Bartholomew Williams,

the unarmed African-American graduate student shot dead on Sunday night by Cal State San Bernardino campus police, showed "superhuman strength" as he struggled with them, according to police. If that sounds familiar, that's because superhumanity is a lot more common than has been thought. Roberto Laudisio-Curdi, an unarmed student killed by police in Sydney in October, also had "superhuman strength." A man on a stolen motorcycle who resisted arrest in South Carolina last September had "superhuman strength" too, although it seems to me that it was more to his advantage that he had a gun, which the deputy through superhuman strength of his own got control of. Last summer in Maryland, a guy in a shootout with police "held on to his gun" after being hit by a bullet, which led a police spokesperson to remark, "The PCP just provokes superhuman strength." And at about the same time, police in Georgia said that a delirious man that they arrested "had superhuman strength and admitted being high on bath salts." (See also State of North Carolina v. Jonathan Howard Norton, No. COA10–1544, June 2011.)

Superhumanity functions as subhumanity; it allows the nonhuman to be eliminated while releasing the perceiver from having to answer for seeing someone as nonhuman. Like last spring's "bath salts" hysteria itself, the phrase "superhuman strength" reflects police discomfort with mental illness--or even just "irrationality"--on the one hand, and with the unaccountable phenomenon of resisting arrest on the other. People who are on drugs or mentally ill are more often "resisters" by default, since they are less likely to understand what's happening. Laudisio-Curdi had taken LSD, stolen cookies from a store, and was not wearing a shirt when he ran away from police. The man in Georgia was "half naked" (i.e., not wearing a shirt) and delirious, and was an African-American waving a golf club around on a golf course. We don't know what Bartholomew Williams was doing or saying, but it has been called "irrational behavior." The two seriously violent incidents above (in SC and Maryland) involved actual armed criminals resisting arrest. In their cases, superhumanity is invoked to explain their choice not to give themselves up, making it sound less like an ability and more like an involuntary condition. (Police officers themselves never show superhuman strength, even when they're agitated by adrenalin in struggle; they show fortitude and tenacity--at least when they don't cut matters short by shooting.) From the perspective of the police, resisting arrest is necessarily irrational: they perceive irrational people as resisters, even if that isn't their intention, and resisters as definitionally crazed.

Since superhumanity is not an actually existing condition, I wish I could say that it was not an actual diagnosis. But its perception has been officially encouraged by medical examiners and emergency physicians. According to the LA Times, medical examiners started citing "excited delirium" as a cause of death in the '90s, usually to explain how someone had died in police custody. Civil rights groups have been objecting to it ever since. The language police use today attests to the institutionalization of superhumanity, even as Excited Delirium arose in the first place in the medical examinations of those already killed. "ExDS" has never been adopted by the DSM, but was formally accepted as a "syndrome" by emergency medicine in 2009. With the announcement of this formalization, Emergency Medicine News showed a color photo of a bleeding black man being held face down by at least nine hospital staff. Pointing out that "the syndrome is often only diagnosed on autopsy" and admitting that "no clear definition or cause exists," the article nonetheless argues that it will be good for patients' safety that police be made aware of the syndrome because it is a medical condition that can lead to death in and of itself. While the public assumes that people are dying from tasers, in other words, they are dying from their own syndrome instead, or at least in addition: "Prehospital ExDS should be presumed, the task force said, if a patient is disoriented or not making sense, constantly physically active, impervious to pain, has superhuman strength, is sweating and breathing rapidly, has tactile hyperthermia, and fails to respond to a police presence [my italics]." Emergency physicians and medical examiners have almost as much of a conflict of interest here as police officers do, being liable for or pressured by official abuse respectively, and the circularity of their logic is telling. The list of symptoms fits precisely over the symptoms of undergoing police restraint itself, and resisting arrest is expressly associated with superhumanity. That something as figuratively vague, not to mention literally nonexistent, as "superhuman strength" could ever find its way into professional medical discourse is damning in itself. Part of superhumanity is being "impervious to pain," which explains why someone would continue to struggle even after being tasered a dozen times--once you've disallowed the thought that they are enraged because they are being tasered, and therefore need a new explanation. But how could this imperviousness be shown except by continuing to resist? Another "potential clinical feature" of "ExDS," according to the newsletter, is "lack of tiring": a description that assumes observation during counter-resistance. Since resisting arrest also counts as "not making sense," the list of symptoms really reads: resisting arrest, resisting arrest, resisting arrest, resisting arrest. Worse than the circularity is the reversal, in which suffering pain becomes imperviousness to pain as long as there is someone there who refuses to credit it.

image: Dirck van Baburan, Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan,1623

What People Think

With script by Viet Le.

 https://vimeo.com/54107216

Death Race 2012

If you’re not voting in the Presidential election, you’ve probably been confronted with the strange desperation of an Obama voter who will not let go of your sleeve. This voter insists that you must vote for the President regardless of your analysis of the political situation and no matter what you think of his policies. This is remarkable, and hasn’t happened in quite this way before. Others have weighed up the reasons for voting for Obama or for anyone—again and again by now. The last thing I want to cogitate is why one should or shouldn’t vote for Obama or why one should or shouldn’t vote at all. I know and understand people on all sides of these questions. What I find worth reflecting on instead is why even raising the question is intolerable for a certain sector of Obama supporters.

If mass elections are always about coerced choice, more recently embracing the coerciveness itself as an index to reality has become a fetish. Apparently, a lot of Obama voters really believe that Ralph Nader supporters—Ralph Nader supporters—are responsible for the invasion of Iraq and its hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. 2,882,995 people voted for Nader, and about 118,990 civilians have died in Iraq so far. So every 24 Nader voters or so share between them the death of an Iraqi civilian. According to DOD, 11,473 Afghan civilians have died in Obama’s Operation Enduring Freedom through June 2012, and ~900 in Pakistan (meanwhile the government has narrowed what counts as a “civilian,” but never mind). In the calculus of the Obama voters, they are therefore responsible for less mass death than Nader voters. I’m filling in the details, but not exaggerating. I’m looking right now at a comments thread in Crooked Timber: “You have to consider the alternative. Last time people played this game we ended up with Bush for president and hundreds of thousands of people dead”; “bad as the Pakistani drone warfare is it can at least be said that . . . the number of casualties is lower than what [R]epublicans gave us. Pakistan can plausibly be said to have harbored Bin Laden”; “Obama’s horrible ‘drone war’ . . . is only a pale and wan reflection of Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq wars,” and so forth.

Projecting the actuarial logic, the commenters figure that they stand to be less responsible than non-voters if Romney is elected and bombs Iran. Romney is seen as a weapon of mass destruction that will be unleashed against the Middle East, abortion and other civil rights, the Supreme Court, and the poor. The immediacy of this threat is so real that it seems wrong to them even to think about not voting for the President whom they freely call an imperial “murderer”: “It’s about minimizing the number of infants who die of shrapnel wounds in their mother’s arms . . . . You’re not choosing between ‘no infants’ and ‘some infants’; you don’t get that choice this election . . . . How many infants dying of shrapnel wounds in their mother’s arms would it take for you to change your mind and vote for Obama?” Ignoring the difference between, let’s maximize it, 118,990 shrapneled infants and 12,373 shrapneled infants is cruel, “purist,” idealistic, jejune, isolated, superior, personal, privileged, and self-indulgent. It’s “monst[rous],” because it disregards a savings of 106,617 shrapneled to death infants.

I don’t know whether this group of Obama voters is unaware of the darkness of their implications or rather, as they claim, perfectly “O.K.” with it—as perfectly comfortable as you can be, that is, with a world that is “imperfect” (imperfect!). No one questions the form of reasoning that is being supported so strongly here, even more strongly than the moderation of civilian death, to the point at which no other valid thinking is acknowledged to exist. The crudely quantitative form of mass elections feeds dangerously into the degraded utilitarianism that provides their content as well. If there are two candidates and one will be elected and both are likely to preside over the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, it becomes self-evidently “silly” (silly!) to make civilian murder one of your main concerns: “You’re pretty much stuck with ‘less murder’ or ‘more murder.’” Although I think the position that the entire notion of ethical adequacy can be dismissed out of hand because it is moralizing also symptomizes the destruction of alternative ways of life (in fact, the very notion of “ways of life”) that has occurred, the inadequacy of the Obama voters’ language to the situation they describe is not only ethical and “symbolic.” It’s historical and effective. Rational choice-driven political realism of this sort is part of the formal apparatus integral to the worst, and I mean the worst, projects of human management in the last two centuries. It’s neither natural and inevitable, nor merely mental. It is neither synonymous with realism (political realism shouldn’t be allowed to stand in for all realisms, which are plural and divergent) nor with organization. Of course, not all its uses are equivalent. But that doesn't mean that the armature of rational choice is neutral and ahistorical, and therefore outside the realm of contention. Other types of realism and even other principles of bureaucratization are not equally compatible with the projects of mass death and the imperial foreign policy of the U.S.: without this kind of political realism, the others cannot easily be neutralized and assimilated. Without it, we can’t see mass state murder as “imperfect”; without it, mass state murder cannot be orchestrated.

Instead of being critical of the reasoning of WMD, experience of which ought to have showed us how to dissolve a coerced choice into a more thought-provoking field of observations and possibilities, the Obama voters believe they have found real WMD: the simple, binary existence or not of people who bomb over fake WMD. “A lot of people who would live happy and healthy lives, all over the world, if Obama wins in November will die if Romney wins. This is very nearly settled fact.” By constraining, even terrorizing, what counts as value, such formulations numb dissensus. A coercive security discourse arises around the threat of the worse violence and the stricter security discourse that awaits you if you ever leave the circle of concerned citizens. But the circle is policed not only by the threat outside, which there are a variety of ways to interpret and deal with, but from inside.

This group of Obama voters is regretful, even angry, about the outcomes of his policies but militantly unapologetic about their political realism. They insist that all that matters is what they think, and not what they think with. They draw the political line not regarding any “issue”—those, as we see, are all negotiable—but between themselves and anyone who asks questions about how they view the process. They conflate raising such a question with a personalist turn toward intentions, when the challenge is rather about the effects of their machinery. Perceiving the barrenness of the choice on offer, they point out and embrace its coerciveness as a kind of hygiene, superior because it offers no grounds for "feeling superior." They act like people who are relieved to have touched bottom. They respect themselves for having shed their illusions. They don’t see the historical connection between the political realism they are proud to be able to use and the infrastructure of the killing, nor why they can seem to others to be going around in a death spiral.

Image: from Alexander Kluge, The Patriot (1979)

This Running Water is Death

Screened at ACLA, March 31: http://vimeo.com/39390959

Following Up on the Double Negative

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"

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

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.

Soanyway River

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 satire, but in many ways Antonioni does hurry to establish the film’s “side” and shows 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 linked by what Antonioni portrays as an incapacity for thought. There’s no suggestion to see their 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. Live doesn’t only mean “express”; in the conditions to which Antonioni repeatedly returns, it usually doesn’t get to. He tries to register intransigent conditions without, like Hegel or Marx or Deleuze or Lacan in different ways, suggesting that life does or will necessarily burst out of of them. Frechette’s allusion to Marx, “People only act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that,” conveys that. 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,” was 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 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 over 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. The name selects 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. A shred of the actual, one of the many documentary elements of Zabriskie Point, the moment forms part of Antonioni’s analysis of the reality trip: a “blind spot,” if you want an impossible Real (cf. Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film [2006], 78). 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 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 from thirteen angles, how it would look if the developers’ modernist architectural paradise were blown up. 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 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 wish fulfillment. So anyway . . .

Within the plot, Halprin doesn’t have the leverage of 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 in the park refers back 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.



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

An Exaggerated Sense of Deprivation

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

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

"Free Speech" as Externalized Thought

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?

Zizek is Not Okay

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

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

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)

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