cry in

The drag of taking a resisting/resistant philli to daycare is this morning a heavy weight. The fine line between knowing when to insist and knowing when to listen to your child may already be crossed when one begins thinking and talking about the fine line and its being crossed... Better: there is surely a reason that Philli does not want to go to Amys house, but is it one that needs to be pushed through or one that needs to be heeded? It occurs to me that Winnicott would have something to say about this issue, and in thinking about it I recall his essay on the reasons for crying in infants, and wonder how it translates into the toddler world--so much more complicated and dramatic, it is. At the time when I read Winnicotts essay (which I cannot now recall exactly what it was), probably two and a half years ago, it was a remarkable relief to find that crying often had to do with frustration, and that crying was a expression of satisfaction, an act that in and of itself did not communicate any content. Perhaps this is implicit in todays question as well--the extent to which acting out is communicative rather than expressive, the extent to which the message is what is manifest in the content of speech. Still there remain only questions--how does the attached-to mother act in such situations? Surely, she cannot help but feel like everything is a matter of this attachment and wish that her morning was more like that of the other parents who walk in, set their children down, say good-bye and leave. Instead, leaving a writhing, screaming mass takes some hours to let go of, in itself.

any-spaces-whatever

“Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise [Unbehagen], a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations.” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents 99).

In his introduction to Cinema 2, Deleuze famously describes a shift from pre- to post-war cinema (from movement-image to time-image) as the crisis of the “cinema of action.” Throughout, Deleuze persists in attributing the cause of this crisis to the figure of the broken “sensory-motor link,” which, if un-broken, signals the correspondence of incoming sensation and action, in short, the ability to register and react to stimulus. Commenting on his choice of the war’s end as a point of demarcation between these two periods, he says that “in fact” the postwar consists of an increase in “spaces which we no longer know how to describe.” It’s not clear whether the post-war as described is cinematic or real; for Deleuze this ambiguity is constitutive of becoming. Such is the ambiguity that inheres in the “I,” the lyric speaker, of postwar poetry. The problem of this speaker is not just one of speaking or representation, but one of being seen, of being observed. The crisis is typically assumed to be traumatic, but as Deleuze’s construction shows us, the crisis of the subject is one of description, not experience.

Deleuze’s own descriptive discourses of these “any-spaces-whatevers” highlight questions for action in general. Such “empty or disconnected” (272) spaces—“deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, wasteground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction (xi)—are alternately referred to as situations: the “rise of situations to which one can no longer react” (272). The disturbance of reception and reaction marks the breakdown of the “sensory-motor” relationship in indescribable spaces and situations which foreground the impossibility of reaction. This crisis of describing and reacting involves exchanging action for perception, hence the breakdown of the “sensory-motor” apparatus. This breakdown and exchange occurs at the level of the character, but as we will come to see in Deleuze and elsewhere, the postwar is qualified by the difficulty and confusion of identifying and differentiating oneself from this omniscient character.

For Deleuze, the war marks a break in filmic modes—not by staging the dictum of writing after Auschwitz, but by reading these broken, postwar “spaces” as the positive introduction of a new subject, a “mutant” character who “does not act without seeing himself acting” (6). In these “any-spaces-whatever,” he states, “a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers” (xi). A similarly eerie perceptiveness is present in Civilization and its Discontents. But this perceptiveness—the coincidence of observing and being observed—is not ascribed to characters and spaces, but first to the meta-critical faculty of the super-ego. Freud notes that the super-ego, conscience, and the “sense of guilt” are different aspects of the same thing: “the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way” (100). Freud orders them topographically, or primordially, describing how the super-ego comes before conscience, and the sense of guilt before the super-ego, such that the sense of guilt is primary. Perhaps Freud later becomes more occupied with how the conscience and super-ego function and how they exercise their critical powers, but for now his most astonishing connection is between the “sense of guilt” is misrecognized, that it appears as “a sort of malaise [Unbehagen].”

post-industrial

At Marx Farm, there are lines everywhere between industrial production and self-production. The lines that I am referring to are not connectives, I come to think, but more like those produced by somewhat randomly connecting a series of points on a plane. They signal layers and multiply. There are ruins, recycleds, and growth. Behind everything are the finely scripted and worn pages of notes that are part of the elaborate eco-system. The farm is a block of land with rows of vegetables—eggplant, kale, purple and green cabbage, corn, cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, carrots, celery, peas, broccoli—and herbs. Upcoming, a chicken coop. The fields that surround it, then, are owned by the people who let Mark keep up his plot. They are corn fields and berry fields, from all appearances, heavily doused with pesticide in the evening, which clouds up and over in light plumes. The smell of the pesticide is noxious and invasive. Greenhouses, low and white peaked. Beyond the immediate fields that surround, there are signs of another complex, a tractored, leveled hill , construction at work, trees, more green, and then further beyond, barely peaking from the trees, the three skyscrapers of downtown Cleveland. Train tracks where trains often pass in both directions. The gravel parking lot, upon which sit some seedlings and the tables where the produce is collected, is also home to a computer- and medical equipment recycling warehouse. The field itself is littered with china, cracked bits and pieces from some former dish factory. Mark is weed tolerant, and thistles adorn.

Purple star thistle, red clover. The cantaloupe looks like a weed, trampled upon at the edge of the herbs. It is a place on the edge, it’s easy to feel on the edge of many things there, not of the world perhaps, but of several different ones, whose common factors are more like collisions.

What is the barbarism of poetry? Adorno’s declaration that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric is often taken as both an indictment and a prohibition, although in the context of his philosophical work, it is meant as neither. Here, the riddle of the statement lies in his claim that the barbarism of writing poetry has “corroded our knowledge” of why it has become impossible to write poetry. In a recent essay on contemporary post-catastrophe Arabic poetry, Nouri Gana finds that the impossibility of writing after what he calls the “proximate historical corollary” of Auschwitz, the occupation of Palestine (the Nakba, or catastrophe of 1948), is one of the conditions for writing poetry after it has been declared barbaric. In this essay, I turn to one of the first writers of Arabic free verse, the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika, to consider how poetry registers the experience of barbarism through its appeal to the impossibility of its expression. I argue that in deliberation over the condition of its impossibility, poetry attempts to answer the metaphysical and increasingly ethical questions that Adorno poses for the “resurrected cultures” of society after catastrophe. Poetry recasts the ethical question of good and evil as the fragile relation between meaning and incoherence. In al-Malaika’s poem, “Five Hymns to Pain” (1949), there is no ethical imperative to “remember,” or to retain the barbaric incoherency of suffering, and neither is there an attempt to find meaning in the remains. Rather, pain is sequestered: it is given “a little corner” in the heart; it partitions, raising walls “between our longing and the moon”; and is sheltered “among the ribs of our joyful songs.” The poetry of barbarism does not work to remember, to account for, or to memorialize, it works to forget: “We shall forget pain, / we shall forget it, / having nurtured it with satisfaction.” Pain is material; figured as an object more than a subjective experience, al-Malaika’s poetry divorces the continuity between pain and barbarism that has been one of the (to my mind false) legacies of Adorno’s philosophical writing on poetry. I argue that in emphasizing this separation of pain and barbarism, al-Malaika realigns barbarism and culture to the extent that Adorno also did when he wrote, just before writing about the barbarism of poetry, that we are at “the final stage” of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.” Such a final stage is conveyed in the melancholic sentiment of al-Malaika’s poetry, which, affectively very different from Adorno’s philosophical-poetic tone, may also help us appraise the permutations of this dialectic and its various points of origin. In this paper, I hope to explore how consideration of al-Malaika’s poetry can help to revise our understanding of Adorno’s philosophical work, especially as it pertains to poetry and lyric theory, but also and perhaps more importantly insofar as it contributes to philosophical discussions of ethics in the twentieth century.

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