Fantasies in Permeable Structures - Laura Elrick

The book begins with two epigraphs, one from German visual artist Rosemarie Trockel, often described as a feminist, and a second from black poet Will Alexander. These epigraphs delineate the book’s central concern and approach: the complexities of “model” behaviors of resistance and the notion of imaginative language as resistance.

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Bergson, Closed and open societies

EU Parliament

In open societies, government is responsive and tolerant, and political mechanisms are transparent and flexible. The state keeps no secrets from itself in the public sense; it is a non-authoritarian society in which all are trusted with the knowledge of all.

military blocked the entrance to the Chinese parliament

Closed society claims to certain knowledge and ultimate truth lead to the attempted imposition of one version of reality.

Democracies are examples of the "open society," whereas totalitarian dictatorships, theocracy, and autocratic monarchies are examples of the "closed society."

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Porous society

The Futility of "Homeland Defense"

"Don't even try to close the holes in a country, and a society, designed to be porous"
David Carr
The Atlantic Magazine, January 2002

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Permeable Membrane

There’s a permeable membrane between art and society. A continuous dialectical motion. Tides brining the estuary. River flowing into sea. A writer describes the landmass “stained” current of the Congo River as discernible three hundred miles out on the ocean. Likewise: the matter of art enters the bloodstream of social energy. Call and response. The empathetic imagination can transform, but we can’t identify precise loci of transformation, can’t track or quantify the moments. Nor say how or when they lead, through innumerable unpredictable passageways, toward recreating survival, undermining illegitimate power and its cruelties.
Nor how newly unlocked social energies, movements of people, demand a renewed social dialogue with art: a spontaneous release of language and forms.
René Char: The poet bursts the bonds of what he touches. He does not teach the end of bonds. She cannot teach the end of bonds; but she can refuse to justify, accord with, ignore their existence.

Adrienne Rich, Permeable Membrane, 2006

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