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A POLEMICAL 30-PART V-LETTER TO, FROM, AND ABOUT PRE(CARE)IOUSNESS:
1.04.2020-20.6.2020

ongoing correspondence from [me]


hello pre(care)iousness,


this is a letter to and about precarious artists, and a questioning of “care” which is everywhere in our nicey-arts-talks; what does care mean when it is care in pursuit of self-promotion, career-self, and self-commodification? the notion of “care” is a concept that we hear and know a-lot about now; however, this letter is concerned with the idea of caring in (perhaps) a non-academic way. but more in terms as a type of intimate-little-marxisms, or real-time mutual-aid: a type of class-care-imperative: that those with kinds of capital ought to look after those without – maybe a sentiment which is a bit abrahamically-religioned, but without the obvious nasty stuff. this is ultimately a letter to you my little ones (the underclass, the socioeconomically disadvantaged) across all intersections, who are still struggling later in life than your peers, who won’t inherit a house or land and who are feeling isolated a lot of the times. who don’t speak the right speech, who code-switch to stay afloat, and who move and think in different ways than those middle-managed-middle-class minds of your colleagues. the ideas in this letter are nothing new, and people are already talking about this stuff, but it is important that i send this letter to you, so we can be reminded again.



when we talk about the idea of “cares,” we realise some of these professional-care-agendas only seem to have real value when framed within an ascendent-professional-network-schema. and despite our dearest altruistic projections, it seems our values as “professionals” are spillin’ all round the discourse in encoded ways and at risk of muddying the nice shoes: think about how many times we tell ourselves: “i care about this opportunity”; i care about meeting this “high-up” and so forth,”; “i care about this funding round,” “i care about my ideas and my practice.”  this is all good. it’s ok. but i truly think it is important to also care about those who also care about making art - but who really don’t get a chance to talk about what they care about: a caring laterally – rather than upwardly – a caring for those outside the network; a caring for precarious artists. and despite the many protestations from nice people who live in gentrified prog-suburbs, underclass people aren’t really a(loud) into galleries, or even those little middle-class radical community spaces – which are seldom as accessible as they would like, or hope to be: you need a bloomin’ bachelor of arts to gain admission with your donation; as well as the right (read: left) configuration of politics and the ability to not speak too much through the nose or say “somethink; somethink.” sure. yes. ok. there are inclusive spaces (mostly activist, or online ones) but are there really inclusive classed-high-art spaces? ones not fused to the coccyx of commodo-knowledge factories formerly known as universities? yeah. nah. yeah. nah. yeah. nah. not really.



my father writes in block letters. to compliment him, i write in lower case here. he finished high-school in year 8. later he had a tafe education which formed his later-literacies. he has always been working-embodied-under aspirational-spiritual deadlock with a rich inner life springing forth from hard times in his outer-life; a philosophical immediacy springs from his tactile connection with physically and emotionally being-in-the-world; his intimate knowledge of surviving and moving within precarity. i borrow from this still-living methodology as he is now writing his life story in his room during this time and i am turning 30 soon, so i will write some of my life-care-concerns at the moment. as a low-s-e-s, artist who has experienced precarity in lots of ways (unemployment, debt, illness, itinerancy, poverty etc.) i have seen from the bottom up – in this way i am so very proudly biased; i am a polemicist.


in fact, ya know, sociologists often talk of how lower-classed people have the ability to isolate social structures and see the world as a hurdle to try and overcome; as opposed to a floaty-free feeling of fluid-opportunity and ascension. when talking about these things, i use language structures as my little power to speak upwardly so you (those with capital) will come downwardly, and perhaps even listen in a lowering way.

this is not a mean letter but it will not be subjugated by the tyranny of bourgeois professional niceness; or by privately educated people who try to tell the disadvantaged how to be and think. we do not deny that precariousness is all round for us humans and non-humans alike - but actual precarity is not distributed equally, as judith butler reminds us. this letter does not believe in class-essentialism and the idea that clever words are for rich people and simple words are for poor. you see: within the seeds of our networks also belies a desire to be loved. these things in my letter are really there and i am so very tired of repeating, grating, traumatic stories for people to actually believe me that there is a class disparity in this country - specifically one that intersects heavily with gender and race. so. yeah. this is a letter that goes down a forked-road; to think about what cares we really value, and how as artists we can’t afford to be “users” at this late-stage. you know exactly what i mean.


i. what is it to care, to really care? (oft spoken within arts discourse and grant-language today) – derived from feminist ethics to importantly describe and illuminate processes regarding unpaid, unrecognised, gendered caring labours, as well as the morality of interpersonal benevolences -  but now, in academic art circles, these ideas are not always used as situationally or acutely as they ought to be, and i suspect used by those who don’t give two shits about the poor and precarious; what do we mean when we say we care: does this mean to care abruptly, provisionally, holistically, unconditionally? and if care is important, then what do words like altruism, ethics and solidarity ultimately engender within artistic communities within our “late-stage” - who really cares about artists from low-ses, disadvantaged or precarious circumstances? they mess up the place, anyhow. how do we begin to disentangle and cutaway those capitalist-bio-chemical-industrial-politiks that inhibit our impetus to care for those outside of our self-hoods; egoic extensions; families; and networks? outside of our parasitic practices? and what does it mean to be an artist/practitioner of precarity within an increasingly incredulously professionalised; neo-liberal, socio-economic-cultural (special-cult) milieu, riddled with hidden help-labours from rich mummy/daddies; capital; clandestine maps and codes; free rent; hidden-nepotisms and network pre-ups (already provided pre-utero) and all those other critical privileges, such as white privileges?  i mean: some artists’ parents still help them with the rent? and poor-artists are meant to compete for grants with these pre-helped-artists? merry meritocracy! what are we to do with all of this excessive discourse that spills around the lexicon of “ professional networks”? which of fucking course unfurls from the ironed-laps of the business world; which we know is always upwardly ascendant, nay cryptically trancendent - rarely lateral. think about how this language affects and inhibits our ability to be really concerned about poor artists (or people in general) when there is a cherry for your ascension motions? for your deep-labours, for our sublime art transfigurations?

a computer network shares/circulates/exchanges information in the network (for various porno-purposes and promo-operations, nowadays) through the internet service providers, which is connected to other nodes i.e. storage servers.  a professional network shares information strategically and advantageously.  what i call the network-aspiration-complex is that which inhibits mutual-aid, altruism, within our late-stage: and we forget, and are panicked, to look down at the horrors, abjecting below.  the ascendant network impels and compels us to always look upwards always; and always scares us with ideas about scarcity by impaling and burning our toes off; and as we breathlessly scramble up those gesticulating quivering branches, there are others knocked off; others whose feet and legs are completely cauterised; or even those without any hands at all. all this clambering nonsense! fuck this mark zuckerberg discursive-subtext – which is that networks supposedly enable and support us for our very own social good: you know the phrases: we are now “more connected than ever; we are a connected “community”: check in on one another during tough times etc. social-media-networks attempt to territorialize, capitalise, and disrupt the realm of signs (replacing it with their own). these networks thus destroy  and delimit the sprawling thick potentiality of the internet, which is too nebulous, and oscillating to come to really know what it is capable of as an extension of our packeted imaginaries. the language of social-network propaganda, tech company ads and fine-art-cultural platitudes alike are all along the friggin same white lines. why are so many speaking of an ethics of radical care with no material benefits? theory or writing is not care? surely citational practice is not care when you have lots of money from your university job? middle-class professional networking practices are not care-full.


ii. what is it to care, to really care?, to love in an arts community? love is sometimes thrown about in  lots of these professional spheres as the presumed underlying basis or motivation for our lovely words, as the bread-text. i really love the marginalised. i love the poor. i love this person whom i work with. i love this friend whom i work with. i love my colleague whom i work with. i love my employer whom i work for. i love this institution in which i study.  i love this performing arts company which gave me a little-chancey.  i love my career. i love (my) art.  i love this aesthetically encoded exclusive encrypted chimeric commodity – (more or less or, at least, comparable with the love i have for you my dearest–dreary-fatty liver).  i really care, ya know? love is thought to be enough. but how can we love when our actions say otherwise; when we participate in discursive practices that reinforce in their very delusion of doing forwardly or upwardly reinforce false capitalist-patriarchal-colonial notions about “excellence”, ascension, and success from hard-work - as if the private school and good nutrition had nothing to do with it.  how can we continue to be so aspirational, when we carelessly reproduce (through our inaction and perverse linguistic inversions) the stigma marked on those thought to be not-doing-capital consciously, or properly-enough, or at all?

by speaking in our riddled ways, we end up riding on the backs of those stigmatised by general capitalist wickedness: this way, we end up giddying up, on the:

homeless
people of colour
unemployed
old aged
underclass men and women (trans and cis)
sexually and gender diverse in various working/underclass cultural contexts
those in resource states or developing countries
underpaid factory and migrant workers
the international proletariat, and precariat
animals, insects, plants, pollen etc.
the differently-abled
those suffering from myriad mental illnesses
the neuro diverse
the ocean and the sand.
prisoners in jails.
the earth’s deep ecologies etc. etc.

this means that by doing and making in unquestioned and particular ways (business-art as usual), we end up digging, destructive and cavernous holes, as we take up more upward space.

into these holes, we cast those that we end up to excluding, or stigmatising as a by-product of our ascension motions.

“i made this good work because i am able-bodied and have enough capital and education to make it happen”; “ i even got a grant for doing it cleverly and goodly!” me happy!

“too bad for those who don’t do goodly and grantly.” i’m sad for them, ya know? it sucks. but my project will make the world better. i will make the world better through my project - at least that’s what i told the arts councils (and my friends).

you didn't get the grant because:

you didn’t work hard enough.

you were not educated enough.

or you weren't excellent or innovative or socially conscious  enough! (in the cryptic ways necessary).

you didn’t know enough people.

you did not shimmy in the right circles!

your thoughts were not organised or sophisticated enough.

your concept was not viable and/or or too ambitious.

you are not aware that this has all be done before and you are a daggy frump thinker! 

so: how by refusing to act and utter in the ways we have been acting and uttering; by opening up more spaces of not-doing in those older or precise ways do these spaces become places of shared ontology and being? places where if you exist, and if you have an earnest desire to create, then you are facilitated in doing so. no prerequisite for technical skill, and no sexy, language acrobatics.

iii. what is it to care, love, in an arts community? but really: on what terms and conditions are we really in an artistic community? how are we bound, entangled,  connected, affected, afforded, or stratified? is this transparent at all? who is keeping an eye on all of this? neo-liberalism has drastically changed the relational qualities of this notion of radical care, and community (formerly similar to the idea of commune, with altruistic connotations) towards the mythic construct of the individual as go-getter. but what support is there really for the precarious artist within a primarily middle-or-upper-middle class “community,” which is really better described as a milieu, or idealistic imaginary?  of course: these professional spheres may align on axis’ of marginalisation; this has its constructive positives without doubt. however, these axes are also engendered and enabled by particular forms of (silenced) and cryptic capital, all the time; encoded by the reconfiguration of the-modern-individual-as-node-in-network (primarily within professional or digital orbits, which overlap more and more these days). ultimately, this node-work, is the result of lots of classist-work, and requires the hidden work of classed-cleaved-bodies; either, those who are forced to professionalise and perform in a slick non-agitative ways, to gain access to the node-work; or those who, say,  clean performance or intellectual labour spaces so we can sit around and think or “make”; or merely those who supply the precious metals for our art-spinning-computers by risking their lives in actually precarious-mines; or who work 12-hour days in non-unionised chinese factories run by rich Western billionaire companies; or those who deliver your uber eats, who are forced to speed while driving/riding, risking accidents, to meet fatal kpis, who are hungry themselves, to feed their children or study for a better life while we sit at home and glut ourselves on our ideas and our “art practice as research” woe-projects.  yes. those who lubricate the node-work are already acquainted/indoctrinated with its ways of conducting one’s body-mind; speech; behaviours, codes, and semiotic allusions. this en-classed-node-work is really not accessible as its proponents like to idealise or espouse: it is not as agential-tangential as it purports to be; and i see little difference between the node works of aspirational companies, and the professional art world; one wears flared-jeans sincerely, and the other ironically.

iv. what is it to care, love, in an arts community, when there is precariousness? of course, to be alive is to be precarious; as judith butler reminds us, once more: precariousness is to be at the whims of inertia; to be febrile connective tissue in sanguine assemblages, held together by imaginative-patriotic glue. this is a condition of being embedded within the flux and dynamo of living; our small kettle skinned soft-bodies; our sad and taut fluids; we are susceptible to the smallest amoeba; the largest hyper objects; our bodies are split and splayed at so many flesh-axis and data-vectors, and they tear so easily when cleaved by the fragile bonds and networks, and systems that hold our so-called societies together.  at current (early 2020). the past four months have been occupied by deeply unnerving and unfathomable damages: the first was horror-fires, whose smoke, like the unwelcomed intruder raps at the shaking windows before forcing their way in; and the sounds of the screams of a billion perishing animals, like shivering pink cartoons; and the inverted, subaltern frequencies of their nerve-ending-hurtings; and interior-bodies expelled from their skins - alike hands breaking through over-excited and dilapidating sock puppets.

yes. our avocado dreams insulate us from this horror; organs boiling and pressured flesh-steam pummelling its way through exhausted, coral-like clavicles; farmers in what seemed like slow motion, defending their cauterised homes, walls collapsing inwards, and rib cages following shortly afterwards; the old woman (not on the news) doubled over coughing up specks of blood; and now coronavirus; with its glimmering, crown-like transmuting surface, which found its way from the nucleus housed in animal saliva, to undermine the concerted efforts of neo-liberal governmentality; where government's lazily-inaction around the world is literally killing thousands - particularly the poor, and the black, and the brown bodies abroad and here as well; where deeply evil-satanic policemen step on young african-american necks, from which they are forced to cry for the inalienable right to breathe. where mining companies blow up 40,000 year old indigeous sites and offer a reluctant twitter apology. where an isreali soldier shoots an unarmed, autistic palestinian boy. where an exacerbated cry barely escapes, like a feeble white ghost from my parched, dishonest lips. is this is all there really is? is that all there is? on loop? a remix of the abject sorrow of hatred. we are traumatised and isolated within this precarious state-hood (of affairs). trauma is not the exception, but one of the defining criteria of our era; for we are constantly traumatised; the emetic state of contemporary capitalist society is not exposed to us, within frameworks of healing, or therapy, but an onslaught; an assault from behind, below, above and between the oppressed already overburdened, paper-mache ribs; of those shivering uncertain questions and the breakdown of systems,  convenient rules, signs and archetypes. basically is this what it really feels like to be at the end of history.

v. what is it to care, love, in an arts community, when there is precariousness and precarity abound? precarity is a further burden resultant from precariousness. it is unequally distributed, the shadow; the inverse of wealth. it is the near-jobless and joblessness; the perpetually and impoverished and ill; it is the mothers and fathers, who will live less longer than yours. precarity is that which results from the neoliberal cult of individual emphasis; of the evisceration of the welfare state; the use of bodies for our bodies; for our celebratory art-and-personalactualisations.   to not experience precarity in these always precarious times for some,  is unfathomable.  in this melancholic way, i am reminded of the beautiful poems of the foxconn worker poet xu lizhi (worked at factory who makes our smartphones). these poems were made with near no resources; no leisure time, and no luxury of bourgeois, psycho-subjective actualisation. he wrote a collection of poems while working at the factory: in his poem " i swallowed an iron moon”  he says so friggin tenderly:

“i swallowed an iron moon, they called it a screw, i swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms, bent over machines, our youth died young, i swallowed labour, i swallowed poverty.” 

he is one but the multitude of precarious artists locally and around the world; this international precarious artist is one i am always worried about and one that we should care about. radically. when you use your computer for your techno-art-work, they sit in factories, not dreaming of biennales; or kisses-on-the-cheek-by-high-ups; art fairs; or grants; but rather, trying to avoid the pitfalls of dreaming, because if they fall asleep on the job - dreams are punished with punitive damages.  and i cried a lot when i heard about the suicides of all of these beautiful, foxconn workers.

vi. what is it to care, love, in an arts community, when there is precariousness and precarity abound in the network? the network system (the fly-ridden stinky oil-painted fruits at the top of which are all those artificial metal-strawed, cross-pollinators;  universities, arts council funding; professional appointments; publications; those private donors and patrons.  this coke-can mound does not legitimise. intersectional-class-struggle-hardships, it denies precarious artists the [albeit alcaline] breath of life needed to practice: because it is an infrastructure of value-architectures predicated on  the attendant exclusions (racial, gendered, classed) associated with the class-capitalist-value system: why would it give sustenance to that which it defines itself against? in opposition to? that is like sharing your birthday cake with the concrete; and one cannot eat a cake solely, on the ground, with their gaping mouth, without grinding their teeth away.

the network values the aesthetics of the ivory-keyed-teeth-speaker - but these cult-notions should be contested. shouldn't they be? Are they not abhorrent for any  sensitive person?

its values are those which typically correspond with enabling particular bodies, times, places, milieus and class-gendered-colonial constructs: the bitter sweet, sweats of its values are only extended (extracted for) to others when the network agents deem it so fit on their terms: excellence, innovation, ability, competence, and professionalism. these are grand enthroned, vista-ideas that perpetuate classed-oppressive structures; and these are replicated on every level of our western society.

for when one is adopted, or is encumbered by other-highups-in-the-network, and clothed in these metric-terms: they make you feel special and different and, yes, yes, superior in ways you have been yearning for now that you cannot be a bigot anymore - or, at least, in a public forum.

yes. we say(secretly):

“i am superior, I deserve it.”

“i worked and entrepreneuriated and innovated hard.”

“ i am disciplined: i am professional, effective, and easy to work with.”

“i am resilient” (against what? this is vastly different for different people: the damages of trauma, or overwork, or casualization. of fucking what? resilient to a bee-sting?)

“i am easy, flexible, and adaptable (but i also believe in emotional boundaries, because my psychologist said so!) i am hard-working, polite and considerate. oh, and also critical, accountable and lo and behold: reflexive.”

how these beaut-platitudes and currency-words are not so easy to disentangle from those given by billionaires such as bill gates and oprah winfrey - who nicole aschoff refers to as the “new prophets of capitalism”: 

“we worked hard, and we innovated they say. we were resilient in pursuit of more and more for me! we are maybe like maybelline © : we’re the ones who are worth it!”

but we all know it, don’t we? these are sickly-trickle-down discourses and imperatives: and are only able to be really explained by luck; opportunity and/or socio-structural-economic privilege.

the logic is that those who didn’t work hard:

have failed: are failed artists: are non-artists: are failed-humans who don’t have the grit or the resilience to succeed: who don’t possess the correct application of subaltern-hidden labour; who don’t have the apparent work-ethics. because ethics themselves are not thought to be enough. mutual-care is not thought to be enough.

vii. this idea of the profesh network arose within the rise of hyper-business- cultures in the early part of the 20th century. however, within the artistic spheres, it is more contemporaneously conditioned by the policy/and rhetorical changes advocated and legitimized by “new labour”; the late-nineties/early 2000s, uk labour party. new labour created an arts policy which was discursively neoliberal and economically rational. in the space of increasingly conservative attacks on public arts funding, new labour sought to protect public funding by reconfiguring the way in which government arts and cultural policy was legally and economically discussed and enacted within the polity. these changes also arose at the time wherein the party was becoming less-class and social-justice oriented and began to adopt the discourse of neo-liberalism, as a way to re-legitimise itself in the face of conservatives’ attacks. to renew its policies, and the arts culture at large: thus spawning the rise of the “creative industries”: quantifiable art making in economically beneficial terms – and even impactful and quantifiable, socially beneficial terms. so now, due to the ways in which we discuss making and policy and funding, my art project cannot be merely to feed the homeless: it must spread awareness about it and produce an ‘object” actual or virtual: it must generate capital in this act;  albeit, i doubt there is arts funding available to feed the homeless in this way: unless an artist decided to “improve” (through social practice and aesthetic-irritation) the circumstances of these people via the revolutionary potential of the great social-leveller that is art!

viii. enter the creative industries (lights, camera, sound, action, innovation, networking, sustainability, new social awareness, active listening, active and very phallo-centric skin tugging) . this is the theatre-arena wherein the arts industry (comprising organisations, individuals, stakeholders, intergovernmental and nongovernmental structures) were pressured/willing to adopt the rhetoric and organisational structures that were formerly associated with businesses and companies. now, art is quantified and justified in terms of its productive economic benefits: its multiplier values; its ability to generate excess, run off chemical residue and coat/lubricate other industries; as having data-quantifiable fiscal-social benefits... as being ultimately  justified. the language of the creative industries – manifest in the highest degree within the codes and aesthetics of modern “design” culture, which have permeated, so heavily, our social imaginaries in this regard: and more devastatingly our little practices. indeed, i among you also embody this network-consciousness 24/7.

ix. the tracings of neo-liberal-creative-industries is highly apparent in the attendant language and rubrics of arts funding grants (now more and more performatively socially progressive) espousing accessibility and social awareness, and all kinds of inclusion: but these wonderful aspirations do not nullify the fact that the mechanisms that engender the grants system is still incredibly competitive and elite; always, always, speaking in terms of “excellence,” of “innovation”; the scabrous buzzwords of the post-care age;  a logic emboldened and justified by the presence of the supposed natural logic market. alas, fine-art, theatre, dance, and art-music have been long enshrined (yet sometimes deluded) that they exist within the “market” (pop-music and other fields, such as advertising have no illusions in this regard).

fuck all of this: i instead turn to and champion a new mediocrity - and, in this regard, believe we ought to question all those who are good at being ontologically-market-driven; who do well to succeed in the markets. those artists from more professionalised, family backgrounds (business owners, ceos, investment bankers; owners of real estates; those within university professions etc.) view their parents, families, and their parents’ associates engaging within vast networks and they thus emulate accordingly to get what they want later in their careers. they view it as fine, and good to relate and operate in this way; and when they come into being as artists, they import this profesh-naturalised way of interaction into everything they do and make; thus reproducing the stilted cult of professionalism which has a very narrow band of operation and has left many behind, standing in torn shirts on the plastic polluted beaches of my childhood, which is the film metaphor equivalent of the remains of a:

cgi gladiatorial battle

air crash where only the beautiful survive

the residue of some heroic war film starring tom hanks

the ever more compromised movie-scene wreckage of everyday neoliberalism

this, funnily, brings back a memory when i was at liveworks (an australian progressive arts festival with the chosen few) at a discussion with a bunch of bougies with jobs, who were whinging about the lack of arts funding in australia.

and in all of this circular-masterbatory, well-enunciated and well-considered self-pity: a bold queer artist suddenly spoke about how it is well and good that artists bemoan the loss of funding, whilst still being able to practice: but that we should remember that there were those artists in the 80s and 90s who fell by the wayside, because they couldn’t understand, or work, or keep up appearences with the obtuse language and writing requirements of the grants -  in tandem with all of the viscious competition abound in the arts, generally.

i understand this desolation, and feeling of being left behind, because the scramble through so many thorny hoops for these life-saving “grants” will induce fear in any feeling person; the competitive funding rounds are highly-problematic; because they are provisional and scarce; as well as being rigidly apex structured;

in the creative industries (just like any other corporate industry), humans are now recast as resource-materials; as capital-accumulation-enablers; as para-social-nodes within the upward airy trajectories; and as a complementary force to this, the social-networks enable further grasping appendages to these competitive arts’ cultures; networks such as facebook are perfect sandwiches for competitive middle-class artists; they were created to implode both flesh-data and network at elite universities - designed for hungry young, aspirational, upper-middle class male professionals to have sex-relations that are network friendly (however, no doubt disadvantaging woman, and queer folk, in more ways than one).

x. but social media isn’t solely responsible, or the progenitor of this type of being and thinking; merely the technological curator of it in the sloppy post-post-modern age; like a friend who enables an alcoholic.  we are willing (and unpaid) interns in a corporate playpen of spectacle; and the network has recast our relationships, familial, sexual, and interpersonal, in pursuit of more capital, as commodity and quartered-photo-flesh; as the swarming locusts of representation; death in this new milieu is for many irrelevance, deactivation or deletion: or the purgatorial performative state of cancellation. and these associated logics, and discourses, and fervour, and imperatives are the very consecration of our networks:

how to make the most out of your friends?

how to win and influence others?

if your friend or acquaintance has a skill or ability or connection: fucking; draw from it: nay use it!

if you see someone high up in the network; seek them: and transcend your wet-bodily-obfuscated-situation and become lovely and beautiful;

become autoluminescent but not too transparent;

lest you be truly vulnerable;

lest you legitimise your little place in the network:

and always, always work to hide the labour or privilege that has enabled your ascension in this way!

xi. within information technology and business nomenclature; a node is part of a network;  represented by a small black dot; that connects you with other encoded dots (like nodes within computer networks)  we are now little packet-datas; encoded with professional curriculum vitaes. of course, our networks have disjunct-and-conjunct-neighbouring-nodes: there are families, and loves connected; and some of that occasional thick and wet desirous sex-longings we seek on tinder and grindr apps.

but, always, always, a seeking of the mega-node: the internationally renowned and adored artist; the lovely panelist. the ted-talker. the often played composer; the professor or lecturer. the arts council board member. the vice-chancellor. these are the array of successful neo-liberals who secretly believe in fucking free-markets; in their skills above others; in their right to be exceptional (above humans and non-humans alike). and by being “excellent” in this competo-way,  they feed into the larger processes that commodify and quantify and extract through data-mining systems that prey (and reduce us numerically and thus sociopathically) on our:

abilities-as-data,

families-as-potential-capital,

friends-as-more-para-capital,

our-bodies-as-bio-data,

interests-and-skills, and they even fucking tabulate our fucking movements!!!!

and deep into the social-darwinist mentality behind the “meta-market” and the quantifying-capital systems, behind the accolades, grants, awards, and successes of the golden children (i mentioned) translates to this stark maxim:

that those who can’t make it according to the  (technical, socio-personal-political) will flounder, or become dispossessed or die - and be punished ad nauseum for this so called “natural failure.”

vii. but the fact of the matter is that: that this protestant work-ethic narrative, (that which the sociologist max weber speaks of “as the spirit of capitalism”) i.e the “rational: hard-working pursuit of capital. this,  in tandem with the those old liberal ideas from post-revolutionary america are perverted and subverted and inverted; now reframed: we are both aided and abetted by neoliberal governmentality: there is no real meritocracy; for some people’s nodes are always growing bigger than others. their networks are like masses of strangler figs; sprawling and empowered by these real-fake ideas of autonomy and agency.

these node-works are upwardly mobile; aspirational and to an extent, saturated by teleological-narrative-ambition. the node-work is a web we did not create, but we maintain, and as we try to scale its stickiness; we will become entangled; become stuck; we will oscillate and vibrate; ultimately, before the 8 legs of precarity: (joblessness, poverty, houselessness, hunger, poor health determinants, mental illness, isolation, and death) will devour, or purposely trip up others along the way;

or, as they cauterise the web behind them as they go;

or, they may leave their own waxy excretions along the way as they go;

as they solidify further the exo-system that engineered and perpetuated the web-structure in the first place.

but who has a right to this web-work? who really has the right to dream in the way we speak of dreaming? or fulfil life as an artist at the cost (competition) of others with similar dreams?

notions surrounding excellence and technique (all of which deny the able bodied privileges inherent in this: for a “working” “healthy” body is its own method which is rewarded for simply being: more so if it is maled-riched-white; there are many poor denied opportunity; and “hustling” or “networking” really just boils down to the spoils of education; or your parents doing lots of favours for you; and you will win a house at the end of it too, so there is nothing to lose! lay around and leisure and think!

the clock is inexhaustible for you, beautiful one!

xiii. we must be wary of what the romantic and modernist baggage of the fucked up idea of this “artist”: the ultimate uber-identity; the subjectivity-master; the vision-renderer; who bends materials, objects, people, and non-humans to their whims; the little autocrat. the romantic archetype has cast this character in stone; they love technique; they love beauty; they love purity of thought whilst they maintain and keep alight a whole array of problematics the non-educated will never be privy to; a belief in the essential, is for workers, a necessity to survive, you post-structuralistfuckhead sycophants; how do you maintain all this whilst being casual? whilst slummin’ it, taking non-prescribed ritalin, and reading foucault. those bougies fail upwards all the time the real precariat, fall into disrepair, decay and addiction. these bougie artists are congratulated for shitting on the pavement and then filming it and selling it for $1700 a usb. the artist is a glutton for actualisation; either reflecting the greater ethos of neo-liberal self-hood (or from formative-psychic-wounds) wants to be loved, and desired to an abject fault; without question; at any cost. the artist plays our levi stauss’s hero's journey which is a noble-narrative; but merely a deep mimesis of the larger judeo-chistian-sacrifical-code; they merely do not want to exist and be excoriated by the whims of the market; they want to either disrupt it; or be their own market. produce, disrupt, repeat are the main tenets of neo-liberal-individo-commodity-systems. the artist does this by embodying the politics of cool; and in this nietzschean-zarathustrian-accent after emerging from the cave; the artist seeks to start anew; ultimately becoming both commodity-libidinal-desirable. the uber-super-duper-subjectivity – and who don’t actually give a shit about uber-workers’ rights, but who gain more capitals for saying that they do.

xiv. this is the defining condition of this late-stage of our shared capitalisms: the self-aggrandising subject; the actualisation at any costs: but these costs are severe and real: these are the costs of bangladesh workers who make our designer clothes; huddled in small sharehouses and sending money back home; the costs are for the underage, african cobalt miners, stuck in dodgy supply chains, who die getting the metals for our computers; for workers committing suicide in endless-day-electronic-parts-factories:

the pre-moderns, as according to the philosopher girard, were terrified of “identity” and would go to violent  sacrificial measures to stop identity from being expressed; this is confronting to the identity glutton and uber-profesh-strategists. and yes, group identity is important in contexts; it is neccessary when the state discriminates in terms of politics of difference; but there is reason to be suspicious of how identity markers are co-opted by the always fleeting, vestiges of big financials; of the way in which neo-liberalism then uses identity politics for its own advantages: co-opting and not adopting or saving or sharing: when banks are promoting queer politics; or pepsi stealing from the momentum of the black lives matter movement; there is cause to be very, very suspicious, because this process results in a limiting of popular struggle against capital – not an enabling of it; because it draws the limits of transgression into those of repetition: the real efficacy of revulsion, and revolt, and thus, will to action is dulled at this point:  popular struggles can only be popularly legitimised now through properly prepared capital marketing: thanks for all the hard work: we will now take over in the legitamisation mechanism. facebook will keep us scrolling onwards, onwards into streaming glittering histories.

xv. this network aspiration capital model is not everyone’s model and many many resist or carve new ways in the fast melting plastic speckled glacier: but this narrative does instill a type of trajectory which seeks to emphasise an ethics-of-care-tethered-to-personal-rubrics-of-capital-value; the artist is now craftsperson of the network of professional language; of rubrics of: ”how does this innovate?; the artist as researcher as positivist; sneaking up, arbitrarily, like the varicose veins of the grants councils: the governments, the donors, the patrons.  the artists’ greater postmodern project is not necessarily the materials they use; the things they write; their ideas, feelings and experiences they share, but the node-work is their greatest project; their hegelian-spiralling ascension upwards; that is the thrill of the egoic-fortification; the deep neural and social reward centres open 24/7; the constant and grating congrats, congratulations, and abundance of erotic-beauty everywhere; but, for some it is more of a poker machine than for others; to attain mastery of the node-work, and then the market (jeff koons for example with his $500million) is the artwork; however, the actual “work” that goes behind the making of success in this way, can include elements such as: the hidden labour behind the artist (family-care-capital; private schooling; university; nepotism; ablebodied-ness; heteronormativity; white-privileges), which to varying degrees; invisibly and silently, prop the artist up why they make installations in mummy/daddy linen-lined lounges; or condusive  spaces fostered over time through highly valuable fret-works.

xvi. but what is this upward-ascent inscribing in the neuron-nervous-behaviors of us all? this exists outside the obligatory care; to care which many religious groups; ngo’s; careworks; nurses, hospital workers; and family carers exude in varying degrees, and according to various needs; there is real, tangible good in some of these places, there clearly is; but nothing is perfect and there are always cases of mis-care, neglect, mis-deed, and/or abuse in all care-spaces.


for companies and artists alike there is a delusion of care; when we are using the language of caring/altruism/community; for upper-networks for applications for morality-applauses and little likies and smilies and memes.

but why can’t i choose who i care for? of course you can: but to care for those who will benefit you; to be interested for the most part in the upper node; because focus and attention are the precursor to care activities: but if capitalism incentivises certain types of cares; then these should be questioned; and no, the state does not always do this; care workers; home carers; and nurses are all drastically underpaid; and most of this work is done by women. conservative governments in this country (and abroad) have successively cut money from state funded care-works; leave it to the market they say; the market will determine if people are worth keeping alive;

they keep cutting, and cutting, and cutting, and “budgeting” for what?

for there is already a lack of readily available crisis accommodation; mental health services: drug and alcohol rehabilitations centres; a profound lack of abundance of care’n.


the key impetus of neo-liberals is “to pick yourself up by the bootstraps”: to care for yourself to enact “self-care”; to make it on your own; dreams can happen and if they don’t: you are fucking defective! only those who generate capitals deserve to be “cared for”; don’t you see how this brine-piss; this fucking torrent of dirty glass, like a white angry god throwing spears, strikes us; and infects every aspect of our motivations.

at this point, you might say, well this author is doing a lot of projecting; this author is fucked up! but next time you go to your gallery function: have a look at who is getting the most attention; who is cared for the most, as you step past the homeless person sleeping  on the pavement outside.

and this discourse (but this is so much more worser) is manifest in the on going health care system crises around the world; caring for those with capital: precarious workers forced to sell organs to feed their families while gluttonous americans can live another life of greed; an emphasis on neglecting those without: a loop as old as massed-hierarchical-societies; but the problem is, now most of us know better, and continue to buy apple products, and order on amazon, and move to burn the house down.

we desperately need to seek forms of caring-in-the-node-work – if we are going to exist in it. but isn’t all type of moral-care selvish you have questioned, agitated with friends while stoned at parties? you come close to eclipsing the ayn randian idea that “all virtue is selfishness.”

well, i don’t think anyone caring for a palliative relative/patient would tell you that this type of emotional-physical-existential-labour is virtuous;

do care workers post selfies next to their sick patients? of course fucking not.

xvii. we ought to question our care-incentive-languages when they are enabled by an upward ascending hierarchical node-work; the conception that we are free-agents working on our own merits is a myth: and so is the illusory professional network; all of this is pertinent, particularly when we are rewarded to be virtuous; or incentivised to care-for/about those above us in the network; here there is a cognitive dissonance in the creative communities; how do i sustain myself (and care for others)?; how can i compete in a scarce world (and be altruistic)? why are we seeking questions always so enshrined within commodo-care: but why should it be a question of  if/or? there would ideally be integration in some way: for example, how do we consider the question of the novice, naive, or precarious artist?: those lower down in the node-work; what are we doing to seek to be altruistic; to create a horizontal or lateral node-work with space for them: a smashed-network; less of a pyramid and more of a nourishing rhizoid structure.; and tutoring or mentoring is not necessarily enough. in 1902, the anarchist philosopher kropotkin proposed mutual-aid as a form of shared commonality between the common good, having observed strategic survival mechanisms in the animal kingdom; his theories challenged the survival of the fittest, and eugenics of the social darwinists which was prominent at the time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

but i mean can’t we fucking see it.

the residue of these social-darwinist ideas: that you must be clever, strong, smart, beautiful to survive, and make it in this world!

don’t you see how this discourse shapes our fucking art world? how much art is made and “hustled” by “able-bodied beauties” who are rich and righteous and fucking white.

these fucking ideas; this fucking language: of technique, critique, virtuosity. whilst having some useful (i guess) postmodern lingerings and progessive-smelly-post-human spores, they still permeate how we talk about how art is made, and keep the gates firmly welded shut by their preclusive linguistics. fuck!

xviii. there is no overcoming the market for the time being (but i still dream) but we can beat or defy its directives if we isolate them; i am in this network and so are you; the question is how do we exist outside of it? how do “we,” in our art-community-struggles emphasise the multiplicitous “us” as opposed to scaling and maintaining the empty-architecture for our great network building monolith, which ends with you sitting alone at the end of your life surrounded by objects and awards and not people who love you for you; how do we make  altruism as an essential part of our practice? i leave this term for you to unpack and figure out what it means for you; one instance of what i could mean here could concern collaboration: if one has more capital than another in a collaborative relationship, then we should be compensating equally, so both are the same-off; or we should be distributing grant money more easily among peers: and always constantly questioning these litanies of what is excellence, what is innovation, what the fucking hell is “good”? why are some artists hoarding the limited money there is: this is predicated on the cumulative assumption principle that they are making better-art: but what the fuck is good art? a progressive-spectacle at carriageworks, or vivid, or the tate; or a folk-song written in a foster home in a rural town; what is our value system; what are the conditions; and on whose directives, agencies, narratives, trajectories, and terms? maybe i’m naive, but i think art can (and has existed) in spite of the bourgeoisie neo-liberal baggage of history. there are those who can remember times before it.

xix. in these stilted-frozen times, there is fertility for re-organisation, reconfiguration and new social imaginaries: maybe it's time to stop the rat-race that is often strengthening class and race and gender inequalities: how can we really-radically extend our-care, and collaboration in support of well being? to do away with encodings of notions of skills, goods, values, excellents, which serve to exclude those who wish to practice art making but who might not resonate with these terms or fulfil these rubrics to perform appropriate to their implicit ideological agendas: why is the art being promoted and fostered in australia and other western countries predicated on graduations of ability/knowledge/bodily-methodologicals. here, again, we re-turn to excellence as another word for virtuosity:

but, let’s try and trace way back to those early mediocrities we all share and stay with them for a lil’ while?

we can resist commodo-cares by reaching and sharing outwardly (which many do already and have always done): but this is a question of the hidden imperatives of horizontalised-discourse, while we have resources to care for our lateralised-precarious-artists: to care for those who are struggling in the professional lattice: we need to emphasise these values over competition, we ought to do this, primarily for the sole purpose of redistributing existential well-beingness: the more artists the better: noam chomsky and delta goodrem both agree when they say “we were born to try”; to make, to create.

we must always try to be conscious of the precarious who do not survive in this world; or thrive as we do - or live less longer because of poorer health determinants;

precarity prevents the facilitation of the right conditions to create and survive; to make it as a “professional”; this is the acute mixture of education; skill building; and leisuretime to create art; why is it that the bourgeois or skilled network builder should predominate in the arts as they do in business? this is not the reason i signed up for: to create new and acute and clever forms of “elite products” or practices for discerning consumers with exponentially  disposable incomes: why is it that the precariat’s body is damaged by the same capitalist processes that engender the proliferation of commodo-art; the computers and phones we use; the objects we involve; the technologies we “innovate” with.

arts a good. yes – a good product for discerning buyers. but, really, to invoke a cliche:  at what cost?

moreover: beware of object-oriented-ontologies proliferated by rich artists who care more about objects then living humans! fuck the flat ontology! i want the retribution of equitable circumstances.

hierarchies are social and bio-social – but these aesthetic value economo-gradations should not exist at the expense of others.

xx. business deceptively appears to be becoming more ethical but it is still ruthless, and sociopaths or narcissists are often rewarded for their cunning activities; is the art world radically different? if you don’t want to be defined by business-consciousness then we have wiggle-room here; but if you are competitive on purpose or want to ascend in this way: then stop tricking me. but if not: we ought to say no to commodo-care (caring for commodities, caring in pursuit of commodity, or fortification of commodity or ourselves as commodity). we have the ability now to touch more than ever; touch is more important than connection sometimes - for it is the sinewy basis of connection: touch through screens, hands and minds: words, and sounds etc.

and once these neo-liberal-discource imperatives dissolve; and these rigid aesthetic and social criterias break like a stale biscuit, then we will have diversity in the arts, and a real structural intersectionality that allows the poor to have a shot to create in a supported way: and not be locked out by the superficial (and often invisible/encoded) rubrics of favourtised (therefore regulated) competitions. as an artist, i desperately yearn for new forms of post-capitalist-intimacies. but solidarity is important. being wary that collaboration is not utopia: for do the disadvantaged/ people you work with for your grant social-praxis project have the same material conditions as you? can they sleep on your lounge if they are struggling? can you lend them money? be a guarantor on a lease because you own your own house? are they really your co-collaborators; or merely-materials? we ought to think about our commod-cares in this way.

xxi. for those of us at the bottom (or the knee-length of the  network), we have the privilege to view and even undermine this wobbly thing. hence springing from this delicate thought-mould sits and spring the idea of a love-works; caressed by thousand fingered transparent labours and privileges; and sharings: mutual aid is best when we are radically transparent: how much income are we receiving? how much capital can be redistributed? who has the money, and from where? for there is precariousness and then there is precarity: we must be vigilant to distinguish. for a little is a lot for someone with nothing, and you may think you have not a lot, but compared to others you have world making tentacles within your reach. transparency demands that we must be wary of those who use constructed or marginalised identities to promote/market capital for capital interests; these para-social-ego-agents will not disarm the network: indeed, they reify it even more: supreme narcissism is to project the self onto everything and manipulate everything according to sick desires of the thinking-self. an ongoing and pathological solipsism. taking this into account, we ought to realise that capitalism is not conservative: it is progressive as fuck: whatever is porous/flexible enough to commodify, it will pick up on and co-opt. it deeply desires this to sustain itself.

the ideologies of communism are profitable; anarchism is profitable if it is popular enough:

this is the supremo loop: it subsumes noise, irruption, resistance, transgression, action, etc; and swallows it all like the incredible blob!

xxii. i really think we need to render our networks into loveworks. but in these ways we must reflect: discussions of structures become reified as structures themselves. how much power are we lending to historical weight and situations? if this is to the point of inaction, let’s push those history-blocks into the bay.  i really do think there are ways, enclaves and modalities with which to beat but not necessarily live outside the markets of capital for the time being. directing energy towards altruistic and mutual aid practice (including but not contingent on art making) is one way through but not out. 

yeah. true.


but how do we deal with the fact that our co-workers, colleagues and peers sometimes/most times have all the monies and opportunities, particularly if they are practicing well into “maturity”? and from this, how do we countenance the socioeconomic privileges from a local and internationalist perspective without alienating or nullifying the real and ravaging a(e)ffects of capital through biopolitics, class-cannibalism, exclusion, and even premature death?

xxiii. throughout history, in most cultures (particularly in the pre-modern periods) spaces can/have been (now more and more rare) cultivated that foster sharing and community, over competition and getting ahead. for these are the negative values that are enabled through inherited capital gifts (property, inheritance, family connections etc.)

can we really have frank discussions of how contributions help the community? can we move through these ideas together in non-aggressive and/or condescending ways? there is really to much at stake here for the precariat-artist to not try and work through these ideas.  could this be attained through rigorous and sustained (wide scale) skill, or actual money sharing: recognising that one may have had a better lot in life than others and how this can be resourced amongst and through the spaces/localities/situations in which one makes and subsists?

in this imaginary: labour and privilege is rendered transparent, confronted face on, and moulded in supple and nourishing ways. there is no one picking oneself up by the bootstrap but a collective walking frame:

together, as thick-friendships dashing against the rocks together in the dark, we struggle slowly towards radical and frank story sharing to clear the way for real-as-can-be and less-fragmented (read: fiercely scared) node-making.

shame and guilt and shying-away are done-away within these tentative yet welcomingly sloppy configurations.

we pay those we collaborate with equitably and fairly from what we have: we share actual capital. money!!!! we also don’t hoard information, opportunity, making, materials etc. you know what i’m talking about? we need to also recognise the growing isolation of our times; the techno-corporate interests who facilitate our alienation and in-fighting and then profit off it (oh, hi marky z). the social media revolution has generated more precise and acute forms of isolation - isolation free from the necessity of actual, corporeal-touch. the poet tao lin describes this condition throughout his bare but tender poems and writings. this is also reflected by the practice of hikikomori - a phenomenon observed in japan, where youth do not leave their houses for months or longer at a time. one such reason for this is “flat economic indicators” whereby, in the society, there are not as many opportunities as there once were in the super competitive job market. i can relate :(

xxiv. it’s a balance of deeply acknowledging and sharing the pain (knowing, for the most part, we are all trying to survive in capitalism or the hegemonic shadow of it) so it keeps us acutely aware of the value of real-caring, sharing, and communal needs for love and tenderness. it's the recognition that in not doing, making, constructing-personhood or even-being in the “modern”sense, we invite and welcome those who capital stigmatises in their “not-doing properly” or at all. this might be a good shared starting point for re-evaluating our tacitly beautified/ sacralised (yet violent) value systems, and from that space, the gaps, mirrors and perceived fertile nothingnesses reveal themselves, for what they are: for earnest engagement, and from that actual transparent love-work world-making might commence in little professional/institutional art/music spaces at first/or remind us the urgency of re-starting forgotten or neglected projects in this capacity: to really make/allow/foster the low-ses and precariat-artist to create unimpeded by structural disadvantage; to create with real fecundity. yet, it is importantly to note, that even though we are all becoming increasingly precarious, that those artists with jobs (or consistent incomes) and internet access access are best equipped to argue for the retention of the policy-corona-changes to welfare and social services that have come about to “save the economy.” we also need to save lives in the process. and we need to always think of the way the global precariat who is suffering and hurting.

xxv. so what is it to care for the precariat? to really care and to (many)fold this into our convenient or easy art-understandings of precarity. this attention to care needs to be focused in spheres that neglect to care, but who perform that they really care.

how to really care for the poor and disadvantaged, and those in the arts such as this? care for the poor is often religiously motivated. often is. is also often abrupt. “ have two dollars and shut up!”


a caring statement here and there utterered in a group chat, a conference, an exhibition statement: always, always inoculated from determined-un-health realities. to care for the poor means to care for their health and well being-in-the-world (my father’s body is deeply precarious and damaged by capital extractions, and his spine is shrinking and they don’t know why) care is often encoded provisionally. and always weighing heavily on the side of linguistic fireworks (not love works).


to care holistically in this way (and to live up to our words) would mean challenging our entire value systems, and politico-bio-aesthetics. to say that: because one may be “unskilled”. or without home. mentally and physically incapacitated. or systemically broken. of skeletal speech. or no speech at all. or of immobility, that they are really still of value, of worth. that they are here, and now. that they are immanent with us and that they have the right to be supported in their act of creation. in spite of your nasty view of them as lacking rigor-technical-aesthetic-sublime visions of labour-ethics; working; and individual accoutrements. in this capacity, we must work against the so-called magic of entrepreneurial spirits, who determine divine metrics at this late stage. they are the brims on the hats we no longer need to wear to shield us from the sun.

we must work harder in spite of a system that views the poor as less-than human or other-than human. put human creep aside and bougie artists who care more about non-human actors and theory, than care-praxis; much, much work still needs to be done to be here with, and to hear these generous stories:

massed. collective. multiplicitous. non-localised. entangled love-worked emotional and physical labours from all privileged spheres:

to transform, but not hopelessly transcend.

xxvi. the plastic structures that narrate the separation of grass stems from one another; which bio-chemically malign and reorganise them for multi-commodo-mouths.  which make crop seeds sterile and impose patents on regenerative life.

what i mean is that these value systems that we devour and grind against in all ways possible are largely arbitrary. the logic of the market and the products and all that. and those funding body inviligations and all that. which (da da dada da) make us care for careers and products more than we do for people, for shimmering, dancing, singing-living things. i make no claims to the natural: romanticism, hitler and art school ruined that for all of us. there is strength in strategic essentialism. there is just-strength in those nice feelings you have in your-tummy-and-back-of-your-neck-tingle when you are genuinely nice to each other ? its bloody simple!

xxvii. my deep liturgical faith in *my* property (actual, torrented, virtual, server-generated-educated) constitutes and determines and allocates my self-hood vectors. and i know how exhausting this writing is by now – and i don’t give a nice-fuck. i was raised by a macro-narcissist and so were you. let”s argue it out. shout it out and fuck it out if you have to! i cry for care and warmth and so do you. admit it. please... someone has to verify to me right now that you are not a philosophical zombie.

xxviii. i cannot resign myself to immuno-apolitical-bourgeois apathy at this time. this is a real lack of care. unfortunately. but structurally across the bloody bread board, there is a lack of care for working and underclass artists within a upper-middle-class aesthetic sublime (bas-turd) milieu, which does not care to recognise its apparent lack of care and good-will, nor does it spare a thought for a second for the financially disadvantaged that sit on the horizons - apparently we are “twiddling” our thumbs.

platitudes are good and well.

aphorisms are good and well.

proviso-care utterances are just good.

but how is altruism in this way truly engendered within our artistic communities in this late-stage? what is a hierarchical community when some peoples” parents will actually just live longer by virtue of being rich or white? how can we care downwards when all we care about is upwards. i want society to live up to the contract it promises. that it promised us. if it is illusory, then just say so and we will revolt. if not. then live up to your end of the bargain.

xxix. as i mentioned a few steps up, there are ways, enclaves and modalities with which to beat and even attempt to live outside the markets of capital for the time-being. directing energy towards altruistic and mutual aid practice (including, but not contingent on art making) is one way through but not out. this is truly nothing new, and many communities are enacting this. but rememering: repetition gives form to anything graspable, including ideology, and products and even community; it solidifies in collaboration with time. but to rupture the appropriate codes on those vectors that harm,  one must aim for more than mere aesthetic differentiation, aesthetics-as-politiks, transgression or even symbolic online, once-a-year protest. we should be recognising and navigating structures always, but always remembering that the nodes in the network should be loved because they have secret/hidden/tender connections elsewhere and aren’t just node-makers all the time. we must talk and listen care-fully, and act well-fully, for the wellbeing of each other. please can we? let’s knock these hierarchies off their stilts and loot something beautiful.

xxx. (three kisses on purpose) look, i really need for us to love and care 4 real – cos i am ready to care and love u. i believe it is my labour to share info with u and explain things that i think about that u might think about to. my emotional labour is the most powerful tool i have 4 u.

and i really do care 4 u

(and i’m trying to make it unconditional).

lots of love,

[me]











©MMXXII James Hazel
All scores, texts, works available via request