In the 2011 book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, the artist Gregory Sholette posits that we are living in an era of surplus creative energies concentrated in a teeming archive of artists, the poor, the “unskilled” and the “economically invisible.” It is a potentially disruptive archive that capitalism can’t always manage but can still hope to eventually exploit and assimilate. Within this archive seethes creative energy that can extend itself in unique and unsettling ways, across multiple categories and disciplines. Often, however such energy is captured by the winners and arbiters in our “risk society” and thereby sanitized and neutralized. So it becomes necessary for artists, theorists, writers and activists to be versatile in their tactics, cryptic and evasive in their manifestations and criminally implacable in their visions. The Iron Garters are an “art gang” that masquerades, disseminates and performs as your archetypal “criminals,” “outcasts” “mystics,” “losers” and “lunatics”: in short, a vital and necessary social surplus. Their antics have been traced back to Jean Genet’s novel The Thief’s Journal, the films of Kenneth Anger, as well as the Dada poems of Baroness Elsa and Hugo Ball. Yet still other Garters have been nourished on the Vienna Actionists, Genesis P-Orridge, Diamanda Galas, Gilles Deleuze, Samuel Delany, and the dulcet sounds of The Cramps. With a critical and aesthetic arsenal salvaged from underground “kulchurs” and academia’s collective libido, the Iron Garters are not afraid to demand excitement along with analysis, frenzy coupled to resistance, and fashion inseparable from infiltration. Founded in San Francisco on a full moon night after a “deathpunk” show, the original members grew adversely impacted by the economic invasions reducing a once great city to a tepid monoculture. Fueled by queer, antinomian, heretical and radical traditions, the Garters pilgrimaged into various trans-continental sanctuaries and beachheads, leaving behind them radiant paper trails of provocation and sedition. This volume is one such radiant paper trail. Despite its many hiatuses, the Garters archive has grown more fertile, thanks in part to its endurance in imaginary/speculative realms. Currently, the Garters are remobilizing as a “crime art collective,” with cells operating in cities most in need of “crime-art,” while also re-asserting itself as an ongoing “transmedia” project. This present archive is a small fraction of the decade’s worth of Garter experiments, epistles, stories and communiqués. In a political epoch when risk and anxiety seem to predicate our every move, and when being poor, different, “unskilled” or “a failure” (as judged by the demigods of Profit, Fear, Reason & Security) means that you are essentially criminalized, then it becomes imperative for art (wedded to theory and style) to celebrate its own “criminal,” “dangerous” and “unassimiliable” nature. So let the Garters initiate you into the mysteries that are already yours, once you rid yourself of fear, anxiety and the need to be respectable. Conceived in 2004 as a gritty mail art project called TresPassions Unlimited, the Iron Garters were established as a full-fledged “art gang” in the Bernal Heights area of San Francisco in 2010. Then almost instantly they vanished yet not before secreting reams of strange, tantalizing and vitriolic propaganda. Today, the Garters have reformed into several cells: a mail network, an inflammatory writing collective, a gaggle of art-activist instigators and a semi-fictional band of heathen outlaws. All of these groups unite and mobilize under the mantle, The Iron Garters Crime Art Collective. Prospective members should inquire for initiatory matters at: thesaltedlash@gmail.com.

Ravish the Republic: The Archives of the Iron Garters Crime/Art Collective

Politics & Social Sciences

Berger, Michael L.

Philosophy

Dead Letter Office

Queer Insists is a memorial essay, a work of mourning, written for the queer theorist and performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) shortly after his untimely death in December 2013. In a series of fragments, not unlike Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, Michael O’Rourke shares memories of Muñoz, the stories and reflections of his friends in the wake of his passing, and readings of his work from Disidentifications to Cruising Utopia and beyond. O’Rourke argues that, for Muñoz, queer does not exist, per se, but rather insists, soliciting us from the future to-come. Muñoz reached towards teleopoietic worlds as he invented a queer theory we have yet to find, but are invited to glimpse. Among the Muñozian themes this chapbook discusses are hope, utopia, affect, punk rock, heresy, the undercommons, temporality, hauntology, forgetting, loss, ephemera, partage, sense, incommensurability, the event and democracy. In reading Muñoz as a Rogue Theorist, this book borrows many of the gifts we have received (and have yet to receive) from him, marking the force and luminescence of his thought, and insisting upon the rare and precious singularity of his work. Muñoz bequeaths to us a queer studies without condition which it is our duty to foster and to bear as we carry it and him into the unknowable futures of an indiscipline.

Queer Insists: (for José Esteban Muñoz)

Literature & Fiction

O’Rourke, Michael

History & Criticism

In this unflinching, unconventional meditation on the understanding of self and identity, filtered through an ethical struggle with visitation and privilege, M.H. Bowker creates an odd, beautiful song of the self. ~Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face: A Cartography of the Void Escargotesque, M.H. Bowker’s restive, memoir-driven meditation on experience, immerses the reader in a mood of sustained contemplative urgency, the peculiarly forceful pull of which inheres, I think, in the unnerving experience of gradually coming to appreciate, with the author, just what a maddening, grasp-slipping Ouroboros of a concept “experience” is — as, e.g., when he cites Freud citing Lichtenberg’s joke that “experience consists in experiencing what one does not wish to experience,” and we glimpse with him the koanic impossibility, the uncrackable kernel of encrypted (non-? anti-?) wisdom this remarkable book winds sinuous coil on coil around, in dexterously flexible prose (plus the occasionally interspersed pencil-sketch and snatch of verse) that when called on to do so adroitly tone-shifts from assured, Montaignian savoir faire to bursts of Kierkegaardian intensity. ~Jonathan Callahan, author of The Consummation of Dirk, Winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction “Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking, knowing, reflecting, and analyzing are kinds of experiences, invocations of “experience” typically direct our attention to what is immediate, embodied, unrepresented, unthought, even unthinkable. And yet, whether by learning experience, traumatic experience, life experience, mystical experience, or all of these, we hope most fervently that our experience will teach us, transform us, become part of us. Why do we strive to find, profit from, and possess experience while insisting upon experience’s intellectual elusiveness? What do we intend when we petition (and re-petition) experience for truth, for growth, for strength? To whom or to what do we sing when we sing experience’s song? Escargotesque, or, What is Experience? asks why both our lived experiences and our mythologies of experience so often fold inward, repeat, return. Departing from his unusual experience of working as a garbage-collector in the West African country of Benin, M.H. Bowker converses with several champions of experience (from Michel de Montaigne to John Dewey, from Søren Kierkegaard to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Simone Weil to R.D. Laing) to pose radical questions about the intentions and dynamics that guide our quest for experience, intentions and dynamics that are more destructive and more melancholy than celebrants of experience would care to admit. Across Escargotesque’s six loosely linear parts, fragments of prose memoir intersect with poetry, sketch art, philosophical reflection, cultural criticism, and psychological examination in ways that both evoke and unsettle the thinking person’s experience. Escargotesque both testifies to an experience and reveals surprising fantasies driving the modern and postmodern turn to experience as a source of truth and hope. Such fantasies include the sacredness of even the most violent ‘pure experience,’ the necessity of supplicating experience’s objects, and the ultimate demise of the one who experiences.

Escargotesque, or, What is Experience?

Bowker, M. H.

Atopological Trilogy creates new concepts for Deleuze-Guattarian thought without any heed for sectarian, sermonising, or dutiful readings of the philosophers. In Part I of the trilogy, “Becoming-Sexual of the Sexual,” Aracagök demonstrates the ways in which quantum theory and the concept of “complementarity” inform Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, especially in relation to “becoming” in general and “becoming-woman” and “becoming-queer” more particularly. Aracagök argues that the ways in which the philosophers put forward a ban on “becoming-man” with a certain degree of undecidability encapsulates (albeit in a cryptic form) other becomings, the most important of which is becoming-queer, or rather, the becoming-sexual of the sexual.  In Part II: “Deleuze on Sound, Music, and Schizo-Incest,” Aracagök puts into resonance the sound, noise, and music (and the question) of schizo-incest with the intention of deterritorialising a notion of the meta-audible. If Kafka’s story, “The Investigations of a Dog” leads us to a realm of the “formless” which cannot be heard without destroying what we know as “hearing,” it also offers us a limit-experience of the meta-audible, which, when radicalised via the notions of “schizo-incest” and “self-shattering,” creates a line of flight that escapes even from the line of flight itself. All these maneuvers pose a serious challenge to Deleuze and Guattari, who claim that despite all his investigations, Kafka’s investigator dog is re-Oedipalised in the end. Proposing in the end a limit experience which Aracagök calls the “meta-audible,” he shows that Kafka’s more radical approach to sound creates a line of flight that escapes even from the line of flight itself.  The final essay of the trilogy, “Clinical and Critical Perversion,” begins with the 19th-century crisis of an abyss presumed to be yawning between mimesis and diegesis ever since Plato. According to Aracagök, this takes the form of a crisis of the “political,” the repression of which becomes the mission of psychoanalytical discourse towards the end of the 19th century. This crisis finds another form of expression in George Büchner’s unfinished 1836 novella Lenz, relative to the audibility of a “terrible voice which is usually called silence.” If the disappearance of the “political” is related to the rise of psychoanalysis on the protocols of, first, hypnosis, and then, the “talking cure,” both of which privilege the presumed form of the voice of the analyst over the analysand’s silence (a psycho-politics?), Aracagök proposes re-distributing this process, calling renewed attention to the clinicalisation of perversion, along Deleuzian-Guattarian distinctions such as: surface and depth, critical and clinical, oedipal-incest and schizo-incest, leading to a re-evaluation of what Deleuze and Guattari might have meant by “homosexual-effusion” in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, all in order to deterritorialise the “political” under a new concept — namely, critical perversion.  Ultimately, Atopological Trilogy offers the reader no safe grounds for preserving not only a philosophical identity but also not any identity, if only to be able to let you float in the air without any guidance à la Kafka’s “Red Indian.”

Atopological Trilogy: Deleuze and Guattari

Aracagök, Zafer

Theory is like a Surging Sea

MUNRO, Michael

This little book arose spontaneously, in the late spring of 2015, when a series of conversations emerged -- first in a university roundtable on graduate student dissertation-writing, and then in a rapidly proliferating series of blog posts -- on the topic of how we write. One commentary generated another, each one characterized by enormous speed, eloquence, and emotional forthrightness. This collection is not about how TO write, but how WE write: unlike a prescriptive manual that promises to unlock the secret to efficient productivity, the contributors talk about their own writing processes, in all their messy, frustrated, exuberant, and awkward dis/order.
The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very active online presence, including blogs and websites; all are committed to strengthening the bonds of community, both in person and online, which helps to explain the effervescent sense of collegiality that pervades the volume, creating linkages across essays and extending outward into the wide world of writers and readers.
Contributors include: Michael Collins, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Alexandra Gillespie, Alice Hutton Sharp, Asa Simon Mittman, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Maura Nolan, Richard H. Godden, Bruce Holsinger, Stuart Elden, Derek Gregory, Steve Mentz, and Dan Kline.

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page

Reference

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

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