AustLit

'After an unspecified disaster, the future is quiet and analogue. Behind a doorway in the old town, a private library service flourishes. Signed up by the inscrutable Charlie, patrons subscribe to a membership they don’t fully understand. Retro-tainment, existential eavesdropping, or the future of self-help?

'Whether heartbreak, a rainstorm, or habitual brittleness leads you to The Memory Library, your contributions can be accommodated.' (Publication summary)

'This paper takes up the onto-poetic device of the ‘subhabitual’, riffing off the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition, where he outlines three modes in which time synthesises. It proposes that, despite the ‘living present’ (the time of habit) being the most basic of Deleuze’s times, certain shared and acquired behaviours prevalent in digitalised, pandemic and/or neoliberalising moments may undermine it. This loss of the basic present, furthermore, isn’t offset by and doesn’t usher in an opening onto either of Deleuze’s other two temporal modes. The paper goes on to consider the later Foucault’s interest in practices of care-of-the-self as pertaining to ethical obligations. Foucault’s self-care practices may be read (almost slant to his earlier analyses of discipline) as pertaining to the performing of behaviours or acts that are the conditions for the capacity for ethical, even emancipatory, behaviours. Complicating this, however, Byung-Chul Han’s recent concerns about Foucault’s earlier lack of scepticism for entrepreneurialism cast a subtle light across the notion of capacity. The paper seeks to begin a disambiguation of kinds of capacity: Deleuzian-Spinozan; late-Foucauldian; and those ‘capacities’ for auto-exploitation that go under the name of being-productive in neoliberal compliance-speak. It argues for actions that might refuse (at least sometimes) to comply with, or which can abstain from, logics that — after Simon Springer — we might dub neoliberal. Creative-writing-as-practising offers itself as one of these — perhaps a practice of care-of-the-self, definitely a valid shape for practising.' (Introduction)

'Don't let that quote up there scare you. My interest in this essay is 'my interest in', my curiosity about, envy. Operating more as Nietzschean difference than as a negating, the 'vs', in other words, is active rather than adversarial. The take-home - to save your reading on - pertains to dosage. While grim to experience, envy insists; it isn't going anywhere. Even as visual trace, as word, it cuts a compelling figure. Four letters, in their uppercase guise: sloping, canyonesque, stalactite-mite-like. The 'E' faces its companions - who wait, lined up - and it contemplates its relation to them. They occupy space nearby, are proximate, parallel, but do not coincide with the 'E'. Envy, as philosopher Agnes Heller reminds us in 'A Theory of Feelings', tends to occur most virulently between 'similars', not across starker hierarchies.' (Publication abstract)

'Travelling around the northern hemisphere, a good chunk of time ago, I'd arranged to stay in ['name of large city'] with the relative of a close friend for a night or so. He lived in a share arrangement with two women artists. When he spoke of them, it was with a kind of dreamy reverence, something a more prudent guest might have clocked. Who knows, too, how he felt about a visitor, about the effort of hosting someone two steps removed? Guests are an interruption, a kind of work, after all. It was confirmed over email and, following a train-bus combo from the main airport to his suburb, he met me somewhere I can't recall and seemed pleased enough, even excited, that I'd arrived. We were about the same age, were known to sleep (at least sometimes) in hetero configurations and were both officially single. That day we traipsed around the city, stopping in at drinking establishments, meandering through galleries, careening around parks. I still have a photo of him clinging to a playground merry-go-round, giddy in the sunshine.' (Publication abstract)

Describes the concept of the New Works on Paper events, held in Melbourne in June, August, and November 2016, the outcomes of which are published in this section of Meniscus.