"Maybe, I prefer a bit of muddle to the use of a gadget."

This title quote comes from Paula Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," about which I have been thinking and writing. After making the above statement, she rescinds it, writing, "I must contradict my last sentence. I do not like muddled thinking at all, although I am guilty of it only too often as just now. I meant to express my strong dislike against introducing any gadget into the psychoanalytic relationship. I probably should not be able to handle it correctly" (339). The quick distance Heimann takes from the "muddle"--it's only there to illustrate a kind of option that might represent a state of not having the "gadget" (the "gadget" in question, a tape recorder)--is something I'd like to think about. But the impulse to ask a question about status of the muddle in relation to the gadget also opens immediately into the problem that such a question is, as Winnicott writes, "not to be formulated" (Playing and Reality 17)* and yet: does the renunciation of the muddle take place because it is already too much like a "gadget"--too much of a thing that can be applied to thinking--or because it operates as a kind of fetish, and so threatens to expose a space that might indicate the absence of method in psychoanalysis?

What is interesting to me about Paula Heimann's term "children-no-longer" is that it clearly locates the adult in relation to a state now passed; in contrast, "grown-ups" suggests having one's sites on the movement forward. Philli, the other day, talking about her feeling that it would be "impossible" to grow up, for example, that it "would take so long." The "grown-up" who knows the other side of this feels the pressure to "grow up" in his/her various ways. The pressure to do so is in every place; even when it is not clearly ideological, as in professionalization, or in determining one's identity, it is there, perhaps simply, as time.

The child-no-longer has no better method than anyone else for getting through the day and the way it throws up, at every juncture, something that needs to be gotten through. But since these forms of mediation appear socially, they seem to require a facility with method--with something, I think, that we think of as providing a procedure or process for getting through. It's, I suppose, obvious why "method" is posited here. Or why the question of method is so firmly lodged in the junctures. Conversations in the recent panel I took part in at the ACLA, "From Extraction to Exhaustion" repeated these questions--something like, what if you move backward into rather than forward from/with method? Maybe it's not spatial (backwards) or regressive but one thing to contend with, on the one hand, is the feeling that it is; on the other hand, it registers in the feeling of not being included in the any of the movements are are pushing forward, coming into being. There, the psychotic aspect of the "child-no-longer" comes into play, in the feeling of having hallucinated oneself into the story about how something has come to be.

Today in the bi-weekly installment of a reading group that I've been taking part in on financialization, led by Miranda Joseph, we were joined by Leigh Claire La Berge, who has written about literary aspects of abstraction and representation in relation to finance, and I felt like this conversation somehow took place for me in the above framework, roughly sketched out. Here, the conversation was explicitly about method and interdisciplinarity, proposing the mediation of various dualisms, such as form/content, or abstract/concrete, or representation/reality, as the work to be done (does the child play and not work simply because it is not required to muster the same kind of energy just to keep things going, to maintain the capacity to set things in motion at every instance?).

So I think the question raised for me here--after a day like today, a day that felt like a continuous hallucination of myself into forms of being that no longer count me in, or that have counted me dead, in various ways, which is a very intensely narcissistic thing as well--is why I'm always lingering in these spaces, from which it feels like others have passed on through, or if they haven't, they are aiming to? Or it's this idea of myself as doing so that I can't let go of. But if the insistence on that is not pathological but rather a part of one's being a child-no-longer, does it mean it's a state that you can continue to hold, even though it's dead to others--dead to those who have moved on to other terms, to fields and disciplines where the stakes require justification on other terms? Why, or in what situation, do we see the dead things behind as "everything"--the everything we want to bring along with us--and not the "nothing"? This was a question that arose for me in Michelle Cho's lovely talk, "Genre Worlds," and in the discussion that followed. Here, I lose a sense of what I'm talking about because I'm talking about so many levels, and for much of the time of the talk all I could be aware of was the way that the room like a space of total loss, giving rise to a very acute feeling of suffocation, a form of the feeling of not making it through. That's what it was, anyway.

Winnicott, who discusses the importance it being a "matter of agreement" not to ask and thus decide whether something was found or created, and yet that's always the demand that method makes, to determine this in some way. I wonder if the feeling that going "back" and trying to pick something up is painful comes not so much from one's encounter with reality (i.e. that whatever it is that is being picked up is not "there") but from being compelled to make this choice between what is found and what is created (which is just as unfathomable as the "impossibility" of growing up).

In object relations, this would be the pain associated not with the destruction of the object, but with pain affecting the ego, the "narcissistic hurts" suffered in time. Looking back on this formulation in Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," it's notable that the description of "narcissistic hurts" comes up when she is talking about the difference between the "regressed" person and the state of original childhood. She writes, "The regressed person, adult or child, suffers from a breakdown of advanced functions, suffers from destructive processes affecting developmental achievements. This implies narcissistic hurts, wounds to self-esteem, shame, a sense of being let down by oneself, failure in many respects" (335). These "hurts" or "wounds" or "shame" seem to point to the vulnerability that the ego must always feel, on the edge of its own destructiveness, as Freud describes, as a border-animal, a Grenstier, whose method, though it might be perceptible to others in this kind of retrospective glance, is nothing other than a kind of hugging to oneself of something--a piece of "time" frozen, an otherwise nothing--about which you have not been compelled to choose, I found it/I created it.

Such was the view out/of the window today in Walter 101: against the backdrop of the fallen classic grandeur of the building of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which is in the middle of being torn down and so boarded up, an April snow large-flaked and gusty. And there continues to be something about the snow--about the way that I experience it as an enclosure (or the perceptibility of an enclosure) close to the form of an embrace--that seems to lend itself to imagining the afterlife of dead letters, those objects that continue to transmit their messages, as falling down to earth.

*Winnicott's passage reads: "Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated. (Playing and Reality 17; italics in original)

Note: As always, a form of working through with RT. So much also moves from the totally moving series of conversations had around what is found/what is created with RP, CC, and AL in the Spring 2016 course "Psychoanalysis and Lit II"; this, in turn, was found/created in "From Exhaustion to Extraction" and continues to converse there, after the conversing is past.

Picture: Still from Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life (1998).

cruel attachment and negative preference

In a recent lecture, “Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism,” Miranda Joseph disputed with the celebratory revival and appropriation of Bartleby; seeking a subject that was more “neither/nor” (neither capitalism nor revolution), a subject that is theorized following the terms of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” Jospeh opposed Bartleby’s negative preference with Berlant’s idea of negative attachment. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant also references Bartleby:

           

Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived immanence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. (28)

I also think there is much to be critical of in the elevation of Bartleby as a figure of political resistance, and yet I think that the figure of Bartleby raises more questions than it answers about political subjectivity. To begin with, then, the primary question raised by Bartleby is the question of what it means to prefer. The story of Bartleby never resolves the ambivalence about preference that some would read into it; rather, it sets in motion the problem of preference as a political gesture. 

In my reading, this problem is also explored in Hannah Arendt’s theory of proairesis, which precedes or informs the distinction between the social and political. I’ve described all of this elsewhere, highlighting preference not as a form of activity, but as a problem for activity. Rather than seeing how Arendt problematically divides these “realms,” I was focusing on how preference not only exposes assumptions about ideas of (political, revolutionary) activity, but poses the question about how these models are formed in the first place. The question of preference does so because, as Arendt spells out, it is an issue of proairesis, literally of pro-airesis, of a choice before choice. It thus occurs at the intersection of one’s political activity and one’s social status, at the intersection of one’s capacity to produce one’s identity or attitude or to be produced (structurally, logically, institutionally) as an identity. Tracing out the consequences of some of Arendt’s observations, I have described how that faculty, that capacity, is worthy of being seen in its own right, not merely as an extension of the idea that in spectating or observing (or in judging) we are already taking action, as Jacques Ranciere formulates, for example, in The Emancipated Spectator.

An important part of this conceptualization resides in Arendt’s formulation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” as something has the capacity to intervene in the social realm. This is an understanding of preference as pre-political that I think is important to rethinking reified notions of political action that are understood as revolutionary. But an aspect that I did not initially explore is the fact that this presentation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” emerges in the context of the issue of school segregation and interracial marriage. And here, Arendt’s insistence on identifying school segregation/integration and miscegenation as things belonging to the social realm rather than the political is clearly in error. 

In her book Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana UP 2014), Kathryn T. Gines argues that Arendt’s distinction represents a severe limitation in Arendt’s thinking about the Negro question (which also rests on her understanding of anti-Black discrimination as a “Negro problem” rather than a “white problem”) and that this has consequences for her ideas about representative thinking and judgment. Gines argues that these shortcomings can be seen in light of her presentation of the Jewish question and the ways that this question is extended, although not explicitly connected to the Negro question.

Seen from this perspective, it’s hard to read Arendt’s essay, along with her other discussions of the problem of race in America, as something other than emissions of a form of white privilege that is little different from white racists of the time, as Gines points to. To consider the concept of preference from this perspective, however, allows for a consideration not so much of how racism emerges through preference, as Arendt is arguing it should (and should freely be allowed to), all the while, of course, not being able to see the contradictions and discriminations (those private, interested things) that she was applying to the political (the realm that she believes should be disinterested, a reading that Gines also thoroughly exposes the contradiction of in terms of her response to James Baldwin, refuting “love” as a political emotion (extension of this in recent debunkings of dwyl (do what you love)).

Rather, the conjunction of preference (via Arendt’s explicit and implicit formulations of preference as something that has the capacity to intervene in the realm of the necessary) and race allows us to turn the way that the “white problem” rewrites as “choice” things that are always mediated by necessity, always mediated not only by the economic necessity or social, but by the way that these political, institutional, and structural conditions get coded or written as bodily necessity. In describing this process, I am following Denise Ferreria da Silva’s formulation of the way that the racial already marks a place for the rewriting of the body via cultural difference. Although it’s difficult with Arendt, and one wants to be very clear about her problematic assumptions and ideas, I do think that she, like Bartleby, provides not so much a model in which these issues are resolved as the kind of nexus in which they can be perceived.

What becomes interesting about this to me is the way that “choice” remains very much at the center, conceptually and otherwise, of the problem, contemporarily phrased, of the “post-racial” or of “racism with race” and also in the critical elaborations of this paradigm. I’m thinking, as I loop back around to where I began, of the way that this emerged in Miranda Joseph’s lecture. Although gesturing to some of the ways that the financial crises of 2008 and 2009 disproportionately affected people of color and also gesturing critically to the discourse of fiscal “responsibility” that drives the terms of debt under capitalism, Joseph’s terms for understanding the problem of debt remain the problem of an “entrepreneurial” subject, a subject, who, as Arendt figures the black parent in “Reflections,” is “involved in an affair of social climbing” (194). Arendt’s whole point—that “free choice” be upheld—is discredited by the fact that segregation is not the same as forcing parents “to send their children to an integrated school against their will” (212). But her point remains important, abstractly, because it is this same version of “free choice” that remains powerfully imbedded in liberal desire.

Joseph highlighted this dynamic at the end of her talk when she identified the way that the desire for quality education and safety fuels middle-class decisions about home-ownership, namely by buying one’s distance from racialized poverty. What I thought was interesting about this conceptualization was that Joseph returned to Berlant’s problem of attachment as a way of talking about this very complex dynamic, in which the desires of white parents about the choice of associations can be seen not to produce race (as Joseph described) but to deploy produce a subject for whom raciality is something substantive, something essential.

My question, which has to do with how this complex dynamic could be understood, was recognized as a question about what constitutes this desire for distance from racialized poverty, and Joseph described (in terms that would also befit the parvenu) how African Americans that were showcased on Oprah’s “Debt Diet” were shown to also have the same desire, that is, the desire to distance themselves from their race, from racialized poverty. What is remarkable about this response is that the terms of “free choice” remain embedded even as the ideology of personal responsibility is brought into question. And it’s interesting that free choice emerges here, where race is identified by recourse to a projective structure (here, the Berlantian attachment to an object that inhibits one’s aims, that is produced as “other” and thus as “bad” or “cruel”) that seems capacious enough to include the “problem” of race as one of its possible “objects.” In this sense, Joseph’s slogan, to “seize the means of temporal production,” is even more explicit in its erasure of the inhering relationship between temporal production (the production of the entrepreneurial subject, for whom “choice” is a real possibility) and the production of others in space as racialized subjects. 

picture: Francisca Sutil, Mute 14 (2009/10)

Adjuncting Love

Recently, questions about desire and love have come out of the woodwork in conversations about graduate/adjunct labor, the work of academia, and intellectual occupations more generally. Meanwhile, student workers at the University of California are on strike protesting unfair labor practices. In the last five years, writing on the working conditions in California public education has been instrumental in communicating the terms of this struggle to those located within and without; the website Remaking the University and the blog/journal Reclamations are prominent examples of places where this writing is taking place. Even while not the explicit subject matter of this writing, the affective intensity of such work is evident here as well as in the on-the-ground organization, activism, and struggle that much of the writing work grapples with, describes, inspires, and responds to. Two recent examples of work that exhibits this affective intensity are "Why We are Striking," a document signed "some strikers, some friends," which puts forth the terms of the current strike at the UC over unfair labor practices; and Earl Perez-Foust's "Why Solidarity Is Important, or an Open Letter to UC Faculty," which addresses the importance of faculty members supporting the strike as a way of making conversations about the conditions of the academic workplace more transparent.

One thing about the intensity of this work that's worth noting is the way that it considers itself to be destructive, or it understands that this is its potential; this is to be understood in opposition to the do what you love ideology that allows the labor of academic work to go unacknowledged as such. While such a naive "love" is widely recognized as "too much," it also becomes quite clear, as Hannah Black describes in "You Are Too Much," that a model, or perhaps better, a narrative, of love that affirms the fitness of the object is long past. Black identifies the way that the model of heterosexual love is not only not available to those who don't identify with this narrative, but "how blackness or queerness or even being gendered female in a white male supremacist world can make it hard to accept love because you are encouraged from childhood to hate yourself." I'm extending her discussion about race and sexuality to academia, because I think that her central insight about love, that the choice we have about it is reserved for the attitude we have toward hate, poses something worthwhile for the discussion. As she finds, there are two positions indicated by the White Family: over-attachment (the maintaining of a belief in attachment as health, as figured in the overly attached girlfriend) and hate or destructiveness (being foreclosed from the narrative, refusing the narrative). Black writes, "For the White Family love is health, but for us love is at once a symbol of a possible future, a vanishing present, and the sign of the patriarchal white permafrost that threatens to destroy us. If we are ambivalent about love in its present form, it is only because, against the odds, we choose to feel something other than hatred."

We might export these two positions to the realm of academic labor: over-attachment or destructiveness. This invites a brief (as brief as possible) discussion of an essay that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elizabeth Segran's "The Danger of Victimizing Ph.D.'s." Her argument can be surmised from the subtitle, "No one but you is forcing you to accept low-paid adjunct work," and what's shocking about the piece (in addition to the fact that there's no mention of the "productive" ways that people at her former graduate institution are also, on the same day, attempting to influence the "labor market") is that there's no account of the complexity of "choice," as an instance of coerced volition in a narrative that's not just ideological, but "bad" psychology.

Segran's presentation of this choice ("Yet Ph.D.’s have the power to resist. They can choose to reject academe altogether and find satisfying work elsewhere.") and her valorization of professionalization (if you fail in being a professional academic, you just need to choose another field in which you can be a professional success) is laughable, perhaps, on certain days, at certain times, because the other side of what she presents is all that cannot be included in such choices, including the very idea of a "choice" as something that can be made "freely" by an individual. As 1970s Marxist feminism has shown, and as this article by low end theory also notes (thanks to Michelle Ty for the reference), choices, in particular about objects of love, are always also coercions. I keep dwelling on this insight, now outdated—perhaps too outdated to explain love now, but also, I suspect, not—in thinking about the close residence of love and hate and the role of destructiveness in love. For as much as Black writes against "love," she also gets that the joke about overattachment is not that funny: "One side of the joke — that a woman would have to be crazy to long for entry into a couple — is negated by the other — that a woman who can’t negotiate her way into a couple is crazy." Put otherwise: One side of the joke—that a PhD has to be crazy to long for entry into academia—is negated by the other—that a PhD who can't negotiate her way into academia is crazy. This ambivalence cannot be resolved by simply choosing another object to love, another profession, another .com identity.

At least, it's not a choice of the sort that I'd want to make. There's no "choice," for example, in some strikers, some friends' phrasing "Today’s strikers, tomorrow’s adjuncts." But there is something to think about in the continuity that is asserted between these positions, which are often seen as occupying different places in society: one, choosing to feel something other than hatred (i.e. choosing destructiveness) and the other, overattached, atomized, nostalgic, failed. The continuity is further asserted at the end of the document with the statement, "We are striking so that we do not end up like the fortunate ones."  In other words, I think, we are striking so that we don't have to be the professionals, the ones for whom choice is both a matter of production and consumption.

Although throughout grad school I resisted professionalization and I was a striker, it's taken me quite some time to see where this leaves me, outside of feeling like I am not a part of anything--too far from the UC (and from my life as a grad student) to be anything but a spectator and too alienated from the University of Minnesota (and my life as an academic) to do anything there. But the insidious component, which I've been trying to describe, is the way that my market failure has contributed to my feeling that I also am not worth enough to contribute to these conversations—the ones at the UC that I described above and read so avidly—as anything more than an overattached spectator. It's been harder to resist feeling like my lack of success on the job market is not tied to wanting "too much," harder to think in an un-atomized, de-individualized way about the plethora of rejection and nonadmittance to the institution.

In other words, it's hard to go from being a striker to an adjunct; it's hard to feel like overattachment is your fate (or that the White Family is) and to come up with a way to articulate a resistance to this structure of affective relations when your relation to the institution seems to affirm that fate. But what the continuity that is described by some strikers, some friends suggests is finally quite helpful for thinking about the very real reasons that are there for not wanting to count oneself as part of the "fortunate." For the Tenure-Track Professor and the White Family (and with the understanding that these are not social categories but upheld and often invisible ideals), there is no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about love, or perhaps better, there's always another reason to feel ambivalent about love, but perhaps too there's no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about one's love objects. In addition to the fact that this is "too bad," the loss of such ambivalence, of a relation to a loved object that does not involve the capacity to hold one's destructiveness, is a profound but perhaps less apparent price to be paid for professionalism.

--ing.

""Flight"": I think might be related to the question of if there can be desire without expectation. This question was posed (I think in this form, apologies to the former, if this is distorted) late in a long day at a bar called the Rush Inn (I heard "the Russian"), and at the end of a conversation about fascism and what forms the conservative revolution takes in the contemporary world. Flighting and fighting present a limit for thinking about natural instincts. It is kind of a fun and interesting thing to consider the world as sorted into them and divided by them and accordingly governed by them or their forces, more generally--but I think that what has been getting me recently not at all that I don't think about the problems with them, or that I don't think about the other things that could replace these naturalized instincts--fright, foresight, feint--but that I haven't been thinking long enough or in enough detail about the differences that emerge between flight and fight, between any of these things--what these things are, or look like, what their universe consists of--but this might be something like the tissue-thin experientiality of the hypnosee, the fantasy of immediacy. Is that the relation to desire and expectation?

flight

is something that works, seemingly, because otherwise you would fall. i think that my fear of flying is related to the idea that flying is merely not falling. animal spirits of flight or fight are among the associations i am having (especially now that beatrice the kitten is, along with choco the dog, one of the inhabitants of our house). but i am also thinking of a decisive moment in the film Journey to Kafiristan in which the choice must be made to travel on to India or to return to Switzerland at the outbreak of World War II. The one journeyer (and National Geographic Society journalist) continues, and wants the other, Annemarie, to continue with her. Annemarie replies that she thinks that they should return, to where they could be useful during the war. She asks the other woman, "But what if you don't know it's you who is turning the wheel?" But flight is clearly the choice of the other woman, who doesn't want to be "useful." I often wonder about the fantasy involved in such a choice. The idea that if you don't do either you would fall is not necessarily elaborated, since flight is, in one way or another, generally synonymous with fall. But not falling presents another question. Marx, for example, in "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation" (Chapter 26 of Capital I), makes an analogy between primitive accumulation and the original sin. The fall of original sin is supposed to account for the division of the world into good and bad, in the same way that primitive accumulation is supposed to account for the division of the world into lazy rascals and the frugal elite. Marx's insight is that primitive accumulation is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production, not its consequence. As "primitive," it is the pre-history of capital. The analogy with original sin is not played out, but Marx's critique of it implies that the myth of the fall (as with the myth of primitive accumulation) involves the type of certain uncertaintly that riddles the presentation of anything that, like flight or fight, seems necessary.

the last resort

has always seemed like a place, somewhere you could go, at least in your mind, if all other options seemed exhausted. i once met this very sad woman when i was selling my jewelry in ohio. she was not sad to the world; there she saw beauty, but the sadness was a tenor, red wine, wildly inexpressible. she told me she had gone to oberlin's bead paradise, not buying a thing. she said she wanted to wait for when she really needed it, when she didn't have anything left to go to. i don't remember her name. the earrings i made yesterday, three lines of batiked shell, are a part of the last resort. she told me not to change. i was 15 then. the earrings changed inevitably, but i think yesterday's she would like. the prescription not to change is perhaps part of the last resort, as is the sense that you can't choose to find yourself there. and it seems to remain to be a question about the illusion of choice, since once you're there, the sense is that you don't want to leave, even if it's the contradiction imposed by the situation that keeps you--the overwhelming sense that any choice you do make would be not the right one. As the title of one of Indian Jewelry's albums reads, "I hate it hear; i never want to leave." Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy), thinking about Spinoza, says it more dogmatically: "Individuals rarely "decide" in the strong sense of the term. What they mistake for their will is most often only ignorance of the passions which lead them to prefer certain actions to others."