Interview with Cassandra Troyan

at The New Inquiry

"For the masochist the relationship to one’s desire is always negotiated through a liminal libidinal space traversing the opposing thresholds of dominance and control. It enables a framework for looking outside the conventional expectation of trauma as a context, mediator, and influence of the masochist’s ‘abberant’ behavior. One of the central hopes in KILL MANUAL is an attempt to rethink the power of the bottom, or what it means to willingly choose to enter spaces of subjugation when multiple domains of life are already operating through mechanisms of policing or force. I think the masochist can teach us about instruments of survival and building new possibilities for reciprocal desire through re-organizing spaces of intimacy, power, and control as they relate to appetites or subjectivities unfit for the habitual spaces of capitalist fantasy."

Danny Hayward's People (review)

How to exit the prison house of certain historical circuits between Marxist- Hegelianism and poetry (from Shelley to Symbolism to Objectivism and Lang Po to post-Occupy)? Or, twisting the words of Stuart Hall, what would a Marxist poetry “without guarantee” look like? 

http://poetryproject.org/wp-content/uploads/PPNL-APR-MAY-14-final-final-final-final.pdf

Renée Green's Other Planes of There (review)

"There is a curious time sense in this book, which has been organized so that we may regard the ways that research, criticism, documentation, and various aesthetic processes feedback with one another, cultivating modes of meta-discourse."

http://bombmagazine.org/article/382633/ren-e-green-s-em-other-planes-of-there-em

Corpsefuckers

They’re fucking with the corpses again

Fucking up the corpses

Fucking with the bodies

Plagiarizing the body count

They’re cutting up the text again

Like his body was a metaphor

Like the text weren’t literal

Like his body wasn’t literal

They’re meddling with things

They understand too well

The unremarkable genitalia

The sad objects of control

Taking up the space that should have been reserved

For corpses, their rumored fosse, their

Poorly marked graves and their graves

In the water in the air

The disaster was only a text to you

It was never actual flesh

It was not like the flesh they cut into

Like a promise and a threat

To some day fuck back

Into unprecedented orifices

With unforeseen organs

Until death wasn’t yet

Like a future we could feel

Having only this present

They’re fucking with the corpses

They’re making the corpses into art

Pretending readymade is not another

Name for discovery, pretending they’re not

Subjects and he wasn’t turned into an object

Taking his last breath

They’re pretending there’s no correlation

Between the contextual and the real

How they will tweet about them fucking him
How a network will treat his second death.

For Lee Lozano

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
--Walter Benjamin, from "The Destructive Character"

Where’d you go, Lee?

There are performances and then there are performances

Like art was always speculation

Like this was a speculation

On how to be a self

A woman, how to be a woman

To stop circulating

In anything but your present

Would resist art’s alibi

Like the self was the last thing

You could quit

Last form of capital

Boycotting your self

In the 70s everyone became a punk

Because identity was the last thing one could destroy (faced with the world’s destruction)

To unmake the image of everything, everyone

To do this through image-making

Then destruction itself became a means of identity

How to locate art’s destructive character?

Because you wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would…

Because you hardly have anything in common...

The name keeps changing, its appearance in a flux riven

The series of names that you were

Every name in her story

Those airless spaces where you continued being born

Motherless except for one letter

All that was left

An exchange of lack withdrawn by a lack of exchange

Like Andrew found all of Hannah’s books and effects thrown to the curb after she died

Death is only the beginning of the artist’s ‘career’

The artist is not present

Or if they are, the discourse is trashed

Question: what is the difference between abjection and dejection and rejection?

Answer: a prefix.

Answer: a different way to destroy.