So, Let us Pivot, Now!

So, Let us Pivot, Now!

“It started with a ride down a(n) [ golden] escalator and ended with a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.” -- Seth Fiegerman

“This is not over. For we shall mount our righteous stand at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Next to Fantasy Island Adult Books. Across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center. Between the fire extinguisher and the yellow hose.” -- Patton Oswalt

We can finally

release the staltward hold

of the dominant “Big Other”

coercing us as hostages to the past.

The invocation of nostalgic

hymnals baptized in the

historical traumas of the past;

the failed regimes of domination;

that have lost their patronage

in the dark corners of social distributed power.

How is the phantasmatic construction of the social, real?

The relation between discursive articulations

and that paradoxical Thing

which is "simultaneously not the hard,

impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization

and a pure chimerical entity

which has in itself no ontological consistency." (Dodson, p. 39)

What defines the subject or creates it:

The symbolic order (or the Other)

refers to the external

signifying network

that determines,

and may even be said to produce,

the subject. (Dodson p. 40)

The "Other" is always lacking,

that it does not exist as a closed and consistent totality. (Dodson, p.40)

We often call it nostalgia;

some social legitimized infrastructure that

privileges some over others;

extracts their surplus

and denies them regenerative power.

The symbolic order

is built upon

and radicalizes the structural linguistics

of de Saussure and Jakobson. (Dodson, p.40 )

The production of the signified

by the signifier,

the logic of metaphor

and metonymy,

the function of nodal points. (Dodson, p.40)

The symbolic order

cannot be reduced

to discourse;

(the Other as Language).

The description

of the social field

provided by discourse theory

is a partial account

of the "socio-symbolic order."

The socio-symbolic order

allows us to draw upon

elaborations of the Real

and the structure of fantasy. (Dodson, p. 40)

The Real

that which is lacking

in the symbolic order.

Every object

that we encounter

in our collective reality

must be constructed

as an object of discourse;

it must be symbolized. (Dodson, p.40)

Collective traumas

and other contingent events

may occur

that have no place

in a particular socio-symbolic order.

In fact, it follows

from the impossibility

of discursive closure

that there must

be exclusions

and gaps in every social order,

and that they

are not accidental,

but constitutive. (Dodson, p. 41)

The Real

is the distortion produced

in social reality

when a given socio-symbolic order

encounters what is impossible

for it to symbolize, if it is to remain

consistent and intelligible. (Dodson, p. 41)

So, we rejoice in the

lines of escape

that domination fails

to capture and

reduce to extractive surplus.

We rejoice

in the temporary zones of autonomy

where our play and laughter

resist symbolization.

I listen to Cesaria Evora

Sodade….

because there is absolutely

no way I can reduce those

cape verdean sounds

to regimes of signification;

i am forces to simply

relishing in the freedom

I feel after this election…

By Tezozomoc