Color Puffs Out of Existence

                                                                                                Martin Luther King Day, 2012

Dear Reader of The Democracy of Objects,

We're going on a cosmic journey tonight. Traveling from a place of not having touched each other to a very sweet and rich, soft and wet place of touching each other most intimately. Without knowing where it's going to take us, how far into pleasure, how far into sea sickness—our Voyage of the Beagle.

Before we embark I wanted to remind you (and me) that this opportunity that we're giving each other to come closer, is an opportunity to deepen our erotic relationship with ourselves—to be that sensual man and sensuous woman we have always wished to be. To seek the truth about our lives and our capacities, not just for orgasm (when that comes), but for whole (or collective)-bodily intimacy, potentially a redrawing of the map. I'm that open to the possibilities that may emanate from our encounter.

I declare to you that in my arms, no harm will come to you. My body is as an oasis for you, a refuge from whatever torments you, and a source of refreshment for your spirit. I'm looking forward to calibrating my future touch to what I sense of you from this encounter.

Pastel by Kerry Smith -- Contains Information

As the Missouri legislature contemplates mandating the teaching of creationism in public schools—the functional equivalent of turning all the lights out in the public hospital's emergency room and pretending it remains operational—I am waiting and wondering, weighing my hopes and fears.

My hope (or series of hopes) is that The Democracy of Objects will be: 1) read hungrily by those with a penchant for theory and those who wish to cultivate a taste for such a penchant; 2) pressed into ready hands and hard drives (it's available online for free) by the scores; 3) that it be translated as quickly and carefully into every possible language so that its wisdom can be grappled with and absorbed across the globe and the conversations it should justly generate commence. And this is more faith than hope, that reading it will propel us into a specific ontological imaginary—a post-prophetic age. What other book so boldly undertakes to demonstrate the exciting ways far flung conceptual dots can be connected fruitfully, composing new collectives of thought? 

My fear, though, is that the very cohort who could ignite that fire is (now that the previously  withdrawn lines of income inequality have been brought to their attention so vividly via the Occupy Movement) 100% preoccupied with jockeying their adult children into position to assume those few slots among the 1% not already long ago bought and paid for. Drilling, fracking, pimping, and enslaving as long as they can sustain the illusion that their own personal biological issue can somehow be safeguarded. A second fear is that The Democracy of Objects is the sensuous object intellectuals like to fuck all night long, but don't want to publicly date. Conveniently forgetting a fundamental moral and evolutionary law: if someone goes to the trouble of figuring out how to fuck you blind, and then actually does it, you have to give it up to them. 

Bryant enfolds his central metaphor in thrilling terms, referring to the volcanic on eleven separate occasions, making a sublime word/numeral poetry while “plod[ding] along in the world of the concept.” Which flower of rhetoric erupts in his poem? I perceive a heat devil shimmering in the air.

Hidden volcanic powers irreducible to any of their manifestations in the world (70)

harbor a volcanic reserve in excess of their qualities (85)

Variations volcanically locked within substances (92),

volcanic potentialities hidden within objects (93),

volcanic powers coiled (95), volcanic, yet unactualized, powers (103),

Encounter the volcanic potentials harbored in the depths (114),

volcanic powers objects have folded within them (169)

Discover what volcanic powers they have hidden within themselves (185),

dark volcanic powers harbored within (281),

the subterranean volcanic core with which its

virtual

proper

being…is haunted

And what peculiar strange fruit does the devilish philosopher depict in his dark prose?

Faced with decades of content-based cultural criticism that implicitly, at least, adheres to Marx's formula that the aim of philosophy is not to represent the word, but rather to change it, it is peculiar that such theory doesn't seem to recognize that such cultural critiques seem to be fairly unsuccessful in producing their desired change. Here one would think that social and political theorists would become aware that this absence of change suggests that perhaps meanings, signifiers, signs, narratives, and discourses are not the entire story. (288)