taste

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

distilling

I lost my backspace key, which makes writing bizarrely difficult... so I thought I might try to plug away here for a while, caught in the space-time question of how to form an argument.

The argument I am working on takes place in an essay on the Guantanamo poets. I had wanted to write about how the reviews of the poems cast aesthetic judgments about the poems in lieu of engaging with the more pressing questions raised by and in the poems. The reviews confine consideration of the detainees within the sovereign and moralizing narratives which figure and polarize the human and inhuman. Such questions, I thought, had to do with the identity of the poets, with how considering enemy combatants as poets presses us to think about the elusive definitions of the enemy combatant and the implications of this status. The poetic speakers in these poems present the problem of the subject of universal history, re-relating guilt and innocence in order to represent the responsibility of the enemy combatant in a new way, and thus to understand the significance of enemy combatant outside of the theory of sovereignty.

1. poetry after 9/11 details a new barbarism through language of human rights (prison / resistance/ liberation literaturethe world)
2. poets are innocent but poems are bad: disabling politics of poems (the reviews reinscribe the moralizing enlightenment narratives of human/inhuman)
3. subject must bear guilt to be political--status of the inhuman subject of universal history (how the inhuman challenges the narrative of morality that is central to understanding human rights)
4. the consequences of reading enemy combatant as poet allow more sustained position between (in the murk of) barbarism and culture through the refiguring of the inhuman (the challenges of identification, conditions of anonymity) than does theorization of enemy combatant according to logic of sovereignty
5. the poems demonstrate the return of suffering to its resistant core, refusing the language of human rights that they seem to adopt (and refusing moral position [to say we are good]) and revisit ideas (somewhat idealistic?) about the shared guilt of culture (as an alternative to the enlightenment and moral narratives of evil/good, barbarism/culture, guilt/innocence)

a blank space

I just finished reading The Archaeology of Knowledge, as part of a reading group project. It's funny because there are ways in which I imagine my whole project to be a kind of anti-Foucauldian dreamworld... yet Foucault really does derive great critical purchase from being able to levy a certain antagonism against himself, from being able to both pin himself into a certain position and then wrest himself from it. There's no easy being, there, and yet the forms of disappearing to which he subjects the subject are not yet fluid or convincing, as perhaps with Deleuze or Lacan. I ended up liking this far more than I had thought, and with an allowance for the imperfections of this kind of work. This kind of writing is currently impossible: the only writing worth reading today strives for a clarity and an argument that is here absent. The suggestion that his discourse on discourse takes place solely within the mind is compelling. A philosophical or historical explanation for the contradiction between what he says he wants to do and what he actually does is insufficient. Far more, it's a symptom of the "blank space" he desires to be at the beginning. In some ways, the argument for "rupture" and "disassociation" is moral, even as it seems epistemological, which calls to mind Kant's idea about how a "pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole" ("Ideas for a Universal History" 44-45). Such a state of conflict as he describes--between not being able to "bear" and not being able to "bear to leave" others--is pathological, or instinctual, or barbaric, in origin, but it too takes its steps towards culture. The idea indicates the problem is not with the subject, with the dispensing of the subject, but with culture. Culture for Foucault...

day to

Came across a small gleaning factory today, again, and even though it's there all of the time, it seems also like it's just there, now. I was looking for something on the origins of European fascism in colonialism. Googled, and was there, then, and an excerpt from "A Poetics of Anti-Colonialism" as well. I like the new (?) wallpaper.

predicating

In her book, The Destructive Element, Lyndsey Stonebridge describes how in her book, On Not Being Able to Paint, Marian Milner prefers the term “reverie” to “phantasie.” Milner is largely discussing Freud’s essay, “On Creative Writers and Day-dreaming [Uber Dichtern und die Phantasieren],” in which Freud talks about phantasy both in terms of the tripartite dynamic of nachträglichkeit and in terms of the state of childhood play and adult daydreaming. Stonebridge writes, “What Milner wants [in moving from Phantasie to “reverie”] is ‘a setting in which it is safe to indulge in reverie, safe to permit a con-fusion of “me” and “not-me”’; a space she finds in both art and analysis” (144). Mistaking “setting” for “settling in,” I imagine nonetheless that there is a sense of imbrication, if not habituation, which is part of the reverie. Stonebridge emphasizes the feeling of timelessness, or of untimed space, which is important to the reverie. Could it be said that the sense of untimed space is as much a part of settling in as it is of the setting of phantasy? Stonebridge introduces the idea that the not-me part of the phantasy exists merely as a means through which the self can find itself again. But her point is not just to refute, as she does, this restorative reading of Milner. It is, rather, to extend this discussion, and the “primal creativity” that Milner finds in the scene of phantasy, to questions about selfhood, agency, and the constitution of the “I.” Stonebridge turns to the question of self-narration: “the possibility of a ‘dangerous’ collapse of the frontier between an omnipresent risk of seduction by a variety of possible stagings of cultural and political phantasies” (152). The question of how the self is imbricated in totalitarian phantasies, indeed, in this double political pathology and art is an issue which is inextricably tied to the question of self-narration. The position of the autobiographical ‘I’ in their first-person narratives is ever-shifting, fragile and subject to sense of setting and settling in, is behind the collapse of the frontier. Stonebridge goes on:

What Hannah Arendt calls the ‘total state’ that totalitarianism proffers, for example, is one, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy suggest, in which ‘I’ can be just as totally represented to myself as a subject. On the one hand, such phantasies appear to erase the self by transforming identity into a limited set of masks, each wearing the grimace of the common good, and which testify to the uniformity of the ‘masses’ for whose sake the subject is willing to sacrifice its difference. (152)

Such a totalitarian state represents the difficulty of maintaining the distinction between the self and non-self even when it would seem that the rediscovery of the one in the other would grant a much-needed redemption. In this sense, Stonebridge’s discussion of the postwar work of wartime trauma indicates how aesthetic notions of “staging” and the “frame” perform the work of keeping open a space for reverie.

picture: Marian Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint

Coup

At one of the Egyptian solidarity protests held at the Saint Paul Capitol Building, my exchange with the other protestors was limited to a single sentence, which is telling, in its various ways. First, of course, because of my personal feelings of alienation from the Twin Cities, and second, for what those words word. For it seems to be the case, more often than not, that words here do rile, they irk, they pry and push at the same time. An effect that seems to be related to the alienation, not the other way around. Thing like this seriously make me question my ability to make it, post-partum, as if still, I can’t get my bearings. The words, “Anti-War Protest March 19 [flyer handed]—it’s all the same thing,” still ring in my ears. And perhaps not just because of this moment, but because the “same” in fact is used in places where “solidarity” is meant to connect one to another these disparately fighting causes. Recalling now LA protests, I got and wanted this in 2003. Even if I wasn’t a part of something particular then, and also hadn’t really done the work to elaborate the causes, I do remember feeling pulled solidly into something. But now that the time of revolution has come, that the person who told me “it’s all the same” will also still encounter the difficulty of such a position, as just a year ago disunited student protestors as UCLA held two versions of March 4, there remains a vague distance in me, one that is at once self-defeating and oppositional. Part of it is the feeling that anything that I think or write, any space that I take, even in my own mind, is a struggle. Taking up space, taking it out on space. While the world seems to be on the move, the space here—in my head and that I occupy—seems to be totally caught up, stagnant, resistant. Moving on, so to speak, is inconceivable. And yet, in writing this, I am attempting to ask whether this position and these feelings also offers something, whether there is recuperation, which, I think would be my first step towards revolution.

picture and artwork by the illustrious Rebecca Ellen Bowden

good grief

Both Slavoj Zizek and Dipesh Chakrabarty (whose article Zizek draws on for his discussion of the Anthropocene Epoch (which would succeed the Holocene) begin their writings on "new" ecology with the imagination of the end of times. It is the nature of this exercise in imagination, and not the fact of inevitability that goes along with it for Zizek, that captures my attention. For Zizek, imagining the end is equal to believing it, which again represents the coveted fidelity of Badiou, and thus the structure of imagining-believing allows the audacity of his remarks to rest not on the content of what he is saying (although naively, we might think that, or he might want us to think that, indeed), but on the convergence of imagining-believing and the environmental inevitability of the end times. The element of inevitability does not exist in the end times, but is a result of Zizek's argumentation. It would be fine if Zizek were saying that we are living in the end times, and perhaps more interesting, at that. In contrast to the argument that he presents, in which the imminent feeling of dread at the end causes a reaction that is both collective and psychological, an argument for the end times might elaborate more usefully what Chakrabarty calls the "contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity" ("The Climate of History," Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009) 197). Zizek, however, structures his argument to follow the five stages of grief defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying: denial, anger, negotiation, depression, and acceptance. Perhaps this is the (only) thing shocking (and I struggle to define it, that is, the element of the alarming that the book produced in me)--the language of trauma and catastrophe tied up here, in spite of the book's efforts to talk about trauma not as an event, but as something ongoing. In what way, then, are these five stages applicable? The impossibility of imagining one's own death, seemingly at the middle of things for Zizek, does not hold here. Why should these stages cohere as some kind of structure of normal grief? Where does disorder come in? Or the idea that symptoms of any given stage could be so diverse as to alter a given stage for any given body? the radical subject must be capable of good grief... bad grief, on the other hand, accounts for the rise of fundamentalism in Middle Eastern oil states, the slipping of potential Left movements off track.

picture: Iceberg B-15. Josh Landis, The National Science Foundation 29 January 2001.

Darkness stands
the door, a brightly lit
room. The barred things
also, at arm's length.
Not, to within
looking out.

Unordinary Rain

Louis Althusser’s elliptical and unfinished book project, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” begins with a “semi-autobiographical” chapter, which I would just call it autobiographical, and then turns, at a later point, to rain. I am interested in this text for many reasons, not least among them its elusive autobiographical details, its fragmented and interrupted nature, and the end that it marks of a period of silence, at least of writerly silence. He begins in October 1982, writing “For, in November 1980, in the course of a severe, unforeseeable crisis that had left me in a state of mental confusion, I strangled my wife” (Philosophy of the Encounter: later writings, 1978-1987, 164). The essay that is included here as what the editors call the core of his ideas about the materialism of the encounter, “Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher,” was written during a period of rehospitalization, from June to July 1986. He begins:

"It is raining.

Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain.

Malabranche wondered ‘why it rains upon sands, upon highways and seas’, since this water from the sky which, elsewhere, waters crops (and that is very good), adds nothing to the water of the sea, or goes to waste on the roads and beaches.

Our concern will not be with that kind of rain, providential or anti-providential.

Quite the contrary: this book is about another kind of rain, about a profound theme which runs through the whole history of philosophy, and was contested and repressed there as soon as it was stated: the ‘rain’ of Epicurus’ atoms that fall parallel to each other in the void…"

The rain that he goes on to detail is the rain of Lucretius’ atoms, the “’rain’ of the parallelism of the infinite attributes” (167). In particular, he is discussing the moment of breaking from this parallelism: the instance of the swerve, the presence of the clinamen, and the non-anteriority of meaning. It is only in the matter of a few lines that the book goes from being about ordinary rain to being about unordinary rain. “Before all else” it is “about” ordinary rain, but “quite the contrary,” it is also “about” another kind of rain. What indeed holds these rains in common? At first Althusser seems to dismiss from consideration the impact of the rain, that is, the meaning of the rain as it pertains to where it falls, i.e. “providential or anti-providential.” But in fact, this point returns in his discussion of the parallelism of atoms in a void, for it colors the impression of the void with this determination that falling lands upon something. His point is to foreground the role of contingency over necessity, and to counter the long history of the rewriting of the materialism of the encounter as the “ideal of freedom” (168). For Althusser, the materialism of the encounter, the “swerve,” contingency, has been “interpreted, repressed, and perverted” into a moment that requires, rather than produces, its opposite. The subordination of contingency to necessity always results in an idealization of freedom. The import of the dynamics at play in this moment—in the difference between Althusser’s mode and the mode that he finds elsewhere—is their relation to political activity. Everywhere it is implied that this is the stake. The production of the ideal of freedom is equal to depoliticization, and describes how acts of depoliticizing occur as acts of rewriting—how the contingent encounter becomes a necessity, in the process evacuating all of the particulars of the contingency of their political content. I am thinking of arguments about how, for example, the history of resistance literature has become rewritten as the history of prison literature, but there are many other ways to think about how discourses that take “freedom” as an ideal actively work against political activity. Althusser’s insistence on the originary and non-derivative nature of the swerve involves a figure of transformation that is non-compulsive, that mandates nothing, including change.

The introduction and retraction of “ordinary rain,” the figure which begins this fragment of his thought, resembles this operation. “Before all else,” he will go on to say, there is “nothing,” and nothing is also the whole, the entirety of all that there is (it is why Spinoza, for example, begins with god and not with the world or with man). Wishing to let the book be “before all else” about ordinary rain, about the “accomplished fact” of the rain, Althusser can only observe this rain, a sign of an world outside the hospital. The question that arises about ordinary rain, of whether it is “good” or “bad,” depending upon where it falls, is one that does not matter for the type of unordinary rain that Althusser goes on to say this book is really “about.” Still, this question which has first been raised only to be dismissed, lingers in the text. The question of providentiality becomes one of how fleeting encounters can become lasting, indeed how durability and perseverance can and cannot be assured simply by the “reality of the accomplished fact.” He writes, “Nothing guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability.” The statement is not merely negative, that durability cannot be guaranteed by reality, by the fact that something has happened. The rain, for example, will stop. “Nothing,” “ordinary rain,” that which comes “before all else,” makes a guarantee; it establishes the relation between contingency and necessity, the non-equivalence between “reality” and “guarantee,” by making itself the subject. “Nothing” can only take place as the subject, however, by containing an internal difference between providentiality and anti-providentiality, one which announces the political being of the subject, its usefulness, its capacity to be used by others. Rain, raining.

picture: Patton Place, bien sur.

collaborate

In A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey formulates several fallacies of literary criticism, which detail problems with contemporary reading practices. The point of identifying these--the empirical, normative, and interpretive fallacies--is to make a distinction between the modes of textual consumption and production, and this distinction amounts to an anti-Platonic materialism that nonetheless seems to maintain an idea of substance. In the section "Positive and Negative Judgment," Macherey writes, "Because it is powerless to examine the work on its own terms, unable to exert an influence on it, criticism resorts to a corroding resentment... Both the "taste" which asks no questions and the "judgment" which dispenses with scruples are closely related. The naive consumer and the harsh judge are finally collaborators in a single action" (18). The complicity between "naive consumer" and "harsh judge" that Macherey asserts has to do, for him, with the intent that both have in regarding a work. Here the tasteless and the tasteful, otherwise polarized to all appearances, conspire. Whether to regard and evaluate the value of a work, or to consume and own it, the act is one and the same on the basis of how little object remains to the object after this exchange is complete. The psychological correlate of this process, resentment, exhibits a quality of "corroding" similar to the damage we can imagine is done to the object. But on what terms can we regard the carrying out of an action to the same effect as a collaboration? Would they not just be unwitting participants who whose coincidence is rather just that, a chance? Their common disregard for the object turns to resentment when it is not able to know the work "on its own terms," and this seems to indicate such an option is foreclosed when something like neglect, on the one hand, and principled interests on the other, overtakes our capacity for relating to a work. Resentment seems to come in when these dynamics of relation fail to produce something that could be called having "an influence" on the work. Similar questions occupied Ingeborg Bachmann in her 1960 lectures on poetry. How do we look at a work of art without taking on these roles, without resentment?

picture: pair of dice, MOCA, from the exhibit pieces from the current collection 2008. photo taken by Rebecca Ellen Bowden.