When you start to like pain things get interesting. Pain is the common result of a subordinate position. Traditionally, suffering is uncomfortable and undesirable. Perhaps it is more intelligent to cultivate pain as a means of liberation? Is it possible that enjoyment of pain can be subversive? When one does not fear pain, one cannot be manipulated. When aroused by suffering, one can control any relationship. When agony ceases to be a barrier, death is not forbidding. The implications are marvellous. Pain is not oppressive, but strengthening and most sublime. It is necessary only to deny the pleasure/pain dichotomy.
- Jenny Holzer
So much of my work this year has been dedicated to this concept. Though not even pain necessarily, but discomfort. Politics of sociability are not comfortable, art practice is not comfortable, thinking is not comfortable, but in my experience, particularly in the past couple of weeks, forcing oneself to explore and dwell in discomfort has been the most generative experience of resistance and empowerment.
In the wake of dissipation, in emptying out fixed notions of what we are and what we want, force and hope exist. It seems to me that the performative assumes these empty spaces where dynamism can emerge; not so much putting identity into action, but allowing new spaces of liberation to arise.
(via brockenspectre)
(Source: , via brockenspectre)
