wall of clouds

"No one is better than Proust at giving the sense that the true interest of a psyche, a landscape, or indeed a sentence may be actually inexhaustible."

--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from "The Weather in Proust"

Sedgwick's suggestion, which aligns psyche, landscape, and sentence, as units, or concept-units measured out by an inexhaustible "true interest," speaks to the problem of state change, of the extent to which change in degree also spans a qualitative realm, and how a shifting of interest may or may not bring into question the "trueness"--here, the aspect, perhaps of being "steady, firm, and dependable in allegiance or devotion to a loved one, friend, leader, group, or cause : not false or perfidious" forms a slight tension in relation to "trueness" as "conformable to fact," or as "conformable to nature, reality, or an original : accurate in delineating or expressing the essential elements." What is there in this connection between "trueness" and a condition of "inexhaustible" interest? Where does the psyche/landscape/sentence stand in relation to this "true interest"? 

State change. Cloud formation. Later: an idea about the sublimation of snow, under conditions of low temperatures, high winds, sun, and low air pressure, snow becomes vapor, passing directly rather than moving through liquidity. A rain shadow wind, a wind whose moisture is expended windward and becomes dry leeward, expending nothing, except itself. The "Chinook Arch," a cloud formation that appears as a gathering storm, a wall of clouds, elevated; below the wall, sky is visible above the horizon. This is one of the few illusions the Minnesotan sky engages in, foreboding (or not) snow. This illusiveness is/appears inexhaustible. Inexhaustible, in the sense of only just barely existing. The sense of having an awareness of something being held up, being held, period, having a sense somewhere that this is false even as, through its continued persistence, it appears, in an aspect, true. 

Sublimation, as state change: the "path of energy of the sex drive or impulse towards nonsexual activities" (Laplanche, "To Situate Sublimation"). Yet, in Loewald, in Heimann, even in Laplanche, the suggestion is otherwise, about the kind of transformation effected. Laplanche: "although sublimation is most often regarded as a transformation of some sexual activity into nonsexual activity, as a 'destined impulse', we find several passages where what is in question is the genesis of objects, of myths or illusions" (9). At the edges of this transformation, then, the production of illusion. Commenting on Freud's reading of Leonardo, Laplanche notes how two subliminatory activities take place--pictorial creation and scientific investigation--so that the questions raised by these different activities allows him to "dwell on this notion, so crucial in psychoanalysis": "of an impossibility of transformation, i.e., the fact that in certain areas the passage from, the conversion of, some site into another, some psychic reality into another, is not possible in both directions" (10). If counting in the idea delineated in the windworks above, of an omitted step--for what reasons we might not know, or know yet--then reasons for the irreversibility of this passage or conversion can be seen as already constitutive of the state change, but in addition to this, can yield the state change as less of a transformation from one thing to another, in response to concern for the existential aspect of the before and after, and more as an elaboration of the integrity of the unit-concept--the psyche, landscape, or sentence. 

Through "To Situate Sublimation," Laplanche makes use of what he calls a "dihedron model" to illustrate the idea of reciprocity (labeled dihedron, between mastery (the drive to know) and sado-masochism; top) against the possibility of "another, non-"mutual" way of understanding the return from sadism toward sublimated activities" (unlabeled dihedron; bottom).

He writes, "For example, we an imagine something that would resemble a refolding of the sexual level back into the level of self-preservation" (15). The level of self-preservation, drawn by Freud as that which takes place in distinction to the sexual (and thus here, on the side of mastery or the drive to know) thus can be seen to hold the same place as that of the sublimated activities, if such reciprocity were to be maintained. In Laplanche's reading, however, the drive to know already "'works with the energy of Schaulust', the drive or desire to see" (15). He writes, 

The activity of seeing is thus considered to consist of two sections, one nonsexual and self-preservative [the other, "the sexual drive to see" forms the other aspect of this "propping movement"]: after all, sight enables each creature endowed with it to orient himself in the world, quite apart from any question of sexual pleasure, and from this point of view Freud links it directly to touch: the act of seeing is an extension of the act of touching. This is linked to the whole Freudian theory of perception, which views perception as consisting of a sending out of feelers, of sensitive tentacles, at rhythmic intervals. Imagine the cilia of a protozoan or the horns of a snail endowed with a kind of in and out movement...indeed, the snail's horns do bear sight organs. That is the image Freud has in mind when he connects sight to touch and compares it to a gathering in of samples from the outside world. The non-sexual activity of seeing, in the propping process, becomes a drive to see as soon as it becomes representative, that is, the interiorization of a scene. (15)

Working across the arrows, then, is this register of a passing through seeing, something which we can glimpse as dislocated from either side. In what sense is this "extension" of touching to seeing an illusive "genesis of objects" even when it appears merely as state change or transformation? 

In the above, it's hard not to read the "one nonsexual and self-preservative" as "one nonsexual and one self-preservative," since this highlights the way in which the return appears and is not the same. Laplanche, further: 

Here we have what I was trying to indicate with regard to the dihedron schema, namely, that the plane of self-preservation is so defective that in certain cases it can be almost virtual and cannot be made active other than at the moment when the right-hand plane (sexuality), as it is called, arouses it. Thus we have a propping reinforced or buttressed by something it has itself brought into being. In other words, the notion of propping still holds surprises. (16; italics mine)

I wonder, in relation to some of the point of outset, whether it is the idea of propping itself, or this notion of "still holds surprises" that could be imagined as a condition of inexhaustibility. Is it, instead, not the "true" interest that is inexhaustible, but the defective one? Or, in what aspect must the true appear so as to appear "defective"? There is a later link made between sublimation and repression, which Laplanche describes as the type of propping associated with sublimation, which is, as fitting for sublimation, the "most rarest and most perfect." Here, "the libido stands aloof from representation, it is sublimated from the beginning into the desire to know and reinforces or buttresses the already powerful drive to investigate" (21). Being sublimated "from the beginning," the libido does not stand outside, as an indication of this non-mutual investment; Laplanche notes, "sublimation is not a repression and yet there is still a turning back" (21). But in/of what does the turning back consist? To which: a defective site of an activity of perception on a plane almost virtual, an inexhaustibility that continues to yield a "turning back," a rain shadow wind, a wall of clouds. 

bit by bit

The point being: to forget the object, or the terms of this object, and to pick it up again, after it has acquired a strange familiarity, which is the externality proper to itself. 

Does this psychoanalytical process of abstraction, following the determinations of the Real in object relations, suggest an alternate ontological figure for capitalism, as it's interesting to note that Toscano's reading of "real abstraction" takes the Lacanian real as real: "This ontology of real abstraction--which is inextricably political, historical, and economic--is, in Finelli's view, a dual ontology to the extent that it both affirms concrete reality as a 'specific articulation of differences' and reveals the void at the heart of Capital, as it were, as the fact of the Real of its abstraction--to speak in a Lacanian vein--is its absence of determinations, the fact that it has no historical or cultural content per se" (Toscano, "The Open Secret of Real Abstraction" 276). My reading of object relations permits thinking about a "real" that is not void or absence, though it too appears in this form. For if there it is the object's perspective that is the real--and all of the terms of inaccessibility that go along with this--then abstraction's connection to thought might also not be as Toscano describes in the Marxian schema, where "abstraction precedes thought," and as he qualifies, "More precisely, it is the social activity of abstraction, in its form as commodity exchange, that plays the pivotal role in the analysis of real abstraction" (281). 

Psychoanalysis loses grip of the way that abstraction is a social activity; it seems to immediately dispense with the idea of anything social, about activity. But if this all sits inside of the inaccessibility of the perspective of the object as a form of knowledge, if this is something like psychoanalysis's grounding of "knowledge" in the parameters of the irrational, it might mean something else for abstraction to precede irrational thought, for even if this is implied in the Marxian analysis of real abstraction, lingering in the phantasy world of real abstraction would imply a form of "knowing" somewhere between Winnicott's notions of relating and using. Impossible to sustain this perspective, which includes the "false" separation of psychic interiority from the "world," it is perhaps a way of thinking about the Real not as void, but as a space in which the Real is acquired, and acquired, as it were, bit by bit. 

Along these lines, the lines about forgetting the object, this is the very first post I made to this blog, back on Thursday May 3, 2007: 

where does a strange silence begin? some have suggested that it is in the forest, the sound that a falling tree makes when no one is around to hear. at times, for brecht, it's the talked-about tree that is the strange silence. A Strange Silence is the title of the project, my dissertation, the thing that everything here is a footnote to, especially the poems, since they are the leaves, what is left over.
from 4/4/07//:

and the green fall to unsafe water:welcome to the 21st century let not many other things be spared--save your happiness; this was Brecht's nightmare.Humanity, the human dog, wants to let go to forget, dismiss, judge, pee wherever it wants.a condition remiss, or a saying unheard.in the woods, we are all quiet; it is solace.and save to other things, too, save to find yourself alone. the distance is unmarked. cross-hatches are what i saw in the desert and didn't draw.the things nightmares are made of leave you with the distance of their unmarkings. becky's dreams are about writing (ask me how i felt when my mom died. it's a feeling i can't think of). i watch her grow.communism is short-lived. the brown notebooks are filled. you are always thinking of brecht. his return is unsettling, a time when autonomy in writing is needed.

picture: smoke-covered Minneapolis, with winds shifting downward from the wildfire in Alberta. 
Question posed by RT: "To what extent is it missing from psychoanalysis or occluded in the general category of mourning--the sociology or ethnography of objects and the real abstractions that make them?" Question abstracted and taken up in both "Psychoanalysis and Lit II" and "Poetry as Cultural Critique," classes which have now come to an end. I don't think I've ever said this seriously before, either, least of all to a class, but "it's been real."

counting in silence

What does it mean to draw attention to Brecht's poetry--to poetry in general--without redeploying the terms of genre, without, for example, deriving from the contrast of his poetic work and his dramatic, a distinction that matters, as genre distinction? At the end of this semester's poetry class, it seems three conclusions were reached: 1) as David Lloyd suggests in "A White Song," that poetry is a condition of "endless readability"; 2) that poetry is something that is an experience of feeling language; and 3) that poetry represents the perspective of the object. Potentially, each of these involves a certain "unrealizability topos," a term Christopher Nealon uses to describe the non-closure of language in the world it discloses. Is it simply that "poetry" names the space for talking about these things--always these things--at the expense of other things?

In reading Brecht, I am drawn to the spaces of non-closure, those spaces that also mark or play at something like the entanglement of illusive appearance and reality in Marx, their nearly impossible extricability from one another. Where is the desire for this extrication? (would be one place to start). Seen in another way, the scene of this extrication takes place only opposite to another no-less real scene--that of the absence, lack, or hole of the Real. Thus Lacanian psychoanaysis and Hegelian dialectics allow for the fantasy of locating oneself on one side or another and develop from the resultant dynamism a sense of the governance by convention of these spaces, as genre. Staying with the impossibility of this extrication is not the equivalent of saying there is no outside; it is a matter of saying there is nothing, outside--of counting in silence, of literally "counting in" silence, as a positive, substantive form of omission. Brecht's lines from "To Those Born After":

Ah, what kind of times are these, where
a conversation about trees is almost a crime
because it includes a silence about so much injustice! 

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschliesst!

On first reading, these lines register an experience of civilian guilt, a feeling or acknowledgment of one's complicity in the injustice of the world. This complicity, while both implicating the individual and registering the injustice in the world, also holds a place for oneself outside of that imagined world. If the trees could not be imagined as standing outside of the injustice of the world--fantasized as not included--then the terms being spoken about would not even be of human conversation about trees, but about the trees speaking themselves. Complicity then registers this kind of fantastic activity of hallucinating oneself into a scene so that one actually comes to stand outside of it. This is the entire mode in which Brecht's poetry--and the problem of civilian guilt that I also come to describe through the illusiveness and indeterminacy of the poetic speaker--toils. The inadequacy or failing of this mode is a way of thinking about how "silence," a term that is meant to signal the unrealizability of a gest(ure) that is not properly social or symbolic, is not just about what is left out of conversation, the merely "mental abstraction" of reality that retains the rights to perspective, but also consists of something, or has substance as such.

In what sense would this kind of silence be (almost) criminal? The crime here would not be one's guilt or complicity in injustice, as is implied in the first reading; to count in silence, to speak poetically (i.e. in a conversation about trees) would be a crime on the basis of the constraints on speaking in "times, where" saying nothing is already saying too much. This kind of silence would not be inadequacy; it would already be too much. Counting oneself in in order to count oneself out--the defensive move that Brecht's work manifests--defends against the world, and in doing so, speaks to the limitation of the mode of complicity as moving toward the kind of political, socialized realization that Brecht imagines possible.

picture: the North Shore (from my first trip there). Poetry questions, thanks to the members of "Poetry as Cultural Critique." All other things are very old and the effort is to see what remains to maintain.

Further thoughts on the non-space of the university

At an institutional event today—a forum on unionization sponsored by the faculty senate and the MN Daily—I was reminded of what institutional space does. It frames a debate around the terms of those who represent power but appear as the market, as if those terms were somehow simply “there” to be represented. This is common enough and easily perceptible as the structure and effect of capitalism, but within an institution, such as the public university, where this phenomenon also sits as subject to a critique of power/knowledge, to behold it is yet another thing. This is a comment about incivility, on the one hand—it’s a comment about the space not being able to hold, within the terms it had established, a challenge to this frame itself. In this regard, it’s possible to see the apparent contingency of the event being called to an end before I got a chance to ask my “question” as far less contingent than that. I was about to ask a fairly “civil” “question” (the discussion, it had been stressed, should be considerate and should be civil, as should the Bureau of Mediation Services hearings, which had taken place in the preceding week), but also to call into question the terms that were being put forth, including the terms of civility (from which I also feel myself excluded, as someone who has been identified as too angry or as too aggressive, in tone, which I also feel amounts to my exclusion from the BMS hearings). The fact is, incivility is not an appealing position for unionization, either. The question, my question—How is it that a union could address and be critical of the changes in the public university in the past ten to fifteen years?—is always to be balanced against needing to appeal to individuals’ self-interest, in other words, strategically needing to validate the concerns expressed by both Aaron Sojourner and Joel Waldfogel about the compression of salaries, for example, when Waldfogel’s salary is over three hundred thousand dollars. So this is the point at which my civil question turns uncivil, and I hope that in writing about it, I can also attempt to do some further work on understanding the “work” of contingency in the university.

I have come to use the phrase “contingent faculty” to identify those who work in a position “without guarantee” at the university. This can include non-tenure-track faculty who are already included in the faculty instructional unit but don’t have tenure positions (term assistant professor, contract assistant professor). Here, contingency is seen as a politicized term, which many of these people may not identify with, due to the closeness of their standing to the tenure line and their disinclination to instead identify with those perceived as being still below, or of a different type of employee altogether. This group below, at the University of Minnesota, is understood as part of the P&A category (Professional & Administrative) and what I am writing to address is the unchallenged claim that held at tonight’s event, which was that these two groups of employees—tenure-line faculty and P&A instructional (“professional”) faculty—have separate interests and are distinct groups.

Waldfogel put forth this claim by initiating a distinction between tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty on the basis of research work, that contingent faculty teach “to eat” (and he has sympathy for anyone in this position and hopes they can find a way to get better terms) but that this is fundamentally different from what faculty do. He cited his own “research” study on those who supported the University of Oregon unionization and found that those who had a greater interest in research were less likely to be supportive of unionization. It’s easy to see where the argument goes, but I was struck by this formulation: “More productive, less supportive.” He went on to cite how just like other “amenities” that can be used (like the sports facility and new recreation center) to attract graduate students, amenities are need to bring in research faculty and unionization would be less appealing to those folks.

In my question turned uncivil, I would say, the only difference between my productivity and yours is that yours is paid for and supported by the institution, including this pathetic “research” study put forward to us tonight, which confuses effect for cause and is blind to the conditions of production.

I do research, I publish peer-reviewed articles, and I have a press interested in reviewing a book manuscript for which I will receive no “course release” to work on, no sabbatical to take, and no institutional grants to apply for. The people who are invested in maintaining this distinction, even at a very minimal level, are those who directly benefit from not having to share the responsibility of doing the work done by these employees. These are tenure-line faculty who can afford to “not get” the difference between the way that contingent labor is valued and the way their own is (acknowledging that there are still many who do get it). Is there much of a difference between the elitism espoused by Joel Waldfogel and the structure of this institutional space (the forum event itself) in which such a difference could go unchallenged? I wonder, tonight, how many more of such things I can sit through—the annihilating feeling of no one objecting to these terms (except, thank you, Michael Goldman). Waldfogel called the “method” of his research study “hogwash,” but its terms still stood. His measure of productivity was challenged but its ontological presuppositions were not and do not tend to get challenged even by faculty members in my own department (all of whom claim to be concerned about contingent faculty): the fact that within the university, the adjunct occupies the position, according to the definition in Merriam-Webster of being “added or accompanying in a subordinate capacity.” This is further qualified, in Merriam Webster, as “attached to a faculty or staff as a temporary or part-time member.” It is in this light that the stakes of Waldfogel’s phrase, “more productive, less supportive” emerge. In the humanities, productivity’s more familiar name is publication. The “more supportive, less productive” side, in contrast, is not, in actuality, another side, it is an included aspect of this productive labor, in all of the ways that are described in Marx and taken up by Silvia Federici, Selma James, and other Marxist feminists. Of course, this makes apparent the investment in the invisibility of this work. The way in which the reality-effect of the two sets of separate interests flickers and blinds.

I would go on to say: see here, your productivity is the result and real abstraction of so much other productivity. And this is probably obvious to a number of people in the room. It’s not the “market,” it’s the politics of the university. What’s less obvious, though, is what all the silence is about. Why didn’t I just say—I was right in front of the microphone when it was called done—oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got this question and I really just have to ask it? We’ve all been here, and we’ve been waiting, and we’ve heard enough from you. Silence, complicity (the past participle of adjungere, “to link up, join, add, attach”), “civil” guilt. This is also an a/effect of the terms in which it was all framed. The adjunct is included; she is invited to speak, so long as it’s in these terms; she can stand in line for the microphone, to ask her question, but her turn will never come. She will never get to decide about the terms of productivity, even though, ontologically, she is committed to that productivity. I think when we say that tenure-line faculty “don’t get it,” this is what I we mean, even though it’s often offered as an excuse or justification for this lack of understanding.

I can’t help but think of this “not getting it” in those terms that Brecht uses in explaining his dissatisfaction with how Mother Courage (in his 1938 play Mother Courage and Her Children) was received by audiences. He was disappointed that by and large, audiences felt empathy for Mother Courage (Anna Fierling), who killed, or let die, her three children, in her blind drive to profit off of the war. Brecht was disappointed that audiences empathized with her conflict rather than that they able to perceive that she “didn’t get it.” I often think about that difference when it is described (empathetically) that faculty “don’t get it.” Can Mother Courage be seen differently for not getting it, for not perceiving her life is contingent upon the death of her children? As Rei Terada describes in “Repletion: Masao Adachi, Landscape Film and Real Abstraction,” this distinction is also apparent in thinking about real abstraction, that “understanding real abstraction by definition departs from the sensory experience of real abstraction rather than being constituted in it.” Brecht’s dissatisfaction with the reception of Mother Courage can be seen in this way; it’s no wonder that he gives up on experience. He would have to in order to want to insist upon Mother Courage’s not-getting-it. If, in Terada’s model, understanding real abstraction can be seen as constituted by the sensory experience of real abstraction, not-getting-it is already inside all of that. Not-getting-it isn’t a transcendental position that fails to think outside itself; not-getting-it is the condition in which real abstraction is experienced, sensorily, by contingent faculty. It is a different kind of failure.

Although “contingency” is a term that is located, philosophically, opposite to necessity, perhaps as Merriam-Webster again, “happening by chance : affected by unforeseen causes or conditions : not patently necessary : unpredictable in occurrence or outcome,” contingency bears traces of the same kind of dependence that comes up with the term “adjunct”: “dependent on, associated with, or conditioned by something else.” Etymologically, this goes further, through an association with “touch,” as the present participle of contingere “to touch on all sides.” Contingency is a position whose associated sensorial experience is one of being touched on all sides by not-getting-it, so that one’s merely being the effect of this is equivalent to one’s annihilation, or feeling of being destroyed, even when “included.” It’s not just about the visibility of the work done by these faculty, although I often come back round to that; it’s about the way in which these positions form the basis of a critique of the institution of the university that does not in turn continue to valorize the uncritical linking of power/knowledge.

Last week in the BMS hearings, a senior lecturer in the Carlson School of Management testified, via his experience on the faculty senate, to the percentage of courses taught, across the university at each level (from 1000-level courses to 8000-level courses), by non-tenure-track faculty. Beginning with 1000-level classes, this number was over 50%; even at 8000-level courses, the number was still around 39%. The university maintains a quoted standard that no more than “25%” of courses should be taught by non-tenure-line faculty. These are courses that should be taught by tenure-line faculty; that they are not illuminates the extent to which the university is underfunding departments with enrollments that exceed their faculty teaching capacity. Where does this divestment in teaching come from? It does not come from “the market,” even if the market were some kind of veritable Mississippi, dividing the campus in two; it comes from the political investment in the financialization of the university, its professionalization, and its optimalization of profit (plus everything else and all that). No one can get out of it, but can you feel “dead” to it even as you are touched on all sides? That space that is most appropriated, most exploited, most alienated? How do you not-valorize that space?

there, there

I can still recall the feeling of certain words--words, perhaps, that I read a long time ago. Maybe this is the minimal index of there being a still there, there. It's kind of like thinking back to certain things I was doing or did when pregnant, and being able to viscerally glimpse the clumsy, over-affected way I felt, tinged with a nausea that still remains poignant, when I read or thought about certain things--about Edith Jacobson's book Depression, for example, or the poems in Grünbein's Grauzone Morgens. Words that I remember from other times retain a place on this spectrum--about the way that they felt going down. I can still recall the feeling of taking them in.

In Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Claudia Rankine explores a tension there, between different ways of feeling, between expressing emotion and feeling loss "to the point of being bent over each time" (57). I'm not endorsing this kind of distinction and its perhaps implicit valorization of the rough form of the latter, as the embodied aspect of an experience, but I am interested in the persistence of associative "feeling." How you are even supposed to "think" about this might be the subject of Feeling in Theory, which I have been coming back round to, largely out of the desire to give it as a gift to a couple of my undergrads, and then realizing that I have forgotten its arguments, though perhaps "forgetting" means internalizing to the point of nonrecognition. "Forgettable living" (Rei Terada, "The Life Processes and Forgettable Living").

On the last double page spread of Rankine's DLMBL, there is an image of a billboard with the words "HERE." Above this, in the text, there is a fair amount of writing that explicates "here" as both a statement of presence (of being in a place) and an assertion of a certain kind of exchange, like a "handshake," Rankine says, referring to a comment of Paul Celan's about the poem being like a handshake, an offering. One of my students observed that this billboard was the same as the image featured on the cover, in which case, these were photoshopped words on the billboard. This provided us with a sort of formal circularity, between the cover and the last pages (at least the last of the pages of poetry, before the many pages of notes). And, as I spun my book around performatively, trying to feel like we could make some kind of cohesive (or complete?) statement about the book in the last 5 minutes we had, I said, what is it that this kind of circularity allows us to see? A student responded, it's a sentence: Don't let me be lonely here." We were all captured, I think, by the simple brilliance of this statement, about the completion of syntax; there was a looking at that, for a while. It was also about the way that completing the sentence undermined the feeling that we had initially had, that the book is announcing its arrival at a particular place, a particular time, that the book gets somewhere, that the speaker gets somewhere. I then asked, what does it mean, then, if it's a sentence? Another student spoke up, "Don't let me be lonely here. But you could let me be lonely there." Another moment, differently felt, of yes. But what is this distinction? What seems to speak in it?

Throughout the book, loneliness seems linked to a certain being towards death. I don't myself know if Rankine is inviting us into this irresolvable space or critiquing the lack of resolve for it not to be. On some level, what's the difference? Where would it be okay to be lonely? Maybe on the "other side," thinking with Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite [translated: The Edge of Heaven, but literally, in my translation: On the other side]. But then, it's the transcendence that cannot be supposed--it's like, waking in the middle of the night, inches away from wall, and thinking of death, thinking of death from within your dreams, waking from thinking of death, inches from the wall. Let me be lonely there.

People talk about the "flow" of the market. Today, in the Gender, Culture, Capitalism Reading Group, talk was about the market as a river. Fuck the river, I thought. What a fantasy of life, what ontology, presupposing life, as if this is all we "know." It's not a "fiction" wherein fiction is a river.  On the other side, there's nothing like this. Imagine the river: don't let me be lonely here. I think Rankine is still on this side. The parts of her text that seem to suggest that living is dying don't seem to go there; they don't seem to say let me be lonely there. They seem to stay on this side of here. Consider that there is no river; there is no flow, except as perceptible entities. The wall is also a perceptible entity, and so is the billboard. So there.

picture: Wisconsin, sunset

"Maybe, I prefer a bit of muddle to the use of a gadget."

This title quote comes from Paula Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," about which I have been thinking and writing. After making the above statement, she rescinds it, writing, "I must contradict my last sentence. I do not like muddled thinking at all, although I am guilty of it only too often as just now. I meant to express my strong dislike against introducing any gadget into the psychoanalytic relationship. I probably should not be able to handle it correctly" (339). The quick distance Heimann takes from the "muddle"--it's only there to illustrate a kind of option that might represent a state of not having the "gadget" (the "gadget" in question, a tape recorder)--is something I'd like to think about. But the impulse to ask a question about status of the muddle in relation to the gadget also opens immediately into the problem that such a question is, as Winnicott writes, "not to be formulated" (Playing and Reality 17)* and yet: does the renunciation of the muddle take place because it is already too much like a "gadget"--too much of a thing that can be applied to thinking--or because it operates as a kind of fetish, and so threatens to expose a space that might indicate the absence of method in psychoanalysis?

What is interesting to me about Paula Heimann's term "children-no-longer" is that it clearly locates the adult in relation to a state now passed; in contrast, "grown-ups" suggests having one's sites on the movement forward. Philli, the other day, talking about her feeling that it would be "impossible" to grow up, for example, that it "would take so long." The "grown-up" who knows the other side of this feels the pressure to "grow up" in his/her various ways. The pressure to do so is in every place; even when it is not clearly ideological, as in professionalization, or in determining one's identity, it is there, perhaps simply, as time.

The child-no-longer has no better method than anyone else for getting through the day and the way it throws up, at every juncture, something that needs to be gotten through. But since these forms of mediation appear socially, they seem to require a facility with method--with something, I think, that we think of as providing a procedure or process for getting through. It's, I suppose, obvious why "method" is posited here. Or why the question of method is so firmly lodged in the junctures. Conversations in the recent panel I took part in at the ACLA, "From Extraction to Exhaustion" repeated these questions--something like, what if you move backward into rather than forward from/with method? Maybe it's not spatial (backwards) or regressive but one thing to contend with, on the one hand, is the feeling that it is; on the other hand, it registers in the feeling of not being included in the any of the movements are are pushing forward, coming into being. There, the psychotic aspect of the "child-no-longer" comes into play, in the feeling of having hallucinated oneself into the story about how something has come to be.

Today in the bi-weekly installment of a reading group that I've been taking part in on financialization, led by Miranda Joseph, we were joined by Leigh Claire La Berge, who has written about literary aspects of abstraction and representation in relation to finance, and I felt like this conversation somehow took place for me in the above framework, roughly sketched out. Here, the conversation was explicitly about method and interdisciplinarity, proposing the mediation of various dualisms, such as form/content, or abstract/concrete, or representation/reality, as the work to be done (does the child play and not work simply because it is not required to muster the same kind of energy just to keep things going, to maintain the capacity to set things in motion at every instance?).

So I think the question raised for me here--after a day like today, a day that felt like a continuous hallucination of myself into forms of being that no longer count me in, or that have counted me dead, in various ways, which is a very intensely narcissistic thing as well--is why I'm always lingering in these spaces, from which it feels like others have passed on through, or if they haven't, they are aiming to? Or it's this idea of myself as doing so that I can't let go of. But if the insistence on that is not pathological but rather a part of one's being a child-no-longer, does it mean it's a state that you can continue to hold, even though it's dead to others--dead to those who have moved on to other terms, to fields and disciplines where the stakes require justification on other terms? Why, or in what situation, do we see the dead things behind as "everything"--the everything we want to bring along with us--and not the "nothing"? This was a question that arose for me in Michelle Cho's lovely talk, "Genre Worlds," and in the discussion that followed. Here, I lose a sense of what I'm talking about because I'm talking about so many levels, and for much of the time of the talk all I could be aware of was the way that the room like a space of total loss, giving rise to a very acute feeling of suffocation, a form of the feeling of not making it through. That's what it was, anyway.

Winnicott, who discusses the importance it being a "matter of agreement" not to ask and thus decide whether something was found or created, and yet that's always the demand that method makes, to determine this in some way. I wonder if the feeling that going "back" and trying to pick something up is painful comes not so much from one's encounter with reality (i.e. that whatever it is that is being picked up is not "there") but from being compelled to make this choice between what is found and what is created (which is just as unfathomable as the "impossibility" of growing up).

In object relations, this would be the pain associated not with the destruction of the object, but with pain affecting the ego, the "narcissistic hurts" suffered in time. Looking back on this formulation in Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," it's notable that the description of "narcissistic hurts" comes up when she is talking about the difference between the "regressed" person and the state of original childhood. She writes, "The regressed person, adult or child, suffers from a breakdown of advanced functions, suffers from destructive processes affecting developmental achievements. This implies narcissistic hurts, wounds to self-esteem, shame, a sense of being let down by oneself, failure in many respects" (335). These "hurts" or "wounds" or "shame" seem to point to the vulnerability that the ego must always feel, on the edge of its own destructiveness, as Freud describes, as a border-animal, a Grenstier, whose method, though it might be perceptible to others in this kind of retrospective glance, is nothing other than a kind of hugging to oneself of something--a piece of "time" frozen, an otherwise nothing--about which you have not been compelled to choose, I found it/I created it.

Such was the view out/of the window today in Walter 101: against the backdrop of the fallen classic grandeur of the building of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which is in the middle of being torn down and so boarded up, an April snow large-flaked and gusty. And there continues to be something about the snow--about the way that I experience it as an enclosure (or the perceptibility of an enclosure) close to the form of an embrace--that seems to lend itself to imagining the afterlife of dead letters, those objects that continue to transmit their messages, as falling down to earth.

*Winnicott's passage reads: "Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated. (Playing and Reality 17; italics in original)

Note: As always, a form of working through with RT. So much also moves from the totally moving series of conversations had around what is found/what is created with RP, CC, and AL in the Spring 2016 course "Psychoanalysis and Lit II"; this, in turn, was found/created in "From Exhaustion to Extraction" and continues to converse there, after the conversing is past.

Picture: Still from Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life (1998).

precisely there where

Though it's not that this hasn't happened, or doesn't happen, at other points, this semester it has felt especially hard to maintain a thinking life that short-circuits the text/class cycle. So everything feeds into the classroom, plays out there, is expended there, with nothing left over--with it feeling like there is nothing left over, like everything expended has also been exhausted. But as I'm describing the feeling that this is a total experience, with nothing left over/left out--in the moment of this very expression--the inadequacy of the formulation also presents itself: I have been thinking about things, in fact, about these very things, about "expression" and in particular the expression of the destructive instinct and how, in Freud's thinking and in those who come after him, the expression of the destructive instinct is never total, or never equal to the primacy of the "death drive," from which it can be seen to arise. So the matter here, the thing that those who pick up and talk about the death drive and aggression discuss, is what happens to after the drive is externalized in the destructive instinct, what happens to that "part" that is internalized post-expression?

Jean Laplanche takes up the problem of the before/beyond of aggressiveness in Life & Death in Psychoanalysis, a book I read many years back in Jonathan Hall's seminar on Laplanche, during a period of relative immersion in his work that I shared with my friend Michelle Cho. I have the feeling that my attempt to work through these problems now was already done at that point, in a different way, and that I have long forgotten any of the conclusions I arrived at then but seek them out now, again. In Chapter 5, "Aggressiveness and Sadomasochism," he writes,

And yet, the essential dimension of the affirmation of a death drive lies neither in the discovery of aggressiveness, or in its theorization, nor even in the fact of hypostatizing it as a biological tendency or a metaphysical universal. It is in the idea that the aggressiveness is first of all directed against the subject and, as it were, stagnant within him, before being deflected toward the outside--"subject" here being understood at every level: the most elementary biological being, a protist or cell, as well as the multicellular biological organism, and, of course, the human individual both in his biological individuality and in his "psychical life." Such is the thesis of "primary masochism," and there appears to be massive evidence leading us to suppose that that thesis is profoundly new, that it emerges only with the positing, in 1920, of the mythical being called the death drive. Nevertheless, without wishing to minimize the novelty of Freud's last theory of drives, we shall attempt to show precisely the tenuous but solid link binding it to the thesis evolved in 1915 from both clinical and dialectical considerations concerning the genesis of sadomasochism. That theory--which is implicit, no doubt imperfectly elaborated by Freud himself, and, above all, quickly covered over--entails, we believe, a double armature: the use of the notion of "propping" or anaclisis in the theory of sadomasochism, and the priority of the masochistic moment in the genesis of the sadomasochistic drive insofar as the latter is a sexual drive (and consequently a drive in the true sense of the Freudian Trieb). (86)

In this passage, it is striking that Laplanche wants both to identify the death drive as "new," as not otherwise formulated by Freud, in his earlier work, and to indicate its earlier form in the idea of sadomasochism (which also, and importantly for Laplanche, expounds the notion of "propping" or anaclisis), as developed in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." What interests me about this description is the location of aggressiveness in "primary masochism,"which locates or implies the "subject" as being the initial aim or target of aggressiveness. "Propping" or anaclisis is important to this it comes in where masochism threatens to become generalized to characterizing all phenomena. Laplanche writes, "But it remains that the subject is masochistic only insofar as he derives enjoyment precisely there where he suffers, and not insofar as he suffers in one place in order to derive enjoyment in another, as a function of some arithmetic or algebra of pleasure. This may also be formulated as follows: the subject suffers in order to derive enjoyment and not only in order to be able to derive enjoyment (or to pay the "tax" [wonders: is this "tax" like the "incentive bonus" of forepleasure (Vorliebe)] for enjoyment)" (104). What this stress on "precisely there where" does is highlight the extent to which this point of juncture corresponds to the logic of "propping," to the "that leaning of nascent sexuality on nonsexual activities" that Laplanche describes in the chapter on aggressiveness and sadomasochism (88). And this is mirrored in the distinction drawn between aggressiveness (non-sexual) and sadism/masochism (sexual). Propping provides a way of talking about this relation of dependence or emergence that is not actualized as the expression or externalization of an instinct (as in the destructive instinct). Instead, "Sexuality appears as a drive that can be isolated and observed only at the moment at which the nonsexual activity, the vital function, becomes detached from its natural object or loses it." (88). This "movement of anaclisis or propping" (87) yields a "slippage...within the genesis of the sexual drive" and it is this "slippage" that is present even in relations of masochism whose pleasure is "precisely there where" it suffers.

This is all a somewhat roundabout and not yet quite coherent way of getting to the idea that the distinction between paying for the object (precisely there were) vs. paying a "tax" for its future use is relevant to the remainder that is left after the externalization of the death drive in the destructive instinct. In his 1960 essay, "Aggressivity," Daniel Lagache describes this exchange as an abandonment (this is resonant with Laplanche's description of the detachment of the "vital function" from the "natural object" above):

There is a series of actions--scratching, excretion, ejaculation, autotomia--in which the reduction of tension occurs by modifying, destroying, or abandoning a part of the body that was the "source" of an unpleasurable tension and by transforming it into an external thing. It is close to Freud's idea on the constitution of the object by the projection of the unpleasurable. But, it must be noted, this self-mutilation is a sacrifice of the part for the whole. The lizard abandons his tail, but it does not lose its head. In other words, it is only by artificially limiting the field of thought that such reactions can be considered as being favorable to a primary tendency to active self-destruction. ("Aggressivity" (1960) in The Works of Daniel Lagache 1938-1964, 230-231)

With the phrase "limiting the field of thought," Lagache recalls his starting point in the essay, where he stated that "[i]n a limited field, an activity appears to be quite simply an activity. Extend the tempero-spatial field ever so little, and it is enough to look like a fight" (210). These phrases point to the conflict, rather than the harmony, inherent in a the field, and this, in turn, registers the "primary" state (in both "primary masochism" and "primary narcissism") as that "proceeds from the force of things, from circumstances, from a convergence of the child's weakness and the environment's caretaking" (231). From this schema, needs precede wishes, and wishes, in turn, "resort deviously to the demand," and demands go on to become protests when the demand is frustrated. With this chain of relations, Lagache proposes that aggressivity, "the unity of meaning or intention of the world of aggressions," is of greater concern that acts of aggression, for in his view, all actions can become act of aggression. So "aggressivity" thus implies this relation of different impingements: "Aggressivity is mobilized by the endogenous emergence of a need, felt as a threat within the body or, if it is preferred, as an internal frustration. It is logical, in Freudian metapsychology, to consider as secondary the aggressivity with which the wish pursues its aims through the mediation of the demand" (218). Here, we can see that Lagache returns to a point of trying to think the "force of things" but that aggressivity itself still seems to imply some notion of a unity of meaning. Is this the return emergence of the anaclitic relation at the heart of the death drive? Or in the "heart's desire" of the death drive?

picture: Faded Lizard Tail

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).