a scribble-scrabble

Lodged at the side of the many disappointments of the public aspect of "the state of things"--a phrase that is neither precise, nor substantive, nor promising, and gestures not just toward the academic conference of this name but toward a ever more general, ever more exhaustive-because-devouring-intensely public sphere--there was, for me, a smaller disappointment. Maybe it's not a disappointment, maybe it's a quibble, or a scribble-scrabble, or an indelible mark of some sort that then does get moved past, brushed away, contorted into a more realized figure.

I had been prepped for the explicit psychoanalytic content of Jacqueline Rose's October 23 talk, "Feminism and the Abomination of Violence," after noting that someone had commented in this way on a Facebook thread about her recent dialogue at UC Berkeley with Judith Butler: that there was "too much" psychoanalysis. Arriving to a conversation after her talk, this was also the topic: that psychoanalysis is "unnecessary," or that it is merely applied when it seems hardly to be suggested by the "material," that it's even "creepy," to the extent that it engages children coercively in feelings/thoughts/fantasies that are not their own, thoughts that are, instead, often thought to belong to the adult analyst instead. Teaching psychoanalysis in a non-systematic way to undergrads, I've also gotten this reaction: that it's "ridiculous" to attribute fantasies of aggression or the anxiety of castration to the infant or the young child.

If Rose's talk was simply aware of itself as a large, public event (thus necessarily reducing some of the complex or content), she did, then, deliver in popularizing the psychoanalytic content to some extent. This was not necessarily a "bad" thing; her most resonant comment was about the deep desire that the young child has for his/her unconscious to be understood, profoundly, by someone else. In this regard, Melanie Klein's insights into destructiveness and unconscious phantasy are not just supplementary to actually existing reality. They do not just "overlay" what is really there with an interpretive framework; they provide a way for thinking about ambivalence that moves outside of those parameters that we usually accept for thinking about the non-contradictory nature of external (or actually existing) reality. Despite the fact that Rose dwelled on Klein, and Klein's account of her analysis of Richard (a ten-year-old boy), she quickly relegated the significance of psychoanalysis to consciousness, to conscious thought. In so doing, she separated the practice of psychoanalysis, as well as its theory, from its radical potential to deliver, to get to ambivalence. For Richard, she said, the therapeutic encounter gave him a way to keep the line in place between war and peace; he could "think," with psychoanalysis. Thus, joined with Arendt, thinking, or "thought," became the means through which compassion and avoidance of social violence could be achieved.

In her response, Jane Blocker, who took the occasion to speak about the violence that absorbs the life, death, and work of Ana Mendieta (appropos both her book, Where is Ana Mendieta? and the current exhibit of Ana Mendieta's short films at the Nash Gallery right now), raised questions about whether making a distinction between war and peace, or between the violent father and the violated mother was the point to be taken about aggression, psychological, physical, social, or otherwise. Blocker suggested that in Carl André's work Lament for the Children, there is a death that he seeks to grapple with (not Mendieta's (whose fall from their 34th story apartment in NYC, which happened during an argument they had, he was found innocent of)), the death of "knowing." I puzzle over just what this means--the "death of knowing"--in much the same way that i puzzle over how the death drive, the movement toward self-dissolution, continues to operate even after it seems it has exhausted itself, in the expression of a destructive instinct.

To return to an underside of the state of things. "Read her [Arendt] against yourself," Rose said in the Q&A in response to a question about Arendt's "thoughtless" dismissal of Fanonian violence and forms of aggression whose expression as destructiveness may not be their most important aspect. A slip, to read her "against yourself," not against "herself." A slip that marks the difference between psychical aggression that may never get expressed but is always directed "against yourself," and destructiveness that takes place as social violence in a "state of things," against "herself." A slip that reminds us of the ambivalence rather than the distinction between subject/object, between state/thing, an ambivalence--to return again--whose excess lends itself to regulation by those who see it, all things being equal (which of course they are not), as a waste of resources.

picture: a herself/yourself: Imogen's first "figure"

A Surge of Silence

What happens when you try to respond to the tone of a letter not written to you? There’s a gap that is akin to the silence in a forest when a tree falls and no one is there to hear it; perhaps it's like what we could imagine remains of the death drive after some destructive instinct has been acted upon, acted out.

This is such a response, a respose to a writing by Commune Editions titled "Dear Simone." The piece by Commune Editions is addressed to Simone White, who asked a number of poets to write about "matters of capital and class" for an issue of The Recluse (a journal of The Poetry Project) that she was editing titled "Capital P." In her introduction, White clarifies that by "capital and class" she means the "systematic dehumanization of the human into laboring factions." The script of the introduction is not apparently the same as the initial phrasing of the request for responses, since Commune Editions invokes several times the phrase "a surge of interest in class (by which some people mean race),” and attributes this phrase to White’s initial request. So when I say I'm responding to "tone," I mean that I'm responding to what lies behind the citation and repetition of this phrase, and to something that begins, and perhaps ends, with the appropriation of this phrase.

Would it matter if we could read Simone White’s initial request? Reading it might give one a sense of the tone of the original phrase, but it's not this that is really at stake--and also not the reality status of it, whether or not Simone White is right or not about this surge, although it's this that is disputed throughout Commune Edition's letter. At stake in this question about the reality of this surge is the organization of a world almost entirely around internal objects, and the extent to which a radical poetic-political project organized in this way can make its hoped-for intervention, its destruction of the world. I find this letter to be mostly about and addressed to internal objects. Internal objects, in contrast to external objects, represent people and events but they involve, as psychoanalyst Paula Heimann writes, "the subject at the same time as her objects." This is significant because in attacking these objects, one is also attacking oneself. Does all the talk about destroying the world in the letter--"the resolute rejection of this world," "the world to be abolished," "in every poem that insists it all has to go"--fold back upon the part that remains as much about the subject as the objects included in this world? If the world includes all struggles worthy of abolition (struggles, Commune defines, aimed at "the unmaking of whiteness, or of gender") but not this capacity to reflect upon the specificity of these struggles in contrast to their inclusion within this totality, might there not be a need to place some pressure upon just what is meant by "the world"?

Reading the letter--its content signalling but never locating, never externalizing, those who've claimed that "the problem is the hubris of purportedly Jacobin militants always going too far"--one gathers some of the referents of these internal objects, if one knows enough of this world. Commune Edition's dispute, for example, with the "surge of interest" is a response to (perhaps other things, too, who knows?) a dossier arranged by Daniel Tiffany for The Boston Review on class. I'm inferring this because I was there in the FB forest when the vitriol about Tiffany's column fell, and it seems likely, given Commune's use of terms "kitsch" and "rhetoric" that Tiffany is an object of critique. Beyond this kind of matching of internal with external objects, one is left feeling like the letter itself, its elliptical response, remains in a world peopled by internal objects, phrases, and discussions whose representation exists almost entirely within the life of the mind. In the letter, the coordinates to external reality cannot be spoken, and one wonders why: Out of tact? Because it's not just a single example, but a set of examples, massified, in this way? Because it's not worth naming these enemies of class, giving this recognition? Because in order to "get" this letter, one should know already, who or what the objects are? To be a reader of this letter, but not the reader, is to be in a forest when the tree fell and not to have heard the noise, to have missed the tone of falling limbs. From this position, a question that is not supported within the discourse arises: how is it that you've come into this place of knowledge?

Perhaps one way of thinking about this circumscription of knowledge is to approach one of the most obvious features of the letter-- its attachment to poetry. This attachment comes with an expressed commitment to the question of "the relation between revolutionary politics (which we take to demand a cothinking of race and class among other things) and a poetry which threatens certainty, commitment, didacticism." We might just as well ask, why poetry? What work is being done by poetry? How is the vaunted antagonism or contradiction of destruction and creation, "between absolute political demand and the proper tonalities for poetry" held in place by the law of genre? And what sort of dynamic of sublimation, of the transfer of destructive and creative energies or vice verse, must be imagined in order to achieve this worldview?

To kind of extend this overextended metaphor, we might imagine that the tree that has fallen--producing or not a noise, a sound, a tone--is itself the poem, and insofar, roughly correlates with Commune's example of the pop song. I am drawn to how Commune theorizes the moment of pleasure--"a cross-class pleasure," a "real pleasure--from the pop song, and by extension from the "pop song in the poem." I quote at length from their description of these moments of pleasure, of "negative delight":

But we are also not sure we see the pop song that way. In truth it sounds more true about Eliot; much has changed since then. Here’s our thought: it matters how you see the pop song. We certainly get that, even after the supposed collapse of the hi-lo distinction, turning your nose up at the pop song is still class-marked, a kind of upper-middlebrow Philistinism. Still, it’s a sort of cross-class pleasure, the pop song, isn’t it? A real pleasure. We hope you will not hear irony. We think that a great pop song, and there are a lot of them — Top 40, sing along, solid gold — is sensually thrilling and emotionally powerful. It is one of the finest things (still no irony) that civilization has produced.

But not just any civilization. Its affordances are capitalism itself, its technologies, its circuits of distribution, its reascriptions of race, its microleisures, invention of the world market, the world audience. In this sense the pop song is emblematic of much human making in the last couple-few centuries. We could speak of Hollywood, or Bollywood, or a videochat with a distant friend, or the Hong Kong skyline. Or bicycling out on the path alongside the Bay Bridge and sitting over the water while the birds and porpoises and oily wakes of container ships pass underneath.

This is the thing about even the most resolute rejection of this world. We know also that this world is in many ways an astonishing achievement of human making, with incomparable pleasures, unevenly distributed. This knowledge is always with us, this pleasure and maybe even wonder. It is with us even in the moments when we think of surplus populations in Dhaka and Sao Paulo, when we think of manganese in the Pearl River and Mike Brown’s body moldering in the street in metropolitan St. Louis. And when we say that it has to go, we say that knowing this means forsaking all of these things.

I read these lines as being about the way in which the "pleasure" that is evoked is subsumed within a total system, and about how these moments "sit inside" this larger system. No single moment could be greater or more expansive than the entirety of the system. And yet, in a way, it's just that--the way that the "poetic" destroys by consuming--that David Marriott, via Cesaire, describes in a recent response to The Boston Review's issue, "Race and the Poetic Avant Garde":

Césaire’s immense productivity consists in creating a poetry of events that does not have form or content as its end, but is rather the pursuit of their irremedial alienation. Instead of claiming, as the various European avant-gardes did while reading Marx, say, or Freud, that he was producing a new dialectics (of culture, or meaning), Césaire claimed that poetic production was productive because it consumed knowledge. Or rather–that it was the ‘poetic’ itself that was productive, often against the express conscious and political wishes of the poet.

Marriott emphasizes how for Cesaire the contradiction between the poetic and political does not express an antagonism that becomes about the tension or maintenance or resolution of this contradiction, i.e. its sublimation in written work, but about an “irremedial alienation” that is consumptive, i.e. destructive, in relation to knowledge. Thus knowledge is not a position from which to maintain certainty or perspective, it is a position that is always threatened by poetry's destructive aspect.

And one might wonder, how much would poetry have to consume, in order to destroy? But I wonder, even if it were just a little bit, would there not be less--quite a bit less--to say about how a knowledge of the whole world pertained to this damaged part?

In Commune Edition's lines, knowledge of the pleasures afforded by capitalism is held alongside "thinking" about surplus populations, manganese, and Mike Brown's body. There's quite a bit of assumption already in the way that "pleasures" and "thinking" constitute the antagonism that is then the aesthetico-political. It's a certain universalism that feels tiring. But there is something here worth thinking about, and it's the way in which these moments of "incomparable pleasures" are in a line with complicity. Here, another tone I am deaf to: "But are we not all complicit, none of us pure, all of us benefitting from entanglement with the very thing from which we claim to take absolute distance? No shit." How do we read the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of no shit? Does this mean that "we" have been accused of complicity? Does it mean that the accusation of complicity is to be read as politically irrelevant? Does it mean that even complicity is a concept that sits inside the structure of this system? Or is it an invocation of complicity as a kind of precursor to this "knowledge"?

In psychoanalysis, complicity is perhaps the least evident thing. It refers, even in the most complex form, in its relation to political emotion, to an ambivalence on the level of a distinction between subject and object, but one that is perhaps even more indeterminate, to a non-integrated state that precedes but is not outside of relating. For those independent analysts in the British postwar, including Paula Heimann and D.W. Winnicott, this state was all about the primacy of destruction, and these formulations followed from Freud's ideas about complicity or guilt being a defense against feelings of aggressiveness or destruction. Complicity, because it involves this defensive relation to aggression, sits not too far afield from sublimation, in terms of the function it assumes to redirect instinctive energy.

In a recent post, I described how Paula Heimann recalls an interaction with a patient in which the patient spontaneously recites a poem in analysis. Heimann recounts the patient's deep joy in this recitation and in the phrasing of words. She reads this withdrawal not as an expression of hostility, a turning away from the analyst, not just as destructive of that structure in which it takes place, but as a moment of reprieve, a momentary lifting, a sublimation that is not just about the recovery of a lost object or about the destruction of analytic space but about finding a self that survives the expression of destructiveness. What does Heimann’s discussion of these moments bring to to the moments of pleasure, of negative delight, that Commune describes? Heimann makes visible the fact that the world Commune wishes to destroy is maintained by a fantasy of omnipotence. It’s a wish that is construed politically--admirably, to some extent--but it’s a wish that, because of this relation to fantasy, to internal objects, involuntarily destroys the struggles of others whose experiences become subsumed within this world as well. The militancy of destruction as a political project does indeed involve a hubris about the scope and aims of such a venture. Being willing to ignore how one’s definition of the “world” affects those it claims to include is also an extension of not taking responsibility for the unintended destruction that one enacts by holding knowledge in such an intimate relation, or the damage that is done by reinforcing the knowledge afforded by a poetics of class, by saying for example that poetic struggles for racial justice and against antiblack racism, transphobic violence, gender discrimination, and racial profiling have “played at least as great a role as a poetics of class.” Because what does that mean to qualify this poetry by quantifying its impact--”at least as great a role”--and to hold firm to this worldview?

Muteness Envy

Threading through psychoanalytic writing on aggression in the 50s, 60s, 70s, lines worn where entrenched divisions formed around the existence of the death drive, the primacy of destructiveness, the attribution of envy to infantile experience, the existence of a primary non-integrated state. In particular, I've begun reading the work of Paula Heimann (her essays collected in the volume About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942-1980, edited by Margret Tonnesmann; The New Library of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10 (London (Tavistock): Routledge, 1989) who is often associated with Melanie Klein, becoming one of Klein's biggest supporters during the 1942-1944 "Controversial Discussions," which split the British Psycho-Analytic Society. Heimann (1899-1980) studied psychiatry in Germany and entered psychoanalytic training in Berlin in the late 1920s; she moved from Berlin to London in 1933 after Hitler came to power, where she encountered Klein and began her own work as an analyst and as a theoretician. Heimann was loyal to Klein and her theories up until Klein's presentation of her essay, "Envy and Gratitude" in Geneva in 1955, but as Pearl King notes in her introductory memoir to Heimann's collected papers, Heimann herself acknowledged a rift that preceded this by several years. Winnicott, too, critiqued what he saw as Klein's over-valuation of envy, in particular her identification of the primacy of this emotional state.

Though I've encountered Winnicott's critique, and even recently returned to it as I continue to think about aggression, Heimann's departure from this notion is accompanied by an idea about the relationship between sublimation and the death drive that illuminates the significance of this theoretical difference. In her separate discussions of sublimation and the death drive throughout the course of her early work, when support of Klein's defense of the death drive was at stake, Heimann asserted its conceptual significance as providing a context for the complex relationship that individuals hold in relation to internal objects. Because of her interest in sublimation, which is about the ego's creative activity, Heimann pursues the idea that the state of primary indeterminacy theorized by Balint as "primary love" and by Winnicott as the "unintegrated state," is not restricted to "object-relatedness" ("Some Notes on Sublimation" (1957; 132). Heimann is thus insistent that the internal objects that we experience as damaging or persecutory or destructive are not primarily objects, but also the self. In her essay "A contribution to the problem of sublimation," from 1939, she writes:

But since these defences consist of attacking the persecutors inside the self, they are of no avail as a solution, for they involve the subject at the same time as her objects. The battlefield is in the home country, not on enemy territory. A vicious circle is thus set up and a perpetual warfare ensues which his played out in the subject's internal world--always affecting her external life and often expressed in terms of physical symptoms. (33)

The "perpetual warfare" that sets itself up here does so to the extent that the internal objects are not recognized as subject to a double aggression: first, the attribution of destructiveness to objects represents a defensive externalization of one's feelings of destructiveness and aggression, as is characteristic of splitting and about which Melanie Klein spoke of especially through recourse to "projective identification"; and second, that the ambivalence; but second, that in addition to this destructiveness that achieves externalization in the internal object, there is something of the death drive that is also not realized in this externalization, and this quotient is the difference between the death instinct and the destructive instinct.

Heimann illustrates this in her example of a patient who breaks off into reciting a poem during analysis. Heimann regards this as a moment of "withdrawal" (130) that is motivated "not by hostility or fear" but by "an urge to engage in creative ego activity," in other words, a sublimation. Here, sublimation is linked with aggression because it represents an interpretive choice not to read this moment as a deflected or destructive impulse. In "The theory of the life and death instincts," which is the essay that she wrote in defense of Klein's work and presented in 1942, she describes the muteness of the death instinct in a manner consistent with this reading of withdrawal as sublimation. Because of the difficulty, often noted in psychoanalytic literature, of locating aggression in a "pure" or "unalloyed" state, it's possible to grant that "reading" it may indeed involve scenarios when the other side--object-relatedness, the reparation of lost or destroyed objects, destructiveness displaced onto/into other objects--can also be read. What compels this reading, then? Perhaps the thesis about perpetual warfare, a statement that gathers significance in the present day, requires thinking more profoundly about the damage that is done by reparative work as well. Here, it's not just that destructiveness accompanies reparative work--the narrow dialectic of civilization and barbarism, the exceedingly harsh strictures of the super-ego suggesting that civilization's destructiveness is greater than not--but that missing the destructive aspect of reparative work means that the capacity for sublimation, in the form of creative activity--figured by Heimann as a reprieve, "short-lived," or as "dwelling on certain instances" (126)--becomes impoverished, constrained, inoperable as well.

Enough Is Enough

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, from “The University and the Undercommons”: 

But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. (26) 

***

In 2014, the Institute for Policy Studies put out a report, titled “The OnePercent at State U: How Public University Presidents Profit from Rising StudentDebt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor.” ^^The report found that the U ranked fourth worst of those 25 public universities with the highest executive salaries (the 1%). President Kaler and the rational men upstairs have promised to reform privatization, including—following a 2012 Wall Street Journal article reporting that the administrative bloat did notfloat—his promise to freeze tuition and his plan to implement measures of “operational excellence,” which he claims would cut administrative costs by $90 million by 2019.

There is the old question, not how the minutes are counted, but of whose minutes are saved (and whose stolen) in a zero sum game that reflects, as Kaler pronounces, no “general trends at the U.” Initially ranked 3^rd  worst in the 1% report, Kaler and the Udisputed these findings on the basis of the way that adjunct and contingent workers are counted. How are the low-wage workers of the university—the graduate student workers, the adjuncts, and the contingent laborers—counted? Buried in the ruins of operation excellence, both the number—which ranges from 500 to 5600, depending on how it’s counted—and the category of those “downlow lowdown” workers are obscured. What else is obscured: “the university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.” What the subversive intellectual bears, carries, births, sustains: the university needs the products of her labor; it ingests these accumulated goods, uses them in the production of profit, and appears to do so efficiently, without waste. There would be much critical work to be done in this vein: exposing, bringing to the surface these conditions, making visible, and so forth, and it’s all necessary. But my interest is on the other side today: what she brings that cannot be borne, what cannot be consumed and so used, that part of the work that yields, that bears, feeds her.  

>      Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, again: 

The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. (27)

I’d like to begin, then, with the question: what is there to be said about the value of teaching for food?

The other-value of food, that which is not fed back into the meaning-affirmative circuit of exchange and use, tends toward that which is destructive in love, a destructiveness, a desire, that is brought but not born into material relations that are always, on the surface, about reparation and resources, about that which provides the “real” sustenance. Moten and Harney’s phrase implies that “teaching for food” means “teaching to live,” means subsistence, but I read it as is already ambivalent: it’s a thing only insofar as it’s a stage to be passed. The phrase, “teaching for food” is already ironic, a term lifted from the DSM, on the list of “symptoms” under the category “sociopathological labor of the university.”

One has the suspicion, however, that this stage is not so much a diagnosis as it is a prescription, one that suggests that food functions not just as an index of the minimum requirement to sustain life, but that it has another value—the other-value of food: a sustenance that allows us to “get to” feelings of destructiveness that we otherwise locate in the world. We find a model of this use for food in objects-relations psychoanalysis, where, for example, ^^DW Winnicott describes the continuous destroying that is at work in “object constancy,” in the very maintenance of an object as outside oneself: “The object is always being destroyed. This destruction becomes the unconscious backcloth for love of a real object; that is, an object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control…In this way a world of shared reality is created which the subject can use and which can feed back other-than-me substance into the subject” (126, emphasis mine).[1] Winnicott’s key move is to show us that what appears to be a closed circuit of exchange and use contains a sequence of psychical equations or relations that must be passed through. While he tends to assume not that this always happens, but that it has the capacity to, a full account of the ambiguity of the prescriptive/diagnostic aspect raises questions, again, about the value of surpassing stages. 

In “On Eating, and Preferring Not To” Adam Phillips writes,

The person who refuses to eat can do something so devastating to the environment—the parents, the therapists, the hospital staff—that they often need to dissociate parts of themselves to manage it. The food refuser, often unconsciously, engineers the possibility of a dissociation in the people who try and help. At first the boss takes it for granted, in a commonsensical way, that Bartleby will do the work demanded of him; just as, in a commonsensical way, one might assume that people will eat, simply in order to live, or feel well; as though food only has a use-value, and not an exchange-value as well. The boss assumes, in other words, that there is a kind of natural (or contractual) order in the office, that people are there because they have agreed to play the game...In this essay, it is the parents and/or the therapist being browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way that I want to consider; just what this preferring-not-to does to the people addressed. Do they, we, begin to stagger in our own plainest faith (in our therapeutic beliefs)? Are we able to experience, to find useful words for, what I want to call the aesthetics of defiance, and Melville calls the vague surmise that all the justice and all the reason is on the other side? (283-285)

In the phrase—“as though food only has a use-value and not an exchange-value as well”—the contrast between use-value and exchange-value seems to misname exchange-value, since it’s not that the exchange value of food was forgotten, but rather that, in addition to the circuit of use and exchange value, there is an “other” value of food—the 0ther-value of food—and its value is as an “other-than-me substance,” which can be “f[e]d back…into the subject” (Winnicott 126).

Phillips shifts the terrain of voluntary/involuntary activity; he proposes that “what are called symptoms—of which refusing to eat and being unable to stop eating are often stark and frightening examples—are experiments in living” (287). These “experiments in living” are not experiments in reparation but experiments in destructiveness, since it is destructiveness and not reparation that is the aim of the reparative mode.[2]

Is the point to create others-in-dissociation out of institutional procedures that usually confront the subject like any other object? Phillips points to how the patient (as subject) might feel confused about the “willingness to suffer” exhibited by parents/therapists who do the work of “surviving”—“accepting projections, containing them and, as it were, feeding them back” (293). This is not a motive or a cause for experimenting, but Phillips suggests that the experimentation that is the other aspect of the symptom leads to the question, “what kind of people will I have on my hands if I prefer not to eat?” It is this that leads to a “necessary” dissociation on the part of the therapist/parent/family/neoliberal university (with its familial classifications of labor), who, like the narrator-lawyer in Bartleby, “begins to stagger in his own plainest faith” (284). The latent insurgency of Moten and Harney’s “subversive intellectual” involves the conceptualization of a reparative moment that persists in drawing this relation of dependence into question: why is it that what she is bringing is too much to bear? An off rhyme: What is the value of teaching for food, teaching for good?

In “Crazy in Love,” an essay written for The New Inquiry, Hannah Black describes the conflict she experiences in caring for/about her brother, through his repeated episodes of psychosis: “As for me, I could not deal with the day-to-day maintenance of B; I found ways to avoid him, told myself lies about tough love and so on. But my love for him followed me everywhere.” My love for him followed me everywhere. The love Black describes “gets to” its own destructiveness, to that which is incapable of loving in love. Like “teaching for food,” modes of identification that don’t keep pace—modes that are about the maintenance of maintenance—become pathological, not merely as an attribute of the system (the university) but as an attribute of an identity within the system. The sociopathological adjunct lecturer teaching specialists contingent.

As 1970s Marxist feminism has shown, and as the text “A Love Letter to Radical Graduate Students Past, Present, andFuture,” by Nick Mitchell, aka low end theory also notes, choices, in particular about objects of love, are always also coercions. I keep dwelling on this insight, now outdated—perhaps too outdated to explain love now, but also, I suspect, not—in thinking about the close residence of love and hate and the role of destructiveness in love. For as much as Black writes against "love," she also gets that the joke about overattachment is not that funny: "One side of the joke — that a woman would have to be crazy to long for entry into a couple — is negated by the other — that a woman who can’t negotiate her way into a couple is crazy." Put otherwise: One side of the joke—that a PhD has to be crazy to long for entry into academia—is negated by the other—that a PhD who can't negotiate her way into academia is crazy.

For the Tenure-Track Professor and the White Family (and with the understanding that these are not social categories but upheld and often invisible ideals), there is no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about love, or perhaps better, there's always another reason to feel ambivalent about love, but perhaps there's no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about one's love objects. In addition to the fact that this is "too bad," and not “for good,” the loss of such ambivalence, of a relation to a loved object that does not involve the capacity to hold one's destructiveness, is a profound but perhaps less apparent price to be paid for professionalism.

***

it’s all life’s all

thrills and regression

flowering cowering

and all the in between

the good and the bad

as if not linking were |not|

an option.

trilling water

the next smallest drop

unentangle desire

love-encumber

entangled estates

pluming is apposite

projecting, providing cover

for the operation

that produces

the other as negative in order to

produce this negativity

as an inhering substance

unentangle this

from thrall

this is the white problem:

of destroying mores

killing the dead child

(the child you were you never were)

again and again and again

and every day

the who you are

in your eyes

who you never were

***

attenuated swings

around to the outset

we have | no access

to dustings of green flowering trees

in early spring

to the wear and tear

of a (linguistic) phenomenon

winter, with all its wear and tear, is forgotten

without giving it

some kind of

role in this quantum qualia, this

figurative representation

writ of access

obverse

the that which is effaced

the child sashays around to the front

again, foxglove, long days,

rain pixilating, little coming out

***

so if now you

can be proposed—

propositioned as above—

does that mean

I am no more?

I my bitterness insufflated

nesting dolls and centrifugitivity

an object within a similar object

always comes to rest

there is always | that

nesting | that

more than less than | that

explains all dynamic

and still, we can want

something more

even if there’s nothing,

about you that,  about | that

we can be sure

a blocked parent has come to

some part of her his child | that

still hurts. it’s the bitterroot wound

an object within a similar object

bears fault: bears, assumes, repairs

to come to something other than | this

you all is object | this

proposition: I don't understand

why we can't—all of us who feel | this

way—just do | this

forever

---

[1] Unlike Graham and Thrift’s “continuous dying,” the subject is the agent of processes of destruction.

[2] One of the outcomes of criticism of “administrative bloat” at the University of Minnesota, as at many other institutions, has been the implementation of “Operational Excellence,” a business model that advocates for “continuous improvement.” In discussions and disputes over this model in the business world, the term “continuous” versus “continual” is given some attention. Reforms and improvements should be both endless (continual) and discrete (continuous), infinite and measurable. Both “continuous dying” and “continuousness improvement” posit the chaotic or entropic tendency of the social organization of life. Seeing this “humble earthworm” from the right perspective—something recently advocated by Eric Hayot, as a way of “seeing others” in a cosmological sense —involves a dissatisfying resolution of the paradox of “destructive love,” the resolution of contradiction rather than the maintenance of indeterminacy.

***presented at the University of Minnesota Graduate Student Colloquium, Inter|Diction on April 3, 2015 (convened by Mikkel Vad, with Kai Bosworth, Emily Fedoruk, and Tom Pepper).

Words Edgewise

Today, I attended a talk by Eric Hayot at the University of Minnesota, which took as intertext his essay "Against Periodization," although the talk concerned cosmology and poetics; the connection between these is interesting--the desire to challenge periodization of course comes from a perspective that values history. So it's not just that this value produces an ideological blind spot, which goes by the name of "aesthetic experience," as if this is the kind of exception upon which the value of the historical then emerges. Perhaps it's true that every theory has such a spot, but what seems untenable about Hayot's approach is that the critical value of history, which emerges out of a desire to raise the value of the humanities on its own turns, emerges as a theory of everything, a cosmology, if you will. Hayot claims that his interest is in thinking about concepts that can themselves overcome a split that itself functions to signify cosmological worlds and post-cosmological worlds: a split between the premodern and modern.

What my interest is in is looking at the figure of this split. I don't think I would dispute the idea that periodization produces a rupture or fracture that is, perhaps, not all it is cracked up to be. I'm curious about the desire or gesture to unify around this split or to step outside of it from a distance that would render it invisible (Hayot uses the idea of asking his students what we will look like in 1000 years as an example of a distance that would render the division between Victorian and modern periods, for example, invisible), and mostly I'm curious about it because it seems to emerge from the shortcomings of the model of the split or fracture, which, I would propose, seems to assume the psychoanalytic model of projection or projective identification as its fundamental operating procedure. This models presents as the problem to be overcome the difficulty of stepping outside of your own aesthetic experience. When Hayot described the problem of not knowing if the split or rupture was there at the conceptual level (i.e. in terms of a presentist scholarly perspective) or at the level of the event (i.e. actually in history), he was invoking this model of the projection in order to conceptualize this split. Projection usually involves the idea of projective identification; it is there in formulations that make use of the figure of a self and other, in other words to think about how objects are set against and become external to individuals. As is often the case, the ethical problems associated with this model emerge from the difficulty in formulating a relation to the other that involves a problematic understanding of difference. The impulse to find a transconcept, or an idea that would assert the sameness of what lies on either side of the split, or a more general form that could traverse these sides can be understood as a way to negotiate with the difficulty of maintaining an adequate relation between these sides, to manage anxiety about one's blindspots actually--to include everything.

So, to return again, my interest in this moment lies perhaps in my desire to maintain the ambivalence of this split, and the psychical experience that it entails. It leads me, in fact, to a point where I wonder whether one of the real values of psychoanalytic theory is that it allows us to understand aesthetics not merely as a theory of beauty or perception, but as a theory of experience, in particular of sensory experience, or as Freud says in "The Uncanny," "a theory of the quality of feelings." From this perspective, the value of the historical, which I mentioned above, does not just have aesthetic experience as its blind spot, because it would say that it includes it, but the value exerted by the historical encloses the aesthetic within it as a kind of foundational gesture of the split it then goes on to critique. Much like the theory of projective identification, which includes the aesthetic as a form of perception or identification, this model of the rupture-to-be-overcome includes the aesthetic but is not able to let aesthetic experiences stand, as "things" in their own right, "things" that are experiences before they are reified or turned into objects.

This is, we might posit, the value of thought--which is not nearly equatable but always replaced in the institution with the idea of the value of the humanities. The value of thought, however, is less codifiable, less professionalizable, less justifiable. It made me think about how yesterday, when I showed students in my class on the rhetoric of everyday life Masao Adachi's film AKA Serial Killer, they had kind of set up some terms for thinking about being bombarded with the environment. Within the first twenty minutes, it becomes possible to experience even the image of a sunflower as a menace, or as demanding something from the viewer/the camera. In this way, it's about information overload before information overload (1969) and about how becoming desensitized is also, perhaps, a demand. I cite this because the film is the opposite of the mode discussed by Hayot; the mode that would relieve a viewer or reader of the perspective of rupture was one that "humbled" one, a view from a distance. Adachi loses sight of a rupture, split, or fracture because it is continually recast, and recast as the instantiation of environment. Rather than representing desensitization, the film produces an environment in which one is made to feel the demand or need for it. And by doing so, the film refigures the model of projective identification, which is generally assumed as the model of primary relating.

To return, then, to psychoanalysis, this is where both Balint's and Winnicott's ideas about the destructiveness of primary love become significant. According to Balint, primary love is a state in which one partner has all of the interests, desires, and needs and the other partner has none. It replaces or is prior to the scene of projection, because, as Winnicott describes, it is a state that precedes integration/disintegration--a state he calls nonintegration, in which what can be seen is that the primary relation assumed by projective identification (between a self and other, in whatever conceptual terms undertaken) already moves to turn an environmental provision into the demand of an other, an object, a thing. This is always a destructive move. Trying to turn it into an ethical or moral relationship (to an other) or to use it as a "humbling" experience misses the point that Winnicott identifies: that these various attitudes do not help us to "repair" our destructiveness, though they can function as a signal that we could "get to" it, or experience it, and therefore take responsibility for it. The problem is, though, I think, that any sort of ethical or moral or epistemological or whatever gesture often functions to defend against or prevent one from taking what Winnicott calls "full responsibility for one's destructiveness." The destructiveness he's talking about--to return to where I started--and the reason that it's defended against has to do with the otherwise very meaninglessness of aesthetic experience, which is also something that does not sit well with those who value history or (inter-)disciplinary professionalism--in the sense that such meaninglessness becomes intolerable, or always seems to be in need of a rationale, justification, or schematization. This is the scene of obliteration that Denise Ferreira da Silva describes in Toward a Global Idea of Race, the scene that is produced via the deployment of the racial. In the schema I've been describing, it might be possible to see how the state of nonintegration or primary love enforces the idea that the deployment of reparative knowledge (as Silva describes via the racial) always contains within it a moment of violence or destructiveness that it seeks to cover over. What's interesting about Winnicott is that because he's so interested in the psychical usefulness of his theoretical information, he does end up "prescribing" the usefulness of this insight into one's destructiveness. Taking responsibility in this sense is not an ethical or positive formulation; Winnicott suggests that what experiencing feelings of destructiveness allows us to do is "not to mobilize it in the service of hate." To do more than this, to think that one is doing more when one takes responsibility, certainly seems today to be the basis of so many misperceptions about where, for example, the problems of this system of racialized state violence lie.

picture: Sunflower, from AKA Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969)--film reference, Rei Terada. 

letter nowhere

buoying moorland more land
hounds the steppe step
escapo the fogs fog

rise low where
otherwise where wise
they never

tundra ice melts mid
winter midst frost flower
fleeting because cause

pulls cause a string
a wooden car
on a string ten years

from now now mid
winter no more land
you said too to write of

trivialities but when
where wise
they never when

correspondence breaks
it breaks off
ex folium

the weeping once
black-eyed susan will
weep freeze again

escapo down
turn down the this
of this thaw that again

Human Rights Poetry and the Writing of Disaster

With the grand jury decision not to indict the officers who shot and killed John Crawford, a 22-yr-old black man, in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Wal-mart (only four days before another young Black man, Michael Brown, was killed in Ferguson, Missouri), I can’t help but to gesture toward the way that the global reparative logic of human rights discourse—which I hope to say a few things about in terms of the archive, the intertext, and disaster—is informed by the capacity, as Umut Özsu points out in his also-recent discussion of the newly erected Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, to “nearly always ignore” socio-economic conditions and racialized state violence. Although this distinction between the civil/political and social/economic is often seen as a split within human rights discourse, Özsu argues that every instance of civil or political violation implies a racialized socio-economic violence that cannot be realized in the discourse.

Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, on John Crawford: “And the fact of the matter is, that the video not being released, the political apparatus in Ohio had weeks to criminalize John Crawford in death, the same way that Michael Brown was criminalized in death.” Although the shooting took place on August 5, in response to a now-altered 911 call reporting that Crawford was pointing a gun at customers (it was a BB gun from the store shelves in an open-carry state, and was never pointed at other customers), the Wal-mart surveillance video footage showing the shooting was only released this past Wednesday. And even though the special prosecutor identified Crawford as a “victim,” who did nothing wrong (he not facing the officers when they shot him and did not have time to react), as Robinson points out, in these weeks he was criminalized. It’s not that Crawford has been slandered or dehumanized in this period, even if he has been, that constitutes his criminalization; rather, his death is criminalized to the extent that his death was not made available to witness. The belated identification of Crawford as a victim, then, assures that the disaster, the injustice of his death would not be experienced on the streets, in public.

A critical discussion of human rights discourse turns on this question: How is it possible to have a victim but no crime? And yet we see time and again in cases of human rights abuses that the association of a victim and a crime misses the way that the disaster unfolds per “neoliberal measures of inclusive democracy” that follow a global mandate based on reparation. In Beavercreek Ohio, this occlusion is glaringly apparent in the multilateral operations that ensured that between the corporation of Wal-mart, the attorney general of Ohio, Greene County, and Beavercreek police, a closed circle of mutual protection functioned to prevent witnessing Crawford’s death as a disaster, a product of socio-economic conditions and racialized state violence.

“Since the disaster always takes place after having taken place,” writes Blanchot, “there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (28). Blanchot casts disaster as something that has always happened, which we have yet to have experienced. That this happens without our experience of it is the disaster. We might reformulate this: the (human rights) disaster takes place, then human rights (the disaster) takes place. Further, human rights takes away the possibility of experiencing socio-economic conditions of the disaster once the human rights disaster has taken place. In concrete instances, such as the case of John Crawford described above, the injustice is the disaster. The lag time pointed out by Robinson, the time between the death of John Crawford and this second death (statement from the family following the grand jury decision: “the family feels it has been victimized all over again”), highlights the way that justice has the first word, though it (or its lack) comes after.

In order to consider the limitations inherent in the role of witnessing in human rights discourse, I believe that we find ourselves—for better or worse—situated in the realm of poetry, but to be very clear: not human rights poetry as typified in the pervasive and humanistic association between poet and witness, in which the poet-witness produces the body of the victim, which characterizes what Bob Meister calls the extension of “Auschwitz-based reasoning into a new discourse of global power” (3). Human rights poetry of this sort is called upon to “bear witness” to atrocity, to catastrophe, to violence, following the global reparative logic of the European postwar (embodied in the 1948 Declaration on Human Rights).[1] It is only against this tendency that human rights poetry, as I would like to consider it, can ask its question: what corpi, what bodies, what words gives rise to discourse of human rights?

We can see this equation between poets and witnesses in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Agamben agrees with Foucault’s effort in the archaeology not to pose the question of the speaking subject, but his main point is to put forth the testimony in contrast to the archive. Foucault’s notion of the archive as a figure between langue, “the system of constructing possible sentences,” and corpus, which “passively collects the words that are spoken” (130), makes it possible to think about the “anonymous field…that defines the possible position of speaking subjects” (122). Agamben wants to clear a space for the speaking subject, but a specific subject: the witness, or the poet. He writes, “Poets—witnesses—found language as what remains.” But like Foucault’s discussion of the speaking subject, Agamben’s reconstruction of the speaking subject as witness seems to rely on the displacement and subsequent fetishization of the corpus, the text, the “poetic word,” which is “situated in the position of a remnant and can, therefore, bear witness” (161).

Human rights poetry, which casts off the role of the speaker as witness to always ask: Who is Speaker? marks the revenant rather than the remanent nature of the corpus, of the book, the text, the word. The revenant, because the disaster consists of that which cannot be experienced in the event of death. In poetry, one is tempted to say, this thwarted question returns: the speaking subject takes place not in, but as the “blank space from which I speak.” In contrast to Foucault, who wishes to ask about the conditions that produce the speaking subject and so comes to the archive as that which includes the very happening of language, via the statement, the possibility of language, human rights poetry proposes to think about how disaster arranges corpi in relation to discourses.

This discourse of the witness justifies itself by producing knowledge about the human, as was predominantly the case, for example, in a recent issue of Qui Parle devoted to the topic of human rights: the “mass intellectuality” of human rights yields new definitions of the “human,” of human “life.” This contains an extended tendency to see rights and genre as instances of law that contribute to our understanding of personhood or as Agamben notes, the human and inhuman. For example, in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, Joseph R. Slaughter describes the common “humanistic social” vision of human rights law and the Bildungsroman, both “genres” contain a “shared image of the human person” (4).

Human rights poetry, the version I’m attempting to re-value, which raises the question of who is speaking, does not share this concern with the knowledge about the human person. It contains what Foucault might call otherwise “meaningless” sentences. He writes, “to say a sentence like this is meaningless presupposes that one has already excluded a number of possibilities—that it describes a dream, that it is part of a poetic text, that it is a coded message, that it is spoken like a drug addict” (90). For Foucault, a poetic text is able to give meaning to words, then, because it is able to index a still very functional human person. Consider this poem, then, which I confess to writing:

Map of 2014 Human Rights Risk Index 

Syria, Sudan
DR Congo Pakistan Somalia
Afghanistan Iraq
Myanmar
Yemen
Nigeria

This poem, which takes as intertext the caption to a 2014 Map put out by the corporation Maplecroft, presents a corpus of knowledge, words “passively collected.” To what archive, what discursive formation do they give rise?

To what belongs a list of nations gathered by a corporation in a poem written by a person who does not witness? If poetry, it’s because poetry arrests the production of knowledge about the human, not because there is something essential or particular about poetry as genre, or form. It concerns the capacity of the person who witnesses to create a space for experiencing the “(human rights) disaster” by refraining from choraling it all into a discourse of justice, of witnessing, and in this refrain, working to set out the terms of the first disaster, the terms that describe the socio-economic conditions acting upon what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call affectable bodies. Human rights poetry is not a genre, not a law, but the explication of the problem of how the corpus, the passively collected words, the text, rearticulates the position of the speaking subject.

The subject of human rights poetry is always passing out of existence; it is a non-witness becoming non-victim, a human being “criminalized in death,” and it is the space of waiting that the poet articulates as a means of experiencing disaster. Consider these lines from the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s Diary of a Wave Outside of the Sea, which depicts the US-led intervention in Iraq in 1991, offering an account of the disaster that marked one of the United States’s first military actions in the post-Cold War period:

One evening…

No…One Morning…
No…I don’t know…One waiting…
Death passed before our eyes, as it did every day.

I was not waiting by myself;
the river was there, too,
and the smoke that rose from the explosions
and from the cigarette of a lover
who contemplated his loneliness
like a pawn in the corner of a chessboard.” (5)

The proposal here is that witnessing changes its tune when it becomes everyday. Slipping into waiting, the subject of human rights poetry shifts between what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call the transparent “I,” a witness, who registers a world “passed before our eyes” and the affectable “I,” who is acted upon by the passing of time (“One evening…No…One Morning…No…I don’t know…One waiting…”).

In this space persists the potentiality of victimhood; the witness persists, but in the disaster, through disaster, she waits, neither as witness nor as victim—but as corpus, something to be “passively collected” after the fact, about the disaster. The poem establishes the tension between this state of waiting, on the one hand, and the forces of intervention, on the other. But Mikhail is not thinking about his contradiction between the rhetoric of the witness, via intervention, and the experience of a potential witness-victim. She wishes to point to a space for the waiting of a body that eschews these positions of witness and victim because, above all, the “responsibility” that inheres between them is “a response to the impossible” (Blanchot 26). “Responsibility,” says Blanchot further, “is itself disastrous” (27). The word—the corpus, the text—intervenes in the archive as an intertext, as Blanchot’s disaster enters Mikhail’s text:

The disaster watches over us at night
—our recurring, endless night—
like a verb with no subject or object.

And look, here we are,
trying in vain to jump over it
—over the disaster—
so that we stumble from nowhere
every time.

We become acquainted with death at the wrong time,
and no one uses their “veto.”

You think, therefore you realize the disaster.

Maurice Blanchot, the French intellectual,
thought that while disaster removes the haven that is the thought of death,
and turns us from the grievous or surprising thing,
and makes us dispense with any will or movement,
it does not, however, give us an opportunity
to raise this question:
What have you done to realize [gain knowledge of] the disaster? (20)

In the poem, Blanchot’s words, which come from early on in The Writing of Disaster, “while disaster removes the haven that is the thought of death, / and turns us from the grievous or surprising thing, / and makes us dispense with any will or movement,” extend the terms of the waiting-processes. The disaster is not the waiting, or the bombing, or intervention, or a veto of intervention. It is none of these things and yet it involves each of them; it is the aggression or violence that cannot be experienced in each. What I’d like to note about Mikhail’s use of Blanchot is the way that the terms of disaster enter into the problem of witnessing that Mikhail proposes: the contradiction between mere thinking or being as a realization of disaster and the subject’s responsibility for realizing disaster.

At the same time that it is a testimony to the atrocity of Desert Storm, the poem struggles with the question that is not posed—what have you done to realize the disaster? Although the question seems to concern one’s complicity in the disaster, or one’s responsibility for preventing it—ultimately, it is a question about that which is impossible. To return to the question with which I began: what corpi, what bodies, what words gives rise to discourse of human rights? The words of disaster, which speak in and through waiting, will always be realized in the human person, but each instance of this realization, each “haven” taken “in the thought of death” crops out the socio-economic conditions of the non-witness.

[1] The ambiguities of witnessing have been theoretically grounded in Holocaust testimony, predominantly through Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony, in which they conceptualize witnessing as a crisis of literature, “insofar as literature becomes a witness” (xviii). The discourse of human rights assumes this literary function of witnessing, as the terms of Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, make explicit, in which victim and listener merge in the experience of witnessing in order to “co-own” the atrocity (Laub 57).

Note: This is an abbreviated version of a paper given at "Intellectual Properties," a graduate student conference at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, September 26–27, 2014.