The Banana Peel Project

“Who’s watching your drink? Let your hair down, not your guard.” In bright pink with big black block lettering, of course.

“Enjoy your night.  Know your limits.  Zero tolerance towards violence.”

A textual exhibition of the physiology of alcohol (and its rapacious others).  A drug defines its own textuality, its own social limits, its own legal presence — but only partly.  There’s a flexibility in the materiality of a drug, a malleability in the uses to which it can be put.  But these words — materiality, physiology, even chemistry or biology — are nonspecific, perhaps even incapable of allowing an easy movement into a zone of activity within which it is possible to affect.

A profound boredom is at work here. “I don’t know what the weather might do” is perhaps a fitting phrase, one that relates the uncertainty of being (on) alcohol: an uncertain space, a language that is almost precise, a danger that is merely apparent and probably kind: “a tiger in a trance.”

Just as “to listen” is to let the words wash over us, to write is to allow words a space to play.  Writing is hardly an analytical exercise, hardly an exercise in circumscription and determination (and least of all logocentrism) — especially when we are writing on (on) reason.  Reason — logos — needs something to bounce off of, something against and for which to assert itself and, in doing so, govern the landscape of its own impossibility.

To translate writing (as logos) into action (as ethos) is not to somehow assimilate every word, to incorporate every every morpheme of what is written — it is to have faith, to surrender (without throwing in the towel) to the play of words.  Words (and worlds) have their own agency, their own desire to move thought and action, to render logos different from what it is.

To surrender to logos is to critique logos, and it requires a recognition of things not for what they may be or what they signify, but for what they appear to be on the surface — what they are now, here.  Ignore signification and textuality.  Let being (on-on) shape its own path.

All this, of course, is to render strange.  It is the experience of traveling while still at home.  Trip at weddings.  Get high everywhere.  Be (on).

A sign can be a sign, and nothing more –: who’s watching your drink?