette, Maria Wallstam, Andrea Javor, Christine Leclerc, Ada Smailbegovic, Susan Steudel, Megan Hepburn, Sasha Langford, Marie-Hlne Tessier, and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. Thanks to Jeff Khonsary from the Future for printing the cover and to Aja and Gabriel from the STAG for hosting our launch.

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