Monuments and Plots

What do you do at the point of your own dissolution? The problem I have with meaning is the deterrence of deconstruction, the ability to systematize everything into causes, effects and trends of power which subject our bodies to forces beyond control. I feel an inability to realize meaning in something that has no origin in self. I’ve found myself engrossed in reading about the spaces I inhabit, the modes of presence I practice – I always do these readings on the top floor of the library, looking down, silently. The monuments here capture you: somehow, their scale as a backdrop transposes onto the scale of your actions, the decicive texture they render on our bodies signals the experience of meaning in its own right. They say: “nowhere else but!” “no place other than!” to your every move, somehow their declarations of where fill in for answers to why. The monuments, the size and scale themselves help to erase what is human between us. They draw your attention towards achievement and permanence in the singular sense, the embodiment of phallic individualism, each erection of concrete and marble secure in their significance and inevitability (with no damage extracted by the photos and films in their various idolatries). It is this final analysis, of the absurdity of practicing self-performance under the tutelage of such immensities and mythical significations leaves me disarmed in purposes, at a cross-ways for understanding meaning: before me lies the massive promises of a world without doubts, behind lies the peculiar isolation of non-participation through deconstruction. Each plays off each other, constructs lurid tales of power, between that of the wise and detached and the engaged and overcoming. Neither seems to respect the immediacy and absence I feel at a point of articulating where my life will lead: predictions for the future tend to ignore us now.

Plots tend towards death: we act on them with an eye towards exceeding ourselves in death, to overcome it by killing others or monumentalizing ourselves. We attempt to rebel from our subjugation to the powers of annihilation in the historical memory. Killing someone else is the final imposition of order, the indisputable mark of potency that also demonstrates our overcoming of that act of death. Disorder, then also signals the inability of any force, including ourselves to produce meaning: there are no economies of attention, no reason to pay attention to any one part before the other, all elements reduced to the same by fact of their mutual irrelevance toward each other. The plot organizes, it draws power between elements to create ourselves anew, now in the eyes of those around us, the co-conspirators as well as those whom we plot against. Deconstruction is the attempt to hatch plots around us in everything we see or do. Deconstruction is the plot without promise of death.

Duncan