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)

Preference and the Revolutionary Spectator

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or, another rejection (this one, from the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, theme: Errans)

Abstract: In contrast to the importance placed on acting in theories of the revolutionary subject in the twentieth century, this project explores the errantry of contemplative activity. Going astray “in the mind” leads, both in political and in psychoanalytic theory, to the philosophical problem of preferring and “preferring not to,” to preference, the mediation of freedom and necessity, of unconscious and conscious desires. The project aims to highlight forms of activity that have been historically marginal in traditions of revolutionary thought and action, such as contemplation, spectatorship, the private realm, aesthetic judgment, and reproductive labor. The project takes up the central question proposed by the core project Errans: how can the negative capacity of errantry be maintained without its being valorized as negativity and thus reinserted teleologically? In answer to this question, I propose to explore the aesthetics of preference, which encompasses various attitudes of contemplation and spectation that are employed in the realm of political activity and can be seen to underlie actions or movements described as errant.

Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist theories of revolutionary transition have tended to emphasize the importance of what I call “negative preference,” a moment that is supposed to escape, through a form of negative agency, subsumption into the system of capitalist production. Theorists of negative preference, such as Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, and Ranciére, have frequently applied Melville’s Bartleby’s utterance “I would prefer not to” as one of its absolute instances, but I argue that this version of negativity is also a form of errantry, a truth statement that produces further questions about freedom and necessity. During the last fifty years, feminist Marxists who argue for the importance of reproductive labor, including Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, and Selma James, have provided ways for thinking about freedom from the reproduction of circumscribed choices within gendered institutions. Taking up the problems of freedom and necessity marked by these traditions, contemporary thinkers of revolution craft a space for contemplation as a condition of praxis, but the tendency of theories of change is to convert the tension between the voluntaristic (or contemplative) subject and an involuntary negativity into a form of necessary action or the necessity of practice. More often than not, passing over moments of spectation and contemplation reflects gendered assumptions about the priority of practice, dismissing depoliticized forms of life that become equated, through the idea of preference as personal choice, with liberal and neoliberal dispositions and with deliberation about “means” rather than about “ends.”

In contrast to the importance placed on the necessity of acting in theories of the resistant or revolutionary subject, this project explores the errantry of contemplative activity. It provides a counternarrative to these stories of the resistant or revolutionary subject by looking at the subject’s tolerance—rather than its sublation—of the conflict between voluntary and involuntary activity. Going astray “in the mind” leads, both in political and in psychoanalytic theory, to the philosophical problem of preferring and “preferring not to,” to preference, the mediation of freedom and necessity. The project aims to highlight forms of activity that have been historically marginal in traditions of revolutionary thought and action, such as contemplation, spectatorship, the private realm, aesthetic judgment, and reproductive labor. This project takes up the central question proposed by the core project Errans: how can the negative capacity of errantry be maintained without its being valorized as negativity and thus reinserted teleologically? In answer to this question, I propose to explore the aesthetics of preference, which encompasses various attitudes of contemplation and spectation that are employed in the realm of political activity and can be seen to underlie actions or movements described as errant.

Although not herself a Marxist, I turn to the texts of Hannah Arendt, written during the sixties and seventies, to work through the problem of freedom and necessity as it pertains to judgment, contemplation, and the gendering of these faculties within the Marxist tradition. The project develops a theoretical framework based on the Arendtian notion of “preference,” which Arendt introduces through the Aristotelian term proairesis (literally pro-airesis, a “choice before choice”) to describe a “proto-will” involving the ambiguity and mediation of freedom and necessity. In her 1970 The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt describes proairesis as a faculty that modifies willing, meant to establish an alternative to the development of willing as the realization of thinking into action.

Arendt does not develop preference as one of her central terms, but it returns in her discussion of the importance of judgment, where preference refers to the desire to “go astray”: “I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents [Errare mehercule malo cum Platone…quam cum istis (sc. Pythagoraeis) vera sentire].” Preference is thus an articulation of the voluntary-involuntary nature of willing in general, and of the role played by aesthetic judgment in thinking and acting. I argue that insofar as it represents the problem of the voluntary-involuntary subject, preference underlies contemplation and errantry. Its claim to validity departs from accepted or normative truths, but rather than being a purely active negation of the truth, this departure signals an acceptance of the ambiguity in acting and spectating, and in the production of truth and error.

Turning from Arendt’s formulations of preference as an aesthetic activity that tolerates the ambiguity of spectating and acting, I explore the problem of the voluntary-involuntary subject in work that seeks to rearticulate the terms of private life in order to produce a resistant subject. I consider how writers have sought to transform literature into a forum in which an automatic resistance to capitalism can be theorized as a matter of aesthetics, and as a poetics. I explore this politicization of literature in several different contexts: the problem of “coerced freedom” in global feminist work of the 1980s (Maria Mies, Rosemarie Trockel, Silvia Federici, Selma James); the construction of the “other” in European poetry of migration (Zafer Senoçak, Zehra Çirak); and contemporary anticapitalist poetry’s intolerance of “apolitical” poetry (Jennifer Moxley, Joshua Clover). Methodologically, the project examines how literary form as poetry has borrowed from sociological models of political agency, but has also complicated sociological notions of history and subjectivity by giving poetic form to the epistemological aporia of the voluntary-involuntary subject.

In bringing together Marxist discourse, Arendt’s writings on preference, and anticapitalist poetry, I focus on two main theoretical issues: the concept of transition, or how necessity is overcome to yield freedom, and the priority of action as a mode of subjecthood. Arendt’s thinking about revolutionary transition and her critique of Marx form an important point of tension with post-Marxist ideas about the immanence and the immediacy of revolutionary transition, because while Arendt also critiques the idea of the transformation from necessity to freedom implicit in the transition, she helps us to think about how making the transition immediate, or doing away with it, does not solve the problem about freedom—or how, in modern thought, freedom is surrendered to necessity. Safeguarding freedom in periods of transition becomes important in the literatures I explore, which think about how contingent needs and desires are the first things to be destroyed in moments of crisis.

Federici and Arendt

Paolo Virno`s ``Virtuosity and Revolution`` pursues some of the lines I have been trying to draw between Arendt`s take on the ``subjective illusion,`` the contradiction between freedom and necessity, and the Marxist concern with the contradiction within the subjective modes of reproduction and productive to capitalism. Resolving such a contradiction on the side of a productive subject who is resistant, autonomous Marxist theorists such Cesare Casarino, Hardt and Negri, and Virno, posit the notion of the ``common`` as a way of thinking about positive models of subjective resistance. Casarino writes, ``To claim back and seize the common as production entails a drastic reorientation of subjectivity.... It entails the production of a form of subjectivity constituted by a counterdesire. Such a counterdesire is the desire to be in common--as opposed to the desire to be for the common-as-negated-by-capital, the desire to be captive of one`s own negation--in short, as opposed to the desire not to be`` (17). Such theories, which prescribe a mode of subjectivity, implicitly--or explicitly, as Casarino--corralling reason and desire, are predicated upon an opposition to the Arendtian model of subjectivity, or rather, the liberal subject that is assumed to be the model or the outcome of Arendt`s ideas about work, labor, and political activity.

Virno`s essay makes clear how central the opposition to Arendt is to work on the common, since, as he claims, ```To each his own` seems to be the message of Arendt`s The Human Condition, and every man for himself...the other two fundamental spheres, work and intellect, remain unchanged in their quantitative structures`` (206). Virno uses Arendt as an (or the) example of unfettered individualism, figured first as a feature of the intellect and then as a figure of work. Virno`s claim that this is what Arendt is doing is built upon the idea that she ``rejects out of hand the very idea of a public intellect`` (193). Conflating the ``life of the mind`` with the private sphere, Virno wrongly concludes that the intellect--which includes thought, willing, and judging, according to The Life of the Mind--does not entail a ``care for common concerns`` (Virno 193). As both The Life of the Mind and her Lectures on Kant`s Political Philosophy demonstrate, however, the care for common concerns turns out to be the central thesis of our intellectual life. What is perhaps more immediate to my concerns here is not this interpretive argument, but rather the noticeable absence of the term ``labor`` from Virno`s analysis of Arendt.

The absence of labor is all the more notable in light of Sylvia Federici`s critique of autonomous Marxists` work on the subject of immaterial labor, ``Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.`` More particularly, the points that Federici claims to be missing from this work--namely that ``capitalist development is always at the same time a process of underdevelopment,`` and that unpaid reproductive labor continues to remain unrecognized, despite feminist analysis of the sexual division of labor--can be seen to be functions of the same type of disregard that is paid Arendt. For in Arendt`s case, labor involves exactly the realm of unwaged labor and the uneven development of freedom to which Federici refers. In her discussion of the private and public realm in The Human Condition, Arendt writes:  ``What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity--for instance, by ruling over slaves--and to become free`` (31). Later in this same section, she describes how the private realm, far from being a realm that individuals could choose (over, say, the common or the public realm) is the realm of labor: ``Hidden away were the laborers who `with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life` and the women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species. Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else`s property but because their life was `laborious,` devoted to bodily functions`` (72). These lines from Arendt describe how the freedom of the worker is dependent upon a realm of necessity--whether his own or the necessary labor of another--from which he cannot become free. It is her concern with the effects of feeling that one is free--the justification of ``force and violence``--that inform her insistence of making visible the distinction between labor and work.

While the distinctions between private and public or between labor and work themselves may be belabored, Arendt`s distinctions in general--such as between ``necessity and freedom,`` ``futility and permanence,`` ``shame and honor`` (73)--they do not serve prescriptive purposes, as I indicated above in the case of the Marxist subject, but rather they work to retain other distinctions that runs across and within both categories (see, for example, unquiet/quiet distinction, HC 15). Arendt`s concern is not only that as work ``assumes the character of labor,`` the value of work (its permanence, the durable world it creates) is denigrated, but that no longer being able to see necessity, the private realm, has its own consequences. In this regard, it remains for Arendt crucial that man knows ``he is subject to necessity,`` since in contrast to ``life in slavery,`` ``this condition [of being subject to need and necessity] is no longer fully manifest and its lack of appearance has made it much more difficult to notice and remember`` (121). But why is it that Arendt finds it so important to maintain the perceptibility of the private realm, which is indeed that realm which is about ``privation,`` about the ``life processes`` which are ``futile``because they appear and disappear? Is it the easing of this ``repugnance to futility`` (121) that she seeks, or, in fact, its opposite? It is the figure of ``socialized mankind,`` the indistinction between society and the life-processes themselves, that presents a threat large enough to defend against with the insistence on maintaining the perceptibility of the private realm.

In Arendt`s conceptualization, the private realm is like ``the other, dark and hidden side of the public realm`` (64), and thus perception of it, or the ability to perceive it does not have the same qualities as perception in public life, which is built around being among others. The perception of the private entails the capacity to see what is ``no longer human`` about human existence, to see that ``man exist[s] in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind`` (46). And while it is true that Arendt does not elevate the capacity to perceive this to the realm of action, its clear function is to preserve the ambivalence within ``futility``--its not only that futility is to be guarded against, as indicated by the danger of the phenomenon of ``loneliness`` (59, which in The Origins of Totalitarianism has consequences for terror), or by the threatened reality of a world that appears impermanent--but the idea that the feeling of ``futility`` is one that provides individuals with the ``strongest impulse`` toward liberation (and thus also toward mastery, violence, and force). The ambivalent treatment of futility in the private realm has to do with the fact that registering it is like registering the desire not to be. That this still follows a model in which the darker ground is given meaning by ``rising into sight,`` does not minimize the potential for thinking about the impacts of losing what Arendt calls the ``non-privative traits of privacy``: ``a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses that quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense`` (71). 

the necessity of irresistibility

In The Micro-Politics of Capital, Jason Read describes the contradiction that is raised for the subject between “the total subjection of sociality and subjectivity to capital and the concomitant development of a subjective and social power irreducible to abstract labor” (119). Read points to a contradiction that gels into the problem of “thinking resistance” (11). I approach the problem of the production of subjectivity, in Read’s terms, of the “more than one” (Balibar’s transinidividual) from a different perspective, which is rooted in Arendt’s critical insight about how the “more than” of preference is not opposed to necessity, but rather, in its capacity to will or choose against the given, remains able to provoke necessity, to see the violence behind necessity. Preference, the “styles, desires, communities, and ways of communicating” (147), to use Read’s phrasing, that become productive in “real subsumption” do not represent a depature from the “necessities of “bare life’” (147), nor do they represent the shift or temporal progression from one mode of production to another; rather, these “preferences” are there from the beginning, first registered as qualities destroyed in “primitive accumulation,” by the “violence necessary to destroy precapitalist social relations” (14). The destruction of preferences is actually, however, the creation of “needs and wants,” the transformation of the oppressive violence of the master into the violence which is there is the force of necessity. Arendt’s interest in preference is linked to her abiding concern with “the beginning,” and with the potential for freedom that is created in this moment of expropriation, the unearthing of what appears as natural or necessary as man-made and political. Arendt describes this as Marx’s most explosive contribution, but following Hegelian turn, in which the recovery of the “ability to act,” which now places laborers under their “daily needs and wants” (53) makes action “irresistible,” not any longer from a feeling of “being violated,” but “by virtue of the very necessity under which emancipation had put the working class” (53).

Arendt’s critique of Marx in On Revolution and The Human Condition and her copious discussions of the thinking individual make her unpopular among theorists of the revolutionary subject. In fact, Arendt is often with the assumption of the liberal subject, but it is more accurate to say that Arendt hits upon the contradictions between the liberal subject and the revolutionary, proposing that the problem of this subject is not, as it has long been assumed, getting rid of the “responsible and isolated subject.” For Arendt, the illusion of the individual subject is necessary (or inevitable) and attempts to do away with it—to reveal how the singular “I” is a collective “We”—end up circling around the problems of agency invoked by this formulation. For Arendt, this illusion is a false problem (Scheinproblem), one whose calls for demystification end up contributing to a mystification that is far worthier of being demystified: the confusion of being at once spectators and actors and the tendency to mistake spectating for acting. It is this illusion, according to Arendt, that allows liberal and revolutionary subjects alike to develop a political morality grounded in the certainty of the self. Whereas this illusion can be disentangled from what appears as historical or economic necessity, the persistence of that other subjective illusion—of the “I”’s feeling that she is a singular one with wants and needs—reveals how “necessary” this articulation is to the concept of freedom.

Preference does not involve becoming free from this necessity, but continually unearths the violent, non-natural premises of necessity, developing the capacity to intervene in this necessity by foregrounding the role of the spectator—our role as spectators—even when it is more compelling to understand ourselves as actors. Arendt’s ideas about preference end up illuminating her discussion of how terror results when necessity replaces freedom, and these insights are significant—not only because of the implicit warning, but because the discussion makes an argument for a opposition of art and politics, based on the what has been seen to happen choices become mistaken as criterion for the endpoint of revolution. The opposition of art and politics is not, as first it may seem, an argument for an apolitical aesthetics. Quite the opposite: the aesthetic is unearthed as a political moment; this unearthing is what I will refer to as aesthetic activity, for it is—quite akin to discussion of the subject—about “recover[ing] its ability to act.” But in being read as political, this artistic “choice” does not, of course, become necessarily political or become a “criterion” for political activity.

picture: Marsha Cottrell, Hitherto Unknown Lights (2011, iron oxide on mulberry paper)

graucats

in night
                           all cats are gray
                  all dreaming generalizations
                                        are equally guilty
in dark   in time
                           all cats are becoming
                                        gray
zones of dark times, eventuating
and we are all equally guilty
                                        in night
                                        in dark times
by night all cats look gray
(to me?) I    to you     to he/she/it
to we       you all       they
they are gray, indiscriminate
                         plucked from the sea of shade
for posterity.

is this what the big party is all about?
                         returning them in their little parts
(P.A.R.T.S.) to the sea
                                         to shades
of gray cats

[the red square, the concrete plaza
            (the grass will not do
            ) the closet will not do
felt. wares.
the little red felt square
wears the gray
cat
                                         by night.



reference: Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, gray cat/Marx, most recently.

R/hode I/sland, P/rovidence

This series of photographs is meant, in ways, to be a response to this running water is death, a film presented by Rei Terada at the ACLA plenary session (March 31, 2012), Thinking Disaster, and to the ACLA panels and Providence encountered there, and perhaps in particular to the continuing and profound conversations with Michelle Cho (missing Travis Tanner and Annette Rubado, of course). In ways, it was as if everything in the past ten years had wound up to this point, and the images that follow are all taken relatively blindly, from the car as I was driving away through Rhode Island. It was the driving away that was inevitable.

 

If there are claims that pattern reduces all figure to ground, as something like improper contrast or the lack of optimal lighting conditions, the phenomenon continues to circulate the myth of being able to distill the one from the other, not just the figure from the ground, but the intention to do so from the lack of mastery. 

Call it a happy accident; the question is why frame action in this way? Even above, you can see how it tends to the edges, already suggesting that there is something to see like the womb in abyss...

It would be funnier, if every time someone in the ``After the Subject`` stream said ``model,`` talking about the need to come up with better models of resistance, it was replaced with ``womb.`` Funnier, I mean, for anyone not in the room, for those outside of the room. ``Womb``--it`s not much of a jump, of course, they are both there, under synonyms for  ``matrix``--invites the ridicule of those who would scorn creation, and aesthetics was also never mentioned.

Such things involve taking into account one`s role as a spectator of the action in which one is also acting. Like driving over bridges whose other side is not yet visible, one`s role as a spectator of the conversation that one is having is illuminated by glimpses of the bridge`s underside--not for any structural considerations, or grounding, or for the security of making such a leap of faith--but for the impossible perspective that you can sustain.

Sometimes, it is the foregrounding of coincidence that makes perceptible the continual registration of ``phenomenal death,`` of death already.

But there are many cases where the examples, to be taken as models, at one remove, and as figures, at the next, are not of much weight, or much consequence. They can seem to be things to merely be regarded and to posit a fairly neutral perspective, as when we`re talking about frames, geometrically, not otherwise.

For example, I thought that the guy who I was sitting catty-corner from was very smart and even liked his insistence that ``biosemiotics`` was the word to save if the project was ``opening other forms of sociality that exceed models of subjectivity.`` But you get outside of the room, and you ask yourself, what is it about the weight of his models? Why do examples of state violence and crowd phenomenon seem to necessitate a return to militant rationality?

He had, after all, stated that the Arendtian liberal model needed to be ``heavily worked on.``

When I think about thought--someone`s thought--being taken to task, being ``heavily worked over,`` for its imputed liberal subject, I imagine the decrepitude of such a warehouse, become waiting room, as if Arendt, herself, were such a place.  

On the freeway, too, disaster presents as a loop. Others, whose projects I admire, want to be committed to the decrepitude of life under regimes of institutional, racial, structural, financial, economic, urban, geographical, physical, empirical, social, and state violence. I can`t help feeling caught in idle, wondering about the tension between ``direct`` intervention in and objections to the violence of this world. 

Then, there was another discussion about ``underdevelopment.``

 

Which I understood as a form of disaster, something like the logical, but irrational, underside of development.

And yet, in remarking about this term, I felt it was impossible to move beyond a determination of whether or not that meant I was complicit with development, or with projects of development. There were its limits, that we never got around to talking about.

As where we are when we are between the necessary and the intolerable.

 

At least from there we can think about figures of resistance without feeling we are obliged to do away with the beauty of decrepit buildings.

 

In this room, we arrived at three terms for signifying a form of community ``after the subject``: ad hoc, emergent, and spontaneous.

Although this was true, spontaneity was found dubious on the grounds of its fantastic nature. Since, once we can give a fuller account of a seemingly ``spontaneous`` event, or once we can historicize or contextualize or narrativize, the spontaneous event is more of a myth of self-organization than a reality. This does not answer the question, however, of why such forms of fantasy exist so powerfully in the experience of activity.

For example, if you would believe it, I took this picture because I kept wanting to capture the ---.

Do we just end up getting bored if we find we don`t have an answer? Is this the type of thing that gets deemed professionally uninteresting, or un-``fit,`` because the answer does not take the shape of an argument?

Why did Arendt maintain that there was something to recuperate--or at least, to hold on to--in spontaneity? She is concerned to the point of obsession with how to distill these experiences of ``beginning,`` which would reflect some kind of capacity to disambiguate spectator and actor, or to confuse them entirely. At what point does the ``assumption of a liberal subject`` become a shorthand for saying that contextualization and historization actually preclude narrative?

 

In other words, value is no longer aligned with aesthetics, but with production.

But all things point towards retrospection, as what is inevitable. For Joshua Clover, this has something to do with line break, ``the dominant formal fact of poetics.``

I am less inclined.

the ou mallon

Georgio Agamben`s discussion of the Skeptic term ou mallon (``no more than``) provides ground for theorizing the Arendtian notion of preferring-as-discrimination, which she introduces in her discussion of taste as a political activity in ``The Crisis in Culture.`` Agamben describes how the ou mallon functions in the Skeptic tradition as the radical ``suspension`` of possibility: ``no more this than that.`` The upshot of this is for potentiality, which is ultimately what Agamben wants (the essay which includes this term, ``Bartleby, or on Contingency,`` is published in his book Potentialities. But potentiality is not as much about the future as about the past--about saving ``what was not.`` Agamben thus finds fault with Nietzsche`s captivation with the liberatory aspect of being able to will backwards. Agamben writes, ``This is why Zarathustra is the one who teaches the will to `will backwards` (zurueckwollen) and to transform every `thus it was` into a `thus I willed it`: `this alone is liberation.` Solely concerned with repressing the spirit of revenge, Nietzsche completely forgets the laments of what was not or could have been otherwise`` (``Bartleby`` 267). Agamben, who mentions Deleuze`s essay on Bartleby (``Bartleby, or the Formula``) in his own essay, does not draw out the connection between ``willing backwards`` and Deleuze`s idea of the automatic passage of the two phases of Bartleby`s refusal into one another, but together, these form the logic of preferring-as-willing. In models of this logic, preferring is seen to be a form of willing. Although she does not fully articulate this in her effort to distinguish between preferring and willing, Arendt`s concern about how freedom is surrendered to necessity even in willing guides her conceptualization of a liberatory moment that does not make this exchange. Arendt`s criticism of Marx for eventually surrendering freedom to necessity, which arises from her belief that freedom needs to be preserved as a social right, anticipates the problematic treatment of the transitional and transitory phenomenon of social change in the work of Deleuze, Zizek, and others who raise Bartleby to the position of a figure of revolution.

In my effort to articulate how the Arendtian preferring-as-discrimination functions as distinct from the above logic of preference, I take recourse through the figure/ground problem, which foregrounds (so to speak) the problem of discerning to whom boundary lines pertain, and thus of making judgments about what constitutes object and what context, what activity and what passivity, what artistic and what aesthetic, and so on... Agamben`s discussion of the ou mallon helps to make the case for Arendt`s version because he is also interested in substantializing the loss, not as an object, but as a continuation of the problem of what constitutes the overlap between artistic and aesthetic activity. In the series of essays published in The Man Without Content, Agamben takes up the issue of the split between genius (and artistic production) and taste (and aesthetic judgment) which Arendt also discusses in her lectures on Kant`s political philosophy. Preferring-as-discrimination thus denotes a realm of aesthetic activity, in which individuals are called upon to be both spectators and actors. As Arendt found, this complex and oftentimes confusing state marks human experience in the world. Her elevation of judging as the highest form of political activity derives from her idea about individuals as ``world spectators,`` including the notions of sociality and communicability that follow from being public beings. Arendtian necessity comes in, however, in the idea of the ``dark times,`` and her imposition of this term to describe periods of ``foreordained doom`` curtails the freedom that should be attainable in this sphere. The ``dark times,`` it begins to seem, are not a period, but something like the obverse of that revolutionary and free spontaneous beginning, the darkness into which figures recede and withdraw.

Arendt does not go so far as to develop these ideas about aesthetic activity, and her discussion of the political aspect of aesthetics does not involve the conflict with the artistic in the sense that Agamben wants and that, thirty-six years after her death, is more clearly invoked in the spectator society of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.   

pictures: winter, Minnesota (2010); Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled (drawing)

aqua-tic

(In memory of Hannah Arendt, who died 36 years ago today): New Yorker cover from publication of ``Eichmann in Jerusalem`` (March 16, 1963).  

taste

In “A Crisis in Culture,” Hannah Arendt describes how the cultivated human mind mediates the conflict between art and politics. Aesthetic taste, understood primarily as the “chief cultural activity” is here, for Arendt, counted among man’s political abilities. The state of “disinterestedness” which man enters into exhibits a humanizing force, its ability to “de-barbarize” the world corresponds to the occupation of a position in which we can “forget ourselves” (207). Arendt thinks that it is possible to “de-barbarize,” to rearticulate the “human” as a mediating factor in the conflict between art and politics, in order to free the individual from feeling coerced. Her concern with the status of human freedom owes much to Enlightenment ideas, but de-barbarization importantly does not mean an increase of cultivation. Rather, it involves counting taste as a political activity, that is, the activity by which the individual considers the world, not his moral or life experiences, as primary. Arendt’s observations on the possibility of de-barbarization heighten our awareness of the way that “taste” describes the entrenchedness of barbarism and culture.

street life

At the same time that she is critical of this perspective, Julia Hell also must spend some time in the midst, and murky waters, of the Cold War logic that she claims "functioned like a mirror." Hell objects to the use of the term "totalitarian" (even as a critical concept, it seems) on the grounds that it remains bound to this "mirror logic," and insofar that it remains blind to "the specific forms of domination and resistance to that system." She also describes this Cold War "mirror logic" as one that creates dichotomies that need to be critically evaluated, such as between "Lukacsian realism" and "Western modernism." So in large part, her book, Post-Fascist Fantasies, is a thorough re-reading of those works in the tradition of "Lukacsian realism" in order to provoke and provide insight into the elements of non-realism (i.e. "fantasy") in these novels. As a project, this is productive and necessary to a reconsideration of East German literature. The wish to interrogate totalitarianism no further is, however, another thing. But it is an interesting "other thing," since it seems to me that the wish to dismiss "totalitarianism" is the backhand of a more moral endeavor--one that more self-consciously wants to discuss its past, future, and present--to deal with the repressed past (and implicit here, is "of the German nation"). Hell does not go at repression from the point of repression until the very end of her book, perhaps, in the epilogue, titled "History as Trauma." Instead, she uses the psychoanalytic notion of "fantasy" to designate an unconscious that functions alongside conscious political activity. In these versions of national repression, which pop up everywhere (I am becoming more convinced of this--not only because they "do," but also because people (?) also want to see them everywhere), the wall functions as a splitting mechanism, one that projects all of the bad elements to the other side. Hell uses the "Iron Curtain," but the logic of the wall (see Klaus Theweleit, for example) follows, "what was valued on one side of the Iron Curtain was devalorized on the other; what counted as a "good," "realist," affirmative text in the GDR became a "bad" text outside the GDR and vice versa" (11). This reading, of the wall as both a symbol and psychic fact of repression, fixes the projective fantasies of both the East and West Germans. With the fall of the wall, the continuation of this perspective was to claim that the "invisible" wall "within the head" was a sign of greater repression. So the "wall within the head," the unconscious "fantasy," becomes the conceptual and methodological turning point of post-totalitarian ideology. Similarly, the figure that Hell reads in this literature is the "sublime body" of the post-fascist father, which she takes from Zizek. What is it about this split, antagonistic subject--the transcendental/material, idealist/realist, communist/individual self--that is threatened by the very conceptualization of "totalitarianism"? It might perhaps be something similar to the threat that could be perceived by finding value in the Berlin Wall, by reading the Berlin Wall not as a symbol or thing of repression, but as something that reconfigures the mood of the people living around and after it. Arendt describes totalitarianism as an "experience"--of indeterminate quality--that becomes either foundational or pervasive. In "Ideology and Terror," she notes that this experience has a "general mood," which, "although it may be familiar in every other respect—never before has pervaded, and directed the handling of, public affairs" (461). This mood is an elusive, but nonetheless essential quality of the totalitarian state, and one which might prove useful for thinking about the wish to dismiss totalitarianism.