Jacob Wren Talks to Masha Tupitsyn About Love Ethics
At the Believer Logger, an interview with Masha Tupitsyn conducted by Jacob Wren sees two prose writers (not the fairest of terms, as you'll see) in good poetic form--whither the interview, the cinematic frame, the intervention, the digital artwork; or radical love, maybe? "Writing visually, writing textually, writing sonically. Text is visual for me and images are textual. There is power in the way ideas are arranged, not just developed rhetorically. Form is everything," says Tupitsyn about Love Dog, her Tumblr turned book (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013). More from the top of this great read:
THE BELIEVER: You’ve said that Love Dog is concerned with a radical love ethic and a feminist politics of love. Can you explain a little bit more what you mean by this?
MASHA TUPITSYN: As James Baldwin wrote, true lovers are as rare as true rebels. This has been a pivotal decree for me, and the quote makes a number of appearances in Love Dog. Baldwin makes an important correlation between love and rebellion. Not only is true love rare and true rebellion rare, real love is itself a radical form of rebellion—engagement, thinking, and being—and therefore happens in the context of a larger project of justice, liberation, and critical thinking. In the book, the stakes of love are co-intricated with the stakes of knowledge. This is why even though Love Dog is a web-based manifesto about love—a kind of digital, feminist follow-up to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse—it is, like all my work, also a collection of cultural criticism. So it’s no accident that those deliberations run alongside one another in the book.
Having a love ethic, as opposed to simply being in love, or having a lover, means love is the way you actively choose to engage with the world—whether you’re in a relationship or not. It’s not about disappearing into existing structures, norms, and privileges. It’s precisely about breaking with the existing structures, values, and norms that prohibit real love in our culture. Love is an active construction, and choice, not just an encounter that happens by chance. And Love Dog is partly about how it is becoming increasingly difficult to find/maintain that kind of love in a culture of commodification, fear, denial, cynicism, and precarity.
BLVR: Reading Love Dog, I found myself wondering if, through the process of writing the blog and the book, did your ideas about love change in some way?
MT: Love has been the ontological pattern for me. And also the withholding pattern. I am still on hold with regards to love. And the longer one is on hold, in suspense, on a search, the harder, paradoxically, it is to continue with a search. The search batters but it also emboldens because it becomes both the way one fails and the way one succeeds. That’s of course the test of every search and truth procedure. It’s also how, one becomes a subject. I am as much what I am because of what I still don’t have as I am because of what I have had and what I might still have one day. As much as it is about mourning, Love Dog is equally a meditation on having faith in a world that no longer believes in singular themes, concepts, or narrative arcs. At any moment I could give up, but I haven’t because love for me is an indispensable structure for being. One that has opened up a space of meaning, possibility, feeling, agency, and writing that might otherwise not exist for me. The struggle now–post-Love Dog, if there is a post yet–is whether I still have faith in people. That is getting increasingly harder to maintain. I just don’t see many people today choosing love. I see people passing it up a lot. Foreclosing on it, deferring it, sabotaging, letting go.
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