Betraying Gestures #43

philosophy

I started writing in bed in a way I didn’t before. It is the position my body takes to reach the keyboard that is new. To myself, I think of it as an even more goblin mode than the goblin mode that writing in bed already is, since I learned about this term, which I, with much delay, learned about through Jen Calleja’s pandemic-ridden essays on goblinhood. This mode of writing pertains to the night, in which I’ve been writing the rewriting of the novel Betraying Gestures, which I committed to rewriting from the moment I started writing it, and particularly since I published it a bit more than a year ago in an exhibition at From me To you Space, where it was introduced as a text doomed to rewriting and reiteration, to be rewritten and reiterated following that publishing circumstance. Between its night-writing mode, which I have been performing in the position I will in a moment describe, and its morning, desk-sitting-down mode, I have been swapping the “we” that narrates the novel for an also collective, also genderless, “they.” Its current pronoun regime reflects a distance that allows the text to intertwine the narrative with accounts of its circulation. I attribute to this writing position the status of mode as I realize it to make the writing more precise: lying on my side, computer on the bed; one arm making it to the computer between ribs, mattress, and pillow, the other, parallel to the bed; my head supported by the folded pillow, diagonally horizontal. It might be the restriction on the movement of one arm and the awkwardness of the other coming from above that creates what I call precision in what my typing fingers write on the keyboard. And it is this exact space and interaction—of writing in bed, of the body and the keyboard—that is the opening scene of Betraying Gestures in its first edition and in this second edition, too, which, in the second edition, is like this: “They lie under the duvet, typing, and they type as if the keyboard keys separate the written words from the written events. But when the fact that typing is in itself an event hits them, despair takes over. Hopeless, they cry to cry helplessness out of them.” I didn’t read it yet, but I want to read the current state of my novel to a research group I’m part of, assembled by The Open Book Society. We are three in this research group: me, A, and M. I thought of us at a lecture that was part of a series of lectures organized by the philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón. Each day, she invited a different artist to

dialogue with her, to articulate or disarticulate the paradox at play, between her philosophically charged discursive thinking and her praise of the artist’s way of thinking, through images, sounds, and objects. Philosophers, I jotted down after a talk by Fred Moten, work on the materiality of meaning, where words are not pre-assembled vessels of meaning; they are what meaning itself is made of. I saw a meme on Instagram where the epistemic is a dust storm and the ontological is a rainstorm—both storms have a dog face. I think what I’m saying is that philosophers relate to the epistemic and artists/writers to the ontological. But I’m not sure, and, to be honest, I have many questions about this meme. In this same uncertain state, I leave Soto Calderón’s lecture, duelling not with the notions of the epistemic and the ontological but with the notions of performance and performativity, which I mostly have clear, but which, after so many uses, put me in a quarrel with. But what of the lecture reminded me of my study group, which was still fresh as we had met earlier that day, was her insistence on, and circling of, the word coincide—a word that, in Spanish, the language of the lecture, is closer to “incide,” mostly obsolete in English, which means the affecting or influencing of something, which I, A, and M have been experiencing together, and therefore followed by the prefix “co,” in relation to publication, writing, and artistic practice, to my surprise!—I’m a bit skeptical of this kind of format (online, assigned). I think of the prefix “co” with João, who has been working with transmission—we try “mission” with “co:” commission. Fred Moten spoke on prefixes, also experimenting with words in their lexeme form and shifting their prefixes. He focused on the prefix “pre,” which he claimed a love for, in opposition to “pro” or “per,” to defend the use of “preposition” rather than proposition, and to call his area of research, performative studies, “preformative studies.” The word proposition tends to appear in my texts more often than not, especially when I’m working on applications. And I have no intention of starting to use preposition instead of proposition… too intentional—a friend this weekend told me she was fed up with unintentional people, which I thought was a funny category of people—but I cherish what it entails: porosity, exchange, process (maybe coincidence, even). I have been writing exhibition projects that try to be, in the text, an already exhibition space. An exhibition preposition rather than a proposition, I guess. A written or spoken exhibition as a structure for projecting, presenting, and articulating works of art in a way that doesn’t necessarily undermine the established format of exhibitions in contemporary art, but as a process between the making and the made that once made finds its way back into the making. What I have many times tried to recreate in applications: the movement between the informative of writing and the constructive of publishing, towards the constructive of writing and the informative of publishing—what I propose with the rewriting of Betraying Gestures, which I’ve been doing in bed, and which I have not yet shared with A and M of my study group, though with whom, in the meeting I still had in mind at Soto Calderón’s lecture, I shared images, we all did, twenty each, to try to counter the sign of the written word we tend to. One of my twenty images was of a work by the artist Carolyn Lazard, from 2020, titled Carolyn Working. It was made by her partner, pen on paper: Carolyn in bed, between the covers, with her computer, in a position similar to the one I have been writing in. A told me she had seen this work in a meme. I didn’t find it, but it makes sense—it is quite an identifiable image. I started writing this letter in that position, not how I finish it. I finish it on a different day, when the event I wanted to announce here—to purpose this newsletter as a newsletter—has already passed. I wanted to announce Betraying Gestures’ participation at the Dublin Art Book Fair at Temple Gallery, between the 4th and the 14th of December.