Author Archives: Despina Durand

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About Despina Durand

part-time goth, full-time critic

Articulate in the face of Absurdity

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In 2011, I heard Billy Collins read a poem about the word like, it was called “What She Said”. This, at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ, was after I had heard Michael Cirelli, a Rhode Island native, read “Dead Ass” about discovering new slag. The contrast between the tones—superior and celebratory, respectively—couldn’t have been more different.

Lately, I’ve wondered about the phrase I can’t even. Which is more appropriate? Mockery or consideration?

It is fair to criticize its abrupt construction, which robs it of both specificity and substance, means that it functions through familiarity; its meaning is contextually and idiosyncratically imparted.

Having emerged from the unreliable and overwhelmingly multifaceted depths of the internet, it is met with distrust by grammarians and the other vanguards of the English language. Whatever inherent meaning might have existed within the aborted structure was further eroded by use in the regressively repetitive reblog threads on tumblr.

But we live in a world dominated by the absurd.

In the country boasting the strongest economy and largest military force on the planet, a reality TV star is running for president against a former Secretary of State and First Lady, after after the two of them beat out an avowed Democratic Socialist, and a man so fundamentally lacking in charisma that a large swath of the public is willing to believe his is the Zodiac Killer, regardless of temporal impossibility. Meanwhile, policemen with military grade equipment shoot unarmed citizens in the streets. While children and families go hungry, Congress shuts down the government out of spite, and the people drown in debt after bailing out bankers facing no new regulation despite nearly creating a financial apocalypse.

Meanwhile, globally, the field is dominated by radicalism, terror, slowing economic growth, and environmental disaster. In a new era of demagoguery, the death of nuance seems both inevitable and potentially absolute. Our political discourse is reduced to emotion rooted in personal truths and we have accepted the dissolution of a collectively structured reality. With the banishment of facts, concensus reality is abolished and events already past can be re-imagined out of existence (Vladimir Putin will not invade Crimea).

A system without rationality can hardly be called a system. It becomes difficult to rely on language, which is a system, composed of atomized concepts and consistent rules, as a means of expression. We resort to other means. Our subjectivity—the production of the self—is given over to the front-facing camera. We situate ourselves within the social, physical, and political world through selfies taken on vacations, with friends, at rallies, and in the presence of our heroes and idols. The camera lens and the portable screen eloquently communicate where we stand on issues, with which candidates, in which cities, and in front of which works of art.

Yet we cannot avoid words: you open the newspaper, or a browser window, or an app and read that the government is refusing to do their constitutionally mandated job, and that, furthermore this comes as no surprise, and that a nation produced a vote which not even the politicians who lobbied for it can support, and that we cannot get the data to know how many people are killed each year by cops, or how many firearms are sold in the country, or how much money is secreted away in off-shore accounts. The words are concrete and undeniable (except by the newly greased escape hatch out of concensus reality) and finding a word to respond, one that encapsulates the emotional state developed under long term absurdity, can feel impossible.

Perhaps one exists within those linguistic traditions which survived the Soviet empire. But even there concensus reality existed, two of them, in parallel. The reality of the state and the reality of the people, spoken and whispered. English—the language of empire, of capitalism, of finance—lacks the appropriate philosophical and linguistic tools.

Beyond its near impossibility, it feels like defeat to attempt to express the entire cycle of horror-distress-incomprehention-frustration-disappointment-anger—and ultimately—complete lack of surprise, never mind cobbling together a framework of rationalized acceptance.

Instead, I reach for the only tool developed to express the whole of our collective emotional disorder: I can’t even.

Deny their responsibility, rob them of their Power: stopping Daesh.

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We have forgotten the true goal of terrorism. It can be difficult, especially in the aftermath of horrible events such as the one which occurred in Nice (or Dallas, or Orlando, or San Bernardino), as we prepared to bury the dead and do what we can to heal the wounded and care for all those who will never truly be whole again, that the goal of terrorism is not death. The goal of terrorism is in the name: terror; fear.

Every time we pick ourselves up and try and take stock of the damage and the pain, and allow ourselves to forget that what those who promote and execute these acts of violence are trying to generate is fear, we allow them to succeed.

Daesh would love to lay claim to the power to reach out and strike us there where it hurts the most. With every independent attack that is attributed to them, they have further proof that their reach is global, that they are able to infect our people with their poisons and use our people to hurt us. They take that power from our headlines, our speculating talking heads, our circumstantial analyses, and our political speeches.

Perhaps the man who struck out at the Queer Latinx community in Orlando justified his actions through the philosophy promoted by Daesh. Perhaps the man who drove a truck through a crowd in Nice came from Tunisia (where an overwhelming number of Daesh fighters hail from) and maybe he, too, justified his actions through their language.

That does not give Daesh the right to claim responsibility for their actions. Their power is not so great that they can reach across space and time and sow the seeds of their hate in the hearts of people who are thousands of miles away from them. These people are not molded by Daesh, they are molded at home, and their choices are their own, they can invoke Daesh in justification, but we do not have to believe them.

We can rob Daesh of their power. We have the power to make them lose the war abroad as they are losing the ground war in Syria and Iraq. Because when the perpetrators are dead—and they are all dead—there is no one left to speak for them. What we have to say about their origins and their motivations is as true as what Daesh has to say. When the Daeshi leadership learn about the attacks as we do, they are no more responsible for them than we are.

A generation of children already grew up with a boogeyman who lived in a cave in a desert most of them could not find on a map: his name was Osama bin-Laden. From September 2001 onward, children who were not yet old enough to comprehend what had happened in New York City and at the Pentagon knew his name and were afraid of him.

We can keep a new generation of children from knowing that fear. We can stop Daesh at the borders of their stolen territory, and their reach at the limits of their trained fighters and evil plots. We do not have to allow the words and tenets of their death cult to have the power of pandemic. We can acknowledge the violence it effects, and work to heal the wounds it leaves, and deny the infection a vector and the opportunity to spread.

Brexit, globalization, nationalism, xenophobia

My natural reaction, when trying to formulate a counterargument to the blatant racism, xenophobia, and blind populist nationalism peddled in Britain in favor of the (successful) Brexit, is to reach for something equally totalizing and outrageous.

I’m not going to crawl into the muck with Boris Johnson (or, on this side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump) and justify his arguments based on some fantastic imagining of the “British People” or some other similar fever dream of historic, national and/or cultural purity.

This is the same government that last year wouldn’t allow the Scots to leave the UK, despite their concerns and desires to remain a part of the EU regardless of whether the Brits made the choice to exit the economic union or not. “There is no history of Scotland acting independently of the rest of Britain” people responded then.

So I have no qualms about reaching into history and saying that the British have no philosophical leg to stand on in their fears about open borders when they made it their policy to forcibly pry open the borders of nations and cultures around the globe in the name of their “British Empire”.

But it comes down to not wanting to crawl through the filth on my belly, like a worm, because to try and argue with the xenophobic, racist, nationalist rhetoric is to justify its existence, is to make some game out of acknowledging its validity. It is not valid, it is not reasonable, and more than all of that, it is not something that can be met or answered with rationality, logic, or consideration. It is fear mongering, and it is lies.

So I’m sorry if history seems irrelevant, if the past is not dictum for the future, if people have no interest or consideration for how the choices made before them might weigh on the choices they face now. I’m not going to address your concerns about people who have no interest in assimilating, in becoming British or European or Western coming and working in your restaurants, and your homes, and your country, until I’m met with equal consideration of the plight of economic migrants and economic refugees and solutions to keep children in the Global South from starving. Making an exception only for refugees of war is to fail to address the cause of which mass migration and the open borders of globalization are merely a symptom.

We will all come to regret where we are finding ourselves. The populists will take us for all we’re worth, and the rich will pluck what little we have left from our unhappy, clenched fists.

After Orlando

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There is very little to say about what happened in Orlando, FL.

There is so much to say about what happened in Orlando, FL.

The noise that emits from your TV and your radio, the words that appear on your Facebook feed, the rainbow flags, the rainbow profile pictures, the prayers, the moments of silence, the platitudes, it is just noise.

My only response to this nightmare—both the one we woke up to on Sunday morning, and the one being perpetuated by the politicians and the media—is to try and find the nuances I believe we all need.

First of all, we need to talk about who the victims are. If we do not understand who the victims are, we are easy prey for the machinations and manipulations of every person with an agenda.

A few broad statements are true: the victims were “American” in that they lived on American soil and engaged in activities made possible because of the political landscape of the geographic area known as “America”. The victims were members of the LGBT*Q*A*/Queer community, because they were in a space dedicated to that community.

But we have lost a particular specificity: these were Latinx Queer individuals.

Let me say that again:

THESE WERE LATINX QUEER INDIVIDUALS.

I cannot speak to the experiences of that community, I cannot speak for that community, I can neither know nor imagine how that community feels. It is not my community. And I will not add to the voices trying their best to do those things.

This massacre may not have been intended to target specifically Latinx LGBT*Q*A*/Queer identified individuals or their community at large. Neither I nor anyone else can tell you whether the perpetrator’s plan selected Saturday night because it was a Latin night at Pulse, maybe it was simply the best weekend for him to commit mass murder. I do not know if, when planning an action intended to inspire fear and grief, when planning to violently manifest hatred and prejudice, you stop to inspect the calendar of events for the sanctuary you are intent on violating. I do not know if this individual’s plan was to strip the LGBT*Q*A* community at large of their sense of safety, or specifically to wound the Latinx community in particular.

Ultimately, as we take time to think about the victims, the perpetrator’s intention does not matter. What matters is what he did: he stabbed a blade made of petrified hatred through the heart of the Latinx LGBT*Q*A* community. He robbed, not generally but specifically, the Latinx LGBT*Q*A* community of their sense of safety, and his act will reverberate most strongly through their community.

Second, we can begin to ask questions about what could bring a person to commit an act of violence so heinous it is the worst act of mass murder in American history. This is where we must be extra vigilant about the narratives promoted by people with an agenda.

We must take a moment here to discuss a specific kind of noise coming from your television, in the form of a debate about nomenclature, centered on “radical Islam”. An agenda is the only thing that could explain why, in the wake of the worst act of mass murder in American history, you have the time or the energy to quibble about whether or not any person is using the term “radical Islam” to describe the unknown motivations of a pathological, anti-social individual.

Specifically, I have two major points of contention with the argument that “radical Islam” is the clear source of this man’s actions, regardless of whether or not he called the police ahead of time and declared his allegiance to the Islamic State.

  1. I do not believe the man to have been stupid, unfortunately.
    Anyone who has lived in this country (or been aware of the politics of this country) for any number of the years following September 11, 2001 and during the subsequent, still ongoing wars in the Middle East, can tell you that if you want people to pay attention to what you’re doing, make it about “terrorism,” specifically “radical Islamic terrorism”.
    Our news media and politicians have proven that we will not care about anti-gay, or anti-woman, or anti-reproductive rights, or anti-Black, or anti-Islamic, or anti-government terrorism. If you shoot up an abortion clinic, you will not be labeled a terrorist, even though the label is appropriate.
    If this man wanted to insure that his act of anti-gay violence made headlines and stayed there, declaring allegiance to the Islamic State is a very easy way to do so.
  2. Even if he is really a “radical Islamist” he’s still pathological. No one decides to open fire on a roomful of unknown strangers (or even a roomful of friends/family/acquaintances) because they are of sound mind. Just as anyone who travels to Syria to decapitate “infidels” is unlikely to be deemed in full possession of their faculties.
    The tie between politics and individually perpetrated acts of excessive or mass violence is psychological imbalance, not religion or affiliation or identity.

This was not an act of violence undertaken against the whole of American society. This was an act of violence perpetrated against the LGBT*Q*A*/Queer community, and potentially the Latinx community within that community. To use it to promote a rhetoric of hatred against Muslims or immigrants or some other American minority, is to avoid the undeniable. Homophobia, violent homophobia, is alive and well in America, and we have more than enough “legitimate” anti-gay rhetorics and politics to incubate it.

Because I am not interested in becoming someone with an agenda, I will not look at the courts, or the filibusters, or the Constitutional debates. I will instead ask that we, as a society, consider the murder rates among trans*women of color, the assaults perpetrated against members of the LGBT*Q*A* community (hate crimes), and the bullying, the rates of homelessness among LGBT*Q*A* youth. We cannot deny that there is a precedent for violence against the LGBT*Q*A* community, and especially the minority communities within the LGBT*Q*A* community. To side step that precedent is to create a false image of reality, and to deny a reality composed not of individual experience but of statistical fact.

Third, and finally, we must ask ourselves about how to solve the problem of acts of mass violence perpetrated with guns. Living in a country where we have to even attempt to demarcate the importance of one act of mass violence, and furthermore have to spend time ranking them, is to live in some Twilight Zone reality.

Here we reach an impasse, because here our politics has ejected the means of objective quantitative reality. The NRA has ensured that collecting the necessary data to develop a statistical reality—that is, a reality which, even when compelled by emotion, is formulated within the bounds of consistent, universal standards, and is independently verifiable by anyone with access to the same data—is impossible. Without that basis of concrete, verifiable conclusions, any argument can be denounced as purely emotional/subjective/rhetorical.

With that in mind I can only repeat that which has been deemed un-Constitutional, weepy liberal bullshit, but which I can only defend as common sense: it is very hard to murder people, especially in large numbers, when your access to weapons and/or ammunition is limited and/or monitored. Though I am against a culture where people keep guns in their homes with the idea that they may well be used against other human beings (guns for “protection”), because I believe it promotes fear and violence, I would happily lose the philosophical battle to win the political war.

We have left behind a question of whether or not guns are a right, and we are faced with the absolute, undeniable, overwhelming, painful evidence that a society with open access to semi- or fully-automatic handguns and rifles, and other military grade equipment is one where its citizens are not safe. We allowed the massacre of school children to pass without action, and maybe it is time, if we will not change the law, to admit that we do not care that people will continue to die.

Without a change to the law, it is time to do away with the noise. Without a change to the law, we should do away with outrage, with moments of silence, with acts of solidarity, with open displays of grief, with a sense of community, with love, with empathy. Anyone who opposes changing the law should make it clear that they are as against civil society as the people who perpetrate these acts of violence, and that they are against us, and they are with the terrorists, whom they are happy to arm and enable.

Gone Home: the return to photography

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Circumstance has returned me to a favored pursuit. I spent the last few months producing graphic art pieces for a 2D design foundations class at RISD, which had me stretching my creative limbs in the realms of pencil, paper, glue, and paint. The basics of design, other than practice, in the form of line, shape, space, color, pattern, repetition, and perspective were familiar strangers, and have since become intimate friends.

My cousin’s college graduation, and the prospect of a new commercial project, have returned me to the loving arms of photography. In the process I’ve developed a new (and psychologically more efficient) method of organizing my photography, and have extended my autodidact explorations into the open source software Darktable and studio lighting.

Graduation, Brown University. June, 2016.

I’ve been playing with color editing and WB correction. Additionally I spent a significant quantity of time figuring out how to edit my little logo in Inkscape so that it would have the right kind of transparency when transformed into a watermark (as well as how to save a vector graphic into the right directory using the Terminal so as to be able to access the file in Darktable).

Much of the fun has just been in having a camera in my hands again. I said to Eric after our photoshoot, that really, all photographers have a fetishistic streak in them.

Eric, fashion photoshoot. June, 2016.
Eric, fashion portrait. June, 2016.

The photographer enjoys the simulated power of aesthetic creation. To take a photograph is to reproduce reality (badly) and to convey the aesthetic quality of a moment–I do not believe that the photographer has any real claim to the beauty of a photograph. Photographs can be either effective, affective, or forgettable. The power of the photographer is in that aspect. Though perhaps that is the entirety of what all artists can lay claim to. Words are beyond the individual command of one person, but placement is everything, in language.

In a roundabout way, I’m picking a fight with the concept that photographs are “made” rather than “taken”. The act of depressing the button that fires the shutter and the light captured in the split second is recorded–that is a process of taking a piece of reality and keeping it for yourself. That is the moment when someone’s soul is stolen–captured along with the light inside the camera. When you enter the developing room, or perhaps the editing software suite, when you begin cutting out bits of reality, adjusting the colors and contrast and the depths of reality, that is when you might begin to “make” a photograph.

I am not, however, a student of photography. I am a student of journalism. My approach to reproducing reality, to laying claim to the experience of the world, is to denounce ownership. My personal expectations are that should I have done my job well, the product looks like the world itself: recognizable, strange, complex, illuminated, and indistinct.

I also need to remember the most important rule of photography in the rest of my life: you can never capture the whole thing. The art of photography is the art of framing. It is pulling the audience along and standing them in a particular spot, and showing them something specific.