GAG has a good history. the first word “gag” ((-->) o ) comes from the word for a gesture gagháls which is old nordic for 'throw back the head', ( ⁐ ) which you can see happening in some statues of norse people in a kind of camp marble way. the first word means a physical object like a bit of rope or cloth used to stop someone from speaking which became the second word which is a figurative “Gag” (((-->) )) which means preventing someone from speaking in a more abstract way e.g. politically. the second word makes the noun and associated action (-->) immaterial (()) in the sense that where the first “gag” is effective, the second is affective.

gagging is always a kind of work: which in its different registers works on, but also co-evolves with the registers of an object ( (speech) (( ~ )))that it works on. but while the first two gags are deliberate (corresponding to speech as utterance, or as a kind of potentiality) – the third word “gag” meaning 'to retch' comes from being flipped over ⤻ in that it's a sort of affected gesture [* ] (is autonomic or 'involuntary'). the gesture, *gag, reacts to the (“g/)Gag(”)s that preceded it (the (/abstract) rope you put in the mouth of thrown back head) to name a productive process (throwing up) that in one way interrupts the original linguistic meaning and in another physically folds the etymology outside in, while the relationship between speech and (naming) (“g/)Gag(“) (~((-->) )) , (~(((-->) ))) – turned inside out in parallel – is puked as an abject, tangled materiality that is less an intentional end than a side-effect ( ) ~

the idea is that “g/Gag” -as a self-perpetuating fact, or world, or set of historico-fictional limits - is at the same time a limitless inside that works on as well as through bodies, or without wanting to point out the pun; masc. History as the stopping up of a lot of other stories over time. not to root the perpetuation or origin of language and representation in masculinity, but to point out that there is a kind of socially cultivated logic, rooted in the idea of an essential male biological body (as a protrusion that fills up a hole ⁐ ) that perpetuates one type of story by the muting of others – with a logic that is in one way conscious, rational, deterministic, linear, progressive, active, or in another way (to avoid suggesting that it's actually got anything to do with 'biological gender') a DRY story in a WET (unconscious, intuitive, irrational, cyclical, passive, nurturing, tangled) mouth. because “g/Gag” as narrative isn't only a relational violence but also a kind of self-suck --> : the GAG that is the idea - in the sense that “**gag” is also a theatrical word for an interpolation into an actors part, to fill up or cover over a loss of memory – is both a fictional technology and a trick ~ --> ~ -->

in the same way that, in it's transition from “(G/)gag” ((abstract) rope) to “gag”(gesture),the word passes through a kind of metaphoric inversion – (or since metaphor is a trope of unconscious logic:) through a WETness that acts on and temporarily dissolves the meaning of the DRY thing – the GAG that is the idea (neither the generic linguistic fact of gagging (its presence in (white/ western) vocabulary), or any specific discursive meaning, but the whole etymological, palindromic tangle of G A G in time) co-opts and accelerates itself by pushing a repressive logic further into contact with a repressed logic to retroactively transform the relationship as a whole into a reproductive gesture that takes on the name without labelling the distinction. It's a technology insofar as it's to do with a re-patterning of information, but unlike DRY technologies - its less to do with the reproduction of ends, or to effect change as a means (since by the time *gag becomes “*gag” it has already dried up again – meaning it is basically aimless), but to expose the space between them - in which a weapon made into and out of a word - and transformed by its affective relation with the body - betrays itself.



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