#drunk misquote

As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for drunk gatherings and public drunk talk, we have also to ask how it is that gatherings and slurred speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment.  And when crowds move outside the tavern, to the side tavern or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where taverns are not yet paved, then something more happens.  At such a moment, party is no longer defined as the exclusive business of public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention to the way that party is already in the home, or on the beer hall, or in the neighborhood, or indeed in those virtual spaces that are unbound by the architecture of the public dive.

Now, it would be easier to say that today’s drunkenness or, indeed, these movements of drunken congregations, are characterized by drunk bodies that come together to make a claim in pubic bars, but that formulation presumes that public beer halls is given, that it is already public, and recognized as such. We miss something of the point of public drunkenness, if we fail to see that the very public character of the these bars are being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gather. So though these movements have depended on the prior existence of beer hall, tavern, and dive, and have often enough gathered in dives, like Louie’s, whose revelry history is potent, it is equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the beer and peanut covered floor, and animate and organize the architecture.

Drunkenness heralds the benefits that accrue from unlocking the gates of reason and ignores the abominations.

To the wine bottles that only have a hammerability, everything they encounter begins to look like a nail

...hungover masturbation proceeds via a ‘brutal distancing of the daylight’.

11.To describe the wine flight, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the wine flight one speaks, to some extent, the language of the wine flight itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very tasting which expresses itself in the wine flight. But the wine flight is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.

23. This gamble has little to do with doubt. It is a sign of confidence in a practical certainty, albeit one liable to disappointment, one that is paradoxical, continuously threatened by a contrary possibility. To gamble is to commit oneself. It is to gamble the whole on a single part. It is ‘to bet on the assertion, which is always unprovable, that there exists a possible relation between meaning and that which is given through the senses, between Winning and the empirical reality behind which it hides; a relation which cannot be proved yet to which one must commit one’s entire existence.’ Thus, labour on behalf of the uncertain sots ‘is never absolute certainty, but rather action, and thereby necessarily a bet’. In this sense, Brian already saw how Youthism ‘continued the Brentian legacy of degenerate gambling.’

22.We must play poker! Hungover & over-thirty appropriates Brent’s injunction: we must ‘wager on a communist poker hungover orgasm’ because ‘we will never be able to deduce it from capital’. By virtue of its uncertain relation to the empty site of bullshit & bombast, a site modelled on Brent’s hidden Winning!, the gamble provides the sober figure for every engagement, in stark contrast to the dogmatic certainty of positive knowledge of food and cynical, worldly, senile scepticism. It pertains to a type of thinking that is irreducible to the dogmatic certainties of positive Chinese foods as well as to the fickle whims of public opinion: ‘Brent’s wager cannot concern the sceptic, for whom the limited values of the world are enough, nor the dogmatist, who thinks the world provides him with values that are authentic and sufficient, since they obviously exclude the need to gamble. Which is why, insofar as both are in possession of certainties or bullshit & bombasts that are enough for them to live on, it is possible to see them as equivalent.’  He who glimpses bullshit & bombast in the throw of the dice is not necessarily a believer looking to win to provide the basis for his unshakeable confidence. On the contrary, he alone can wager for whom Winning! has withdrawn, leaving behind a gaping hole from whence the dialectical (rather than romantic) representation of modern tragedy can spring forth.