Category Archives: theory

from Kuki’s Metaphysics of Literature:

“The past is not simply something that has already gone. The future is not simply something that has not yet come. The past comes again in the future; the future has already come into the past. If we follow the past far enough, we return to the future; if we follow the future far enough, we return to the past. Time forms a circle; it is recurrent. If we locate time in the present, we can say that this present possesses as present an infinite past and an infinite future and, moreover, that it is identical with a limitless present. The present is the eternal present with an infinite depth; in short, time is nothing but the infinite present, the eternal now.”

Excerpts from The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City by Anna Sherman:

The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.

Time was like a whirlpool.

Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.

The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.

Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.

Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.



According to the anthropologist Carmen Blacker, the word for divination in Japanese is ‘ura or uranai, a term which appears to indicate primarily “that which is behind, and hence invisible” (nayra)



But some imported ideas were rejected outright. In 1948, the Japanese, still recovering from the war and the lingering exhaustion that followed years of starvation and despair, held noisy protests against American-style Daylight Savings Time. The Occupation authorities were surprised: bringing the clocks forward an hour had seemed a minor innovation, when more drastic ones – granting suffrage to women, abolishing the hereditary rights of the nobility – drew fewer and less vehement complaints.

Daylight Savings Time became sanmah ta-imu (‘summer time’) in what the historian John Dower has termed ‘the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment. The Japanese felt summer time drew out the difficulty of their daily lives, and when the Occupation ended, it was one of the first things to be scrapped.

People wanted darkness to come earlier.



Since the late nineteenth century, Japan has used the Western calendar, but never the Christian system of counting years from the birth of Christ…The end of the Cold War gave its name to the reign of Emperor Hirohito’s successor, Emperor Akihito: Heisei (‘Peace Everywhere’), because he ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The 9/11 attacks happened in Heisei 13. Under the old system, the emperor’s astronomers might perhaps have restarted time by calling a new nengo after the so-called Bubble Economy collapsed in 1991, or after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But Heisei – Peace Everywhere has continued on, while North Korea launched missiles into the Sea of Japan and the United States fought al-Qaeda.



In 1921, a “Correct Time” propaganda was carried out in Japan under the sponsorship of the Education Department, and some eighty bell-ringers were rewarded for their long and faithful service. The recipients…included two women, one of whom was named Matsu Obata, aged 82. For fifty years she had struck the bell twenty- four times a day, and she had been admired for her accuracy in the execution of her duty, one requiring a great deal of watchfulness…



The monks wore enormous, tight-woven wicker barrels over their heads, hats that symbolize the death of the ego. When the Tokugawa fell, the emperor’s new government outlawed komusō, because they had often acted as spies for the Tokugawa. After 1868, komusō temples were burned, and much of the sect’s musical repertoire lost: notes that imitated the crying of cranes, or the beating of their wings; wind; petals falling; a bell. The Meiji authorities appropriated the beehive-shaped hat for convicts, who wore them into court. What had symbolized the ascetic’s ascension toward the sublime became stigmatized, an object of shame.



Kobayashi moved toward the eighteenth-century tomb of Tsunayoshi, the ‘Dog Shogun. Tsunayoshi became infamous for his edicts that penalized anyone who mistreated animals, especially dogs. ‘For the sake of a single bird or beast, the death penalty was inflicted. Even relatives were given capital punishment or deported and exiled…one contemporary account complained, after Tsunayoshi’s death, and his so- called ‘Laws of Compassion’ were rescinded.



Reducing a land to atoms,/ These atoms are measureless, untold./ Boundless lands, as many as these atoms/ are gathered on a single hair.

‘For Buddhists, the past, the future, and this moment: everything flows at the same pace, Takahashi said. ‘Every second is equal. The past and the future and what’s happening now, aren’t separate.

You can say a lot about time: but time is also things that don’t happen. I grew up in Hokkaido. On my route to school there was a crossroads and at the crossroads was a stop light. It was such a quiet place that my younger brother and I used to blast right through on our bikes without stopping. But one day, for some reason, I did stop. And a car whipped around the bend and zoomed through the crossing. If I hadn’t held back a few moments before, I would have died. Right in front of my younger brother.

Afterward I thought everything had happened in slow motion. For my brother, the moment went by like a flash. But time has the same flow: everywhere and always. How we think of it must just be a function of our brains. That sense is just the way we process our fear of death.

Because no one comes back to tell us what happens after we stop breathing, we’re scared of death. Time is the frame- work, the scaffolding, for how we experience that terror. Time lets us look away from fear. You might think of time as the life we have left.’

‘And the dead?’ I asked. ‘What about the dead?’

Takahashi shrugged. ‘The dead have slipped out of the framework.’

Excerpts from Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (which I cannot recommend enough):

Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves- each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.

Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.



That week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.

‘For me, understanding and reading 17th and 18th century colonial documents through Wabanaki political and cultural frameworks is part of a process of ôjmowôgan, the Abenaki word for history. The language tells us that “history” is a collective process of telling and re-telling, an ongoing activity in which we are all engaged.’

– Lisa Brooks, from https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/2976/page/4665/print

The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of the society. There is a continual exchange of meaning between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction, the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression… To be useful, the structural analysis of symbols has somehow to be related to a hypothesis about role structure. From here, the argument will go in two stages. First, the drive to achieve consonance in all levels of experience produces concordance among other means of expression, so that the use of the body is co-ordinated with other media. Second, controls exerted from the social system place limits on the use of the body as medium.

– Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols

from https://www.objectsandsounds.com/sonic-confessions-with-martyna-basta/:

“When I make music, I feel like I’m writing a letter and my message is just expressed in tones instead of words. The fragments of my thoughts are scattered in pieces, so perhaps my message is never clear but rather just full of questions.

Most of the time I also feel like the pieces I make are just kind of coming my way and taking shape naturally. Almost as if it’s happening without my control, even though I’m the creator. I am also an observer at the same time, so the outcome is always a surprise.



My process is spontaneous and chaotic. I feel very strongly driven by intuition and impulsivity. I can create a piece in a very short period, but I find that it’s important for my practice to leave it for a while, so I can come back to it and hear it differently or have other ideas that can contribute to it. Giving space to my music is just as important to me as making music.”


from https://shapeplatform.eu/2023/mistakes-became-a-source-of-inspiration-an-interview-with-martyna-basta/:

“From what I’ve observed – because I believe that being driven by intuition means that you also learn about your practice on the way – my albums evolve as a culmination of emotions, sentiments, or images experienced during a particular period. I never start a record with a blank page, but rather collect some sketches for a while, see what they’re about, and only from there I start to weave everything together, adding some new little narratives here and there. It’s very interesting to me because it shifts your position from being a maker, a musician, to being an observer. I like to think of music not just as a product of my making, but as something mysteriously materialising before me, originating from some magical realm.



I don’t think I’ve ever sonified a specific memory – it evokes the action, but it’s more a feeling that leaves a trace in the music. When I revisit my past compositions, it’s like flipping through old photographs, revealing fleeting glimpses of emotions. This is the essence of how my compositions unfold – I often blend field recordings from different times and places into a cohesive whole.”


Excerpts from https://publications.iai.spk-berlin.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/Document_derivate_00002030/BIA_055_067_081.pdf (this does include briefly the negative associations between q’iwa, homosexuality, and unproductivity that Elly mentions in the other thing I will link below, but think it is worth reading first if you are not familiar with the language/vocabulary for context before diving deeper):

Ethnomusicological studies in other parts of the world have noted correspondences between sound structure in music and social structure (e.g. Feld 1984). Similarly, I shall suggest that specific sounds used in musical perfor­mance, by certain peasant farmers in highland Bolivia, both appear to reflect and are perceived to manipulate social and cosmological structures. (note: see Noise by Jacques Attali for more on how musical relationships can affect new relationships in this world and beyond)



Whilst in the towns q’iwa is commonly translated as maricón or homosexual, in the countryside it is used in a less specific way to refer to a variety of aspects of gender mediation. A man with a high-pitched voice is q’iwa as is a woman who speaks in a low-pitched voice or acts like a man. Similarly the term is used to refer to men when they dress up in women’s clothes for certain rituals. But more specifically, on several occasions I have been told that q’iwa is khuskan qhari, khuskan warmi or “half-man, half-woman”. As such, q’iwa represents the conjunction of male and female, where the opposing sexes mix together equally.



Excerpts from https://www.momaps1.org/post/228-transcriptions-of-the-indigenous-and-migrant-justice-symposium:

Elly Crampton Chuquimia Quiñones-Tancara: In the 5th edition modern Aymara-Castellano dictionary, q’iwa & q’iwsa are treated as synonyms for queer people. Strategically, the new entries omit the anti-queer or bad character traits that have come to be associated with the terms (thank you Dr. Pairumani). We recall the musical or medicinal roles of these terms, which shows their unique medicinal or practical functions— for instance, the q’iwsa siku and q’iwa pinkillu. Q’iwsa also relates to the anti-spiral, unscrewing, twisting or luxation/dislocation, and q’iwa— the tears of our ancestors as qillqa, as writing, as language, joyful sadness. It is this medicine that also directs our roles as queer (q’iwa/q’iwsa) people for our communities, our relations, which is our ayni to the pachanaka, reciprocity to our people. The refusal of this medicine, brought by Christian doctrine, state law, and so forth, has caused a break in ayni that has yet to be paid back, or made just. In our commitment to our relations and the wak’as, our ancestors, we as queer people continue to give back what we owe, even when our medicine is so often mistaken for poison. We have a saying in our language, which is said many ways, but that I learned this way: qhipnayr uñtasisawa sarnaqaña. This is translated as: hay que mirar el pasado y el futuro para proyectarse en el presente—we must look at past and future in order to project ourselves in the present. Google translates it as: walking around looking backwards. Recalling the verb q’iwsuña, in the context of this phrase, we’re reminded that living in so-called reverse is also a perspective of balance. When it’s winter in our territories, it’s summer over here—to be in good relation with these lands I must live in reverse.

The phrase qhipnayara uñtasisawa sarnaqaña also implies we live with the ancestors in permanent encounter. The ancestors in our misperceived individuation, the elders of our elders, what physicists call the void, vacuum, the powerful small, where spacetime undoes—they say—somewhere around 10 minus 33 cm (a physicist told me that once). Can we understand that permanent encounter means we can give up the story of loss and recovery and remember what we already know, what cognitive neuroscience calls implicit or non-declarative memory, immemorable memory, which, as such, cannot be forgotten.



Ch’ixi indicates grayishness. Specifically, tiny spots, in contrast to the word allqa, which refers to big spots. This is important because allqa is associated with the contrasting colors that are seen as paired, and sometimes differentiated from q’iwa or queer medicine, which is frequently called lonely or single, separated from pairing (while q’iwsa also means “to remove something from its place,” we should be careful using q’iwa and q’iwsa as synonyms).

Through ch’ixi, what appears as a solid color, gray, is in fact made up of various spots. What is sometimes missed in the translation of the word ch’ixi, is that it also means a pile of small rocks, additionally, referring to the Pleiades constellation. Ch’ixi is also accumulated scree or the rocky debris that forms below mountains. Perhaps this recalls the image of our chullpas, the stone mounds that hold our eldest elders, in Paqajes. The spots & grayness of ch’ixi describe the titi felid or Andean cat, which the great Aymara scholar Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua drew as chuqui chinchay or qowa, writing this quote “very speckled animal” was “guardian of hermaphrodites, Indians of two natures.” Pachacuti also illustrates the relation, between the Pleiades, Venus, and chuqui chinchay or qowa the cat—our elders still speak these connections, as do confesionarios from the early colonial period.



It is in this context that Dr. Cusicanqui works our ancient queer medicines. Elaborating on that, we look at the suffix -naka, which is often referred to as a pluralizing suffix. Our elders tell us this suffix does not just indicate pluralization however, but variety, more precisely. So, when we say q’iwanaka and q’iwsanaka, we are referring to the manifold variations of so-called queer medicine. Re-sounding and practicing q’iwa and q’iwsa medicine is part of our ayni, our obligation of reciprocity as queer people. We say this in order to address the misunderstanding, of q’iwa, as unproductive, which comes with the historical violence of forced sterilization on queer people by the occupying states. Dormancy or repose, is not the same as unproductivity—Guamán Poma and his uncredited scribes and elders showed us this beautifully, in their planting ceremony illustrations.



This is why we listen to the tree, the bud, pankara, the butterfly, snail, ant, cricket, the trash, the river, the road that we set foot upon every day as stem, where we, as sariri, relay Tunupa, who they say changed from man to woman across the water, seemingly walking alone, only paired or connected across spacetimes. Recall the elders’ famous saying, translated as: “Do not pity q’iwa people, because they walk looking at the stars.” As mentioned, the last time we spoke, balance is a matter of perspective.



The pachanaka, or manifold spacetimes, stained us, jiwasa, before the creation of the World over our mother, the earth. Like titi, we were already stained before Europe arrived to these lands—very speckled, muy pintado, to quote elder Pachacuti again. This is the bittersweet red song, the lonely q’iwa melody, the transnocturnal huayño, the blood-red penumbra that spilled out as the chullpas mistakenly sang the first sunrise, seeing each other for the first time, individuated in sadness and joy, shared aloneness, speaking with tears, our first language: the birth of the mundo en policía, the policed world.



Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Our languages have been colonized, our philosophers have been killed, our theorists have been killed, and we have been left with nothing but degraded words, only words reduced to their pragmatic meanings. Then it’s up to the new generations.



Because the thing about the potency of ch’ixi is that it’s indeterminate. It is neither male nor female, it is neither above nor below, but it is both at the same time.

It is both male and female, it is both above and below. So how can this be transferred to the human? One can be in two forms. Ch’i—The pronunciation is a little difficult because there is ch’ixi with aspirate [pronunciation] and there is ch’ixi with explosive [pronunciation]. Ch’ixi is soft, it is unlearned. And I’ve made it more understandable with the notion of Pa’churrima divided heart, divided soul like the “double bind” that Gayatri Spivak talks about, right? I mean, “double bind” is when you have one identity mandate and you have the opposite mandate. You have the mandate to be white, and you have the mandate to be Indigenous. And they are in a clash. But that causes schizophrenia, social schizophrenia, collective schizophrenia, and personal schizophrenia. And the ways to cure these schizophrenias are to find [how] to live with the contradiction of having this identity that has two roots. They force you to choose one to deny the other, and I refuse to ignore the fact that I am also white, that I also have European roots, and that I do not regret it because I am not to blame for having been born that way. So I want to liberate myself by recognizing the best, the most profoundly contentious of both dimensions.

“In my study, I noticed something interesting about the etymology of “genre” and “gender.” Both words come from the Latin word “genus,” translating to “race.” It was an enlightening discovery to learn that “race,” “gender,” “genre,” and even “class” all come from the same word in Latin, thereby having the same function.”

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387112/noise-is-the-nigga-of-sound/

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/138/553676/who-haunts/

https://www.e-flux.com/notes/575616/how-to-haunt-oppenheimer-and-black-hanford?utm_campaign=later-linkinbio-e_flux&utm_content=later-39391406&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio

https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80952&page=1#.Tymk41wltKI
https://www.gallupsun.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17065:letter-to-the-editor-honoring-larry-casuse&catid=185:letters-to-the-editor&Itemid=615

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/fifty-years-later-casuse-an-ancestor-and-a-predecessor-in-indigenous-struggle/article_a0e706b8-b2ee-11ed-88c2-372450fae035.html

https://indypendent.org/2022/05/the-brief-brave-life-of-larry-casuse/

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/22829/19320/58582

“I am certainly aware that negative emotions such as anger and resentment have the potential to manifest themselves in disempowering and violent ways, I am not advocating for Indigenous peoples to be angry or to harbor hatred for the colonial world; rather, I am advocating that we love ourselves. At the same time, I am exploring my own resentment (or ressentiment) and attempting to apply my own understanding of Hul’qumi’num’ practice as a starting point to express emotions other than love. Finally, I remain unconvinced that ressentiment is not defensible as a potentially transformative subjectivity or affective reaction to the practices of the Canadian state in the past and present. The Western tradition is particularly obsessed with time, inventing different times (Fabian, 1983), exploitation of time, transcending time, evolution through time and so on. This is true for their conception of resentment and harm, that “ressentiment nails us to the past, blocks the exit to the future, twists or disorders the time-sense of the person trapped in it” (Brudholm, 2006, p. 21). For Hul’qumi’num’qun’ nations, we are more concerned with place, but in our big house when a harm or transgression is committed, it is addressed before the ceremony or family can move forward, and nobody in attendance is allowed to leave until there is resolution witnessed and the place where the incident occurred is cleansed by the women.

In Hul’qumi’num’, teytiyuq translates to angry, whereas qul’sthaat translates as anger that involves the entire body. The root words of qul’sthaat are qul’ and qul’aan. Qul’ is our word for eye, and qul’aan means a terrible thing that happened (in the past) that can be fixed, which suggests that some things can not be fixed. For Hul’qumi’num’qun’, anger is an embodied experience that is localized in our eyes and in our vision, how we see the world and how we are seen. For Hul’qumi’num’qun’, there are different forms of anger. Individuals must engage in certain practices to ensure protection for themselves and others from that anger, but certainly no outsider can assess the validity of another’s anger. Depending on the form, we have different practices that function to cleanse those feelings so that they do not harm that person or others in their family and community. Traditionally, and especially during ceremony today, if we are sad or angry we are instructed to not look other people in the eye for fear of hurting them, we say that our eyes are sharp. These cleansing practices, however, do not banish that anger and ask the person to forget, they are concerned with protecting the people from that anger so that it is not directed inward. Given that the violent colonial history of domination and dispossession of Indigenous peoples continues to structure our daily lives and has profound affects on our health, colonial rage overtly and covertly shapes our relations with self and Others. Indigenous women’s voices including those of love and anger must prefigure the politics of resistance and approaches to solidarity.



In the city, in the classroom, or at a protest, there is always a settler seeking my recognition. She wants me to recognize that she is distanced from the others. She is innocent. Through her look, the Other wants me to see that she is a good settler, an ally. But my only thought is: Don’t smile at me. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) demonstrates the futility of appealing to the Other for recognition and instead identifies the enemy, “since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known” (p. 92). Similarly, when Indigenous peoples deploy ‘settler’ it identifies the enemy, whereas, when deployed by settlers it is often depoliticized and neutralized rather than counter-performative in its function. When the colonized are not grateful or fail to recognize and commend the self-decolonizing of the settler, we are resented.



A settler political will should be willful, that is, willing to disobey a general will and always working toward an alternative future. Revolution is only possible when subjects violate the directives of commanding bodies, a willing willfulness to create the world anew by opposing the old orders (Foucault, 1982, p. 336). The will to change is simultaneously a negation and an affirmation. It is, as Foucault (1982) writes, “through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us” that new forms of subjectivity emerge (p. 336). The political will of decolonization refuses to reproduce the present and affirms alternative futures.”

“The powers of the world are invested in destroying time like subsidised corn burning in a field”

– Porpentine Charity Heartscape



From Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short story, ‘Collector of Cracks’:

The jerkiness of our vision, the discontinuousness of our perception of a motion picture, say, is a fairly well-known fact. But to face that fact is not enough: One must go inside it. Wedged in between instants – when the film, having withdrawn one image from the retina, is advancing so as to produce another – is a split second when everything has been taken from the eye and another new given it. In that split second the eye is before emptiness, but it sees it: Something unseen seems seen.



From Stuck in a Sticky Shed with Side Chain Compression by Kristen Gallerneaux:

Stone, slime, mud and soundwaves are mineral level media with opinions. The taboo that connects the grime to the shine of our everyday digital life is on Drew’s mind too:

The tools I use are haunted by the souls that made them and origin in which they were conceived. It feels inescapable, as I type on my mid-2014 MacBook Pro. All the techno-wonders just feel drenched in exploitation – or bad vibrations – embedded in the circuitry.