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).

R/hode I/sland, P/rovidence

This series of photographs is meant, in ways, to be a response to this running water is death, a film presented by Rei Terada at the ACLA plenary session (March 31, 2012), Thinking Disaster, and to the ACLA panels and Providence encountered there, and perhaps in particular to the continuing and profound conversations with Michelle Cho (missing Travis Tanner and Annette Rubado, of course). In ways, it was as if everything in the past ten years had wound up to this point, and the images that follow are all taken relatively blindly, from the car as I was driving away through Rhode Island. It was the driving away that was inevitable.

 

If there are claims that pattern reduces all figure to ground, as something like improper contrast or the lack of optimal lighting conditions, the phenomenon continues to circulate the myth of being able to distill the one from the other, not just the figure from the ground, but the intention to do so from the lack of mastery. 

Call it a happy accident; the question is why frame action in this way? Even above, you can see how it tends to the edges, already suggesting that there is something to see like the womb in abyss...

It would be funnier, if every time someone in the ``After the Subject`` stream said ``model,`` talking about the need to come up with better models of resistance, it was replaced with ``womb.`` Funnier, I mean, for anyone not in the room, for those outside of the room. ``Womb``--it`s not much of a jump, of course, they are both there, under synonyms for  ``matrix``--invites the ridicule of those who would scorn creation, and aesthetics was also never mentioned.

Such things involve taking into account one`s role as a spectator of the action in which one is also acting. Like driving over bridges whose other side is not yet visible, one`s role as a spectator of the conversation that one is having is illuminated by glimpses of the bridge`s underside--not for any structural considerations, or grounding, or for the security of making such a leap of faith--but for the impossible perspective that you can sustain.

Sometimes, it is the foregrounding of coincidence that makes perceptible the continual registration of ``phenomenal death,`` of death already.

But there are many cases where the examples, to be taken as models, at one remove, and as figures, at the next, are not of much weight, or much consequence. They can seem to be things to merely be regarded and to posit a fairly neutral perspective, as when we`re talking about frames, geometrically, not otherwise.

For example, I thought that the guy who I was sitting catty-corner from was very smart and even liked his insistence that ``biosemiotics`` was the word to save if the project was ``opening other forms of sociality that exceed models of subjectivity.`` But you get outside of the room, and you ask yourself, what is it about the weight of his models? Why do examples of state violence and crowd phenomenon seem to necessitate a return to militant rationality?

He had, after all, stated that the Arendtian liberal model needed to be ``heavily worked on.``

When I think about thought--someone`s thought--being taken to task, being ``heavily worked over,`` for its imputed liberal subject, I imagine the decrepitude of such a warehouse, become waiting room, as if Arendt, herself, were such a place.  

On the freeway, too, disaster presents as a loop. Others, whose projects I admire, want to be committed to the decrepitude of life under regimes of institutional, racial, structural, financial, economic, urban, geographical, physical, empirical, social, and state violence. I can`t help feeling caught in idle, wondering about the tension between ``direct`` intervention in and objections to the violence of this world. 

Then, there was another discussion about ``underdevelopment.``

 

Which I understood as a form of disaster, something like the logical, but irrational, underside of development.

And yet, in remarking about this term, I felt it was impossible to move beyond a determination of whether or not that meant I was complicit with development, or with projects of development. There were its limits, that we never got around to talking about.

As where we are when we are between the necessary and the intolerable.

 

At least from there we can think about figures of resistance without feeling we are obliged to do away with the beauty of decrepit buildings.

 

In this room, we arrived at three terms for signifying a form of community ``after the subject``: ad hoc, emergent, and spontaneous.

Although this was true, spontaneity was found dubious on the grounds of its fantastic nature. Since, once we can give a fuller account of a seemingly ``spontaneous`` event, or once we can historicize or contextualize or narrativize, the spontaneous event is more of a myth of self-organization than a reality. This does not answer the question, however, of why such forms of fantasy exist so powerfully in the experience of activity.

For example, if you would believe it, I took this picture because I kept wanting to capture the ---.

Do we just end up getting bored if we find we don`t have an answer? Is this the type of thing that gets deemed professionally uninteresting, or un-``fit,`` because the answer does not take the shape of an argument?

Why did Arendt maintain that there was something to recuperate--or at least, to hold on to--in spontaneity? She is concerned to the point of obsession with how to distill these experiences of ``beginning,`` which would reflect some kind of capacity to disambiguate spectator and actor, or to confuse them entirely. At what point does the ``assumption of a liberal subject`` become a shorthand for saying that contextualization and historization actually preclude narrative?

 

In other words, value is no longer aligned with aesthetics, but with production.

But all things point towards retrospection, as what is inevitable. For Joshua Clover, this has something to do with line break, ``the dominant formal fact of poetics.``

I am less inclined.

the ou mallon

Georgio Agamben`s discussion of the Skeptic term ou mallon (``no more than``) provides ground for theorizing the Arendtian notion of preferring-as-discrimination, which she introduces in her discussion of taste as a political activity in ``The Crisis in Culture.`` Agamben describes how the ou mallon functions in the Skeptic tradition as the radical ``suspension`` of possibility: ``no more this than that.`` The upshot of this is for potentiality, which is ultimately what Agamben wants (the essay which includes this term, ``Bartleby, or on Contingency,`` is published in his book Potentialities. But potentiality is not as much about the future as about the past--about saving ``what was not.`` Agamben thus finds fault with Nietzsche`s captivation with the liberatory aspect of being able to will backwards. Agamben writes, ``This is why Zarathustra is the one who teaches the will to `will backwards` (zurueckwollen) and to transform every `thus it was` into a `thus I willed it`: `this alone is liberation.` Solely concerned with repressing the spirit of revenge, Nietzsche completely forgets the laments of what was not or could have been otherwise`` (``Bartleby`` 267). Agamben, who mentions Deleuze`s essay on Bartleby (``Bartleby, or the Formula``) in his own essay, does not draw out the connection between ``willing backwards`` and Deleuze`s idea of the automatic passage of the two phases of Bartleby`s refusal into one another, but together, these form the logic of preferring-as-willing. In models of this logic, preferring is seen to be a form of willing. Although she does not fully articulate this in her effort to distinguish between preferring and willing, Arendt`s concern about how freedom is surrendered to necessity even in willing guides her conceptualization of a liberatory moment that does not make this exchange. Arendt`s criticism of Marx for eventually surrendering freedom to necessity, which arises from her belief that freedom needs to be preserved as a social right, anticipates the problematic treatment of the transitional and transitory phenomenon of social change in the work of Deleuze, Zizek, and others who raise Bartleby to the position of a figure of revolution.

In my effort to articulate how the Arendtian preferring-as-discrimination functions as distinct from the above logic of preference, I take recourse through the figure/ground problem, which foregrounds (so to speak) the problem of discerning to whom boundary lines pertain, and thus of making judgments about what constitutes object and what context, what activity and what passivity, what artistic and what aesthetic, and so on... Agamben`s discussion of the ou mallon helps to make the case for Arendt`s version because he is also interested in substantializing the loss, not as an object, but as a continuation of the problem of what constitutes the overlap between artistic and aesthetic activity. In the series of essays published in The Man Without Content, Agamben takes up the issue of the split between genius (and artistic production) and taste (and aesthetic judgment) which Arendt also discusses in her lectures on Kant`s political philosophy. Preferring-as-discrimination thus denotes a realm of aesthetic activity, in which individuals are called upon to be both spectators and actors. As Arendt found, this complex and oftentimes confusing state marks human experience in the world. Her elevation of judging as the highest form of political activity derives from her idea about individuals as ``world spectators,`` including the notions of sociality and communicability that follow from being public beings. Arendtian necessity comes in, however, in the idea of the ``dark times,`` and her imposition of this term to describe periods of ``foreordained doom`` curtails the freedom that should be attainable in this sphere. The ``dark times,`` it begins to seem, are not a period, but something like the obverse of that revolutionary and free spontaneous beginning, the darkness into which figures recede and withdraw.

Arendt does not go so far as to develop these ideas about aesthetic activity, and her discussion of the political aspect of aesthetics does not involve the conflict with the artistic in the sense that Agamben wants and that, thirty-six years after her death, is more clearly invoked in the spectator society of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.   

pictures: winter, Minnesota (2010); Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled (drawing)

aqua-tic

(In memory of Hannah Arendt, who died 36 years ago today): New Yorker cover from publication of ``Eichmann in Jerusalem`` (March 16, 1963).  

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)

november

unremarked

tiny plugs of light

notched

the gasp is primordial

and returns to echo

november: 

there is never enough time

in the morning there is

what there is

and gray.

timid, uncanny

the evening expires

and you rake

grousing

aectivity

Of the several panels and talks that I attended last weekend as part of the University of Minnesota`s graduate student conference in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Aesthetics/Class/Worlds, many explicitly addressed the question of aesthetics, perhaps even explicitly formulated in this way: as the question of aesthetics, and much of what I heard seemed to be invested in insisting on aesthetics, as if it was in some danger of being lost, or revoked, or done away with. Such projects are perhaps easy to understand, if we consider, for example, that it is perhaps not so much a matter of aesthetics disappearing, but the problem of reconciling the political and aesthetic, which is perhaps a rough way of phrasing the problem of Marxist literary and cultural theory. It is not really surprising then that aesthetics would seem to be the object that might be lost, since insistence upon the priority of the political almost always takes the place of further examinations about how exactly these things are related, except that they are.

In the panel, ``Marxism Today,`` my observation about the occurrence of the above coincided with the pointed tendency of each paper to discuss through its own theoretical apparatus, the problem of conceptualizing (much less inhabiting, if this was a part of it) the point of resistance. It seems to me that this resistance is an aesthetic matter. But I may need to be more descriptive about what this aesthetics is, because my thinking about aesthetics derives from Freud`s observations about the principle of fore-pleasure, and ideas about the relative indeterminency, or the ambivalence of activity and passivity that pertains to thinking about how the role of the observer or spectator can be acted out. There is a moment--or at times, a series of moments--when these roles of activity and inactivity become articulated with one another and the ability to identify with fictional entities, or the ability to see oneself in this position of another--and to mistake one`s movements for another`s--becomes possible. This is the gist of what Freud writes about in also writing about seduction in ``Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,`` but his observations about the function of this principle also extend to the function of the economics of movement that govern his later writing on pain and pleasure and the dynamics of these principles. In this regard, aesthetics is more fundamentally about the politics of identification, and this conceptualization of two interdependent but antagonistic spheres has as much to do with taste as beauty, qualifying such notions about the qualities by which we judge aesthetic work with the fact of our own perception of that work. Pleasure, as much about fore-pleasure, and the non-teleological, non-normative implications of the concept. Taste, I think works on beauty in much a similar way, always undermining its seeming obduracy or self-evidence.

picture: Franklin Bridge, Minneapolis

late autumn

The turn to late autumn was marked today by the return of temperatures upwards of 60 degrees. It is not that this change, marks the turn, but rather that it functions as a reminder both of the autumn or late summer that has passed (the ``long summer days``) and, as it is somewhat needless to say, of the winter days to come.

In his essay ``Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital,`` Joshua Clover uses this figurative language of the change of seasons--Braudel`s ``sign of Autumn,`` which must already be the ``onset of Winter``--to describe a challenge to narrative, the problem of time. The narrative mode that he details here, of ``Autumnal literature,`` is one that takes as its organizing trope ``the conversion of the temporal to the spatial.`` The fact of this conversion, something like the synchronization of diachronic passages, leads Clover to argue for the aptness of poetics--including as variants the non-narrative and poetry, to grapple with these situations of ``manifold absence`` (46), ``discontinuity`` (47), and ``dislocation`` (46).

Such situations refer to the gap between our experience of daily life and our material role in the economy, what Clover calls a ``phantom space`` (48) between the financial and real economy, which represents the inability to ``forward its accumulation via real expansion.`` Similar reflections seem to abound in the Zizek- and non-Zizek-inspired discourse of the end times, with its varying degrees of fantasy about life and non-life.

The feeling is, if not easy to take up, at least ubiquitous. How could it not be? Riding home on my bike tonight, it occurred to me that the unseasonableness of the weather reflected, more than anything, the ephemerality of existence, the basic fact of non-existence that is so aptly characterized by the season.

Winter becomes a trope for this state, in ways that belie this more fundamental presence of non-existence in life. In riding home, so pleasantly--one of the truly enjoyable activities that I undertake in the city--it was easy to imagine that in a month, this form of activity would no longer take place. It is not much of a revelation, and trying to recapture some of it makes it less so, but it is the case that the summer (and as the summer moves to fall) produces the sublime effect that winter is unimaginable. Not just undesirable (in fact it is quite desirable), but actually impossible to imagine that the terms of accessibility and environment are so altered (buried, to be precise) that the prior form of existence can really appear not just to be altered, but actually gone.

on no longer being a student-in-debt

the irony being that one is never no longer a student-in-debt...

It is hard for me to know where to stand right now; at a time that many experience as a hoped for or even waited for moment, a time of occupation that carries all varieties of forward-oriented activity. My lost feelings of collective action are hard to come to terms with, pushing as they do beyond the colloquial notion of "guilt" for not being more active, or activist, a feeling which several friends confessed to, tossing it around the other day. I feel I should be able to inhabit more profoundly something of the position that Mia McIver refers to in a facebook photo album titled, "We lost our jobs and found our occupations."

The idea of the student-in-debt, to which I refer above and elsewhere, is Morgan Adamson's brilliant rendering of the counterrevolutionary transformation of the "energy of student life" (the "life of the mind") into surplus value through the institution of debt. The sense of loss--the lost job--above pertains to both the conditions of unemployment within and without higher education, but perhaps also to the vulnerable position of labor to which McIver refers above all, to the position of one for whom the loss is not even the loss of a job, but the loss of this potential. What I mean to try and compel thinking about and understand in terms that express frustration with systems other than the job market is my own status of transitional unemployment.

In the economic sense, I never was a student-in-debt, and realizing this helped me the other day, to move a little bit past thinking of myself as the victim of market forces and a little bit in the direction of thinking about how such a position represents the inconsequential and superfluous elements of the global financial system. The position of transitional unemployment is occupied by those disregarded by a system that derives value from the equation between investment and return--and not the humanist value of academic labor, but the surplus value of student labor. It is thus the experience of oneself as an element of surplus value that represents the necessity and inevitability of student professionalization as a means of also sustaining oneself within this state of indebtedness. So having eschewed professionalization, it of course seems logical to conclude that one would have no hopes of entering into the profession, it being the case that from this position, one produces nothing of "value."

It is from this position that it becomes possible to understand the loss of a job and the experience of never having had one (i.e. never having had a job outside of the job of being employed or exploited as a graduate student instructor), or the actually more concrete realization of what it means to be only a student-in-debt.

picture: from at OccupyMN

inscapes, escapes

The camera in 40 qm Deutschland, Tevfik Baser`s 1986 drama about a Turkish woman who accompanies her arranged husband to Germany, is at once the eyes and seeing mind of this nameless woman (Ozay Fecht). Somewhat in the genre of Charlotte Perkin`s Gilman`s ``The Yellow Wallpaper`` or Ingeborg Bachmann`s Malina, the film depicts the destructive interiority of the domestic space. The fascism of everyday relationships, a phrase which Bachmann uses to characterize the aggression of postwar relations, derives from the very palpable sense of confinement that is the condition of domestic labor. Georgio Agamben once told me that he had visited Bachmann`s apartment in Rome, and that it was like a little Vienna, a sequestered nostalgic shadow of a city within another. The model of this interior space is also Baser`s, and also that of Raul Ruiz, who depicts the sort of enclave-like existence of Chilean immigrants in Paris in 1974. In an interview with Ruiz from 2008 that is included in the 2010 restoration of the film, Percey Matas (Ruiz`s cameraman) first takes us through Ruiz`s family apartment (occupied by his mother until her death six months before the filming) in Santiago, Chile, which he describes as ``frozen in time,`` the lingering over kitschy nautical decor and knick-knacks, cut crystal goblets and fine serving dishes in glass cabinets. Like Ruiz`s film, Baser`s moves out of its interior on only several occasions, although the experience of confinement is not literalized. Baser follows the protagonist, this young wife, around the apartment, traces her sitting silently, looking out the window, catches her brief exchange of gestures with a little girl at a window across the way, and moves within her mind, in flashbacks, to her life in Turkey, and then slowly, reveals her unraveling mind, as dreams intrude on waking life, and hallucinations overwhelm. She is pregnant by this point; sex also a joyless, aggressive act, her feelings about the pregnancy evince this haunting aggression. She chops off the hair of a kitsch-like doll, the once she had used to communicate with the girl across the way, and the doll sits prominently on top of a dresser, the locks fallen around a little statuette of a mother and baby. Her husband`s joy over her pregnancy is as disturbing as the blankness with which he regards her and the state of imprisonment in which he keeps her. Her morbid fantasies about his death finally become real; his naked body lays between her and the outside, in front of the door. After sitting for some time in the apartment with his dead body, the last scene shows her pulling his legs to move away from the door. On the winding staircase down, she knocks on several doors, pleading in Turkish with old German people who look at her without understanding, before reaching large double doors to the outside, blinding light. In the end, the film figures escape as a radical expression--perhaps an inevitability--of heightened interiority, and it figures the sense of this inevitability as the condition of imprisonment.

picture: Ozay Fecht in 40qm Deutschland

complacency

In his quirky little essay, ``Discussion of War Aims, `` D.W. Winnicott regards the problem of opposing morality in times of war (in which friend and enemy lines are drawn with a thick black Sharpie market) as a matter of complacency. Complicity, which is often regarded as a condition of guilt, is here only a kind of psychic fact, something like a condition for existing in such times:

At the present time we [Englanders] are in the apparently fortunate position of having an enemy who says, ‘I am bad; I intend to be bad’, which enables us to feel, ‘We are good’. If our behavior can be said to be good, it is by no means clear that we can thereby slip out of our responsibility for the German attitude and the German utilization of Hitler’s peculiar qualities. In fact, there would be actual and immediate danger in such complacency, since the enemy’s declaration is honest just where ours is dishonest. (211-212)

Complicity is the very movement of identifying and dis-identifying that comes to define the status of individual ambivalence in relation to group or collective identification. In most writing about guilt in the context not only of Holocaust studies but also, and potentially more problematically, in the context of contemporary Human Rights discourse and problems of ethics, complicity, however, remains the defining paradigm for thinking about the relationship between guilt and responsibility. Adorno`s statement on Auschwitz is often interpreted as one that identifies the inevitable complicity of art (and poetry), as for example Nouri Gana`s (nonetheless beautiful and compelling) essays on post-elegaic, post-Nabka, post-catastrophic film and poetry. Still others have attempted to shift the discussion away from such issues of guilt by turning to the theoretical notion of shame. For these individuals, including Ruth Leys and Timothy Bewes, shame is preferable because it provides a way of talking about conditions of vulnerability as ontological states, in contrast to the ethics that guilt seems to proscribe.

It is however, particularly difficult to want to talk about Adorno without talking about guilt, since the notion of guilt is so central to his conceptualization of both the artwork and individual experience after Auschwitz. Guilt--the ``guilt of the artwork,`` the ``encompassing context of guilt [umfassende Schuldzusammenhang], the ``guilt of society``--is pervasive. Winnicott`s idea that complacency figures into guilt highlights something which is also there is Adorno`s writings on the society of the artwork in postwar culture. One does not, in fact, have to look far. In his revision of his (by now tired) Auschwitz statement, Adorno noted that he was speaking about culture particularly (this is evident when one reads ``Cultural Criticism and Society``) , but about the ``resurrected [auferstanden]`` culture of postwar Europe ( Metaphysics: Concept and Problems 112).

The idea complacency [Wohlbehagen] is also resonant with Freud`s discussion of the sense of guilt, which he suggests is ultimately the same as (or maybe a ``close up`` of) the discontents [Unbehagen] of civilization [Kultur].

plus/minus

It is the terms of employment--short-term contract work, virtual freelancing, obsession turned investigation--more than the type of the work (although this is also enviable) that makes Cayce Pollard`s position in William Gibson`s Pattern Recognition so appealing. She is hired for her aesthetic sense, which is attuned to the yet-to-be cool (itself, an outdated term, Cayce thinks). Like binary computing or the primacy of plus/minus, Cayce`s output is a yes or a no, but it is a gutteral, instinctual yes/no; she needs only an instant, a quick glance, to receive the impression. There is then the idea, so carefully preserved, that aesthetics--this resonance between sensory impression and expression, this self-moving enterprise--itself exists. Cayce`s skill (which even if believable is nonetheless somewhat superhuman) at knowing these things is impervious to external threats, which come mainly in the form of paranoia and of being exposed to phobic logos. Although Lauren Berlant calls it affect--and arguably, it is--it is nonetheless not the affective aspect of Gibson`s novel which invites its readers to take on the terms of Cayce`s world as their own but the leap that is required and continually performed in order to establish aesthetic certainty.