尽きる

The blood comes and comes; I spend all night in the tub, water running. It pours from me: gush of child undone. Black.

summer reading list—unconventional critical religious theory

“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.

“It should not be forgotten that photography emerged as a technology of surveillance within the context of a developing global economy. A circulation of notions can be observed between photography and imperialism. Emissaries of the imperial bureaucracy set out with the explicit, if haphazard, aim of ordering and assembling the myriad world economies into a single commodity culture. In order to centralize the world system, the need grew for a universal currency of exchange, through which the world’s economic cultures could be subordinated and made docile. At the same time, to disseminate commodity capital and the “truth” of technological progress to a world audience, a centralized system of cultural communication was called for. Photography provided the cultural equivalent of a universal currency. Like money, photography promised from the outset to embody a universal language. As one newspaper report exulted: “[Photography] is the first universal language addressing itself to all who possess vision and in characters alike understood in the course of civilization and the hut of the savage.” Hailed as superseding the messy enigmas of language and as capable of communicating on a global scale through the universal faculty of vision, photography shifted the authority of universal knowledge from print language to spectacle.”

“Violence in colonized cultures is not always unlettered. In the colonies, as Frantz Fanon knew, the policeman and soldier by their immediate presence “maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge.” These same colonies also need the tactful squadrons of moral teachers, advisers and bewilderers to coax the colonized into admitting the legitimacy and “universality” of the rulers’ values. Rule by gunpowder and whip is blended with forms of cultural cajolement that create an atmosphere of deference and complicity, immeasurably easing the burden of policing. As a result a divided complicity springs up between the lords of humankind and the colonized elite. The colonized intellectual, “dusted over by colonial culture,” comes to play a checkered role in the life of the people.”