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.

sketched

After listening to Rachel Greenwald-Smith give a paper on Aldo Leopold and the contemporary Naturalist, Charles Bowden, titled “After the Land Ethic,” I have been reading from A Sand County Almanac, and thinking about the literature and theory that inhabited Greenwald-Smith’s work. At the same time that I have been drawn towards this body of work, it continues to provoke my feelings of alienation from academic work, as well as uncertainty about what constitutes my own field and area of study. In part, the seeming flexibility but ultimate rigidity of defining and redefining oneself for the diminishing market offerings can be a process that threatens, challenges, or destroys one’s feelings about one’s own work. I don’t know if it’s this that has seemed to destroy my own work, or if my work was destined to some sort of end in itself that began, perhaps, in the claustrophobic office space of Andrej Warminski, who found my writing so unintelligible and my German so in need of correction that the only comments he could muster were dramatic x’s across entire pages. I was incredibly fortunate to find the counsel and friendship of Rei Terada, who cared to read my writing and to try and sort out its terms of intelligibility. Still, there were gaping periods of white noise, of things that did not come across: the mess of my qualifying exams, for example. The dissertation ended up being a more affirmative process. The chapter on Brecht remains a disaster, but the next chapter that I worked on, on Durs Grünbein, which ended up being the third, has been published and reviewed and presented, and I like it while still not entirely getting what it’s all about. The chapters that I wrote after having Philomena, on Ingeborg Bachmann and on the Science Fiction poet, Ann K. Schwader, were inspired acts of writing, as were the introduction and conclusion. And now it has been a year since this last bit of really necessary work has been completed. Since, I’ve applied to two rounds of job postings, and to over twenty adjunct positions. I have given one conference paper, submitted one essay for publication (not accepted), and submitted two conference proposals. I’ve listened to a handful of talks, read drafts of peers’ papers and work, and done some research work in German.

Nothing exactly seems to stick. I have the feeling that I am a tourist, passing through these worlds and feeling the emptiness that often accompanies these feelings of estrangement. Or I would feel like I was co-opting someone else’s something. In California, I felt hugely distant from the lived experience of the student protests, even while attending some and while having at many other points in my graduate student life taken on these activities. I wonder if it was because I was no longer a student, or if it was because the causes that were so worth fighting for were ones that had already demoralized me and that even now I have not found an adequate response for. And so I settle for wallowing, a pathetic defense, and feeling instead like I have suffered injustice on top of injustice for the way that my life has been affected by these political and structural realities. And amidst the wallowing, I kind of bob up to realize that I have lost the ability to talk about these things in an intelligent way. I am so self-absorbed, in other words, that I have given up trying to think about the variety of aspects that are expressed in any one thing, and that even on this level, reading is a choice.

I think that this was the meaning and import of encountering Greenwald-Smith’s work at this point, and of talking to her about her work and my own. The desire for a space of non-coercive writing, such as is also found in Rei Terada’s. Reading Aldo Leopold, there is room to think about the profundity of this process. The main target of his critique is conservation economists, and he calls for a supplemental ethic, one which “presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism” (214). In contrast to the image of “the balance of nature,” which I think for Leopold involves the logic of exchange between populations and species, according to each its rightful place, the biotic image is a pyramid consists of layers “alike not in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat” (215). Energy is thus in movement up and down, in life and death. Such a dynamic, which recalls to my mind Rei Terada’s figure of the erosion at work in Hegel’s logic in her essay, “Hegel’s Bearings,” is a compelling anti-Hegelian logic, since it displaces the dynamic of conversion from A to B, and the coerciveness which is also a part of this logic, with the variety of connections that can link chains across layers. In a sense, I am sure, this is what is compelling to so many about the rhizome, but I have never felt convinced of wanting to take up its abstraction until now, since the biotic not only redefines how we think of “the land,” but it also simply and fundamentally reorganizes the place of the human, and not in contrast to the animal, but as a matter of this schema: “Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables” (215). The human being takes his place in this scheme according to how he uses the land, that which is the common ground for all things. Perhaps this is also in line with Jane Bennett’s construction in Vibrant Matter (reference to this book was made by Greenwald-Smith in her essay, thanks) of the vital materialist, in contrast to the historical materialist when she claims that it is a “dogged resistance to anthropomorphism” on the part of the vital materialist that constitutes their difference. Despite or because of this, the vital materialist paradoxically needs to “cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism,” highlighting for me a contradiction that inheres, both productively and unproductively, within the discussion of the human and nonhuman. I feel like Leopold’s bioticism swerves much of the contention about the human nonhuman without deflating the political and obviously ecological impact of making such designations. Bennett’s project of giving agency to nonhuman actors as a way of attempting to establish a more equatable and non-instrumental relationship between things and nonthings still involves characterizing humanity at the very beginning as “complexity,” and even while she offers this as a way to break apart the ontological divide, in which humans remain distinct on the basis of intellect or a rational soul, I can’t quite help but to want to know more about what drives this apparently ethical question for her, of establishing the affective agency of all material. Would Leopold find a similar desire for the “balance of nature” lurking here? An argument that is economic because of the way in which it attempts to correct injustice, to balance and counterbalance according to continued anthopomorphic standards?

picture: trees, biotica, Minneapolis.

gray zone

In the middle of working on the essay, "Double Speak: Poems from Guantanamo," it was somewhat weird to listen to the NPR/ABC hosted debate on whether or not the detainees should be treated as "enemy combatants" rather than "criminals." The debate, for the program "Intelligence Squared," was a joke, in more ways than one, perhaps. Because of whatever the format of the airing was (as an "Oxford style debate in the U.S.") stage laughter was cued in at various moments during the program, especially to highlight moments in intractable difference. A joke because the political difference between the debaters seems to amount to very little, in the end. And so little was brought to the table. A question for the audience about the definition of "enemy combatant" for example, yielded no clear answer from either side. Perhaps this murky realm of "political debate," the staging of a supposedly clear difference between two sides, is also exemplary of the results of the trial of Ahmed Ghailani, the first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee. Ghailani, who was convicted on only one count of the 285 brought against him in a 4-week trial that ended on November 17, 2010, was found guilty of conspiring in the 1998 African embassy bombings. The results of the trial seem to indicate that, in contrast to what those engaged in debate about whether or not so-called terrorists should be convicted in civilian or military courts had thought, hoped or feared, the civilian court put terrorism, not counter-terrorism on trial.

In the forty page transcript of this debate, there is one attempt to get near the import of the difference between civilian and military trial, and while I had thought that this might also include some wisdom as to what the demarcation of enemy combatant means, this was never approached, not by a long shot. Instead, the terrain of the debate was marked by attempts to prove that we are at war, and followed by the logic that since we are at war, and since the enemy is ununiformed, then the battleground is everywhere, and since the battleground is everywhere, then enemy combatants are also everywhere. This caused formed Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen to respond by saying this is "not about guilt." But his statement is more telling than any of the things that he or others might find it to be about. He means that once everyone is an enemy combatant, guilt no longer needs to be proved. All that is required is "reasonable belief" that individuals are members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The threat posed by treating these cases emerges at this point, since entering into civilian courts would threaten the security provided in the creation of the culture of the enemy combatant.

picture: Sidewalk, Los Angeles. Becky Bowden