complicity, again

As the articulations against the regime of debt becomes more pronounced, it is perhaps worthwhile to dwell for a minute on those things entailed but not enumerated (in statistics and percentages) by this regime. The culture of debt and indebtedness differs vastly from the culture of  guilt as Schuld in postwar Germany, yet I would like to draw out some of these continuities in light of an ethical and affective position that has held sway (shall we say, following the clinamen) since those times. Such a continuity is not, it should first be remarked, historical. Historically, and philosophically (with Nietzsche) there are other ways to track this conjuncture of debt and guilt marked otherwise with German Schuld. And these historical markers indicate that--of course--debt and Schuld and guilt all have specific contexts and contextual differences, But I would argue that there are a couple of (however jagged) lines connecting postwar guilt/debt to today`s version. These connections have been made, from Deleuze on, through the figure of the man-in-debt. On the side of guilt, however, it has been easier to renounce indications of this affect (as if we could file bankruptcy), as if guilt were merely voluntary or the effective mechanism of bad conscience. According to these ideas, guilt is an ethical problem, one which could be corrected by cognitive behavorial approaches to psychology. Of course this is not what Deleuze and Guattari intended when they renounced the validity of Freud`s findings about guilt. In Anti-Oedipus, they describe the function of Oedipus: ``The paranoic father Oedipalizes the son. Guilt is an idea projected by the father before it is an inner feeling experienced by the son. The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting as if things began with the child`` (275). The point about whether guilt is first an ``idea projected`` or a ``feeling`` establishes as primary the relative indistinction between guilt and complicity, between the ``feeling`` or ``sense`` of guilt and its ``projected idea.`` Exactly here, because nowhere else is it more clear: complicity expresses the contorted roles of the theater of cruelty which defines the notion of debt--the triad of voice, body, and eye--and does not ever allow these roles to be distilled from one another. There is no spectator who is not also a voice and a body--and this fundamental constellation of multiple relations within oneself is also always construed through personification.

It is important to understand that complicity entails this entire nexus--that perhaps it is a term that contains the double meaning of German Schuld because it involves the idea of the guilt of existence, of surviving, and the temporal structure of debt requires one`s permission for the extraction of one`s own labor. The fundamental aspect of this complicity--its self-destructiveness--is what is ultimately disavowed by those who claim that capitalism is the reality, the lesser of evils, the only viable economic system. The contradictions of this yet to be realized self-destructiveness call up not only as the ``cracks`` of higher ups, indicative of the ``time`` of revolution, but as signs of the weary resolution of those for whom revolution is imperceptible--the tense crumbling of regents` meetings and public lectures, Chancellor Linda Katehi`s deafening walk of silence, and images of onlooking police officers called in to raid occupy sites. These signs of the thoroughgoing self-destructiveness of the economic policies are not recognized by those involved. Instead, such self-destructive is experienced and felt as complicity. Being ``implicated`` has become the one sure sign that one is still alive, still ``there`` in the big sense, within the system.

It is precisely this feeling of aliveness that can be challenged through a comparison with the postwar regime of complicity. There, we can see how those who dwelt in the contradictions of these multiple positions--the voice, body, eye--took up in addition to the question of resistance (the political question of how to remain opposed, to remain an enemy of that which extracts you from your life) the question of what to do in the aporia of a subjectivity that no longer turned  into an objectivity, the collapse of disinterested liking. The question of how to ``refuse`` the system includes the problem of how to create a space for the experience of common, or universal, or objective feelings. This is the problem that occupied postwar thinkers, such as Adorno, Brecht, Bachmann, and Arendt, and it is one that continues to occupy others, such as Zehra Cirak, Denise Riley, Tiqqun, and Rosemarie Trockel, working to become unimplicated from the paradigm of postwar complicity that persists in our assumptions about what counts as effective ethical and political activity.

picture: Er-war-the, Juergen Walter (1984)

Unordinary Rain

Louis Althusser’s elliptical and unfinished book project, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” begins with a “semi-autobiographical” chapter, which I would just call it autobiographical, and then turns, at a later point, to rain. I am interested in this text for many reasons, not least among them its elusive autobiographical details, its fragmented and interrupted nature, and the end that it marks of a period of silence, at least of writerly silence. He begins in October 1982, writing “For, in November 1980, in the course of a severe, unforeseeable crisis that had left me in a state of mental confusion, I strangled my wife” (Philosophy of the Encounter: later writings, 1978-1987, 164). The essay that is included here as what the editors call the core of his ideas about the materialism of the encounter, “Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher,” was written during a period of rehospitalization, from June to July 1986. He begins:

"It is raining.

Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain.

Malabranche wondered ‘why it rains upon sands, upon highways and seas’, since this water from the sky which, elsewhere, waters crops (and that is very good), adds nothing to the water of the sea, or goes to waste on the roads and beaches.

Our concern will not be with that kind of rain, providential or anti-providential.

Quite the contrary: this book is about another kind of rain, about a profound theme which runs through the whole history of philosophy, and was contested and repressed there as soon as it was stated: the ‘rain’ of Epicurus’ atoms that fall parallel to each other in the void…"

The rain that he goes on to detail is the rain of Lucretius’ atoms, the “’rain’ of the parallelism of the infinite attributes” (167). In particular, he is discussing the moment of breaking from this parallelism: the instance of the swerve, the presence of the clinamen, and the non-anteriority of meaning. It is only in the matter of a few lines that the book goes from being about ordinary rain to being about unordinary rain. “Before all else” it is “about” ordinary rain, but “quite the contrary,” it is also “about” another kind of rain. What indeed holds these rains in common? At first Althusser seems to dismiss from consideration the impact of the rain, that is, the meaning of the rain as it pertains to where it falls, i.e. “providential or anti-providential.” But in fact, this point returns in his discussion of the parallelism of atoms in a void, for it colors the impression of the void with this determination that falling lands upon something. His point is to foreground the role of contingency over necessity, and to counter the long history of the rewriting of the materialism of the encounter as the “ideal of freedom” (168). For Althusser, the materialism of the encounter, the “swerve,” contingency, has been “interpreted, repressed, and perverted” into a moment that requires, rather than produces, its opposite. The subordination of contingency to necessity always results in an idealization of freedom. The import of the dynamics at play in this moment—in the difference between Althusser’s mode and the mode that he finds elsewhere—is their relation to political activity. Everywhere it is implied that this is the stake. The production of the ideal of freedom is equal to depoliticization, and describes how acts of depoliticizing occur as acts of rewriting—how the contingent encounter becomes a necessity, in the process evacuating all of the particulars of the contingency of their political content. I am thinking of arguments about how, for example, the history of resistance literature has become rewritten as the history of prison literature, but there are many other ways to think about how discourses that take “freedom” as an ideal actively work against political activity. Althusser’s insistence on the originary and non-derivative nature of the swerve involves a figure of transformation that is non-compulsive, that mandates nothing, including change.

The introduction and retraction of “ordinary rain,” the figure which begins this fragment of his thought, resembles this operation. “Before all else,” he will go on to say, there is “nothing,” and nothing is also the whole, the entirety of all that there is (it is why Spinoza, for example, begins with god and not with the world or with man). Wishing to let the book be “before all else” about ordinary rain, about the “accomplished fact” of the rain, Althusser can only observe this rain, a sign of an world outside the hospital. The question that arises about ordinary rain, of whether it is “good” or “bad,” depending upon where it falls, is one that does not matter for the type of unordinary rain that Althusser goes on to say this book is really “about.” Still, this question which has first been raised only to be dismissed, lingers in the text. The question of providentiality becomes one of how fleeting encounters can become lasting, indeed how durability and perseverance can and cannot be assured simply by the “reality of the accomplished fact.” He writes, “Nothing guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability.” The statement is not merely negative, that durability cannot be guaranteed by reality, by the fact that something has happened. The rain, for example, will stop. “Nothing,” “ordinary rain,” that which comes “before all else,” makes a guarantee; it establishes the relation between contingency and necessity, the non-equivalence between “reality” and “guarantee,” by making itself the subject. “Nothing” can only take place as the subject, however, by containing an internal difference between providentiality and anti-providentiality, one which announces the political being of the subject, its usefulness, its capacity to be used by others. Rain, raining.

picture: Patton Place, bien sur.

collaborate

In A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey formulates several fallacies of literary criticism, which detail problems with contemporary reading practices. The point of identifying these--the empirical, normative, and interpretive fallacies--is to make a distinction between the modes of textual consumption and production, and this distinction amounts to an anti-Platonic materialism that nonetheless seems to maintain an idea of substance. In the section "Positive and Negative Judgment," Macherey writes, "Because it is powerless to examine the work on its own terms, unable to exert an influence on it, criticism resorts to a corroding resentment... Both the "taste" which asks no questions and the "judgment" which dispenses with scruples are closely related. The naive consumer and the harsh judge are finally collaborators in a single action" (18). The complicity between "naive consumer" and "harsh judge" that Macherey asserts has to do, for him, with the intent that both have in regarding a work. Here the tasteless and the tasteful, otherwise polarized to all appearances, conspire. Whether to regard and evaluate the value of a work, or to consume and own it, the act is one and the same on the basis of how little object remains to the object after this exchange is complete. The psychological correlate of this process, resentment, exhibits a quality of "corroding" similar to the damage we can imagine is done to the object. But on what terms can we regard the carrying out of an action to the same effect as a collaboration? Would they not just be unwitting participants who whose coincidence is rather just that, a chance? Their common disregard for the object turns to resentment when it is not able to know the work "on its own terms," and this seems to indicate such an option is foreclosed when something like neglect, on the one hand, and principled interests on the other, overtakes our capacity for relating to a work. Resentment seems to come in when these dynamics of relation fail to produce something that could be called having "an influence" on the work. Similar questions occupied Ingeborg Bachmann in her 1960 lectures on poetry. How do we look at a work of art without taking on these roles, without resentment?

picture: pair of dice, MOCA, from the exhibit pieces from the current collection 2008. photo taken by Rebecca Ellen Bowden.

Aleatory

In "Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event," Lauren Berlant searches for a way to talk about what she calls the "historical present." She argues that the present has undergone some serious neglect and defamation in theories that prioritize the past, the future, or that mark the present as simply an effect of these pasts and futures. Instead, her theory of the present is one that also argues for a notion of "embeddedness," in contrast to structure or agency. Berlant's argument for a strong, substantive third is unmistakable--that is, for the substantiality of an alternative option. Perhaps this is what I have been struggling to describe in posts and project-beginnings since the more or less formal completion of my dissertation, a work which, I must add, I'm still sorry to be done with, even as I realize that being done only means that I must also pick it up again and continue along. Since it seems that being "done" means that the anticipated liberatory feeling of being able to now write about anything has actually been experienced as not that.

The third, as it occurs in Berlant's work, is an argument for ongoingness, one that could be seen to complete with Brodsky's argument for building, as the equal meeting of theory and praxis in technology. These are, however, different forms of materialism. Berlant writes, "But Cayce is no modernist flaneuse: the aleatory is a professional style by the time of Pattern Recognition" (857). Referring to William Gibson's 2003 novel, Berlant implicitly compares the protagonist here with Lila Mae Watson in the other novel she discusss, The Intuitionist (1998). In the time of five years, then, and given the crises to which Berlant also refers, namely 9/11, the mode of sensory detection inhabited by Lila Mae has become something not just to make a profit on (Berlant suggests that Lila Mae's profession turned non-profitable at the point where she experienced the crisis), but to make a career out of. Berlant does not emphasize or discuss this point, but sees professionalization as an outgrowth of an earlier mode of inhabiting the present, and indeed of seeking ways of theorizing, although not actualizing, utopia. Such a career based on the style of the aleatory, however, is perhaps a way of returning to some of my earlier thoughts on Fatih Akin's films. Here, the first word that came to mind was "aleatory," "dependent on chance," in particular the notion as it occurs in Althusser, as "aleatory materialism," the materialism of the encounter. What Berlant reminds me of, even as she discusses the move into professionalism of a mode that is attached to chance, is that embeddedness has a price, at least, as the story goes.

picture: San Diego Zoo, built chimpanzee environment (eternal present)

addendum

Right, preliminarily, I would say that Akin's coincidences are obscure (reading Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009]).