Date: Sun, 24 Apr 1994 18:23:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Judith Frederika Rodenbeck <jfr10-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: decoys


Since I'm here I'll write a little something, but I will sidestep the 
wooden ducklings for the moment:

Malgosia asks (emulating my faux-naive method?):

> Can anything that involves fulfilling expectations be a useful
> liberatory concept?  

As the contemporary limit-cases we would probably have to ask about pain 
practices, which some revile as the worst internalization of fascism and 
others claim as precisely radically liberatory, personally and politically 
(whatever politics is). Is a martyrdom liberatory for the martyr? 

Certainly "you get what you pay for" is a kind of pathetic liberation. On
the other hand, if the expectation is defined outside of one's self--to
touch the face of the other--in the circular economy of self-erasure of
the potlatch, isn't this a different animal? There is the risk of bad
faith, and I seem to remember that wars have been fought over inadequate
gifts or abnegation, but potlatch is a system: there are, I'm going to 
write the word, rules.

> Can gift-giving be expected and liberatory at the same time?

I've always hated xmas & bdays. But that's stuff-getting, right? If the
gift is communitas, and it's a special binding which exceeds the everyday
I think we're talking about something else. One of the best gifts given me
before I moved to the City of Filth was a ritual done by my core women
friends in which I was stripped, washed, grafittied, hung by my ankles,
buried in dirt, and then waved overhead while their voices vibrated
through my body in a long, for lack of a better word, OHM. Somebody read
something by H.D. The gift was an exchange of trust, kinds of intimacy,
alternations of authority and submission, shedding physical boundaries,
etc., friendship, unutterables; also a gift of doing such things without
having one's emotions stunted by a sense of being foolish, of pushing past
that kind of socializing. (All this sans drugs, btw.) And in this 
decorporealized age, it was marked across my body. 

> Since I was thinking about these questions, it occurred to me that
> the destruction aspect of the potlatch circumvents this.  By
> destroying my baggage, I become a new person, one who has never
> before participated in a potlatch and is unaware of the expectations
> which attach to it.  Thus, every new get-together is a completely
> unexpected event, a chance meeting of people who have never met before.

And yet they do it again and again.

> How would we live if every year we engaged in a celebratory destruction
> of all the accumulated "accomplishments" of the previous year? 

Fabulously, in a small community, horribly in the world at large. 
Although, for Malgosia's benefit: I went to see some films by Jonas Mekas
the other night, in particular Zefiro Torna or Scenes from the Life of
George Maciunas. It's composed of quick little shots, taken over the
course of 20 or so years, assembled rather than edited. Mekas reads from
his diaries mostly about the last few years of Maciunas's life. Maciunas,
dying for 10 years of some horrible cancer, at age 50 decides to get
married, with just a few months left to live. "Life is all I have left," 
he says. A man who spent his entire life making everyday life an event,
and everyday objects precious. (We see him awaiting a translantic call
from one of his friends: a crowd gathers round and the phone booth is
decorated with tinsel and gewgaws. Mid-way through the film Mekas cuts in
a flash card which reads:  "This is a political film." Maciunas had a 
yearly dumpling event. Everybody came and ate Lithuanian dumplings. Mekas 
says they were terrible, but everyone ate them anyway, happily.

-fido

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