as in, parts

"The exchange from part to whole generates wholes that turn out to be only parts."

--Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant"

In Adorno's writing on damaged life, guilt—the “context of guilt” [Schuldzusammenhang]—is understood as constitutive of postwar society.[1] This phrase, which he uses in the lectures on Metaphysics, noting that “all culture shares the guilt of society [alle Kultur am Schuldzusammenhang der Gesellschaft teilhat]” (153), is key to thinking about how experiences of guilt becomes rewritten according to a model of complicity that functions as the predominant mode of figuring postwar European subjectivity. Even if it is the case that all culture shares in the “context of guilt,” by which Adorno refers to the inextricability of culture and barbarism, there is yet another question here, of how the European subject comes to know this inextricability, which is also a matter of how guilt is experienced. Adorno figures this as a problem of practical knowledge rather than aesthetic experience; insofar as they can be seen via the aesthetic problem of representation, artistic works share this problem of being imbricated in a barbarism they also seek to rise above. In Adorno’s description, culture’s “taking part” in society’s “context of guilt” phrases the latter as given and the former as acting upon it, the latter as a “crime,” and the former as a crime of the second order, of complice. The more colloquial phrasing Adorno uses through these lectures and his lectures on moral philosophy, about how to live a good life in a bad world, is a translation of this scenario. What kind of “good life” one might lead is not a problem Adorno or theorists of compicity take up, rather, the problem is dealing with the apparent necessity of dissolving the terms of the relation of inextricability—a problem for practical knowledge, echoed in aesthetic works. But if culture and society relate to one another through these logics of consumption and sustenance, which may—though do not necessarily need to—lead to an understanding of the social “context [Zusammenhang],” terms of extricability are also equally evident. Although they often get parsed as impossible “in reality”—in the sense that, we could say, it is impossible to isolate one’s psychic reality from social reality, and so forth (even though the obverse, that social reality can be imagined as separate from psychic reality, is often not just possible, but the dominant explanation)—such relations of extricability make it possible to think about how compelling the imagination of oneself as part rather than limit is. In their social untenability, such relations make it possible to think about spaces and cultural experiences that open under what might be called the aesthetic problem of sublimation, in which the relief afforded by state change, as in being able to make this distinction between part and limit, is not available, for one reason or another, including that defenses come to been seen as entirely necessary. The aesthetic problem of sublimation pertains to the illusiveness of the representation’s mediating determination about the kinds of state changes that go into the constitution of a dynamic that becomes construed as necessary, as between culture and barbarism, addressing the extent to which the achievement of the aesthetic is a negotiation of the availability of a perspective as part in contrast to as limit of the Zusammenhang of society. The problem of sublimation acknowledges a constraint on one’s ability to negotiate this perspective, as when the bad world described by Adorno seems not just bad, but as W.R.D Fairbairn might say, “unconditionally bad”—in other words, perhaps not “there” at all. In such a world, the terms and concrete conditions of the “guilt context” of society are apparently so diffuse and vast that everything seems to be a part; poetic modes that point out minute distinctions between sustenance and destruction challenge the idea that what can be used to explain them is actually there. If culture is not just a part of the guilt context of society but one of its limits, part of its task—which Adorno also recognizes and to which he assigns the task of art—is to resist the totalizing context of guilt. Left off, however, is the experience of culture as the expression of this limit, an experience of guilt that is extricable to the extent that it is non-utile. For it is preferable to think of what one “cannot do” when one imagines oneself as a part of the good world, and this is the perspective that complicity always produces; this is what it means, in Adorno’s world, to live (or not) the “good life.” It is preferable, only when one glimpses the alternative, ideas about forms of inaction that are not enough in a bad world—for here, where everything is dissatisfying and/or absent, what can possibly be enough? Only in this scape does asserting what is given assume a certain risk, as also it takes place in relation to what is lost; only here does it mean something to say that there is a there, there.

Adorno’s concern with the adequation of culture to society leads to his 1955 essay “Guilt and Defense,” a qualitative summary of the findings of the Frankfurt School’s Gruppenexperiment, which surveyed Germans about conflicts present in accepting responsibility for Nazism. Adorno describes an “intermediate layer” of “transsubjective elements” that he imagines as a “subjective social-psychological disposition” (52) that spans social and psychological, ultimately explaining how it would be possible for individuals to take responsibility for their part in the context of guilt. If the “transsubjective” means to point to one’s implication in social institutions and discourses, it can be seen as a solution that also holds in place a certain dynamic between guilt and complicity, and maintains a set of assumptions about part/whole relations, more generally. Adorno describes this dynamic in the following way:

Instead, it is most often a matter of trying to reconcile one’s own excessive identification with the collective to which one belongs with the knowledge of the crime: one denies or minimizes this knowledge so that one does not lose the possibility of identifying with the collective to which one belongs, which is the only thing that psychologically allows countless people to overcome the unbearable feeling of their own powerlessness. (53)

Here, Adorno positions the “unbearable feeling of…powerlessness” as that against which a certain tension between identification with a collective and knowledge of a crime defends. As Adorno argues, “identifying with the collective to which one belongs” is preferable to feeling powerless in committing a crime, and this amounts to the difference between living in a conditionally bad versus an unconditionally bad world, a world, which Fairbairn describes as a world ruled by god versus one ruled by the devil.[2] Denial or minimization is read as a defense that allows for identification and the feeling of belonging, and that ultimately protects people from experiencing the “unbearable feeling of their own powerlessness.” This dynamic of complicity, in which such a denial or minimization of knowledge secures a feeling of belonging, has the secondary but perhaps more significant function of holding away an experience of guilt that might come upon one as the feeling of this powerlessness. While we can glimpse, from Adorno’s perspective, the threat posed to the coherence of society by this guilt or powerlessness, we can also see that in his work, the maintenance of the dialectic, including the dialectic of civilization and barbarism—another iteration of the dynamic between the “possibility of identifying with a collective” and “knowledge of the crime”—serves a conservative function, in still protecting the idea of civilization [Kultur] against a more damaging idea about the guilt of society.[3] If the transsubjective refers to these relations of complicity that are secured within the dialectic, the experience of guilt, as a feeling unprotected from this badness, is a nonsubjective registration of the environment of destructiveness. One way of thinking about the contrast in modes I am trying to articulate might be to think about experiences of guilt as the loss of a registration of what is “whole” or total about society—it might be to indicate a realm of experiences in which one’s idea of oneself and others follows more closely a model of relations between part objects than between subject and objects. Experiencing relations as between part objects might be another way of thinking about not being able to afford the relief offered by state change—state changes that pertain to the shifting of attachment and investment (of instinct, for Freud), as for example, involved in experiencing oneself as part of society, or as belonging to it, rather than as a limit. The experience of European subjectivity in the postwar articulates the aesthetic problem of sublimation; there is no insight into or knowledge of destructiveness that can be used to negotiate the relation between one’s part and one’s limit, between one’s experience as a human [menschliches] subject and one’s experience as a metaphysical [metaphysiches] subject. Paul de Man’s reading of Kant’s location of aesthetic judgment as the mediation of pure reason and practical reason pushes in the direction of thinking about conditions that maintain the irreconcilability of these experiences. While it becomes clear that for certain subjects this means the re-entrenchment of an impossible politics of reparation, which counts on establishing not just lyric works but the artwork as a vehicle for change, what is far less clear is what is desirable about situations of imperceptible state change, or when what is desired is the obscuring of change. In much the same way, it’s always clear what sublimation, in its traditional sense as the shifting of instinctual energy from sexual to non-sexual, makes representable, though it’s far less clear what theories of sublimation have to say about how the logic of change governs ideas of the scapes that (part) objects find themselves in.

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[1] In his lectures on Metaphysics, Adorno uses the phrase in this way: “all culture shares the guilt of society [alle Kultur am Schuldzusammenhang der Gesellschaft teilhat]” (153).

[2] See W.R.D. Fairbairn, “The Return and Repression of Bad Objects,” page 66-67.

[3] Consider Michael Rothberg’s distinction between guilt and complicity, for example, which I disagree with, in Multidirectional Memory: “The concept of complicity offers a way of thinking about the iterations of the face that neither transcends race and racism, nor subsumes all of the figures into identical subject positions as racist perpetrators. The rhetoric of complicity suggests both a form of binding and a degree of distance: to be complicit is to be responsible (bound to certain events, processes, or people),” but it is not identical to begin guilty. Complicity suggests an ethical binding distinct from legal guilt…[t]o be complicit, as opposed to being guilty, implies at least a minimal distance from the center of events” (250).”

complice in humanity

In his 1931 essay “Left-wing Melancholy,” which presents a critique of the poetry of Erich Kästner, Walter Benjamin makes a proposition about the “task” (Aufgabe) of “political lyric”:

Was Wunder, da sie ihre Funktion darin haben, diesen Typ mit sich selbst zu versöhnen und jene Identität zwischen Berufs- und Privatleben herzustellen, die von diesen Leuten unter dem Namen »Menschlichkeit« verstanden wird, in Wahrheit aber das eigentlich Bestialische ist, weil alle echte Menschlichkeit – unter den heutigen Verhältnissen - nur aus der Spannung zwischen jenen beiden Polen hervorgehen kann. In ihr bilden sich Besinnung und Tat, sie zu schaffen ist die Aufgabe jeder politischen Lyrik, und erfüllt wird sie heute am strengsten in den Gedichten von Brecht.

[It is surprising that their [the poems’] function is to reconcile this type of person to himself, and to establish that identity of professional and private life which these men understand by the name “humanity” but which is in truth the genuinely bestial, since authentic humanity—under present conditions—can arise only from a tension between these two poles. In this tension, consciousness and deed are formed. To create it is the task of the all political lyricism, and today this task is most strictly fulfilled by Bertolt Brecht’s poems.]

In this somewhat involuted formulation, Benjamin describes as the task of political lyric its capacity to create “authentic humanity.” In contrast to recourse to a humanity that is actually “bestial” because it is formed through the identity rather than the difference of professional and private life, “authentic humanity” would be formed through the maintenance of this tension. In Benjamin’s estimation, the easy reconciliation, or identity, of professional and private life involves the absorption of “life” into professional interests, constituting the “bestiality” of bourgeois consciousness. The formulation is marked by the indeterminacy of the object (sie) of this task: sie zu schaffen--“to create it,” humanity; “to accomplish it,” the tension between poles; “to form them,” consciousness and deed. This indeterminacy is not merely an index of overdetermination, of the multiply determinate processes invoked by the task, but points to a series of mediating processes that must be moved through in order to oppose humanity and bestiality in such a way that an idea of “genuine humanity” can also be preserved.

This scene, a scene that retains “genuine humanity” as a possible outcome of not reconciling one to oneself, begins to articulate the terms of complicity upon which political consciousness—and political lyric following the Brechtian model—is based. Benjamin values political lyric because it prevents an individual from becoming reconciled with himself—and from this tension, “consciousness and deed” can be seen to arise. Such tension can be described in the terms of guilt that complicity proposes.

Complicity, Mitschuld, or Teilhaberschaft, is defined as “association or participation in or as if in a wrongful act,” and it’s the “complice” part of this that is important, as it sets up a relation between the act, or crime, i.e. what has been done, and a nebulous idea about what counts as “association or participation” in this act. In this sense, then, the problem that underlies complicity—and onto which this work opens—is a problem of part/whole relations, and how one can be seen, or see oneself, as having a part in a wrongful act. It could be said that complicity raises a question about the phantasy or reality of the wrongful act—and this, perhaps, in a way not dissimilar to the stakes of reality/phantasy in Freud’s thinking about seduction. So if complicity begins with an assumption that there is a crime and therefore someone who can assume guilt for it, it ends more speculatively, with relations of guilt as Freud describes in The Ego and the Id (and/or Civilization and Its Discontents), where something like aggression, the need for punishment, pushes guilt into a fantasy formation. Indeed, it becomes easy to see how complicity is a structure of fantasy. I am interested in relations of “associations or participation” that register at the most minimal level, and thus that hold this question of in what way the notion of “taking part” can be construed. If the effective relation of guilt/aggression holds complicity in place, at once offering an explanation for it and suggesting how it contributes to the compelling hold that complicity seems to have in thinking about political agency. 

In what way—in what place, in what time—is living itself a form of complicity; more: in what way—in what place, in what time—is it not?

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?

being born later

In his recent book, The Bonds of Debt, Richard Dienst devotes a couple of paragraphs to Bertolt Brecht`s poem, ``An die Nachgeborenen.`` It is actually Benjamin who Dienst is discussing, and in particular a phrase of Benjamin`s that is often difficult to locate, and may in fact only be represented here in fragments: ``for the sake of the hopeless, we are given hope.`` Dienst describes Benjamin`s awareness of the schizophrenic organization of the Jetztzeit, that ``complex interval between wishful expectation and dread, teaching us to practice different modalities of anticipation and suspension, long patience and outright refusal (166),`` connecting Benjamin`s notes on Brecht`s poem to these ``conflicted moods`` (166, Dienst`s words). Benjamin`s notes read:

[line scratched out:] Example of genuine historical representation: `An die Nachgeborenen.` We claim from those born later not thanks for our victories but rather remembrance for our defeats. [not scratched out:] That is consolation: the only kind that can be given to those who have no more hope for consolation. (Dienst 166)    

The footnote attributes this passage to Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Band I/iii (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), p. 1,240), and although it is not the passage that I mention above, the common theme of consolation, from which Dienst distills an idea about remembering defeat, and in fact, establishing continuity on the basis of notions of defeat or failure. These grounds of  ``infinite indebtedness,`` which for Dienst also refer to the phenomenological aspects of the given, aspects that qualify it not as inert or fixed, but as fluid, ``to be drawn out in our encounter with it,`` form the basis of the types of political subjectivity that Dienst imagines possible.

Dienst`s point of departure suggests that thinking in dark times has to do with negotiating this point of historical continuity and transition. In the last lines of the poem, Brecht writes,

Think—

When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time

That brought them forth.

The lines anticipate the perspective of historical judgment, proposing that the consolation is not only a form of historical forgiveness, but that such a position of spectatorship is central to the formulation of subjects who take up the project that Brecht (or Dienst or Benjamin) describes. Brecht`s seemingly straightforward caveat is also contorted by his effort throughout the poem to articulate the limits of speaking in dark times. And although his poems tend to be organized around the themes of state oppression and class conflict, they articulate less visible arguments about political agency. In actuality, they articulate the struggles of the bourgeois subject, struggles that become presented and seemingly resolved in terms of morality, and predominantly, in terms of complicity. If complicity is the only way that the bourgeois subject experiences political agency, the problem (and its solution) is not that to deal with the problem of debt we must refuse the morality of guilt and personal responsibility that accompanies it, or that, as Nietzsche found, guilt produces bad morality, but that the refusal of guilt as a form of moral or ethical activity or the construction of an alternative (take for example, Timothy Bewes` promotion of ``shame`` in his book, The Event of Postcolonial Shame) is an expression of its very centrality in conceptualizing political agency. Brecht is the great thinker of this bourgeois guilt, the thing that keeps the bourgeoisie from being able to identify as proletarians, and this is also why the problem of morality is one of identification. In other words, the circularity of refusal and recuperation works much like the aesthetic identification that is the object of Brecht`s critique. Projects that articulate the possibility of  ``refusing guilt,`` or ``refusing debt,`` are thus not that far from Brecht`s project refusing aesthetic identification, and there can be something to take from his determinations of complicity.
    
picture: Selected Poems by Bertolt Brecht, cover by Roy Kuhlman (Grove Press, 1959).

complicity, again

As the articulations against the regime of debt becomes more pronounced, it is perhaps worthwhile to dwell for a minute on those things entailed but not enumerated (in statistics and percentages) by this regime. The culture of debt and indebtedness differs vastly from the culture of  guilt as Schuld in postwar Germany, yet I would like to draw out some of these continuities in light of an ethical and affective position that has held sway (shall we say, following the clinamen) since those times. Such a continuity is not, it should first be remarked, historical. Historically, and philosophically (with Nietzsche) there are other ways to track this conjuncture of debt and guilt marked otherwise with German Schuld. And these historical markers indicate that--of course--debt and Schuld and guilt all have specific contexts and contextual differences, But I would argue that there are a couple of (however jagged) lines connecting postwar guilt/debt to today`s version. These connections have been made, from Deleuze on, through the figure of the man-in-debt. On the side of guilt, however, it has been easier to renounce indications of this affect (as if we could file bankruptcy), as if guilt were merely voluntary or the effective mechanism of bad conscience. According to these ideas, guilt is an ethical problem, one which could be corrected by cognitive behavorial approaches to psychology. Of course this is not what Deleuze and Guattari intended when they renounced the validity of Freud`s findings about guilt. In Anti-Oedipus, they describe the function of Oedipus: ``The paranoic father Oedipalizes the son. Guilt is an idea projected by the father before it is an inner feeling experienced by the son. The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting as if things began with the child`` (275). The point about whether guilt is first an ``idea projected`` or a ``feeling`` establishes as primary the relative indistinction between guilt and complicity, between the ``feeling`` or ``sense`` of guilt and its ``projected idea.`` Exactly here, because nowhere else is it more clear: complicity expresses the contorted roles of the theater of cruelty which defines the notion of debt--the triad of voice, body, and eye--and does not ever allow these roles to be distilled from one another. There is no spectator who is not also a voice and a body--and this fundamental constellation of multiple relations within oneself is also always construed through personification.

It is important to understand that complicity entails this entire nexus--that perhaps it is a term that contains the double meaning of German Schuld because it involves the idea of the guilt of existence, of surviving, and the temporal structure of debt requires one`s permission for the extraction of one`s own labor. The fundamental aspect of this complicity--its self-destructiveness--is what is ultimately disavowed by those who claim that capitalism is the reality, the lesser of evils, the only viable economic system. The contradictions of this yet to be realized self-destructiveness call up not only as the ``cracks`` of higher ups, indicative of the ``time`` of revolution, but as signs of the weary resolution of those for whom revolution is imperceptible--the tense crumbling of regents` meetings and public lectures, Chancellor Linda Katehi`s deafening walk of silence, and images of onlooking police officers called in to raid occupy sites. These signs of the thoroughgoing self-destructiveness of the economic policies are not recognized by those involved. Instead, such self-destructive is experienced and felt as complicity. Being ``implicated`` has become the one sure sign that one is still alive, still ``there`` in the big sense, within the system.

It is precisely this feeling of aliveness that can be challenged through a comparison with the postwar regime of complicity. There, we can see how those who dwelt in the contradictions of these multiple positions--the voice, body, eye--took up in addition to the question of resistance (the political question of how to remain opposed, to remain an enemy of that which extracts you from your life) the question of what to do in the aporia of a subjectivity that no longer turned  into an objectivity, the collapse of disinterested liking. The question of how to ``refuse`` the system includes the problem of how to create a space for the experience of common, or universal, or objective feelings. This is the problem that occupied postwar thinkers, such as Adorno, Brecht, Bachmann, and Arendt, and it is one that continues to occupy others, such as Zehra Cirak, Denise Riley, Tiqqun, and Rosemarie Trockel, working to become unimplicated from the paradigm of postwar complicity that persists in our assumptions about what counts as effective ethical and political activity.

picture: Er-war-the, Juergen Walter (1984)