Work Without Dread

Following Up on the Double Negative

2011-11-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

This is a different kind of post: a response to Jerry Z.’s response, which is broken into 4 comments on the previous post below, the resonances of which help to bring out the theoretical dimensions of the situation that Birgeneau’s language symptomizes. (The quotations all refer to Jerry's comments.)

(1) I’ve been interested in the “strange neither-positive-nor-negative realm” of the double negative for a long time. One of the earliest posts on WWD (written when I was very uncertain what I wanted posts to look like) deals with J.L. Austin’s idea that the real is signaled most persuasively by the double negative of the not unreal. The appelation “real” is redundant and defensive—itself negative—except when it distinguishes X from something being passed off as X. So, I don’t think that saying that something is not-not something else merely dissimulates alternatives that would otherwise be clear. Rather, it virtually admits that what counts as reality is always something that’s being decided socially, through representations. This realm is strange because such moments are like lucid dreaming, when what had seemed static and thinglike becomes dynamic and the fluidity of everything is illuminated. If we followed this line of thought it would eventually lead to a metaphysical argument about the inextricability and codependence of representation with the ability to think beyond it. On the local level, this is to say that Birgeneau backed himself out of the world of social fact (the “yes-or-no modality of violence and its absence, or whatever”) and into the zone of indetermination from which social facts arise and where they go to die.

(2) JZ recognizes as a recent phenomenon the “incapacity to think the changing conditions of politics as such” reflected in this kind of language: “the sense of simultaneously feeling like one cannot do anything but attempting at some kind of tentative action, is becoming more and more congruent with the terms of politics itself . . . . The conditions of this new formulation of political agency . . . is a figure of political agency as non-agency, not a kind of resistance but a kind of reaction.” As a figure (and I think we’re now talking about figures, not about metaphysics, and with no direct cause and effect between them, just a resonance), the realm of the not-un is associated with being between what you don’t want and is “already broken” and something you can’t and maybe don’t want to name and which you can’t exactly “do”: with (now I paraphrase/rephrase/double back) wanting the not-“already broken,” the not-false. I recognize this, too, as a good description of what a lot of people are experiencing and don’t want to be hurried out of. (A reference point here is Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which keeps this particular space open.) It’s encouraging that this kind of space, formerly experienced or typed as intolerable, seems to be getting experienced (if wearily) as tolerable and more than tolerable. It’s interesting to think of the incapacity of the police to feel they know what they’re doing—they’re officially “confused”—as a reflection of the indetermination that is the mode of occupation.

(3) Bringing in the inability not to act (where “act” is understood to be qualified, shot through with incapacity) suggests that, as the not-unreal is the powerful form of “real,” inability not to act is the powerful form of “act” (here the reference point is Kant’s Second Critique, as Jerry implies; for [1] above it is the First Critique). Revolutionary theory takes up this thought whenever it assumes that the people will act only when they literally can no longer not act. Jerry’s associations to the nonhuman and the natural, the automated or spontaneous reaction, inflect this thought. That “the police are allowed to be violent not because they are claiming a kind of sovereign right but because they have been provoked into it” shows that there is no particular political valance built into this figure; the logic in which the double negative is stronger appears in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary discourse, in revolution from below and from above. Birgeneau’s and police statements applied while denying it, asymmetrically, to protesters. In the memo, protesters “choose to defy the policy” of banned encampments; within that choice, some further “chose to obstruct the police by linking arms” while others “chose to be arrested peacefully.” Additionally, “tens of thousands . . . elected [!] not to participate.” The administration and police, on the other hand, were “required” by their own policy to “forcibly remove tents and arrest people,” while the policy itself was “born out of past experiences that grew beyond our control and ability.” These past experiences have made them realize that they “are not equipped.” We could reply by saying that if the protesters had choices, the administration also had choices, recently and in the past. And we could also say that the administration is refusing to credit the fact that, given their own policy, born out of their own “past experiences,” the people who “chose to obstruct the police” felt they had no choice but to link arms. “The protests and its violence/nonviolence/non-non-violence becomes a kind of swirling vortex of non-agency, where the conditions for action always originate in the actions of another . . . . it seems here that violent or not, violence, when it occurs must always be framed as a kind of ethical reaction to a situation that is always-already outside of one's grasp. that is, not even the state has a legitimate claim over a proactive violence anymore.” This is both a description of conditions and a critique of sovereignty (<--allusion to the seminar taught by my friend Dina al-Kassim).

I totally agree with the implication (?) that there is some kind of slight of hand or slippage between the consciousness of the not-already broken, the not-false, which occupies (literally) the strange realm of decomposing social fact, on one hand, and the automaticity, returned spontaneity, and immanent if not sovereign action that would infuse the inability-not-to-act, on the other. On my reading, this slippage is not there in Kant, and thus perhaps doesn't need to be there if we're careful. Kant doesn’t say that you are ever unable-not-to-act; he says that you are unable not to know how you want to be acting, which is, in his view, how you ought to be acting. On my reading, getting a sense of what you are incapable of wanting (which will always be multiple) does not in and of itself close the interval to make an outcome inevitable (a logic that tends to make whatever is currently happening seem inevitable), but only moves it explicitly into the realm of indetermination so that the next act can be “free.”

[*The scare quotes mean that I don’t mean this in an absolute sense; rather, this is what counts as “free” to me and I think it deserves the word.]

"Not Non-Violent Civil Disobedience"

2011-11-11T04:34:00.001-08:00

UCB Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s statement rationalizing police beatings of unarmed and unthreatening protesters relies on a contentious contrast between those who “chose to be arrested peacefully” and are to be “honor[ed]” because they “were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” and others who “chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents” of their would-be encampment. The latter tactic, he writes, is “not non-violent civil disobedience.” Overnight the discussion of Birgeneau’s letter has focused on its willingness to defend beating in the name of non-violence and its fetishization of non-violence as such. In agreement with those points, I'm also interested in Birgeneau's falsification of the history he references and, positively, in the tensions it suggests when we don’t accept such a cheap edition of it.

Birgeneau’s double negative locution, “not non-violent,” acknowledges that the Berkeley protesters were, well, lacking in violence, if also lacking in non-violence. It frames an ambiguous realm between violence and non-violence, further partitioning a field already divided by the term “non-violent” in the first place. A program, or “tradition,” of “non-violence” is not automatically a program of peace. That’s why Birgeneau has to add “peaceful” and “peacefully” to his description; it is not redundant. “Traditionally,” non-violence is the realm of the march and the sit-in, which challenge opponents to commit or resist aggression on their own side. In the history of U.S. civil rights struggle by African-Americans, arguments like Birgeneau’s have often functioned to justify racist force by a white community on the grounds that the actions of African-Americans were provocative, if not violent. That is, the violence or not of protesters’ actions was part of the debate; acts were perceived as violent enough to warrant indubitably violent repression because of their contextual, subjectively perceived aggression. Protesters invited, or provoked, police violence through ambiguous “non-violence” in order to question the cultural norms beneath white perceptions of what felt violent (enough) to them. We miss part of the significance if we view the segregationist charges of provocation as completely disingenuous. The debate, and the genuine confusion, about violence and non-violence recurs in Birgeneau’s distinction between non-violence and that which is “not non-violent.”

Birgeneau has seen Eyes on the Prize and knows he cannot come out against non-violent civil disobedience. Yet he also seems to demur from UC Police Captain Margo Bennett's less subtle statement: "The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence." Pragmatically, he’s talking about the legal difference between being arrested and also resisting arrest. Traditional civil rights protesters, Birgeneau suggests, do not resist arrest. But this claim doesn’t bear scrutiny. It must be said that guides to civil disobedience often advise not resisting arrest on practical grounds: it’s an additional and gratuitous charge if you’re being arrested anyway, and conviction on resisting arrest disallows a civil rights complaint against police. It’s also difficult to say how often “traditional” civil rights protesters resisted because resisting arrest was so often charged to promote conviction in the absence of other persuasive offenses. What constitutes physical resistance is itself in the realm of perceptual ambiguity, to the interest of which this kind of protest calls attention. Even so, the docket records of civil rights struggle show too much resistance for it to be plausible to assert that it was no part of the tradition Birgeneau wants to honor. Chicago v. Gregory (1966), Pennsylvania v. 100 Defs. (1963), New York City v. 7 Defs. (1963), New York v. 17 Demonstrators (1966), and New York v. Gray, Vaughan (1966), to name a few, look like good places to explore further resistance to arrest within the civil disobedience "tradition." In New York v. 17 Demonstrators, for example, “50 demonstrators, mostly mothers on welfare, blocked doors of Dept of Welfare, seeking increased clothes allowances for school children,” and were arrested for “disorderly conduct, trespass, resisting arrest.”

Closer to home, Mario Savio was among a group of protesters who repeatedly picketed and sat in at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco to protest its racially discriminatory hiring policies in 1964. They did so in violation of a court injunction that limited the time they could protest, and on March 7, 1964, were arrested “lying down with arms linked . . . blocking the exits of the hotel” (from Savio’s applications to the Mississippi Summer Project, King Center Library, Atlanta; quoted in Jo Freeman, “How the 1963-64 Bay Area Civil Rights Demonstrations Paved the Way to Campus Protest,” Organization of American Historians, San Francisco, April 19, 1997; my italics). Freeman, who participated in the Sheraton Palace protests, remembers how their efforts were almost universally reviled.

In thinking about the reception of African-American civil rights protest and examples like Mario Savio’s together, we re-encounter in its most powerful form Birgeneau’s hoped-for distinction between heroic non-violent activists and undesirable, not non-violent students. It's the convenience of this that is at stake in the question of the incidence of resisting arrest in “classic” African-American civil rights protest. In a recent book on the photography of the civil rights era, Martin Berger and David Garrow ponder the anonymous photograph above, showing a woman in the Birmingham protest fiercely contesting her arrest. Berger and Garrow point out that the mainstream history of the era tends not to reproduce such photographs, and we can see the legacy of that pattern in the cliché version of the “tradition” mobilized by Birgeneau. “White publications in the North shunned such complicating photographs,” they note, and left it to segregationist journals to publish them. The “inactive-active opposition,” they argue, “structured the emotional and intellectual response of whites to photographs of dogs and fire hoses” ( Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, p. 119]) and so regulated both their empathy and their understanding of protest. It is this very opposition that Birgeneau complacently repeats, at once narrowing the possibilities for activism and obscuring the complexity of the history he thinks he honors.

Manzanar by Night

2011-09-24T21:37:00.001-07:00

Driving back to L.A. from the Owens Valley, we decided to take the turnoff to Manzanar even though it was already completely dark. We hadn't been there before. It was hard to tell what we were looking at, the camp had no lighting, and I had no adequate flash; I could only photograph what was directly in front of our headlights. But in the light, the remoteness and desolation of the place (except for many rabbits) would not have appeared in the same way, nor the gesture of the cemetery monument by Ryozo Kado, nor the isolation of the five graves that remain there.

Telepathy for rioters

2011-08-14T03:27:00.000-07:00

Guy Debord’s question about the Watts riots--“Who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve?”--is still a challenge upon the 45th anniversary of the riots, in which 34 people died. Written four months afterward, in December 1965, Debord’s essay, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” struggles with its relation to the rioters while rejecting the positions of the U.S. civil rights movement leadership and an unspecified “vacuous international left.” Like these other positions, and like all commentary on the U.K. this week, Debord’s text performs the class division between participants and commentators in the same gestures in which it defends the rioters against other commentators.

“Decline and Fall” moves unsteadily between vicarious gratification and identification, between the subordination of race to class and inquiry into the origins of “race.” There may not finally be a line there that can be walked without erring: the space for it seems to have disappeared, along with many other possibilities that ought to exist and don’t. Debord’s (interesting) thumbnail theory of “racisms” is that they are created by hierarchies within commodities. He therefore concludes that African-American revolt is “the negation at work” at the leading edge of class war. About looting, Debord hypothesizes that it’s a way of “taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value” that thereby reveals its “hoax”—for example, looters take things they cannot easily use, as in “the theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity.” The intentional or unintentional status of the point doesn’t matter as much as the resulting object lesson for everyone, speaking through the events. Debord pushes it, and risks re-racializing the question, when he remarks that looting is a “natural” response to unnatural conditions, that African-Americans can expose the emptiness of commodities because they “have nothing of their own to insure,” and that they “really are” the enemies of modern alienation. In a way, Debord’s comments mirror those of historian David Starkey, who has just now interpreted the phenomenon of multiethnic working- and lower middle-class rioting as meaning that “The whites have become black” (Telegraph, 13 August 2011; while Starkey’s intention seems to have been to shame young whites, his remark sounds eyebrow-raisingly heartening from outside his perspective). In Debord’s view the “blacks” are black in the first place as a result of commodity dynamics, and in that spirit he predicts the blackening of young whites in the wake of Watts: “The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks” (Debord, “Decline and Fall”). In order to write this way Debord risks appropriation; he nominates himself “to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search,” and in trying to, he doesn’t mention colonialism (for starters).

Debord’s megalomania was such that he may not have needed an excuse to step forward as the theoretician of the uprising. He saw one, however, in the inadequacy of the surrounding discourse:

Police Chief William Parker . . . rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force” . . . . Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama.

Debord’s criticism of the civil rights leadership is part of his repudiation of “legal means” in general given the already “blatant illegality” of segregationist practices and “socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws.” For the corresponding vacuity of the “international left,” he gives no citation. This week in the U.K., though, the anarchist North London Solidarity Federation issued a statement: “as revolutionaries, we cannot condone attacks on working people . . . . Tonight and for as long as it takes, people should band together to defend themselves when such violence threatens homes and communities. We believe that the legitimate anger of the rioters can be far more powerful if it is directed in a collective, democratic way.” This led to a discussion on an anarchist forum in which a single writer repeatedly complained that SolFed ought not only to have specified what was bad about the conditions that led to the riots and bad about the riots, but what was good about them, granted that that wasn’t “gangsterism against other working class people”: “what's bad in it . . . shouldn't restraint us to point to and show what is good in it. if revolutionnaries don't do that, who will?”

Over the last several days, supporting statements have evolved. Evan Calder Williams has composed just such an index of good, among other points. George Ciccariello-Maher has organized his response around participants’ speech, quoted in fragments in reports, to stress how “much we can learn from those rushing through the London streets”--i.e., not to make them mean something, but to begin the reading and listening. Williams makes a similar gesture when he demands that participants not remain a “they”: “We cannot allow our critique to remain critique at a distance. We cannot remain afar and venture claims as to what ‘they’ should or should not do . . . . we recognize real material separations between populations and their class background (one should be very clear in recognizing when a struggle is not one where one is welcome). Yet we strive to entirely abolish those separations. That is, to stop speaking of the looting they as if a different species.” At the same time, Williams’s text in its entirety is an open letter to a “you” whom he pivots in the next moment to address: “for all these critiques of ourselves, all our slipping into distanced forms of condemnation and wishful thinking, still, yours is far, far worse.” “You” are far, far worse, but “‘they’” are farther away than you. Debord is in a similar bind (as am I), in danger of being distracted by the sheer possibility of attacking the available, familiar, language-sharing, and nearly always male class peer from even imagining addressing the others—the ones he’d like to call “we,” but can’t, the ones he feels have expressed his own outrage. Debord does a better job than Williams of tearing himself away from his enemies long enough to let the stress fall on achievements. But he also presents a wish as a fact, stating that his project and the Watts rioters “already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing.” Yet to the end Debord addresses "us," not "them," even in fantasy. Williams doesn’t imagine agreement or even “welcome.” “Yet we strive to entirely abolish those separations.”

The intractability of the separations is the sad, unwilled infrastructure of the commentary. It was only December when Debord distributed “Decline and Fall,” and the Watts participants would probably have been concerned to avoid arrest or awaiting trial at that point, which would have made it difficult for them to speak and for Debord to have anything to cite. For similar reasons, Ciccariello-Maher makes do with shards. There have been some recent community meetings where participants and non-participants must be mingling—and there’s got to be value in that—but the former will be pressured by law to choose between saying much and identifying themselves. Likewise, if rioters had been more organized and more explicitly “political,” forming groups and writing up rationales, they would face longer sentences for conspiracy and terrorism. SolFed, by virtue of being an organization at all, becomes liable to say and do less. The cliché of “division between practice and theory,” thought of as undesirable all around, is watered by law.

Courtroom support for people arrested has been promised, and over time there should be more ways to read and hear from participants. (The Museum of London, however, fails completely to include participants in its currently running Brixton Riots Community Project “delv[ing] into the lives of people who experienced the Brixton Riots”: seven people are interviewed, all of them white, six of them men, none of them participants. For a better job see History is Made at Night, a blog about the politics of music and dancing.) In the meantime the space that Debord and Williams want to enter seems to exist only in imagination, as the latter knows. The poster who wanted SolFed to include a statement of active good was met by another who thought he knew that “real” “working-class residents wouldn’t want to be lectured about why the riots are ‘good’”-—in advance, with fantasy equal to Debord’s (and making up the part about the lecture form of the utterance). As it is so endemic, maybe we--intellectuals--should make space for our desires and do some florid imagining. My fantasy is not to argue with residents but to communicate telepathically with a few participants. To the eighteen-year-old women interviewed on the BBC, who said they were enjoying the riots and that it was “the government’s fault, conservatives,” and then were called “despicable” by the press, and not part of “the real Britain”—“It's the ‘joy on display’ that is so disturbing" (Scott Stinson, National Post, 10 August 2011, cited in “British teens' 'unsettling' riot interview,” The Week, 10 August 2011): thanks for knowing your own enjoyment, which it would have been easy for you to downplay, even to yourself; it’s that people are disturbed by your joy, specifically--not at what happened, but that it could thrill you because you don't like the government--that is so unsettling. To the thirteen-year-old boy arrested in Manchester, who said “It's the worst, stupidest thing I have ever done”: (in Californian) Dude, if that’s true, you’ve lived a blameless life. To the twelve-year-old whose family the Manchester City Council is trying to evict from their home after he stole a bottle of wine from a Saintsbury’s, who said, “I am gutted my picture's in the paper and now I have a record" (Telegraph, 14 August 2011): you have (always had) a record, beyond the papers, as something better than a thief, which is more than I can say for David Cameron.

And they’d say ____________? As he claims synchronicity at least Debord claims the relation to be mutual, specifying that Situationist writing can only “be understood” and “illuminated” by events like Watts. I hope he meant illuminated for himself, as well as readers.

Image: Roberto Matta, L'Escalade

A Nameless Thing

2011-08-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

Moses Hess’s phrase “the German misère” lends a name to the perception that Germany is continually waiting for its revolution, and to the absurd quality of this wait:

die deutsche Bourgeoisie scheint dazu verdammt zu sein, auf dem Stillen Ozean der deutschen Misere zwischen Furcht und Hoffnung so lange hin und her zu lavieren, bis der Sturm vom Westen losbricht und die Wogen des Proletariats aus der Tiefe herauf schäumend über Königtum, Adel und Bourgeoisie zusammenschlagen.

the German bourgeoisie seems doomed to tack back and forth, between fear and hope, on the Pacific Ocean of German misère, until the storm from the West breaks loose and foaming waves from the depths of the proletariat beat upon kingship, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie.

There's still no better name for the experience of the period from a Left perspective than the one Hess gives it. Writing in 1847, he makes misère ambiguously mental and environmental, inside and outside the bourgeoisie. Ever after, the term has been associated with the thesis of bourgeois failure, and in Germany, of German “backwardness.”

But as many critics have pointed out—most recently and incisively Rebecca Comay—the incompletion of revolutionary fulfullment is not a matter of German pathology. As Comay observes, it can take the form of a too late as well as a too early, an “after” as well as a “before.” If it seems strange that Germany manages a “restoration” without a revolution, as Marx complains, by the time of Louis-Philippe at the latest it is no less strange that France seems to have managed a revolution without a revolution, one whose core economic and political goals remain unfulfilled. Later in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, there would be similar debates about the “disappointing” results of Italian unification. Sixty years after 1789, Victor Hugo calls for attention to “la misère” in the Legislative Assembly. In response to a colleague’s reflection that “"Certainly there are 'misères' that can be abolished. But you cannot abolish 'la misère,'” Hugo replies:

“La misère’” is not suffering; “la misère”’ is not poverty itself; “la misère” is a nameless thing which I have tried to describe.... Suffering cannot disappear; “la misère” must disappear. There will always be some unfortunates, but it is possible that there may not always be “misèrables” on the Left.

Hugo mulls over the double meanings of “misery” and “poverty” within the French word “misère”—meanings also mobilized by Marx’s La Misère de la philosophie (1847), originally written in French as a reply to Proudhon’s Philosophe de la misère (also 1847). While the scale and indefiniteness of Hugo’s object may seem to presage interminability for the revolutionary project, Hugo dismisses that objection: the project is achievable, although not guaranteed; the goal is not impossible, only not simply physiological. That misery isn’t simply mental, either—that it’s a matter of material justice—goes without saying. Nonetheless, the provocation here is Hugo’s idea that the “Left” could cease to be miserable even in the face of poverty and suffering (up to some point).

Hugo ends up talking about the condition of “the Left” as well as of the poor, and we might ask why he needs to stake Left viability on the ontology of misery. Different entities are miserable in Hess and in Hugo. Hess’s “Pacific Ocean” of “deutsche misère” sounds vast enough to include everybody, although people have different places in it (the bourgeoisie sail on the surface and the proletariat lives in the depths). For Hugo, it is as a member of a political wing consisting of members of various classes, “the Left,” that one is “miserable,” and so implicitly as part of a political group that les misèrables would meet their goal of ending misery. In an ordinary kind of way, Hugo’s warning that things will not always be as they are now simply looks forward to getting the chance, someday, to govern. But through misery’s migration to the Left who are out of power, subtly and implicitly la misère comes to hold the place of Left ascendancy, as though it existed instead of it: la misère or us. So, to the objection that you can end specific “misères” but not “la misère,” Hugo responds that misery is not poverty and that the Left may not always be miserable. As Peter Stallybrass notes: “On the one hand, then, the Right with its claim that the poor are always with us; on the other, the negations and hesitations of Hugo—'not suffering,' 'not poverty,' 'a nameless thing’” (“Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations 31 (1990), pp. 69-95, 7). How do these ontological terms acquire the ability to drive the exchange?

Many radical narratives in the period assume that the problem of the nineteenth century is revolution’s failure: its failure to happen at all or its failure to take, to keep happening. By this logic the first remedy is Leftist self-criticism—looking back on concrete turning points and suggesting what should be done differently in future. One great relief Marx brings is his proposal that the main fault lies not in the failings of revolutionaries but in the structure of capitalism. What’s most devastating for radicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, what makes them miserable, is the anxiety that revolution is neither failed nor merely absent at present, but that it is not real: that it does not exist, never really existed—even when it most seemed to—and cannot exist; that, ultimately, radicals themselves do not exist. Like Hess, one can think of revolution as structurally too early or too late right now, but the release that the trope of absence--faultless nonpresence—can deliver is fragile and collapses under the weight of anxiety or accusation. Then the moralization of failure returns with a vengeance, attached to the supposed privation of nonexistence. If we think about the whereabouts of revolution in this way—as being about nonexistence instead of local failure—Marx then brings a different but equally great relief by installing revolution inside capitalism, which (strangely) no one doubts exists. Capitalism is derealized by this, but possibly in a reinforcing way; and the Left is safe there, inside capitalism for now but more importantly bound to the dialectic of transition, which is the safest place in the world, the only thing that will continue to exist in a world of relentless transition. I'm not speaking of “determinism,” of confidence in its future actualization (an overrated problem), but of where revolution is thought to “be” before it is actualized—of Marx’s presentation of its elements, principle, and possibility. His presentation assumes something like the ontological anxiety of Hugo’s exchange with his colleague; it assuages by explaining the existence of revolution, not in the future but already, and therefore justifies ontologically the existence of the Left, since revolutionaries are themselves elements of revolution.

But, again: how did things come to the point where everyone agrees that what the Left needs to be doing is demonstrating its project's and its own existence? Why is there such a consensus on the ontological terms of the question, regardless of the merits of the style of the ontology chosen? If people say, as Hugo does, that that’s because neither the problem of misère nor the solution of revolution is strictly an empirical matter in the first place, that only reflects the way the accusation has come to be answered, not the source of the accusation itself.

Image: metamorphosis of the Tree of Liberty (1848), from Les quarantes-huitards, ed. Maurice Agulhon (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975).

Realism and Passive Revolution (with Gramsci)

2011-07-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

Political realism is something larger than Cold War game theory; it's the grounding of political options in a hegemonic philosophy of reality, a system that is supposedly not political but just a reflection of the way things are, of which game theory was the midcentury style. (A hegemonic philosophy of reality would be one that coerces consent and does not recognize the existence of other realisms.) Those who sign on to political realism do so not only because they believe they can prosper as realists—indeed, they believe that there is no other way to prosper or even to survive—but also because realism brings along its own morality and therapeutics. Beneficiaries benefit psychologically as well as materially; they’re shielded by a realist therapeutics from what they might otherwise experience as psychic poverty. Doing the “only” thing becomes doing the right thing; it becomes the right thing to perceive and act on the belief that conditions recognized by realism are the “only” conditions there are, and to be outraged by the number of “stubborn” “deniers of reality” that somehow subsist in the world. (“UC Irvine Students Protest Against Reality,” wrote the right-wing blogs in my university’s neighborhood, during the 2010 demonstrations against budget cuts, restriction of civil liberties, and institutional racism. )

Theories of reality are always also therapies, and Hegel’s philosophy is, in a way that’s still insufficiently examined, a theory of postwar working through in an age of counter-revolution. His psychology is more powerful in effect the more it seems to form in response to a reality that Hegel’s philosophy has formulated to fit it. And the more responsive Hegel’s working through seems, the more it is able to cast the philosophy of which it is part as an insight into reality itself which by definition helps one live. The circularity of psychology and philosophy in Hegel’s work lends his conclusion, the Idea, the authenticity of psychic reality and the authority of externality: the Idea is the very model of the depth of field, multidimensionality, and ambiguity that modern reality is ever after required to have. Paying attention primarily to its psychological functions, then, presents Hegel’s way of thinking, his postwar strategy of thinking restoration transformatively as part of the work of spirit (a strategy which is not only his, not only inside Hegel), from an angle that shows the normative model of working through that drives it. Hegel’s working through calls on political realism to choose the actions that move the self through therapeutic stages. The “text” in question here, then, is not just what Hegel says, but what his sayings do. The cruxes of argument are not places where Hegel is wrong or contradictory in his own terms, much less whether his system is “open” or “closed.” Let’s assume for expedience a Hegel who’s “open”: what is at stake is not the consequence of his openness (as unclear as that is) but of the depth of the reality claim he makes for this open system.

Redefining the problem of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ postwars as a problem of hegemonic realism shifts the source of historical trauma during these periods from the failure of revolution to the inability to tell revolution and restoration apart. A look at part of Gramsci’s account of nineteenth century history can help here—a brief look that sets aside for the time being the deeper analysis of Gramsci scholars. –In 1933, Gramsci explores the historical process that begins in the Napoleonic postwar by inquiring whether it can be thought of as “revolution-restoration.” “Revolution-restoration,” also known as “passive revolution,” hypothesizes a type of political process that might also be discerned in the Risorgimento, in “the period . . . which followed the war of 1914-18” (Selections fron the Prison Notebooks 106), and in the U.S. after the 1929 economic crisis, and that becomes a “general principle” to consider in “similar situations [that] almost always arise in every historical development” (PN 109). The condensed term “revolution-restoration,” written with a hyphen or a slash, registers the idea that in this formation, there is

the necessity for the “thesis” to achieve its full development, up to the point where it would even succeed in incorporating a part of the antithesis itself—in order, that is, not to allow itself to be “transcended” in the dialectical opposition. The thesis alone in fact develops to the full its potential for struggle, up to the point where it absorbs even the so-called representatives of the antithesis: it is precisely in this that the passive revolution or revolution/restoration consists. (PN 110)

Revolution-restoration takes ground incrementally through the overdevelopment of the thesis during stretches when a society is not ready for confrontation. Gramsci associates it with incremental reformism and the political management of state transition by “moderate and conservative liberalism” (PN 119). In his related notion of the “war of position” (PN 106, 108), a kind of “siege warfare,” “concentrated, difficult,” and requiring “exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness,” takes precedence over the frontal “war of maneuver” (PN 239; Gramsci famously recommends wars of position, in contrast and in response now to passive revolution, as a working-class strategy for difficult times). Observing some similarity between revolution-restoration and his own idea of war of position, Gramsci asks whether at times they can be identified: “does there exist, or can there be conceived, an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical” (PN 108)? If so, then there could be an entire historical period when war of position is reduced to revolution-restoration, i.e., when the only possibility left is through the hypertrophy of the opposition. If so, for Gramsci revolution-restoration would still be bounded by an “until” that it is nurturing: it might hold “until the point at which the war of position once again becomes a war of maneuver” (PN 108). The identity of revolution-restoration and war of position would be the line where antagonism is everywhere and nowhere.

Two years later, Gramsci considers “The History of Europe Seen as ‘Passive Revolution’” and asks, “Are we in a period of ‘revolution-restoration’ to be permanently consolidated, to be organized ideologically, to be exalted lyrically?” (PN 118). The irony in the question implies that it is a rhetorical rebuttal to overconfident conservative-liberals and especially to Croce’s just published History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1933). Croce’s book is the narrative of "Europe" as the product of reform: it begins “from 1815” and repeatedly “excludes the moment of struggle” (PN 119). But by this time, Gramsci’s own gradually expanding reflection has reached from the Napoleonic postwar to Italian fascism, even as it has remained hypothetical. Revolution-restoration is an “interpretation” of conditions, not a “program,” he emphasizes. But if Croce spins the totalization of revolution-restoration as reality, Gramsci traces in his wake the dominance of revolution-restoration as a way of thinking about history, as well as its actuality as a recurrent condition that presents itself for interpretation. (In fact, I am emphasizing the hypothetical character of Gramsci’s reflection more than most readers of these passages, who treat passive revolutions as objects of Gramsci’s cognition.) In 1935, he writes, someone could propose that fascist industry is creating kinds of “socialization and cooperation” that release economically progressive forces. Such a “schema,” he goes on, “is capable of creating—and indeed does create—a period of expectation and hope . . . . It thus reinforces the hegemonic system and the forces of military and civil coercion at the disposal of the traditional ruling classes” (PN 120).

The temptation of revolution-restoration is that by its logic “restorations in toto do not exist,” even and especially just when they would otherwise seem most totalized. Yet, the impossibility of telling revolution and restoration apart in the postrevolutionary narrative is more disturbing than any “failure” of revolution, because then revolution-restoration appears as that against which revolution, already thoroughly submerged in it, is definitionally incapable of doing more than it is already doing. The hyphen or slash between revolution and restoration recurs in Gramsci’s question about whether revolution-restoration, in turn, and the war of position that can be the working-class response to it could also become indiscernable. The increasing closeness, threatening identity even if Gramsci doesn't finally go there, between revolution-restoration and wars of position expresses the realism that relates both notions to Marx’s realist assessment that “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve” (Preface to Critique of Political Economy; PN 106). For Gramsci, the idea of revolution-revolution is a “critical corollary” to this passage of Marx, an impetus to the “revision” of hopeful fatalism (PN 114). But what if we see its critical purchase as affecting not only "determinism," but the hegemonic realism that may have captured in advance the theory of wars of position as well?

Image: Richard Long

Soanyway River

2011-07-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

Most of what’s has been written in English on Zabriskie Point was written when it came out in 1970. Commentators (mostly Italian) in the post-neorealist milieu taking Antonioni to task for not articulating a clear political position converge with those (mostly American, notably the narratologist Seymour Chatman) opining that the films are formal experiments crafted to be “incapable” of political argument (Chatman, Antonioni or The Surface of the World [1985], 78). Zabriskie Point incorporates this monotonic circle of realism and aestheticism when the male lead actor, Mark Frechette, complains about the “reality trip” his associates have been on. Asked “Were you in with that group? Why didn’t you get out?,” he responds in part: “I wasn’t really in a group . . . . But when it gets down to it, you have to choose one side or the other.” “There are a thousand sides, not just heroes and villains,” Daria Halprin, the female lead, responds. Her suggestion multiplies neorealism by a thousand, surpassing it by outdoing it.

Frechette’s character has been read as an object of criticism and even satire, but in many ways Antonioni does hurry to establish the film’s “side” and is not without sympathy for his need for things to happen before their time. Zabriskie Point presents group conflicts with unmissable crudity: right and left, white and black, man and woman, rich and poor, old and young, South and North. Although differences between black and white militant students are shown as tense yet susceptible to discussion, and a moment of mutual recognition seems to pass between the white, sexually exploited Daria and an indigenous-looking Latina housekeeper in a corporate villa, the capitalist developers, police, and tourists with bumper stickers from the South are caricatures of common enemies, linked by what Antonioni portrays as an incapacity for thought. There’s never the slightest suggestion that we should take the corporate elite or the Nixonian rabble seriously, nor see their kinds of lives as credible options: there may be a thousand possible sides, but those aren’t among them.

The problem that emerges only when “side” is not a problem is how to live one’s sidedness as part of the weaker side. Live doesn’t only mean “express”; in the conditions to which Antonioni repeatedly returns, it usually doesn’t get to. His dwelling on the problem of these conditions in almost pure terms is still hard to understand. He tries to register the intransigence of the times without, like Hegel or Marx or Deleuze or Lacan in different ways, suggesting that life does or will burst out of one's recognition of them. Frechette’s allusion to Marx, “People only act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that,” constructs an impasse where before there was a single historical process. Antonioni never shows the outside (nor radical inside) of the process, but only the legitimacy of the desire for one. The meeting of militants that opens the film debates the question of how to be on a side as one of political strategy and goal. When Frechette leaves the meeting, his exit line, “I’m also willing to die, but not of boredom,” fuels the charge of aestheticism (interest vs. boredom is more important than life vs. death). Read at the time as criticizing the immaturity of characters who don’t understand that political action is different from moral impulse, the film nonetheless implies that they have a “point,” even if it's only one point in the “center of nothing” (Antonioni’s interview with Roger Ebert [1969]). Antonioni seems to posit that something does happen when his characters finish their inventories of the limits that enclose them, and further--this is the part that bears more thinking about--that it’s not possible to say, only to show, what that something is.

Zabriskie Point is an outlook in Death Valley from which there’s a panoramic view of a prehistoric lake bed. The notion of "Zabriskie Point" as a "place" involves a Cartesian emplotment of the necessary and the arbitrary, a piece of language nailed to a vast expanse to privilege one of a thousand possible, in many cases equally grand, views. Rather than commemorating a significant human history, it points to a geological formation that indexes time itself. “This is an area of ancient lakebeds deposited five to ten million years ago,” Halprin intones, reading from the actual State Park sign, after which the camera shoots what one can see from the outlook. This bit of Parks and Recreation boilerplate is deadening erasure from a historical point of view. As a shred of the actual, one of the many documentary elements of Zabriskie Point, it’s part of Antonioni’s analysis of the reality trip: a “blind spot,” if you’re one to believe in the impossible Real (cf. Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film [2006], 78). Like Marker in La Jetée and Guzman in Nostalgia for the Light, Antonioni plays with the idea that a portal to the scarcely knowable can expose the contingency of human acts. What Halprin can see from Zabriskie Point is the almost arbitrary power in its naming. It makes her think, a little later, that “’Soanyway’ ought to be one word—the name of a place or a river. Soanyway River.” (The name here is a shortcut past still slower changes in grammar.)

Halprin's “ought to be” mode amplifies in her vision toward the end of the film, in which she imagines, and Antonioni imagines her imagining in loving 70mm from thirteen different angles, how it would look if the developers’ modernist architectural paradise were blown to bits. This famous sequence works like the still more famous sequence in L’Eclisse when a minute of silence on the Bourse passes in real time, Alain Delon whispers to Monica Vitti that the minute is costing money, and the viewer realizes that every passing minute of a film production also costs money. In Zabriskie Point, Antonioni’s realization of a destruction that is counterfactual inside Zabriskie Point is the opposite of the almost-free documentary moment of reading a State Park sign. Showing assets blowing up, Antonioni is also really burning cash in “the biggest controlled explosion ever filmed” up to that time (Barry Miles, Hippie [2005], 351).

Fictively virtual, the explosions (but not the destruction of the house) are literally actual. We know they are supposed to be virtual within the logic of the film partly because the house blows up again and again, violating a chronology which until now has been paratactic ("so anyway") but linear. The thirteen or thousand realities of destruction project the film’s technical capacity into Halprin’s “inner” space of transformations and vice-versa. She doesn’t need to be able to see each angle physically in order to be able to imagine them, while Antonioni gathers them in one place--serially instead of spatially as the geological Zabriskie Point gathers slices of time--so that we can see them. I can’t work my way around to reading the sequence as claiming that its crossing of the virtual and the real is efficacious or inefficacious, or even that it is pre-efficacious. Showing what people wish for without suggesting that because it is impossible, they should wish for something else, the scene stops short of making us feel that this is wish fulfillment. So anyway . . . .

Within the plot, Halprin doesn’t have the leverage over naming exercised by the Borax Company, which got Zabriskie Point named after one of its early 20th-century mining executives; but behind the plot, Antonioni did. Even though no one liked Zabriskie Point at the time—or maybe because people hated it so spectacularly—the spot refers to the film now. They say Foucault took acid there in 1975 (James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault [1993], 245). I don’t know what the radical architect Paolo Soleri made of Antonioni’s use of his house to exemplify the corporatization of avant-garde art; he started building his visionary desert community, Arcosanti, in the same year. He’s 92 now and it’s still unfinished, and that still cuts two ways. “One gets the strong impression that these different shapes and arrangements must mean something” (Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, 45).

Zabriskie Point's final sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJsW6ta4X8o

Whose Bankruptcy? Marx after 1848

2011-07-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

Among the alarmingly familiar-sounding things that Marx observed in the wake of the “failed” 1848 revolutions, the most familiar-sounding at the moment are his reflections on credit and “confidence.” In his writings on both the French and German revolutions, Marx finds that the “most eloquent” barometers of the post-revolutionary times are “its financial measures” (The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, trans. Paul Jackson, in Surveys From Exile, ed. David Fernbach [London: Verso, 2010], p. 49). In his 1850 analysis of events in France, Marx notes that the provisional government sealed its political allegiances when it became anxious to “remove even the suspicion” that it might not honor the debts of the previous government (49). Paying out interest on its bonds before it was even due, the government exacerbated the financial straits of the state and missed the chance at “the bankruptcy of the Bank” which “would have been the deluge which in a trice would have swept from the soil of France the financial aristocracy” (50). Instead, it acted like a “harassed debtor,” so that “credit became a condition of its existence” (52)--or at least was reaffirmed as a condition of its existence.

In December 1848 Marx had written something very similar about the German post-revolution. Reading closely speeches by the Prussian finance minister, David Hansemann, Marx selected for special sarcasm Hansemann’s call for “the strengthening of the state power, which is necessary for the protection of the freedom gained . . . and for the restoration of the confidence that has been disturbed” (Neue Rhenische Zeitung, 31 December 1848, trans. Ben Fowkes, in The Revolutions of 1848, ed. David Fernbach [London: Verso, 2010], 202; Marx’s italics). Marx notes the necessary proximity of police power to investor confidence, and the rhetoric by which Hansemann assured the working class that its condition would improve along with confidence, and so depended on restoring confidence first by “put[ting] a stop to its political agitation” (203).

In the German case, Marx wants to show that Hansemann’s explicit foregrounding of financial over political (and all other) motives was weakening the monarchy even if it was strengthening a new liberal state. Marx points out that between 1847 and 1848, Hansemann’s deployment of bottom-line logic, favorable to his own mercantile interests, changed its main target from the aristocracy to the people. Put another way, Hansemann “change[d] passive resistance against the people into an active attack on the people” [200]. Still, in 1848 as ever, Hansemann’s straightforward emphasis on financial results showed that “the monarchy had become a ‘matter of money’ in Prussia” (204). Implicitly, the monarchy could be switched out when it became insufficiently unprofitable just like anything else. Chez Hansemann, what survives of the old state is “police” and “treasury,” where “police means treasury” (207). So, the finance minister kills confidence in the government and actively reduces its scope at the same time that he attends, in more of Hansemann’s own words underlined by Marx, “to the establishment of confidence, and to the resuscitation of the trading activities which are at present languishing" (205).

Now, Marx predicts that the current ministry will expire by the same bottom-line logic by which it rose. Here Marx himself takes up the financial metaphor of “guarantees” on investment: “However, we have a guarantee that the more active part of the bourgeoisie will have to awaken again from its apathy, in the shape of the monstrous bill with which the counter-revolution will surprise the bourgeoisie in the spring” (212). The idea here is that since everyone is agreed that the reason for doing things is financial, Hansemann’s own credit will be downgraded as soon as society finds out how much it has to pay for his ventures--pay literally, in cash and not only in social bonds. Threading its way through Marx’s witty analysis is Marx’s own increasing investment in the logic of self-interest. Here at the very beginning of his economic turn, the potential to lose in this speculation, this bet on the overriding nature of interest, already appears. Marx believes that Hansemann was mistaken “in the nature of this ‘state power’” that he thought to enhance: “he believed he was strengthening that state power which is worthy of credit, of bourgeois confidence, but he only strengthened the state power which simply insists on confidence, and, where necessary, obtains it with grape-shot because it possesses no credit” (203). Marx plays with the homophony of middle-class confidence in government on the basis of its capacities and investors’ confidence in credit, and apparently wants to imply that the two together are stronger than the latter trying to survive without the former. He seems to be trying to draw a distinction between the stable and capacious government whose economy would merit investment and the state of gangster capital that makes an “offer you can’t refuse.” Hansemann, he suggests, confuses the two and does not notice the real meaning of his moves. But perhaps it’s Marx who’s confused in supposing that any such distinction matters pragmatically, not Hansemann, who was indeed attacked by both conservatives and radicals, and soon departed the political scene, but only to form a hugely successful banking society that eventually merged with Deutsche Bank (“die grosse Fusion,” 1929).

A little over a year later, Marx would write of the French post-revolution:

Both public credit and private credit were, of course, shaken. Public credit is based on the confidence that the state will allow itself to be exploited by the financial sharks . . . . Private credit was therefore paralysed, circulation restricted, production at a standstill before the February revolution broke out. The revolutionary crisis intensified the commercial crisis. And if private credit is based on the confidence that bourgeois production—the full range of relations of production—and bourgeois order are inviolable and will remain unviolated, what sort of effect must a revolution have which calls into question the basis of bourgeois production . . . . Public and private credit are the thermometers by which the intensity of a revolution can be measured. They fall, the more the passion and potency of the revolution rises. (The Class Struggles in France, 49).

Marx again divides, yet still aiigns the two kinds of credit--credit a state may merit in substance, even if the criteria are limited to those pertaining to the overall economic condition of the state, and credit as measured by investors, which reflects only the prospects of the investors themselves. This is where Marx’s text gets especially, distressingly familiar. In the ongoing Euro crisis many commentators have pointed out the non-relation between a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio and its credit rating. In debt-to-GDP ratio and annual economic growth, Argentina currently outperforms Ireland, but Argentina’s credit rating remains five levels below investment grade and “Ireland’s credit rating remains eight levels above Argentina’s” (“Ireland Follows Greece as Fernandez Beats Euro Nations: Argentina Credit,” Bloomberg News, January 4, 2011). Argentina’s “credit remains constrained by events such as the 2008 nationalization of pension funds and rate freezes on subsidized public utilities,” according to securities expert Siobhan Morden; “You’d need to remove these policies in order to say that Argentina is on the path toward investment grade” (Bloomberg News). What drives the credit rating is not the condition of the economy but the promise to investors that they will be paid no matter what happens to the economy. Similarly, before the Egyptian revolution Standard & Poor’s praised Egypt’s “fairly strong banking sector, which has been well insulated against the recent global financial turmoil”---although this wasn't enough to counter what it called “uncertainties concerning presidential succession” (Arab Finance Brokerage, March 28, 2010). Analysts openly discuss the fact that European assistance “to Greece” actually means assistance to the European banks that would lose money in a Greek default (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE_2RCVkq1w): Greece is being “helped” only so that it can repay the banks, not to enable it to recover. The main reason that Greece is supposed to go along with this is that otherwise it, like Argentina, will not be able to get credit in the future (“As Greece Ponders Default, Lessons from Argentina,” New York Times, June 23, 2011).

Since repaying the IMF in 2006, Argentina has not borrowed from the IMF again, which “has enabled the Kirchner governments to avoid the agency’s typical prescription of cutting state spending,” The New York Times points out. Argentina wants to repay more and re-enter the credit market; Marx’s comments on confidence, though, suggest that with friends like investment banks, no society needs to arrange for its own counterrevolution. If credit falls “the more the passion and potency of the revolution rises,” of course that doesn’t mean that the more credit falls, the more potentially pro-proletarian a state or a society becomes. Meanwhile, the beginning of Marx’s theoretical conclusion--that the calculus of interest must be brought over to the side of the people, by the process of elimination if necessary--casts its own lot, maybe fatally, with the perceived “reality” of economic interests.

* * *

P.S. July 12:

European officials who've expressed little regret at the economic suffering of ordinary EU citizens are now enraged at the credit rating agencies for downgrading Portugal even though it has met every "austerity" demand of the IMF. "Wolfgang Schauble, German finance minister, said there was no justification for the four-notch downgrade" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8621520/Europe-declares-war-on-rating-agencies.html, my italics). "Heiner Flassbeck, director of the UN Office for World Trade and Development, said the agencies should be 'dissolved' before they can do any more damage, or at least banned from rating countries" (ibid.). For its part Moody's has "said it had little choice once EU leaders began to insist on 'burden sharing' for private holders of Greek debt" (ibid.). Since the downgrade of Portugal, Irish bonds have been junked and Italy and Spain are "being targeted by the financial markets" (http://m.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/12/greece-set-to-default-massive-debt-burden?cat=business&type=article). The EU notes that the Irish rating "contrasts very much with the recent data, which support a return to GDP growth this year, and the determined implementation of the [austerity] programme by Dublin" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8633665/Irish-bonds-cut-to-junk-status-on-bail-out-worries.html). The EU is protesting business as usual as applied to non-European countries now that they are experiencing the ability of private enterprises to undermine all the hard work they've been doing and the very stability of their states. Still, it's nice that Viviane Reding and José Manuel Barroso have joined the indignados. There's room in protest camp for everyone.

Revolution-Restoration, 1814--

2011-06-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

Revolution-Restoration, 1814— is a half-hour DV film composed of found footage, famous cinematic footage, and, to a smaller extent, shot footage. The cinematic material has been altered in all cases but (perhaps) one. These alterations include cropping, editing (cutting within a sequence), slowing, color change and removal, and sound removal and addition. None of the alterations is meant to be noticeable unless you are already hunting for it. Internet versions of films were used and copy degradations were not enhanced or regularized—this history of copying is noticeable. Between the evident and obscure changes, it’s difficult to know what exactly you’re looking at.

Two precedents that may be useful for thinking about the kinds of visual questions raised here are Luc Tuymans’s paintings of mediatized images (http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/405) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema, which is composed largely of clips from previous films. Godard’s Histoire(s) is often discussed through debates about the intellectual property rights to cinema. Godard refers to the legal entanglements that Histoire(s) was forced to navigate at the end of his most recent work, Film Socialisme, in which the title “Si la loi est injuste, la justice passe avant la loi [If the law is unjust, justice comes before the law]” appears over a copy of the FBI copyright infringement notice. Clips from Godard’s Germany Year Ninety Nine Zero are the least altered of the materials that appear here. I believe that RR 1814's rearrangements and noncommercial scholarly purposes conform to fair use. At the same time, this fairness may be irrelevant both pragmatically and philosophically: many publishers and institutions do not feel that fair use standards provide them with sufficient legal cover, while for my part, I don’t believe in copyright. Unsaleable, un-institutionally publishable work, at any rate, has its own appeal.

The text of RR 1814 is drawn from work in progress, especially two articles: “Looking at the Stars Forever,” forthcoming in a special issue of Studies in Romanticism edited by Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun; and “Hegel’s Bearings,” forthcoming in Romantic Circles Praxis Series’ special issue on Romanticism and Disaster edited by David Collings and Jacques Khalip. It may not be entirely comprehensible without them. In RR 1814, the verbal burden is borne almost entirely by subtitles, and it’s necessary to focus fairly hard on the subtitles to follow the text amid other sensory events. The text is a little simpler than would appear in an article, but not much. Part of the experiment here, then, involves the possibilities for philosophical reading within a visual frame and for the non-mimetic deployment of images therein.

In thinking about these possibilities, I found more relevant ideas in film itself than in the underdeveloped genre of multimedia scholarship. So far, the latter tends to remain within a mimetic model in which images illustrate or accompany text or vice-versa, while animation and HTML stamp the work with the semiology of multimedial generic belonging. That said, the image-text relationship is inescapably mimetic to the extent that mimetic relations are found by the mind always willing and able to connect the not-necessarily connected. Dialogue with mimeticism is both inevitable and interesting, but is so only if we are not driving for it. The film excerpts in RR 1814 are lifted from narratives, even when the sources themselves are only quasi-narrative, as in Godard and Antonioni. Loosened from their contexts, some may take on a magnified documentary function. Alessia Ricciardi pointed out to me that the effect is different in clips from Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, where the narrative teleology is very strong: Edmund, the boy who wanders the postwar wreckage, throws himself out the window of the abandoned building at the end of the film. Rather than seeming aleatory and documentary, the inclusion of sequences in the building seems to invite the question of what’s being said about Rossellini’s narrative or offered as an analogy to it. (Is the agoraphobia of globalization supposed to feel suicidal?). One way of looking at it is that this time Edmund does not jump out the window, but remains suspended in the time “before.” But it’s probably true that RR 1814 does not aim to answer this kind of question enough to justify seeming to bring it up in the first place. I was very glad to have provoked Ricciardi’s reflection, at any rate, and our exchange exemplifies the sorts of conversations I would like to enable.

It seems to add weight to the work to append acknowledgments to it, but (consistent with the point about copyright) I have a hard time ignoring the ambiguous property lines. Thanks to Ian Balfour for reminding me about the relevance of Germany Year Ninety Nine Zero through his paper concerning it; to Rebecca Comay, Erin Trapp, and David Collings for substantive conversations about related topics; to Nasser Mufti for the link to latent civil war; and to people in the fall 2010 seminar Politics after Expectation for many thoughts. Robert Wood, you’re right that Gramsci needs to be part of it, and he will be more so later.....

After having finalized this version (whose end titles credit the found as well as cinematic footage) I heard from Peter Molloy, a student of military history whose video of the Waterloo battlefield and Hougoumont Farm appears at the beginning. Molloy has kindly allowed this incorporation of parts of his video. The original video (which he didn’t consider to be videography, but research) is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQYTiD8DgzQ. He observes in the notes posted with it: “The two bare trees approached during the video are all that remains of the woods which existed south of the farm in 1815. This is the ground that French infantry of Reille's II Corps attacked over again and again during the late morning and afternoon of Waterloo. Could the indentations that scar one of the trunks mark the impact of musket balls nearly two centuries ago? Just in shot as the trees are approached is an area of ice and frost covered open ground which marks the location of one of several mass graves known to exist at various points around the battlefield (with at least two located in the immediate area of Wellington's crossroads, further east). It is likely that most of those who fell at Hougoumont, attacker and defender alike, ended up buried here.”

http://vimeo.com/25335771

Naive Melody

2011-02-11T18:04:00.001-08:00

I am not going to become a "blogger" proper, someone who writes quickly to moving events. But today I can't help it.

The Tunisian and Egyptian movements seem different from anything that has happened in the last 50 years, in their apparent internal structure as well as their capacity to restructure relations. It's the dovetailing of these two elements that seems so promising. Unlike the various regime changes in Iran (1979), Poland, or South Africa, the Egyptian revolution is neither subsumed in the position of a party (religious or political) nor led by an inspirational figure; and unlike the USSR and Eastern bloc countries that reorganized after 1989, Egypt has been a strategic ally of the U.S., privy to its support. The "leaderless" quality of the events in Egypt perplexes and threatens many Western elites, as though the horizontally organized nature of the protests were the actual object of fear, behind a trumped-up fear of a "power vacuum" and Muslim extremism. That's already been said.

Leaderlessness and partylessness here is not an epiphenomenon of spontaneous actions, though, but a stated position of the April 6 Youth Movement, "We are all Khaled Said" and January 25 Movement, just as it is often a position of contemporary student movements. All of the above are made up of mostly-educated people dissatisfied with oligarchic representational politics and consciously reaching for something beyond it. Professional politicians reflexively dismiss this stance as "highly unrealistic," as the U.S. Embassy did in a now-notorious WikiLeaks-released cable. Unrealistic, yes: literally outside "realist" politics, therefore prima facie naive to realist politicians used to viewing their own game as the only one in the world. The Egyptian revolution seems crucially non-naive, however--thought-out, organized, educated, prepared, staffed--in ways that those of us at a distance will only be able to learn over time. The organizers of the Egyptian revolution held to their scrupulous and nonaccidental leaderlessness over the last eighteen days, and the main reason for optimism now is that their position has survived 300 protester deaths, thousands of injuries, and innumerable threats to life and limb, to emerge intact. The value on leaderlessness is reflected more casually in ordinary Egyptians' relative coolness to Mohamed ElBaradei, whom the U.S. press is eager to cast in the leading-man role of human rights reformer (this is not to say that he has no role, but it has not been the mythic one that the U.S. press keeps hoping for), and in Egyptian passerby's response, to journalists who asked who should be in the new government, that there were all kinds of perfectly competent people who could fill government posts. No one famous or particularly well-connected is necessary, and it is obviously not difficult to improve radically on the job that Mubarak's officials have done. Posts will get filled and there will be massive pressure on the people who fill them to join the oligarchic payroll, but the degree of conscious determination that the youth movements have shown not to participate in party and personality politics, or take seriously those who elevate them, may be unprecedented. They have a rigorous and specific idea of what counts as democracy, and they know that long-term vigilance is required. One thing about being "unrealistic": it's a lot more work than being a realist.

If they did not know that, the Egyptian revolution could not have resisted the standard narrative at every turn, most especially the moment in the script when symbolic concessions were offered, the killing intensified, and businesspeople took up their cue to act as though things had returned to normal (February 5-7). This moment was so familiar, and so filled with the intimidation of realist history retold (from Tiananmen Square to Iran 2009), that you could practically hear the foreign journalists retrieving their suitcases. "The means for escalation [were] still there," as a "30-year-old coordinator" named Zyad el-Alawi told The New York Times ("Egypt’s Leaders Seek to Project Air of Normalcy," February 7, 2011). The delicate moment became "the Week of Steadfastness"; widespread strike cannily supplemented mass demonstration (staying home from work is something one can do when one is tired and physically threatened), and the Egyptian movement continued to be the most inconvenient revolution ever. I don't know if general strikes would have helped in China, 1989 or Iran, 2009 (other horizontally organized movements): those regimes and security forces were even more awful than this one. But after those despair-inducing examples the global citizenry did not, this time, only desire the realization of democracy, but wanted to know whether it was even possible for a popular revolution to achieve democracy by such "naive" methods. Whether or not democratization is fully completed, it now exists as a present possibility; no matter what happens, we know that it will have been possible, not in spite of "leaderlessness" but through it. It is more possible than ever.

As for the restructuring of relations: although commentator Glenn Greenwald made fun of "established media outlets" for failing to notice that their shocked descriptions of oligarchic Egypt equally described many U.S. institutions ("The Egyptian Mirror," Salon, February 7, 2011), "established" rhetoric was in a new way contested, if not overwhelmed, by a pervasive acknowledgment that what was happening in Egypt was relevant to the citizens of Western states, even as the primary modes of feeling this relevance surpassed sympathy and shame. More telling than Greenwald's citation of dusty phrasings from The New York Times was the appearance of his column itself; and not only his. Mainstream editorials noticed--how could they not?--that no democratic head of state, or former head of state, came out fully in favor of the demands of the Egyptian democracy movements. While citizens streamed almost impossibly moving videos of average Egyptians transported by nonsectarian democratic hope, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, speaking at Davos, "highly appreciate[d]" Egypt's contribution to "peace" and stability; Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Cameron murmured inaudibly; and Berlusconi, Blair, and Cheney joined human rights luminaries like China and Saudi Arabia in praising Mubarak outright. It really was difficult not to feel, if not to draw the conclusion as a matter of belief, that the democratic Western governments had no enthusiasm for democracy, period, and not just democracy in the Middle East. While venues like The Economist do continue to criticize the Western response in the old vocabulary of hypocrisies ("we" should allow "them" to have what we have), in the wider environment it's possible to hear blunter sentiments. So, a West Virginia community blogger opines that "as we have all watched the events unfold in Egypt over the past several days, I couldn't help but realize how inherently wrong I was in my original assessment of the transition of power in West Virginia." The Onion offers the "hope that the Egyptian people will get something more out of the whole ordeal than just democracy" ("Egyptian Populace To Hopefully Get Something Better Than Democracy Out Of All This," February 9, 2011). About a crackdown on domestic political protesters, Tim Rutten observes in the L.A. Times that "you'd think Southern California suddenly had become Paris in 1848--or, maybe, contemporary Cairo" ("Not Fit to be Tried," February 12, 2011). When the admin of the international "We Are All Khaled Said" page thanked U.S. supporters for help and promised that Egyptians would help with our revolution when the time came (ha ha), people shot back that it was "not a joke." My point isn't that it is not a joke, exactly, but that it is significant that this exchange became sayable. Whether you think it is or isn't a joke, no one had difficulty understanding it. Nothing like that has happened in previous comparable situations. If it has been made possible by accelerations of media, still, it has been made possible. The Egyptian revolution has been the world's most inconvenient for Western powers partly because it occurred in a context of draconian cuts to poor and middle-class social programs, education, and labor across the West, a concomitant orgy of pharaonic looting, civil rights losses, and significant social unrest, just as Greenwald remarks. Many people discontented with this situation watched events in Egypt not with sympathy but with a livelier, more urgent, more first-person feeling that intervened: a feeling of solidarity. In electronic exchanges, it was recognized and reaffirmed as such by Egyptians.

The foregrounding of solidarity, and the shifting of perspective that solidarity requires, seemed to be repeated in the formal experience of following the revolution, especially in the fact that Al-Jazeera is not available on U.S. cable TV. Peering at the Al-Jazeera feed on laptops, U.S. viewers couldn't help but notice that they were not in transparent-information central; that the Western free press had failed to materialize; that we were getting our information from Twitter and Facebook, like the Egyptians themselves. Al-Jazeera feeds were embedded in The Washington Post, a material representation of mediatized dependence. Today a columnist for the Baltimore Sun not only observes that Al-Jazeera did a finer job of covering Egypt, but "ha[s] to also say how refreshing it was to see Al Jazeera's reaction to President Obama's speech," "a kind of analysis" he fails to find "anywhere on American TV" (David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun, February 11, 2011). This reflexive also-having-to-say, indicating the overcoming of a previous unwillingness, and a spilling of insight onto U.S. objects, traces the realignment of consciousnesses and relations that I mean.

My friend Timothy Bewes writes that shame--inadequacy to "ethical responsibilities," especially in the sense of not having done enough--is structurally endemic in the postcolonial era. He points out that for Marx, "shame is more than a mere feeling"; it is, in Marx's words, a "revolution in itself," because "shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring" (Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, quoted in Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011], 6). I'm still reading Bewes's very interesting book, and can't represent its thesis' end. Book in hand, though, and Marx's sense of the preliminary quality of shame in mind, it occurs to me that Western citizens who could be feeling shame--like the Americans who signed petitions against the invasion of Iraq, "Not in My Name"--are beyond that at the moment. We are feeling happy in the first person plural instead: an emotion at once powerful and "highly unrealistic," like our own student movements.

Image: from Islam Kamal, Public Domain (2009)

An Exaggerated Sense of Deprivation

2011-01-22T02:43:00.000-08:00

If, wanting to know more about Israel’s increased razing of Bedouin villages in the Negev this year, you visit the electronic home of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, you will see a curious piece of writing called “The Bedouin in Israel.” It’s dated 1999 and is by a Yosef Ben-David, who is identified as an associate researcher at the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies but is no longer at that institution (a think tank). The document doesn’t reveal anything new—even by 1999 standards—about the situation of Bedouin in the Negev, and as a nonexpert, I bring it up not to perform a scholarly analysis but to reflect on the tensions of enunciation that appear in it, and which may call out specifically to the casual reader.

It can’t be a surprise that this officially approved account of relations between the State of Israel and its Bedouin population does not really count Bedouins as Israelis. “Bedouin citizens” are described as though their citizenship has not yet made them into Israelis. Their ongoing “integration” is assumed as an imperative, and Bedouins are said to be resisting to a greater or lesser degree—greater in the Negev, lesser in northern Israel—because of the “‘natural’ difficulties experienced by this cultural group.” Involuntary verbs bear too much weight: the transition “entails relinquishing values, customs and a traditional economy”; “the Bedouin have to cope with the process of urbanization”; “it became necessary to move an airport to a locality inhabited by 5000 Bedouin,” and so forth. Unlike the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, however—to make a rather random comparison to another agency historically responsible for the impact of colonial settlement on indigenous populations—the Foreign Ministry is personal and hectoring, as though the website were a place to air grievances and international readers could be sympathetic referees. Ben-David’s paternalism is overweening, but it may be more remarkable that he insists on telling us—an audience assumed to be composed of visitors from the English-literate West—all about it, and that this presumes, in turn, that Bedouins themselves are not reading. It is not a matter of course that the role of Foreign Ministry literature as such is to offer (tendentious) facts about domestic groups to the outside. The U.S. Department of State website is not filled with demographic tidbits about U.S. populations, much less opinions about their anthropological stages. It explains U.S. positions and initiatives on other world regions. The Bureau of Indian Affairs makes a demographic report on the state of the tribes available, but any ideological bias in what it’s doing is buried in the particulars of its quantitative methodology; there is not a colorful adjective in the entire text, and the BIA knows better than to attempt a historical overview. You understand I’m not praising the State Department or the BIA; I’m saying that they write differently. The generic possibility that a ten-year-old soft-social science text by an individual researcher could be on the website is out of the question. A ten-year-old piece that points to the “increased attention” the issue has been receiving “in recent years” is embarrassing before it has even said anything.

But then it does start to “speak,” and the oral metaphor, which I don’t usually like in dealing with any writing, is for once apropos. Although there is no literal first person in the text, against the norms of government literature this text is far too close up. Ben-David wants international readers to be impressed by his omniscient view of Bedouin conditions and perspective, and has a egotistic faith in the ability of individual “expert” testimony to legitimate authority: the “last two governments,” he assures us, were “well aware of the difficulties of the Bedouin and based on a thorough knowledge of the subject . . . have begun taking steps to solve the problems.” He becomes confidential. He’s in our intimate space, and has been in Bedouin heads. “The Bedouin to some extent fail to distinguish between objective difficulties and those connected with their changing sub-culture and thus feel an exaggerated sense of deprivation,” he opines. He is even in a position to tell us what the Bedouin cannot, since “the Bedouin themselves have difficulty in articulating their wishes in planning terms.” A Bedouin woman who goes to a hospital for delivery not only is “eligible for a grant” but will receive “unaccustomed pampering.” Northern Bedouin have “pleasant social and political relations with their Jewish neighbors,” conditions that, Ben-David notes with schadenfreude, do not obtain in Arab villages (“Israeli Bedouin enjoy conditions that their [Arab] brethren lack”). So governmental policy implementation is also, complementarily, invested with affective attitudes: “tents and light structures . . . built illegally are treated forgivingly”; “Israel's attitude towards its Bedouin citizens has always been positive”; Northern Bedouin join the armed forces “believing that the Jewish state would be generous to them,” and indeed, as a result of their assimilation and especially their military service, “the Bedouin in the North are rewarded with a friendly attitude, both from the establishment and from Jewish society at large.” What does it mean that Ben-David wants to characterize state policy by its attitude? The structural inequity of the relation modeled is blatantly racist; only one side is considered able to judge and condition the other, and to define what constitutes “the willingness and goodwill of both partners.” Yet what Ben-David wants the policies to be evaluated on instead—their sentiments—is equally blatantly racist, and nothing makes this clearer than characterizing state policy as “forgiving” or “generous.” The oddity is that Ben-David, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry by keeping his text on the public record, does not do what the BIA does and simply not mention history at all. Rather, he insists on drawing our attention to the psychological, resentful, intimate manner in which racism toward Bedouins subsists. And why does he do that? Because he believes that he is speaking to interested, English-speaking Westerners as friends and equals; he really hopes we will agree, since we have so much in common and all. The rhetoric here would be impossible without triangulation. Ben-David’s disdain for Bedouin Israelis is the other side of his trust in his audience, as he constructs it; he craves its forbearance, if not its approval, despite the state’s land restrictions’ being “at times depicted in the media as cruel.” To that extent, the display of racism (as opposed to the racism itself), in the form of would-be conspiratorial superiority, is a kind of gift offered up to us.

This text hits the note of the commandant in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”—that of pretending to admire for our benefit rusty equipment all too familiar to local administrators. It’s haplessly blind to the reader’s modern taste for gleaming corporate prose and easy multiculturalism. Not anomalously so; being in its eleventh year of official status, this text has been copied all over the place, for example by tour sites that reappropriate its vulgarity with fresh obliviousness. As in “The Penal Colony,” we want to detach these provincial fingers from our sleeve. And as in the story, we turn away and cast off without any further regard for those we stop thinking of.

Variations on the Name Obegg

2011-01-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

or, Minervan statesmanship:
www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk

Now We Are Perfect

2010-12-28T00:15:00.000-08:00

Stranded in Canton (2008) has been assembled by Robert Gordon from approximately thirty hours of videotape William Eggleston shot in the ’70s in Memphis, New Orleans, and Greenwood, Mississippi. The video has been screening as part of “The Democratic Camera,” the recent retrospective of Eggleston’s photography; I was lucky enough to see it on a big screen at Cinefamily, at an event affiliated with LACMA’s mounting of the “The Democratic Camera.” Gordon, the author of a cultural history of Memphis, has done a sensitive job of crafting a film out of something larger than a film--the archive that came to be known as “Stranded in Canton”--yet the Stranded in Canton we do have can’t help but make us think of the outwork we don't have. The next thought, though, is that even if I could see every moment Eggleston shot--which I might well want to do--I still wouldn't “have” “Stranded in Canton,” because “Stranded in Canton” is neither an object nor a story.

Gordon starts the film with Eggleston’s long takes of his young children and his then-girlfriend, Marcia Hare. He uses titles and light retrospective narration by Eggleston to introduce the friends and relatives, which is also to say the drug addicts, transvestites, and exhibitionists, who are its protagonists and whose powerful performances of art-as-life and vice versa compose most of the film. He builds up to some of the intenser scenes, creating a musical texture of variation and refrain, tension and relief; then the film crescendos again and stops with a bang. Before too long we understand that the opening scenes of loved ones are emblematic, that they have been chosen because everyone in the film loves and is loved by Eggleston. The children are puzzling at first, since we may not immediately grasp that they are Eggleston’s children, and their actions are otherwise incomprehensible. Physically beautiful (in a classical sense) and apparently accustomed to the camera, a little girl and boy approach and seem to try out expressions, but they're not the stereotypical ones that children deploy for home video. They’re slow, meditative, and tonally unparaphrasable, seeming to border on pain without completely going there; it's like Warhol's Screen Tests for children. The girl may be wearing makeup and is vampish. (She grew up to be an actress, it's said: but in this film, there's no difference between acting and not acting.) Family relation appears here as a nonpejoratively perverse, sideways complicity. The girl’s intense gaze and symmetrical beauty spill over into another early scene which features Marcia Hare smiling on her back on a bed. Eggleston touches her lips: “There's a little bit of ash . . . . Now you’re perfect.”

While we will need to think about the unequal burdens of erotic community, Stranded in Canton presents such a community, which exceeds the family but does not exclude it, from a perspective that has come to rest in its warmth. The warmth is entirely literal, since Eggleston equipped his camera, the early Sony PortaPak, with infrared so that it could run on heat instead of light. To get more light, Eggleston had to come close enough to a body for the camera to sense more heat. Much of Stranded in Canton is shot at night, which means that many of its closeups are very, very close; so close that often only part of the face can be in the frame, glowing white as a light bulb where it’s hottest. But we don’t get the impression that Eggleston would want to be any further away. The camera seems to be constructed as it is to give him an excuse to stay close (as his photographs also often are). It sways and lingers in beautiful ways in the space between meditation and actually touching. There is no “establishment” of any environment or contrasting it to another. There is a kind of real-time, on-the-fly editing, but it would be difficult to describe in conventional vocabulary the protocols that shape it. Even when his angles are diverse, Eggleston mainly looks at the people performing at the time as if no one else existed.

Gordon’s setting up the film as he does hints to the audience that it should transfer the erotic pleasure, aestheticization and even idealization—“perfect[ion]”—of these opening scenes to all the scenes that follow: scenes in which self-denigration runs to self-glorification, nothing seems more eloquent than modes of expression that are obviously inadequate, and failure ceases to have any social meaning. Afloat in alcohol and various blood-contaminants, Eggleston’s friends display and comment on their bodies, dilate and divagate, argue, and most of all improvise verbally—with indefatigable invention—their mythically proportioned abjection. They act out the significance of their exploits, the audacity of their sexuality, and the heroism of their continuing to exist at all while “stranded in Canton”—a figure for wreck that turns into a festive wail. (Simultaneously a city in China, a town in Mississippi, and many other towns, “Canton” is a nowhere, a Utopia. The Egglestonians distinguish it from Canton, Mississippi by pronouncing it Canton.) People give each other the time for long soliloquies, although they may also yell and talk over one another. The sense of solidarity is both impressive and claustrophobic. While it’s entirely possible for people in the Eggleston circle to die from drugs or bullets in the course of the life depicted—as we are told they sometimes do—it doesn’t seem possible for them to elicit any material judgment from one another or from Eggleston. That fact seems more important than the part about living or dying. Here Eggleston is the antithesis of Diane Arbus, in whose work people who don’t know each other stare at one another with incomprehension. In Stranded in Canton we experience what it would be like to have a surfeit of understanding. It would mean re-approaching the infantile world of imagined omnipotence, in which each surface is animate and sparkles back when we smile at it. No doubt this world is a little creepy; but we don't think so when it's our experience and we're in love.

Maybe only one sequence is anthropological, defined against the rest. In that passage, a group of young guys in a New Orleans alley bite the heads off some live chickens, which is apparently something that goes on from time to time in certain New Orleans subcultures. No regulars are included in the action and Eggleston comments in a framing remark that he is "not too fond of the geek scene; too many other people were involved; it was not nearly as personal--like a circus act.” This value axis—personal/ impersonal—is the only one still operating in Stranded in Canton. “Personal” doesn’t mean “real” or “natural”; in the film people are personal in various kinds of costumes and altered states or while lying about themselves. But the very fact that the “geek scene” is a scene with a name means that a ritual determines the action to be taken. Because Stranded in Canton is not about that, it is not a film about "the South" (it "isn't about anything but itself," as Eggleston phrases it) and its action cannot be explained away by supposing that it's like this in Tennessee, that people are melodramatic and have a more casual attitude about guns, etc. For all that Eggleston’s friends use local props and in-jokes, they continually exceed or fall short of their own frameworks for meeting. "The South" is in many ways what they are challenging and reality-testing; they go nowhere, fall and are caught in their own idiosyncratic net of deadpan rapture.

Thus the paradigmatic scene of the film--juxtaposed by Gordon to that of the "geeks"--is one in which Eggleston’s friend Randall, who is corpulent, wild-haired, and maybe thirty years old, stands out in the kind of weed field that adjoins the gravel parking lot of the bar on the edge of town in a lot of places. He weaves, sheds some clothes, then seems to get an idea, the idea to put his half-full beer bottle into his ass--"Regardez-la!"--at which he makes a nominal effort, and then triumphantly, getting to the other half of the idea, he brings the bottle back around and takes a comprehensive swig. "It's like love for the asking--love for the ass king--for the ass skin!" In all seriousness, it's a sacred moment, one that merits an address to Posterity (the receiver of a lot of the dialogue in the film): “I'm gonna tell you one god damn thing. I'm tired of hearing all that bullshit about--bring that, bring that thing over here--bring that right down here." (For whom is he calling this press conference? Eggleston doesn't need to be told, and there is no audience beyond as yet; Eggleston isn't famous yet, the MOMA show is in the future.) "I'm tired of hearing all that shit about queers. I'm tired of it. You gotta realize that it's all right, baby." In effect, Randall summarizes what he wants realized through his gesture: this representative act, the "it," is right in its entirety; further, the equivalence of orifices and homophones it mobilizes exemplifies a larger system of equivalences that makes up the all: one could just keep going and it would still be right, all of it. It’s more than all right, it’s grand. He looks weary for only a moment, then it's on.

This episode strangely joins the trust specific to a (relatively) private relation with a dramatic publicity of utterance that offers the self as representative. The fact that the offer is made to no one seems to allow it to be made to everyone. The unpredictability and contingency of this occurrence, its experimental means as well as its content, puts to shame the narrow construction of “public” discourse, including the contributions of art and cinema. The seeming conversion of inconsequence into almost astral significance is one of the big paradoxes of outsider art and life, and it tends to push the audience toward a transcendental construction of truth as that which is usually invisible. We don't need to take such romanticism at face value in order to admire its ability to criticize what passes for public. Commentators predictably assert that because of the purity of the conditions of production (embedded filmmaker, unobtrusive camera, no art-market motive), Eggleston gives us a reality. But no world can give us that. Instead, he constructs a fantasy of the virtual as a space uniquely protected from any evaluation short of indifference to the impersonal. Now we are perfect.

The balance is fragile. At one point a couple of “normals,” as Erving Goffman would call them, wander into a bar in the middle of a song being murdered by Lady Russell, whom Eggleston calls the “travesty of transvestism.” Eggleston notes their horrified, self-protective bafflement. Their presence creates a slight anxiety, something to get over, a reminder to the audience that sociology indicates an infinitesimal level of support in Memphis, 1973 for the kinds of activities in the film. Lady Russell's performance could be physically dangerous in only slightly expanded circumstances. So the tightness of Eggleston’s closeups is also a defense. Another uncomfortable example, not of exclusion but of inclusion that nonetheless draws attention to the radius of the circle: Gordon incorporates Eggleston’s footage of the blues musicians Furry Lewis and Johnny Woods. The footage itself is neither token nor racist, but the appearance of tokenism is created as soon as “Stranded in Canton” the archive is edited into Stranded in Canton the film. For editorially, no choice is right. Leaving it out would give the impression that Eggleston was only interested in white people, while including it creates either a false continuity or an undue contrast with the Eggleston regulars: unlike a couple of other African-American men who appear more passingly, Lewis and Woods are not pursuing the derangement of the senses, and in no way cultivate ruin as a form of expression. That doesn’t mean that doing the latter is necessarily elitist and elective; rather, Lewis and Woods are not barometers of authenticity, these options are not necessarily comparable at all, and no one would be comparing them if it were not for the fact that the film had to either include or exclude these dignified men. Under those circumstances, if you've got footage of Furry Lewis, you can't leave it out. But in the archive, they are neither in nor out of anything--no claim and therefore no comparison is made. The passage from nonart to art here destroys value ambiguity. It is not that the archive is whole and the film is not; just the opposite, the film is a whole film, and thus necessarily partial, while the archive is no whole and does not order our reaction. Further, even though a stack of videotapes in a box is the logical conclusion of, the adequate form for, Eggleston's project, as I pointed out before the edited film doesn't show reality just because it came from the box. Similarly, what is in the box is not reality either, even if remains unopened. It's only the image of perfection, the construction of perfection projected by Eggleston's desire.

So I return to the creepiness or not of the desire for polymorphous perfection: can we endorse its pursuit? It must be said that Marcia Hare’s beauty isn’t perfect in the same way that Randall’s beauty is perfect. Hers bears the pressure of change and of noblesse oblige to men. Hare is the muse of plenitude, whose generosity has to be as even as Eggleston’s sustaining glance. At one point she is sitting on the lap of an elderly man, V.L. Richards, as though allowing him to take pleasure in the (unaccustomed?) proximity of her young body. She lets him touch her breasts, and declines when he asks if he can kiss one. “I’m not a wet nurse,” she says, as gently as though she were in fact talking to a baby. “Well, I think I can make you a wet nurse,” he returns, and everybody laughs, especially her. I know that laughter: it's called on to demonstrate that the fact that she is "not a wet nurse" does not mean that the man has to act like a grownup. She does not have to have sex with him, and yet he can and will keep on wanting her to. She accepts that state of affairs and absorbs the tension of it; on the ground of her acceptance, the group founds a community of erotic innocence. In Freudian thought civilization is supposed to be a compromise, forever unsatisfactory, with the asymmetry of desire—the fact that people want all of their wishes granted, but not all of everybody else’s. In "Canton" there’s a consolation prize: you may not get your wish, but you are supported in continuing to wish it. (This appears to be the conspiratorial message that passes between father and daughter, as well, in Gordon’s opening move.) The fantasy is that this group’s relations have refined themselves to the point where that is possible without cost. The issue of Hare's wet-nurserie shows where the cost is, and who is likely to pay. Play with a loaded gun at the end of the film similarly indicates the border of Canton--what non-contingent event could possibly break up the community. Still the sense that something important is going on between the members overrides any attempt to look ahead. They tacitly agree not to expose the fact that the omnipotence of desire is fictive. To keep it up, they have to push, pull, and experiment; but the underlying agreement holds, like a natural right.

Although Eggleston’s video seems to complement his photography—black and white where the photography is in color, unfocused rather than sharp, dealing with people dynamically instead of with objects or people-as-statuesque-objects—it may also suggest that the photography too treats objects as animate. At least, an animating desire turns toward these objects despite their mass production and sometime neglect. Each is the center of its universe, dryly lodged in eloquent muteness and adequate inadequacy. Far from exposing the “real” world, Eggleston is constantly subordinating the rest of the world to the right of the singular to assert its pre-eminence, and refusing to dwell on the contradictions in serial omnipotence. Eggleston’s voice is seldom heard in his own video, but when Eggleston’s loquacious dentist friend T.C. opines that “You don't want to go around all fucked up all the time,” it’s Eggleston who responds, “Why not?” There are a lot of ways to answer that. There are a lot of reasons to decline the fantasy of Stranded in Canton, yet room to wonder whether anyone really does.

Thanks to Eyal Amiran, Michelle Cho, and Toshi Tomori.

"Free Speech" as Externalized Thought

2010-12-23T15:01:00.000-08:00

In Political Spaces and Global War (trans. Elisabeth Fey, ed. Adam Sitze [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010]), Carlo Galli suggests that demand for the “positive ‘freedom of’ speech and criticism” is created by the modern state form’s neutralization of domestic political space. “The neutralizing action of State sovereignty,” he writes, “relegates political energies . . . to the Subject’s interior in order to render them politically inoffensive” (58). The state’s neutralization of public space encourages the development of interior space, thus creating “the Subject’s initially secret conscience” (59). As Galli sees it, Hobbes actively promotes the idea of such an “interior reserve.” “This situation,” he continues, then “quickly gave rise to a new demand and aspiration” to liberate these interior thoughts (59).

In this sketch, the movement of state repression interestingly seems to bring about a lasting elevation of “speech and criticism” among “political energies” of an undifferentiated kind. "Energies" that are unspecified at the beginning of Galli’s description go verbal in order to go underground—they are translated into a form that can survive mentally—only to re-emerge at the end of the cycle, without shedding their linguistic specificity, as a newfound concern for “'freedom of' speech and criticism.” It is as though having lived so long on thoughts, Galli’s citizen comes to value verbal forms of freedom—its loyal companions during state-induced quiescence—more than before. This is not to say that post-Hobbesian political actors are uninterested in political behavior generally, nor that speech and criticism are not also themselves actions, but that they are now and for the first time also interested in freedom of speech and criticism in and of themselves. By going through Hobbes, Galli’s genealogy differentiates itself from the one in which modern freedom of speech descends from, or revives, the supposedly high value of public rhetoric in classical days. In the latter model, the free speech of the individual extends or potentially intersects with debate among political elites: if not part of the political process itself, it is consonant in principle with the (supposedly) reasoned discourse of parliaments, courts, or groups of deciders. But in Galli's account (and Galli does not linger over the implications of his different model, but we can), free speech after Hobbes is based on something that is not public and is at odds with publicity: “interior” thought, paradigmatically thoughts of political dissidence that could lead to strife and conceivably civil war.

“Freedom of speech” thus involves the paradoxical desire that interior thoughts be able to appear in public without becoming public, without becoming “of” the public. This desire (that something public not be public) sounds contradictory because it really is hostile to the public space, which it sees as having a certain consistency, and which it does not want to be itself. The core being defended here is something that cannot exist in space maintained by the state without transforming that space against its will. The historical construction known as “free speech,” then, is strictly speaking revolutionary, because unlike the goal of equality under the laws of the state, it doesn’t assume the value of maintaining the state. It does not perform equality: it performs autonomy.

Image: Obama's hand; an imitation of Luc Tuymans?

2010-12-23T02:11:00.000-08:00

Zizek is Not Okay

2010-12-13T14:56:00.000-08:00

I was once among a group of people having a conversation about Zizek in a car speeding from Southampton to London. In his support, someone observed that “Zizek is not okay”—that his writings and his presence convey psychic unease, so that no one reading him could imagine that the world that had produced the writings was one in which things were going according to plan. No, it’s a world that’s tilted at a sickening angle, and the perspective of the prose is on the ground, looking up with one eye while clutching its stomach. One of the main strategies of the prose, given this awful situation, or perhaps it is something more serious and less voluntary than a strategy, is to become, as Zizek has said on one occasion, “a machine for theory.” The machinic quality makes and emanates from a staccato pattern of rigidified mannerism and grimacing comedy. He is attacked for repeating himself, yet most critical writers would trade their CVs to have arrived at the signature that repetition-with-variation—the paradox of originality—alone can bring. Such repetition takes persistence and it takes pills. I think every reader would agree that Zizek has expanded the range of characteristics and references that critical theory can have, and in ways that offer up its living and suffering connections to the capitalized mass media world. The ganglia of Zizek’s theory are plugged into Time Warner Cable. With your ear to the page you can hear the crackling of plastic wrappers and the shuffling of socks on wall-to-wall hotel carpet. Yet the prose is also aspirational. Rightly viewing undeadness as a threat, it is not entirely undead, but keeps reaching up from—or perhaps down into—the “utter dismemberment” of its favorite passage in Hegel, finding a way to depict what it is doing as something that needs to be done. It goes on; but it also does not go on. Indeed things within Zizek’s philosophy are far from completely automatic and systematized—if they were, he would be completely unreadable, he would be Badiou—but partly overly so and partly contradictory and fragmented.

I’m looking at the pages on “Thinking Backwards” in his new book, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), pages I was very interested to read because I am working on the same issue, the production of retroactive illusion by teleological history and the implications of “commitment to alternative histories” (Living 87). But it is generally impossible to read Zizek the way you read something else, i.e., hoping to find oneself in dialogue with ideas. Once the interesting topic is framed, we are given some strong negative examples: we do not want to think like Malebranche; like the conservative historian of Rome, Bryan Ward-Perkins; or incidentally like Walter Benjamin, who is said to have advocated that “we simply go back in time to the moment of decision and, this time, make the right choice” (88). They are all wrong in different ways, and the first two are dealt with in a few paragraphs each while Benjamin is dealt with in two (unconnected) sentences that say two different things. Anyway, “the only way to truly avoid” the “perversion” of Malebranche, “not just to obfuscate it, is to fully accept the Fall as the starting point which creates the conditions of Salvation” (93), a Fall which is preceded by nothing and whose “justification is always and a priori retroactive” (94). Right choices can only be made after wrong choices have occurred; wrong choices are necessary, but not because they are part of a pre-existing divine plan for right. For example, “it was the Christian Dark Ages which created the conditions for the specific rationality of modern science as opposed to the science of the Ancients” (92). Because Descartes claimed to derive the authority of facts from God, the condition of the autonomy of modern rationality is “the Fall into the early ‘dark’ Middle Ages” (92). “Only in this way [by realizing this] can we truly avoid the perverse consequences of religious fundamentalism,” for example as embodied by the postwar career of Radovan Karadzic (94).

Oh, the experience of reading Zizek. Especially now, when we need so much. The futility of formulating any response logically, historically, philologically, or empirically. The impossibility of acting as though that is what it’s about. Or, more precisely, my paraphrase already organizes the pages logically, historically, etc., by underlining things in it, and has already managed implicitly to respond by doing so--one can do that, that gets done--but that doesn't touch what's mainly happening. The text will never respond back to my various incredulities, because it is unconcerned with them, and concerned with hurtling along a dark channel in which frightening figures pop up on either side, and where the “only way” not to be captured by them is to accept the grace of a metaphorical Jesus, who is only a symbol, of course, don’t get agitated, we're all concretely universal here, although when it is put that way reasons now come to mind why this line of thought was not so appealing to Benjamin, but never mind. As I said in the car that day, when other people attack him, I defend him. Some of the articles actually stick with a line of thought. I am not nostalgic about the record of philology or any of those other methodologies. It’s not as though they generally work; go to the library and read the “normal science” of the last fifty years, the dismal shelves of ordinary scholarship bound in dark green volumes, and ask yourself where it got to. Just like most of it, Zizek’s theory is filled with prejudicial references to places and contexts he doesn’t pretend to know anything about and defenses of authority in the guise of transcendental structural necessities; unlike it, it is also filled with defenses of religion in the names of revolution and atheism, and a desire for economic justice, as well as detours through Brian de Palma, insistence that G.K. Chesterton was talking about something, many exclamation marks, and frankly metonymic transitions ("Let us begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael Apted's Enigma" [54]). It is wringing wet with the residue of sentimental Catholicism, which is not to its credit, and dusty with crumbs of Dramamine, which is, given the main alternative of horrifyingly clean professionalism. But is that all there is? I agree with my friend from London: what is okay about Zizek is that Zizek is not okay.

Image: from Brian de Palma, Redacted (2007)

Outside the Free Speech Cage

2010-12-10T22:26:00.000-08:00

Marx remarks that the “principle of public safety” can be a legitimate moral force, even though “measures of public safety” are usually “dictatorial measures.” But as he writes this, he is making the point that the Prussian ministry “never hesitated to apply measures of public safety . . . against the democrats,” even as it has “taken good care not to intervene against the counter-revolution on grounds of public safety” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 14 September 1848, in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Vol. 1 [New York: Verso, 2010], 162). All moral legitimacy is lost in this asymmetry, which winds up subordinating the supposedly hallowed principle of public safety to political conformity and revealing the narrowness of the ministry’s idea of the public.

In the University of California the discourse of “safety” was densest amid the racist incidents of 2009-10, such as the discovery of a noose on the UCSD campus. During and after that time, President Mark C. Yudof and several UC Chancellors declared their desire that students be able to feel safe. “Campus climate is about a sense of belonging,” said Yudof. “It is about a sense that you are welcome, that you are supported and that you are safe. That is your right as students, to a safe, respectful and welcoming campus climate” (newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=2326). In various statements and speeches, the representatives of UC administration paired “safe’” with “civil” and even with “comfortable”: “safe, inclusive, and civil”; (chancellor.ucsb.edu/memos/details.cfm?V=B60719BD750CAB2B”; “"I understand that students don't feel safe, they don't feel comfortable" (www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/22934). The problem is not only the administration’s slide from literal safety to nebulous civility, which equates hate speech with political speech on the ground that both might make someone uncomfortable. The problem is that, as the protests have continued, the administration has failed to show the kind of concern for public safety and public civility that would require it to include protesters within their caring. In order for such a concern to exist, high-ranking UC administrators would need to acknowledge that it is possible for student protesters to be the victims of violence and incivility by others. But this they cannot do, because it would show the speech and acts of protesters to be responses to a political situation rather than simple aggressions; it would show that the administrators themselves are invested actors who have already taken sides in a political situation.

The impression the administration promulgates, instead, is the same--coincidentally, uncannily the same--as the one that the Orange County District Attorney relied on in its press release yesterday explaining why it is filing criminal charges against 19 students and workers who held a sit-in at UC Irvine on February 24, 2010 or protested outside. The D.A. points out that the campus offers “designated areas to practice free speech in a safe and effective manner without disrupting the normal operations of the University.” (Why the campus code is at all relevant to the decision to prosecute under California law is a mystery.) The D.A., citing UCI, divides “safe” from unsafe free speech by the ability of the former to comport with “normal operations,” which are thus implicitly defined as not already including free speech. “Normal operations” does not mean that freedom of speech normally describes or suffuses the activities of the university. They are that which free speech has to navigate around, and it is this process of navigation, a “manner,” that accrues the responsibility for maintaining safety: free speech can of itself be unsafe. The contradictions of campus speech codes and applications of the First Amendment generally have been subject to many scholarly analyses since the introduction of free speech “zones.” I am pointing to something different, albeit complementary: the failure of the University to vouch for safety outside the straitened terms of these self-created zones: the crushing disinterest of the University in actively defending safety for dissidents.

As far as I know, no UC Chancellor has unilaterally declared his or her concern for the treatment of protesters. No police scandal should be necessary for such a declaration. After the botched police breakup of the Wheeler Hall occupation on November 20, 2009, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau of UC Berkeley “truly regret[ted] the incidents that brought physical and emotional injury to members of our community” and initiated a review of police actions. He did not characterize the kinds of incidents and agents that brought on this injury, however, nor say who was injured. He leaves open the possibility that protesters themselves were on both sides of the injury line, while leaving the dynamic of the events undescribed. Of course it’s often the intention of protesters to provoke somebody. But the provocation of protesters is referenced by UC officials again and again while their interlocutors, and the history of their exchanges, at best remain tactfully faceless and at worst are erased from existence. As we know, the concentric circles created by the campus/community wall and repeated by the designation of special zones within the campus work against protesters and never for them (paralleling in this way the Student Code of Conduct). Complementarily, each constructed circle relieves the University of more of its responsibility even as it places additional restrictions on protesters. It protects “normal operations” from free speech that counts as unsafe without defending free speakers from police harassment outside the “normal” sphere but inside the campus wall--or from attack in the community, where they are subject to violent racist threats. While the University worries about the safety of policemen, it seems to lose no sleep on violence against its students. It relieves itself of the responsibility to criticize what happens off-campus—even if it happens next door, like the so-called “Compton Cookout”--or with private money, like the Sarah Palin banquet at Cal State Stanislaus or the racist UCSD “humor” magazine The Koala. It implies that policemen are entitled to break students’ fingers with batons and point loaded guns at them when students are not within the “place, time, and manner” restrictions. These restrictions are restrictions on civility, but in one direction only. And they are so egregious that they must damage our confidence, not only in democracy, but in any public safety that would merit the term "public."

So, on the one hand the Orange County D.A. charges 19 students and workers variously with trespassing, disorderly conduct, failure to disperse, “false imprisonment” (which I take to mean that someone blocked an exit), "obstruction of a public place," and “being a public nuisance.” The fascinating language of the D.A.’s press release phrases legal and routine actions in a vocabulary of emergency and denunciation. The defendants are “accused” of disorderly conduct; they are also “accused” of “trespassing onto the UCI campus, entering the fifth floor of Aldrich Hall, and gathering outside the Office of the Chancellor.” (Why not “accuse” them of using the stairs instead of the elevator, or of wearing T-shirts? There’s no difference.) “400 UCI employees,” according to the D.A., were “evacuated” because of the 17 students within, although they never threatened anyone, orally or otherwise. On the other, after an account of this sit-in appeared in the Orange County Register, Orange County community members distinguished themselves with an avalanche of vicious comments. They were bothered primarily by the dark skin color of many of the students, and secondarily by the criticism of “heteronormativity” that appeared in their literature. People called for background checks on the citizenship of the students, commented that “it looks like some of them are illegal,” asked if any “American-born” students were left at the University, blamed “diversity,” and recommended deportation: “Expel, deport or incarcerate as appropriate UCI.” Along the way they opined that “hetero- behavior IS the norm of society.” In comments that were deleted because I myself objected to them (which I afterward regretted—it was an impulse), people commented directly on the physical appearance of students, used racial slurs, and suggested attacking them with dogs. Would it not have been appropriate for someone, for example the Dean of Students, to write in under his own name to say “Please do not advocate attacking our students with dogs. I do not appreciate it”? Yet 400 UCI employees were “evacuated” lest they be harmed by students, which, as someone who was on the fifth floor for the whole thing, I can say was certainly the only thing that disrupted these employees’ ability to work.

Things were, if possible, even worse when 11 Muslim students protested the on-campus appearance of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., and Israel's head of P.R. during its 2008-09 offensive against Gaza, Michael Oren. As you know, video shows a boisterous and increasingly excited crowd of mostly elderly community members whose exhortations to the students are rather less polite than the students’ addresses to Oren. My point is not to urge “civility” on them but to note that this dynamic was not invented in February, 2010. The Muslim Students Union is located in Orange County, amid a vociferous right-wing community whose views can be read on blogs like jewtudes and Jewlicious. These writings are not exactly pinnacles of public culture. If you have the heart to read the comments attached to the Orange County Register’s article about the Oren protest, it will take you over an hour to make your way through dozens and dozens of xenophobic and racist insults. They go beyond calling for the deportation of U.S. citizen students, although they do that frequently. “Name one muslim that has done anything good for mankind.” “These students, like their culture of origin, have never created the substantial wealth that a university like this requires. They are interlopers in this country that will be squashed like the bugs they are.” “Islam is a social cancer and these 'students' are a perfect example of what a tumor looks like.” “America is a tolerant country. However, we have free speech in the United States. Respect that while you are here as a guest and respect ALL OF OUR GUESTS! If you don’t like it, you can take your diaperhead bassackward culture and go suck sand in the dessert with the the rest of the caveman culture in the middle east.” Shortly after this the moderator censors someone for “capitaliz[ing] entire words and sentences,” then seems to give up entirely. The comments go on and on. Multiple people call for nuclear genocide. No administrator from UCI, then or since, has come forward to defend the safety of our so-provocative students in this climate, even as the larger public discourse degenerates to the point at which public figures call for the execution of dissidents and a U.S. congressman opines that he’d like to revive McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities. In this environment the literal safety of dissident students is no joke. In the absence of any moral word in defense of unfettered protest from any UC official, Mark Yudof’s attempts to emote on behalf of students who don’t feel “comfortable” are the dregs of plausibility. Even now, after a UC Irvine campus policeman pulled his gun on protesters at UCSF, the Berkeley campus police are taking down posters about police violence because they are worried about his safety. There is nothing public-spirited in such an act.

Some of the Orange County right wing community are currently pressuring UC Irvine to dissociate itself from the Olive Tree Initiative, a mainstream Israeli/Palestianian-issues dialogue project funded by the Ford Foundation in specific response to the supposedly bad relations of Muslim and Jewish groups at UCI. The Olive Tree Initiative is all about civil inquiry in tightly controlled spaces (and only there). But it isn’t the Worker-Student Alliance, the Radical Students Union, or Students for Justice in Palestine that’s calling for its discontinuation. Colleagues who work in Middle East studies tell me casually and ruefully that “of course” the right-wing community is the reason there is no Middle East Studies program at Irvine, despite plentiful faculty and graduate students working in the area and a developed proposal that has been on the table for years. Such pressure is the legal, socially sanctioned way of shutting down others’ speech—the way that operates upon the campus while standing safely outside its wall, while students who would protest it have to stay within their free speech cages. And the administrators continue to wonder aloud why the MSU couldn’t have done things differently, and the police keep citing the students for writing on the “free speech zone” in chalk.

Image: photo by Fabio Chee of "Chalk is Free Speech," November 22, 2010, UC Irvine

Two Hundred Years of University "Reform" and How to Dream It

2010-12-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

Click on title. Please also see Issue 3 of Reclamations in its entirety.

photo: UC Irvine, March 4, 2010 (photo by Eyal Amiran)

On "Binding" (Bindung)

2010-12-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

One of Freud’s main ways of discussing trauma is to remark that excitations that are brought on by catastrophe and may cause trauma are “unbound.” The theory of binding [Bindung] goes all the way back to Studies in Hysteria and the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), in which Freud describes energy as “free” or “bound” (Standard Edition I, 368; Anfängen 457). Freud’s discussion of binding is important to the Project’s elaboration of “quantitative,” material aspects of psychic function. It tries to grasp the material basis of thought in the dynamics of neuronal connections. In the Project, psychic investment results from the quantity and connectedness of thoughts: depth of commitment, and ultimately ego identity itself, is our name for a kind of mental strength in numbers. A cluster of thoughts and affects becomes an egoic “mass” with gravitational force to attract others, while an unbound, “untamed [ungebändigt] mnemic image” is one not yet attached to a mass (SE I, 381; Anfängen 465). Since reified attachments are also problematic, the implicit ideal of the dynamics of attachments is an ego that is neither straitjacketed by its own bindings nor overwhelmed by stimuli inconveniently coming unbound.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud reverts to binding to explain how the excitations brought on by catastrophe destabilize one’s energy system. In his description of the challenge of binding, stimulus threatens the sensitive core of the system. When something “provoke[s] a disturbance on a large scale of the functioning of the organism’s energy,”

there is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of. (SE XVIII, 29-30)

Die Überschwemmung des seelischen Apparats mit großen Reizmengen ist nicht mehr hintanzuhalten; es ergibt sich vielmehr eine andere Aufgabe, den Reiz zu bewältigen, die hereingebrochenen Reizmengen psychisch zu binden, um sie dann der Erledigung zuzuführen. (GW XIII, 29)

In suggesting that the unwanted excitation is unbound, Freud does not state that it is unconscious. In fact, breaching the hardened outer layer of the organism, its “protective shield [Reizschutz],” requires interaction with the sensitive cortical core that “is later to become the system cs.” (SE 28 [GW XIII, 26]). Freud’s invented term “Reizschutz,” which straightforwardly enough means “stimulus shield,” indexes the sexual overtone of the stimulation involved, since “schutz” also connotes a prophylactic device. Freud’s future tense--the cortex “is later to become” consciousnsess [“das spätere System Bw”] —reflects a certain blurriness of the entity he imagines, a blurriness that we also see in his frequent reluctance to draw a boundary between consciousness and the preconsciousness that mediates between consciousness and unconsciousness. This passage, however, is blurry because its target is in motion. It tells how the development of the protective shield, by its hardening through “the ceaseless impact [unausgesetztem Anprall] of external stimuli on the surface” (26, GW 25), creates the conditions for an also developing consciousness that could not evolve without the shield. The more the shield is “baked through [durchgebrannt]” (26, GW 25), the more conscious the inner cortex can afford to be: “by its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate--unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield” (27, GW 27). The core that forms in tandem with the self-sacrificing shield is the ever-evolving “system cs.”; when disastrous stimuli breach the shield and suffuse the “deeper layers [eine gewisse Tiefe]” of the mind, then, those which are responsible for “reception [Reizaufnahme]” (27, GW 25), it can only be the system cs. that is flooded. Until overflow and trauma, the problem is neither unconsciousness nor uneven consciousness, but the difficulty of binding that of which the mind is unwillingly aware.

In the discussion that follows, the system’s reaction to the security breach of the shield assumes that diffusion of energy throughout cs.--“being flooded"--is the worst thing that can happen:

And how shall we expect the mind to react to this invasion? Cathectic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. An “anticathexis” on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical systems are extensively paralysed or reduced. We must endeavor to draw a lesson from examples such as this and use them as a basis for our metapsychological speculations. From the present case, then, we infer that a system which is itself highly cathected is capable of taking up an additional stream of fresh inflowing energy and of converting it into quiescent cathexis, that is of binding it psychically. The higher the system’s own quiescent cathexis, the greater seems to be its binding force; conversely, therefore, the lower its cathexis, the less capacity it will have for taking up inflowing energy and the more violent must be the consequences of such a breach in the protective shield against stimuli. (SE XVIII, 30)

Und was können wir als die Reaktion des Seelenlebens auf diesen Einbruch erwarten? Von allen Seiten her wird die Besetzungsenergie aufgeboten, um in der Umgebung der Einbruchstelle entsprechend hohe Energiebesetzungen zu schaffen. Es wird eine großartige “Gegenbesetzung” hergestellt, zu deren Gunsten alle anderen psychischen Systeme verarmen, so daß eine ausgedehnte Lähmung oder Herabsetzung der sonstigen psychischen Leistung erfolgt. Wir suchen aus solchen Beispielen zu lernen, unsere metapsychologischen Vermutungen an solche Vorbilder anzulehnen. Wir ziehen also aus diesem Verhalten den Schluß, daß ein selbst hochbesetztes System imstande ist, neu hinzukommende strömende Energie aufzunehmen, sie in ruhende Besetzung umzuwandeln, also sie psychisch zu “binden.” Je höher die eigene ruhende Besetzung ist, desto größer wäre auch ihre bindende Kraft; umgekehrt also, je niedriger seine Besetzung ist, desto weniger wird das System für die Aufnahme zuströmender Energie befähigt sein, desto gewaltsamer müssen dann die Folgen eines solchen Durchbruches des Reizschutzes sein. (GW XIII, 30)]

The idea of unbound, suffusing energies is consistent with Freud’s account of trauma as a break-in. But while Freud’s theory of trauma concentrates on unwanted excitation’s subsequent career in the unconscious, from where it makes itself known indirectly by deforming consciousness or appearing in disguises of compromise, the logic of binding insinuates that the unconscious or conscious status of an experience or memory may be less important than the control of its mobility, and that its mobility is greatest when it is conscious.

The sometimes unfortunately free, unfortunately complete nature of conscious thoughts is emphasized by Freud's collaborator Breuer in Studies in Hysteria and carried forward by Freud. Although there may not be a single place where Breuer establishes the distinction between primary and secondary processes, his psychic topography in these pages is sensitive. Breuer discusses what Freud terms the breach of the shield, using the figure of “damage done to the system itself through a break-down of its insulation” (SE II, 199, Studien 177). But what is most interesting for my purposes is his speculation that conscious thoughts and affects are frighteningly free. The power and danger of conscious ideas, he writes, is their aptitude for association, which can bring the brain “into a state of higher facilitation [Zustand höherer Bahnung]” (SE II, 196, Studien 173). In contrast, in sleep “ideas that emerge do not, as in waking life, activate all the ideas which are connected with them”; the deeper the sleep, the more “association is defective and incomplete” (SE II, 193). In sleep we aren't likely to act physically on our thoughts. But “when we are fully awake every act of will initiates the corresponding movement; sense-impressions become conscious perceptions; and ideas are associated with the whole store present in potential consciousness,” reflecting the fact that the conscious brain is “completely . . . traversable [gangbar]” by whatever psychic energy it holds (SE II, 193, Studien 168). The other, advantageous side of conscious thought’s mobility is that “complete” thought, by trending toward motor action, is also likely to lead to discharge. Freud draws on Breuer’s material for his conclusion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that “resistance . . . to passage [Übergangswiderstand] from one element to another would no longer exist” in the system cs. (SE XVIII, 26; GW XIII, 26), as though consciousness were the Canada of thoughts on the lam. Only unconsciousness, Freud hypothesizes, is scarred by mnemic traces; mnemic traces and conscious thoughts cannot simultaneously exist. There are times when conscious thoughts are worse than scars, however: when damaging, they are active damage.

These worries about the liabilities of consciousness replace the problem of mnemic scarring with a new problem. If conscious thoughts are so easy to release, why panic when the system cs. gets taken by surprise? The concerted action of the system, rushing from “all sides” to contain awareness, implies that it regards comprehensive realization as both a plausible possibility and as the most damaging of outcomes. It’s not hard to see why that might be. While the symptoms of unconscious conflict--displacements, resistances, blanks in memory--are autoimmune effects in which one’s defenses do more than is convenient, but are at least doing something to protect the ego, the ill effects of conscious ruin are more invidious to the extent that they are not defensive at all. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud stresses more the embattled quality of consciousness itself. It is here that he assigns to preconsciousness the role of exploring thoughts before either releasing them to consciousness or cathecting them in a way that would “avoid releasing the unpleasure [Unlustentbindung]” (SE V, 601, GW II, 606). Noting that a secondary process that takes place in preconsciousness raises the possibility of “thought seeking to convey itself into the preconscious so as to be able then to force its way through into consciousness” (SE V, 610; GW II, 615), he goes on to observe that the distinctness of consciousness is by no means pure, and that in fact consciousness is not necessarily an achievement to write home about. In that case, damage done by the breach of the protective shield would be less likely to be compensated by the benefits of consciousness’s access to discharge, and so ameliorated by later actions.

The theory of trauma radicalizes the threat posed by consciousness by focusing on the more-than-maximal moment when overstimulation whites out. By doing so, it proposes that trauma is the residue of too much, not too little consciousness, yet skips over the entire arena of conscious injury, as though the breach were instantly traumatic. Between melancholy defense and traumatic excess, both mainly unconscious, there is little theoretical articulation of what happens after consciousness is stimulated and before its capacity is overrun--even though this territory would seem to be the area that corresponds to suffering.

Image: Lucian Freud, The Painter's Room

Keats and the Activist Double Bind

2010-11-28T16:28:00.001-08:00

Thirty years of secondary literature treats Keats’s political beliefs as a question: it overwhelmingly proceeds as though there is a relation between Keats’s writings and his radical views, and as though that relation is unusual and needs explaining. In this it echoes Keats himself, in passages of The Fall of Hyperion that intimate that Keats is the sort of thinker who is “less” than an activist. The main response to Keats’s self-accusation is a consensus that the political insights in his writings are far from negligible, but also that it remains difficult to phrase, not what his beliefs are, but what he thought he was doing.

In statements frequently adduced by the secondary literature, Keats intends to make himself useful “on the Liberal side of the question” and avows that he would “jump down Aetna for any great Public good” (Letters, 9 April 1818). He determines that he should “set [him]self doing something, and live no longer upon hopes.” Writing journalism on the liberal side for pay is an example of what “doing something” would mean, alongside activities like not relying on his friend Brown, “living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper.” Keats’s rather low standard for “doing something” shows that he feels an imperative to be active, but also that he considers himself not to have done anything, and still sees nothing convincingly pressing to do, except not borrow from Brown. The letter is not killer evidence of Keats’s social determination. Similarly, his remark about Aetna has sometimes been offered as proof of his dedication to social involvement. Yet it implies that he can’t think of anything he could do, despite infinite willingness, that would result in a “great Public good.” He’d be happy to jump down Aetna; but he hasn’t jumped down Aetna, which means that nothing short of that is available either. A reader rooting for Keats to be politically active will like the Aetna statement if she interprets it as earnest, but if she interprets it as ironic, may hear it as defensive and untrue--conveniently overlooking all the actual things that he could have done to effect public good. “Great public good,” Keats might answer, “I said ‘great public good’”; and who can argue that great public good isn’t required. If we feel inclined to question the concept of greatness and its ability to downplay small actual goods, the strength of that inclination is also a symptom of the current dominant way of coping with the difficulty of disclosing opportunities: focusing intensively on local or short-term matters and setting aside their connections to terrible systems.

Leigh Hunt believes that Keats and Shelley are separated by a great distance, yet his contrast between them actually indicates the double bind of the post-Waterloo political reality in which both Keats and Shelley are caught:

Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance [Shelley], that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands. (The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, Vol. 2 [London: Smith, Elder, 1850], 202)

Hunt references one normative picture of the activist: someone who endeavors to be Archimedes. The ideal picture of how social justice comes about is that it is to be won through the ever harder work of individuals in groups, laboring under a logic of recognition that is increasingly hypothetical and existentialized, and yet never given up. Hunt’s retrospective portrait of Shelley rejects the “realist” assumptions of political complicity in a way that complements Keats’s perplexity at them, and should not be moralized as overreaching (or heroic) any more than Keats’s attitude should be moralized as inadequate (or more knowing). Carl Schmitt moralizes both when he notices the ambivalence of the word “romantic” for restoration radicals: “extreme individualism and vegetative torpor are named together as characteristics” (Political Romanticism, 25). But Shelley and Keats are placed in their double bind by post-Napoleonic political realms: the same political theory that promotes the indiscernability of options in the political field, and makes it difficult to imagine intervening in a present that will always be murkily transitional, insists on the monopoly value of “active alteration.” Shelley, who decides to do it all himself, and Keats, who has sincere radical beliefs and yet does not see himself as knowing either what to do about them or how to adjust his views, are not reacting arbitrarily. The Shelley/Keats pairing of attitudes is an artifact of thinking revolution and restoration together: an amalgamation of options, rendering the desire for stronger opposition recessive or necessarily “impossibly” external, accompanied by the assertion that nothing but positivity is valuable, rendering recessive opposition null and external opposition nonexistent.

The enemies of romanticism agree that romanticism was the initial resistance to the formation of the double bind above. On one level, the aftermath of Waterloo ends with the consolidation of European nation-states, and the consolidation of the state in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. These developments are rival ways of trying to make clear what the process for altering society is. In that case, though, the ending of the aftermath of Waterloo itself has an ending in the globalization that undermines the nation-state and the nineteenth-and twentieth-century theories that assumed its existence. What would end—or end again—the open-ended aftermath of “Waterloo”? Schmitt asserts that there isn’t a lot at stake in being a romantic, because really there is only realism; but in the society delineated by the parameters of realism, there isn’t a lot at stake in being a realist, either. As the Shelley/Keats pairing within romanticism can be understood as an artifact of this dominant realism, the romantic/realist pairing itself is no more real, given anticlimactic translatability of realist possibility. Schmitt’s comment that “romantic activity . . . is a contradiction in terms” (100) barely deflects the insinuation that “political activity” is a contradiction in terms—as he later implies through his radicalization of the “political” as willingness to die and kill. Perceiving the ambiguity of “political activity,” Schmitt heightens activity in order to keep calling it politics, and so diminishes the political again even as he seems to insist on it. Perhaps getting beyond the double bind of activism and doing nothing would mean no longer concealing the nonexistence of “political activity,” either by rarefying or by expanding its definition.

photo: cemetery, Urique, MX

Assange and Information Restriction

2010-11-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

In the November 8 New Yorker, Steve Coll expresses a series of reservations about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. He raises, only to set aside, doubts about Assange's character and recent charges of rape to focus on "his political conceptions and acuity" (27). The core of Coll's criticism is that WikiLeaks "so far . . . lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media" (28). Coll never quite specifies what these ideals are, but at one point opposes "dissent" to "vandalism": WikiLeaks "will have to steer through the foggy borderlands" between the two. Another version of this opposition pits "insurgency" against journalism as a profession, which, "despite its flaws, has constructed its legitimacy by serving as a check on governmental and corporate power within constitutional arrangements that assume the viability of the rule of law," or "normalcy within a national system" (28). "Ethical culture" is thus associated with the subordination of the questioning of the state to the defense, at most the expansion, of legal citizenship within a particular state.

Coll does not mention WikiLeaks' association with The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times to release the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs. But describing the papers' contact with Assange, The New York Times's Eric Schmitt also underlines the distinction between journalists and "sources" to exclude Assange from the media, stressing that the journalists alone arranged the documents to make them intelligible to the reader ("we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He’s making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that’s not what it was” [quoted in Clint Hendler, "The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs," Columbia Journalism Review, July 28, 2010). Schmitt implies that if he was not collaborating in a "journalistic enterprise," then he was not collaborating in anything. Coll's and Schmitt's primary reaction is to struggle with WikiLeaks' wielding of information without narratives --except that of its own heroism--and without neutrality. Rather than addressing the reader from a position between the reader and the state, WikiLeaks make the reader a witness to a contest between the state and itself, while the media mediates between the files and the reader. Schmitt calls WikiLeaks the "source" to assimilate this situation to what the media usually does: frame the source for the reader. But because WikiLeaks is not in fact the original source, and yet also presents its data independently, underneath runs the anxiety that it is a media entity trying to get itself into the position of a state-level actor, at least in its structural relation to other media--and even, in the case of the leaked U.S. Embassy cables, other governments. Coll's qualification, "free media," suggests that WikiLeaks' tactics could be consistent with unfree or state media.

Interestingly, Assange's texts "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance" (2006) describe his goal and that of state-associated conspiracy as that of obstructing communication. By "conspiracy" he means the organization to mutual benefit of authoritarian elites, including government agencies and mass media. Communicative restriction, he writes, is the modus operandi of conspiracy: "usually the effect runs the other way; it is the conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction." Although leaks create new chances for communication--"only revealed injustice can be answered"--Assange's texts more often describe the leaks as double negatives restricting the conspiracy's restrictive powers, which are inseparable from its productive communicative powers. Finally the effect runs this way: "we can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating." On the whole, rather than claiming to enhance transparency, Assange points out that one party's transparency is another's opacity. To harass the opposition is to make it hesitate to speak. Insofar as this is WikiLeaks' program, it may be disquieting but not contradictory that it operates secretly--that, as rival leaker John Young remarks, "They're acting like a government."

It isn't finally the hiddenness of the data that's at issue for Assange, but its ability to flow at all. Still, restriction and efficiency are supposed to be linked, since broader knowledge of what governments do is imagined to be in itself a way of slowing their doing it. The idea is that data wouldn't stream as efficiently toward any purpose if people couldn't be sure that they could control it. And control, again, is imagined to consist of distributing non-information and limiting operational information. One outcome to anticipate from Assange's point of view, then, would be a technological arms race in which state agencies shift from security clearances and encryption to more sophisticated digital defenses. But another possible development appears in an NSA text called "Toward a Taxonomy of Secrets" published by Young on his own leak site, Cryptome. The author, a philosophically minded engineer for the NSA, concludes that not all secrets can or need to be digitally managed:

Our efforts might, in some cases, be better applied to understanding the motivations and dynamics that are creating the secrets in the first place, with an eye toward coming up with a system that better maps to the human processes and behavioral tendencies.

We may find that by shifting the structures, rules, and value systems in human space, we have fewer secrets to deal with. We may find that we can alter the human-space systems to clarify the context and valuation of secrets, and put them into a form more amenable to elegant automation. We must get back to the notion that, in dealing with secrets, the human/automation construct works better if the whole system is adapted to the behaviors, values, and motivations of the humans.

A more secure world, for the engineer, is one in which on the one hand, secrets are safest when those who want them kept mobilize human beings' various positive desires for secrecy, while on the other by "shifting . . . value systems" one may create less need to have certain information secret, and hence to have it revealed, as the case may be. Roberto Bolaño describes such a state of affairs in By Night in Chile (2000). The narrator is sworn to "absolute discretion" about being hired to give General Pinochet's junta an academic introduction to Marxism. Having completed this black-comic commission, he unburdens himself to a friend, only to hear his story repeated all over Santiago, to his horror. He expects recriminations, but the phone never rings. "At first I thought this silence was the result of a concerted decision to ostracize me. Then, to my astonishment, I realized that nobody gave a damn. The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, grey horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke" (By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews, 102). This world already exists, its logic expressed by the Daily Telegraph's deputy editor, Benedict Brogan: "The Saudis would like someone to whack Iran? No kidding . . . . infinite boredom" ("WikiLeaks is embarrassing – but not serious," November 28, 2010). WikiLeaks did not create new possibilities for Brogan's boredom: by his own declaration, he was already well and truly bored. Maybe, then, it's actually the vastness of such uncaring that WikiLeaks brings to light, in so doing giving it the chance to be otherwise.

photo: A Secret Service agent stands outside a door waiting for the entrance of Barack Obama at a press conference at the end of the NATO Summit at Feira Internacional de Lisboa, November 20, 2010 (Getty).

Little Blank Stones

2010-04-27T23:49:00.001-07:00

Lee Edelman's lecture, "The Queer and the Zero" (UC Irvine, April 20), included powerful close readings of Derrida's Archive Fever and interview "9/11 and Global Terrorism" that highlighted Derrida's investment in survival. I don't have the text of Edelman's lecture, but I remember especially his citation of Derrida's statement in the interview with Giovanna Borradori that "If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the 'world' itself, then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter [of the 'bin Laden effect']" (9/11 and Global Terrorism: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003]). Against Derrida's ultimately conservative tendency to defer to a future that is not really entirely unknown since it must include the imperative to survival, Edelman places a confrontation with annihilation, impossible to realize stably, that would open the way to the heretofore unknown thinking that the reflexive commitment to survival forecloses.

In principle, I agree with all of this. I've written some similar things about late Derrida, and one thing that interested me as I listened to Edelman's talk was that I started to think of reasons to unwrite those things. Reading a passage of Derrida's "Faith and Knowledge" in which "Derrida associates 'keeping quiet' with letting live, 'stop[ping] short of that which must or should remain safe and sound, intact, unscathed, before what must be allowed to be what it ought to be'" (“Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” [1996], in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. Samuel Weber [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], p. 50, quoted in Terada, "Scruples, or, Faith in Derrida," SAQ 106 (2007), 237-264, p. 256), I wished that Derrida had not felt the need to make the religious gesture of remaining tactful about what everyone knows, even if no one can prove it--that eventually everything living will be gone, and no one left to remember. Derrida seems to use the unprovability of this eventuality as a pretext for discretion, allowing a conceptual space for the tiny probability of survival, which he associates in turn with the sacred. My point was that the rhetoric of magical thinking does no actual saving, while the category of sacredness tends to repress other thoughts and feelings one might have and need to know about. I contrasted Derrida's pathos to de Man's laconic observation, preferable to my taste, that we are “quite powerless to convert even the smallest particle of nature into something human” (“The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 214).

During Edelman's attack on Archive Fever, though, I wanted more of a sense that what Derrida usually likes in his late work is discretion in the handling of objects and situations, a freedom to act towards things in a certain way, and not delusion in one's actual beliefs about survival. One might argue that resistance to annihilation per se gets displaced, in Derrida's concern for manner, into the management of annihilation. In the style of radicalized utterance we find in works such as Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, however, Derrida might respond that this kind of discretion depends for its performance on the utter realization of its futility; on that realization its Kantian ethic--an ethic for nothing--depends. In Edelman's terms, such acts of discretion show denial or disavowal of annihilation. They might be conceived instead as expressive responses to the recognized inevitability of complete annihilation.

It's true that they are memorial gestures. Derrida writes such a gesture for the Wolf-Man, averring respect for the secrecy of the "magic word" that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argue was the Wolf-Man's obsession. "Derrida identifies himself with the Wolf-Man, describing himself as writing only the words that come before the magic word: 'I’ll stop here . . . setting down on the edge of the crypt the little blank stone of a scruple, a voiceless word for the thought alone, on the sole path, in order to engage others to it, of a crypt'" (Derrida, “Fors,” trans. Barbara Johnson, foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], xiii; quoted in Terada, "Scruples," 259). There are imaginary others here to be engaged in some future. But a scruple is not an act, but a holding back. The memorial language is "a voiceless word," and the memorial stone is a "little blank stone" that does not seem likely to be distinguished from a common pebble and that therefore seems to be imagined not to be legible to the "others" that would supposedly be engaged. Future memory isn't completely released here, and that is certainly Derrida's point, but that's just it--it's "not released" instead of being expected and pursued.

That tenuous attitude has been as frustrating to readers who want Derrida to take more constructive actions as it is now to Edelman, who wants him to give up entirely on the weak futurity it implies. Listening, after a while these positions sounded closer to one another than to Derrida, and Derrida began to sound resistant and queer. Leaving an illegible stone for others to read--and this is archive fever, preserving things even from ourselves by placing them where we can never find them again--is either disavowal or perversity. Reading it as disavowal seems to assume that, annihilation having been glimpsed, there is only one possible attitudinal response, a kind of being swept away, breathless, to the "blank page of freedom" (Edelman). But are there other attitudes, between being so taken (however briefly) and disavowal? (Similar questions could be asked of other truths, or what gets cast as truths.) Bearing the example of the Wolf-Man in mind, what would a perverse response to the apprehension of annihilation look like? Leaving the stone would seem to be an oblique mode of consignment to annihilation rather than a disavowal of it.... What is gained by moralizing, pathologizing this gesture?

image: pine nuts, Bell Canyon, CA

The Image Beyond Futility

2010-03-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

In a small etymological essay called “The Origins of Cognitive Thought,” B.F. Skinner points out that “seeing is only part of behaving; it is behaving up to the point of action.” “Behaving” includes “seeing” for Skinner because seeing is directing and directed, mobile and responsive. The eye is neither just autonomous nor just reactive, and for Skinner the rapport between these qualities is the very definition of "behaving." In a discussion of “thinking” later in the same essay, he deploys visual language that goes beyond figure to register how, as behaving, seeing may contribute to thinking:

when no effective stimulus is available, we sometimes expose one
. . . when we cannot uncover a stimulus, we sometimes keep an accessible one in view until a response occurs. Observe and regard both come from words that meant to hold or keep in view, the latter from the French garder. Consider once meant to look steadily at the stars until something could be made of them. (“The Origins of Cognitive Thought,” American Psychologist, January 1989, 13-18, pp. 14, 16)

In Cinema One and Two, Deleuze argues that the formerly movement- and montage-oriented cinema develops a “certain motor helplessness” (C2 3) in the postwar period. Intention and cause and effect, he writes, lose credibility and fall out of favor along with the kinds of cinematic sequences that staged them. Time in the postwar no longer depends on actions and montage for its apparent actualization. Rather, it dominates the shot as “objectively emptied” characters, suffering “less from the absence of one another than from their absence from themselves” (C2 9), “experience and act out obscure events which are as poorly linked as the portion of the any-space-whatever which they traverse” (C1 213). In the space created by the loosening of “sensory-motor connections,” optical and sonic phenomena come into the foreground. Unable to act, the protagonist is “all the more capable of seeing and hearing”: “the character has become a kind of viewer” (C2 3).

The Cinema books remain elliptical about the function of the time-image—the kind of response it constitutes to the crisis it indexes. The time-image reflects an attitude about a “global situation,” Deleuze asserts: “we hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it—no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially” (C1 206). Locating the crisis more or less at the close of the war (while also pointing out latent and recurrent aspects of it), Deleuze goes on to explain that the time-image blossoms in Italian neorealism because, among other reasons, French postwar cinema is too invested in making French life “appear as a contribution to victory” (C1 211). Similarly, he speculates that U.S. cinema had been too given over to action to produce something other than degraded versions of action during the same period, while the German “cinematographic institution” had been devoted to fascism. The implication is that the time-image is a reflection on the ambiguity of postwar victory and defeat--the contamination of victory by defeat and vice versa--so that those who wanted to imagine themselves simply victorious or defeated did not develop the time-image. Some scholars understand the Italian position at the war’s endgame to be ambiguous in his way--an awkward position in which “the future of Italy, whatever side a person identified with, no longer depended at all on the Italians” (Mario Vivarelli, “Winners and Losers in Italy at the End of the Second World War,” October 128, Spring 2009, pp. 6–22). Neither Italian Fascists nor anti-Fascists controlled the way the war ended for Italy; there was a "certain motor helplessness," an irrelevance of actions in relation to the situation.

So how exactly does Deleuze’s derivation of the time-image from postwar attitudes mesh with his thesis that the time-image suits the inability of action to “disclose” a “global situation”? The latter observation, which comes first in the order of his prose, emerges from Deleuze’s own time of writing, the early 1980’s. Deleuze is about to describe in the European theater of the recent past the very kinds of modifications of situations by actions—the victories and defeats of nations in WWII, shifting perspectives afterwards—that he claims have since become impossible. The word “global” introduces a change. It implies a historical situation greater than any of the modifications—large as they are—that Deleuze is about to name. Deleuze suggests that the time-image arises somehow to deal with this new global situation that it cannot disclose or modify, even as globalization hasn’t quite come about yet in the contexts he describes and which he believes gave rise to the time-image (!). Maybe we can translate Deleuze like this: Italian-style ambiguity--the inability to have much to do with the outcome of the action--is by the 1980’s almost everywhere, a generalized helplessness under globalization. Rather than suggesting possibilities for acting upon this shift in turn, the time image continues to open its lens upon it although the possibility for acting through disclosure does not exist. That would mean that the time-image is not engaged in exposing anything in Skinner’s terms, in which we scan the visual field in order to find something to grasp. What is film that is not exposing anything doing? If this cinema is “look[ing] steadily at the stars until something could be made of them,” it will have become a messianic cinema of infinite hope or one that knows how to live without hope--one for whom futility is no longer a reason for not looking.

(Image: Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade, 1999)

Telescopic Cinema

2010-03-19T19:35:00.000-07:00

Kieslowski’s tendency to aestheticization, the transcendent vision of a Europe-to-come from the end of Blue, and the Catholic humanism of his films are all liabilities for me. It’s not out of partisanship that I return to him, although I recognize that he is always thinking visually and visually thinking. Zizek’s attempt to rescue Kieslowski from his sublimative aesthetic by arguing that he rather makes available the fantasy of “reality” (The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory [London: BFI, 2001]) doesn’t deal with the fact that, if so, Kieslowski sentimentalizes this very critique as one that is special to the sacred space of film art.

In A Short Film about Love (1988), the companion to A Short Film about Killing, Kieslowlski supposedly indulged his lead actress, Grazyna Szapolowska, by changing the ending from that of the corresponding segment of The Decalogue on which the film is based. In the TV version, there is only imaginary, one-way love, first experienced by the voyeur for his object and then by the former object for the former voyeur after he is no longer in love with her. In the film, the possibility of mutuality appears, but only within an even more explicitly filmic episode. As in A Short Film about Killing in which studio photography is the closest thing on earth to heaven, and as in Blue where European unity is expressed only in montage, A Short Film about Love closes when Magda (Szapolowska) looks through the telescope that Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) had used to spy on her in the apartment across the way from his. She then sees replayed, through the telescope, her actions on a previous night, when coming home after a quarrel with her lover, she had cried at the kitchen table, with the difference that Tomek enters the tableau and comforts her in ways that he is not able to achieve "in life." The tableau is set up, Rear Window-style, as a screen, with the edge of the window clearly visible, and in the hypercinematic mode of slow motion. The episode functions to unfold and defend the imaginary world of voyeurism by showing that its isolation shelters a dream of the common.

Even before Tomek enters the picture, while she is watching herself sobbing, Magda is already smiling: why? It’s as though filmic representation were inherently pleasing, no matter what it depicts: as though there were already pleasure in saying “Yes, that’s a picture of me, X looks like Y” (Adorno calls this the thrill of stage magic); or perhaps an eternal return-like pleasure in the resurrection of any past; or perhaps a pleasure in the self-distance achieved at such instants, in the out-of-body glimpse with its atmosphere of omniscience. The telescope is not only a lens but the extension of the lens, a world in between "here" and "there," literally moving looking toward a touching that never occurs. On the one hand, it’s only in cinema that what’s otherwise impossible is realized--“only in cinema” limits Kieslowski’s claim; on the other, the impossible happens only in cinema in the sense that cinema is a realm of special achievements, not merely exceptional but prosthetically superior. In the last shot of the film, a tightening close-up of Magda, Magda almost seems to be engaging in a sex act with the telescope, coming to love along with the images of requited love the instrument that gives them to her (which is, of course, kind of great). And that is what Kieslowski's cameraman is at that moment doing with her and what Tomek has always been doing. The telescope has been a spiritualized phallus, outdoing the fleshy one in extending without collapsing, caressing without touching. In an earlier scene of Tomek's too rapid ejaculation, Magda had said, brutally, "Love: that's all it is. You'll find a towel in the bathroom." She wants to say now that this is wrong, that there is something more, but it is in film that there is more. As the camera creeps nearer to Magda's eyes, we are invited to dream on her "forever" in an extension that will never collapse. Cinema becomes a high pornography for delivering humanistic fulfillment.

There's a more trenchant take on the exceptionality of film in Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds. The whole of Tarentino’s film is as explicitly counterfactual as this sequence in Kieslowski: fiction is what doesn’t happen and what ought to have happened. Tarentino’s self-criticism surpasses any accusation that the film is “ahistorical.” Inside the plot, the counterfactual events are able to take place because the cinephile heroine sets a theater on fire by burning the very flammable archive of films within it. In effect, Tarentino offers the proposition, “I would sacrifice all of film history if only this could have occurred.” Circumstances are imaginable in which film is worth more as substance than as substrate for images. Film comes closest to direct action when, instead of presenting itself as a substitution or place holder, it is able to stage the difference between itself and the content it projects. In this way, the merely-imagistic dimension of Inglourious Basterds can be the medium for exploring the ramifications of its anti-imagistic point and all the imaginary fulfillment it can summon. But cinema’s adequacies and inadequacies are explained from two directions--by the limitations as well as the potential of the ideal, and by the power of, for example, burning down a theater. You can't show a film about burning down the theater and burn down the theater at the same time. This double statement, instead of implying that “art is incendiary,” implies that art may be incendiary in its own best fantasies of itself, but there is no bridge between history and fantasy.

Imposed Minority and the Student Movements

2010-03-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

On March 4, the day of massive student protest in the public universities of California, I was at Cornell at a conference called Theory Now, where I heard a talk by Michael Hardt, "The Militancy of Theory and the Exodus from Minority," while I thought about California, where issues of militancy and minority had come to life.

Kant writes that "enlightenment is humanity's emergence from its self-imposed minority [Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit]," where minority means "the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." The mindset of minority is comfortable, he goes on, because "I don't have to think about anything, if only I can pay [Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann]. . . .The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of humanity have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of humanity (including the fair sex in its entirety) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous . . . these guardians . . . show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" [1784], in Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie-Ausgabe), vol. 8, Abhandlungen nach 1781, Kleine Schriften, p. 35).

What should we say, then, when artificial minority is not self-imposed, but part of the culture of the university--any university that treats its students as consumers whose roles are to listen and to pay? The call and response "Whose university? Our university," goes to the core of UC activism. I understand the "our" in "our university" to include faculty and workers, but the roles of faculty and students are never farther apart than in the assumption of students' minority that is taken as inevitable in the usual course of things. A reform-minded approach to the UC would therefore include greater formal participation of students in university governance. I don't doubt that if students had really substantial representation in that governance, universities would not be placing instruction last on their lists of priorities or trying to attract students through branding rather than programs and services (for example, at UC Irvine, by constructing commercial and office space while downsizing the staff of Student Academic Advancement Services). UC Irvine's capital plan of January 2010 commits to raise $8 million of private funds for the construction by 2012 of a "meditation and reflection center" containing no classrooms or research facilities; this $8 million--a small amount by fundraising standards--would be roughly equivalent to the operating budgets of 53 small departments not featured in Irvine's development plan (or, since we don't have 53 small departments, 10 small departments for five years each). My reformist daydream of shared governance is also inadequate, however. We can tell that it's inadequate from the fact that it immediately appears as a naive and impossible idea. It's impossible now partly for circular reasons--i.e., because the university has already been taken over by self-interested privateers--but it's also impossible, and has almost always been impossible, for deeper cultural reasons that activism makes obvious. Socially and administratively, the university makes minors out of legal and political equals; so its eyes glaze over whenever any student begins to speak as a non-minor, overwhelmed by the absence of the insider insinuations that alone count as evidence of administrative savvy. In times of conflict, it becomes sadly clear that students have more rights outside than inside the university. Where criminal charges are absurd--we can predict that they won't hold up in court--administrative charges and academic retaliation persist which can be remarkably punitive and intimidating. So, in order to be serious about standing up for the free speech and representational needs of students, one would need to change as well the cultural attitudes and social practices through which faculty and administrators, consciously and unconsciously, gather students into a minority from which they are trying to escape.

Jacques Rancière observes that the borders of democracy are always drawn to exclude what he calls the "incompetents"--those who don't own property, speak the wrong language, or are the wrong race or gender (Hatred of Democracy [2005], trans. Steve Corcoran [London: Verso, 2006], 54 ff.). It's important that, after having criticized the border that the UC Chancellors and Academic Senate have erected between “civility” and “incivility,” we do not simply put it back up in another place, for example by opining from external positions on the competent and incompetent features of student movements. Part of getting beyond addressing students as minors is coming to terms with the independence and internal complexity with which the student movements confront us, acknowledging their difference (as well as their continuity) with protests of forty years ago. Taken together, the student movements project formations that are sometimes difficult to describe using words like “class,” “society,” or “state.” That should not be assumed to be a symptom of incoherence, but absorbed as a sign of the unknowability of experience that is contemporary, experience that is not yet history. We can be glad that the situation requires the expression and discussion of differences without delimiting those discussions in advance. This is one way to enact Rancière’s idea that democracy includes letting the people be further divided (Hatred of Democracy, 77 ff.) Questions of how the future could be better (better for what? better for whom?) can be addressed most legitimately and fully through activism by all, including whoever is being cast as incompetent at the time.

The intensity of protest at UC Irvine--an "apolitical campus," it's often repeated-- takes one by surprise to the extent that one holds a stereotypical view of the capacities of the student body. The African American Studies Department at UCI was created after student activism on behalf of underrepresented populations and fields of study in 1989, when UCI had a total of five black faculty on campus (under 3/4 of 1% of the faculty). Stephanie Lopez, a member of Associated Graduate Students then, said: “They’ve got to start opening doors today, or we’re going to kick the doors down tomorrow” ("More Minority Students, Faculty Urged at UCI," Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1989). Asian-American students went on a 35-day hunger strike to establish the Department of Asian-American Studies in 1993. An undergraduate named C. Michelle Ko wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “The deprivation of bodily nourishment is nothing compared to the intellectual starvation at UCI” ("UCI Needs an Asian-American Program," May 24, 1993). Ko notes that her "education taught [her] . . . . that Asian- and Pacific-Americans were successful, wealthy and had no needs or concerns." There is a case to be made that student passivity at UC Irvine is a myth perpetuated by a reluctance to hear or remember students' political speech: as though what had been taken as silence was instead the uncommon deafness of the community ear.

On March 4th, back at the conference, colleagues were talking about the need to “create new political subjects" while I wondered about the events significant for critical theory that were happening at home. I had to catch up on the events themselves later that night, by looking at photos posted online. Among the many moving images, this one, taken by an International Studies student named Bao Lor, is my favorite. These pink-nailed, braceleted fists of an indeterminate color are raised by those bodies that historically have drawn the most sentimentalized “guardianship” of the institution. They reveal themselves here to belong to political actors who seek to emerge from their involuntary minority.

Remarks at "Recent Activism, Better Futures," UC Irvine, March 15, 2010

The Weakness of Strong Ontologies

2010-03-08T23:53:00.000-08:00

There’s no such thing as ontology on the whole—-or even “leftist ontology,” as Carsten Strathausen’s inclusive new anthology, A Leftist Ontology, makes clear (A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009]). Ontology is limited only by being the study of being in the abstract. Thus Bruno Bosteel’s afterword to the anthology remarks that “the most radical ontological investigations toward tend toward spectrality, virtuality, potentiality—and not toward actuality,” in contrast to Foucault’s call for a “historical ontology of ourselves” (in Strathausen, 244). So, the possible leftism of an ontology is often rejected on the ground that it weakens an ontology’s claim to generality to tie it to any quality, leftist or otherwise. There is likewise no logical reason, however, to characterize ontology by strength. Any way of organizing entities, substances, and forces is ontological, ontologies that emphasize transience and frailty no less than others. (In addition to Foucault’s, the projects of Ian Hacking and Catherine Malabou might be called to exemplify such ontological theories.) Despite recognition of “weak” ontologies, the discourse of ontology in the theoretical landscape tends to slide from abstraction to generality to invariance. Its most common function is to protect against the potential fascism of loyalty to any particular, but also against historicity and contingency, which are not excluded from, but are often denigrated within, ontological theory.

As a result, as Bosteels notes, contemporary ontologies can show hostility toward the entire category of the actual as well as to specific actualities. Criticism of actuality in ontological writing, including that writing’s objection to the aggression of ontic reality claims, co-exists with the charge that after all, ontic claims are not aggresaive enough: that what's desirable is something more invariant than could be achieved by any mere ontic claim. The abstract form of an ontological system, its representation of a carapace that holds experience, then becomes a kind of armor: the ontic without organs, invariance without vulnerability.

Zizek draws a distinction between theologies that treat appearance as a cover for an absolute void (“the Oriental notion of the Absolute Void-Substance-Ground beneath the fragile, deceptive appearances that constitute our reality”) and Christianity in which it is “the Absolute that is thoroughly fragile and fleeting” (The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? [London: Verso, 2001],128). Yet, he enjoins the reader to work to preserve the glimpse of frailty and to make it recur; the Absolute isn't frail in the sense that it is allowed to change, much less to depart. It is treated as a beloved object in “the place of the Thing, the unconditional object” (128). Absolute fragility flashes pathos, while denying the mutability of attachments.

Conversation about ontology replaces debates about what critical theorists used to call “agency.” We now accept without anxiety the notion that subjugation and subjectivation are not separate, while much 1980’s and 1990’s work was saturated with anxiety about the problem for agency thought to have been created by Foucault. So, Meili Steele, writing in 1997, sees herself as resolving the dilemma of how to arrive at “a satisfactory account of the interplay between the two kinds of stories we need for critical theory: those that speak of the subject’s determination and those that speak of the subject’s ethical/political agency” (Theorizing Textual Subjects: Agency and Oppression [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 108). This vocabulary of determination versus agency, twelve to thirteen years old, is rarely used any longer. The support for action formerly (and unpersuasively) supplied by versions of agency is more likely to be located in an ontology of which the self is only one element; the role formerly played by a moment of subjective agency in brilliant excess of its conditions is more likely to be played by an equally primary ontology that is counted on for leverage. In a general way, this second narrative makes some advances over the first. It doesn't necessarily require a sovereign subject; it is able to distribute the energy and significance of situations more evenly over the elements that compose them; it can recognize more fully the materiality of objects and forces. At least, nothing prevents it from doing so. Yet the earlier conversation about agency continues to shape the current conversation in unacknowledged ways. If there is little anxiety about agency, it’s because the muscular rhetoric of ontology interposes itself. Figured a certain way, ontological assertion perpetuates infantile and/or masculinist wishes for invulnerability, over and against the toleration of ambiguity—-even though it isn’t inevitable that any of this happen.

In one essay in Strathausen’s anthology, “an ontological priority of violence” leads to the necessity of “political authority” (4; 14); in another, “the unconditional primacy of inherent antagonism as constitutive of the political” is discovered in anxiety (225). Both figure ontology as priority, the unconditioned, the primary, the inherent, the constitutive; both associate firstness, in turn, with aggressive affirmation. The question is not just whether ontology is prior, but what conflicts the affirmation of this priority may appease. Aggressive affirmation is often the mode of even negative ontology; Klaus Mladek and George Edmondson value the “unclear ontological and epistemological standing” of the specter (it “invites our hesitant investigation,” induces questions for being), yet focus on the one feature of the specter that is not unclear, its insistence: “to be possessed by a specter . . . is really to be dispossessed . . . of the bedrock (mis)assumption that the lack of the phallus is merely transient . . . . We cannot will away specters any more than we can will away the political” (225). The “confused” ontology of the specter, reflected in the multiple negatives of the utterance (so as not to make the lack of the phallus into another presence), does not affect its force, which remains “affirmative” (206) and possessive.

Or again, in Sorin Radu-Cucu’s (noncontroversial) reading of Ernesto Laclau, “the ontological element” achieves “autonomy.” Laclau proposes “a procedural category” that “acts as the formal structure for the constitution of the social” (164). Quoting Laclau: “order, for instance, is autonomous in regard to ‘particular order in so far as it is the name of an absent fullness that no concrete social order can achieve.’” Ontology here possesses the priority of first philosophy; this priority is assumed to be desirable because it enables one to claim to overcome the particularity and mortality of concrete phenomena which may falsely propose themselves to be irreplaceable, riding on their concreteness. So Laclau’s “ontological tools” (165) are constants to be leveraged against particular manifestations of politics. They “show the instability of political divisions and the contingent character of the political spectrum” (165) by being stable themselves—as if, were they not stable, the contingency of political movements would be less observable. Is this true? And what is the impact of the assumed virtue of formal invariance—-and of the desire that constructs it—-on the evaluation that it supposedly enables? I don’t doubt the sincerity of Laclau’s critique of tyrannical presence, a critique so strong that his ontology should be described as negative. But because his kind of critique of presence is consistent with the deployment of invariance in the name of autonomy, Laclau’s writing does not raise the anxiety that Foucault’s did. It’s as though we didn’t care so much about being autonomous as about the preservation of autonomy somewhere. In this way formalism relocates the source of stability that was lost with the illusion of autonomous agency.

Given the insistence on autonomy, it's unclear how ontologies might think self-critically and why the subject of the ontology—-but not the ontologist-—must take on all the risk of connecting the system to a historical context that renders it meaningful in the present. Why shouldn't the ontologist write about being in the game? It's possible, of course, to present a system in assertions and let the reader do all the work of testing and comparison. An ontology that does that, however, may disavow its historicity or treat it as though it were unrelated to its formal theses, and so miss the chance to reflect on its historical meaning. Or it may assert a historical significance as though it were the inevitable outcome of its formal structure, which is also not really to reflect on their relation. But most of all, it may miss the advantages of presenting philosophy—-to oneself and to others-—as mutable and vulnerable, susceptible to historical contradiction and therefore able to reveal contradiction inside itself. The relationships that change us, and thereby change individual and group experience to an extent, are with phenomena that are frail.

image: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (1992/93)

The Restlessness of the Lawn Ornaments

2010-02-17T00:02:00.000-08:00

Adorno uses the language of the posthistorical fairly frequently in Minima Moralia, most often to indicate the superannuation of the postwar individual, who is among the objects “that history has condemned” and that “are dragged along . . . neutralized, powerless [mitgeschleppt . . . neutralisiert, ohnmächtig] as ignominious ballast” (Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951], 153; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott [New York: Verso, 1978], 135, trans. modified). His willingness to talk about posthistory is worth attention although the end of history (even as catastrophe) is a problematic and mystifying figure. Rather than justifying the idea of posthistory or attacking it as unjustifiable, we can ask what someone like Adorno manages to draw from it nevertheless. For Adorno, thinking about posthistory and the kind of perception that it calls forth helps one to take in and to take up--to realize in some way--the “neutralized” position. These thoughts about realization offer a reason to revisit the Hegelian idea that to realize a position is to think beyond it. Adorno’s kind of realization is not power or necessarily even the thought of it, but a diagnostic that shows to what self power would have to be joined in order to be worthy of the name.

How does the figure of posthistory help one to live one’s neutralization--and why should anyone want to do this? Its appeal has to do with the mutual suitability of posthistory’s empty time and the attentive mode of “tarrying with ["staying with"] the negative,” which, Adorno writes, “school[s]” the method of Minima Moralia (MM 16). Their association arises from the closeness between posthistorical suspension--the nothing-much that the posthistorical being has to do—and the form of thought in which, for Hegel, the mind/spirit is most powerful. According to the chestnut passage of Phenomenology of Spirit, the mind finds its power “only when looking the negative in the face” (MM 16). Readers have discussed the negativity in this passage more than the figure of looking that structures it:

It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being [Er gewinnt seine Wahrheit nur, indem er in der absoluten Zerrissenheit sich selbst findet. Diese Macht ist er nicht als das Positive, welches von dem Negativen wegsieht, wie wenn wir von etwas sagen, dies ist nichts oder falsch, und nun, damit fertig, davon weg zu irgend etwas anderem übergehen; sondern er ist diese Macht nur, indem er dem Negativen ins Angesicht schaut, bei ihm verweilt. Dieses Verweilen ist die Zauberkraft, die es in das Sein umkehrt] (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977], 19).

Zizek’s quotation of these lines in the epigraph to Tarrying with the Negative cuts the sentence about looking altogether, not even marking it with an ellipsis (Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology [Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000], vii). The elision omits the description’s account of how the mind works--“by looking”--leaving the impression that finding oneself dismembered is in itself the form that tarrying with the negative takes, and its own magical response. Without the explanation of how one finds oneself, in a state of alert reception, truth becomes a matter of sacrifice and resurrection instead of an achievement of perception and absorption. It is Hegel’s visual figure for awareness “only” that indicates the kind of attention through which power can be turned on. The power proposed inheres in the creative ability of attention to bring out of reality something to work with, but this operation is not time-limited and not an action in conventional terms. It therefore bears relation to descriptions of the “nothing” there is to do after history has ended.

Adorno gives this autobiographical description of the kind of nothingness he found in postwar employment: “in the midst of standardized, organized human units the individual persists. He is even protected and gaining monopoly value. But he is in reality no more than the mere function of his own uniqueness, an exhibition piece [Ausstellungsstück]” (MM 135). “Ausstellungsstück” can mean “fixture,” “plaster decoration”; I’d be tempted to translate, unfaithfully: “lawn ornament.” The “nullified” individuals may be successful and busy. People praise their work; they utter “aggressive jibes [Witze] masochistically enjoyed by” their employers (MM 135). They perpetuate the nothingness of human affairs. In contrast, the person tarrying with negativity is a gazer, willingly using up time, and then using some more.

Adorno claims that his project is to reveal what “social analysis can learn . . . from individual experience” (MM 17) even if that experience consists only in reflections of “the nullity [Nichtigkeit] demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp” (MM 16). What is one supposed to do--or even to feel--while being “dragged along”? It’s not as obvious as it would seem to say that first of all, we’re supposed to feel that we are being dragged along. (The odd sound of this sentence indicates the difficulty of the supposedly obvious apprehension....) The challenge is to notice the neutralization; and after we arrive at that observation, which for most people is never, we need to “stay with” it. For how long, and why? Being able to look at, even dwell on and in, powerlessness does not in itself make one powerful, or even provide the thought of what power would be like. It shows, rather, to whom and as what power would be relevant, to what condition it would have to be linked in order to be power at all. To disregard the unemployed state of one's negativity would be to insult the attempt to live “in the matter” of it, to dare to be alive in it and not elsewhere or as someone else. As tasks go, this one tends to be seen as at once anticlimactically easy and too hard, unlike the kind of nothing we’re used to doing.

Image: advertising for photograph backdrops, with Ausstellungsstücken.

Green Filter

2010-02-16T01:04:00.000-08:00

Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988) was part of a discussion we were having in the course The Politics of Crime in 2008 to try to get under the idea of “random” crime. Most interpretations of this film focus on the apparently arbitrary nature of the protagonist’s murder of a taxi driver he does not know, and the mirroring of that murder in the depiction of his subsequent execution. There’s scandal in the fact that the apparatus of justice is not likely to make the viewer feel much easier about the death by hanging of the young criminal, Jacek (Miraslaw Baka). In the terms made prominent by biopolitical theories, Jacek’s death should appear as the ritualized legal death of a human with rights and responsibilities; but Kieslowski seems to attack the purported distinction between such a death and the “killing” of a body as nonhuman. Death with dignity at the hands of another, even if that other is the state, is played instead as a merely romantic notion, actually a contradiction in terms. Kieslowski makes this point in another, and if you think about it even more scandalous, way by portraying the taxi driver (Jan Tesarz) as such a cad that one is likely to feel most outrage on his behalf when, no longer able to take the sight of his sufferings, Jacek covers his face with a cloth. This conventionally dehumanizing, defacing gesture—as Jacek intends it to be—promptly increases the pathos and the difficulty, as though we were more prepared to defend the driver’s nameless and innocent body than his speaking and corrupt person. (A point made by Lucas Chan.) I believe this driver gains a name in the narrative—“Waldemar Rekowski”—only as the deceased in the trial.

These interesting reversals of certain biopolitical assumptions are well understood in the reception of the film (if not explicitly connected by critics to biopolitics). They leave aside the whole of the film before Jacek and the driver meet—a long stretch of aleatory scenes in which Jacek wanders the city and both Jacek and the driver perform strange acts of minor destruction: dropping a small rock into traffic from an overpass, or deliberately dividing a passerby from the dog she is walking, respectively, among other examples. These gestures appeared to us as intended magical gestures, pieces of reality testing in which the characters reveal, by reaching out of it concretely for a moment, the irrational fantasy of omnipotence in which they must always live. And where there’s omnipotence there is guilt, since if you’re omnipotent, why isn’t the world any better? This reversible, hazy egotism of unlimited aggressive power and unlimited responsibility may be another reading of the sepia miasma that permeates the film, achieved by a green filter, so they say. That atmosphere reminded us of the psychotic imagination of vigilante justice in the narrative of Pierre Rivière (I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jelinek [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982]). Eventually, the viewer understands that Jacek suffers from the kind of misfortune that disproportionately befalls the poor--the death of his kid sister, run over in the muddy ruts of his home village by a vehicle driven by his friend, in which he was himself a passenger: the sort of injustice for which no one is ever convictable. He feels not only grief but guilt; he goes to a photo shop with a picture of his sister and says, gently and apologetically, “I creased it.” (It may not be possible to erase the damage completely in a copy, he is told.)

Thus Jacek’s obsession with tiny mechanical possibilities that might (magically) add up to an overwhelming difference in the world. They belong to the series, “If he hadn’t had the last drink . . . if there had been more of a moon . . . if she hadn’t been tired . . .” It’s as if, after her death, it still was not too late for the world to be different. Jacek wills things to matter: he shouts at a bakery cashier that he wants that particular cream puff, not the one next to it (and why couldn’t it have been “the next one”? Why her and not another? Why, at other times, someone else and not me? So, the taxi driver plays the lottery). Plot is replaced by the characters’ associative testing of their sense of unbearable exigency against exaggerated dramas of agency, leading up to the existential act of murder.

As in Pierre Rivière, the final difference offered is Jacek’s suicidal sacrifice of himself. This outcome is not “random” but obviously entailed—only made easier by Jacek’s activating the machine that is the legal system, so that it can do its automated work. (Rivière also does this, as Foucault points out.) The machinic, abstract element makes it possible for the justice system to kill at all, and it is in this sense that it becomes quasi-automated that execution should be easier than murder, but it never becomes easy. The little acts of physical intervention into the world "take"--it does make a difference if you drop a stone from an overpass--but they can’t add up to the big difference hoped for, the exchange of death for life, sacrifice for redemption. Or perhaps Kieslowski thinks that offscreen--off the world screen, so to speak--they can. To the extent that this question can’t be answered in Kieslowski’s universe, he makes justice through law look merely mystified even as the still more mystical idea of justice through redemption remains possible. Kieslowski’s Christianity, like other dark versions, consists in the suspension (hanging) of this possibility over the miasmatic world. His view of the suspension of the film image is scarcely less mystical, as becomes clear when Jacek pauses at the window of the photographer, with its banal wedding and first communion portraits, as though it were a sacred place. Divided from it by glass, he enters, as he sees it, to submit his sister's body for restoration. He can’t see himself where we see him, hovering in Kieslowski’s frame. The alcove the images are in reflects the lightbox he is in, image himself. This fact itself furnishes at least the aesthetic substitution for grace, although only in the Kieslowski-universe. The division of labor between Kieslowski and his god: Kieslowski can arrange for things to happen and he can film them, but he can’t make them appear on film.

Agamben: Self-Expropriation (or, Dear Mrs. Arendt...)

2010-02-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

Something like Arendt's reflexive fear of "meaninglessness" exists in Agamben’s work, drawn in part from his sustained engagement with Arendt and in part from the long-standing philosophical view of auto-affection—-the supposed condition of the living being—-as shameful self-victimization (the connection between auto-affection and masturbation, for example, appears in Rousseau literature). From Stanzas down to What Is an Apparatus?, we have in Agamben a theory of subjectivation based on consent to expropriation which is an interpretation of sacrificial and especially of Christian thinking. In Stanzas Agamben writes that "shame is the index of the shuddering proximity of man to himself" (Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture [1977], translated by Ronald L. Martinez [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002], 84). In a somewhat over-debated passage of Remnants of Auschwitz-—which I nonetheless have to go through to get to something else—he adduces Robert Antelme’s story of a camp inmate who blushes when he realizes that he has been selected to die in order to argue that it’s as though people feel “ashamed for having to die” (my italics): “man, dying, cannot find any other sense in his death than this flush, this shame” (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive [1998], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [New York: Zone Books, 1999], 104). Here, absence of “sense” is presumed to be so unbearable that self-laceration comes as a relief. (And as others have noted, absence of sense also seems to displace absence of justice.) Reading Levinas’s Evasion, Agamben remarks (in free indirect discourse) that “just as we experience our revolting and yet unsuppressible presence to ourselves in bodily need and nausea . . . in shame we are consigned to something from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves” (Remnants 105). This “something” is “what is most intimate in us (for example, our own physiological life)” (105). The “order to be present at its own defacement” plunges the self into the “desubjectification” in which, according to Agamben (and a good deal of philosophy before him), subjectivation consists (105-106). The casual inclusions of Agamben’s first person plural paraphrase—-“we experience our revolting . . . presence to ourselves,” etc.—-smoothe over the immobility of self-presence in this passage and the impossibility of a different attitude, here called “distance” (but any attitude different from shame seems to be equally excluded: do "we" necessarily feel this way about our bodies?). As Adorno writes of existentialism, insistence on something discovered to be a core reality pushes away “the question as to the right of this something” that can still be asked even if it is a core reality (The Jargon of Authencity [1964], trans. New York: Routledge, 2003, 32).

Agamben now turns to “expropriation” (espropriazione)—one of his favorite terms, usually used metaphorically. He continues Arendt’s thought that relation to one’s “own physiological life” involves capitulation to the life process. Agamben passes the idea of life as expropriation through auto-affection, the turning around on oneself by which, in the classical philosophical tradition, subjectivation is often said to occur. He finds a “genuine ‘paradox’ . . . in the fact that we ‘must behave toward ourselves as passive’” (Remnants 109) and yet “actively [feel] . . . being passive” (110). The fact that we may experience involuntary states as activity matters to Agamben because he assumes that experiencing something as one’s own action constitutes an endorsement of it, or feels as though it did, hence opening the possibility of feeling shame about it. Such an occurrence parallels the speculative, prehistoric moment of consent in Arendt, when individuals cede their rights to the household out of interest in their “own survival.”

In Remnants Agamben’s illustration of the dependence of subjectivation on expropriation is the position taken by the feminized partner (eromenos) of Greek “homosexual relation,” as, metaphorically, he makes this relation into the image of auto-affection within the individual. The subject, for Agamben, corresponds (in one formulation) to “agent and patient” in the same person (111) or (in a second, better formulation) to the self “produced as a remainder” of the self-expropriative act. Self-expropriation is figured as a hierarchized, ambiguous, male self-rape. Agamben points out that survival “implies the reference to something or someone that is survived” (132); in Remnants’ schematization this “someone” is one’s own “actively passive” pole, continually capitulating to subjugation so that a remainder of the process can emerge as subject. The advantage here is that one is now able to tell oneself that the tension will go on forever, that it can be counted on. Subjectivation functions for Agamben as the “world” does for Arendt—-as a relatively stable and stabilizing phenomenon that grows up around the assumed fixed point of invasion and shame. Outside the process lies “senseless” mortality.

In Homo Sacer, complementarily, the state’s production of bare life appears as the other side of individual relation to the life process. The relation between these two sides is the point I wanted to get to. Although it’s the earlier book, Homo Sacer is subtler than Remnants and allows itself to be read in a more ambivalent way. On one hand, in the interpretation of the book that most readers emphasize, nation states are dangerous because for the very reason that they protect citizen life, anyone not bearing their insignia can seem unworthy to live. Shame and subjectivation emerge when the nation state creates bare life on one hand and citizenship on the other. The argument is this time historical: bare life and the apparent absence of “sense” that would come to be ascribed to non-citizen existence in Remnants are here seen as the costs of nation-state citizenship specifically. The historical claim is undermined, however, by the implication that it’s because shame is such a plausible response to the perception of “senseless” empirical life that belonging gets formalized in structures like nation-states in the first place—-and for that reason that it is potentially lethal to strip symbols from bodies. Running beneath the historical argument is a half-articulated ontological one, or perhaps the one articulated in Remnants. Critics take the likelihood of repugnance at the stateless to be an Arendtian legacy in Agamben: Arendt had pointed out in “We Refugees” (1943) that “in this mad world it is much easier to be accepted as a ‘great man’ than as a human being” (in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman [New York: Grove Press, 1978], 55-66, p. 23). This remark too is historical—-confined to the world as it is when Arendt writes, namely, "mad"—-but the source of the madness can be followed back to Arendt’s own preference of distinction to living. In Remnants and Homo Sacer it often sounds as though people must relate to each other symbolically to the extent that revulsion from the meaninglessness of life—-our Levinasian “revolting and yet unsuppressible presence to ourselves in bodily need”—-is not really contingent. Through Agamben, then, we can see a division between the problem of expropriation and the subjectivation that redescribes and seals it, and the dread of meaninglessness that otherwise falls upon living and is even more to be avoided.

Image: Agamben's letter to Arendt: Dear Mrs. Arendt, I had your address from Dominique Fourcade, with whom I had the pleasure of attending the seminars of Heidegger in Provence in the Summers of 1966 and 1968. / I am a young writer and essayst for whom discovering your books last year has represented a decisive experience. / May I express here my gratitude to you, and that of those who, along with me, in the gap between past and future feel all the urgency of working in the direction you pointed out? / Cordially Yours, Giorgio Agamben / You will excuse if I take the liberty of enclosing an essay on violence which I should have been unable to wright without the guide of your books. / Giorgio Agamben, Piazza della Coppelle 48, Roma (Italy)

"Rien faire comme un bête"

2010-02-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

Revulsion at the “futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time” runs through Arendt's Human Condition [1958; Chicago: University Of Chicago P, 1998], 8). Dana Villa argues that political activity serves a mission for Arendt beyond the maintenance of the public sphere in that it bestows existence with a “meaning” that she fears it otherwise lacks. “Arendt affirms action,” he writes, “the ‘sharing of words and deeds’ on a public stage,’ because it provides a source of meaning—a justification of existence” (“Modernity, Alienation, and Critique,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of the Political, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997], 180). This justification, and not just democracy, is therefore threatened when modernity “destroys the conditions necessary if political action is to fulfill its existential vocation.” Arendt points out that the pre-Socratic polis is so anxious for this kind of justification that it repeats “the distinction between man and animal” within “the human species itself”: it considers “only the best (aristoi)” who act and work in the public spirit to be fully human, while “the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals” (HC 19). Arendt attributes this sentiment to Heraclitus, fragment B29: “αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἒν ἀντὶ ἀπάντων οἱ ἄριστοι, κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν· οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκόρηνται ὄκωσπερ κτήνεα”; in another translation, “the many gorge themselves like cattle.” The example of “cattle [κτήνεα]” is interesting, since cattle are quite directly human creations and the vacuity of their existence depends historically on the founding of “human” society. At issue here is contempt for “the others” via contempt for “animals,” the category created by the creation of the “human.” Although Arendt does not, like the Greeks she studies, withhold humanity from her too easily sated contemporaries, she agrees in principle with a possible distinction on this basis between human and nonhuman Homo sapiens:

if the ideal were already in existence and we were truly nothing but members of a consumers’ society, we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish, never to last long enough to surround the life process in their midst . . . . without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct constrast to life, this life would never be human. (HC 134-135)

At times like these labor seems to be wrong for Arendt not because it exhausts the individual without recompense but because it channels energy away from the work and action that alleviate what she thinks of as meaninglessness. The opposite of the meaningless in Arendt is always the “human,” which she locates in culture and politics in “direct contrast to life.” Thus the classical philosopher’s special contempt for those who pass up the chance for work and action, and content themselves with forgettable experiences. the no longer exploited being would no longer feel the need to build a world. The idea of living free of the compensatory drive to "work," to culture, is a figure of fulfillment that Arendt does not know what to do with: to her, “the futility of mortal life,” “living and dying like animals,” seems to be as dreadful as expropriative life.

Adorno touches on the non-cultural, non-laboring aspect of living that Arendt fears when instead of invoking society’s expropriation of labor, he invokes the loss of “pleasure” (Lust) that is the other side of labor and the possibility it overshadows:

The problem is that the quantum of pleasure [Lustquantum], if I may be permitted to speak in such bluntly rationalistic terms, that individuals are required to sacrifice is not subsequently returned to them in a different form, as ought to be the case according to the underlying rational principle. Instead, this entire process of admonition only exists in order to preserve society as a whole. With very few exceptions, individual human beings do not in fact profit from their acts of renunciation—and even where they appear to do so we may enquire whether they truly profited. … The equivalent reward it [society] always promises never arrives, and so in a very profound and radical sense the interest of the individual and of all individual human beings diverges from that of humanity as a whole. (Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schroder, trans. Rodney Livingstone [New York: Polity, 2000], 138-139. Thanks to ET for the Lustquantum.)

Adorno is able to consider society’s effect on the individual differently--bringing in the new term of pleasure--because he is able to separate laboring life from “meaningless” living and hence the expropriation of labor from the renunciation of pleasure. For they are different even if they are two aspects of the same phenomenon. His curious phrase “quantum of pleasure” connotes fleeting enjoyments and respites, and suggests that pleasure bears a curious relationship to economy because, although the environment can be made inhospitable to it and although it can be deferred or evaded, it cannot be exchanged, returned, or even simply expended, because it cannot be saved.

Arendt's fear that "meaninglessness" would appear in place of expropriation and its compensations, if there was neither labor, work, nor action, is answered by the disappearance of “meaninglessness” along with “meaning.” What would appear instead is something that the notions of the meaningless and the animal obstruct. So, Adorno suggests that the “futility of mortal life” appears as futile only in comparison to a work and labor that actually precede it (Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life [1951], trans. E.F.N. Jephcott [London: Verso, 1978], 175). Similarly, he finds that the suggestion that “the goal of an emancipated society” is “the fulfillment of human possibilities or the richness of life” reflects the current “mode of human conduct adapted to production as an end in itself” (MM 156). Adorno, who may seem to be in love with alienation for its preservation of oppositional identity, opposes “the savage spread of the social” to feared indolence, and finds meaninglessness a screen for “freedom”:

Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the consquest of strange stars. A mankind which no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusory, futile nature of all the arrangements hitherto made in order to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale. Enjoyment itself would be affected . . . . Rien faire comme une bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, “being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfillment,” might take the place of process, act, satisfaction, and so truly keep the promise of dialectical logic that it would culminate in its origin. (MM 156-157)

Such passages of utopian writing describe nonpejoratively the environment that Arendt fears would evolve from consumer society, in which “things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish” without “erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life” and in which existence is not human. In consumer society, life is not human because it is constantly subject to the life process, consuming and being consumed. In the utopian society, in contrast, things “appear and disappear” because experience is no longer bound to be meaningful or meaningless. In our current and very justifiable anger at the demise of democracy, one thing not to mourn for, perhaps, is the fading intelligibility of “futility” as a reason not to do or not to think something. In the failing procedural state, it becomes more difficult to limit oneself to “meaningful” actions. As Gayatri Spivak points out, “a perception of meaninglessness . . . assume[s] a preliminary understanding of what meaning in/of history might be” (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics [New York: Routledge, 1988], 129.) In the loss of the illusion of such a grasp of the meaningful, a chance arises that the possibilities of forgettable living--without value and worthlessness; without humans and animals; without culture and labor; without meaningfulness and meaninglessness--can begin to operative in the interstices of value-laden life, and provide a purchase point in their irrelevance to criticize the dual sources of value: reproduction and work alike. Arendt’s phrases run clearly enough to expose for a moment the potential of the forgettable living that she submerges in The Human Condition for the reason that it really is not human.

photo: Urique, Chihuahua

Strawberry, noun

2010-02-02T07:58:00.000-08:00

In his seminar on The Psychoses, Lacan discusses Anna Freud’s infantile dream, used by Freud as a basic example of wish fulfillment, which reads in its entirety, “Big strawberries, raspberries, cakes, porridge.” Lacan asserts that the “essential phenomenon” of the dream is not the appearance of the particular objects in it, but their metonymic syntax, characteristic of a nineteen-month-old—“the positional function that places them in a situation of equivalence” (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV:130; quoted in Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre III, Les Psychoses [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981], 259; The Psychoses 1955-1956 (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Gregg [New York: W.W. Nortion, 1993], 227). Understanding noun parallelism allows Anna to understand how things may be held to be equivalent and so substitute for one another: here begins a power that Lacan will grant to ontology but not to the ontic. It’s possible, however, to confuse the idea that libidinal attachments use and depend on a formal system with the idea that the formal system is more significant in each instance than the particular shifts it enables. That depends on the kind of significance we're thinking about. Anna Freud has done more than exemplify how things may move around, and how she may enjoy the fact that they can move around. She has also made a claim that these objects and not others have appeared. This claim is not a fantasy, as the claim that the objects are absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, would be, or the claim that the strawberry is literal would be. (The question “What is the strawberry?” is still hard to answer.) Their particular appearance and no other reflects the innumerable registrations of occurrences and thoughts that happen to make up the state of affairs named Anna Freud on that night, and makes its small contribution to certain specific futures of Anna Freud (who will now be written about, for example, as the person who dreamed this dream). There is no regnant particularism in this claim. It's not as if the appearance of strawberries could be reduced to a bid by Anna for the hegemony of the cult of the strawberry and the exclusion of the blueberry. Rather, in the registration of the strawberry, something has happened that may later be forgotten, substituted, or repressed, but that cannot unhappen. This is neither irrelevance nor tyranny, but history.

Claudia Brodsky has recently tried to redescribe the indexical power of reference, and this power is also evident in the nineteen-month-old Anna’s dream:

language [need] never be related . . . to the historical, to the actuality and pastness of events . . . . language that, ever molting, lives by shedding its skins, can momentarily make but, of itself, never mark a context, never fix in time any one in the stream of signs. . . . [I]ts force is made available to the individual mind when its place in space is encountered in time, and that place is never given, by language or the earth, but marked, unearthed, built. (In the Place of Language [New York: Fordham UP, 2009], 143.

“Big strawberries” is not only the discovery of the grammar of the adjectival phrase but Anna’s energetic, not-to-be-taken-for-granted declaration of what has taken place--even as this declaration does not obligate her own feelings about what has taken place beyond the day. We can, as traditional philosophy has always done, shake out the contingent particulars and contemplate the form. But to say anything about the functions of these abstractions or even to perceive them as meaningful is to reintroduce everything that was subtracted, not by hypostasizing their “content” but by indexing the relevance of the system by connecting it to a historical moment (asserting that it is relevant to a society today; in this case, that syntax is good for, renewable by, its ability to describe dream strawberries).

Forms themselves are historical--grammars, as well as others--and are remade by cumulative shifts in their usage. As Leo Bersani notes, discussing Foucault, Freudian “psychoanalysis powerfully argues against the illusion that new ways of structuring relations can simply be ‘performed’” (“Fr-oucault and the End of Sex,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009], 133-138, p. 137). For Bersani, Foucault’s stress on epistemic breaks, which Foucault often discusses as breaks in formal organization, gives an idea of what new relations look like once we have worked through sufficiently the resistance to performing and even to perceiving them; they occlude the incremental work of shifting bodies that precedes the breaks. The notion of epistemic breaks, in this light, always reflects on the aftermath of working through, on broken obstacles, neither explaining nor intending to explain why what has happened has happened. Epistemic breaks indicate work previously done, implicitly too small and fleeting to have been taken seriously by society. The “new relational modes” proposed by dissident sexuality, for example, evolve from the movements of bodies in different combinations, enabling very different perceptions of reality, according to “a few major strategies” of organization that change on a longer time scale: the inertial, yet ultimately historical syntaxes of possible relation. Bersani thus envisages a communal change of which psychic action, accumulations of registration, furnishes a more comprehensive account than "agency." While for some critics Foucault’s nonpsychological treatment of power structures seemed to disallow action altogether, for Bersani Foucault’s epistemic breaks neglect, on the contrary, the depth of the problem of action against resistance, giving the resulting action but not—-perhaps necessarily not—-its incremental process. Freudian thought helps Bersani with his interpretation of Foucault because it posits a molecular history for each structural shift.

In this molecular history, action will have consisted in noticing the cumulative connections of heterogeneous bodies: in perceiving, registering, arranging, naming, representing, comparing, in attending to one’s own confusion, in uncertainty, attraction, grief, and satisfaction; in the interaction and expiration of ontic elements and of ontologies, along with the linguistic relevance claims necessarily made on their behalf. Action will have consisted of registering the transient particulars maligned by ontologists, whose recombination constitutes the history and the opportunity of ontological spaces.

Image: photos of Anna Freud, 1895-1982

Avatar, Animation, and the Losses of Compensation

2010-01-22T21:50:00.000-08:00

Avatar is a disturbing film, but most of its peculiar disturbance goes unmentioned in complaints about its imperialism and primitivism (imperialist and primitivist as it is). Rather than compensating the viewer through its rendition of natural beauty, or failing to, the film disturbs by staging the problems of aesthetic compensation. The urban legends about teenagers depressed at having to return from the film to the world and about the man whose heart gave out at the sight of its wonders lie closer to the point. Avatar features a protagonist, Jake, who is asked to invest in the film’s world given that he has lost a leg and lost his brother; like Ishmael, he has no living earthly attachment to hold him back, not even a plant (“There’s nothing green there”). As everyone agrees, what follows, the middle of the film, is the compelling part, in which Jake immerses himself in the ordinary activities of the new planet and its gorgeous species. Here, every sensory experience that the viewer ought to experience as discovery of the new, we experience as Jake might, as also referencing and substituting for everything that once enjoyed living on Earth, but does no longer. This is moving because just as the images of beauty open us up like eyes dilating to take in more, the realization, carried as the underside of restoration, hits us of the heretofore unfocused magnitude of the loss itself. If you’ve never wept for Tasmanian tigers, South African quaggas, golden toads, Great Auks, the twenty-one extinct frogs of Sri Lanka, etc., etc., etc., you may want to now; and if you haven’t thought about what it would be like to inhabit an environment in which literally everything one sees is alive, hence radiant with unpredictability and potential relation, then welcome to—animation (whose ideological trompes-l’oeil Paul de Man explored through lyric poetry). Avatar becomes idealist and ideological when it suggests that Jake can decant his mental contents into the body of his differently speciated avatar, but allegorically perhaps the hint is that for homo sapiens there is no redemption as homo sapiens. Homo sapiens would have to survive long enough to become something better—which seems barely possible evolutionarily given the current rate of self-destruction—or not at all. What is open to Jake and the future overman is closed to the audience either way. Jake gets a new natural world; all the audience gets, like the drones in the military-industrial headquarters who know color and light only from the digital images on their work screens, is Avatar. Cameron may be idealist and egocentric enough to believe that his art really is a second nature, but the form and economy of his work suggest otherwise. When Jake devours a Pandora fruit, cackling with infantile delight, it may be because he’s never known what it’s like to eat a fresh fruit. We’re at the point where a spray of really wild grapes dressing a plate of pumpkin is worth almost as much as a strand of pearls, and an animated film that simulates a glimpse of what "nature" might mean is worth $1,689,630,947 (so far). If that makes you feel like crying in itself, it may be not only because of the lost opportunities it represents but because of the irrecoverable losses whose dimensions it begins to measure.

above: Tasmanian tigers; below: quagga. Thanks to Michelle Cho for conversation.

Malle and Postwar Murder

2009-12-23T01:27:00.000-08:00

Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957), like much of the film noir it references, is structured by a criss-cross: a young couple joyrides in the car of a murderer, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), and winds up committing more murders under his name. What’s exchanged seems to be not only their names, however, but also possible motivations for killing more generally. The victims of both crimes are older men implicated in the legal atrocities of the postwar period: Tavernier’s victim, Simon Carala, is not only his employer and the husband of the woman he loves (Florence-Jeanne Moreau) but a global businessman at one point described as an “arms dealer.” Tavernier shoots him after turning in his last assignment as an employee, a dossier he has compiled labeled “Exploitation des gisements de Djelfa” (above). The principal victim of the joyriding youngsters, meanwhile, shot by Louis, the surly, Brando-esque half of the couple, is a sixtyish German “tourist” named Bencker. Bencker is old enough to have held high positions in wartime, and acts like a victor in the postwar. He drives a Mercedes, the official Nazi car, carries a gun, and enjoys a much younger girlfriend; he laughs off everything with bottles of champagne, and we understand that his false bonhomie is awash in creepy "economic miracle" cash. Following the highway drag race that throws them together, a champagne afterparty enacts the postwar’s compulsory democratization of criminality through economic complicity. The difficulty of extrication is explicit: “My dear Mr. Tavernier, you are my guest.” “I can’t accept.” “But you must--I am the sporting kind . . . and besides, we nearly died together.” These two singularly unapologetic victims, Bencker and Carala, are potentially linked by the name of Djelfa, a district in Algeria but also a town in that district where an internment camp was located. The transition of war into postwar transforms a camp into an oilfield.

A familiar plot device, then—using unattractive victims to allow the viewer to sympathize with criminal protagonists—pushes a little further, as though to ask to what extent apparently apolitical crimes of passion deliver messages of history ignored by by the formalism of law. Julien and Florence murder her husband to be “free,” as the saying goes (with his money too, though they don’t say that); Louis murders Bencker for reasons more difficult to express, yet these motivations are also forced to cross as though by some compensatory economy. By killing Bencker while calling himself Tavernier, Louis is also killing Tavernier, and he has a motive to do this because his girlfriend, Véronique, idolizes Tavernier and is basically always telling him he’s no Tavernier. And Tavernier in turn is implicated in colonial war not only by working for Carala but by having served in Indochina. If he seems disillusioned now, that’s mostly because he kills Carala—by killing Carala, he acts upon a disapproval that may be the audience’s incentive for not feeling sorry, but is not his own main motive. Louis satisfies a generational political hostility that is, this time, his own—he is even aware of it--yet which takes a detour through his contradictory admiration for the sports cars of his hated rivals. The joyride gone awry makes for inarticulate terrorism, and suggests the nascent political quality of crime set against, and itself corrupted by, the oblivion of living high in the postwar. Photographs of Florence and Julien smiling together, images of the freedom for which they kill, appear on the same roll of film that incriminates Véronique and Louis by showing them drinking champagne with Bencker—as though the desire to be “free” in the postwar could only be trailed by the whisper, free with criminal money.

And yet

2009-12-14T18:35:00.001-08:00

It’s been almost two years since the entry of dread into Work Without Dread, dread which for me felt like the impress of the society outside WWD upon WWD, in the form of thoughts about things that ought or ought not to be said in response to events in that society. Thinking such thoughts has been a lose-lose game for me, in which I worry about feeling coerced whether I do or do not write. Even writing this now is easier to the extent that I assume that, after a long hiatus, fewer people are reading—my version of the Dickinsonian secret that writing loses its limits as it loses its purpose as communication. Local readers have been more inhibiting than faraway readers; concretely, I was more upset by the experience in 2008 of going to a really horrid talk by a colleague in another department, having a lot to say about the issues involved therein, and not feeling it ethical to write them, as they would be read and their object recognized by her students, than by any other single thing related to writing or not writing here. The failure I’m talking about is a failure of the idea of the university, of course, in which it should be possible to debate anything rationally. (Man, was that a terrible talk; nor did I feel rational; more than offended, I felt traumatized by that talk.) Everyone knows that’s not true: the space of the university has never been the neutral space of the analytic session or the disinterested space of aesthetics—if these are ever neutral or disinterested in the first place. Whether you’re worried about losing social purchase, retaliation, or just about hurting others’ feelings, the result is the closing of a space. I feel like writing now because finally, at the University of California, there are explicit conversations about the question of open space in the university and along its margins. They take place in another vocabulary, the vocabulary of infrastructural access, but these very public discussions, never figured in psychological terms, brush against questions that could be posed in those terms—questions about which interests can be private, shared, addressed conspiratorially, broadcast publicly, or addressed without direction, as things now stand. The secret, the open secret, and the communication disseminated to the point of dissolution are possible modes, but not in every instance possible in the university or in writing done in the university as we know it, nor “here” either, nor necessarily anywhere at all. And yet . . . I didn’t say at the talk what I’ve said here.

Photo: U.S.-Mexico border, New York Times

Nicely Situated Houses

2009-12-07T21:27:00.000-08:00

We may see the meeting of working-through with the registration of perception in general in Melanie Klein’s major essay “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940; in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945 [New York: Free Press, 1975], 344). Here Klein sets forth her idea that “the child goes through states of mind comparable to the mourning of the adult” and resolves its mourning through “the testing of reality.” Klein, like Freud in “Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911; Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols., 12:219), believes that the registration of any perception of a piece of reality implies resistance and therefore a foregoing process of overcoming resistance. Klein’s child, having attained during weaning a sense of the mother’s fragility and separateness as a person, mourns the loss of the breast and the future loss of parents. The child negotiates mourning by discovering through reality testing how to compare fantasy objects to external ones and so to some extent “disprove anxieties and sorrow relating to the internal reality” alone (Klein, "Mourning" 346). The “internal reality” is a reality; but it requires a different relation, a different handling, than external reality, and it cannot be treated as a dominant reality. Klein’s view is pessimistic epistemologically in that the goal of the continually self-splitting self falls short of lucidity. It is to establish a set of pragmatically helpful, reasonably stabilized fantasy objects and, using these objects as ballast, to carry out its self-splitting “on planes which gradually become nearer and nearer to reality” (350). Working through, then, is synchronized by Klein to relative emotional stability and the slow achievement of proximity to reality.

In discussing how adult experience revives infantile experience Klein offers an example that draws on her experience of the death of her adult son Hans. In April, 1934, when he was twenty-seven, Hans Klein lost his footing while walking in the mountains and fell to his death. By the following summer, Klein was organizing her ideas on mourning in “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1934)—a remarkable paper that confronts some of the most violent fantasies in psychoanalytic literature. Six years later in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” Klein looks back on the ordeal:

If, for instance, a woman loses her child through death, along with sorrow and pain her early dread of being robbed by a “bad” retaliating mother is reactivated and confirmed . . . . The reinforcement of feelings of persecution in the state of mourning is all the more painful because, as a result of an increase in ambivalence and distrust, friendly relations with people, which might at that time be so helpful, become impeded. The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning thus seems to be partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing. (353-354)

Like Freud writing about the unnamed death of his daughter Sophie in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in these pages Klein gives an intense rendition of the mourner’s inner states—the flashes of “manic” elation “due to the feeling of possessing the perfect loved object (idealized) inside”; the secret wish for revenge against the loved one who is already dead; the “great relief” from reminiscences of his kindness, also partly reflecting the suspect “reassurance” of his idealization (355). She explains that mourning means ultimately “regaining trust in external objects and values” and thus regaining confidence in the “lost loved person” to a realistic, rather than idealized, extent (355).

At this point, Klein “give[s] an instance” to “illustrate the ways in which a normal mourner re-established connections with the external world”:

Mrs. A., in the first few days after the shattering loss of her young son, who had died suddenly while at school, took to sorting out letters, keeping his and throwing others away. She was thus unconsciously attempting to restore him and keep him safe inside herself, and throwing out what she felt to be indifferent, or rather hostile—that is to say, the “bad” objects, dangerous excreta and bad feelings. (355)

This passage begins a narrative of about four pages in which “Mrs. A.” sorts the letters (Klein notes here that some people move furniture around, and points out the obsessional dimension of such actions); appreciates time spent with a very few close friends; has two dreams about her son’s death, one remembering a humiliation suffered by her brother in childhood in which her hostility predominates, and another in which a boy’s disappearance is at least upsetting, although she’s glad to have survived herself. Klein remarks that during this time Mrs. A. “did not cry much, and tears did not bring her the relief which they did later on” (356). After the dreams, in the second week after her son’s death,

Mrs. A. found some comfort in looking at nicely situated houses in the country, and in wishing to have such a house of her own. But this comfort was soon interrupted by bouts of despair and sorrow. She now cried abundantly, and found relief in tears. The solace she found in looking at houses came from her rebuilding her inner world in her phantasy by means of this interest and also getting satisfaction from the knowledge that other people’s houses and good objects existed. Ultimately this stood for re-creating her good parents, internally and externally . . . . Thus her fear that the death of her son was a punishment inflicted on her by retaliating parents lost in strength, and also the feeling that her son frustrated and punished her by his death was lessened. The diminuition of hatred and fear in this way allowed the sorrow itself to come out in full strength. (358-359)

Klein believes that feelings of sorrow are “held up in certain stages of grief by an extensive manic control.” To work through resistance to sorrow therefore involves releasing the controlling feelings of “hatred and fear” (359). Mrs. A. stops needing to feel that her brother/son deserves what he gets and triumphant that she herself is still alive, by a route that is more or less cognitive: she realizes that those feelings are irrelevant because no one is persecuting her through her son’s death. She realizes this, in turn, by comparing several ideas and things with one another: things that seem “indifferent” and things she likes; dreams of hostility and memories of affection mingled with jealousy. The idea is that by noticing the differences between her various representations of experiences and objects, Mrs. A. realizes that certain of her feelings are not to the point; that their function is rather mostly to control her grief. If one wants to know how her realization occurs, the principle that connects realization to diminuition of resistance, or makes them two sides of the same thing, is difficult to discern. We are reduced to saying over again that Mrs. A. notices the friction between the world of her dreams (of her fantasized internal objects) and that of her memories and present. Klein registers friction, difference, and thereby an opening for a rearranged reality, the possibility for it to be this way or that way, through the banal observation of her perceptions. She feels this friction to be compelling; not so much that it requires a response on her part, but that it already comprises one—comes with its inbuilt effect of psychic reorganization, which is the very flexibility of her reality. Klein’s registration assists a realization, so smoothly that it’s hard to say whether registration and realization are the same.

Let’s move backward from Klein’s registration of difference to a single registration, that of the nicely situated houses. The former emerges from comparison between Mrs. A.’s various actions and experiences: going through the letters, spending time with friends, crying little and ineffectively, dreaming and thinking about the dreams, looking at “nicely situated” houses, and crying “abundantly.” Cumulatively, Klein exemplifies her own theory: Mrs. A. indeed places her internal and external objects in relation to one another “on planes which gradually become nearer and nearer to reality” (350), relying in this on her crucial registration of the fact that they are different from one another, of their various individual properties. In the instance of her taking pleasure in looking at the houses, the fact that she is better than she was appears in her very ability to perceive the houses as well-sited (the favorite phrase of the Blue Guide). The breakthrough of the houses’ seeming nice, followed by her greater grief, is also a consolidation, prepared by recent reflections and experiences in which the working through must already have been done in order for the houses to appear nice. In Klein’s symbolic interpretation, the houses are associated metonymically with family relations (“good” internal objects), contribute to her “rebuilding” of her inner world, and perhaps also figure containers of her complicated feelings. But these symbolic aspects find their ground in the basic “knowledge that other people’s houses and good objects existed” (358; my italics). The near irrefutability of this knowledge that the houses are able to provide differentiates the episode of the nice houses from the other experiential elements of Mrs. A’s working through, and exemplifies the prosaic quality of registration: the main thing that the houses do is “exist.” Klein finds she can still get “satisfaction from the knowledge” that they exist, and her satisfaction brings what she calls “gratitude”—that is, her satisfaction constitutes a “reparation to her parents” for her persecutorial fantasies (358). Under these circumstances, to perceive that a nicely sited house exists is to wish to make others happy. And the wish to make others happy, although it would seem economically to be just another emotion competing for space with her grief, does not stand in the way of grief as “increase of distrust” does (359).

If Klein’s ability to work through to abundant tears depends on her openness to pleasure, and her openness to pleasure depends on her openness to perception, her ability to register the difference between internal and external objects, the problem is that this ability can fail, has failed in the first place, as Mrs. A. founders in persecutorial fantasies that deflect her sorrow from what Klein figures as its natural course. Why she is able to tell the differences between these things again after having lost the ability, Klein cannot explain to the last degree. Thus in the story Mrs. A. seems to find a lucky break, a contingent contribution from outside, something that catches her attention in the right way. This outside is not a radical outside, opposed by definition to what she is or can know, but a happenstance outside, like a country house glimpsed through a train window whose handsomeness can still attract the eye. Censorship has a hard time defending against such a thing. For a psychic system that once has failed may also fail to fail. Feeling a little pleasure may enable us to feel grief if we make the most of it, and any approach to reality holds the hope of something satisfying to look at. That any such moment is potential fulcrum for action, can legitimately give hope.

photo: toys used by Melanie Klein in her analysis of children; from the Melanie Klein Trust

Sleeping in the Library

2009-12-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

[In honor of over 1,600 UC Irvine students in favor of occupying the library unless the University restored 24-hour library access for finals week, this reflection on library rules. The protest is part of UC-wide protests against 32% fee increases and the privatization of the University of California system.]

If singing was ever allowed in the library, no one can remember it; likewise drinking and sex.

Talking aloud became difficult early in the library’s history, certainly by 1300,* or perhaps as soon as a public appeared.

The common prohibition of eating may have been more recent, and of course of photography, as it became a security risk.

The Fresno Public Library specifically rules out “bathing.” Also “giving speeches or handing out literature.”** In Ann Arbor there can be no board games, “except . . . when such games are provided by the Library as part of an organized activity.”***

No one can sleep in such places. Nor, in Washington, D.C., may there be any “lying or placing head on tables or on the floor.” You’re allowed two bags: “the official Airport standard ‘carry on’ size—9”x 14” x 22”—will be applied to the large bag.”+

California libraries aren’t open long enough for dreams. In practice, you might sleep there for a short time, without a blanket and on the condition you’re not homeless. You must show your identity card (if asked) to the campus police.++

What are we going to say to the notice
that there’ll be no more studying in the library,
that reading and writing will no longer be allowed?
--Meet you at the library, the one named
after the real estate tycoon. No one has ever seen it
after closing time. Inside every book
is someone’s lost place,
between the books an out of order
democracy.

*Scott Douglas, “Dispatches from a Public Librarian,” Dispatch 23, McSweeney’s, 8/14/06
**www.fresnolibrary.org/about/conduct.html
***www.aadl.org/aboutus/policies/behavior
+www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/28/AR2008122802176.html
++www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6465592.html

Crisis of Unity

2009-01-17T23:23:00.000-08:00

Around the time Lehman Brothers fell, and thinking about the topic--Crisis--chosen by graduate students for this year's Comp Lit Graduate Conference at Irvine, I figured I should look up what Marx had to say about crisis. In The Marx-Engels Reader, some pages from Theories of Surplus Value are gathered conveniently under the rubric "Crisis Theory." The occasion for Marx to bring up crisis, here, is his refutation of an assertion by Ricardo that there can be no such thing as "over-production." Very very loosely, their debate concerns whether markets are self-correcting, in this case by being mutually compensating (463). Marx argues that there being too much of something is not an absolute condition (one that we measure in relation to absolute needs) but one relative to ability to pay. And economic crises, crises in the ability to pay, he observes, are crises of syncopation: "if in the interval between [purchase and sale] the value has changed, if the commodity at the moment of its sale is not worth what it was worth at the moment when money was acting as a measure of value . . . the whole series of transactions which retrogressively depend on this one transaction, cannot be settled." Money functions within a given frame of time: "the crisis occurs not only because the commodity is unsaleable, but because it is not saleable within a particular period of time" (456). Last fall, some analysts similarly explained that crashes of the NYSE were occurring not when people were panicking for psychological reasons, but when people were forced to sell to pay bills that could be deferred no longer; they not only had to pay, they had to pay now.

Marx's idea about the temporal form of crisis is the most narratively resonant of his arguments here, but his most fundamental one is that crises are outbreaks of "unity." The passage is a great illustration of a dialecticized idea, of how thoroughly an idea can be dialecticized and self-differential for him:

If, for example, purchase and sale--or the metamorphosis of commodities--represent the unity of two processes, or rather the movement of one process through two opposite phases, and thus essentially the unity of the two phases, the movement is essentially just as much the separation of these two phases and their becoming independent of each other. Since, however, they belong together, the independence of the two correlated aspects can only show itself forcibly, as a destructive process. It is just the crises in which they assert their unity, the unity of the different aspects. The independence which these two linked and complementary phases assume in relation to each other is forcibly destroyed. Thus the crisis manifests the unity of the two phases that have become independent of each other. (444)

Purchase and sale, because they are two angles on the same event, form a unity. Although their coming apart for a while (as in the syncopated story above, when value abruptly changes) is necessary for crisis and is "the elementary form of the crisis" (445), the fact that they come apart is not itself the crisis, and disjuncture is not the meaning of crisis. The message of the crisis is that things that have come apart cannot stay apart; what cannot be deferred is their collapse back into a unity they can't escape.

Meanwhile, back in Irvine, Comp Lit 144, Politics of Crime, watched Ridley Scott's American Gangster. There's quite a bit to say about this not exactly "good" but interesting film, and I hope to come back to it and to many other things that happened in Politics of Crime, a wonderful undergraduate class that kept me going the last several months. For now I'll only recall the scene in which the two protagonists of the film, detective and criminal (Richie and Frank, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington), set eyes on each other for the first time, just as various factors, including the end of the Vietnam War, have brought about a crisis in Frank's globalized business of cocaine distribution. (The cocaine industry and the war industry are explicitly aligned and, in the plot, materially connected.) Since the occasion of their meeting is Frank's arrest, it marks a break in the film; the logic of the film up to that point culminates in the scene and has to shift afterward. Shots of police raiding the sites of Frank's enterprise are intercut with views of Frank and his family emerging from church, and "Amazing Grace" plays over the sequence. Who was blind and now sees when the antagonists look at each other for the first time and with recognition? They are about to become allies, and in many ways were made to be so. The kind of seeing that is done here occurs when you step outside the church door, outside the fantasy of the enclosed family. Although there are redemptive overtones in the idea that losing everything could be the best thing that ever happened, the gain isn't because the psyches involved will now be different--they will prove to be markedly unchanged--but because of the sudden reconnection of worlds that thought they could live without relation to one another.

Image: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Fallen Sky (2006)

Style is Cheap, or, George Kuchar

2008-07-30T13:33:00.001-07:00

At the L.A. Film Festival there was a large, blissed-out audience at the Billy Wilder Theater for ten short films by George and/or Mike Kuchar. The Kuchars, twin brothers from the Bronx, began making 8 mm films starring their friends and families as children in the fifties; the films shown at the Festival were made from 1958 to 1963. These are mostly silent, except for pirated music, and use intertitles. George Kuchar went on to "experimental" films in the same DIY-smart aleck vein--a little artier, and with a gradually increasing component of explicit homoeroticism, but no different in spirit from the childhood projects--in 16 mm and digital video, and since 1971 has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. (A selection of George Kuchar's films is available on UBUWEB.) L.A. seems to be afloat on Kucharmania. The festival audience would¹ve been delighted to stay all night--the authorities at the Hammer had to ask the audience and the Kuchars to leave. Cinefamily is screening a series of camp films curated by George Kuchar and two nights of his mid- and later films that more or less take up where the Film Festival left off. The second of these evenings, covering his work in San Francisco, is August 3.

George and Mike Kuchar were present for the Wilder screening, and George commented on each film from his chair in the dark as though we were watching home movies, which we were. On a budget on which you could either make a film or buy a toaster, Kuchar plugs friends and neighbors like "the Leibowitz family" into the rudimentary formulae and--to a startling degree--the elegant shots of the Hollywood genres, especially over-the-top melodrama. While the storylines often head straight for chaos, textbook specimens of minute compositional conventions shape almost every frame: the turning doorknob, the dolly back to reveal you¹ve been looking out a window, the alienation of TV antennae, the shadow of the fistfight on the stairs, the pathos of the windowsill, etc.--each one a compact myth. Almost none of the films is missing its neo-Sirkian mirror shot. In Hold Me While I¹m Naked (1965), a beautiful woman comes through a door three times to answer the same ringing phone, an effect that reminds me of the repeated zoom toward Delphine Seyrig's outstretched arms in Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

In Knockturne (1968), guests at a party, including Edie Sedgwick (!), peel away from the center of the screen finally to reveal Warhol's Jackie on the distant wall.

The narratives run at 78 rpm, the dialogue is pulpy, and the music is usually a painfully crude '50s pop. The acting is "bad" and therefore Brechtian, as in profound schlock like Edward Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. Watched on their own time, the films are hilarious. Viewed as a series of stills, the images have lyrical melancholy, even when they're deranged, like outtakes from Godard. The audience does not feel this as a contradiction; one level doesn't seem truer than the other.

(Hold Me While I'm Naked)

(Mike Kuchar in The Corruption of the Damned [1965])

(Mike Kuchar in The Corruption of the Damned)

(Hold Me While I'm Naked)

In a mainstream melodrama like George Stevens's Penny Serenade, pathos comes from the distance between what the film is able to do ideologically and what it seems to yearn to do, as the Time Out Film Guide notes in its summary of the film:

A classic "women's picture" in every sense: an emotional/sentimental switchback, nostalgically framed (Dunne, on the point of leaving Grant, reminisces the family-romance narrative to gramophone accompaniment) and a construction of the "ideal woman" (fulfilled in motherhood, naturally) so upfront as to be almost disarming--though not, as in similar work by Douglas Sirk, pushed quite so far that it might be construed as being critical. Either with it or at it, or more likely both, you'll weep.

With it or at it. Melodrama becomes interestingly difficult when you cry not only with it but at it, since the film¹s limitations then unwittingly reinforce its characteristic theme, the restriction of a character by society. When you cry at a melodrama, it's pointed you mutely to what it can¹t acknowledge--outdone itself. Camp embraces its inabilities, but that may not rule out lament. In Warhol, only approach the paintings traditionally as portraits of the outer and inner states of their subjects and you feel like busting out, because you realize you're in the graveyard of the reified. In Kuchar, the film takes so much pleasure in being a film at all that it's hard to say what limits the film either claims or has.

The meta-film Hold Me While I¹m Naked argues, classically, that cinema is the sublimation of reality, well of course! A director, played by Kuchar, is forced to suspend production when his actress decides (correctly) that he's only a pervert who wants to see her in the nude: he had asked her to remove her bra "because the mysticism of the stained glass window and the profanity of that brassiere do not go well together." Stranded, he applies lipstick to a plastic doll and literally wallows in his own wasted reels among intercut scenes of "real women" having sexual interludes with other guys. In some cases, though, it¹s not clear whether these women (the rebellious actress, for example) are getting it on in the present, in the director's morbid and cinematic imagination, or in scenes of the lost film. An ordinary life appears--the director twirling in the shower alone, sitting in the kitchen with his battleaxe mother and her awful cuisine--that is the very melodramatic image of "unmelodramatic life." The film seems to differ not from a social reality that limits it but just from the unfilmed. The unfilmed is an unknown state altogether, something we can't assume anything about and that the films don't want to know anything about.

(...the beauty of the space between Kuchar and the doll....)

At the end of Hold Me Kuchar looks into the camera and asks, "There's a lot of things in life worth living for. Isn't there?" Things "in life" are unspeakable and feared dead, like the untransmogrified matter on the dinner plate. In Kuchar's virtuostic editing, almost every shot comes as a huge surprise. So much so that an equally huge fear of sameness is implied. In George and Mike Kuchar's Town Called Tempest (1962), an ex-prostitute whose new life of pious service risks being unmasked by the reappearance of the film¹s protagonist, an old acquaintance, comes up with a grenade and lobs it at him in the second she perceives the threat. No hesitation--goodbye, protagonist. This was one of the most uproarious and delightful moments at the Wilder. Who would go so far? (Early Fassbinder? Godard in Every Man for Himself, when the director starts shooting with a pistol as well as with a camera?) We noticed the same narrative originality in the mini-stories Kuchar emitted in the dark. Of the Leibowitzes, for example, he said: "The parents are dead, of course. And the animals. But Larry is still alive. And the house is a complete mess." The little story is edited for unpredictability. Like it, the films realize the resources of disloyalty, distraction, and anticlimax. The cliche, "the house is a complete mess," in the wrong place is euphoric. The films can feed on their own self-destruction, they burden classic shots with material--events, words, clothes, bric-a-bric, settings and human substance--that's dross and needs to be dross so that the films can show their lack of obligation to it. That any thing can be as interesting on film as any other is repeatedly proven by filming crap in a state of flux. (As Kuchar noted in the theater, he's also been "typecast," as he put it, as literally a photographer of turds.) Some of Kuchar's recent projects sound as though they move from playing with rhetorical obstacles, obstacles representing "recalcitrant matter," to a kind of minimalism that plays with lack of resistance--"weather diaries" in which he travels to Oklahoma to observe cyclones but films whatever happens, including nothing. The question that never gets answered is what has worth when not filmed. What's not filmed is dead meat, or so we're afraid. But that doesn't need to concern us as long as we're filming or watching films, and composition costs nothing. Style is cheap; life is cheaper.

Image of Kuchar that appears at the end of Wild Night in El Reno
(1977).

Acknowledgments: Thanks to comrades at the screenings for dialogue: Eyal Amiran, Joe Mahoney, Daniel Tiffany, Toshi Tomori. This post was written for Oh! Industry, and appears in similar form there: thank you to Karen Tongson and Team Oh! Industry.

Hemisphereless James

2008-07-08T17:38:00.000-07:00

Years ago I ordered William James’s Principles of Psychology ([1898]; ed. George A. Miller; Harvard University Press,1981) and Niels Bohr’s Philosophical Writings . . . 1933-1957 (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1978) in the same batch of books, and was very surprised to discover that the former was about 1300 pages and the latter 100. James took twelve years to write the Principles, but Bohr’s interest in writing philosophically at all was apparently not that strong, even over twenty. The essays are really occasional pieces, while James’s work, it's no secret, is intensely personal and reflexively organic. It becomes a moralized cosmology of life, a guide to living in the guise of a description of the properties of being alive. (I’d be interested in knowing about readings that track James’s personal investment in detail rather than just noting that he wrote it after a breakdown and in the mode of self-analysis.)

Like Descartes, James searches for a zero degree from which to start living. It’s notable that he takes the trouble to justify his exclusion of inanimate entities, as though the line between inert and living matter were not obvious enough to assume. That when “we pass from such actions” as are performed by magnetized iron filings “to those of living things, we notice a striking difference” which consists in living things’ caring to move and act (20), does not so much define the biological as raise the possibility—as Descartes does by positing mechanical animals—of the appearance of life without the desire for it. Although the first differences James notes are between iron filings and Romeo and Juliet, between “chopping the foot of a tree” and “the foot of a fellow-man” (20, 25), he proves the difference where it matters by vivisecting a series of conscious beings, ascending from hapless frogs to dogs, monkeys, and lobe-injured people. We know we are conscious through privation (as Freud would agree):

If, then, we reduce the frog’s nervous system to the spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection with the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but with a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breathe or swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a normal frog, sit up on its fore-paws, though its hind-legs are kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately resume this position if drawn out. If thrown on its back it lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog. (28)

While dissatisfaction spurs the action that lets us know we’re alive, the effect of the experiments, and of the diegesis of the early chapters, is to move in the opposite direction, showing how the living thing can suffer the vegetable condition of not caring about itself. “Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary hemisphereless frogs” (32); they no longer make choices, so that “copulation occurs per fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often with dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway” (35). The explicit shock is now the one latent in the example of the filings, of how much of the capacity for, and therefore the appearance of, action can be preserved without there being any self or meaning in it: “if . . . we take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordinarily cut out for a lecture-room demonstration[,] [t]here is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the inner promptings seem deficient, and when left to himself he spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his head sunk between his shoulders as if asleep” (32).

The pathos of the recumbent animals serves the function--cutting across the narrative order of events--of stimulating the vivisector and the reader to care on their behalf, and discover their own aliveness by contrast, at the price that aliveness is relativized and contingent for all. Here the nineteenth-century relative freedom of convention in scientific writing allows James—and not only James, since it’s interestingly pervasive to the time, in the material he cites, for example—to express for the hemisphereless animal what it cannot express for itself, a desire that, further, James expresses on its behalf before he goes on to do so on his own. From the substrate that James keeps calling the “ordinary" brainless organism (and more precisely, his ability to feel something for them), he rebuilds to account for the almost equal disturbance of possible and partial repair. Although strictly speaking it can't restore a loss, the hemisphereless animal can create new actions for old purposes, and force a cognitive path through cortical obstructions: “e.g., the sound of ‘give your paw’ discharges after some weeks into the same canine muscles into which it used to discharge before the operation” (78). The good news is that a lot of capacity, even for consciousness, is built in, and that every action that happens makes it easier to do that action again; the bad news is the same—that “the original organization . . . must always be the ground-work of the psychological scheme” (141), on which “every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar” (131).

Image: Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided, 2007

Communicating, Not

2008-07-02T00:21:00.000-07:00

It’s July 1 as I write this, the date in the dream in the my last post, but not as hot as the dream July 1.

The Winnicott essay that used to be most important to me is “The Use of an Object,” the one that explains that a relational object is discovered to be independent when it survives its “destruction” (the omnipotent imagination’s assumption that the object will not live alone, and its consignment of it to this expected fate). Lately the one that’s most important is “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” [1963] (The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development [Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1965). Here Winnicott "stak[es] a claim, to his surprise, to the right not to communicate" (179). For split egos, he writes, but also in "the healthy individual" in a parallel way, the self comes to gain the "feeling of real" to the very degree that it withdraws from contact. Non-communication becomes a figure of the self's realness because through intrusive parents and other social experiences "communication so easily becomes linked with some degree of false or compliant" behavior (184). In this way, Winnicott understands non-communication in the session as progress toward trust, a variety of the deep aloneness that he argues can be experienced paradoxically only with others in the room ("The Capacity to Be Alone," also in Maturational Processes, 29-36). Winnicott also believes that cultural phenomena mediate between communication and the "subjective objects" which we convene within ourselves only when we are not communicating. He gives the examples of diaries and lyric poems. For Winnicott these instances of language overheard assume a social contract with the audience receiving items placed in the ambiguous transitional space—an understanding that, as in play, there will be no serious demand.

But of course some of us never get the balance, and in addition to just not communicating, with and without others, we use non-communication to negate discourse, and so communicate by means of non-communication, which, if you ask me, is the worst of both worlds—although it may very well be what there is to say (see Ann Smock, What is There to Say? [U of Nebraska P, 1993]). I've thought about starting over anonymously (and a circle of known readers sounds even more inhibiting), but I think this might be naive or circumlocutionary. I might soon find myself back in the same place, not because of things that would or wouldn't feel different but because a complaint about communicating is after all one of the things I most want to utter. The beauty of published writing is its taking care of the delicate social/asocial contract by its very form, as I mention below (January 4, 2008). But real-time writing plays the game for desperate stakes, like Winnicott's nine-year-old patient with her "stolen school book in which she collected poems and sayings . . . . On the front page she wrote: 'What a man thinketh in his heart, so is he'" (186; Winnicott leaves tactfully unresolved the question of whether she invents or finds this citation). What does it mean for the nine-year-old girl to keep this book in her own house, when "rape, and being eaten by cannibals . . . are mere bagatelles as compared with the violation of the self's core, the alteration of the self's central elements by communication seeping through the defences" (187)?

Image: Stephen Cannon, Camouflaged Moth

University of Dream

2008-03-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

“I just had the most terrible nightmare,” my friend (white male full professor at another institution) rang up to tell me.
“What’s that?”
“I dreamed I was a female graduate student!” The female graduate students were kept in a sort of razor-wired pen, from which they were drawn periodically to be raped by faculty. Sometimes they walked through a place from which they could see where the tenured faculty lived. There they were drinking and laughing.

Inspired by this, I embarked on some variations on the theme. I dreamed that a white male graduate applicant from anthropology was a black African woman. She and I walked on a beach and I was very sorry that we didn’t have more funding to offer. I dreamed (on another night) that it was July 1, and so hot that our senior French theorist walked by wearing a dress. To be specific, a sleeveless black top with a rounded neck, and a brown tube skirt. (Eyal: “What kind of shoes?” “Flat, black leather slip-ons, gender-noncommital.”) It was understood that this was purely pragmatic, just because it was so hot.

Last night I was going to give a talk to an audience of historians. One of them, a middle-aged woman with glasses, was looking over a copy of the paper in a café beforehand. There were a few references to Aristotle in the opening pages. “Are you an Aristotelian?” she said.
“No!” (Did I have to be?) She continued through the paper and asked another question, something about factual evidence. I realized with despair that she was going to demand empirical historical work to footnote each noncontroversial historical claim, and flung my cup of lukewarm tea at her. She wasn’t nearly as upset as you might expect. She was upset, but I was a lot more upset. It wasn’t clear that I was disinvited from the engagement, although it wasn’t going to go off quite normally either. About 40 minutes after the talk was to begin I saw people still waiting in the library-like room where it was to take place. I told them I’d make some phone calls and find out what was going on (they didn’t realize I was the speaker). I could maybe still give this talk although it would be late at night. In the meantime people were reminiscing about a lavish banquet that the former chair there had staged for an emeritus colleague too ill to appreciate it; there were huge plates of cold poached salmon, berries and fruits of the season, and probably twenty other dishes laid out on a white tablecloth. “That’s the worst thing that Phyllis ever did,” one of them said. Then I was in an apartment in the Midwest with a colleague with whom I did once share an apartment building, though not the unit, in Ann Arbor. I saw various little tchotchkes that belonged to me in the apartment and, feeling an urge to get completely out of there, started putting them in my bag. She said it was convenient to keep an apartment in the Midwest. “Who is on the lease of this apartment?” I asked. “That’s not clear,” she said quickly, as to say, “Good point.” Then my phone rang and I saw on the screen an alarm notice to let me know that it was 9:00 and I had missed my flight. It was news to me that there was a service that notified you if you missed your flight. I’d have to try to make the redeye, but I had a feeling I was going to miss that too.

The great academic dreamwork, though—apart from Adorno’s Dream Notes, which includes many university nightmares—is Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944), in which Edward G. Robinson plays a New York City professor who falls in with a femme fatale and commits crimes for her. At the end of the film, Robinson wakes up in the faculty club. Throughout the film, the clues that Robinson is dreaming all pertain to his profession. When his car is stopped by the police—a corpse in the trunk, of course—and he hands his i.d. through the window, the cop responds: “Professor, huh?” (It’s printed on his i.d.!) “Assistant!” Robinson squeaks, as though that were ameliorating. Which it is. (Edward G. Robinson is in his 50’s at the time of the film: is he lying to the cop?) At another point, his being named chair of his department—an occurrence in contradiction with the other scene referencing his status--is printed on page two of the New York paper. I’m not sure whose joke this all is: did Lang, or the writers (Nunnally Johnson, based on a novel by J.H. Wallis) know enough about the university system to know that these moments puncture the realism of the film? If so, then these are the moments in which Robinson almost awakes, when the anxiety provoking the dream pushes itself almost to the point of unbearability: the moments connected to his profession. On the other hand, the wake-up scene is itself compromised by the fact that it comes at the moment when the whole game that is the film is up, when there would be the most motive—as in Gilliam’s Brazil--for Robinson to go psychotic and dream of an alternative space, in a falling asleep of reason. To be able to recognize the more plausible of these interpretations, it helps to be one of him; you have to remember that an academic’s profession isn’t printed on his driver’s license; it just feels like it is.

Support Tenure for Andrea Smith

NOTE: Thank you very much to Jed Rasula, who pointed out that I had conflated The Woman in the Window with Scarlet Street (which shares its director and cast) in the earlier version of this post. I'll let the still from Scarlet Street stand as a memento to the paraprax!

Image: Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street

Reverb

2008-02-17T20:56:00.000-08:00

Apparently, it’s common for a blog to go through a “crisis.” Often, it has to do with uncertainty of audience. The art blog Anaba, written by Martin Bromirski, had one last June. Bromirski described his longing for a “motivation transfusion”:

Sometimes I get kind of blah about this blog.... like... what is the point, who cares, nobody comments anyway, artists are not taking control, this is too much effort on my part, i want to focus on PARKOUR now, etc. . . .

Plus, and related, someone mentioning something negative about blogs appearing self-promoting.... aargh, that bothers me. I am ALL FOR artists promoting their work, in whatever way they best know how... whether that means moving to NYC and networking, or putting your shit on a blog.... just hate the hangups and hypocrisy people have about it, acting blase... the stealth shit. SORRY, I am not trying to be confrontational.

A couple of Bromirski’s friends wrote in: “Martin. Screw it. Just do it.” “Think of all the new friends you've made, Martin.” The crisis passed.

My contribution to the crisis genre, which at least provides some comic relief, seems to be my continued perplexity at having readers. It may be that the goals and questions phrased at the outset could have been better pursued in anonymity. Writing to people you know, social obligations hover. To a group at UC Irvine, I’d find it strange never to mention common experiences and problems, institutional issues, people we know, and the like, and stranger still never to use direct address, never to say “you” or “we.” Yet I wouldn’t want to duplicate or intensify here the exchanges I already have—to do that, there’s no need to write. This conflict, if that’s the right word, hasn’t resolved itself; I don’t resolve it, I set it aside. Meanwhile, it rained, the garden got wet, the cultural offerings contracted, my mother got no better, the work got denser, my hard drive expired. A friend with glaucoma and an active but largely invisible inner life identified with the protagonist in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly--“There aren’t many films about people who live out of one eye”--and decided to have a baby with a co-worker. It’s like a post-Symbolist poem, "Spleen" V or VI or VII or "2,000 Light Years From Home." These are the cypress trees in our yard, these pages are from this postmark.

Hydraulics of Cinema History

2008-01-19T04:19:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to understand, and I’m not sure I do, how Paul Thomas Anderson can have made a film so apparently straightforward as There Will Be Blood, so almost transparent, out of materials so crude, at a date so late as this, that is so powerful in its effects. I can see why people are going back to 1940s films for comparisons; so why doesn’t Anderson’s movie seem nostalgic? It isn’t quite transparent, although it lets you see it that way or want it to be; it conveys historical self-consciousness, not through what usually goes by the name of irony, but in all but invisible ways that serve similar functions. Daniel Day-Lewis’s manipulation of his voice, for example, into something artificial that’s broadcasting all the time, makes clear that his character, Plainview, has at some point we never see poured himself into a mold. He’s beside himself from the beginning, remote-controlling himself from an undisclosed location. Day-Lewis method-acts a method actor character. Everyone has only residual spontaneity; they’ve paid out everything human before the plot begins. Plainview’s child, H.W., shows the process in motion, soft matter being shaped into a businessman. Dealing only with calcified objects—including Lewis's dusty novel—Anderson can afford to evoke the fluctuating life inside these objects. (This is a film about hydraulics, of course, like Written on the Wind and Chinatown, that suggests that psychic and kinship logics underlie and even explain economics.) Because the forms are not “revitalized” but treated as dead, the emotions seem to be outsize because they have to be to penetrate the crust that has formed over everything. Anthony Lane’s review of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men just misses a similar point, complaining that the Coens taxidermize classic U.S. film genres (New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2007). They do, and that’s what allows their films to be so creepy. Similarly Stephanie Zacharek in Salon (Dec. 26, 2007): "There Will Be Blood" only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought,” etc., etc.--when its "really" being elemental and raw would cover over the lethal reification, the difficulty, and with it the counterforce.

One of the tropes of There Will Be Blood is the lengths to which people will go in the attempt to recover, or cover over, a loss; thus the apt comparison to Citizen Kane. Anderson gives the content of the loss in the opening scenes, before we know what the film is about and what to look for, so that we have the equivalent of an unconscious memory of it. Plainview (we don’t know who he is yet, we can’t even see him clearly) in a mine shaft, under great duress, checks the silver particles inside a stone and says “There she is, there she is,” self-soothingly as you’d say “There, there.” “She,” when people will ask throughout the film where his wife is, and the closest anyone comes to mentioning his mother is “I’m your brother with a different mother.” While their absences are conspicuous, we’re liable to miss completely “her” presence in the rock, as does Plainview himself, in a way. The grammar conceals the particular in the conventional, but it’s a scene of necrophilia. Every scene but the last two take place inside the ravenous deprivation of the desire to raise the dead or live with them. The last ones correspond to a historical jump that marks, more importantly than a number of years, a shift in eras. There, with the thematization of modernity, it’s as though the film’s self-consciousness comes forward, alligning itself with the audience to look back at the preceding film, and confesses itself to be a long, cold perspective like Stanley Kubrick’s. The very last scene reminds me of the final interior scenes of 2001, which take you as though to the place where the film was made (not a very habitable place)—here, after all the film's obsessing over the turn of the 20th century, in the end it might as well be 2501. From there you’re offered a view of what has been given to see and what has been giving it to be seen, but it’s likely to be more than you can absorb.

"Desert Flowers"

2008-01-12T02:11:00.000-08:00

Is there a film that aligns itself more fully with what Erving Goffman calls “the normals” than My Darling Clementine (1946), the scariest film I saw last year? There must be a thick literature on Ford’s interest in foundations of various sorts, and on his racism—observations on this can’t be new; so why is the film still surprising? It’s unimaginably upfront about the costs of what it depicts; it’s all in the daylight. It’s very early on that Henry Fonda/Wyatt Earp gets himself nominated marshall by slipping into a dark saloon to deal with an armed “drunken Indian” whom no one wants to confront, and emerges dragging the inert body, which he proceeds to insult and abuse before shoving it permanently offscreen. The power of this self-nomination to “proper authority,” as he calls it, radiates from Fonda’s sensitive, precise body language in long, silent shots as he hangs out, doing nothing, on the porch, and is elevated by Ford in symbols that go deeper than “religious imagery.” Fonda’s natural morality, for example, is figured in the wildflower fragrance that the barber spritzes on him and that people comment on thereafter (“The air is so clean and clear! The scent of the desert flowers!” “That’s me. Barber”). He’s anointed with oil, but he’s no Jesus type; he’s something better, he’s the pagan stud that preceded Jesus,who doesn’t need to be saved. (“Nobody with a good car needs justification” [Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood].) The central scene in which the citizens gather without a minister for a secular dance on the foundation of the future church uses the same logic, implying that we’re looking at something more ancient than any religion, from which religions evolve; and Wyatt Earp’s and Clementine Carter’s walk down the sidewalk in the sunshine, shot head-on and faraway to look like a walk down the wedding aisle, is fresher than any wedding—it uses the future wedding to make us nostalgic for the present. (This is a totally magical cinematic moment, like the carriage-house kiss in Vertigo.) There’s a little of this nostalgia in the use of the title song, which is temporally disruptive; it plays before Clementine is introduced, and at the same time the Clementine in the song is dead while Ford’s is young and alive. Ford presents the time of the film as a momentary eternity, even altering the refrain of the song in its last rendering from “You are lost and gone forever, / Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” to “I’ll be loving you forever, oh my darling Clementine.” But it’s plain enough that they can have only a short time. It’s only the loss of the civilization left behind that exposes the layer of radical purity in which the film is invested, and which gives it its “sweet” air, so in a way, the normals are working against themselves by community building—or at least, they will experience declining returns. If law and church were already established, Wyatt Earp and Clementine Carter would be invisible, which is why they like it out there in the territory even though they could be more comfortable and wealthy back East. Fonda’s soliloquy over his young brother’s grave, claiming that the point (of ejecting and slaying the unfit, or dying yourself to do so, as amply shown) is that kids like him be “able to grow up and live safe,” does nothing to account for why you’d want to go to the Arizona Territory to do that. So, discontent with the limits of civilization gets sublimated into the fantasy of civilization-creation, which comes with the bonus of seeming to get to stand outside it for as long as the construction lasts.

Image: Henry Fonda in John Ford's My Darling Clementine, 1946

Filling the Graves, or, The End of the Iliad

2008-01-08T01:48:00.000-08:00

Abraham and Torok observe that the melancholic often imagines the lost object feeling the pain that she or he actually feels because of the loss of object: the melancholic “pretend[s] that the suffering is not an injury to the subject but instead a loss sustained by the lost object” (Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” The Shell and the Kernel [U of Chicago P , 1998], 127). Maybe unexpectedly, this is one of the most intuitive, easily exemplified points in psychoanalytic literature. The lover imagines her ex to be suffering terribly, to be unable to bear the information that she has a new lover, but in keeping this secret, it’s she who shields herself from the finality of the loss of the former lover. (Dean Wareham, who’s tough on erotic illusions, may be getting at this when he suggests instead that “the lost glove is happy.”) The most spectacular example of Abraham and Torok’s ”endopsychic encryption” is Achilles in the madness of non-mourning, who insists at one point that he cannot give up Hector’s body because if he did, Patroclus would be angry. It takes a while for the magnitude of the distortion to sink in: Achilles, the paragon of outsized rage, who has been dragging Hector’s corpse around for days, claims that the problem is that Patroclus, who is dead, might get angry. Achilles comes out of it through a radically banal series of maneuvers whose main function is to get Achilles to acknowledge his, and Patroclus’s, place in an economy of substitutions in which Priam, representing outside interests, also participates. Priam quantifies Achilles’s grief and his own in the ransom of “gifts beyond number” that he is willing to pay for Hector’s body (XXIV:504), and by the way reminds Achilles that he has a dead father as well as a dead companion, so that “"Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos" (510-511). Achilles accepts the ransom by promising himself to "give [Patroklos his] share of the spoils" (595). Under the safe pretext of service, however, the subject being served slips from the the dead to the living body. Achilles eats again instead of being “eaten out” from within by Patroclus; and Abraham and Torok’s “false I,” able to speak only in the borrowed voice of the dead, is exchanged for one that takes up its “divine right” to live (“The Lost Object—Me,” The Shell and the Kernel 155-56). Simone Weil and Sharon Cameron in her essay on Weil comment that The Iliad treats bodies as flesh and parts subject first and last to the laws of physics. Their writings (Cameron’s essay intensifies Weil’s) point to an unspoken connection between positivism and the prosaic procedures of funerary rites: in both, necessities are separated from desires, not so that we should give up desires, but so that they could be recognized as desires, stripped from the facts in which mourners attempt to conceal them. In the interlocking structure of Book XXIV, a direct barter in losses is the only thing that interrupts the killing. The soft, suspensive ending of the poem seems to drift off in the preparations for Hector's funeral. The Trojans have a truce of a limited number of days to perform these, then it''ll be back to the business of their annihilation, but the poem never goes back. (Aesthetic suspension? There's a fantasy that as long as one is writing or reading or reciting a poem, one isn't doing something else, such as hurting or being hurt.) Mourning without end, here, though, looks less like melancholy circulation than like the infinity of desires imprisoned by melancholy and liberated by mourning, as though contact with those desires and war were incompatible.

Acknowledgment: still spring 2005 (SK, TT, JN), also winter 2006

Image: Cy Twombly, Synopsis of a Battle, 1968

"Asplenium and the Lizards"

2007-12-26T13:40:00.000-08:00

“Asplenium and the Lizards,” a dream recounted by the nineteenth-century philosopher of psychology Joseph Delboeuf, is cited by Freud as a heroic feat of oneiric recall. The dream involves the Latin name of a fern:

He saw in a dream the courtyard of his own house covered with snow and found two small lizards half-frozen and buried under it. Being an animal-lover, he picked them up, warmed them and carried them back to the little hole in the masonry where they belonged. He further gave them a few leaves of a small fern which grew on the wall and of which, as he knew, they were very fond. In the dream he knew the name of the plant: Asplenium ruta muralis. [According to Freud, “its correct name is Asplenium ruta muraria, which had been slightly distorted in the dream.”]

The dream proceeded and, after a digression, came back to the lizards. Delboeuf then saw to his astonishment two new ones which were busy on the remains of the fern. He then looked round him and saw a fifth and then a sixth lizard making their way to the hole in the wall, until the whole roadway was filled with a procession of lizards, all moving in the same direction . . . and so on. (SE IV, 12)

This Escherian sequence is about generation and animation, making more out of the same. Delboeuf is taken aback by the Latin name in the dream because “when he was awake, Delboeuf knew the Latin names of very few plants and an Asplenium was not among them.” “Sixteen years later,” Freud writes,

When the philosopher was on a visit to one of his friends, he saw a little album of pressed flowers of the sort that are sold to foreigners as mementos in some parts of Switzerland. A recollection began to dawn on him—he opened the herbarium, found the Asplenium of his dream and saw its Latin name written underneath it in his own handwriting. (SE IV, 12)

The incident combines sensory clarity, conceptual intelligibility, and a sense of the marvelous in a recovery of language. The herbarium highlights the objectlike quality of a name: the name identifies the sample plant and the plant exemplifies the name, the noun level with the thing. Although Freud stipulates that words that occur in dreams are memorial pictures of words, not working language, this picture of a word seems to go along with a feeling that in waking life does accompany working language.

The Asplenium dream, that is, engages a kind of circular satisfaction that accompanies language use and may itself be one of language’s main uses. In the dream the classic notion of thing as name and name as thing orchestrates a drama of understanding, of obscurity brought to light. What requires explanation is the dream’s ability to use a word that the dreamer doesn’t know he knows. This name, Asplenium, seems unusually memorable. Not only does it stick in a corner of the dreamer’s mind without his permission, until it reappears in the dream; he also remembers that reappearance sixteen years later. “Asplenium” is memorable because of its unaccountability; it had been a “mystery,” Freud writes, that remained unsolved. The story of finding the herbarium is presented as a solution to the mystery. It features the phenomenology of understanding, the “dawning” feeling. Yet Delboeuf’s understanding is never actually miraculous; it’s something he knew already, in “his own handwriting.” (This uploading of previously known blocs of information is what leads Freud to propose that language in dreams isn’t really thinking, moving forward.) It seems miraculous only insofar as he forgets what he knows; his having forgotten is what actually demands explanation and remains unexplained by the story. When Delboeuf finds the herbarium we are “driven to admit,” writes Freud, that “we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking memory” (SE IV, 11). The moment is striking for its simultaneous climax and anticlimax: we begin with a sense of extra insight—which we might be tempted to attribute to superstition, or “overstanding”—and exchange it for a scientific explanation. Delboeuf remembered the name of the fern before he remembered that he had forgotten it: nothing has been gained for the mind’s capacity (no foreknowledge or visionary knowledge), yet every bit of wonder given up to the explanation is replenished by the wonder of re-experiencing what one already knows. This re-experience registers with all the impact of gain, but has the structure of trompe-l’oeil. This is also what Freud calls “cheap thrill”: civilization is a cheap thrill because it loves to “solve” problems it creates, as when one puts one's feet outside the coverlet on a cold night to enjoy the pleasure of pulling them back in again.

Freud’s point in retelling this dream is not to interpret it psychoanalytically but to characterize dream language: Asplenium, an artifact of linguistic memory stored as an image file, embodies the recycled character of language in dreams, which appears very insightful because it is very plagiaristic. If Freud wants to make this point aboutdream language, though, it’s hard to keep it from spreading to language per se at its most basic, its pairing of word and concept, which can seem to explain things simply by pairing them (“That fern is an Asplenium.” “So that’s what it is!”). How often is the feeling of mental discovery nothing more than this? And, turning it around again, maybe this nothing, this non-thought, is what thought is made of, and is really something. The temporary occlusion of familiarity when language appears in a dream is enough to activate a vivacity, an animation effect, that belongs all the time to language as such, as the other side of its standardization. “I know this word!” is most of the excitement—an excitement that all of us, at some early point of development, must have felt, and still can feel. Dream language recovers amazement at the thing here that really is amazing--that there is language at all.

Notice: Islands of L.A.

2007-12-23T23:17:00.001-08:00

I've never posted a news item before, but am particularly happy about this: islandsofla.com. It came to my attention today when I stopped at a light near Glendale and Berkeley. . .

Like an Animal

2007-12-23T22:28:00.000-08:00

Is there a word missing between “animate” and “anthropomorphic,” for stones and plants that look like animals, not people? And for people and actions that recall animals, but not pejoratively as in “bestial”? “Animate[d],” like “vital,” stays on the level of motion and transformation, a principle without a shape; wind can resemble anima, but “animate” is no good for describing a tree pod that looks like a sea urchin. Why is a landscape usually thought of as anthropomorphic rather than animal-like? As an adjective for a human being "animal" virtually means “bodily,” only with a connotation of active energy, and fails to carry the identification that arrives for better and worse with “anthropomorphic”; “X is an animal," or "X's animal presence," makes less of X (less thought, less compunction, less depth) rather than clarifying X’s shape. For that we say “feline,” “bearlike,” etc., at which point personality denied to “animal” comes back in. So, are animals supposed to be too varied to be referenced as a group? Too redundant with the anthropomorphic to be worth mentioning, as though lacking a particular wavelength? (Yet encounters with the animal-like do have a special character--they have all of the solidarity and less of the uncanniness that characterizes the “anthropomorphic” [cf. David Berman’s song, “Animal Shapes”].)

Image 1: cholla, Joshua Tree National Park: zoomorphic?

Image 2: Wang Fu, Ju Yong Pass (Ming): anthropomorphic?

Kafka's Combinations

2007-12-20T01:24:00.000-08:00

You can see why Blanchot gets caught up in Kafka’s headache-inducing Letters to Felice, because they have the kind of narrative involution and recession, and precision about indescribable feelings, that Blanchot wants in his fictions. Blanchot would like especially to draw a general insight from the logical trap Kafka builds for himself by trying to “convince [Felice Bauer] of what he is”:

to say everything . . .means to tell how he will make her unhappy or, more precisely, the impossibility of communal life to which he is condemning her; and this with nothing to make up for it, so that she may accept it and see it precisely as impossible, from which it will follow that none of the answers that she gives him can satisfy him. For if she says to him, perhaps out of levity, out of affection, perhaps also out of a proper concern for nuances: "You speak too abruptly about yourself," or else "things are perhaps as you say, but you cannot know that they will not change when we are together," this hope that she maintains despairs him: "What do I have to do? How can I make you believe the unbelievable?" . . . . This on the one hand. But on the other hand if, convinced or eventually hurt, she takes her distance, becomes reticent, formulates doubts, writes less, then he becomes all the more despairing, for he has the feeling that she misjudges him precisely because she knows him, thus deciding according to the knowledge he gives her of himself, instead of deciding, not blindly, not by weighing the reasons, but in all clarity under the attraction of the impossible. There are, he says, three answers; there are no others that she can make: "It is impossible, and therefore I do not want it." "It is impossible, and for the time being, I do not want it." "It is impossible, and therefore I want it." This third answer, the only correct one (which might, inspired by Luther, take this form: "I cannot do otherwise, in spite of everything"). (L’Amitie [1971], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford UP, 1997], 274)

Blanchot believes Kafka pursues something like the sublime and wants Bauer to do the same; he tries to convince her the whole thing is impossible not so that she will leave him, but so that she can want it for the right reason, because it’s impossible. The fact that Blanchot is so invested in formalizing the logical possibilities of Bauer’s answer is interesting in itself—as though Kafka and Bauer had to work to the end of a symbolic problem to settle their affairs. Blanchot’s “therefores” are also interesting, because they show the way that Kafka interpolates cause and effect into what may be just preference. Both of these formal features support the idea that Kafka is looking for support from some unknown law of nature. But the three “answers” that Blanchot says Felice Bauer might give aren’t the only ones. First of all, the second answer, the one with the temporal hedge in it, isn’t really a separate possibility and isn’t really an answer. And there are two other possible semantic combinations that Blanchot doesn’t mention.

Kafka does consider the combination normal people would prefer, but it’s his worst nightmare, so I understand why Blanchot doesn’t bother with it. If Felice seems to think “It is possible, and therefore I want it,” then Kafka tells her, “You lack true insight into my wretched personality, disregard my confessions” (Letters to Felice [ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth; Schocken Books, 1973], March 6-7, 1913; p. 215). If she thinks it’s possible, she doesn’t know him, so it’s impossible. The second non-answer, the one that decides “only for the time being,” only waits for the first, pragmatic possibility to come about: “you . . . may think that at some time I might yet turn into a useful human being with whom a steady, calm, lively relationship would be possible. If this is what you think, you are under a terrible misapprehension” (Kafka 215). These answers are only the other side of the other thing that sensible people think, “It is impossible, and therefore I do not want it.” That formulation is better than “Possible/Want it” because if Bauer were to think it, at least her observation would be credible, she’d be talking about the right person. That’s why Kafka keeps thinking that this must be what she really wants to say. And, although he hopes that she may want it because it’s impossible, that seems like too much to hope for, and would also leave him in the situation of wanting her to want it because it’s impossible, even though this would mean her commitment to a life of misery; that she can say it doesn’t mean she should say it. She would have to be actually unable to say anything else, i.e., be persuasively as hopeless, as incapable of anything better, as he is . . . which strains belief. So, Blanchot’s answers--negative/negative (waiting/not answering) and negative/positive—and one other, the worst, positive/positive.

But logically, one side of the square is still missing: positive/negative, “It is possible, and therefore I do not want it.” Isn’t this one really the best, from Kafka’s perspective? It’s the only one that gets him off the hook, because if Felice isn’t motivated by compassion (something that worries him a lot), her judgment that “It is possible” would suddenly be credible. Being followed by nothing, it would bring no ethical anxieties about her future; and being non-utilitarian, Felice would be joining him in “a relation of strangeness” (Blanchot 275) that couldn’t be perceived as calculation. Kafka would be validated and free. He practically instructs her to say it: “And now, dearest, take me as I am, but don’t forget, don’t forget to throw me out at the right moment!” (Kafka 216).

Image: Elena del Rivero, Les Amoreuses: Elena & Rrose, 2001

Post-Totalitarian

2007-12-17T22:18:00.000-08:00

Having taken a long time to get around to seeing Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se, Jie), and admiring some things about it, and wishing to acknowledge that it is not nearly as shocking as Zhang Yimou’s totalitarian Hero . . . nonetheless, the film is “post-totalitarian” in its affinities, for better and worse. Its legend is “We were so naïve.” This line is spoken by the heroine, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei) in reference to her participation in a student group of freelance “resistance” fighters. But the phrase belongs paradigmatically to the post-Tiananmen era (even though Ang Lee is from Taiwan: the film is about Chinese history, and the sentiment about the supposed naivete of Tiananmen has been repeated globally). She means that it was innocent for the group to have imagined that, as underfunded amateurs, they could succeed in assassinating Yee, a high official of the occupation government (Tony Leung). As she utters the phrase, she is being recruited back to action by a colleague and possible love interest from the former group, who tells her that three years before, they “were being watched” by a more established terrorist unit for which he now works: would she like another try at the assassination? This second attempt is even more “naïve” than the first, as it turns out that (being a more professional group, more susceptible to notice) they, too are being monitored, this time by the occupation government itself, and have little chance to accomplish their goal. The impression of globalized defeatism is supported by the casting of Tony Leung as Yee, since Leung, a citizen of Hong Kong, "enraged the human rights and pro-democracy camps by saying that it was right for the Mainland government to end pro-democracy protests with the June 4 crackdown" in the interest of stability ("Tony Leung Chiu-Wai claims he was misquoted regarding Tiananmen," Hong Kong Entertainment News in Review, December 19, 2002). Yet what’s not naïve, according to the film, is Wang's existentialist gesture, in the last minutes, of throwing her life away to protect the skin of the fascist Yee, who for the middle forty minutes has devoted himself to impressive sex with her. Given this, what does it mean that Reuters/Yahoo! News can locate the film’s “controversy” in the fact that “some [decry] it for being too long” while “others [are] critical of its graphic sex scenes”? Lee’s logic, and Reuters’, seems to be: you’re going to end up in the quarry anyway, so there’s more point to sacrificing yourself on the altar of good sex than of any political hope. Post-Tiananmen, we’re no longer naïve. We’re “post-totalitarian,” sophisticated enough to understand this. And to prove it, we are happy to show you Tony Leung’s testicles: that’s how sophisticated we are.

Image: from Xu Bing, Tobacco Project, 2000. For updates on the aftermath of June 4, see chinadigitaltimes.net

Ideology and the Infra-Thin

2007-12-12T21:36:00.000-08:00

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism (Oxford University Press, 1999) describes itself as a study of the emergence of a society that attempted to accustom itself to the pervasiveness of the Soviet state. With other histories of everyday life, it “shares . . . a focus on practice” (2) over ideational statement. This logic extends to the title of the book, in which “Stalinism” serves “as a shorthand for the complex of institutions, structures, and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the Stalin era” (3). The book's effort to register forms of life that express themselves in practices as much as in words and thereby to accumulate a more holistic sense of the experience of Stalinism, however, is immediately in tension with the idea of totalitarianism itself. Because “the state was a central and ubiquitous presence” in 1930s urban Russia, Fitzpatrick feels justified in “defin[ing] the ‘everyday’ for the purposes of this book in terms of everyday interactions that in some way involved the state” (3). But if the state was pervasive, as seems noncontroversial, then there should be no need for this restriction. If “an ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality—that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself” (Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology [Verso, 1989], 49), then everyday Stalinism would potentially reveal itself most in experiences that do not explicitly involve contact with the Soviet state. Poets engage this problem when they write in “dark times” about petty love affairs, window reflections, and the sky—such topics indicate neither evasion of the censors nor escapist imagination, but intent to document the inextricability of the political through the route of the hardest case. Even explicit ideologies of the imagination, such as Eugenio Montale’s claim that what was important about being a poet was that at any time, while standing in line at the post office, he was apt to think about something unconnected, some non sequitur (I promise to fill in this reference . . .), are remarkable for their assumption that in the twentieth century the occurrence of a disparate thought has become surprising. Since the zero degree of ideology remains amnesiac, the most unprepossessing exchanges that someone still feels like recording measure the “infra-thin”--Duchamp's term--distance between the interior and the limit of the state. (This returns us to the genius of photography and minimalism.)

Image: Andrei Tarkovsky, Myasnore, Polaroid; a view from his house in the town of Myasnore. More Tarkovsky Polaroids at film.guardian.co.uk

de Man/Foucault

2007-12-06T19:42:00.000-08:00

De Man dramatizes each text as a conflict between rhetorical and philosophical closure—a drive toward a relatively seamless account he was increasingly willing to call “ideology”—and unregulable excess, often figured as anxiety. A text’s allegorical operations—its attempts to retell its own foundering tale as a story about a foundering tale—never succeed in sealing off the extra, inconvenient knowledge of its participation in a greater discourse ("language") it cannot control. Like Foucault on power, de Man on language suggests that a text-system can't help knowing and revealing more than it wants to. Foucault’s claim that power is multiplicitous and de Man’s claim that texts inherently make available more than they can manage owe to Freud’s assurance that human beings “babble at our fingertips” when we don’t declare ourselves in denotation. While Foucault stresses the institutional forms that bring an episteme into being at a certain moment and support its persistence, de Man examines the linguistic strategies that try, and fail, to limit its interpretation; their relationship resembles that between history and historiography (Foucault’s realm is a superset of de Man’s). They share the assumption that descriptions of particular struggles for consolidation, whether within a period frame, a reception history, or a “single” text, bear consequence for future scenes. This assumption too descends from Freud's confidence that empirical instances of self-deception are pertinent to any understanding of self-deception: the language of the case study is compelling, revealing. A Lacanian structural analysis, in contrast, views interpretation mostly as a delaying tactic initiated by the malingering patient. It does not find the description of what language is up to particularly interesting, and even finds it actively counterproductive. So, Lacanian analyses figure change as a radical break, a sudden giving way—e.g., “going through the fantasy”—whose explanation is beside the point; and they offer little to someone who wants to learn how and why doxa take hold, persist, and erode. De Man did not possess Foucault’s curiosity about many social, sexual, and political problems, nor his identification with excluded members of populations. But although he often plays the apparently small field of literary reception history, his model emphasizes, over the accumulation of a knowledge, the extent to which an alternative discourse is failing at any moment to be captured. De Man’s deconstructive anxiety, from this perspective, isn’t something to get over, an obstacle to development: unlike the deranging Real, it is always present in subtle ways, like a cool draft in a room, to indicate where discourse is pressing against or filtering through a knowledge, where something is continuously happening. In de Man’s narrative the investigator is difficult to surprise, because work is done little by little, through observation and tenacity, and the process furnishes its own ethic and justification. But if both de Man and Foucault keep peering at the places where something registers, and wondering why it registers just there, neither, maybe, came up with a model that quite answers the question . . . .

Image: still from Stan Brakhage, The Text of Light, 1974

Michel, Marcus, and Self-Exhortation

2007-12-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

Foucault typologizes some kinds of ancient texts attending to moral self-maintenance in “Self-Writing,” a fragment of his project in the genealogy of ethics (History of Sexuality, Uses of Pleasure, The Care of the Self). Foucault ends by making a distinction between hupomnemata (reading-journal entries, miscellanies for one’s own reperusal) and accounts of oneself in letters to another: in the latter, “it is a matter of bringing into congruence the gaze of the other and that gaze which one aims at oneself when one measures one’s everyday actions according to the rules of a technique of living” (Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol 1, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: New Press, 1997], 221). On the way, he quotes an interesting letter from the youngish Marcus Aurelius to his mentor Fronto which may bear comparison to the genreless journal writing by Walter Benjamin that interested me last summer (September 16, below):

I slept somewhat late because of my slight cold, which seems now to have subsided. So I spent from five a.m. till nine partly reading some of Cato’s Agriculture and partly writing stuff that wasn’t quite as awful, thank God, as yesterday. Then, after paying my respects to my father, I soothed my throat, I won’t say by gargling—though the word gargarisso is, I believe, in Novius and elsewhere—but by almost swallowing honey water and spitting it out again. After easing my throat I went off to my father and went with him to a sacrifice. Then we went to lunch. Guess what I ate? A little bread, although I saw other people stuffing themselves with beans, onions, and herrings full of roe. Then we worked hard gathering the grapes, and worked up a good sweat . . . .

Then I had a long talk with my little mother sitting on her bed. . . . I would ask “What do you think Fronto is doing right now?” and then she would ask “What do you think Gratia is doing?” So while we were . . . arguing about which of us loved one or the other of you more, the gong rang, meaning my father had gone across to his bath. So we had dinner after bathing in the oil-press room, I mean, we didn’t bathe in the oil-press room but after we bathed we had dinner there, and we had fun listening to the peasants giving each other a hard time. After that back home, and before rolling over to snore, I get my task done and give my dearest of masters an account of what I did today, and if I could miss you more, I’d be even more consumed.

The best of health to you, my Fronto, wherever you are, my honey-sweetest, my beloved, my delight. How are things between you and me? I love you, even though you’re not here. (Quoted in Foucault, “Self Writing,” 220; Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninius, trans. A.S.L. Farquharson, ed. R.B. Rutherford [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989], 127-128; trans. modified)

If Foucault has The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in mind as a counterpoint, the contrast couldn’t be starker. Meditations is, weirdly—weird even if this was a convention--written in the second person, as a series of self-exhortations as from some other self: “Let not the future trouble you” (VII, §8); “Provided you are doing your proper work it should be indifferent to you whether you are cold” (VI, §2); “Whenever you are obliged by circumstances to be in a way troubled, quickly return to yourself” (VI, §11). There is also a prominent and always adversial “they”: “Endeavour to persuade them, but act even if they themselves are unwilling” (VII, §50); “See that you do not feel to[ward] the inhuman what they feel to mankind” (VII, §65). Self-exhortation is always already self-defeated, running behind a discouragement that has settled into the bones. The fundamental repeated sentiment, “Get yourself together!,” can’t be issued without splitting the self that is being exhorted to be together. Love of nature, interiority, self-knowledge, ipseity, are exposed in their tattered condition by this self-help mode, whose “desire to cheer yourself” (VI, §48) would seem to be based on the fear of the meaning of one’s wants. If Marcus’s Meditations can be excused by their being written during the hard campaigns against Germanic tribes of ~A.D. 170, when “Keep going!” was a military as well as psychological thought, we should also ask exactly what kind of excuse that is supposed to be. In those circumstances the will to keep going may be what we need less of, despite the ritual praise Marcus’s English translators give him for persevering, “for many years of his reign,” in “unproductive and exhausting" campaigns that were defensive in origin, but punitive and colonizing in their long-range goals. Karl Kraus notes that when it follows an interested social path, the will to self-sacrifice comes oddly easy: “Standing in line, for example, is great fun. People practically stand in line just to stand in line” [The Last Days of Mankind, ed. and trans. Alexander Gode and Ellen Wright [New York: Ungar, 1974], 36).

To an even greater extent than Foucault indicates, the letter to Fronto has little to do with that. It records efforts and submits itself to the thrill of a daily report to an intimate, but not only efforts are reported. Its rhetoric depends on the inclusion of irrelevant and physical details that would appeal only to someone by definition interested in “everything,” i.e., a beloved who would be amused to guess what Marcus ate for lunch and who would appreciate his every gesture, even the sniffling and the snoring so smoothly confided here. (In the previous letter Marcus had offered, “I am certainly a man of a generally runny-nosed tendency” [Rutherford 127]). Therefore nothing is scratched out or pre-censored. The dead grammatical end of bathing in the oil-press room stands, and we have to make a U-turn to get out of that scene. It’s the kind of mistake you can make in a realm where there are no real mistakes, as when it’s OK to walk in on a person naked, and the pleasure has already been taken by the time the apology is given. The point is really, “I could tell you if I took a bath with my mother in the oil-press room.” “I won’t use a slang word like GARGLE. Oh, did I just say GARGLE?” All of these extensions and retractions are verbal ways of putting the honey-water in his mouth and spitting it out again, where the thought of his interlocutor provides the honey flavoring. “Congruence with the gaze of the other” is a way of putting it, but there is also exhibitionism before the other’s glance, and most importantly the transformation of everyday events by a relation that is not so much a technique for living as a way of investing with interest even the parts of life that would seem not to contribute to any narrative, any ideal or useful good. Without that, we don't feel like working, even on ourselves. The self-exhortations of the older Marcus are prosthetic in comparison; the second person of the Meditations suggests, amid the promotion of self-relienace, a taxidermic vestige of that other who would make life worth living.

Image: Bruce Jackson, Foucault at the ruins of columns from an old bank, University at Buffalo, 1971.

p.s. Foucault is the only figure I’ve ever dreamed about. He was the life of the party, overmuch so, and he wanted to be loved.

Terror of Ultimate Value

2007-11-30T01:48:00.000-08:00

Marx compliments De Quincey for perceiving that subjective value is the central reality of political economy, while noting laconically that his “dialectical depth is more affected than real” (Theories of Surplus Value [1863], Chapter XX, §3c). Affectedness and depth are pretty much inextricable in TDQ, as his more experienced readers know, but Marx is right if he means that De Quincey indulges the sensationalism of dialectics. He wallows in the psychology of its extremes. De Quincey’s main subject in The Logic of Political Economy (1844) is less economic law than the vertiginous effect of its exigency. That exigency touches just one place, where it creates the wound of subjective price.

De Quincey’s solution to the unwieldiness of “use value” and “exchange value” is to configure in their place two kinds of exchange value, “affirmative” and “negative” value. Affirmative value (“U”) is the maximum the buyer will pay for what the object does for her subjectively; negative value (“D” for “difficulty”) results from circumstances such as “difficulty of attainment” (26) or the going rate of labor power. To put it another way, U is “what good it will do to yourself,” while D is “what harm it has done to some other man” (47). For what we can have at a market price or less, we don’t need to pay more, no matter how much we like it; and what we don’t value affirmatively to some degree, we won’t buy at all, no matter how cheap it is. “It is rare that the whole potential utility value is exhausted by the cost or difficulty value. But the inverse case is monstrous: D can never outrun U by the most fractional increment” (30).

The external forces of D are usually operative, so that U doesn't have to reveal itself entirely. But an economic sublime opens under one's feet when the market no longer protects the consumer from naked need: “Instantly, under these circumstances, U springs up to its utmost height. But what is the utmost?” (27). What will you pay, De Quincey knows, is a traumatic question for the buyer who takes it literally, not only because the answer might be “Everything” but, more importantly, because no matter what the answer is, on the other side is certain loss. This principle drives the plots of film noir and gangster capitalism. It doesn’t matter that the answer “fluctuates with the feelings or opinions of the individual” (54)--that ten minutes later, you might pay much less; the answer of the moment is what is owed. Bargaining and gambling move through deceptions, false answers, because the proffer of the true answer is beyond dealing—it turns toward the exigency that ends all deals, an exigency all the more painful for depending on another person’s arbitrary power. So, De Quincey explains that Theophrastus describes a “knavish friend” whose knavishness consists in just this, that he answers queries about a commodity’s price by returning the question, What will you pay? (86-87). TDQ comments: “Scamp seems to have the best of it: their benefit from the article could not be affected by the terms on which he had acquired it” (87). Price for De Quincey, then, “instead of being founded on [the object’s] cost, (or the resistance to its reproduction,) is founded on its power” to realize a purpose for the buyer, even if that purpose is objectively pointless, “pernicious, or even destructive to the user” (80). Here De Quincey writes as the addict who understands the exposure of the true extent of a subjective need as mortal confrontation. Pharmaceuticals, sex, and toys are prominent among his examples.

And so there is something terrifying about “What will you pay?” that is not to be found in “What does it cost?” We can feel this vertigo of value even in its miniature forms, when we step across the abyss to risk tiny losses on eBay and Priceline: only gamblers imagine they can get stronger from these little glimpses of death. In the 1980’s, when the game of lethal economic confrontation had some novelty to it, U.S.A. Today used to ask ludicrous poll questions: For $10,000 would you throw your dog out of an airplane? For $100,000? For $1,000,000? The paper presented these as statistics illustrated with a bar graph: 60% of Americans would throw a pet out of a plane for $10,000, 80% for $100,000, etc. In this form, “What will you take?” isn’t different from “What will you pay,” since it means “Will you pay X to get Y?” The board game Scruples was based on the same idea, with the amelioration that it was supposed to be fun to lie about it: if you could make your friends think you’d do it for $10,000, you could win a round and reclaim your reputation after—if you could still be believed. I remember an evening that ground to a pensive silence in Providence, R.I. because a friend and I discovered that we could not functionally play this game, to the bafflement of the people who invited us. Less because our scruples were perfect—we could play the game better when money wasn’t involved—than because the question, “What will you pay, you in particular,” is so invasive that Kantian scruples themselves appear as shelter from its stab. Statements like “I’d pay anything,” “I wouldn’t take anything,” and “I wouldn’t pay anything” take up morality as a defense against exposure to the threat of externally imposed loss (as does the Sadean version, “I’d do it for free”).

Image: Piero Manzoni, Line of Infinite Length, 1960

Two Truths Told to Adults

2007-11-28T22:10:00.000-08:00

An article I haven’t been able to get hold of promises to contemplate children’s literature’s obsession with lies—which is to say, adults’ obsession with children’s lies, in contrast to their own. Prepubescent children would seem to be the only group whose lies still possess transgressive power outside the courtroom. In “Two Lies Told By Children” (SE XII, 305-309), Freud assumes that the usual “serious mistake” is “to read into childish misdemeanors like these a prognosis of the development of a bad character” (309). Rather, in the case studies he reads, lies foretell an unhappy character, as they symptomize inadmissible love for and idealization of the father. Lies are not rational manipulations, but performances and disavowals that reflect irresistible passion and unbearable loss. That sheds light on Freud’s cases’ lies, but not on adults’ pervasive and pointed intolerance of children’s lying. The focus on character would suggest that in children’s lies adults repudiate their sense of their own moral damage; yet, people are rarely so disturbed by their own moral damage, and this hypothesis doesn’t explain the epistemic frenzy that suffuses the scene of the pre-pubescent lie. Michael Haneke’s Seventh Continent contains typical dialogue between mother and daughter: “Just tell me! I promise I won’t harm you,” the mother lies. This kind of line says: “Do you imagine that your small foibles and embarrassments can possibly shock me? I’m only bothered that you could think I’d be bothered. Your secrets are nothing we haven’t thought of a long time ago. Who do you think you are, the master criminal? And who do you think I am? You think I can’t handle the slightest disturbance?” To which the child’s lie says, No, you can’t handle the slightest disturbance. And If you could, you wouldn’t be asking me this.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Jason W.

Image: Yeondoo Jung, Three Brothers Riding the Rainbow Wave, 2005; photographs based on children's drawings at www.yeondoojung.com