ON PALINODE

We have now reached a stage of experimentation with new collective constructions and new synthesis, and there is no longer any point in combating the values of the old world by a Neo-Dadaist refusal. Whether these values be ideological, artistic, or even financial, the proper thing is to unleash inflation everywhere.

–Michele Bernstein

Because palinode is relational or prepositional, like emotion, it has to do with change, but not with the propulsive will. By issuing, or inviting desertion, palinode perforates the sovereign. Desertion is metrical. Each passive catastrophe is new. Each is a shape of reception become material. Expectancy turns to and from habit. Fear is involved, which is not harmful. Here the subject, an incomplete desertion, is metrical only, a pattern of surge and rest and cry and resist.

I need a detailed account of passivity so I’m trying to make one. I have never completed an act of passivity. I built nothing. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I memorize in my bed at night and lose the words in my sleep. I record that loss. I started thinking about passivity by studying furniture. I picture here the sociality of cinema, but with no image—Derek Jarman’s Blue perhaps. I thought of a bed. I thought of a chair. I thought of a cupboard. I want to think about the shapeliness of reception, about expectancy recumbent. I wanted to participate in change. I was lucky and I was wrong. I’m not sure it’s identity.

It became more and more interesting—this interiority I mean, in itself material and so resisting. It does spread problems. It doesn’t come naturally to me or to anyone to be passive. It doesn’t exist. It furnishes the wrong desire, the wrong desire, the wrong desire. It has no spatial discretion. It has to do with negativity as decoration. It is a clown with no image. It is difficult to arrest an excess of interiority. It’s shaped and then deployed as a technique. It is more passive than furniture. It is only ever entirely insecure, although here the word “entirely” would be wrong. It possesses nothing. It is weirdly funny. It’s a gestural catastrophe. It’s a grooming situation. It’s always in a series—thus its pornographic unctuousness. It’s because it’s intolerable. It’s not founded, but practices itself through attentive receptivity, reciprocity, inflation, imitation, transcription, accident, subterfuge, and response. It’s obsolete or cosmetic. It’s still an experiment without closure. It’s too insecure. It’s wrongly inflated. Its value is unimaginable and ridiculous.

Maybe I could consider passivity as a groundless gesture, a kind of stance that introverts in a series. Maybe I desired the wrong thing. Melancholy would be approaching this extreme. Now passivity seems like the right concept to inflate.

Or, I began to attend change. Part of passivity would be the timely notation of that turn. Passivity is not shaped like myself, or it is, but it converts thinking to a metrics always nearly redundant. Passive volition can’t be bounded, charted. Passivity attends and then it inflates. Passivity deserts itself. Passivity is a milieu that relays. Passivity is intolerable; masterless. Passivity isn’t a border-state. Passivity makes inappropriate pacts. Passivity takes no position, although it may be about to welcome one.

Resistance and reception confounded themselves. So a shade of shapeliness persists within the gesture. Testing, not retreating, passivity scares me. The attending gesture needs no action: it awaits x, inevitably. The fear pertains to the uninterpretibility of material. The palinode is the most passive thing I can imagine. There is a doubled sensation. Therefore, it’s obscene. This is a comedy. This is why it interests me. Thus I systematically forget the poem. Unknowable matters could arrive. What can one receive? What is desertion? What is the extreme of reception?