Afterlives / A Different Way to Destroy
by Thom Donovan
Afterlives
In the beginning there was punishment
Then there was forgetting why we punished
Then there were laws and the enforcement of the laws
There was the commodity fetish and what speaks like a subject
And bleeds like any object bleeds, but can only appear criminalized
By the bland recourse to what is right and who should have rights
Coming into visibility gagged and bound by their exception
Absconding with themselves every time like this music of the immeasurable
A marronage in the song itself fucks with logistics, with the calculability
Of ends without end, figuring a way to be free whatever else one is
Sentimented in what is most obscene.
A Different Way to Destroy
–for Lee Lozano
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 don’t even know yourself
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An exchange of lack withdrawn by a lack of exchange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.
Thom Donovan is the author of numerous books, including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015); To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses Of Fire. His current projects include a book of poems and other writings based upon the compositions of Julius Eastman, a book of critical essays regarding poetics, political practice, and the occult, and an ongoing "ante-memoir" entitled Left
Melancholy.
