INFLUENCES

Grrrr… by Majena Mafe 2001

INFLUENCES COME IN MANY FORMS.

Like us all, I have a background that informs my thinking and my ‘making’ choices, and also no less so the impact and pressures from the chaotic chaos of our situation. My work is intimately connected to these two poles, added are ideas, (feminst theory and writing abnd avant-garde texts), places, attitudes and objects that thicken the threads.

Key research areas are

words that are lost, forgotten, misheard, shut-down, shut-up.

what is stupidity and what is its opposite

women’s history and prehistory

women’s voices as containers for the unsung unsaid and ultimately unacknowledged wisdom

women’s testimonies, diaries.

authors, in particular those that have a heathy disregard for language rules but instead play, key in this area for me is Gertrude Stein whom I did my PhD research on

fairytales and fables the older the better

the mythic and the Imaginal

a type of love in language I call Soundage (see thesis)

women’s stitchery throughout the ages, in terms of notions of subversive stitchery

raw, lowbrow, glitchy language and work.

feminist literary esp French theory Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, et

Themes I’m exploring

the monstrous

woman words

the unsaid

retelling better

telling the whole lot

‘other’ oraculars

listening to resonance

deep imaginal =more than your thinking

herstories

her tongue

soundage

love

mis heard

mistakes

the unsavoury

jamming meaning and frames of meaning

process

stitching as meaning making

outsider lowbrow works/art

odd guild systems

matriliniarity

the matrixial

the event in language

Kristeva on language

Irigaray on love

the sublime

Weiss - mouths of disquietude

Moifs I’m exploring

monsters, monsters

monsters given a voice beyond the grrr

hybrids / shape shifting

tongues given a voice

objects with their own voice

mock biographies

ear words

ventriloquist dummies

detectives / detectors

hearing / ear instruments

journeys though concepts

glossolalia

labyrinths walls as the way

Quotes I’m inspired by

“The idea that a ‘nothing to be seen’ … might yet have some reality, would indeed be intolerable to man”

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

“Women can’t add, he said once, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said,

For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four.

What do they make? I said, expecting five or three.

Just one and one and one and one, he said.”

Atwood, The Handmaidens Tale 

“Aida’s method, as will appear, was to weave daydreams into seemingly authentic calculations.”

            Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace

“Certainly my troops must consist of numbers, or they can have no existence at all, & would cease to be the particular sort of troops in question.- But then what are these numbers? There is a riddle.” 

Ada Lovelace

“Somewhere there is a siren. Her green body is covered with scales. Her face is bare. The undersides of her arms are a rosy colour. Sometimes she begins to sing. The women say that of her song nothing is to be heard but a continuous O. That is why this song evokes for them, like everything that recalls the O, the zero or the circle, the vulval ring.”

                                    Monique Wittig, Les Guerillieres

“She does not set herself up as a one, (single)) female unit.

She is not closed up or around one single truth or essence. The essence of a truth remains foreign to her. She neither has nor is a being. And she does not oppose a feminine truth to a masculine truth… the female sex takes place by embracing itself, by endlessly sharing and exchanging its lips, its edges, its borders, and their ‘content’, as it ceaselessly becomes other, no stability or essence is proper to her.”

                                    Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

“Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of straiting it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese.”

                                    Gilles and Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

“It is already getting around- at what rate? In what contexts? In spite of what resistances? - that women diffuse themselves according to modalities scarcely compatible with the framework of the ruling symbolics. Which doesn’t happen without causing some turbulence, we might even say whirlwinds, that ought to be reconfined within solid walls of principle, to keep them from spreading to infinity…”

                                    Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One

“Strictly speaking, one cannot say that she mimics anything, for that would suppose a certain intention, a project, a minimum of consciousness. She (is) pure mimicry. Which is always the case for inferior species, of course. Needed to define essences, her function requires that she herself have no definition.”

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

“They say they are inventing a new dynamic. They say they are throwing off their sheets. They say they are getting down from their beds. They say they are leaving the museums the show-cases the pedestals where they have been installed. They say they are quite astonished that they can move.”

                                    Monique Wittig, Les Guerillieres

“But if you knew one half the harum-scarum extraordinary things I do, you would certainly incline to the idea that I have a spell of some sort about me.”

                                  Ada Lovelace, December 1841

“A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.”

                                    Gilles and Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

“They say that they have a concern for strategy and tactics. They say that the massive armies that comprise divisions corps regiments sections companies are ineffectual.”

                                    Monique Wittig, Les Guerillieres

“At this stage of the march one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero. If one makes no mistake with the calculations, if one jumps with feet together at just the right moment, one will not fall into the sake pit. At this stage of the march one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero. If one makes no mistakes in the calculations, if one bends down at just the right moment, one will not be caught in the jaws of the trap. At this stage of the march one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero.”

Monique Wittig, Les Guerillieres

“They say take your time, consider this new species that seeks a new language.”

Monique Wittig, Les Guerillieres

“I wish I went on quicker. That is- I wish a human head, or my head at all event, could take in a great deal more and a great deal more rapidly than is the case;

- and if I had made up my own head, I would have portioned its wishes and ambition a little more to its capacity… In time, I will do all, I dare say. And if not, why, it don’t signify, and I shall have amused myself at least.”

Ada Lovelace, September 1840

“Inside the libraries department, the construct cunt inserted a sub-program into that part of the video network.

            “The sub-program alerted certain core custodial commands so that she could retrieve the code.

            “The code said: GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU; NOW EAT YOUR MIND.”

Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

“ ‘Gong over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery- since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over that brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth.’

“ ‘Add infinitum’ Sam said, expressionlessly. ‘Like a fractal growing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Triggered by catastrophe.’

            “ ‘I didn’t get a break while all this was going on, of course,’ Fez continued. ‘The information never stopped coming in, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos is just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net now than the one we started out with. We woke it up.’ ”

                                                Pat Cadigan, Synners

“ ‘That’s all there was, just the wires, ‘ Travis said. Connecting them directly to each other. Wires, and blood, and piss. And shit. Just the way the hotel maid found them.’”

Pat Cadigan, Synners

“I walk about, not in a Snail –Shell, but in a Molecular Laboratory.”

Ada Lovelace, November 1844

“It had been present  ‘for all time,’ but under different perceptual conditions. New conditions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or concluded, presently to rise to the surface.”

                                    Gilles and Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

“The occupant, owner of a villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a jacquard loom.

“These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads with the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.”

                        William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine