JAM299

Muoz 2

Beyond Boundaries and towards

Borders: Collected Works of Jesus
Moncholi
By Jonathon Muoz

Fragment from Border-Town

A boundary divides, a border connects;

A boundary derides, a border projects;

Both issue forth in southern scent as proximate-antinomy,

Only the nostrils can save us from eternal metonymy.

 Muoz 3

Table of Contents

Introduction

pg

Early

Period

.pg

Middle

Period

pg

Late

Period

.pg
 Muoz 4

Introduction
Well-known, master-class, academic, prophet: these are all terms

which can usually be applied to a productive author during the course of her life.

These words fill in spaces within many books of criticism with a power that is

both arresting and commanding. However, I will begin this introduction by

introducing terms more appropriate to our author: unknown, lower-class, self-

educated, pathetic. It is these categories which our author not only inhabits, but

explodes. But, if some authors have been considered dynamite, then it is only

proper to call our author a supernova. For him explosion is just a way to make

implosion more sensuous and meaningful.

I came across the work of Jesus Moncholi while rummaging through the

house of my grandmother in her home in Brownsville, Texas. It was a small brown

book with ridged edges, coffee stains, and the usual wear and tear of those

books long forgotten. I read the title, Meditations on Mexica, and proceeded to

skim through the first pages. It was a collection of poetry, and from the first

lines, If Man is reified disease, the Mexican is deified defecation/ Man dies with

death, the Mexican with drought, I could not help but feel that a profoundly

relevant voice was speaking to me, bridging the gap of time in a moment of

authentic connection. I continued to read, until only after a few pages I realized
 Muoz 5

that there were detailed notes written on the margins, noting errata and

addenda. This was not only a book which belongs to Jesus Moncholi as an author,

but belonged to him as a person.

Doing research at the local library at the University of Texas Pan-American

I discovered that Mr. Moncholi had taught there for 20 years. Moncholi was born

in Brownsville, Texas in 1940, to a large migrant family. His father died when he

was young, and he was mostly taken care of by his brothers and sisters (of which

he had 12). During his professorship he wrote many theoretical and creative

texts which were never published. The following is a collection of some of those

texts, divided into three periods: early, middle, and late.

Moncholis early period consists of a poetic spectrum which ranges from

the poetic death throes of impassioned youth to the rigid and controlled

experimentation with culture and revolution. The small border-town culture of

Brownsville, Texas, ensured Moncholi was never too far or too close from the

revolution. While the Communist Ideal was being compromised by Maoism and

Stalinism, the South was quiet and tranquil. However, this tranquility was

characteristic of an impending storm more than of an equilibrium between man

and nature. Moncholis early period roughly corresponds to the time during which

he began his philosophical and literary studies, ending at the time when he was

finishing college. Growing up on a ranch, Moncholi was self-educated. Depending

on a small local library affiliated with the Catholic Church, Moncholis early

exposure to philosophy had a noticeable Christian bent, e.g. Aquinas and

Augustine. However, he was also exposed to a certain unrest which

characterized the vast amount of Chicano laborers in the South. At the age of 18

his mother and other members of his family were converted to the Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was his conversion that allowed Moncholi to
 Muoz 6

attend Brigham Young University on scholarship. There would always be a

tension in his life between the conservative orthodoxy of his church, and the

liberal anti-establishment sentiments formed during the sweat of his youth.

Immediately after college, his labor sentiments materialized into an intense

study of the works of Marx and Marxist Theorists.

Moncholis middle period consists of his theoretical and philosophical

works. Returning to South Texas, he received a position teaching philosophy at

the University of Texas Pan-American. During this period the Communist Ideal

was losing its sway, as Capitalism became more and more complex, e.g. multi-

national capital. South Texas was largely unaffected by such advancements, but

Moncholis stress is evident. If the Revolution can only come when the symptoms

of Capital have become too much to bear, the system has been deadly efficient

in creating a false-consciousness for the masses. Much of the work of this period

is also a response to deconstruction and Derrida. Moncholi saw in deconstruction

an unconscious tendency to fragment the subject of late Capital, so as to make

her forever inert and unable to revolt.

Moncholis late period is characterized by a general malaise over the loss

of momentum in the labor movement. South Texas quickly became ever more

commercialized, and many of the intellectuals of the south assimilated into a

new modality of late Capital. During this period he returned to the roots of

Mexican culture by studying Mexica cosmology.

Moncholi died abruptly at the age of 40. Most of his work remains

unknown, as he was an avid letter writer. This critical text is from a folio of his

collected papers given to me by his daughter. I am indebted to her for help and

willingness to publish these important texts. I am also very thankful to the

Lannan Poetry Seminar for supporting this endeavor.

 Muoz 7

Fragment from A Criticism of Shelley

[] poetry must not forget that it itself is not integral, that its constitution

only becomes so in and through relating itself to the real concrete historical

actions of humankind. Shelley was right to have said that poets are the

unacknowledged legislators of the world, except he forgot to qualify this world.

We must understand the direction of all future poetry in light of this qualification:

poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the primary world. The task of

poetry is not to teach humanity to hide in those imaginative fountains of

meaning devoid of sensate existence, but to teach humanity to reclaim that

primordial unity of sensuous-external experience and imaginative integral

 Muoz 8

meaning. We should apply Marxs thesis for the philosophers to the poets, with

modification: the poets have only given interpretation of the world a meaning;

they must also give meaning to the concrete changes of the world. In other

words, we should make change itself integrally significant for interpretation. We

must first reclaim the world, if we ever wish to reclaim the future.

I. Early Period

Chapter 1: Origins: poems and songs of youth

The Limitation of Language (Age 16)

The limitations of language are indicative of the human impulse of metaphor-

creation.

Subjectivity demands relations to the external world;

it necessitates language, the means by which subjective impulses

and thoughts gain tangibility and add form to the primordial content of self.
 Muoz 9

Language, at times, can seem like a tomb for the reality of objects,

for the essence of any action or intent.

But, forever will I wrap myself in the sweet comfort

of the metaphorical,

let it be the gold standard of linguistic economy.

Let language relate the crude output of my consciousness to a world of

becoming.

Let all my thoughts function as new verses in the free rhyming structure of
existence.

Let me make mantra of language now,

and let it free me from the confines of anonymity.

My thoughts are indefinite,

Indeed, the content which fills and animates my thoughts

is perhaps too dense to comprehend that it threatens

to rip through the landscape of my consciousness; a perpetual black hole of

unintelligible entropy.

Oh but what bliss this density has emanating from within it!

These thoughts are new constellations

that have formed in the cosmos of my subjective universe,

and watching them I become even

more aware of the beauty of my self-actualization.

All experience is absorbed and processed through the faculties of the mind;

they are refined,

conceptualized and incorporated

into the subject in a continual flux of becoming.

Let these experiences illuminate the dense mass,

let me peer into the causal relations that give life meaning

and give my thoughts shape, let me relate these thoughts as feelings

and let me unravel from them the source of my new disposition.

 Muoz 10

Indeed, I have racked my mind,

filled countless papers with scribbles and verses of poor poetry.

For a long time I could only relate a deep feeling of anonymity and solitude,

I abused language for my own design,

relentlessly giving substance to false concepts and shallow feelings.

These were mere shadows of the true poetry written into my heart,

the poetry that filled my youth with joy and ecstasy;

the poetry that reigned over me on its holy throne

from which it peered down and lulled me into a romantic slumber,

when all the forces of nature seemed like envoys of the Divine.

Now only do I realize that this was not a slumber,

it was an awakening!

Only now do I realize that the divine potentiality that illuminates my existence

has always been latent within.

This spring has awoken the poetry within:

the sad, withered poetry that was once the fountainhead of all my efforts.

Now, with newfound clarity, I can decipher some of the text of the eternal poem

that loosely assembles as my essence.

I know not whether this is the title,

or a line,

I do not know its length,

its style,

or its origin.

All I know is this one line,

and by it I will live my life in accordance to its principle.

Let the shadows of self doubt flee from the power that I now possess,

indeed no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Let my life be a testament to this verse of truth and beauty:

 Muoz 11

AMO ERGO SUM.

I love, therefore I am!

Let every creative function within my domain cease its dissent from this
principle,

let all my powers of imagination conform to it,

let my actions derive value from it,

and let my God flow from it.

Oh lovely lords of Parnassus, allow me to enter into your realm so I can act upon
this principle;

No, so that I may be this principle.

Una meditacin (Age 20)

El aullido del alma no est all,

Radica en mi razn:

La quemadura del cuerpo me pertenece.

Me apedreo con artefactos que sosiegan,

Pero slo abro horizontes de heridos.

A meditation
The howl of the spirit is not out there,
 Muoz 12

It resides in my reason:

The burn of the corpse belongs to me.

I stone myself with artifacts which sooth,

But I only open horizons of hurt.

Meta-Mexicano (Age 21)

Beyond borders lie broken backs,

Bent into shape and shade of corpse.

Dirt opens the frontiers long past,

Where ancient gritos sound and shudder.

Do you hear those odd-alley tejano strings

Being played by big hats and little things?

I hear it, out there where souls will always yearn,

Spiritless apparitions clinging to words to burn.

Revolutionary Selves (Age 22)

We hide from the other in liquid pools of silvery night, mesmerized by image.

We violently sustain her by the equivocation of thereness and transcendence.

We project our pains and unfulfilled desires into the image of the other;

Make her a monster, a living contradiction of stone and slumber.

We disfigure her, scale her down until her skeleton remains poor and brittle,
 Muoz 13

Until she is nothing more than a pathetic reflection of those thoughts we cannot
bear.

But we cannot escape the homogeneity of being nor its motion and magnetism.

We revolutionary selves can only rest in the sublime notion of receptivity.

II. Middle Period

Chapter 3: Limits and landscape: Internal boundaries of universal

expression
Upon Encountering a Paradox by Jesus Moncholi (Age 24)

Entering upon the open horizon left open by ridged edge

I found myself tied leg and foot beyond a rope of lead.

Detached from the sky above I leapt toward a cloud

White it was with a shape of a square-root made round.

Fleeing from the bastard plain I crept toward a home

 Muoz 14

Whose red doors uttered a sigh of ocean spray and foam.

Lightly I surfed on a creaky wooden lump of debris

Till the lead came out and finally made me free.

There I stood standing on one foot looking for room

Waiting for a space to open up in which to boom.

I yelled without air to breath and finally there I saw the sea

Only once did I blink to look at the void that was in me.

There I saw that newfound art made ancient by sound

The words gave way to the weight of water-blue around

Finally the word came to rest in that old paradox of the rest.

Exegesis: An attempt at Psycho-archeology

Here, I am recounting an experience of a paradox; that old paradox of the

rest. I am not only experiencing a paradox, I am creating paradoxes; i.e. the use

of paradox-objects creates those same paradoxes as objects of the imagination.

For example, a rope of lead is a paradoxical thought-object because for it is

essential to being a rope that it is made of flexible cord, while it is an essential

property of lead to not be.

In total, this poem is about the aesthetic experience of reading, about

opening oneself up and bringing oneself to bear upon the experience of another

individual. From the beginning, ridged edge signifies the edges of pages of a

book, while the book itself is quite literally an open horizon, e.g. a book left

open in a horizontal position on a desk. We must also be wary of giving

conventional meaning to words that are quite obviously paradoxical objects. For

example, when we read There I saw that newfound art made ancient by sound,

we must take this to mean that sound itself has the ability to ossify poetic

ventures. The medium of sound is another remove from meaning. If words are

estranged from their meaning-objects, then the sound of words are even more
 Muoz 15

susceptible to being alienated from meaning. I try to do this with the word lead

which at first is meant to be taken as the metal, but which really means lead in

the sense of the verb. Thus this paradox is not simply a contradiction in the

essence of objects, but is a pathway to re-evaluating the terms. It also plays with

our tendency to identify the words at the ends of lines as something to be

completed. We read edge and assume that lead is to complete it, as if edge itself

was an incomplete notion whose meaning only came into being through its

acoustical complement; hence, his use of detached.

If lead signifies the verb, then it is with reference to narrative direction,

or the direction of meaning in general. If we are to be wary of being detached, it

is as an aesthetic subject that we must be so. That is, since every story or poem

tries to communicate an experience that belongs to a consciousness alien to our

own, we must seek to occupy that consciousness, to detach ourselves from

ourselves. At the beginning of the poem the narrator cannot do so, and so feels

as though he is being lead. He feels as though he is tied to a meaning not his

own, a meaning whose utter lack of clarity is symbolized by that cloud with a

shape of a square-root made round. It is not until he encounters that red

wooden door that the narrator is set free from the lead, whose position as

grammatical subject in the lead came out and finally made me free indicates

the narrators objectification by the narrative leading.

It is also significant that in my metaphor-experience, the ocean is the

source of the spray and foam. Here, ocean refers to those oceanic feelings

which have been noted as the source of religious feeling. In other words, it was

not until I experienced, within the context of the narrative I was reading, a

genuine feeling of oceanic depth that I am freed from the lead. The previously

noted oceanic feeling also symbolizes a complete return to the unidividuated

 Muoz 16

ego. For example, in psychoanalytic theory, Freud refers to the oceanic feeling

as the feeling proper to the individual prior to the formation of the superego and

the guilt of conscience. This feeling is an experience of being one with the

universe, of having subjectivity being objectified in all things. Also, in the words

of Lacan, such a feeling symbolizes a penetration of the real (as that which is

pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic, that which is the ineliminable residue of all

articulation) into the stability of the imaginary ego-ideal who is determined by

the symbolic order. It is this feeling which frees the narrator (of the poem) from

the constraints of narrative (of what he is experiencing), but only because it

fragments subjectivity and thereby destabilizes meaning altogether. For this

reason, he is freed as a passive grammatical object; his fragmented experience

precludes the advent of the subject, grammatically and ontologically.

Being freed from being lead, the narrator finds himself looking for room in

which to boom. He is waiting for space to open up and since he is looking to

boom in that space, we can take this to mean that the narrator is looking for a

space to open up in the narrative in which to articulate his presence, without

symbolization. Since a boom is a sound without words, athe author is clearly

trying to inject his subjective experience (of the real) into the symbolic order of

the narrative (which he is experiencing).

Next the narrator proceeds to yell without air to breath, and it is only

with such a gesture that he finds the sea. In other words, only in a gesture

which is an emptying out to a reality which negates the very content of the

gesture, does one find the sea, which is the final (note the use of finally)

object of the narrative search. Yelling is a gesture which rids the body of air,

while air itself is precisely what the environment lacks. The subject is filled with

anguish, with the inability to express the real of experience, that the only
 Muoz 17

possible way to rid himself of such excess is to release it into a medium which

represents a total lack of excess. Paradoxically, it is through such a gesture itself

that the medium becomes more than lack. For example, exhaling air into a room

with no air transforms this room without air into a room with air. This air is always

filled with potential, and we must see its lack as a transitory stage, an exclusion

waiting for a conclusion. The author is inviting us to give into aesthetic

experience by shading in the symbolic order of the other with subject

appropriations of an experience of excess. We must do so in the faith that the

symbols of the other have a meaning for us, that they have a potency for

receptivity that is able to coincide with an oceanic feeling.

Next, the narrator states that he looks one last time at the void which he

was. This concludes the previous analysis: he has finally rid himself of his excess

and blinks only once, i.e. he transcends subjectivity (the me). In the end, the

words (symbolic order) collapse under the experience of the real (water-blue

around) and the poem concludes with the line, Finally the word came to rest in

that old paradox of the rest. Here we see the completion of his aesthetic

experience, the word (as symbol, Logos) comes to rest (as in a moment without

movement, i.e. it is a completed action) in that old paradox of the rest. Here

rest signifies the other, the consciousness of another being which is always

implied in a subjects own consciousness, but which is always hidden and alien.

This is the paradox of aesthetic experience itself: one comes to find meaning in

the words of a consciousness totally and inaccessibly other to the person

experiencing them, yet there is an absolute foundation of experience which

makes even the most particular symbolized experience of the other a real and

felt experience for the subject.

 Muoz 18

From Logic of the postmodern1 (Age 26)

Editors note: In Logic of the postmodern, Moncholi outlines his polemic against

deconstruction. Also, he mostly uses an aphoristic form in an attempt to mirror one of his

intellectual influences, Friedrich Nietzsche.

[] The postmodern hegemony of the aesthetics of fragmentation and

decentring is exemplified in the process of reification as image commoditization.

Thinghood exists solely as an aesthetic phenomenon which the postmodernist

constructs in order to then deconstruct. Reification is no longer a rupture in

reality, reality itself becomes a rupture in the process of reification and

deconstruction. In the postmodern epoch we find reality only in the conjuncture,

as an endless play of signs where the meaning-effect itself is a reified image of

the dissoluble oscillation between stable meanings. This projection of reality as

the process of reification and deconstruction is thus applied to everything which

has meaning. The declarative sentence, along with the declarative-being (Being

as a matter of fact), are denied logical cohesion and are contradictory in

essence.

Aphorisms: Meaning contra Deconstruction

X.

On the Deconstruction of a poem*

*See On the Construction of a poem

On the Construction of a poem**

1 Editors note: Moncholi uses as an epigraph lines from Sartre To forget about the others?
How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your
mouth, cut your tongue out-but you cant prevent your being there (Inez from Sartres No Exit).
 Muoz 19

**See On the Deconstruction of a poem

XVI.

Sentence: This is not a poem, this is a sentence.

Deconstructive exegete: This poem is obviously an expression of the inherent

contrariness of the hypercritical expression of the declarative sentence. By stating that

this sentence is not a poem, it is obviously invoking the antithetical processing-

procedures of bringing into the critical field a state of affairs which must necessarily take

the form of that to which they are opposed. The authorial intent is undermined precisely

because it is what it is, i.e. authorial. Perhaps if the poet had said, He said that this is

not a poem he could have successfully detached himself from the declaratives co-

extension with subject appropriations. However, we must not be fooled by the authors

willingness to detach himself from the poem-form, because it is in such a form that he

delimits the grammatical sense-affectations of the declarative. In other words, no

statement made public can be said to have the same existential-grammatical grounding

as those private thoughts, those sentences which declare everything, yet nothing.

Sentence: This is not a poem, this is a sentence.

XX.

The new law of non-contradiction:

A (subject-truth) non-A (subject-meaning)

XXI.

New law of social interaction:

World (Subject + Subject ) = [(Subject ^-) (Subject + Subject )] World

The Deconstructionist constructs the negated-subjectivity as the principle of meaning,

and in so doing subsumes the positive monads which constitute the life-world

(Lebenswelt)
 Muoz 20

XXX.

New law of aesthetic criticism:

Text World-meaning = Subject-truth

Truth is here estranged from meaning because subjective truth and meaning can only

coincide in the meaningful context of the world which constitutes subjectivity. For them,

the truth of the world (through the dialectic of history) is irreconcilable with the truth of

subjectivity.

XXXVI.

The deconstruction of deconstructing is the deconstructing of deconstruction

This is not circular logical, and cannot lead to a tautology. Rather it is a nothingology;

nothing, not in the metaphysical sense, but in the sense of a negated medium, a nothing

which implies the potent sensuousness and power of that which is denied. When we need

a new monadology they give us a nomanology.

 Muoz 21

From Towards a poetry of the future, or Projection contra Negation

(26)
Editors note: Here are collected excerpts from Moncholis folio, included with the

collected aphorisms above. Most of these are meant to be short sketches, and many of

the themes touched upon figure into his poetry and aesthetic theory.

III.

The world is essentially a conflict. Even as I write I am lost in ideality, I entertain the

ghost-thoughts of eras past, where communion left no hands empty. We can deprive the

world of self-conscious thought, and we would get along just fine. This is the double-

edged sword of self-reflection: it is superfluous. We need not think about the physical-

spatial place of the sun, its cosmological import, or its placement in a causal chain in

order to feel its heat. The sun burns, our bodies feel this, and at bottom this feeling is

always already an interpretation. Bodily existence is interpretation. We can only make

sense of the world through its unfaithful equivocation. As long as my thought can ascend

to a higher place where thought itself becomes my object, I can never escape the

metaphor. The metaphor is a phylogenetic burden, a remnant of our original sin.

IV.

Where poetry and philosophy meet, they also dissolve. The precipitate is none other than

that notion which has given modernity her vigor: consciousness. However, consciousness
 Muoz 22

is not always reflective; we need not even be conscious of it. Therefore, while modernity

provided the world with the conceptual modification to understand structures of

domination, it also gave those structures a way to sedate the masses. When we needed

the activity of revolt we were given the passivity of the reified noun-concept of the

revolution.

XI.

Poetry is nothing unless it can transform itself into poetic praxis. The task of poetry must

be to break the human from her chains, those chains which bind us to a cold and stale

objectivity. Poetry has for too long been impoverished, we have had too many poems and

not enough poets. We need reclaim the primacy of the notion to poeticize.

XVIII.

One cannot poeticize and not be a philosopher. We must actualize the concept of the

poet-philosopher that finds no better expression than in the person of Nietzsche. Before

Nietzsche suffered his crazed vegetation he tried to embrace a horse who was being

whipped. This last gesture represents his regret, the burden of his asociality. Indeed, this

last gesture in the life of Nietzsche is the last symptom-formation of his neurosis: that his

poetry and philosophy were devoid of the social-productive force of praxis.

XIV.

Towards a redefinition of the poet-philosopher. The burdens of history have shown than

the lover of wisdom has also been the despiser of the body. Philosophy must reclaim

the philos and bring it to bear on the wisdom, not of our concepts or our ideas, but on the

emergent interconnections between man and man (the embodied transcendental

intersubjective relations). The poet has since antiquity been considered a maker, or a

composer of sorts. However, precisely what it is he made was always contingent on his

historical epoch. Perhaps the poet only turned to words because the body-universe was

condemned to be separated from the highest aspirations of man. The poet-philosopher

 Muoz 23

must be a composer of love who loves to compose. We need the philospoetes (loving

poet).

Excerpts from Alienation, Praxis and a Marxist Aesthetic (30-33)

Editors note: The following excerpts are from Moncholis notes for the planned book,

Alienation, Praxis, and a Marxist Aesthetic. The book was planned to underpin his new

notion of body, and its relation to aesthetics, especially as artistic laboring.

The writings of Marx in his younger and more philosophy-orientated stage center on his

themes of alienation and estrangement.2 These concepts were used in his argument that

self-alienation is a result of an alienated labor-process, and it is here that we can see

Marx as a proto-existentialist. Both Existentialism and Marxism work towards a dialectic

understanding of the processes which create and orient subjectivity, and these processes

are inherent in laboring acts. []

2 Editors note: for example, the young Marx writes that it stems from the very nature of
estrangement that each sphere (e.g. morality and politics) applies to me a different and
opposite yardstickfor each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on
a particular round of estranged essential activity (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844).
 Muoz 24

Concerning Labor as Praxis. [] In the labor-process we interact with objects of the world

with a potential that we appropriate for our own ends. This interaction with objects of the

world is only possible if we endow ourselves with the inertia proper to those physical

objects which are governed by the natural laws of the universe. We cannot use the

hammer if we do not make our own bodily extensions (e.g. our arms and hands) inert

objects in the physical universe. It is not as though they were not already intricately

incorporated in that universe, but in laboring acts motions become automatic,

unconscious; our actions lack the determination of purely self-conscious acts. In other

words to interact in such a universe we must make ourselves the en-soi of thinghood in

order to commune with the thing. However, this en-soi cannot determine the self, for we

are also pour-soi and this order of mental acts must determine those acts of existential

determination. Our en-soi must be relegated to acts of labor which objectify the will, and

which give physical, external objectifications to the pour-soi. We must not forget that

through the entire process we are body entirely, and that the body is itself my action in

the world. It is precisely this aspect of the bodys relation to the world (i.e. the primacy of

its intentions) in productive labor that capitalist ideology suppresses. []

The laborer and sense-giving acts. [] Sense-giving acts define the individual as an

entity that is for-itself:if he (the human-being) ceases to be definable in terms of the

act of sense-giving, he relapses into the condition of the thing, the thing being precisely

what does not know, what slumbers in absolute ignorance of itselfwhat consequently is

not a true self, i.e. a for-itself, and has only a spatio-temporal form of individuation,

existence in itself (Merleau-Ponty; The Phenomenology of Perception). In bourgeois-

capitalist society the mythology of the individual is that of an alienated self endowed

only with a spatio-temporal form of individuation. The individual is only an authentic self

if he is capable of sense-giving acts, and this cannot happen under the guise of ideology.

Within an ideological framework actions never give meaning but only relate to a pre-

established meaning; to a source of authority that is also outside the system. For

example, in capitalistic society our actions are accorded to impersonal market forces and

an underlying presence that never comes into question. We make ourselves things but

this thingness is not merely a transitional form that allows us to engage with the inert,
 Muoz 25

as in productive laboring praxis, but rather it is the ground for all our engagements. The

ideological false-consciousness of the individual does not become aware of this inertia

which he has himself become because the entire process of subjectification has been

reified into a mere image of something other to the individual. []

The subject of ideology. [] The ideological subject is and his actual material becoming

turns from a process of dynamism into a cold stagnant pendulum in which motion can

only be conceived along certain trajectories. For example, the quantifiable nature of the

functioning of capital, its ability to be made sense of, leaves no room for trajectories of

subject movement that are outside the system. When a laborer thinks of change it is

merely a horizontal movement from one pole to the other, e.g. from poor to rich,

unknown to know, useless to useful; vertical movement and the prospect of another

horizon never occur. The system never allows the process itself to become something of

import. The subject along the trajectories of capital never reaches that thingness which

is as quantifiable as capital, and hence he is always alienated because even in the

process of becoming a subject or an individual he is constantly held up to the standards

of a thing. The laborer thinks but does not know: he thinks he is a thing but does not

know it. He does not give meaning but suspends the process entirely in order to get

meaning from the system which merely points to a pole on the horizon and says, Wait,

soon you shall be one or the other. []

Towards an authentic laboring-consciousness. [] The fundamental difference between

alienated consciousness and non-alienated consciousness, or authentic consciousness,

lies in labor as praxis or process. When Marx argues that social being determines

consciousness he is not saying that consciousness is wholly determined by social

relations, but that the only way consciousness can express itself is through universal

social networks of interaction. Many existentialists argue that there is a pre-reflexive

consciousness, a consciousness that interacts with the world that precedes the advent of

the self or ego. With this in mind, Marxs statement can improve from qualification:

social being (the way society is constructed) determines our consciousness of the self.

This is not to say that our interaction with the world, founded on primordial
 Muoz 26

consciousness, is wholly determined by the society in which we are born into, only that

we cannot think of ourselves as asocial individuals. His statement is meant to criticize the

philosophical thought that reason exists prior to society with its laws intact, e.g.

Rationalism. This statement must not be understood in such a way that it makes

impersonal social relations the only determining causal factor for our existence; this

would be merely an inverse expression of the ideology he is criticizing. Our

consciousness can only be authentic when it has freed itself from the impediment of

social relations in which we are mere things. If we were engaged in social relations that

formed a dialectic process involving a plurality of subjects then consciousness would be

determined by our own interactions with other subjects. This consciousness would be

plastic and would not only think but know. It would be a consciousness-in-process which

would have intimate knowledge of the dialectic envelopment of many subjects. Only if

social relations are impersonal and systematic, i.e. capitalistic, can they determine a

consciousness that is false. Marx is arguing that we must not simply try to change the

way we think (as Hegel suggests) but the way that we relate to the world and to others.

The only way to do this is to revolutionize the labor process. []

Primacy of world-relating. [] If we are to understand dialectic materialism, we must

understand that for Marx the primacy of world-relating lies in labor. According to Marx,

self-alienation is a result of an alienated labor-process.3 We do not become alienated in

an abstract sense through a false relating to abstract labor, we become alienated in the

labor-process; or rather we become conscious of our alienation in relating to this labor-

process. Only if we deny the process of our own subject-becoming, which is founded on a

basic material intentionality, do we then become alienated. This also implies that human

nature is not itself alienated which is why Marxism can serve as a viable Humanism.

[] Our interactions with the material world constitute a horizon of intelligibility which we

use to make sense of the world. Motility is the basic intentionality because it precedes

3 Editors note: Marx writes that if then the product of labour is alienation, production
itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation
(Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).
 Muoz 27

reflection; it is a way of relating to the world and, according to Merleau-Ponty, it is the

primary way of doing so.4 []

The subject-object nexus of laboring praxis. [] Our interaction in labor concerned with

the production of something must be an interaction which fundamentally revolves around

our use of equipment.5 There is no product without the tool, there is no way to take raw

natural resources and produce something to serve a purpose without a process which

imposes such a purpose or end. Paper does not become a tool without the writing tool;

the writing tool does not become a tool without a system of intelligible symbols and so on

and so forth. This is important to Marxist theories because it implies that equipment is

not a thing in the sense of an entity with a stable nature; a piece of equipment only

becomes what it is through use. Even if it is not used it still has a use-potential that is

implicit in its being a tool, but this does not mean that it is a tool in-itself without

reference to use. It becomes a tool once it has been used and this use is integrated in a

horizon of a totality of equipment; a tool will not always remain as such. []

Wage-laborer as tool. [] There is an analogy to be made between the wage-laborer and

a piece of equipment. Both have potentialities for creating values. The wage-laborer has

a labor-power which they sell for a wage while a tool has a use-potential which is

appropriated during the labor process. Therefore, wage-laborers can be seen as tools to

the capitalists, as pieces of equipment which are to be exploited. Exploited labor rests on

the creation of surplus-value which rests on the use of the laborer as an exploited tool.

For example, the capitalist ends up with more value in the commodity than the value a

4 Editors note: According to Merleau-Pontys notion of motility, (we) understand motility

as basic intentionality. Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of I think that but
of I can (Ponty 379).

5 Editors note: According to Heidegger a piece of equipment has a different ontological

structure than things that simply are. We enter into a certain relationship with
equipment, one that is characterized as something in-order-to and within this
structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something (Heidegger;
Being and Time). Also it is important to note that for Heidegger such equipment is
always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: there is a horizon of in-order-to
(s) which constitute the field in which a piece of equipment attains its equipmentality:
We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern equipmentwhat makes an
item of equipment[is] its equipmentality (Heidegger; Being and Time).
 Muoz 28

workers wage can purchase. However, it is precisely the structure of exploitation to

efface the use-value of a tool, to keep it hidden and to steep it in mystification. []

Capital therefore rests on ideology in so far as such an ideology already constitutes the

human subject as an inert product with a nature that is stable and given. Such an

ideological perspective places the subject in a relation with the world that demands him

to remain inert. Capital rests on the perpetual inertia of the human subject in economic

relations, he is quantified, reified and then his consciousness is always in this mode

because without the system he would lose himself. Humans have a different ontological

structure than the tool or the thing and it is this discovery that both existentialists and

Marxists assert.6 However, I believe that human are tools in a qualified sense: a human is

a tool which has the ability to understand itself as tool because it creates use-values.

Human-beings have a use-value which is different from all other use-values: its use as

tool generates more use-values. A human-being seems to be a tool (in-itself) which has

the ability to realize itself as such (for-itself).

[]I believe that for Marx authentic consciousness accords with the ability to free oneself

from the constraints of ideologically-enforced reification and to see oneself as a tool

which both creates and uses itself.7 In the capitalist system false-consciousness is two-

fold: the laborer only sees herself as a thing to be used (she does not create) and the

capitalist sees herself as a transcendent subject who only creates (she does not use).

Only in a system in which use and creation are integrated into a singular process can

consciousness be liberated. Only once property has been abolished can the individual

appropriate his energies in such a way that every product of his labor is simultaneously a

self-use and a self-creation. This genuine labor process can only arise if we adopt a

certain attitude towards ourselves and our productions, and I believe that for both

6 Editors note: For Heidegger the human-being has a specific ontological structure: that
of Dasein.

7 Editors note: Moncholi is here identifying self-creation as the existential category of

pour-soi (contrasting en-soi). The equipmentality of the human subject is in-itself (en-
soi) to the extent that we each discover our ability to produce in a horizon of the in-
order-to; However, we also possess a transcendent aspect of self which is able to come
away from this in-itself and to free itself from its thingness.
 Muoz 29

Marxism and Existentialism the best model for this sort of process is that of artistic

creation.

Labor as art. []We must be engaged in a long process of appropriating all those actions

and thoughts which are existentially determining. Freedom accords to a responsibility

over actions. To be what one is, is to integrate past actions, intentions, and feelings into a

whole and this rests on an assumption of responsibility. In the labor process, this

responsibilityis lacking in both worker and capitalist. Without responsibility all

individuals involved in the production process are alienated. 8 []

The worker cannot see her actions as her own because they always over-determined by

the system. Her actions are never her own but are the actions of an ego; a fiction which

does not exist. Also the capitalist is not a genuine self because he takes responsibility

over actions that are not his own. For example, he will take credit for the production of

commodities that are not fully her own; they have a surplus-value which originates from

the worker. Capitalism forbids this construction of the self (using our freedom)because

it relies on an alienated production process which cannot afford for responsibility to be

authentically subject-appropriated. []

This authenticityis only realized as an artistic endeavor in which one gives style to

oneself. We must make characters of ourselves and learn to stylize our action in order to

fit them into an artistic plan.9 This stylization is precisely the taking of responsibility as

mentioned above. To give style to our character is to constantly re-interpret our actions

and to fit them into a larger scheme: it is to use ourselves as tools that produce meaning

and to take responsibility for those productions because they constitute and create the

self. We must not only be artists but we must be creations. []

8 Editors note: For example, Marx states that the possessing class and the proletarian
class represent one and the same human self-alienation (Marx; Alienation and Social
Classes).

9 Editors note: This paragraph and above arguments center on Moncholis reading of
Friedrich Nietzsche.
 Muoz 30

To be the novelist of oneself implies that we must treat our lives as an artwork itself; we

must become both creator and created. We must be a new type of human being. 10 We

must be free spirits who are free from the metaphysical caprice which makes our

principle of motion an estranged figure over and beyond ourselves. We must preserve

that sacred innocence of becoming, which is nothing other than taking a stand on those

acts which have a meaning for us. As Nietzsche said, as soon as we fancy that someone

is responsible for the fact that we are thus and thuswe corrupt the innocence of

Becoming for ourselves (Nietzsche; Will to Power, 266). []

Our life constitutes a particular history and it is this history which must be enriched by

artistic nuances if it is to properly reflect our freedom, i.e. our responsibility. This entire

process of integration and re-interpretation does not originate in ideation, it is a real

actual process and in this sense it is like Marxs dialectic. Each integration, dissolution,

and re-integration is constantly working at a whole and the success of this process relies

on an intricate equilibrium of the self. Like the dialectic, each part of the process is

retained and becomes necessary to the whole and I think that for both Nietzsche and

Marx existence is a continual dialectical process. To engage with the world while adhering

to its ebb and flow is to take proper responsibility over actions and to make them

necessary. This aesthetic interpretation of ones history and ones self is the foundation

for liberating the consciousness of the worker. He can only view his life as a piece of art if

he is involved in an aesthetic relation to labor in which his product is a manifestation of

his own project and not the imposition of a transcendent system.

Chorro (Age 32)

When thoughts lose their shape they become real.

When reality loses its shade it becomes thought.

When new horizons appear ancient they take flight,

When ancient borders appear new they burn.

From whence sleep drowns,

10 Editors note: Thought taken from Nietzsche: What is the ape to man? A
laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a
laughingstock or a painful embarrassment (Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
 Muoz 31

There too we are found,

Hiding in rock and in stone.

We are the marks,

Which surface

When surface

Has gone.

Con mi gente. (Age 35)

Editors note: Written to be recited at a pro-labor congregation of local
professors and civic leaders.

It seems that no matter which way the skies surround, the wind always blows
South.

South to a land made foreign by my traversing strange lands: Northern exposure.

All movements lead me to those boundaries and borders where people obscure
the cityscape with towering shadowy shapes which have colored the world
around them.

Every commitment finds its completion there where the individual and
community are one; with my people.

There are ties to that valley set beyond those hills tainted by modernity and
industry alike.

They extend to every person great and small; the community made flesh does
not care if you are a tooth or a toe.

There, skins gently caress each other like grains of sand along the beach.

The sun beats down upon us, but this is not tyranny, it is translation.

We sweat not from exhaustion but from over-abundance; can you not already see
that the liquid on our naked bodies has lost its salt but not its flavor?

We walk in that puddle set beneath us; solid land is not too clean, it is too safe.
 Muoz 32

After all, has not the American city taken away from us all that moderns call
dirty: tradition, faith, family, hard-work, and above all community?

No we inhabit new spheres of existence where old beliefs make good homes and
no fires smoke because winter never comes.

We are a people of stick and mud, but we would be insulted if you filthied our
name with those empty abstractions of the post-modern epoch; you see pro-
gress I only see proto-re-gress.

Already you have taken that primordial mud and made it concrete, you fill it in
with the contraptions of technological fetishisms and see only the crass
exchange of false realities.

You are Capitalists par-excellence, but you sell us stability and safety and
demand that we give you our honors and virtues.

You give us the media already deprived of the individual, human relations
deconstructing the individual, yet claim a hitherto unknown allegiance to the
individual.

You communicate with signs not our own; you scream at us and are angered
when they do not sustain.

We are not merely shadows, we are presences; and all presences have their
magnitude and motion.

You take from us all interaction, intention, and ideation; you make every hand a
foreign one, you take all labor and make it your own.

Process, purpose, and people you have stripped from us and produced it in your
gilded factories of commodity production, selling it back as if you were the
solution instead of the disease.

I give you my people.

We were here when the lands went by many names, a time in which signs were
not designed and produced to sell on the market.

We were there before the advent of mechanization.

In your ears only clamor the humming of machines but in those days all forces of
nature spoke with their own power and nuance.

Before the free market our markets were free, before your surplus of things we
were surpluses unto ourselves, before you gave us the wage as noun we had it
as verb, before supply and demand we only new need and sharing, before capital
we were a community.

We give you Democracy you say?

 Muoz 33

Democracy is glitz and glamour without substance, it is a few hands raised here
and there but voices silenced everywhere.

You play government with images and half-humans and claim that in this lies
truth.

No, truth is nowhere there; a truth that hides in the beyond is no truth to us.

Hermanos y Hermanas, this is a song a lament, but it is not far from a funeral
dirge.

We must take those tamed images of ourselves forged by those phantoms of the
mind; our modern, American, Democratic selves.

We must not fear quiet places set above shaky grounds.

Nothing is more frightening than silent convulsions, but nothing is as grotesque

and stupid as motions which arrive before their presence.

We are done with playing with sights and sounds; we wish to grasp things and
the power of life within them.

It is time to build our houses in a valley of mud.

Only in mud, in mute movements, in many contradictions, in anti-modernity, in

possible misguidance, in mazes missing directions can we live.

We mud-people are not afraid of being too wet or too dry, because we know that
from the well-spring of life flows waters that will always replenish and
reconfigure.

Perhaps I was wrong, this is a funeral dirge, but only those people set on the hill
are dead.

They died many winters ago and they have not yet caught the scent of their
decomposing corpses. Yes even ideas decompose!

Mud-people grab your sticks and re-orient yourselves. There is a vast ocean set
before you, but never forget that this ocean is never beyond you.

You are mud, you are dirt and water, and you absorb the waters of life as much
as you spread your dirt amongst its many currents.

We are people of the sun and we never tire of being made solid only in order to
be made liquid again.

We are never one or the other, we are process, we are people, and we are a
community.

In mud we rise and fall, feast and starve, but we never claim autonomy because
for us autonomy is a euphemism for egoism.
 Muoz 34

Mud-people, my people, mi gente, let us reclaim our huts and hammers, let us
work for one goal: the eternal recurrence of our mud-existence.

III. Late Period

[Untitled]
The act embodied

The natures actualized

Two souls meet

In the quiet recess

Of courses having been embarked

Of words having been uttered

Of realities having been negated

 Muoz 35

And find themselves stripped of self

Holding on by letting go

Staying firm by shifting ground

Booming by staying silent

Disclosing the world

By enclosing those thoughts

Which can make a paradox a terminus

Which rip through the soul

In bleak entropy-flow

Which make time substance

Which make excess impenetrable

We break to infinity

In the beauty of paradox-flow

Finding each other

In the reflexivity of receptivity

In those movements forward

Which always take on a circular trajectory

In those eternal moments

Which speak of youth and death

Being and Nothingness

In that sacred communion

We dissolve into each other

Without notion

We are sheer presences

Projecting ourselves

Onto that ineliminable residue

That we call connection

When we are
 Muoz 36

I is excluded

I am excluded

Exclusion becomes the principle of individuation

Only to those who rise with the sun

To those free spirits

Who are satisfied drinking the sweat

Of romantic love during ecstatic dream-flow

We are act and potency

Becoming in perpetual process

Becoming cause and effect

Esse and ens

Within the grasp of two hands touching

We find the moment-totality

Of the individual reclaiming the universal

With Eros by our side

Holding Thanatos at bay

Not with sword or shield

But with our hands

Being held out in unison

Toward that which will always be

Toward that dark path we cannot see

Toward that holy domain

Which we touch

When we touch

But Love will be in concord with all

Even death and despair

When two lovers re-discover each other

In that delicate dance

 Muoz 37

Of flesh penetrating soul

Of two travelers mapping out intimate skinscapes

Of two entities bordering each other

In the utter concreteness of being-flow

From The metaphysics of Mexica

I.

Oh ancient Ometeotl, God of duality,

You sustain the ancient chords of song

With that sacred resonance

Which seeps into object and aspect.

You did not hide in the starry sky

With her hidden secrets and blue confusion.

As immanent principle you God Two

Give us both light and limit.

We are not below you,

The bounds between God and man

Are strained in the slow drip drop

Of stars falling and heavens moving

 Muoz 38

In their eternal circular motions.

You are not beyond man or woman,

You are gender embodied in the full

Weight of natures being co-actualized

Along body-borders in the heat and sweat

Of lovers taking each other in;

Of two souls communing

And materializing the winds sway

And the waters ramble.

Tonacatecuhtli, Tonacacihuatl,

Lord and Lady of Our Flesh,

In your supreme motus life is embraced.

The body of master and slave need no resurrection

When in the intimate confines of a body

Extending itself out into the world

Lies the escapable gray-haze

Of beings being actualized.

In that orgasmic orchestration

Of people touching, loving,

We find our own limits by reaching,

And grasping the sweet slumbering

Reality of the other,

Inhering in skins rough and red.

You are that by which stars shine,

And you are the skys skirt and sequence.

You clothe truths in intimate patterns,

You weave wayward destinies together

In the eternal procession of community.

 Muoz 39

We need not believe in the God-man,

Sent here to perish for the sins of humanity.

We purge our sins daily,

Through those thoughts which pronounce

An authenticity-made-conscious.

The only sin is against nature;

The ordered chaos which perpetuates

Those antinomies and ambiguities

Which we cannot escape.

The original sin of man is not disobeying God,

But rather it was eating of fruit

Transcendent and incomprehensible.

Oh Father and Mother of the Gods,

We thank you for making our fruit ripe,

For making the corn ready for plow,

For making the seasons and souls scintillate

And scatter in tempos human and horrendous.

You are teyotl, dancing through

The chaos of time,

Disenchanting those boundaries

Which are scars to that landscape

That grounds thought and thing.

You dance in cosmic rhythms

Which culminate and caress

Our bodies-having-been-warmed

By the luminous and dense steps

Of stars and steam enembered.

You created by singing,

 Muoz 40

Through vibrations acoustic

You brought about the universe

And the engendered gods.

For you creation was free and excessive.

Your ears could not suffer the lack

Of songs to be heard,

Of that sublime voice

Enfleshed and enmeshed

In cosmic uniqueness.

You could not release the tonalli,

that spark of human life,

In the self-contained simplicity

Of perfection in stagnant stench.

You song was of anguish;

It was an effort to reconfigure

And recast your youthful spirit

Into a legitimate landscape

Which was neither absent nor abstract.

Your ancient grito still resounds,

In those pueblos of mud and stick,

Where souls still yearn for completion,

Where passivity is rediscovered

As sacred remembrance.

No God or man wishes to keep to himself,

We all seek rugged refuge

From the bastard plain of autonomy.

To create is to ex-sist,

To sing is to be heard,
 Muoz 41

To touch is to live.

RES and Space (Age 30)

Down at the wooden station

I sit and wait for an arrival from past stops

I look to the dark specks of dust and bird

The tracks beneath heave and sigh in heavy breath

They sink into obscurity and resurface as rupture

Utter fate of the straight steel path bent towards earth and grime

She sits across from me

In rough cut dress and short black hair

Her breath coalesces in the humid air above

Water droplets waver in and out of place around her head

She blinks: open, close, open

In a rhythm which penetrate machine and man

The steel bars begin to wiggle and wallow in their own space

Left open by the horizon which hurt and burned

Black streaks across lines made bare

She winks to herself to the calamity of space

And time sits there like a child

 Muoz 42

Playing on the swing until gravity chimes in

With omnipotent sway

But only if you let it

With its slow-roll hum of deep points of departure

But time can make its home at the apex of flight

Not knowing the ground

The dirt a mere passing acquaintance

Feeling the wind only at the upper limit of pendulum-flow

She herself is but a child

Sitting on park bench at this stop

Which was my stop last week

And the week before that on trip to Las Flores

But today there is no stop

The red markers are all gone away

The dust has covered them with usual southern-flow

I inhabit shadows here on this bench

Toppling over one on another

Passing secrets on acoustic borders

Quickly dissolving to silver-white haze

This is no stop but space

Open and freed from the enclosed

Demarcations of difference

Those word-calamities of obscurity

Which have struggled with shadows for so long

That they take on their form

That dark vacuity which punctures holes

In the soul

And calls that home

 Muoz 43

Here I sit surrounded only by bodies

Emanating heat in rapid discharge

From people centered on benches,

Telephones, tickets, hands-being-held,

Hands, holding, being

In the fullness of moments momentum is gone

Lost in non-words in ( )

I feel the sensation of gaze and eye-burst

Thirst foam and fragrance reaching across

The benches of wood and dust

Thrust down on cement slab and labor-sweat

Open, close, open

Her eyes upon me with thick film

I imagine her swallowing me hole

Little speck in Browntown

Her saliva in slime-encasement

Breaking through at joints made hard

By work and practical indiscretion

Her hot body breath congeals

As water-blades rub across my spine and belly

I feel my arms break

Disjunction

I feel my limbs being thrust towards each other

In the ambivalent love-hate of fetus-flow

Conjunction

Bones break and crash in warm flesh

Blood oozes out through tears of skin

Carnage in the acuteness of point

 Muoz 44

Shoulder blades at back

Legs ripped from limb-socket

Ears dissolving in the heat of liquid corporeality

Hair-pores infiltrated

Ears deafened

Eyes torn from nerve-endings

Needles everywhere on body

She is needles

Junction

I dissolve into her body-flow

Still a hole lost in the daze of ego-dance

The train is heard coming

Steam is seen from afar

Near the green fences to the east

Straight steel lines vibrate and motion

Mounds of earth are moved and quiver

The dense air with inner tension

Is soothed by the sheer volume

Of people and furniture waiting

Thoughts going out

Into world

Without symbol only sensation

Centers being realigned

Onto the spaces between bodies

She winks once more

Open, open, open

In unitary world-flow

As she swallows me whole

 Muoz 45

Where is the train now?