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

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

so unraveling is accomplished, unlike becoming deideologized, by having a focus, or a fetish.

LA in the rains

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

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

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

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

picture: Beatrice, a cat.

This would be included in images and visions of the unraveling.

of the things to be unraveled

picture: Square Navels, Erin Trapp

I have this idea for a children's book that would be about the unraveling of the world. The images that I think of are ones with lines unwhorling and flattening out, or becoming invisible. And all the textures and depths lessening.

out there

We did some gardening today. My mom has a wooden sign in her kitchen that reads, "gardening is cheaper than therapy." This is certainly true. And by this, I don't think that my mom has ever meant, "so you don't need therapy." It seems to be more a testament to her sense of a certain fluidity between psychic and social realities.

picture: from MOCA exhibit Collecting Collections, courtesy of the iphone camera of Becky Bowden.

double language

there's already a lot going on this week. surprisingly, it has to do--in part, at least--with things i don't really have much context for. "Not knowing many things about a thing"--this type of knowledge is also always a pardon begged in relation to knowledge. It makes me wonder if we should ever hope to resolve such a thing. this lack of context is surprising because i thought that these things were continuities of things i had already been working with. like Spinoza, for example. But what were last year questions of ideology and the individual put to Hegel, are this year questions of belief, theology and the relation to the political put to Spinoza. Looking back at my notes, I find much of it unintelligible. what did make sense to me was Balibar's explication of the "double truth" as a strategy for speaking the universal. well, it did not actually make SO much sense in terms of speaking the universal, except that i think it is similar to Badiou's notion that the separation of spheres for science, art, love, and politics would allow non-interference between them. Spinoza is also similar to Wittgenstein, who wrote two dissimilar theoretical pieces during his life. So Balibar brings this question of authorship into the circle of things that there is to say about how Spinoza might be able to speak the universal. He concludes that the Political-Theological Tractatus is, minimally, a certain disguise of the author's opinions.

One of the things i very much like about the idea that the Political-Theological Tractatus is disguised in some way, or cryptic, in others, is that Balibar eschews the somewhat normed idea that censorship functions to hide those "real" or "true" elements that otherwise would not allow the text to get past the censor. Instead, he proposes that the genre of the tractatus is such that basic philosophical ideas fall under the cover of imaginative representations immediately accessible to the common ideas. With this style, Balibar concludes, "truth is not accessible in the same way." Similar to the "double truth" of the Spinozan and Wittgensteinian doctrines, language itself becomes doubled, and the prolbem with language is once again how to transform ideas to representations and truths to opinions (held by many). So it is, language.

Picture: from The History of Egypt, "The Occupations of Ani in the Elysian Fields" followed by text "...in the Great Hall of the Double Truth, who have no falsehood in your bosoms, but who live on Truth in Aûnû, and feed your hearts upon it before the Lord God who dwelleth in his solar disc."

blind contours

These blog writings began as things that could not be included in my dissertation. i suppose at some point, my feelings about the dissertation began to change. i think at this time, the content of what was included here also changed. though the dissertation is hopefully changing in positive ways, what is here is not. and that is largely because there is very little here. this is very sad to me. at the same time, the fact that there is not very much here seems to be one of the phenomena that i am trying to explain in my dissertation. i am writing about how poetry is able to theorize about political activity. one of the outcomes of this is that i am able to see and to say how poetry can engage in political action. in the first chapter, which deals with the Bertolt Brecht, i suppose i am trying to see how poetry sees its removal from the realm of politics, and how Brecht theorizes its return. one of the consequences of this removal from politics is the loss of external reality. by external reality, i mean things that are registered as belonging to the world--the "many-sided world," according to Brecht. i feel like not being able to write things in this blog is related to the loss of external reality, of my external reality. i think this relationship--that is, to external reality--is always very tenuous anyways. i think it takes a lot to maintain it, but the "work" of its activity is not always that clear. in fact, i think the work is downright murky; it is dark.

One of the things that has made the dissertation writing go better is that i am slowly realizing how slowly i need to proceed in order to present an intelligible argument. sometimes i am surprised at how "beyond me" this has seemed. i have begun to think that this process is somewhat like drawing blind contours. i have held onto this practice for quite some time, since high school, i think. the task is to move your pen as slowly as your eyes trace the object you are drawing, not looking at your paper until you have finished tracing the whole object. what results is, of course, never realistic, but it is rare that the object that is traced is not at all intelligible on the paper. i have never grasped the idea, exactly, that in writing, my pen might have to move as slowly. the value of the patience of sticking with it blindly to end goes without need to say more. so perhaps that is something

the lost posts

As my "Humanities Core" (http://www.humcoretrapp.blogspot.com/) blog threatens to overtake "Zoo" in sheer number of posts, as November begins, as the pressure to finish chapter one increases, and as i get used to idea that the letters are still not about love... as all these things, I really hope that I am picking up again, on these postings. Even with this, there is the sense of loss and redemption, and perhaps this where to begin. I had come to the conclusion that redemption is what Brecht wanted to thwart through his development of anti-aristotelian theater.


In "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," Brecht's 1936 [1949] essay relating his observation of Mei Lan-fang's theater company in Moscow to his development of the estrangement-effect, Brecht's concerns seem primarily to involve what we have come to understand as consciousness-raising. It seems possible find in hte essay the repetition of a call for consciousness. From the beginning, he writes: "The efforts in question were directed to playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious." It follows, therefore: all of the readings of his didacticism, his empiricism, his objective reality, his undeserved greatness... all of these things deal with and assert the primacy of the "conscious plane" to Brecht.


The interesting part of this process seems to be the way in which "identifying with" the actions subconsciously becomes Brecht's shorthand for the way that theater, and art in general, has functioned since Aristotle. It is what Leo Bersani has called "the culture of redemption," what Benjamin saw as the messianistic, what myths of "primitive accumulation" allow, and, as Savvy T and I discuss endlessly, it is the predominant justification and grounds for the production and study of literature. Or is it itself an uninvestigated, assumed uncritical blah blah blah ideology? But this percolating idea about Brecht's non-redemptiveness is that art, for Brecht, does something other than affirm (positively or negatively) the adequacy of the relationship between form and content (which, for Aristotle, is intricately related to the interdependency of the soul and the body), that before art conveys the coincidence of form and content (something accidental?), it does something else: this is the question that it seems even the very consideration of involves the willingness "to suspend belief."

Picture: Cozydan t-shirt design. thanks to Becky for buying.

identity threat

Craters of the Moon National Monument: where the "them" are spatter cones.

Talking with friends last night about irony (thanks to Alanis Morisette for providing the the procative lyrics that were inspiration for the conversation—something about rain and wedding day), we struggled to define irony itself. This arose from the observation that the incidents Morisette mentions do not qualify as irony because they do not involve the thwarting of intention and are instead just “bad things” that happen. It seemed that, in some way, the not knowing had to be related to intention--as if the incongruity between what was expected and what actually happened needed, nonetheless, an active agent. What is irony with this idea that in some way, without your knowing, you contribute to your downfall?

not making waves

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