the state of sleep

I feel that what is perhaps Philomena’s first night of sleep (8 hours!!!) deserves a blog entry, coincident with my desire to read Jacqueline Rose’s essay, “’On Not Being Able to Sleep’,” and to think about the beginnings of things. Anyhow, I think Philomena slept through the night last night. The reason that there is uncertainty about this is that it is entirely possible (and not unlikely), that I got up with her at some point and that I just do not remember it. However, to the best of my recollection, she did not get up, which means that this is a major event. It could be an anomaly. That’s fine, too. I think it’s just a matter of it being able to happen. I mean, now I’ve seen that it’s possible.

I found it ironic, in a certain way, that in Winnicott’s book, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World, there is no mention in either the index or the table of contents of sleep. Of course I have found this to be the most difficult thing about having a child, seven months in. So maybe my response is a little overdetermined. On the other hand, the hundreds of books on sleep, sleep training, sleep techniques, and etc,.. attest to this problem, at least in contemporary society.

In Jacqueline Rose’s essay, she explores the question of what sleep is, for Freud. She writes, “Although Freud will crucially identify all the features of the dreamwork, not only in symptom formation, but also in jokes and slips, the dream—through sleep—at least partly escapes the mantle of these forms. It breaks the line which Freud—in a gesture which might be seen as the founding gesture of psychoanalysis—runs from the neurotic to the everyday (the ‘approximately normal person’ as he famously describes himself in the preamble to the specimen dream). Sleep changes everything” (106). In this passage, Rose addresses the primary task of psychoanalysis, arguably, the distinctions it makes between the normal, neurotic, and psychotic states of the individual. If sleep breaks the line between or beneath the normal and the neurotic, it is, as she describes, because it is psychotic. The question of how psychotic states of mind intervene in the normal/neurotic continuum is one that is often understated in literature on madness and psychoanalysis, because, I think, it is often assumed that it interrupts or is a rupture in this manner. Perhaps because it seems to follow from the way that psychosis itself is figured as a break, or a rupture with reality. I’ve begun to consider psychosis as less radical and more regressive, perhaps as a reaction to the drama involved in pseudo-psychotic moments.

Regression also turns up in Rose’s essay (also in my above notes that it’s okay if the night of sleep was an anomaly, as if to forestall already the disappointment of regression), several pages later. Rose writes, “Could it be then that the greatest fear for the analyst is not the fear of not knowing, one loss of omnipotence, but another, more tangible, more physical, the fear of slipping backwards (regression is of course also central to this chapter), of turning—with awesome, hallucinogenic vividness—into a frightened child?” (110). For Rose, the idea of the “infantile wish,” which contains the ambiguity of this as a wish that was had as a child or a wish to be a child. Of course regression involves the idea of being “taken back” to something. This is a very abstract and general formula for regression, but it can also therefore include a number of experiences, ones that I would like to think together—certain forms of tradition that are authenticated by being able to be “taken back,” Winnicott’s desire to return to a time when metaphors mean something, recovery from the past or the present, historical reference or citation to an earlier version of an event or idea, the two steps forward one step back theory of progress…

moving on

Reading through my journal of the past months, nothing of much substance is to be found, just lists of things to do, and things done, notes about how tired I am, etc,... There are a few passing comments about wanting to see Philomena's dreams. The blog began as an effort to write alongside the dissertation, and now that that's past, I feel the paucity of new material. Or the overwhelming nature of white space. So, squiggle. I mean, that's one answer. I've been thinking of organizing some thinking on mobility and childhood aggression around the figure of the squiggle, D.W. Winnicott's game for the analysis of children. It's in line with blind contours, at any rate. This is just to mark the end. And, just now, the beginning of the wiggle: meaning, Philomena started crawling today.

philomena, phenomenophile

Although I had the pleasure of reading almost all of Rei Terada's recent book, Looking Away, before it was published, I must have forgotten most of what I read. Like the flat cow that Philomena had in her crib, as Rei noted, we get to know things, in order to forget, in order to remember, to be reminded of an elusive familiarity. That's the point. So maybe all along, I've known that Philomena is a phenomenophile, and it's just taken a while to put a name to the face. If the woman at the Hollywood farmer's market, who so rudely told me that Philomena's name did not suit her, was just asking a hypothetical question, it's too bad; I thought she really wanted to know how babies think. Like little Isabella's mom, who I met today outside of the Downbeat Cafe, put it, "I try to look at her at least once a day." It's an expression, I think, of trying to see change, to see (if not to remember) its gradations. I tried to tell the woman at the Hollywood farmer's market that I thought babies thought by perceiving contrasts, between light and dark for example, because I have noticed how Philomena becomes fixated by various forms of light--shadows on the wall, or the glow of sun from being a curtain, a certain shine to the ceiling where deflected light is hitting. Or because it seemed like she tried to focus, in her early days, on the contours of things, trying to discern an edge, a line, a frame. Now she can see the cat, but we're still talking about tracking movements, as a form of recognition.

picture: Bellman Bar, Berlin

the saga of sleep

i hate going to sleep early. as you might be able to tell from the above picture, someone else hates it too. so that means that i get less and less sleep, because i do things like stay up for hours knitting and looking through my dissertation notes and then feel compelled to write about it. but today is philomena's 4-month birthday, so it seemed like reason enough to write. and we went to a party tonight, at yuting and nasia's, which went okay. philomena slept on the way there at 7:30 and it took us a while to get there in the newly-mufflered mauto, also because we were talking about science fiction poetry and this last chapter. i wasn't there when she and daddy walked in with her in the baby bjorn because i was returning the stroller to the car, but she got upset enough to take them both (and yuting and zen) back outside. she takes a while getting used to a new environment before she can deal with the people. she has to do things like check out the light fixtures and the art collection before she decides that it's okay to look at them without screaming. it's a nice quality. she made a friend with a grad student in applied linguistics who was holding a glass of wine that she was very into. the friend said that she thought that philomena had spotted it when they were walking down the stairs, from across the room. she also liked the little bee magnets on the refridgerator. i will kick myself at 6 a.m. if i don't know to sleep right now (or at the end of this row).

violetizing

In the back matter to an issue of Science Fiction Studies (#20 volume 7, pt 1: March 1980), Darko Suvin takes note of a new journal of science fiction poetry. He writes, "Starline raised the question of whether there waws such a wordbeast as SF poetry, and if so how was it to be defined or delimited: a theoretically and practically fascinating questsion, so far unanswered (e.g. is something like "the door-handle opened a violet eye, and blinked at him" SF, or poetry, or both?)."

Like Adorno, Suvin is dedicated to genre, and some of his fascination eludes us if we don't acknowledge this preoccupation. His work on the "poetics" of Science Fiction has classified it as a genre that is based on "estrangement and cognition" ("On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre"). Leading scholars following him to adopt the term "cognitive estrangement" in their descriptions of science fiction, Suvin also acknowledged the role of the novum in the construction of the SF text (or "word-beast," following Samuel Delaney). The novum, a concept taken from Ernst Bloch, is an element of novelty or innovation that structures the narrative--"an imaginative framework." For Suvin, it is important both that this framework is something other than the author's "empirical environment," and that all of the fantastic elements are controlled by the logic of this framework. Returning to the question of science fiction poetry, this framework is relevant because it is the distinction between a efficacious (i.e. cognitive) metaphor and its non-cognitive other. The compelling question of SF poetry matters to Suvin because it concerns the role of metaphor. The possibility of SF poetry seems to be something that excites Suvin--something that, unlike poetry, would not merely be metaphor, but that would transport the cognitive aspect of science fiction, its logical narrative unfolding into a poetic form. And though this possibility excites Suvin, it also pushes at the strictly defined generic conventions, for it poses the question: what would ineffacious metaphor look like? In other words, how do uncontrolled "fantastic" elements interact?

The example Suvin gives --"the door-handle opened a violet eye, and blinked at him"-- presents several options for reading. To read it realistically, as SF, it presents the creation of a world in which door-handles have eyes, in which perception is located in structuring objects. Thus, the "violet eye" is a fantastic element, but as part of the novum, becomes a metaphor for the habitation of the faculty of perception within door-handles, suggesting that the inanimate world has agency. To read the "violet eye" as simply an image--that is, to read it as a fantastic element that is not part of a greater framework--would be to read it as an element of fantastic literature, and I would wager that this is what Suvin means by poetry. But if this image takes place within a Science Fiction poem, then it is not simply an image either, that is, it becomes a metaphor that might not be taken literally. In this case, one of the literal referents would be non-literal, the tenor of the metaphor. It could be that "door-handle" is a metaphor for an abstract concept (if we think of something like "love is like the door-handle that opened a violet eye and blinked at him"), in which case we are asked to think about the literal meaning through a fantastic example, without having to take the fantastic element seriously, perhaps, without having to think through the possibility of its logic. Cognitive, or estrangement, or both?

picture: violets, on the Balkon

the name of place

On the way back from LACMA's The Art of Two Germanies exhibit, Philomena and I drove beneath a canopy of trees, and it made me think of the enfolding monumentality of Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee. Philomena was literally a pea when I drove my bike beneath those trees last August, turning off to visit the monument to Soviet soldiers with Travis on one of our last nights in Berlin. We had had many conversations about monuments in Berlin, with our friend Dave, who has been attempting to articulate an argument about the relationship between monuments and the filth, trash, or refuse of a city, which are the general terms Adorno uses to describe the problem of culture in his lectures on metaphysics.This is the dialectic of cutlture and barbarism central to his thinking about expression and Auschwitz. In the last of these lectures, he attempts to identify the possibility of metaphysical experience, given this dialectic and the sense that he has of the prevailing barbarism, the corruption, of society. He gives two examples, which are not intended as a dialectical pair, but which are interesting to think as the particulars of the barbarism/culture dialectic. Earlier, he says, metaphysical experiences of the sort theorized by Proust were available to us, experiences related to the feeling of "it" being held in a single word. For Proust, this happens in terms of the names of places, places that seem to offer all possible fulfillment. These experieces are metaphysical because even if the place disappoints (and it always/often? does), the feeling of it being "it" is retained. Adorno also gives the example of looking back on children's literature, of having the feeling of being able to return to the imagined places of childhood. It seems that this would be the monumental version of cutlture. On the other side, and realistically, in the post-Auschwitz trash heap of barbarism, the most we can hope of a metaphysical experience is what Adorno calls "fruitless waiting." Fruitless waiting, bureacracy, a disillusioned promise, a dystopia maybe, and yet it retains something of the metaphysical offer of fulfillment, despite disappointment.

picture: blind shot from driver's seat window, Los Angeles

writing with philomena

In his lectures on metaphysics (1965), Adorno writes

One would need to be a very superficial and, if you like, a very nominalistic linguistic philosopher to deny that this experience of being unable to take certain words into one's mouth--which you can all have and which was probably first registered, though in a avery different way, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Chandos' letter--also says something about what the words stand for. I believe that one of the crucial points on which the theory I advocate, and of which I can present you at least some sizable fragments in these lectures, differs from the currently prevalent one, is my view that the historical-philosophical fate of language is at the same time the historical-philosophical fate of the subject matter to which it refers. This is supported, incidentally, by a viewpoint which was by no means foreign to German idealism, and especially to Wilhelm von Humboldt: that language constitutes thought no less than thought language.


Adorno's comments about the way that language constitutes thought (as more radical than the idea that thought constitutes language) take place only within the "negativity" that he urges his students to be able to "think." To me it seems that the purported radicalness of this formulation does not lie in the role of the constituent, but in the idea that language is in some sense crucial to the type of thinking that Adorno advocates as our way of not merely "adapting" to the ways of the world, of not simply accepting what is. But in what sense language? His version here of something like "silence"--of "not being able to take certain words into one's mouth"--differs indeed from the prevalent notions of silence. In these, silence registers as good or bad: as a mode of resistance, as testiment to the enormity of the referent, as traumatic symptom, as irresponsibility for the past, as the bystander's response to atrocity, and as lack of awareness of real social or political injustice (i.e. a problem of ideology). It might, in fact, be helpful to catalogue these forms of silence. What Adorno grants to silence here is an ambivalence, one that takes place however, only within the need to think about the negativity of the world. This "not being able to take in certain words" is both the fate of language and the fate of the subject matter; it stands not for language's inability to grasp reality, but for the nature of language to be on course with reality--I want here to say to "reflect" reality, but it is not exactly this, at least the mimetic implications. In previous lectures, these "certain words" are "squalid" and "dark" realities necessarily suppressed by the sublime and lofty goals of culture. It is to gain some form of access to these "unsayable" squalids and darks that is the task of philosophy. This silence is thus a silence that is paired with talking out the other side of one's mouth. Perhaps this is also its ambivalence.

deflected light

Concerning mood, I have been reading Edith Jacobson's book, Depression: Comparative Studies of Normal, Pathological, and Psychotic States. It is easy to overdo thoughts about mood when traveling, I think. Perhaps because it is also easy to overdo mood. Jacobson makes a distinction between mood and affective state on the basis of the "generalized" nature of mood--its capacity to recode all feelings in the pattern of the mood, regardless of whether or not these feelings are related to the same particular object.

picture: "Beach," Berlin

In thinking again about unobservable change, it is a certain return to perception, to self-perception, to the equivalence of these two things in the eyes of some external world, the one that Zizek says does not exist. There is so much at work in such logic. And logic, it seems, derives from the persistent desire to resolve something about all of those inperceptible entities, even as they seem to push towards perceptibility.

street life

At the same time that she is critical of this perspective, Julia Hell also must spend some time in the midst, and murky waters, of the Cold War logic that she claims "functioned like a mirror." Hell objects to the use of the term "totalitarian" (even as a critical concept, it seems) on the grounds that it remains bound to this "mirror logic," and insofar that it remains blind to "the specific forms of domination and resistance to that system." She also describes this Cold War "mirror logic" as one that creates dichotomies that need to be critically evaluated, such as between "Lukacsian realism" and "Western modernism." So in large part, her book, Post-Fascist Fantasies, is a thorough re-reading of those works in the tradition of "Lukacsian realism" in order to provoke and provide insight into the elements of non-realism (i.e. "fantasy") in these novels. As a project, this is productive and necessary to a reconsideration of East German literature. The wish to interrogate totalitarianism no further is, however, another thing. But it is an interesting "other thing," since it seems to me that the wish to dismiss "totalitarianism" is the backhand of a more moral endeavor--one that more self-consciously wants to discuss its past, future, and present--to deal with the repressed past (and implicit here, is "of the German nation"). Hell does not go at repression from the point of repression until the very end of her book, perhaps, in the epilogue, titled "History as Trauma." Instead, she uses the psychoanalytic notion of "fantasy" to designate an unconscious that functions alongside conscious political activity. In these versions of national repression, which pop up everywhere (I am becoming more convinced of this--not only because they "do," but also because people (?) also want to see them everywhere), the wall functions as a splitting mechanism, one that projects all of the bad elements to the other side. Hell uses the "Iron Curtain," but the logic of the wall (see Klaus Theweleit, for example) follows, "what was valued on one side of the Iron Curtain was devalorized on the other; what counted as a "good," "realist," affirmative text in the GDR became a "bad" text outside the GDR and vice versa" (11). This reading, of the wall as both a symbol and psychic fact of repression, fixes the projective fantasies of both the East and West Germans. With the fall of the wall, the continuation of this perspective was to claim that the "invisible" wall "within the head" was a sign of greater repression. So the "wall within the head," the unconscious "fantasy," becomes the conceptual and methodological turning point of post-totalitarian ideology. Similarly, the figure that Hell reads in this literature is the "sublime body" of the post-fascist father, which she takes from Zizek. What is it about this split, antagonistic subject--the transcendental/material, idealist/realist, communist/individual self--that is threatened by the very conceptualization of "totalitarianism"? It might perhaps be something similar to the threat that could be perceived by finding value in the Berlin Wall, by reading the Berlin Wall not as a symbol or thing of repression, but as something that reconfigures the mood of the people living around and after it. Arendt describes totalitarianism as an "experience"--of indeterminate quality--that becomes either foundational or pervasive. In "Ideology and Terror," she notes that this experience has a "general mood," which, "although it may be familiar in every other respect—never before has pervaded, and directed the handling of, public affairs" (461). This mood is an elusive, but nonetheless essential quality of the totalitarian state, and one which might prove useful for thinking about the wish to dismiss totalitarianism.

the difference between one and zero

In her June 1966 preface to Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism [1950], Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarianism can perhaps best be identified by what can exist when it is no longer:

“The clearest sign that the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term is, of course, the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts during the last decade. To be sure, efforts to rehabilitate Stalin and to curtail the increasingly vocal demands for freedom of speech and thought among students, writers, and artists recur again and again, but none of them has been very successful or is likely to be successful without a full-fledged re-establishment of terror and police rule. No doubt, the people of the Soviet Union are denied all forms of political freedom, not only freedom of association but also freedom of thought, opinion and public expression. It looks as though nothing has changed, while in fact everything has changed. When Stalin died the drawers of writers and artists were empty; today there exists a whole literature that circulates in manuscript and all kinds of modern painting are tried out in the painters’ studios and become known even though they are not exhibited. This is not to minimize the difference between tyrannical censorship and freedom of the arts, it is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.”

Arendt notes that totalitarianism is experienced as a "zero" environment, in which not only does art not have a public, it is also not produced. The above then, the change that appears "as though nothing has changed," is her description of the "thaw," a word she uses hesitatingly to describe the process of destalinization following the death of Stalin. It seems that this tension--"the difference between one and zero"--is raised in particular through the genre of lyric poetry. Emily Lygo has written of the "embargo on lyric poetry" during the Stalin era, but this seems to involve, for her and for the others, the idea that despite the official taboo, writers continued to produce poetry, among other things, "for the drawer." She and other historians of Soviet destalinization would perhaps prefer to discuss this period as one of the "impoverishment" of lyric poetry, which suffered most because it was the most direct form of expression. Those loyal to the party line might have felt differently, or justified the impoverishment of individual expression for the sake of upholding communal solidarity. Here, lyric suffers simply out of the moral sense that there were "more important things to do." But this argument is also one that seems to be echoed whenever this discussion is raised, since it involves deciding or placing a judgment upon the art that can actually do something to achieve political or social justice. In short, this is the issue that Arendt seems also to highlight; one part of it is something like seeing change where there appears to be none, and the other part, perhaps implicit, is that you would have to hold off, or not be swayed, by the insistence of the need to make decisions about moral, or artistic, or aesthetic realities. Perhaps I can't write anymore regarding this here, but it seems that at this point, Zizek's arguments about "complexity" being used to avoid making decisions you need to make could be seen as iterations of this problem. I think it's also interesting that Arendt wants you to see something where nothing appears; Zizek to see "nothing" or the "real" where something appears (in his language, to "discern the hidden necessity") as an irreducible antagonism. The location of antagonism in Arendt's formulation is always deferred, however: here, not one v. zero, but the difference between one and zero, also not locating the point at which ideology becomes itself, but about identifying the perceptual desire to see "one" in the first place.