Bios Politikos from a Dead Angle

…prostituere (to set forth in public, to expose to dishonor, to prostitute, to put to unworthy use). The Latin verb is a composition of pro (forward) and statuere (to cause to stand, to station, place erect). (Wikipedia, Prostitution)

The name of this yet undefined little building – a French euphemism – is intended as a reference to the mutual reluctance with which people’s attempts to create and furnish some personal space for themselves are treated in pretty much all human social organisation.

Olivier Razac states it in his history of barbed wire (Histoire politique du barbelé, Le Fabrique Éditions, 2000): barbed wire marks something akin to the game of citizenship that bestows symbolic tokens to all those, who are ready to embrace the figurative, not that actual at all, equality within. In a landscape of direct and indirect borders, biofilters, those without the game tend to be unpronounced, undeveloped property that yet waits to be conceptually and physically earmarked.

I have a nagging feeling that it’s not all this simple, though, and I’m perhaps not primarily interested in workings, rights and wrongs of any particular political agenda. I don’t mean to sound like an anti-globalist either. I’m still figuring out the globular part. Bitter-smelling territory markings, gradually washed away by recurring showers of rain or covered in particles, are unavoidable in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention that in a way or another, when correctly positioned in the right conversations, the scent compels us all.

All the small ways in which human life-spheres and bodies necessarily keep being prostituted as a sign of submission to the game – aesthetic, economic, political, ethical, you name it to make it seem true – mark the site of maison de tolérance, the barely tolerant tension that marks the most palatably queer of our storytelling traditions; or the embarrassed feelings that fill those, who suddenly become aware of their own curiosity toward their newly incarcerated playthings in the game of barbed wire relations. Without the right stories to go with, leaving to die is not all that different from keeping alive.

No promises, other than where there stands a treelike tree in all its hierarchical, arborescent form, it stands on a plateau that gazes at it from many a more unknown places.

And how can we talk of order overall

when the very placement of the stars

leaves us doubting just which one shines for whom?

(from Szymborska, Psalm)

(image: Harboured Hopes, Scribe of Salmacis 2010)