bit by bit

The point being: to forget the object, or the terms of this object, and to pick it up again, after it has acquired a strange familiarity, which is the externality proper to itself. 

Does this psychoanalytical process of abstraction, following the determinations of the Real in object relations, suggest an alternate ontological figure for capitalism, as it's interesting to note that Toscano's reading of "real abstraction" takes the Lacanian real as real: "This ontology of real abstraction--which is inextricably political, historical, and economic--is, in Finelli's view, a dual ontology to the extent that it both affirms concrete reality as a 'specific articulation of differences' and reveals the void at the heart of Capital, as it were, as the fact of the Real of its abstraction--to speak in a Lacanian vein--is its absence of determinations, the fact that it has no historical or cultural content per se" (Toscano, "The Open Secret of Real Abstraction" 276). My reading of object relations permits thinking about a "real" that is not void or absence, though it too appears in this form. For if there it is the object's perspective that is the real--and all of the terms of inaccessibility that go along with this--then abstraction's connection to thought might also not be as Toscano describes in the Marxian schema, where "abstraction precedes thought," and as he qualifies, "More precisely, it is the social activity of abstraction, in its form as commodity exchange, that plays the pivotal role in the analysis of real abstraction" (281). 

Psychoanalysis loses grip of the way that abstraction is a social activity; it seems to immediately dispense with the idea of anything social, about activity. But if this all sits inside of the inaccessibility of the perspective of the object as a form of knowledge, if this is something like psychoanalysis's grounding of "knowledge" in the parameters of the irrational, it might mean something else for abstraction to precede irrational thought, for even if this is implied in the Marxian analysis of real abstraction, lingering in the phantasy world of real abstraction would imply a form of "knowing" somewhere between Winnicott's notions of relating and using. Impossible to sustain this perspective, which includes the "false" separation of psychic interiority from the "world," it is perhaps a way of thinking about the Real not as void, but as a space in which the Real is acquired, and acquired, as it were, bit by bit. 

Along these lines, the lines about forgetting the object, this is the very first post I made to this blog, back on Thursday May 3, 2007: 

where does a strange silence begin? some have suggested that it is in the forest, the sound that a falling tree makes when no one is around to hear. at times, for brecht, it's the talked-about tree that is the strange silence. A Strange Silence is the title of the project, my dissertation, the thing that everything here is a footnote to, especially the poems, since they are the leaves, what is left over.
from 4/4/07//:

and the green fall to unsafe water:welcome to the 21st century let not many other things be spared--save your happiness; this was Brecht's nightmare.Humanity, the human dog, wants to let go to forget, dismiss, judge, pee wherever it wants.a condition remiss, or a saying unheard.in the woods, we are all quiet; it is solace.and save to other things, too, save to find yourself alone. the distance is unmarked. cross-hatches are what i saw in the desert and didn't draw.the things nightmares are made of leave you with the distance of their unmarkings. becky's dreams are about writing (ask me how i felt when my mom died. it's a feeling i can't think of). i watch her grow.communism is short-lived. the brown notebooks are filled. you are always thinking of brecht. his return is unsettling, a time when autonomy in writing is needed.

picture: smoke-covered Minneapolis, with winds shifting downward from the wildfire in Alberta. 
Question posed by RT: "To what extent is it missing from psychoanalysis or occluded in the general category of mourning--the sociology or ethnography of objects and the real abstractions that make them?" Question abstracted and taken up in both "Psychoanalysis and Lit II" and "Poetry as Cultural Critique," classes which have now come to an end. I don't think I've ever said this seriously before, either, least of all to a class, but "it's been real."

counting in silence

What does it mean to draw attention to Brecht's poetry--to poetry in general--without redeploying the terms of genre, without, for example, deriving from the contrast of his poetic work and his dramatic, a distinction that matters, as genre distinction? At the end of this semester's poetry class, it seems three conclusions were reached: 1) as David Lloyd suggests in "A White Song," that poetry is a condition of "endless readability"; 2) that poetry is something that is an experience of feeling language; and 3) that poetry represents the perspective of the object. Potentially, each of these involves a certain "unrealizability topos," a term Christopher Nealon uses to describe the non-closure of language in the world it discloses. Is it simply that "poetry" names the space for talking about these things--always these things--at the expense of other things?

In reading Brecht, I am drawn to the spaces of non-closure, those spaces that also mark or play at something like the entanglement of illusive appearance and reality in Marx, their nearly impossible extricability from one another. Where is the desire for this extrication? (would be one place to start). Seen in another way, the scene of this extrication takes place only opposite to another no-less real scene--that of the absence, lack, or hole of the Real. Thus Lacanian psychoanaysis and Hegelian dialectics allow for the fantasy of locating oneself on one side or another and develop from the resultant dynamism a sense of the governance by convention of these spaces, as genre. Staying with the impossibility of this extrication is not the equivalent of saying there is no outside; it is a matter of saying there is nothing, outside--of counting in silence, of literally "counting in" silence, as a positive, substantive form of omission. Brecht's lines from "To Those Born After":

Ah, what kind of times are these, where
a conversation about trees is almost a crime
because it includes a silence about so much injustice! 

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschliesst!

On first reading, these lines register an experience of civilian guilt, a feeling or acknowledgment of one's complicity in the injustice of the world. This complicity, while both implicating the individual and registering the injustice in the world, also holds a place for oneself outside of that imagined world. If the trees could not be imagined as standing outside of the injustice of the world--fantasized as not included--then the terms being spoken about would not even be of human conversation about trees, but about the trees speaking themselves. Complicity then registers this kind of fantastic activity of hallucinating oneself into a scene so that one actually comes to stand outside of it. This is the entire mode in which Brecht's poetry--and the problem of civilian guilt that I also come to describe through the illusiveness and indeterminacy of the poetic speaker--toils. The inadequacy or failing of this mode is a way of thinking about how "silence," a term that is meant to signal the unrealizability of a gest(ure) that is not properly social or symbolic, is not just about what is left out of conversation, the merely "mental abstraction" of reality that retains the rights to perspective, but also consists of something, or has substance as such.

In what sense would this kind of silence be (almost) criminal? The crime here would not be one's guilt or complicity in injustice, as is implied in the first reading; to count in silence, to speak poetically (i.e. in a conversation about trees) would be a crime on the basis of the constraints on speaking in "times, where" saying nothing is already saying too much. This kind of silence would not be inadequacy; it would already be too much. Counting oneself in in order to count oneself out--the defensive move that Brecht's work manifests--defends against the world, and in doing so, speaks to the limitation of the mode of complicity as moving toward the kind of political, socialized realization that Brecht imagines possible.

picture: the North Shore (from my first trip there). Poetry questions, thanks to the members of "Poetry as Cultural Critique." All other things are very old and the effort is to see what remains to maintain.

Further thoughts on the non-space of the university

At an institutional event today—a forum on unionization sponsored by the faculty senate and the MN Daily—I was reminded of what institutional space does. It frames a debate around the terms of those who represent power but appear as the market, as if those terms were somehow simply “there” to be represented. This is common enough and easily perceptible as the structure and effect of capitalism, but within an institution, such as the public university, where this phenomenon also sits as subject to a critique of power/knowledge, to behold it is yet another thing. This is a comment about incivility, on the one hand—it’s a comment about the space not being able to hold, within the terms it had established, a challenge to this frame itself. In this regard, it’s possible to see the apparent contingency of the event being called to an end before I got a chance to ask my “question” as far less contingent than that. I was about to ask a fairly “civil” “question” (the discussion, it had been stressed, should be considerate and should be civil, as should the Bureau of Mediation Services hearings, which had taken place in the preceding week), but also to call into question the terms that were being put forth, including the terms of civility (from which I also feel myself excluded, as someone who has been identified as too angry or as too aggressive, in tone, which I also feel amounts to my exclusion from the BMS hearings). The fact is, incivility is not an appealing position for unionization, either. The question, my question—How is it that a union could address and be critical of the changes in the public university in the past ten to fifteen years?—is always to be balanced against needing to appeal to individuals’ self-interest, in other words, strategically needing to validate the concerns expressed by both Aaron Sojourner and Joel Waldfogel about the compression of salaries, for example, when Waldfogel’s salary is over three hundred thousand dollars. So this is the point at which my civil question turns uncivil, and I hope that in writing about it, I can also attempt to do some further work on understanding the “work” of contingency in the university.

I have come to use the phrase “contingent faculty” to identify those who work in a position “without guarantee” at the university. This can include non-tenure-track faculty who are already included in the faculty instructional unit but don’t have tenure positions (term assistant professor, contract assistant professor). Here, contingency is seen as a politicized term, which many of these people may not identify with, due to the closeness of their standing to the tenure line and their disinclination to instead identify with those perceived as being still below, or of a different type of employee altogether. This group below, at the University of Minnesota, is understood as part of the P&A category (Professional & Administrative) and what I am writing to address is the unchallenged claim that held at tonight’s event, which was that these two groups of employees—tenure-line faculty and P&A instructional (“professional”) faculty—have separate interests and are distinct groups.

Waldfogel put forth this claim by initiating a distinction between tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty on the basis of research work, that contingent faculty teach “to eat” (and he has sympathy for anyone in this position and hopes they can find a way to get better terms) but that this is fundamentally different from what faculty do. He cited his own “research” study on those who supported the University of Oregon unionization and found that those who had a greater interest in research were less likely to be supportive of unionization. It’s easy to see where the argument goes, but I was struck by this formulation: “More productive, less supportive.” He went on to cite how just like other “amenities” that can be used (like the sports facility and new recreation center) to attract graduate students, amenities are need to bring in research faculty and unionization would be less appealing to those folks.

In my question turned uncivil, I would say, the only difference between my productivity and yours is that yours is paid for and supported by the institution, including this pathetic “research” study put forward to us tonight, which confuses effect for cause and is blind to the conditions of production.

I do research, I publish peer-reviewed articles, and I have a press interested in reviewing a book manuscript for which I will receive no “course release” to work on, no sabbatical to take, and no institutional grants to apply for. The people who are invested in maintaining this distinction, even at a very minimal level, are those who directly benefit from not having to share the responsibility of doing the work done by these employees. These are tenure-line faculty who can afford to “not get” the difference between the way that contingent labor is valued and the way their own is (acknowledging that there are still many who do get it). Is there much of a difference between the elitism espoused by Joel Waldfogel and the structure of this institutional space (the forum event itself) in which such a difference could go unchallenged? I wonder, tonight, how many more of such things I can sit through—the annihilating feeling of no one objecting to these terms (except, thank you, Michael Goldman). Waldfogel called the “method” of his research study “hogwash,” but its terms still stood. His measure of productivity was challenged but its ontological presuppositions were not and do not tend to get challenged even by faculty members in my own department (all of whom claim to be concerned about contingent faculty): the fact that within the university, the adjunct occupies the position, according to the definition in Merriam-Webster of being “added or accompanying in a subordinate capacity.” This is further qualified, in Merriam Webster, as “attached to a faculty or staff as a temporary or part-time member.” It is in this light that the stakes of Waldfogel’s phrase, “more productive, less supportive” emerge. In the humanities, productivity’s more familiar name is publication. The “more supportive, less productive” side, in contrast, is not, in actuality, another side, it is an included aspect of this productive labor, in all of the ways that are described in Marx and taken up by Silvia Federici, Selma James, and other Marxist feminists. Of course, this makes apparent the investment in the invisibility of this work. The way in which the reality-effect of the two sets of separate interests flickers and blinds.

I would go on to say: see here, your productivity is the result and real abstraction of so much other productivity. And this is probably obvious to a number of people in the room. It’s not the “market,” it’s the politics of the university. What’s less obvious, though, is what all the silence is about. Why didn’t I just say—I was right in front of the microphone when it was called done—oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got this question and I really just have to ask it? We’ve all been here, and we’ve been waiting, and we’ve heard enough from you. Silence, complicity (the past participle of adjungere, “to link up, join, add, attach”), “civil” guilt. This is also an a/effect of the terms in which it was all framed. The adjunct is included; she is invited to speak, so long as it’s in these terms; she can stand in line for the microphone, to ask her question, but her turn will never come. She will never get to decide about the terms of productivity, even though, ontologically, she is committed to that productivity. I think when we say that tenure-line faculty “don’t get it,” this is what I we mean, even though it’s often offered as an excuse or justification for this lack of understanding.

I can’t help but think of this “not getting it” in those terms that Brecht uses in explaining his dissatisfaction with how Mother Courage (in his 1938 play Mother Courage and Her Children) was received by audiences. He was disappointed that by and large, audiences felt empathy for Mother Courage (Anna Fierling), who killed, or let die, her three children, in her blind drive to profit off of the war. Brecht was disappointed that audiences empathized with her conflict rather than that they able to perceive that she “didn’t get it.” I often think about that difference when it is described (empathetically) that faculty “don’t get it.” Can Mother Courage be seen differently for not getting it, for not perceiving her life is contingent upon the death of her children? As Rei Terada describes in “Repletion: Masao Adachi, Landscape Film and Real Abstraction,” this distinction is also apparent in thinking about real abstraction, that “understanding real abstraction by definition departs from the sensory experience of real abstraction rather than being constituted in it.” Brecht’s dissatisfaction with the reception of Mother Courage can be seen in this way; it’s no wonder that he gives up on experience. He would have to in order to want to insist upon Mother Courage’s not-getting-it. If, in Terada’s model, understanding real abstraction can be seen as constituted by the sensory experience of real abstraction, not-getting-it is already inside all of that. Not-getting-it isn’t a transcendental position that fails to think outside itself; not-getting-it is the condition in which real abstraction is experienced, sensorily, by contingent faculty. It is a different kind of failure.

Although “contingency” is a term that is located, philosophically, opposite to necessity, perhaps as Merriam-Webster again, “happening by chance : affected by unforeseen causes or conditions : not patently necessary : unpredictable in occurrence or outcome,” contingency bears traces of the same kind of dependence that comes up with the term “adjunct”: “dependent on, associated with, or conditioned by something else.” Etymologically, this goes further, through an association with “touch,” as the present participle of contingere “to touch on all sides.” Contingency is a position whose associated sensorial experience is one of being touched on all sides by not-getting-it, so that one’s merely being the effect of this is equivalent to one’s annihilation, or feeling of being destroyed, even when “included.” It’s not just about the visibility of the work done by these faculty, although I often come back round to that; it’s about the way in which these positions form the basis of a critique of the institution of the university that does not in turn continue to valorize the uncritical linking of power/knowledge.

Last week in the BMS hearings, a senior lecturer in the Carlson School of Management testified, via his experience on the faculty senate, to the percentage of courses taught, across the university at each level (from 1000-level courses to 8000-level courses), by non-tenure-track faculty. Beginning with 1000-level classes, this number was over 50%; even at 8000-level courses, the number was still around 39%. The university maintains a quoted standard that no more than “25%” of courses should be taught by non-tenure-line faculty. These are courses that should be taught by tenure-line faculty; that they are not illuminates the extent to which the university is underfunding departments with enrollments that exceed their faculty teaching capacity. Where does this divestment in teaching come from? It does not come from “the market,” even if the market were some kind of veritable Mississippi, dividing the campus in two; it comes from the political investment in the financialization of the university, its professionalization, and its optimalization of profit (plus everything else and all that). No one can get out of it, but can you feel “dead” to it even as you are touched on all sides? That space that is most appropriated, most exploited, most alienated? How do you not-valorize that space?

A Surge of Silence

What happens when you try to respond to the tone of a letter not written to you? There’s a gap that is akin to the silence in a forest when a tree falls and no one is there to hear it; perhaps it's like what we could imagine remains of the death drive after some destructive instinct has been acted upon, acted out.

This is such a response, a respose to a writing by Commune Editions titled "Dear Simone." The piece by Commune Editions is addressed to Simone White, who asked a number of poets to write about "matters of capital and class" for an issue of The Recluse (a journal of The Poetry Project) that she was editing titled "Capital P." In her introduction, White clarifies that by "capital and class" she means the "systematic dehumanization of the human into laboring factions." The script of the introduction is not apparently the same as the initial phrasing of the request for responses, since Commune Editions invokes several times the phrase "a surge of interest in class (by which some people mean race),” and attributes this phrase to White’s initial request. So when I say I'm responding to "tone," I mean that I'm responding to what lies behind the citation and repetition of this phrase, and to something that begins, and perhaps ends, with the appropriation of this phrase.

Would it matter if we could read Simone White’s initial request? Reading it might give one a sense of the tone of the original phrase, but it's not this that is really at stake--and also not the reality status of it, whether or not Simone White is right or not about this surge, although it's this that is disputed throughout Commune Edition's letter. At stake in this question about the reality of this surge is the organization of a world almost entirely around internal objects, and the extent to which a radical poetic-political project organized in this way can make its hoped-for intervention, its destruction of the world. I find this letter to be mostly about and addressed to internal objects. Internal objects, in contrast to external objects, represent people and events but they involve, as psychoanalyst Paula Heimann writes, "the subject at the same time as her objects." This is significant because in attacking these objects, one is also attacking oneself. Does all the talk about destroying the world in the letter--"the resolute rejection of this world," "the world to be abolished," "in every poem that insists it all has to go"--fold back upon the part that remains as much about the subject as the objects included in this world? If the world includes all struggles worthy of abolition (struggles, Commune defines, aimed at "the unmaking of whiteness, or of gender") but not this capacity to reflect upon the specificity of these struggles in contrast to their inclusion within this totality, might there not be a need to place some pressure upon just what is meant by "the world"?

Reading the letter--its content signalling but never locating, never externalizing, those who've claimed that "the problem is the hubris of purportedly Jacobin militants always going too far"--one gathers some of the referents of these internal objects, if one knows enough of this world. Commune Edition's dispute, for example, with the "surge of interest" is a response to (perhaps other things, too, who knows?) a dossier arranged by Daniel Tiffany for The Boston Review on class. I'm inferring this because I was there in the FB forest when the vitriol about Tiffany's column fell, and it seems likely, given Commune's use of terms "kitsch" and "rhetoric" that Tiffany is an object of critique. Beyond this kind of matching of internal with external objects, one is left feeling like the letter itself, its elliptical response, remains in a world peopled by internal objects, phrases, and discussions whose representation exists almost entirely within the life of the mind. In the letter, the coordinates to external reality cannot be spoken, and one wonders why: Out of tact? Because it's not just a single example, but a set of examples, massified, in this way? Because it's not worth naming these enemies of class, giving this recognition? Because in order to "get" this letter, one should know already, who or what the objects are? To be a reader of this letter, but not the reader, is to be in a forest when the tree fell and not to have heard the noise, to have missed the tone of falling limbs. From this position, a question that is not supported within the discourse arises: how is it that you've come into this place of knowledge?

Perhaps one way of thinking about this circumscription of knowledge is to approach one of the most obvious features of the letter-- its attachment to poetry. This attachment comes with an expressed commitment to the question of "the relation between revolutionary politics (which we take to demand a cothinking of race and class among other things) and a poetry which threatens certainty, commitment, didacticism." We might just as well ask, why poetry? What work is being done by poetry? How is the vaunted antagonism or contradiction of destruction and creation, "between absolute political demand and the proper tonalities for poetry" held in place by the law of genre? And what sort of dynamic of sublimation, of the transfer of destructive and creative energies or vice verse, must be imagined in order to achieve this worldview?

To kind of extend this overextended metaphor, we might imagine that the tree that has fallen--producing or not a noise, a sound, a tone--is itself the poem, and insofar, roughly correlates with Commune's example of the pop song. I am drawn to how Commune theorizes the moment of pleasure--"a cross-class pleasure," a "real pleasure--from the pop song, and by extension from the "pop song in the poem." I quote at length from their description of these moments of pleasure, of "negative delight":

But we are also not sure we see the pop song that way. In truth it sounds more true about Eliot; much has changed since then. Here’s our thought: it matters how you see the pop song. We certainly get that, even after the supposed collapse of the hi-lo distinction, turning your nose up at the pop song is still class-marked, a kind of upper-middlebrow Philistinism. Still, it’s a sort of cross-class pleasure, the pop song, isn’t it? A real pleasure. We hope you will not hear irony. We think that a great pop song, and there are a lot of them — Top 40, sing along, solid gold — is sensually thrilling and emotionally powerful. It is one of the finest things (still no irony) that civilization has produced.

But not just any civilization. Its affordances are capitalism itself, its technologies, its circuits of distribution, its reascriptions of race, its microleisures, invention of the world market, the world audience. In this sense the pop song is emblematic of much human making in the last couple-few centuries. We could speak of Hollywood, or Bollywood, or a videochat with a distant friend, or the Hong Kong skyline. Or bicycling out on the path alongside the Bay Bridge and sitting over the water while the birds and porpoises and oily wakes of container ships pass underneath.

This is the thing about even the most resolute rejection of this world. We know also that this world is in many ways an astonishing achievement of human making, with incomparable pleasures, unevenly distributed. This knowledge is always with us, this pleasure and maybe even wonder. It is with us even in the moments when we think of surplus populations in Dhaka and Sao Paulo, when we think of manganese in the Pearl River and Mike Brown’s body moldering in the street in metropolitan St. Louis. And when we say that it has to go, we say that knowing this means forsaking all of these things.

I read these lines as being about the way in which the "pleasure" that is evoked is subsumed within a total system, and about how these moments "sit inside" this larger system. No single moment could be greater or more expansive than the entirety of the system. And yet, in a way, it's just that--the way that the "poetic" destroys by consuming--that David Marriott, via Cesaire, describes in a recent response to The Boston Review's issue, "Race and the Poetic Avant Garde":

Césaire’s immense productivity consists in creating a poetry of events that does not have form or content as its end, but is rather the pursuit of their irremedial alienation. Instead of claiming, as the various European avant-gardes did while reading Marx, say, or Freud, that he was producing a new dialectics (of culture, or meaning), Césaire claimed that poetic production was productive because it consumed knowledge. Or rather–that it was the ‘poetic’ itself that was productive, often against the express conscious and political wishes of the poet.

Marriott emphasizes how for Cesaire the contradiction between the poetic and political does not express an antagonism that becomes about the tension or maintenance or resolution of this contradiction, i.e. its sublimation in written work, but about an “irremedial alienation” that is consumptive, i.e. destructive, in relation to knowledge. Thus knowledge is not a position from which to maintain certainty or perspective, it is a position that is always threatened by poetry's destructive aspect.

And one might wonder, how much would poetry have to consume, in order to destroy? But I wonder, even if it were just a little bit, would there not be less--quite a bit less--to say about how a knowledge of the whole world pertained to this damaged part?

In Commune Edition's lines, knowledge of the pleasures afforded by capitalism is held alongside "thinking" about surplus populations, manganese, and Mike Brown's body. There's quite a bit of assumption already in the way that "pleasures" and "thinking" constitute the antagonism that is then the aesthetico-political. It's a certain universalism that feels tiring. But there is something here worth thinking about, and it's the way in which these moments of "incomparable pleasures" are in a line with complicity. Here, another tone I am deaf to: "But are we not all complicit, none of us pure, all of us benefitting from entanglement with the very thing from which we claim to take absolute distance? No shit." How do we read the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of no shit? Does this mean that "we" have been accused of complicity? Does it mean that the accusation of complicity is to be read as politically irrelevant? Does it mean that even complicity is a concept that sits inside the structure of this system? Or is it an invocation of complicity as a kind of precursor to this "knowledge"?

In psychoanalysis, complicity is perhaps the least evident thing. It refers, even in the most complex form, in its relation to political emotion, to an ambivalence on the level of a distinction between subject and object, but one that is perhaps even more indeterminate, to a non-integrated state that precedes but is not outside of relating. For those independent analysts in the British postwar, including Paula Heimann and D.W. Winnicott, this state was all about the primacy of destruction, and these formulations followed from Freud's ideas about complicity or guilt being a defense against feelings of aggressiveness or destruction. Complicity, because it involves this defensive relation to aggression, sits not too far afield from sublimation, in terms of the function it assumes to redirect instinctive energy.

In a recent post, I described how Paula Heimann recalls an interaction with a patient in which the patient spontaneously recites a poem in analysis. Heimann recounts the patient's deep joy in this recitation and in the phrasing of words. She reads this withdrawal not as an expression of hostility, a turning away from the analyst, not just as destructive of that structure in which it takes place, but as a moment of reprieve, a momentary lifting, a sublimation that is not just about the recovery of a lost object or about the destruction of analytic space but about finding a self that survives the expression of destructiveness. What does Heimann’s discussion of these moments bring to to the moments of pleasure, of negative delight, that Commune describes? Heimann makes visible the fact that the world Commune wishes to destroy is maintained by a fantasy of omnipotence. It’s a wish that is construed politically--admirably, to some extent--but it’s a wish that, because of this relation to fantasy, to internal objects, involuntarily destroys the struggles of others whose experiences become subsumed within this world as well. The militancy of destruction as a political project does indeed involve a hubris about the scope and aims of such a venture. Being willing to ignore how one’s definition of the “world” affects those it claims to include is also an extension of not taking responsibility for the unintended destruction that one enacts by holding knowledge in such an intimate relation, or the damage that is done by reinforcing the knowledge afforded by a poetics of class, by saying for example that poetic struggles for racial justice and against antiblack racism, transphobic violence, gender discrimination, and racial profiling have “played at least as great a role as a poetics of class.” Because what does that mean to qualify this poetry by quantifying its impact--”at least as great a role”--and to hold firm to this worldview?

Muteness Envy

Threading through psychoanalytic writing on aggression in the 50s, 60s, 70s, lines worn where entrenched divisions formed around the existence of the death drive, the primacy of destructiveness, the attribution of envy to infantile experience, the existence of a primary non-integrated state. In particular, I've begun reading the work of Paula Heimann (her essays collected in the volume About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942-1980, edited by Margret Tonnesmann; The New Library of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10 (London (Tavistock): Routledge, 1989) who is often associated with Melanie Klein, becoming one of Klein's biggest supporters during the 1942-1944 "Controversial Discussions," which split the British Psycho-Analytic Society. Heimann (1899-1980) studied psychiatry in Germany and entered psychoanalytic training in Berlin in the late 1920s; she moved from Berlin to London in 1933 after Hitler came to power, where she encountered Klein and began her own work as an analyst and as a theoretician. Heimann was loyal to Klein and her theories up until Klein's presentation of her essay, "Envy and Gratitude" in Geneva in 1955, but as Pearl King notes in her introductory memoir to Heimann's collected papers, Heimann herself acknowledged a rift that preceded this by several years. Winnicott, too, critiqued what he saw as Klein's over-valuation of envy, in particular her identification of the primacy of this emotional state.

Though I've encountered Winnicott's critique, and even recently returned to it as I continue to think about aggression, Heimann's departure from this notion is accompanied by an idea about the relationship between sublimation and the death drive that illuminates the significance of this theoretical difference. In her separate discussions of sublimation and the death drive throughout the course of her early work, when support of Klein's defense of the death drive was at stake, Heimann asserted its conceptual significance as providing a context for the complex relationship that individuals hold in relation to internal objects. Because of her interest in sublimation, which is about the ego's creative activity, Heimann pursues the idea that the state of primary indeterminacy theorized by Balint as "primary love" and by Winnicott as the "unintegrated state," is not restricted to "object-relatedness" ("Some Notes on Sublimation" (1957; 132). Heimann is thus insistent that the internal objects that we experience as damaging or persecutory or destructive are not primarily objects, but also the self. In her essay "A contribution to the problem of sublimation," from 1939, she writes:

But since these defences consist of attacking the persecutors inside the self, they are of no avail as a solution, for they involve the subject at the same time as her objects. The battlefield is in the home country, not on enemy territory. A vicious circle is thus set up and a perpetual warfare ensues which his played out in the subject's internal world--always affecting her external life and often expressed in terms of physical symptoms. (33)

The "perpetual warfare" that sets itself up here does so to the extent that the internal objects are not recognized as subject to a double aggression: first, the attribution of destructiveness to objects represents a defensive externalization of one's feelings of destructiveness and aggression, as is characteristic of splitting and about which Melanie Klein spoke of especially through recourse to "projective identification"; and second, that the ambivalence; but second, that in addition to this destructiveness that achieves externalization in the internal object, there is something of the death drive that is also not realized in this externalization, and this quotient is the difference between the death instinct and the destructive instinct.

Heimann illustrates this in her example of a patient who breaks off into reciting a poem during analysis. Heimann regards this as a moment of "withdrawal" (130) that is motivated "not by hostility or fear" but by "an urge to engage in creative ego activity," in other words, a sublimation. Here, sublimation is linked with aggression because it represents an interpretive choice not to read this moment as a deflected or destructive impulse. In "The theory of the life and death instincts," which is the essay that she wrote in defense of Klein's work and presented in 1942, she describes the muteness of the death instinct in a manner consistent with this reading of withdrawal as sublimation. Because of the difficulty, often noted in psychoanalytic literature, of locating aggression in a "pure" or "unalloyed" state, it's possible to grant that "reading" it may indeed involve scenarios when the other side--object-relatedness, the reparation of lost or destroyed objects, destructiveness displaced onto/into other objects--can also be read. What compels this reading, then? Perhaps the thesis about perpetual warfare, a statement that gathers significance in the present day, requires thinking more profoundly about the damage that is done by reparative work as well. Here, it's not just that destructiveness accompanies reparative work--the narrow dialectic of civilization and barbarism, the exceedingly harsh strictures of the super-ego suggesting that civilization's destructiveness is greater than not--but that missing the destructive aspect of reparative work means that the capacity for sublimation, in the form of creative activity--figured by Heimann as a reprieve, "short-lived," or as "dwelling on certain instances" (126)--becomes impoverished, constrained, inoperable as well.

silent i

A comment that (apparently?) continues to await moderation at The New Inquiry, in response to Aaron Bady's "(Some Provisional Writing on) Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project” (March 29, 2014). Original comment date March 30, 2014:


I’ve been reading your blog [zunguzungu] for a little while…and i’m kind of provoked by these issues to finally respond in person, although i’ve kind of (i hope you don’t mind) referred to your writing (specifically, on Bartleby) in other places. Among other things, I’m interested in your formulation of the “violation co-extensive with silence,” which seems to propose that this is both something to question and also the condition upon which “agency,” under the model of human rights discourse, is conceptualized. As you describe, this moment also, then, contributes to an event’s being determined as “past” and thus as “historical” and thus as something that can be dealt with, versus something that is not perhaps turned into an object of the past, to be dealt with, and so on.

It seems like silence is kind of falsely reparative in this sense–or as Bob Meister might say in *After Evil,* that this is an instance of “manic reparation,” a kind of reparation that is about inscribing the legitimacy of juridical structures (of HRD) rather than doing justice for the victims (these are his terms). I guess I tend to think that silence, when invoked, does get used against those who were violated, in this way. But silence, as you suggest, that is co-extensive with violation, might be something else. It’s interesting in the report you cite, how “silence” is listed with “tears” and “emotion” as something that cannot be expressed in the form of the report, almost as an index of emotionality itself. Silence seems to stand here for the unsayable, the unspeakable, for the inadequacy of language–already kind of pushing it over into the kind of silence-as-manic-reparation. But I don’t know if this is how you are reading it or how you are thinking of it, in this passage or in other places. It also seems like “silence” as an extension of violation could help to think about ongoing violence/violation that is not captured as an object of the past.

And it’s interesting–I think that poetry, when it gets roped into this context, does sometimes help get to different questions about the place of political violation/violence in psychosocial trauma, questions that emphasize–as I think you are saying–the importance of looking at political violence instead of just seeing psychosocial trauma (sorry–i’ve kind of falsely opposed political and psychosocial here, maybe it’s not necessary). I tend to think about this as a matter of how the “I” becomes a problem in (lyric) poetry. But it is also perhaps less about poetics and just as much about a narrative of poetry in which poetry disappoints its expressive function, or the expectations of this function (as perhaps coalesce around the poetry/barbarism/Auschwitz question)…I’d be interested in more about Kenya, about how the span indicated with the initiation of the commission (1963-2008) also comes to count 2008 as a kind of endpoint, or the term around which the *post* is figured. These are really just associations, or actually, kind of rephrasings of what you’ve written. I hope it’s okay. It follows my own kind of burst of idealism about SC, as well, fwiw, and thanks–

on therapeutic utility

In a rather astonishing passage in The Writing of Disaster (trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), Blanchot discusses Serge Leclaire’s and D.W. Winnicott’s “child,” the dead child, the child who is “always already dead.” The discussion takes place in his reflections on “impossible necessary death,” and the death of the child is understood as the first death; in contrast to “organic” death, the second death. One of the remarkable things about the passage is that Blanchot identifies the object of one’s destructiveness in a way that Winnicott himself does not quite get to. This object is “the dead child”; “what we strive thus to kill is the dead child: not only the one who would have for his function to sustain and maintain death in life, but the one for whom the ‘confusion’ of the two deaths has been unable not to obtain and who, therefore, does not ever authorize us to ‘lift’ this confusion” (69, italics mine). This child is perhaps really two: the child, like Leclaire’s infans, whose death is the instance of our being able to speak and to live; and the child for whom the first and the second deaths remain confused (double negative: unable not to obtain), which for Blanchot signals the “the infinite passivity of dying” (70). That child who is the condition of individuality (who is in this sense a “me”), is also not an individual, is a “not-me.” Both of these “children” are dead; they are “confused,” on this basis.

What I find worth noting about the passage is the way that Blanchot qualifies psychoanalysis. He does so, first, by noting that Winnicott’s explanation, which is “fictive,” is perhaps “therapeutically useful”: 

Or rather, this explanation of Winnicott’s is only an explanation, albeit impressive—a fictive application designed to individualize that which cannot be individualized or to furnish a representation for the unrepresentable: to allow the belief that one can, with the help of transference, fix in the present of a memory (that is, in a present experience) the passivity of the immemorial unknown. The introduction of a such a detour is perhaps therapeutically useful, to the extent that, through a kind of Platonism, it permits him who lives haunted by the imminent collapse to say: this will not happen, it has already happened; I know, I remember. It allows him to restore, in other words, a knowledge which is relation to truth, and a common, linear temporality (66).

As Blanchot describes, Winnicott’s “primitive agonies” entail a state in which the child is not yet a subject, and the function of this state, the unintegrated state, is to allow the adult individual to have a narrative in which organic death, the “immemorial unknown” can be known as a memory that refers back to this primary state, a state of primary nonintegration. It’s perhaps precisely because it’s “fictive,” or “therapeutically useful,” that Winnicott’s explanation functions as the obverse to Leclaire’s assertion that “one lives and speaks only by killing the infans in oneself (in others also)” (67). The condition of living and speaking is the death of the child, not just of the child, but of the “dead child.”

Thus, one of the dead children is “therapeutically useful” insofar as she allows the lifting of confusion, to return to knowledge, to establish a linear temporality. I think Blanchot is right about this utility, and in identifying it, he points to something that is perhaps obvious but that might seem too much so. It’s one of the aspects of Winnicott’s writing that I think others, including Michael D. Snediker, in Queer Optimism, have highlighted, which is the terrific metaphorical capaciousness of Winnicott’s writing. What Blanchot underscores is that this “fictive” or metaphorical capacity is its therapeutic utility.

Blanchot goes further. In a parenthetical comment in the next paragraph, he claims that psychoanalytic vocabulary should be used only by analysts: “only those who practice psychoanalysis can use—only those, that is, for whom analysis is a risk, an extreme danger, a daily test—for otherwise it is only the convenient language of established culture” (67). Only the analyst, perhaps, writes and speaks and lives these terms through their practice, terms that would otherwise merely describe “established culture.” Winnicott’s position as an analyst allows him to function in a realm in which the metaphorical aspect of language is therapeutically useful because it does not have a correlate with social experience; it “has not been experienced.” To turn the language of psychoanalysis over to ordinary language implies that this metaphorical dimension will be lost. This is the dimension of language that is at work in representation.

The dead dead child—this means not just that we kill “the marvelous (terrifying) child which we have been in the dreams and desires of those who were present at our birth (parents, society in general),” but that we kill the identification of the child with “primary narcissistic representation,” a representation that “has the status of an ever-unconscious, and consequently, forever indelible, representation” (67). The “indelible ever-unconscious representation” is the impossible necessary death, and it’s this that we seek to destroy (and that in destroying gives us the ability to live, to speak). Blanchot writes: “Whence the literally ‘maddening’ difficulty: in order not to remain in the limbo of the infans, on the near side of desire, one must destroy the indestructible and even finish off (not at one blow, but constantly) that to which one has not now, nor has one ever had, nor will one ever have, access: impossible, necessary death” (67). We destroy the representation itself, though we want (hence the limbo) to maintain it. This, among other things, getting to the end, leaves us confused…

roundabout

-->

Is poetry also

like young babies and regressed patients

preverbal?

There are mix-ups

like subject matters

about which externality

and internality

cannot be decided

Is it called white privilege

these clean sheets:

|a horrid empty space|?

|a friendly expanse|?

|harmonious mix-up|?

Your white is not my white

pro/intro-jection is its mechanism

seeming already to decide

about privilege it has nothing to say

about race

projection of bad | object

introjection of good | subject

these aggressive renderings

sub/ob-ject leave

no space

for mix-ups

and silence becomes something to

include in conversations

it’s not enough to want to talk

about race

that’s what

being

preverbal means

not enough to want

to talk

enough to want

want

Nonintegration, the Unintegrated State: the Silence of Falling Trees

One of the impressive features of Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" is the emphasis that he places on the disjuncture between individual morality and the morality of the community, a disjuncture that is also at play in his account of the ambivalence of civilization and barbarism. The difference in the matter has to do with the role and the function of instinctual renunciaton, which both "creates" civilization (per Freud), but also (per Adorno) only creates civilization (i.e. leads to the appropriation of individual interests for the sake of "humanity"). In his effort to describe the primitive attitude towards death, from which he thinks we stand to learn something, Freud digresses about the function of the artwork in representing death:

"It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, of general literature and of the theatre compensation for the impoverishment of life. There we still find people who know how to die, indeed, who are even capable of killing someone else. There alone too we can enjoy the condition which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death—namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we preserve our existence intact. For it is indeed too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, when one false move may lose us the game, but with the difference that we can have no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we discover that plurality of lives for which we crave. We die in the person of a given hero, yet we survive him, and are ready to die again with the next hero just as safely."

As he describes elsewhere (primarily in "Creative Writers and Daydreaming") through the concept of forepleasure, Freud here again attempts to account for that "extra" work that the artwork does; the so-called "incentive bonus" of the artwork, which elicits--also through identification--catharsis for an observing audience. But the suggestion that "compensation for the impoverishment of life" is provided by artworks links aesthetic "forepleasure" more explicitly with the performance of instinctual renunciation, with the renounced "death wish" that there is to experience (so his narrative of the primitive attitude of death goes) that is there in the observation of the deaths of others. The secret of forepleasure, then, is that it can provide us with the experience of the "plurality of lives," and this somehow provides the "compensation" for the feeling that life is impoverished. This is a feeling that Freud finds characteristic of the modern attitude towards death and one that he is optimistic that war (via aggression) could also work against, that is, counter-intuitively, that war could enrichen the experience of life.

Winnicott's similar interpretation of a patient that "All sorts of things happen and they wither. This is the myriad deaths you have dies. But if someone is there, someone who can give you back what has happened, then the details dealt with in this way become part of you, and do not die" (Playing and Reality 82) contributes to the development of the link between forepleasure and death. In the footnote to this interpretation, he comments: "This is, the sense of self comes on the basis of an unintegrated state which, however, by definition is not observed and remembered by the individual, and which is lost unless observed and mirrored back by someone who is trusted and who justifies the trust and meets the dependence." Here, and in other essays on the maturation of infants, he writes about the "unintegrated" state which precedes the important phase of "integration" in child development. This "unintegrated state," which he describes as also existing in older children and adults as a "non-purposive state" (74) is "the opposite of integration" (86).

The value of making a distinction between the pre-integration state (which is also not disintegration) and integration lies is Winnicott's desire to say something about "what life can be about for healthy children and adults" and thus to creativity and culture (there are also things to say, he notes, about the unintegrated state in relation to infant life and schizoid disorders). In "The Concept of a Healthy Individual," he writes, "In adult life, integration is enjoyed along with the ever-extending meaning of the term right up to and including integrity. Disintegration, in resting and in relaxation and in dreaming, can be allowed by the healthy person, and the pain associated with it accepted, especially because relaxation is associated with creativity, so that it is out of the unintegrated state that the creative impulse appears and reappears. Organized defence against disintegration robs the individual of the precondition for the creative impulse and therefore prevents creative living" (Home is Where We Start From 29). In his footnote, he also gestures towards forepleasure: "It is thought by some, as in Balint's paper (in Problems of Human Pleasure and Behavior, 1952) discussing Khan, that much of the pleasure in the experience of art in one form or another arises from the nearness to unintegration to which the artist's creation may safely lead the audience or viewer. So where the artist's achievement is potentially great, failure near the point of achievement may cause great pain to the audience by bringing them close to disintegration or the memory of disintegration, and leaving them there. The appreciation of art thus keeps people on a knife-edge, because achievement is so close to painful failure. This experience must be reckoned part of health." As Winnicott suggests, like Freud, the value of art, as described, is its ability to create conditions for the experience of nonintegration, a state that is lost unless observed and reflected back by someone (or in the case of the artwork, something). Much like the question of whether a tree can be heard if it falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, the enigma lies in imagining the parameters of a state that hinges on, but does not necessarily lead to integration (to being heard). The silence of the tree that falls without being heard is nonintegration.

As suggested by Winnicott, and by Bernard Golse's definition of "integration" in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, nonintegration is significant because it implies the trust to "yield to this regressive movement"; such a negative state occurs like depression between integration and disintegration, civilization and barbarism, and guilt and aggression to indicate the work of alternative forms of rearrangement that enhance our understanding of agency and activity--political, emotional, and otherwise.

photo: Philli Workman
Disclaimer: Above thoughts and associations might only be confused at this point...

moving on

Reading through my journal of the past months, nothing of much substance is to be found, just lists of things to do, and things done, notes about how tired I am, etc,... There are a few passing comments about wanting to see Philomena's dreams. The blog began as an effort to write alongside the dissertation, and now that that's past, I feel the paucity of new material. Or the overwhelming nature of white space. So, squiggle. I mean, that's one answer. I've been thinking of organizing some thinking on mobility and childhood aggression around the figure of the squiggle, D.W. Winnicott's game for the analysis of children. It's in line with blind contours, at any rate. This is just to mark the end. And, just now, the beginning of the wiggle: meaning, Philomena started crawling today.

writing with philomena

In his lectures on metaphysics (1965), Adorno writes

One would need to be a very superficial and, if you like, a very nominalistic linguistic philosopher to deny that this experience of being unable to take certain words into one's mouth--which you can all have and which was probably first registered, though in a avery different way, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Chandos' letter--also says something about what the words stand for. I believe that one of the crucial points on which the theory I advocate, and of which I can present you at least some sizable fragments in these lectures, differs from the currently prevalent one, is my view that the historical-philosophical fate of language is at the same time the historical-philosophical fate of the subject matter to which it refers. This is supported, incidentally, by a viewpoint which was by no means foreign to German idealism, and especially to Wilhelm von Humboldt: that language constitutes thought no less than thought language.


Adorno's comments about the way that language constitutes thought (as more radical than the idea that thought constitutes language) take place only within the "negativity" that he urges his students to be able to "think." To me it seems that the purported radicalness of this formulation does not lie in the role of the constituent, but in the idea that language is in some sense crucial to the type of thinking that Adorno advocates as our way of not merely "adapting" to the ways of the world, of not simply accepting what is. But in what sense language? His version here of something like "silence"--of "not being able to take certain words into one's mouth"--differs indeed from the prevalent notions of silence. In these, silence registers as good or bad: as a mode of resistance, as testiment to the enormity of the referent, as traumatic symptom, as irresponsibility for the past, as the bystander's response to atrocity, and as lack of awareness of real social or political injustice (i.e. a problem of ideology). It might, in fact, be helpful to catalogue these forms of silence. What Adorno grants to silence here is an ambivalence, one that takes place however, only within the need to think about the negativity of the world. This "not being able to take in certain words" is both the fate of language and the fate of the subject matter; it stands not for language's inability to grasp reality, but for the nature of language to be on course with reality--I want here to say to "reflect" reality, but it is not exactly this, at least the mimetic implications. In previous lectures, these "certain words" are "squalid" and "dark" realities necessarily suppressed by the sublime and lofty goals of culture. It is to gain some form of access to these "unsayable" squalids and darks that is the task of philosophy. This silence is thus a silence that is paired with talking out the other side of one's mouth. Perhaps this is also its ambivalence.

the project

where does a strange silence begin? some have suggested that it is in the forest, the sound that a falling tree makes when no one is around to hear. at times, for brecht, it's the talked-about tree that is the strange silence. A Strange Silence is the title of the project, my dissertation, the thing that everything here is a footnote to, especially the poems, since they are the leaves, what is left over.

from 4/4/07//:

and the green fall to unsafe water:
welcome to the 21st century
let not many other things be spared--save your
happiness; this was Brecht's nightmare.
Humanity, the human dog, wants to let go
to forget, dismiss, judge, pee wherever it wants.
a condition remiss, or a saying unheard.
in the woods, we are all quiet; it is solace.
and save to other things, too, save to find yourself
alone. the distance is unmarked. cross-hatches
are what i saw in the desert and didn't draw.
the things nightmares are made of
leave you with the distance
of their unmarkings.
becky's dreams are about writing (ask me
how i felt when my mom died. it's a feeling
i can't think of). i watch her grow.
communism is short-lived. the brown notebooks
are filled. you are always thinking of brecht.
his return is unsettling, a time
when autonomy in writing is needed.