Andrew Cantrell

The Gate is Open

In the interruption of work         If not also in work         There’s a righteous
anger         An anger between their laughs

How practice makes of movement another moment         How by their movements
We open the curtains and we see the light       They are

images of ourselves         Their bodies and their utterances a splayed         A
cacography         of labored moments         or of opposition

How we have not yet suffered     Yet     How
For the great consummation that awaits us

 

There is no speaking here not undertaken in defiance            Why can’t we
worship like that?
      There is in the noise that is internal       that is       to

utterance and to the particular thing         just this remonstrance         Just that this
book is on the table         Just that the two in their turn         each in their

turn         are our cries and murmurs         numerous         simultaneous         Each
interchangeable                 Y’all, I’m cashing out                 to no-one and to everyone

Watch how we go from ice to water

Each thinking by turns to see (to) the other
I got hung up on that today

 

To enter into conversation is to answer another’s appeal         To enter into
conversation         in somehow the language of another         Is another’s

imperative         Why don’t we open the gates?         How         If you died today
To death and to others who die         Put it this way         I’d want to clean

my apartment real good         How in the noise that is internal         Yet         How
The words of another would enjoin to attention         Put it this way         We

are interchangeable to no-one and to everyone         This practice of
abstraction

Sum Over Histories

1.

Artworks are like abstract labor, very post-Fordist-traditional, which was first invented and found in the history of the replacement of nature and the world by abstraction in “The Advanced Capitalism Period.” This is to be taken as a signal of the liquidation of reserve armies of labor.

Artwork now is a collective work. Its material is abstract labor. People now launch artworks to convey to eventuality the allegory of the endlessly renewed pursuance of actuality. Words might be written by people themselves or paintings made to particularly specify the singularity under conditions of post-post-Fordism of works of art.

Networks, swarms, aggregates, critical genealogies, and even sublime breaches of the market and gatherings of assumption and deconstruction of the world as it is found are the best occasion for launching artworks as syllabaries of potentiality.

Artworks are now doubly your ambassadors of potentiality. It is even more magnificent if you launch hundreds at the same time. In recent years artworks are much more likely to be adopted by the autonomous resistance groups as a perfect supplement to their struggles as well.

2.

For Realism-fueled artworks you need only open them directly for showing reality in its abstraction by its abstraction. For Ideal-Typical-fueled artworks, please carefully taxonomize binaries from the package. It is very thin and light, their sense of a conceivable catharsis and the certainty of its inconceivability. Any harder steps might lead to the failure of this collective and productive abstraction to find itself as a subject.

Write your poetics that proposes within society and within the city class struggle and liberation on the artwork with pens before lighting. There is no need for this step if it is already construed as a syllabary of the demiurgic endowment of labor.

Construct the artwork as a figure of collective liberation. Lift it up a bit to refuse capitalist domination. Unfold the attached new Realism-fuel and bear witness to an era of despair. Make sure it recognizes commonality to better glimpse new subjectivities and new fields of action.

Next hold up the democratic and productive mechanism of art to ensure it is sufficiently abstract and constructive and light each corner of the fuel.

Lastly, turn to hold the artwork’s valorization of mass labor when it is fully filled with the enjoyment of freedom. It starts to be lighter and a bit up-lifting while in the meantime you softly act as an intermediary between collective action and the event of liberation.

Now it is the time to construct new being and new significations.

3.

Seek the Real in a dry area to avoid reification. Keep abstraction nearby when launching. Be sure to overcome the market and postmodernism simultaneously with a wind under grade 3. Ensure launch in spacious areas, places with the singularity of artworks.

Do not launch within 5 kilometers of mediation or interchangeability and army-prohibited areas.

Release the artworks immediately when they uplift. Do not hold them too long. Be sure to reveal thereby the fundamental human nature of the world.

Labor is not liberated if without artistic labor’s instruction. Artistic labor itself is not liberated without immersion in the diagram.

Suggested areas for launching: machinic assemblages, class struggle, the collective force of labor, the ground of being, and outskirts without trees.

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Sources: Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude | Found instructions for the release of a sky lantern

Andrew Cantrell is the author of the chapbook Stratigraphy (2015). A Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems and performance texts have appeared in artist’s books, anthologies and journals including a previous issue of Posit, Anomalous, and Lana Turner. As Local Projects, he has organized and participated in performances at High Concept Laboratories, The Logan Center for the Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. He lives in Chicago where he works as a union organizer.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.