late autumn

The turn to late autumn was marked today by the return of temperatures upwards of 60 degrees. It is not that this change, marks the turn, but rather that it functions as a reminder both of the autumn or late summer that has passed (the ``long summer days``) and, as it is somewhat needless to say, of the winter days to come.

In his essay ``Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital,`` Joshua Clover uses this figurative language of the change of seasons--Braudel`s ``sign of Autumn,`` which must already be the ``onset of Winter``--to describe a challenge to narrative, the problem of time. The narrative mode that he details here, of ``Autumnal literature,`` is one that takes as its organizing trope ``the conversion of the temporal to the spatial.`` The fact of this conversion, something like the synchronization of diachronic passages, leads Clover to argue for the aptness of poetics--including as variants the non-narrative and poetry, to grapple with these situations of ``manifold absence`` (46), ``discontinuity`` (47), and ``dislocation`` (46).

Such situations refer to the gap between our experience of daily life and our material role in the economy, what Clover calls a ``phantom space`` (48) between the financial and real economy, which represents the inability to ``forward its accumulation via real expansion.`` Similar reflections seem to abound in the Zizek- and non-Zizek-inspired discourse of the end times, with its varying degrees of fantasy about life and non-life.

The feeling is, if not easy to take up, at least ubiquitous. How could it not be? Riding home on my bike tonight, it occurred to me that the unseasonableness of the weather reflected, more than anything, the ephemerality of existence, the basic fact of non-existence that is so aptly characterized by the season.

Winter becomes a trope for this state, in ways that belie this more fundamental presence of non-existence in life. In riding home, so pleasantly--one of the truly enjoyable activities that I undertake in the city--it was easy to imagine that in a month, this form of activity would no longer take place. It is not much of a revelation, and trying to recapture some of it makes it less so, but it is the case that the summer (and as the summer moves to fall) produces the sublime effect that winter is unimaginable. Not just undesirable (in fact it is quite desirable), but actually impossible to imagine that the terms of accessibility and environment are so altered (buried, to be precise) that the prior form of existence can really appear not just to be altered, but actually gone.

good grief

Both Slavoj Zizek and Dipesh Chakrabarty (whose article Zizek draws on for his discussion of the Anthropocene Epoch (which would succeed the Holocene) begin their writings on "new" ecology with the imagination of the end of times. It is the nature of this exercise in imagination, and not the fact of inevitability that goes along with it for Zizek, that captures my attention. For Zizek, imagining the end is equal to believing it, which again represents the coveted fidelity of Badiou, and thus the structure of imagining-believing allows the audacity of his remarks to rest not on the content of what he is saying (although naively, we might think that, or he might want us to think that, indeed), but on the convergence of imagining-believing and the environmental inevitability of the end times. The element of inevitability does not exist in the end times, but is a result of Zizek's argumentation. It would be fine if Zizek were saying that we are living in the end times, and perhaps more interesting, at that. In contrast to the argument that he presents, in which the imminent feeling of dread at the end causes a reaction that is both collective and psychological, an argument for the end times might elaborate more usefully what Chakrabarty calls the "contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity" ("The Climate of History," Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009) 197). Zizek, however, structures his argument to follow the five stages of grief defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying: denial, anger, negotiation, depression, and acceptance. Perhaps this is the (only) thing shocking (and I struggle to define it, that is, the element of the alarming that the book produced in me)--the language of trauma and catastrophe tied up here, in spite of the book's efforts to talk about trauma not as an event, but as something ongoing. In what way, then, are these five stages applicable? The impossibility of imagining one's own death, seemingly at the middle of things for Zizek, does not hold here. Why should these stages cohere as some kind of structure of normal grief? Where does disorder come in? Or the idea that symptoms of any given stage could be so diverse as to alter a given stage for any given body? the radical subject must be capable of good grief... bad grief, on the other hand, accounts for the rise of fundamentalism in Middle Eastern oil states, the slipping of potential Left movements off track.

picture: Iceberg B-15. Josh Landis, The National Science Foundation 29 January 2001.

In thinking again about unobservable change, it is a certain return to perception, to self-perception, to the equivalence of these two things in the eyes of some external world, the one that Zizek says does not exist. There is so much at work in such logic. And logic, it seems, derives from the persistent desire to resolve something about all of those inperceptible entities, even as they seem to push towards perceptibility.

the difference between one and zero

In her June 1966 preface to Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism [1950], Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarianism can perhaps best be identified by what can exist when it is no longer:

“The clearest sign that the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term is, of course, the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts during the last decade. To be sure, efforts to rehabilitate Stalin and to curtail the increasingly vocal demands for freedom of speech and thought among students, writers, and artists recur again and again, but none of them has been very successful or is likely to be successful without a full-fledged re-establishment of terror and police rule. No doubt, the people of the Soviet Union are denied all forms of political freedom, not only freedom of association but also freedom of thought, opinion and public expression. It looks as though nothing has changed, while in fact everything has changed. When Stalin died the drawers of writers and artists were empty; today there exists a whole literature that circulates in manuscript and all kinds of modern painting are tried out in the painters’ studios and become known even though they are not exhibited. This is not to minimize the difference between tyrannical censorship and freedom of the arts, it is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.”

Arendt notes that totalitarianism is experienced as a "zero" environment, in which not only does art not have a public, it is also not produced. The above then, the change that appears "as though nothing has changed," is her description of the "thaw," a word she uses hesitatingly to describe the process of destalinization following the death of Stalin. It seems that this tension--"the difference between one and zero"--is raised in particular through the genre of lyric poetry. Emily Lygo has written of the "embargo on lyric poetry" during the Stalin era, but this seems to involve, for her and for the others, the idea that despite the official taboo, writers continued to produce poetry, among other things, "for the drawer." She and other historians of Soviet destalinization would perhaps prefer to discuss this period as one of the "impoverishment" of lyric poetry, which suffered most because it was the most direct form of expression. Those loyal to the party line might have felt differently, or justified the impoverishment of individual expression for the sake of upholding communal solidarity. Here, lyric suffers simply out of the moral sense that there were "more important things to do." But this argument is also one that seems to be echoed whenever this discussion is raised, since it involves deciding or placing a judgment upon the art that can actually do something to achieve political or social justice. In short, this is the issue that Arendt seems also to highlight; one part of it is something like seeing change where there appears to be none, and the other part, perhaps implicit, is that you would have to hold off, or not be swayed, by the insistence of the need to make decisions about moral, or artistic, or aesthetic realities. Perhaps I can't write anymore regarding this here, but it seems that at this point, Zizek's arguments about "complexity" being used to avoid making decisions you need to make could be seen as iterations of this problem. I think it's also interesting that Arendt wants you to see something where nothing appears; Zizek to see "nothing" or the "real" where something appears (in his language, to "discern the hidden necessity") as an irreducible antagonism. The location of antagonism in Arendt's formulation is always deferred, however: here, not one v. zero, but the difference between one and zero, also not locating the point at which ideology becomes itself, but about identifying the perceptual desire to see "one" in the first place.

Typically, and maybe in this story, images like this would be ones to contend with. But let's take one part of de-ideology par Zizek/Eagleton, which is the idea that ideology is an issue of totality. This is Balibar's point, in his still systematic but less systemic ways: that, perhaps on the one hand, it is (or presents) the fantasy of a certain completeness of methodology (or closure between consciousness and representation/reality) and that the gap of ideology (for Zizek, the real) is a "non-totalizable complexity." I am interested in this notion, because it seems to be similar to D.W. Winnicott's notion that the positive thing "in favor" of the Berlin Wall is the proof it offers that humans cannot withstand "totality." I think that this is a really interesting cross-over, since it is Zizek's ideas about ideology that are both so predominant and so confounding. There are a few points--one is his dismissal of any remaining good to come from a discussion of the problem of "representation, and the other the strictness with which he equates psychoanalysis with repression. This reminds me, as a side note (and because I am trying to get a grip on my argument for the third chapter of my dissertation here), of Geoffry Cocks' article on psychoanlysis, psychotherapy, and psychiatry in divided Germany, which is titled, "Repression, Remembering, Working-Through," as if "repression" can, without comment, both stand in for psychoanalysis and substitute for a notion of repeating, or acting out. I have no thoughts about this "totality" yet, although I do have to say that I don't think it is the above image, which means that the image above would also have to be one of "unraveling"; maybe it would just be harder to digest.

picture: voyeur's view of recycled materials, near the train tracks, Los Angeles

LA in the rains

More and more I find myself feeling this absurd juxtaposition of seemingly trivial, superficial details of life, of livivng and these heady, profound even unthinkable questions about the meaning of existence. The feeling is bizarre. And all words in this register apply--it always strikes me that this should actually be one of the most normal feelings, so to speak. Since I have been trying, in the past days (save for the day of feeling totally trivial, myself), to get a generous sense of Zizek's take on ideology and ideology critique, I have thought that this feeling is related to this confusing process of externalization and internalization that he finds at work in the process of ideology--both the standard, normal Ideology and the new, Zizek-redefined IDeology. The old version would have that internalization is the process of ideology--that contingency is turned into necessity through a process of taking in the contingency and giving it meaning (through our belief in some necessity). The new version has that the inner necessity of external, contingent events is ignored, thus ignoring the inherent logic of a system that produces such contingencies. Thus the contrast between versions:

• V(old): "internalization of the external contingency"
• V(new): "externalization of the result of an inner necessity"

I feel like the sense that these things (the internal/external, necessity/contingency) are very distance from one another is one of the inevitable points of Zizek's theorizing, although I feel that this seems, in his writing, to happen accidentally--or by way of method, to be one of the things you must accept, if you are to think of things in the end in the way that he does. It seems, on the one hand as bizarre as the above-mentioned feeling of the normalcy of feeling estranged from your very own life. This feeling, an affect that Zizek does not comment on, but one that I feel is the predominant outcome of his theoretical writings, founds the desire I have to think critically about his work, and ultimately to not want it.

picture: Forest Spirits, from Hayou Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke