wall of clouds

"No one is better than Proust at giving the sense that the true interest of a psyche, a landscape, or indeed a sentence may be actually inexhaustible."

--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from "The Weather in Proust"

Sedgwick's suggestion, which aligns psyche, landscape, and sentence, as units, or concept-units measured out by an inexhaustible "true interest," speaks to the problem of state change, of the extent to which change in degree also spans a qualitative realm, and how a shifting of interest may or may not bring into question the "trueness"--here, the aspect, perhaps of being "steady, firm, and dependable in allegiance or devotion to a loved one, friend, leader, group, or cause : not false or perfidious" forms a slight tension in relation to "trueness" as "conformable to fact," or as "conformable to nature, reality, or an original : accurate in delineating or expressing the essential elements." What is there in this connection between "trueness" and a condition of "inexhaustible" interest? Where does the psyche/landscape/sentence stand in relation to this "true interest"? 

State change. Cloud formation. Later: an idea about the sublimation of snow, under conditions of low temperatures, high winds, sun, and low air pressure, snow becomes vapor, passing directly rather than moving through liquidity. A rain shadow wind, a wind whose moisture is expended windward and becomes dry leeward, expending nothing, except itself. The "Chinook Arch," a cloud formation that appears as a gathering storm, a wall of clouds, elevated; below the wall, sky is visible above the horizon. This is one of the few illusions the Minnesotan sky engages in, foreboding (or not) snow. This illusiveness is/appears inexhaustible. Inexhaustible, in the sense of only just barely existing. The sense of having an awareness of something being held up, being held, period, having a sense somewhere that this is false even as, through its continued persistence, it appears, in an aspect, true. 

Sublimation, as state change: the "path of energy of the sex drive or impulse towards nonsexual activities" (Laplanche, "To Situate Sublimation"). Yet, in Loewald, in Heimann, even in Laplanche, the suggestion is otherwise, about the kind of transformation effected. Laplanche: "although sublimation is most often regarded as a transformation of some sexual activity into nonsexual activity, as a 'destined impulse', we find several passages where what is in question is the genesis of objects, of myths or illusions" (9). At the edges of this transformation, then, the production of illusion. Commenting on Freud's reading of Leonardo, Laplanche notes how two subliminatory activities take place--pictorial creation and scientific investigation--so that the questions raised by these different activities allows him to "dwell on this notion, so crucial in psychoanalysis": "of an impossibility of transformation, i.e., the fact that in certain areas the passage from, the conversion of, some site into another, some psychic reality into another, is not possible in both directions" (10). If counting in the idea delineated in the windworks above, of an omitted step--for what reasons we might not know, or know yet--then reasons for the irreversibility of this passage or conversion can be seen as already constitutive of the state change, but in addition to this, can yield the state change as less of a transformation from one thing to another, in response to concern for the existential aspect of the before and after, and more as an elaboration of the integrity of the unit-concept--the psyche, landscape, or sentence. 

Through "To Situate Sublimation," Laplanche makes use of what he calls a "dihedron model" to illustrate the idea of reciprocity (labeled dihedron, between mastery (the drive to know) and sado-masochism; top) against the possibility of "another, non-"mutual" way of understanding the return from sadism toward sublimated activities" (unlabeled dihedron; bottom).

He writes, "For example, we an imagine something that would resemble a refolding of the sexual level back into the level of self-preservation" (15). The level of self-preservation, drawn by Freud as that which takes place in distinction to the sexual (and thus here, on the side of mastery or the drive to know) thus can be seen to hold the same place as that of the sublimated activities, if such reciprocity were to be maintained. In Laplanche's reading, however, the drive to know already "'works with the energy of Schaulust', the drive or desire to see" (15). He writes, 

The activity of seeing is thus considered to consist of two sections, one nonsexual and self-preservative [the other, "the sexual drive to see" forms the other aspect of this "propping movement"]: after all, sight enables each creature endowed with it to orient himself in the world, quite apart from any question of sexual pleasure, and from this point of view Freud links it directly to touch: the act of seeing is an extension of the act of touching. This is linked to the whole Freudian theory of perception, which views perception as consisting of a sending out of feelers, of sensitive tentacles, at rhythmic intervals. Imagine the cilia of a protozoan or the horns of a snail endowed with a kind of in and out movement...indeed, the snail's horns do bear sight organs. That is the image Freud has in mind when he connects sight to touch and compares it to a gathering in of samples from the outside world. The non-sexual activity of seeing, in the propping process, becomes a drive to see as soon as it becomes representative, that is, the interiorization of a scene. (15)

Working across the arrows, then, is this register of a passing through seeing, something which we can glimpse as dislocated from either side. In what sense is this "extension" of touching to seeing an illusive "genesis of objects" even when it appears merely as state change or transformation? 

In the above, it's hard not to read the "one nonsexual and self-preservative" as "one nonsexual and one self-preservative," since this highlights the way in which the return appears and is not the same. Laplanche, further: 

Here we have what I was trying to indicate with regard to the dihedron schema, namely, that the plane of self-preservation is so defective that in certain cases it can be almost virtual and cannot be made active other than at the moment when the right-hand plane (sexuality), as it is called, arouses it. Thus we have a propping reinforced or buttressed by something it has itself brought into being. In other words, the notion of propping still holds surprises. (16; italics mine)

I wonder, in relation to some of the point of outset, whether it is the idea of propping itself, or this notion of "still holds surprises" that could be imagined as a condition of inexhaustibility. Is it, instead, not the "true" interest that is inexhaustible, but the defective one? Or, in what aspect must the true appear so as to appear "defective"? There is a later link made between sublimation and repression, which Laplanche describes as the type of propping associated with sublimation, which is, as fitting for sublimation, the "most rarest and most perfect." Here, "the libido stands aloof from representation, it is sublimated from the beginning into the desire to know and reinforces or buttresses the already powerful drive to investigate" (21). Being sublimated "from the beginning," the libido does not stand outside, as an indication of this non-mutual investment; Laplanche notes, "sublimation is not a repression and yet there is still a turning back" (21). But in/of what does the turning back consist? To which: a defective site of an activity of perception on a plane almost virtual, an inexhaustibility that continues to yield a "turning back," a rain shadow wind, a wall of clouds. 

Der andere Schauplatz

I'm trying to synthesize a few things with this post, perhaps more wildly disparate than will merge in the space of writing this (both temporal and raeumlich), and all of them associatively linked to the convergence of some factors experientially and conceptually. The first is Balibar's notion of "the other scene," which occurred to me as a formulation that could be useful for thinking about alternative functions of the poetic work (alternative to the "task" of political lyric, or the task of lyric to sublimate aggression or combat barbarism). Turning to Balibar, I noted that "the other scene" is a reference taken from Freud (primarily in The Interpretation of Dreams), and further, that Freud develops his ideas about it from the luminous G.T. Fechner, whose Principles of Psycho-Physics is also a primary referent of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This all only means something to me because in attempting to think about "forepleasure [Vorlust]" as a means for thinking alternatively about the function of tension release in relation to pleasure and displeasure, Freud's references also lead to Fechner, who develops this notion in The Primer of Aesthetics, and here it is the idea of the mutual non-contradiction of factors that allows him to account for otherwise inexplicable effects, such as the feelings of identification and transfer of emotions that occur in experiencing works of art and aesthetic events.

In Politics and the Other Scene, Balibar uses the term to refer to the "differentiation of change," or a "change within change," rather than the "changing of conditions." The idea seems to provide Balibar with a way of conceptualizing the "locality" of such factors, or the coherence of a pattern that is, as he says, one "inverted" from Marx's turning away from the "apparent scene" of politics to reveal the "real scene" of economic processes. Balibar writes, "I have a certain tendency to invert this pattern--not to return to the idea that 'ideas drive history', but to emphasize the fact that 'material' processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary which have their own very effective materiality and need to be unveiled" (xiii). Balibar qualifies this distinction with the idea that it's not exactly that the political other scene is the scene of the imaginary collective processes and their unconscious determinants, and this qualification perhaps points to the significance of this being originally Fechner's notion. It's been a little while since I've looked more closely at his work, but the Fechner/Freud distinction (which is elaborated by Mai Wegener in "DAS PSYCHOPHYSISCHE UNBEWUSSTE: GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER UND DER MOND" (Psychoanalytische Perspectiven 23 (2005) 2, 261-282)) often seems to consist of Fechner's greater emphasis upon the preconscious aspects of the unconscious, rather than the unconscious itself. The structure is interesting, however, and resonates with Balibar's above because Fechner's elaboration of the indistinction seems to require the rather more forceful distinction of cs/ucs, as Balibar's inversion seeks also to recombine and relocate the place, or perhaps "moment," of their interaction. This is the point at which, I think, the associative connection with "the other scene" shifts into a conceptualization of "civility" and for a "politics of civility." In the preface, the connection is drawn, although not explicit: "A politics of violence, or a politics of civility (the same thing obversely formulated), is not something that can be pursued solely on the stage of globalization, where processes, motivations and interests are supposed to be visible and manageable" (xii). Balibar explains that it's in order to account for the heterogeneity of the processes of globalization that Freud's concept is so useful, and it's this that Freud attempts to describe as the "essential heterogeneity of psychic processes" (xii). It's possible, therefore, to think about how this notion of the Schauplatz provides a scene for civility, for what is neither, according to Balibar, "transformation" or "emancipation."

Briefly, civility is, for Balibar, "a politics which regulates the conflict of identifications between the impossible (and yet, in a sense, very real) limits of a total and floating identification, 'civility'. Civility in this sense is certainly not a politics which suppresses all violence; but it excludes extremes of violence, so as to create a (public, private) space for politics (emancipation, transformation), and enable violence itself to be historicized. What interests me, here, is not to codify that civility, but to attempt, in conclusion to outline some of its problems" (29-30). "Civility" is not then a model for a politics, but a way of thinking about the problems that are necessarily involved in thinking what precedes political actions, or politics, or what takes place behind the scenes of globalization. And in this sense, "civility" refers to the processes of identification and misidentification (processes involved in the master-slave dynamic and in the notion that fascism is the desire that "desires its own repression") and the destructiveness (tending toward death drivenness) of these processes. These ideas are elaborated in "Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Anthropology" (differences 20 (2009)), and here above I've done little more than outline the argument and ideas, but the link that I'm attempting to draw out between "the other scene" and "civility" relates to the distinction between sleeping and waking.

It's not just that "the other scene" refers to this distinction, and in fact becomes a concept that allows for the theorization of the distinction, but it remains very much the case, in Balibar's writings, that this also underlies the parallel (and gain) of the essential heterogeneity of the psychical and the essential heterogeneity of the political.

In her essay, Wegener describes the difference between Freud's and Fechner's notions of "the other scene [anderen Schauplatz] by talking about how Freud fixes the concept as a "synonym of the unconscious itself." (271, translations mine). In contrast, Wegener argues that Fechner's conceptualization of the unconscious is "physical," which is surprising, she notes, for the founder of psychophysics: "Dies ist nicht der Fall [die Zuordnung des Unbewussten zwischen dem Koerperlichen und dem Psychischen], Fechners Unbewusstsein ist unzweitdeutig ein physisches. Die psychophysisiche Taetigkeit wird, wie oben erwaehnt, von ihm als koerperliche gekennzeichnet, sie ist der koerperliche Traeger des Psychischen. Ihre negativen Werte, also das Unbewusste, entsprechen schlicht dem Schlaf [This is not the case [the placement of the unconscious between the bodily and the psychical]; Fechner's unconscious is unambivalently physical. The psychophysical activity becomes, as mentioned above, designated as bodily; it is the bodily carrier of the physical. Its negative value, the unconscious, corresponds simply in sleep]." As Wegener describes, "the other scene" is the expression of a negativity, rather than the expression of an ambivalence between psychical and physical life, as the distinction between waking and sleeping often seems to entail. Fechner articulates this: "Sollte der Schauplatz der psychophysischen Thaetigkeit waehrend des Schlafes und des Wachens derselbe sein, so koennte der Traum meines Erachtens blos eine, auf einem niedern Grade der Intensistaet sich haltende, Forsetzung des wachen Vorstellungsleben sein, und muesste uebrigens dessen Stoff und dessen Form theilen. Aber es verhaelt sich ganz anders [If the scene of psychophysical activity is supposed to be the same during sleep and waking, then the dream, in my opinion, can be merely a continuation, which maintains a lower degree of intensity, of the waking imaginative life and would therefore share this material and form. But it behaves quite differently]." His articulation of this difference between waking and sleeping makes use of the notion of the "threshold [die Schwelle]," which preoccupies the Elements. From this threshold, he derives the notion of negativity that Wegener takes up above: "...die zunehmende Vertiefung des Schlafes unter die Schwelle eben so mit wachsenden negativen Werthen zu bezeichnen, womit sich unsere fruehere Auffassung negativer Bewusstseinswerthe als unbewusster Werthe von der Empfindung auf das Gesammtbewusstsein uebertraegt, und eine Verallgemeinerung und Verstaerkung der frueheren Auffassung zugleich erwaechst [the growing deepening of sleep beneath the threshold indicates the growing negative value, with which our earlier ideas about the negative consciousness value were translated as the unconscious value of the sensation on the entire consciousness and a generalization and strengthening of the earlier ideas simultaneously increase] (441)." This rather figural notion of the negativity and positivity in relation to the threshold thus serves as Fechner's conceptualization of the oscillation that is constitutive of conscious and unconscious value. It's all about the threshold, for Fechner, and how or what its overcoming can be conceived of as. In this conception, "the other scene" is not the unconscious, per se, but the registration of a threshold which can be passed over and under, according to the gradations in the state of sleep.

Note: These associations/convergences latently manifested walking in Boston, with a recounted dream of EB (with Rei Terada and Travis Tanner).

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.

not making waves

If the "hard things do give way," as Brecht wrote, it is hardly a reassurance, although it is one that Benjamin holds onto, and esteems, when he speaks of Brecht. We might be inclined to want this--the passing away of tension, the eventual ease of transformation, the hopeful sense that change is endless--but with Brecht, one does not dwell with this too long. More than the sense that things can change (and counter to the obvious rendition of "change, not mere interpretation"), Brecht seems to find that the sense of "being otherwise" depends upon a tenuous perception of the difference between the rules that govern and the society that persists. The insight here is perhaps not so profound, but what I think Brecht offers is the idea that art is not there to change or even to reflect the possibility of change, but that art is there to maintain this tenuousness. What is the work of maintaining this disjunct, one that might be seen to correspond to the inadequacy of the relationship between content and form, or between reality and representation?