If you missed my abliguritive presentation last month at the Champaign Urbana Design Organization’s second Pecha Kucha, or if you just feel up for another licking, now you can watch the video!  Many thanks to Nick Mann, a great local photographer (and fellow bike rider), who was the videographer and a fellow presenter at the event, speaking about the book on The Elements he did with Theo Grey.  Many thanks also to Jay, who spent long hours banging his head against a wall, in order to make WordPress video-friendly.

If you haven’t already, mark your calendars for Friday, April 16, when the next Pecha Kucha is scheduled!  (In the meantime, all the Canopy Club’s bouncers have been sent to re-education camp, where they are getting sensitivity training, so they should be more accomodating next time!)

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No, Pecha Kucha is not some strange new thing made with pig parts.  As Wikipedia succintly explains: “usually pronounced in three syllables like ‘pe-chak-cha,’ Pecha Kucha is a presentation format in which content can be easily, efficiently and informally shown, usually at a public event designed for that purpose. Under the format, a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds.”

What’s this got to do with yours truly or with the meaty morsels I dish out?  Believe it or not, the folks at Champaign-Urbana Pecha Kucha Night are actually crazy enough to have invited someone as crazy as me to be one of the presenters at their second gathering, which takes place at the Canopy Club, this Saturday night. As you might expect, I’ll be letting it all hang out, wagging my tongue on the subject of abligurition.  The presentation should rewind some minds and rethread some heads.

Doors open at 7pm and the show starts at 8:20.  I’m going on just after the beer break, or around 9. But if you don’t get there early, good luck finding even a place to stand!  The first time they did this, they had a line down the block when doors opened and 500 people crowded in to see the show!  Tickets are 5 bucks in advance or $7 at the door.  Buy your ticket now and plan to get there early!

See everyone there for a great show!

After spelunking in some of the abysses opened up by the word “abligurition,”  here is something lighter.  Perhaps even golden.

I did not find this image so much as it found me, arrested me, gaping out from the November cover of American Craft.  (It’s an uncanny moment when something you’re pondering, turning over in the dark recesses of your mind suddenly looms up before you, confronts you, and mocks you, sticking its tongue out at you.)

This is a still image from a 12-minute video work by Lauren Kalman, called “tongue gilding,” which is part of a series she has done on Hard Ware.

Ware, in this sense, stems back to Old English and means “manufactured articles, products of art or craft, goods.”  Ware does not necessarily refer to something that you wear, although there is a variant of the verb wear spelled “ware” (in Scottish dialect).  And the root these verbs come from, the Old Norse verja, means not just “to clothe,” but also “to invest, to spend, and to expend.”  So, tangentially at least, we are still moving very much in the orbit of abligurition as a prodigal expenditure.

Finally, Webster’s speculates that ware and its Old English root waru, in the sense of “goods,” is “probably akin” to the Old English word wær, which means ware, in the sense of being aware, beware, or wary.  So let us proceed cautiously, in the knowledge that not all that glitters is gold.

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It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy claiming to be an editorial assistant for Nerve.com and soliciting my responses to a questionnaire for a feature they wanted to run on “Sex Advice From Butchers.” My first thought was “Whoa! This is a change from the penis enlargement spam or the ‘please-allow-me-to-introduce-myself-I-work-at-an-African-bank’ spam. This is a joke or scam aimed just at me!’” I guess that’s what it feels like to hit the big time: personalized spam.

Even crazier than that, the request was legit, and today you can read the feature on Nerve.com. Now, as you may know from earlier posts taking others to task for fawning over butchers as the new porn stars, I don’t believe that butchers have any special insight to offer when it comes to personal sex advice. In fact, I’m sure my friends all think it’s hysterical that someone would solicit such advice from ME. (They’re just too polite to laugh right in my face. Well, most of them are.) But I am willing to entertain the notion that butchers might have some insight when it comes to “meat,” and how our culture deals or fails to deal with meaty matters.

For their feature, they didn’t have room to run my full responses or my answers to all their questions, so you can read them here. If you’re a real glutton for punishment, you can find more meaty musings by selecting “Curiosities” from the Categories list or by clicking on “abliguritions” in the tag cloud.

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Last week I was contacted by Nerve.com to participate in a weekly interview they conduct, soliciting sex advice from different groups: single moms, pastors, tattoo artists–this week it’s people who attended Burning Man. They contacted me to get the point of view of a butcher.

Now, I’m no butcher and really have next to no personal advice to offer on the subject of sex.  But the questions they had collected presented an opportunity for some reflections about carnivorism in general and its relation to questions of sex and love.  I was surprised how much I found to say on the subject.  My other surprise is that they haven’t been able to find anyone else who works with meat who has anything worthwhile to say or is willing to say it.  At least not publicly.  So I have no idea if or when this feature will run.

Are butchers really not thinking about the material that they have in their hands all day every day, about the profound significance of animal sacrifice and carnivorism in our culture?  And, having heard every possible joke about their “meat,” about salamis and sausages, are they really too shy or embarrassed to share any insights they might have about sex or love?  A butcher with nothing to say about sex?  I would not have thought it possible.   Butchers, I would have thought, are the high priests of carno-phallogocentrism, they feed (on) our voracious appetite for meat.  So why is it so taboo to articulate the connections between meat-eating and sex or politics?  Why do we choke on it?

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In my post on scold’s bridles, I quoted from the book Literary Fat Ladies, by feminist scholar Patricia Parker, where she calls them “a kind of chastity belt for the tongue.” She also notes the longstanding “link between garrulity and unbridled sexuality,” between a loose tongue and a loose woman. Both devices are designed to occlude, seal an opening, one to immure a froward tongue, the other to prevent penetration by any penis other than that of the husband, the holder of the proper key to his wife’s womb.

As with the mouth and other liminal orifices of the body, it is always a matter of both ingress and egress, of what is allowed to penetrate and of what then issues forth.

There are several examples of chastity belts in museum collections in Europe, but recently it’s been questioned whether they date back to the early Renaissance or were fabricated for the prurient in the nineteenth-century. But written descriptions and illustrations go back to Konrad Kyeser von Eichstätt’s Bellifortis, written around 1400, which includes this illustration of the “hard iron breeches” worn by Florentine women. (My Latin is non-existent, but I would guess “bellifortis” means something like “beautiful fortifications,” and the book was written as a description of the military technology of the period. There’s a whole lot more that could be said about the links between military fortifications and the attempts to preserve chastity. Just think of the numerous stories and fairy tales of the damsel or princess immured in a tower to protect her from suitors.)

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Having taken a stab at both the conceptual apparatus as well as the physical restraints designed to curb the tongue and keep it in its place, the question arises: why are all these supplementary restraints, this whole elaborate machinery of glosso-machia, necessary? If the tongue is moored by an essential connection to the Logos, to the true word (the word of the truth and the truth of the word), then how does it get loose, how is it possible for it to slip anchor? How is it possible for the phallus and its surrogates to drift from their moorings, to be (mis)appropriated and wielded by women, liers, scolds, gossips, slanderers, defamers–to become the tongue that utters untruth, that expends capital, and disturbs the world? How does the abliguritive tongue usurp the power to tip the balance of the world?

In other words, elinguation and other symbolic forms of castration, as retributive punishments for speaking untruth, would not be necessary unless the phallus was somehow already castrated or castratable, dislocated from the true source of its power. Castration would then be a name for the fear–not of being cut off from the one true source of power and order–but of the source itself being cut off from any possible legitimation, of the source being, in truth, no truth at all but mere power. In this case, elinguation would no longer be the punishment for a misappropriation or misuse of the tongue’s phallic power to dictate what is. Instead, it becomes a matter of violently silencing the wayward or abliguritive tongue to keep it from speaking of this originary and essential castration. The (non-true) truth of castration and not Logos as the (non-originary) origin of the world.

Yet, as I suggested in my prologue, such an elinguation/castration can never be wholely or holely effective. The bloody, gaping wound that it leaves behind, the silence that it violently enforces, remain mutely eloquent. If we have eyes to see, ears to hear, or, better still, a tongue to taste or blindly probe the void or “nothing” of the vacant orifice, in the shape of a zero or “0,” it still signifies the power that has castrated it as always already castrated.

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From All’s Well That Ends Well (Act II, scene iv):

Parolles [whose name literally means "speech"]: Why, I say nothing.
Clown: Marry, you are the wiser man; for many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing: to say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great part of your title; which is within a very little of nothing.

From Hamlet (Act III, scene ii):

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Lying down at Ophelia’s feet
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

I’m back from my vacation, which means literally to “vacate” (to empty one’s mind in the sense of freeing it, but also in the sense of voiding or annulling), and I’m brimming over with thoughts about the fullness and emptiness of the word abligurition and all it promises.

The further I plunge into the labyrinth opened by the word “abligurition,” the less satisfied I am with what I’ve written, with the slender thread spooled out or meager trail of crumbs dropped by these posts. And it is precisely the attempt or pretense to satisfy–to offer a full, final, complete, or sufficient explication and explanation–that is so unsatisfactory.

After all, to write is to promise an end to writing. From the first word, an implicit promise is made that a point will be reached when the field of knowledge is more or less saturated, when the reader will be satiated, and there will be nothing left to say on the subject. But, to the extent that abligurition names an insatiable appetite (and, further, perhaps even a taste, an appetite for the insatiable, the unsaturatable), then any attempt to satisfy ourselves on the subject remains allied, complicit with the whole system of norms, controls, muzzles, gags, or bridles used to rein in, to neutralize and neuter, this monstrous or demon tongue.

In other words, any writing on the subject of abligurition cannot fail to promise more than it can deliver. Unless, of course, it promises (more or less explicitly) to promise more than it can deliver, in which case its inevitable failure (to deliver on its promises of satisfaction) becomes translated into success, the fulfillment of its (empty) promise, its promise to void or default on its promises. All this may sound like so much doubletalk, like talking out of both sides of my mouth, but it corresponds with the double movement or double bind that remains unthought in abligurition. As an insatiable appetite, abligurition may seem like a totalizing attempt at incorporation, an attempt to devour the world and make it one with our flesh. Yet it’s crucial to recollect that this gathering-together-in-one-body remains essentially allied to a voiding or emptying out, a dispensing, dispersing, or disbursing. As “prodigal expenditure for food,” the excessive ingestion of abligurition requires an excessive outlay, a waste of accumulated capital. As with the binging and purging of a bulimic, totalizing consumption is followed or haunted by the ghost or doppelgänger of radical, prodigal dispersion. The gaping, garrulous, all-consuming maw lapses into the vocative silence of “nOthing,” the cuntry “thought to lie between maids’ legs,” the land of the lie and the lie of the land that opens onto the fathomless fear of castration.

On the one hand, no tongue can sound the depths of this void, just as no writing can hope to fill it in or gloss it over. On the other hand, that’s all the tongue and its surrogates can promise. Yet,–another promise, some other’s promise–somewhere, somehow and some way, the most garrulous prolixity collapses under the weight of its own words, and ends up mutely signalling the silence that is its end and origin, its ultimate undoing and its initial opening to the future. Like the final scene in Hamlet, where his “dying voice” desperately tries to cover up, to fill in the gap he leaves behind (in the proper, patrilineal order of succession) by prophesying and giving his voice to Fortinbras only to articulate, in the end, a silence that remains and swallows up his own voice: “The rest is silence.”

In my last post on abligurition, I drew on a number of quotations to elaborate a social hierarchy, a domestic economy, a phallogocentric metaphysics–in short, a saturated power grid that attempted to dictate the place of the tongue, to circumscribe its proper sphere, to regulate its motions, and constrain its waywardness.  Such an account might seem purely speculative until we take into account the social history of efforts to regulate the tongue and women’s bodies in which the tongue was most apt to run loose.

While the last post dwelt on the mental regulation that was supposed to govern the activity of the tongue, to keep it from betraying its submission to the order of the logos, this discipline has never been purely or primarily mental.  Reason’s rule has been supplemented, reinforced by a whole realm of physical punishments more elaborate and fantastical than anything I could possibly have imagined

When the tongue fails in its phallic or phallogocentric function of articulating Truth, a whole host of other phallic symbols are mobilized to constrain it, to rein it back in. As with the shadow-fencing in Hamlet, swords are mobilized against words wielded like daggers, pseudo-phalluses against pseudo-phalluses, until the potency and primacy of any original phallus comes to seem purely mythical.

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“Parolles [whose name literally means "speech"]: ‘Why, I say nothing.’

“Clown: ‘Marry, you are the wiser man; for many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing: to say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great part of your title; which is within a very little of nothing.’”
-All’s Well That Ends Well (II, iv)

In my previous posts on “abligurition,” I’ve touched on how this word points to the tongue as a nexus where logocentrism, phallocentrism, and capitalism all intersect, all lie concealed, like a sweet morsel tucked under the tongue.

At first glance, it seems as if abligurition has only the most banal connection with capitalism. As “prodigal expenditure for food,” it represents a needless expenditure, a waste of capital. It is a sin or crime against the compulsion to accumulate capital, to hold it in reserve, but a fairly trivial one.

What we have all-but-completely forgotten is the origin of capital in the Latin caput, which means “head.” Far from being just an economic system for generating and accumulating monetary wealth, capitalism remains in its unthought philosophical underpinnings, a system for maximizing the rule of the head, of intellect and reason. Capitalism is not just enshrined in Wall Street, it is literally enshrined in our capital cities, dominated by their classical architecture, where the top of every column is crowned by a capitellum or “small head.” The idea of a capital is to have a unified, central directive point, a singular heading, animating and directing the body politic. As reason, capitalism supposedly represents the reign of universal truth (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”), it represents the head’s usurpation of the claim to truth and universal knowledge that used to be the province of religion and its priesthood.

And this directly concerns or engages the tongue, because in the economics of the head, there is a clear hierarchy: the tongue is supposed to be ruled or governed by the mind. In the proper order of things, the mind is master and the tongue is its faithful and obedient servant. The tongue is not supposed to have a mind of its own; it is not supposed to get ahead of itself; instead the task of the tongue is to articulate, to give utterance to the thoughts of the mind.

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