WHAT WAS I THINKING DURING WEEK 1?

CLASS:

So I totally hate Bitch, she annoys the crap out of me, but I thought I’d post this as a good example of a manifesto and of a performative text.

If that wasn’t performative, I don’t know what is. I’m amused thinking about when Bitch says, “Let pussy manifest,” while remembering the etymology of manifest. To bring into being (with the hands). One definition of a manifesto that Julia gave us on Wednesday was that it invents the conditions for its own existence. What are the implications of inventing the conditions for your own existence? What are the implications of holding that possibility within and doing nothing with it? As we move through this world, as we become, we are each living manifestos. The implication of this last sentence is that we may/are constantly inventing the conditions for our own existences. But what happens when we are unaware of this power of invention? Strangers walking around with a hidden power, thought locked down by a system that rings our necks with its own seemingly arbitrary but in fact purposive conditions. What is there between being given the conditions of my existence and inventing them? Is it true to say that “the system” is a default setting for the conditions of my existence.Thinking about it in these terms I am beginning to imagine the categories of “male” and “female” as default conditions of existence and the queer individual as one who has been (somehow) empowered to, or maybe they just remembered that they can, invent the conditions of their own existence.

PROJECT:

This week was spent mostly slogging through the vast amout of material we are working with and beginning to cut it down to a reasonable size of text for our recording. We are starting to have a more final idea of the text we are going to read including: The Audible Past by Jonathan Sterne, Sound Theory/Sound Practice by Rick Altman, Bodies That Matter and Gender Trouble by Judith Butler and others to come.