We are crowded and (still) hot down here at the bottom.
The deep fisted hole of desire. The bodies stack. They call that the basement principle.* The mix, the measure, the objectification, the trill - and the fact that touch both does and actually does not actually touch, instead riffs, rubs, and tribs. In this, our people suggest that we turn our bodies towards. This trib turns into tribbing - reproduced by an added extra “b” and the activation of the “ing”. Look what we have done. Shorthand for getting off. Another way. An easy way, it comes as release along a rhythmic slippery line, desperate, direct.
Wait.
How is this me holding onto and splaying out the argument for the crush of distance? the difficulty and the excellence of distancing.
Why does distance flash a neon sign: A C H E. Wait, with spaces, the ache isn’t familiar anymore.
It is better here: ACHE. Ache, then, is rendered familiar – so we can see and feel that ache is the thing that remains so close, too close in order to feel how the D I S T A N C E is there.
Farther from the thud of its present-to-us symptom, distance vibrates and fathoms between, perhaps a bit below, behind and all-around. The isolated ache, aims to land in and on the body. I think it is clear, if we were to change to such an intimate address, and that words could convince us and render us familiar, we could (or might) see and feel that ache is the thing that remains so close, too close in order to feel how the D I S T A N C E is there.
Farther from the thud of its present-to-us symptom, distance vibrates and fathoms between, perhaps a bit below, behind and all-around. The isolated ache, aims to land in, and on the body. I think it is clear, if we were to repeat such an intimate address that words may convince us to crawl back into ourselves.
There is the ache -- firmly landed. Only you know where it lands.
Sometimes, it’s in the throat. Or it grabs at your breath taken in a multiple octave gasp, the moment marked by its impact and sharp-ness, it sounds and runs. Like ache’s tears trailing dusty eyeliner, or the fat heat-filled tears that choke your eye/site. In a way, you hold that burning before letting go of weight – it travels far from the inside onto your lap, your laptop.
Streaked face mapping how the feeling tries to get away. Or it lands and puffs up with the kind of tissue that is known for its swell, its come-to-attention, its blood-bearing heat.
It might land as sweat, diss-comfort, a dry mouth that can’t close, or one that refuses to open.
If you feel something, say something.
Somewhere I read that touch does not truly touch. It is Barad. A Documenta booklet with an old-school Kinko’s cardstock blue cover. A stapled-seamed zine. The physicist made a zine for the fancy art-fair.
Yes, it is in the piece that is called: On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1) Karen Barad. (Forthcoming in The Politics of Materiality edited by Susanne Witzgall (a revision of differences article published in 2012 – see its Endnote for more details.)
In searching these Endnotes, there it is:
“What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes—100 Thoughts (099). English and German ed. June 2012.
In this, she is offering us new spaces: the vacuum and the virtual. Like the drumbeat between Moten and Sexton, I want to talk about how touching others touches all others.
Barad says this – and unsettles me. She, with a bunch of folks from so many back-thens and continents, and future-thinkers of our now, with their heads pointing down microscopes or getting close to a memory that “smells like gasoline” while head poised in their downward-facing chin’s epaulement, they are brewing intent. Then it “let’s go”. We give way from those postures, something shapes the air. You touch me with something less craft, more practice, more hunger, more uncertainty, a lot of abstract playing havoc with the call -to, of, for touching.
We see each other and more seeps and guides towards how touch in some ways, does not touch at all. I need to worry a lot about all of this overflow of nothingness.
We learned from this largess of touch – non-touch. Living with dying. We are trained in it, from them, and some of them become some of those weighted magnets called “my people”.
You might know them too, in their haunt, as our people.
BARAD says on Page 7:
“Together with Haraway, we might ask: Whom and what do
we touch when we touch electrons? Or, rather, in
decentering deconstructing the “us” in the very act of touching
(touching as intra-action), we might put the question this
way: When electrons meet each other “halfway,” when they
intra-act with one another, when they touch one another,
whom or what do they touch? In addition to all the various
iteratively reconfiguring ways that electrons, indeed all
material “entities,” are entangled relations of becoming, there
is also the fact that materiality “itself” is always already
touched by and touching infinite configurings of other beings
and other times. In an important sense, in a breathtakingly
intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or
rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-
ability. Touching is a matter of response. Each of “us” is
constituted in response-ability. Each of “us” is constituted as
responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other.”
Thus a (my) concern with obligation.
In general -- people don’t feel they should EVER be “obliged” to do things....
as if that is not a way to be in relation. It is as if we should not feel “obliged”?
To be there, so intimate with the overflow of nothings and response.
(Brown Skin, sings India Arie “I can’t tell where yours begins, I can’t tell you where mine ends” She dips into the top of the cream, leaving the sting of the slur behind.)
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*Crenshaw, Kimberle () “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8