ugh, this piece so eloquently describes why akerman is one of the goat’s. so glad i discovered her when i did. timing is of the essence sometimes.
“Akerman was Jewish. Akerman was queer. Akerman was Belgian. These were not incidental facts to a body of work about isolation, dislocation, and social marginalization: she was an artist for whom identity was key, although also inchoate and complex and abstract. Akerman made her own persona and inner life central to her work without making her work all about herself.“
“Repression can provoke silence or ferocity, but it doesn’t simply lord over us demanding conformity, nor does it necessarily bottle us up tightly so that we explode under pressure. It has no particular aim: it doesn’t want anything. It takes whatever it gets, whatever it stumbles over. And most of the time, it stumbles over clichés, because there are so many of them: not because people are idiotic parrots who repeat simplicities, but because the meaning of clichés is random and dispersed, so that they’re littered everywhere. No cliché produces a single intended meaning, it adopts whatever meaning happens to be in front of us while we’re flailing around, trying to find something we can pretend we’re looking for. This arbitrariness is far from an idealized freedom: chance can certainly be framed as liberatory (as when one courts the inadvertent so as to pretend that one’s habits of thought are temporarily thwarted), but it can also be framed as stultifying (as when an endless series of clichés chokes off the possibility of time moving forward, creating the sense of a continuous present consisting wholly of things one already knows.)”
— Steven Zultanski, On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless
one of the things that bothers me most about posts which imply (or outright state) that all men are inherently abusive, aside from the fact that it’s objectively untrue, is that it normalises and excuses abuse – if abusiveness is inseparable from maleness and masculinity, then abusive men aren’t really accountable for their actions, because by that logic they can’t help it. this also falsely implies that there is no alternative male behaviour, which is incredibly dangerous and absolutely contributes to victim blaming where the perpetrator was a man. men can be gentle! men can be loving! if you’re attracted to men, accept nothing less, and never place the blame on your own attraction to men if you are poorly treated rather than on the man in question for actively choosing to mistreat you.
There are only two problems with the work ethic today: Work doesn’t reliably deliver the social, moral, and spiritual goods it promises, and artificial intelligence is about to render the work ethic moot. Its central promise is like rickety scaffolding that doesn’t reach high enough. People fall off of it all the time as they climb in pursuit of the prize supposedly awaiting them at the top. At the same time, the whole structure stands over an unstable geological fault; sooner or later, a quake will reduce it to matchwood. Even so, we insist that the structure is sound. Anyone who gets off is deemed lazy and earns derision.
The very meaning of work is in jeopardy right now, and a big reason is that we expect too much meaning from work. We believe the false promise that work confers dignity, character, and purpose, and we inculcate that belief in our children and students. But in the present stage of American capitalism, working means having a job. It means having an employer who puts our time, sweat, and (one hopes) talent to use in accordance with current managerial doctrines and for the sake of profit. So what we say about work—at the dinner table, at graduations, in opinion columns, in sermons, on the floor of the Senate—doesn’t match the reality of the work we do. This mismatch leads us to a sad, profound irony: Our commitment to the work ethic, meant to help us live the good life, is actually keeping us from doing so. It will take an effort engaging our entire society to replace the cultural mythology that created this problem, before the profit motive leads companies to do away with human labor altogether. Our first step in this effort must be to understand how each component of the promise fails us.
This is fucking outrageous. She’s insane. Like nuts. Fucking genius. Also, this bitch is from Hawaii, which sort of explains her water photo obsession, I guess?
countervisuality 