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At Rob & Lee's house.
1248 Treat, after stapling Try!
at Cyber Copy, at 16th, then
taking the BART to 24th,
taking 14 books out from the
library & walking down.

Ro Taylor, Rob, Eleni, Lee,
Jocelyn, John Sakkis, Jen Hofer,
A (Chris?), Amber, (a
woman to whom I was introduced but
whose name I forget), (Chris =
a man who the same), Chris
(actually Chris), Stephen Vincent,
Rob (not Halpern but with another
last name I forget), Amy Balkin,
Thom Donovan, Robin Tremblay-
McGaw, me.
All these
sitting in a circle in the
living room, with the sounds of

kids in the pool outside coming through
the the window. Light & light
wind on the trees outside.
(Simonides, before
the palace collapse, whether this is
in Quintilian or Ad Herennium,
I dont know, I forget.)

Poetics of disability.
Amber & Eleni. Health &
fitness.
Pasta, beans, salad,
a piece of cheese on bread,
glasses of wine, a cookie
Amy Balkin called 'solid'.
(And it was.)

Patrick Durgin chiming in on
an internet conversation.
(apropos of Hannah Weiner
read through the filter of
disability studies -- not limited to
body)

"how to not cause further harm"
--Kocik

"epiphenomena of the unmade" --Kocik
(look at notes on Nonsite site)

disability & fitness.
reorient myself to
heed Thom.

"forms can serve scial struggle or
ethical / political dilemmas"

potential bodies.

"the body as a proof that I
was there" *
"parse the body" *

voice & autoaffection.

• Vito Acconci

* (cf. Spinoza :
the body proving to itself that it
exists)

"the performance of the body
mediated by the immediate
threat of harm"
--Martha Rosler

"violence was being conveyed"

BRING THE WAR HOME
(Rosler's photos -- cf.
Tyrone Williams' Aggression talk)

"I'll lock it to itself"
--Rob [name] re: his bike *

[Oliveros, Conrad, Sherrits,
Living Theatre (Dionysus '68)] *

• autoaffection

Elliot Anderson: Greenhouse

It was a rich follow-up discussion with Elliot Anderson and Amy Trachtenberg this past Sunday, which included a little "field-trip" down to the Greenhouse--a kind of counter-atrium?--set up for the occasion beneath a redwood. Some notes should be forthcoming.

I am entering this discussion within the fibers of personal and professional desire/response/ community discourse.

On one hand, it delights me to know that notes for this discussion on disability/disablement were made during the Movement Research Festival Potluck, though also find admitted irony in the fact that I could not attend it due to my own chronic pain (as disability or from a physical disfiguration that is the disability, who can define which?).

Something that has been a little hard for me to enter in this blog is the technical apparatus of "disability" and its various functions...

I prefer more to find agency in a discussion of the mechanism of suffering, which is a very personal and continuous ____ for one who is disabled.

This ____ is my gift to you, reader to insert whatever word you think fits best.

I think of "place," "ground," "text," "momentum," "test," "dance," "funk," or "motherfucker." For me that is more interesting than this idea of re-invention that we seem to be fantastically splashing around in through this discourse.

I am not saying that it is beside the point to re-work this term, or to create perspectives or situations where this sense of the abled and disabled border is dismantled.

I think that the previous bloggers have done an excellent job of that on the nonsite,

but I AM saying that pain is pain,

discomfort is important information, and that can't be by-passed by a revision of terminology or code.

The most important art that I have witnessed or been a part of has emerged from or addressed

the artist's struggle to overcome suffering,

whether it is rooted in disfigurement,
addiction,
loss of many kinds,
and the awkward place
where a desire cannot be met
but persists in its strength of presence,
like the struggle for identity whether that is maintaining one or uncovering one. Read more

Here is a written version of my talk from last Wednesday. Thanks to Rob and Lee for hosting, and to all in attendance. It is great to see responses from Amber and Chris (at Nonsite), and John Sakkis at his blog. If anyone has any pics from the event (Lee? John?) and could put them up here it wld be great to have some visual documents. I will be putting the talk and ensuing conversation up in an audio form just as soon as I'm back in New York with the proper tech support....

Thom

Allegories of Disablement: some consequences of form towards potential bodies

Wandering the artist’s monographs at a University of Maryland library in the spring of 2006, I came across the following:

Possibly, in earlier pieces, I used the body as a proof that "I" was there—the way a person might talk to himself in the dark. So, with that assumption—that the body was analogous to a word-system as a placement device—there was an attempt made to "parse" the body: it could be the subject of an action, or it could be the receiver, the object (it should be noted that most of the earlier pieces were kinds of reflexive sentences: "I" acted on "me."

This initial fragment, from a monograph of Vito Acconci’s work, among other materials I’ve gathered in the past few years, has led me to a prospectus of sorts, if not an inchoate essay on what may be called “disability” in relation to practices in poetics, architecture, design, “live art,” and movement research.

What interests me about the Acconci quotation, is how it may encapsulate a larger discourse occurring in the late 60s and early 70s. This discourse, I believe, concerns the constitution of subjects as they are extended in space by movement, language and image; it also concerns what I will call, after a remark by Martha Rosler conveyed to me by a student of hers in conversation, the performance of the body mediated by the imminent threat of harm. Read more

Disability History: Theory and Practice, San Francisco State University, July 31-August 3, 2008. San Francisco State University's Institute on Disability, the Disability History Association, and the Disability History Group of the United Kingdom will jointly host Disability History: Theory and Practice, a conference at San Francisco State University, 31 July-3 August 2008.

During the past two decades, research, teaching, and scholarly publication on the history of disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon have drawn increasing attention. The goal of this conference is to assess the state of the field. It will examine the theory and practice of disability history. And it will explore theoretical and substantive, methodological and practical strategies to promote the continued development and intellectual coherence of this field.

While the more than four dozen papers are diverse in subject matter, we intend that the presenters, commentators, and audience participants will use these historical case studies to open up discussion of broader issues. We will consider how scholars approach the history of disability. What theoretical concepts inform our interpretations? What analytical and methodological tools do we find most useful? How does our work benefit from or contribute to other fields of historical inquiry, such as social history, political history, the histories of class, economic systems, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth? In work that focuses on a specific stream of disability history, such as the history of blind people or the history of public policies regarding disabled veterans, what are its connections to and implications for other streams of disability history? How does our historical research draw upon the more general field of disability studies and what are its implications for disability studies?

The program will include papers on the histories of: Read more