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).”

"self-incurred minority"

What, then, does the “intellectual elite” discover as it begins to take stock of its feelings? Those feelings themselves? They have long since been remaindered. What is left is the empty spaces, where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings--nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity--once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed. 

[Was findet “die geistige Elite,” die an die Bestandaufnahmne ihrer Gefühle herantritt, den vor? Diese selbst etwa? Sie sind längst verramscht worden. Was blieb, sind die leeren Stellen, wo in verstaubten Sammetherzen die Gefühle—Natur und Liebe, Enthusiasmus und Menschlichkeit—einmal gelegen haben. Nun liebkost man geistabwesend die Hohlform.]

--Walter Benjamin, "Left-wing Melancholy”

In "The University and the Undercommons," Fred Moten and Stefano Harney dwell on Kant's phrase, which opens "What Is Enlightenment?," of a "self-incurred minority" [selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit]. They are talking about a stage of "teaching for food," which is either surpassed if one is "successful" or consigned to the sociopathological labor of the university. Moten and Harney propose that those who refuse to move past this stage remain in the "beyond of teaching," continuing to take sustenance from others around them. Kant's notion of the selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit refers, as M & H also parse, to "having the 'determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.'” Schuld--here the root of selbstverschuldeten--both "debt," as its translation "self-incurred" seems to imply, and "guilt." And Unmündigkeit, which M & H take as "minorities," carries mündig, "to be of age," "mature," "responsible," within. I'm drawn to this double implication of "guilt" and "responsibility" as minor terms of this phrase. How is being not "of age" something that is brought about by one's own fault? How does being "one's own fault" relate to what on the other side is a "being guided by another"? At what point is it not a stage that persists, but the guilt/debt itself? And at what point (at that point?) is this "eines anderes" also not "another"? Where, when does this become a personification of something like a holding environment? Is there a determination here, about personhood, that arises from the indeterminacy of environment?

Moten and Harney write that "Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them [the self-incurred minority] as waste." Being seen as "waste," as objects sold "at a loss," and thus remaindered in this way--is it from this perspective of feeling something quite irrecuperable about yourself, as your sense of yours and others' estimation of you, of a persistent guilt, that the fuzziness of personhood/environment can also be registered? Then, this describes not so much what there is to be gained from a stage that one persists in (as a kind of self-sacrificial model might have), but it can perhaps help to think about why one might want to remain in such a place, even when all the reasons, social, political, psychological, and otherwise, point to the advantages of not.

There are ample places here to link such a state of Unmündigkeit with Paula Heimann's idea of "children-no-longer," perhaps as the other side of it--for Heimann's "child-no-longer" is not someone who has surpassed such a stage, but someone whose being there "no longer" indexes a firm attachment to, rather than a leaving of, childhood.

It's all happening within my wondering about being able to "return" to a place where I am "no longer"--and so a place where I left my "heart," where my "heart" remains. There's feeling that, and then the badness of that feeling. And there's the not knowing what to do with any of it. There's a question that seems silly and completely besides the point about all of it, and also completely narcissistic, because it's not at all about me, but it's a question about why my return to Irvine, which I had not been able to undertake at any earlier point since I left six years ago, coincided with Joe's death. There's always that question, why?, about death, especially about the deaths of people like Joe, like Frank. It's so futile, it often can't be asked, is not bearable. I had told Imogen about Joe dying when I returned from California three weeks ago. I don't think I've talked about it since then. Today, just a long day of feeling all these things and feeling like there's no place to put them, and no place to return to here, in Minnesota. So it's evening, before bed, and I say, finally, after being beyond and at the edge of tears all day, I'm just feeling so sad. Several minutes later, Imogen says, "Mommy, are you sad because your friend died?" Three weeks, for a three-year-old, is a long time to hold a memory, to hold something in mind. "Yes, I am." "What was his name?" This, I've already told her, too. She's asking not to know, but to be reminded, or to remind me, or to let me know, and it gives me a small place to return to.

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?

Nonintegration, the Unintegrated State: the Silence of Falling Trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

proposal-ing

The revised Estranging Lyric proposes to examine the emergence of civilian guilt as one of the dominant modes in which the moral regime of financial capitalism comes to be developed out of the framework of postwar Europe. I argue that poetry creates a space in which the discourse of political morality becomes discernible, first, because the subject of poetry figures centrally in how the postwar dialectic of culture and barbarism reaches its so-called last stage, and second, because the processes of identification that become perceptible in this “crisis of lyric agency” map onto the crises of political activity experienced after the second world war. In short, the lyric “I” becomes a cipher for reading the newly construed “bystander,” who arose as the model of the world citizen after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Part of the work of the book is to develop the terms for talking about this postwar period, in which, I argue, the terms of “culture” and the “economy” are developed together. In this book, I propose a strong reading of the “postwar,” problematizing characterizations of the period as the aftermath of trauma. Instead, I focus on how economic restructuring gets taken up through figures of guilt and responsibility. The unique focus of my project lies in approaching the discursive aspect of guilt and considers how this period yields the simultaneous constitution and crisis of the liberal bourgeois subject as the subject of lyric poetry.  The situation of this discussion around the figure of war isolates the problem of violence and representation by establishing barbarism as the term through which the continuity of European fascism and imperialism can be thought. In contrast to books that explore postwar culture as a problem or crisis of representation, this book addresses the continuity of aggression in the postwar through the construction of morality.

There are many historical pinpoints that elicit periods and readings of the “postwar” period, and there are multiple aspects of the restructuring processes, including the global economic policies put forth in Bretton Woods in 1944 implemented later in 1958, the Marshall Plan, the creation of the IMF and World Bank, the restructuring of defeated countries and the organization of Cold War states, decolonization, and wars of national liberation. Now, it is possible to see this all as the unfolding of capitalism, of neo-liberal economic policies, and to see it not as something inevitable, but as something with pronounced turning points throughout. Accompanying these discontinuous developments of today’s late capitalist world, are the moral and ethical positions that not only keep pace with development, but present us with the very capacity to make sense of historical periods. This is crucial: it is crucial that the construction of morality and the distribution of ethical behavior are not just the ideological underpinning of these economic and structural forms of violence, but that they are the very means  by which we can claim to be able to see something like the system from the position of the system, to see the very materiality and immateriality of labor. The arc that forms connecting one plotted point to the next coincides with a necessity that appears narrative. 

The question I approach is thus an inversion of one that is often posed elsewhere, such as Christopher Nealon’s notion in his article “Value| Theory | Crisis” (PMLA 127.1 (Jan 2012)101-106) that it is “not the pursuit of a transcendental vantage point or the critique of that pursuit but the relentless surveying of possible grounds for solidarity among those for whom the regime of capital spells only suffering” (106, cites after During 115). The turn to poetry made recently and explicitly by Nealon and by Joshua Clover (whose essay of the same title also appears in this issue of PMLA, pages 107-114), as a response to the narrative (and I would say performative) supremacy of the linguistic turn (and post-structuralism), involves thinking about the suitability of poetry as a form to deal with the contradictions of “value theory” (Clover 110). 

Acknowledging, as Nealon does above, that the pursuit of the subject and its critique are one and the same, his positing of a third, of the “solidarity [of] … suffering,” raises similar contradictions about how to think of the position of subjectivity. If Nealon exhibits “the optimism of the will,” Clover, in his own phrase, inhabits “the delusion of the intellect” (Clover 113), something that, if I am to read him correctly, is only a good thing. Postwar poetry too has a lot to say about the tension that holds between the collective “we” and the individually deluded “I,” and more explicitly about the claims that are made to either of these positions. It is for good reason that Adorno maintains the tension and distinction between individual and collective identifications--not, of course, to place one above the other, but because of this very tension, which is at the heart of the production of morality. 

The value of addressing the terms of identification in poetry is that it opens up questions about how we can theorize the crisis of agency and also possibilities of subjectivity. These are important because they concern “the subjective life-world of labor” (Clover 111). If it is true that poetry is better equipped to deal with the “axial transmutation” of price into value, as Clover claims, or with “passing off time as space,” it is not because it has resolved and put behind the debates and discussion surrounding poetry in Europe in the 40s and 50s, and in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, which track the emergence of the problem of the subject. By “problem,” I mean, perhaps, what Jason Read has identified in The Micro-politics of Capital: Marx and the prehistory of the Present as the “philosophical” nature of the mode of production, which Read emphasizes is not “just another name for economy or society,” but relates to the production of consciousness and subjectivity (6). My study of poetry develops this aspect of Marxist and poetic thought, proposing that the lyric “I” is a cipher for this problem of subjective agency. 

The experience of feeling “haunted,” which Clover describes in “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital” (Journal of Narrative Theory 41.1 (Spring 2011) 34-52) as akin to Jameson’s account of the “waning of affect,” is the experiential grasp of this subtraction: “the feeling of M-M’; haunted by the C to come” (Clover 46). The experience of this haunting has a correlate in postwar writing on the problem of civilian guilt. Different, and yet not unrelated to mourning, or the working through of the atrocity of the Holocaust, civilian guilt involves thinking about the limits of language, that is, precisely those points at which things become unsayable. Normally read through trauma theory, the unsayable also pertains to the intractability of the moral and economic and to be more precise to the figure of indeterminacy and delusion that is well-taken by the “I” in postwar lyric. My thesis is that the crisis of agency in the lyric speaker of postwar poetry corresponds to the experience of civilian guilt. Civilian guilt, in the figure of the bystander, in turn, becomes the founding narrative of postwar reconstruction; it describes how subjects experience the postwar but it also involves the subject’s capacity to maintain the delusion of a moral regime that accompanies capital’s global expansion. 

Postwar poetry makes the argument that wartime aggression continues into daily life, that it becomes everyday. But this argument is supplanted by another, more critical discourse, which notes a similar phenomenon. This critical postwar poetry regards the continuation of aggression into society as the extension of European imperialism and thus as the continued project of European self-making. These “I”s are thus critical of both reconstruction and the denunciation of aggression because they are two sides of the same construction of morality. The project is thus to think about the genealogy of the bystander, the guilty civilian, who becomes the figure of morality that accompanies the regime of postwar globalized capital. There are reasons to locate this figure in the context of Germany. The bystander, I propose, is not immediately the liberal subject, but the barbarity of bystanding becomes internalized or introjected; it provides us with a model for thinking about the problems of the liberal subject that is no merely not-not-a-collective, and by taking the conflict between ethical and transcendental subject head on.       

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)