De Stijl Histrionics

"What is felt to be dangerous is precisely the seduction contained in the mixture of lack of rigor and grandiose pronouncements. Those who most strongly object to the seductive aspects of Theory would then tend to consider it almost as a pathological phenomenon, but whenever they try to denounce what they see as fake mastery and real mimicry, by a logic which pertains more to hysterical contagion than to sedate intellectual debate, they find themselves failing into ranting denunciations."
Jean - Michel Rabate, The Future of Theory, 2002

After a magical anonymity which sets the law in its as if-ness - as with all laws - we begin. It is with the arche and its abilities that one starts, with the abilities of the arche in the beginning of every commentary. The pathology of such a beginning is the pathology of the style of articulate articulations. To articulate the ability of the arche therefore is to dwell upon the prescribed symptoms of a perceived disability to clarify, to clear out, and as such to set, articulately (and) in writing beginnings and middle and ends. Or at least their modes of desired separation au pair with their functions. Not their style, clearly.

It has been demanded, through the necessity of a necessary invocation of ability (not once) to not write employing in writing talk, to not write in tongues that is, in times of urgency, which, critically, are not the exception but the rule. Time and time again the conmentary, beginning here, has commented on them tongues, as if this were The Times. Yet who after all knows were have they been last night? Or the night before? The tongues, not the times. Which lips they parted, time and again, in times of dismantling and definitional disarray, were they have been hiding, where they have been housed? The house is not to be weathered by such tongues, having been build after the tongues' elimination. One could turn back to other tongues and clarify that, but dwelling here on it will not clarify anything. If anything "I simply lay my pathos down on the table, reserving to myself the right to unwrap the package later, depending on the circumstances."

What can a cloud be other than such unraveled exposure though? It is from the beginning that this cloud, patho-logicaly set on the table, which has been revealing itself, not least here. From the arche. One only needs to turn back, go down. To the beginning, here or there. The tongue has always been one of an exposed dis-ability. A form of dyslexia you might say. A techno-logical disanexia more like it with a whiff of anticipation. Anticipation of avalanching commentary as it snowballs, in tongues, post-orgasmically, always, already. Is this then a mirroring, a representation of its own? What are you looking at? Inscribed representations? After all Theory misses out. Misses out on the real, clearly. And even in such uncontainable histrionics it is this desire that is expressed: the yearning for a comfortable dwelling. A house not missing anything as such, but one with no nooks and crannies. A house were every nook and cranny has been polished clean, crystal clear and sharp. As a bullet.

Such politics are really about biting the dusty bullet. Not long ago surgery was performed on hysterics, the shell-shocked and the poilus (if they ever were different). An editing of sorts. A clearing as one does during these days with houses. What has trespassed, what crossed the porous seals of doors and windows is cleared out. And the outside is also cleared too. The modernist discomfort with comfort is well documented. Try the reverse cow-girl on a Rietveld chair or go all doggie-style on the LC4 if you will not take my word for it. Within that discomfort an analogous to the anti-weathering delineations of writing geography can be traced. Across white walls and double-glazed windows which pretend to clearly demarcate the house that one lives in and what hysterically goes on outside. As with these houses, it was not a matter of style, not least for style as it has treacled down, but of function. Of a form that would follow function. Nothing would just simply animate itself - no sir! - there are techniques to be mastered, machines to be lived in. The minimalism of bare essentials, of simply unpacked objects, just another code-word for the discomfort with, admittedly, scatty, dust-prone, that is opaque and iffy, accommodating hysteria of traces, memories, quotes; tongues.

It is not of course, not only, about the course of possessions from accumulation to flaunting. The question of style, of the arche of the beginning of every comment within the remits of a knowingly insufficient, dis-able, Theory, long after the Althusserian separation by strangulation, is a question of the quest of criticality. The reciprocal seduction has to at some point involve tongues. Such an assemblages of tongues is nothing but a body language which puts into productive disjunction the bodies of mastery, re-mastering in mixing the cards and the questions into a self-conscious witnessing, a voyeurism if you prefer, but one across a car park, improper and thus neither of propriety nor of property - as the house is becoming architecture- an excited witnessing, agape. And we are all aware of how difficult it is to even start to make a swift, uncomplicated exit with your pants down to your knees in such situations.