thewilsonian

san lorenzo mon amour

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 16:20:00 +0000

originally published at The Vonnegut Review

"By painful experience we have learnt that rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life. Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor, making his life easier and richer; but on the other hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life, making him a slave to his technological environments, and — most catastrophic of all — creating the means for his own mass destruction.”

- Albert Einstein, “A Message to Intellectuals,” 1948

“We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima

Into the ceaseless catastrophe of the twentieth century steps Kurt Vonnegut. Cat’s Cradle is a narrative of disaster. Hiroshima is an absence that infects the entirety of the novel, the threat of annihilation that invades the modern consciousness. Jonah, in the liminal space between apocalypse and death, narrates Cat’s Cradle as a Bokononist meditation on living through the end of time. The omnipresence of cataclysm pervades the narrative, which is woven together through the parallel and competing discursive threads of science and religion. Vonnegut’s primary concern in his fourth novel is the unstable relationship between discourse, disaster, and the human. In Cat’s Cradle, the author interrogates the existential and imminent threats against the human, and, as in The Sirens of Titan, imagines an alternate mode of being outside of history. The deep narrative tension of Cat’s Cradle — the uncertain relationship between truth and fiction, life and death, love and disaster, creation and destruction — results from the tragic absurdity of the human condition. After apocalypse, Vonnegut subversively re-imagines and re-enchants the human through the creation of a counter-hegemonic mode of being via a discourse of sacrality, while de-mystifying and de-legitimizing rationalism as a discourse of meaning and mode of being.

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the kings of infinite space and the sirens of titan

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:15:00 +0000

“You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters

of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man

who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens

singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting

his wife and little children as they stand about him in greeting,

but the Sirens by the melody of their singing enchant him.”

- Homer, The Odyssey, XII.39-44

John, I’m Only Dancing

When confronted with the absurdity of the human condition, Harrison Bergeron chooses to dance. Refusing any longer to bear the pain of existence, the weight of history, or Hamlet’s “whips and scorns of time,” Bergeron casts off his burdens and dances with revolutionary grace. Through art, Bergeron transcends life itself. As Nietzsche suggests in The Birth of Tragedy, “our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art — for only asaesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” Bergeron invests life with meaning through his actualized desire to “become a work of art.” Bergeron’s dance is a dance against history and against time. Bergeron’s dance is Sisyphus’ scorn — to quote Camus, all of his “silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him.” In his rejection of absurdity, Bergeron discovers his soul.

Harrison Bergeron revolts against a totalitarian regime that demands, in the name of equity, all subjects to bear weighted handicaps and an implanted radio, the latter for the purpose of disrupting thought. “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” resounds with echoes of ideas first explored in 1959 through Vonnegut’s second novel, The Sirens of Titan. Bergeron’s revolt into a transcendent, aesthetic realm transforms an absurd life and imbues it with sublimity. As Bergeron’s revolt suggests, meaning can only be sought within the existential self, and that meaning can only be realized through aesthetic engagement with the world. Bergeron, dancing with revolutionary grace, dies into freedom. Through art, Bergeron becomes timeless. Bergeron exits the cycle of history and his moment of transcendence is eternal.

The Sirens of Titan is Vonnegut’s novelistic meditation on history and happiness. Like Malachi Constant, all are victims of fate; all are hostages on inevitable and inscrutable odysseys. True meaning can only be found through exiting the terror of history to find the eternal — to dance, like Bergeron, against the accidents of fate. In order to avoid Charybdis and Scylla, Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” it is best to exit history and sing with the Sirens.

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aesthetic bliss and the end of literature

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:37:00 +0000

"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955

Pablo Picasso, Les Demesoilles d'Avignon, 1907

A pragmatic society struggles to comprehend art. Therein lies art's highest virtue. Gregory Currie has recently published an essay in The New York Times, “Does Literature Make Us Better?”, discussing the complexity of the cliched argument that literature can act as an agent of moral refinement. Although he admits that there is no evidence for such a claim, Currie affirms that literature civilizes and that literature moralizes. Literature, he offers, “deals in complexity,” and “gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed to undertake.” This idea of literature as a boot camp for the soul is widespread, and reduces reading and engagement with art to the moral equivalent of eating vegetables. The trouble with this sort of argument is not the obvious contradictions therein (Teju Cole writes in The New Yorker of the Nazi’s taste for fine art and literature), but a much more basic methodological problem — why is this question posed at all, and on what assumptions is it constructed?

In the Middle Ages, the Church would commission works of art in the belief that contemplating beauty inspired individual transcendence. The contemporary age, identified by Michel Foucault as an extension of the Victorian, views literature as an exercise in morality, and subjects literature to an instrumental rationality and a cold logic of pragmatics. What an atrophied imagination; what a prudish approach! Sublimating aesthetics into morality is a symptom of a society in decline, and subjecting literature to the strictures of instrumental rationality stultifies both art and humanity. The ceaseless debates claiming literature as a moralizing agent are misguided, and expose a broader epistemological quandary of the contemporary condition. The attempt to subsume all facets of human existence into the dull logic of instrumentality, the demand that everything have a strict and specific purpose, shackles the quintessentially human pursuit of art under a peculiarly inhuman logic. It suggests a certain self-alienation of humankind when art is reduced from an end to a means of the good life. Demanding that literature reach its highest end as a vehicle for morality exhibits an urge to tame aesthetics, to bring the unruly passions of the human spirit into the comfortingly false structures of the social construction.

I wonder too what this debate says about our digital age and present cultural moment. Much has been made about the “death of the book” and the decline of literature, which is perhaps a symptom of the ubiquity of instrumental rationality and digital consciousness. Late capitalism is, according to Jameson, the purest form of capitalism, wherein greater spheres of human existence are subsumed into the machinery of capital. If so, artistic pursuit is imperiled if it cannot justify itself on pragmatic grounds. As Plato in his Republic, the cultural logic of late capitalism is left wondering what to do with its poets. Aesthetics are not easily commodified. It is possible that Currie believes himself to be saving literature from digital triviality, when, in fact, he is hastening the process. To determine a specific and pragmatic end of literature is to trivialize it. For literature and art are not concerned with morality or as any pragmatic means, but with a far higher and uncertain realm of “being.” And to claim that literature is an end-in-itself, that one should engage in art for art’s sake, is to value it more highly and with far more purity than to demand it buttress decaying structures of whatever. Remember that Aristotle’s valuation of the highest good is found in the pursuit of an activity as an end-in-itself. Thus must we protect literature for its own sake; there is no higher good.

Nabokov famously imbued literature with the capability of cultivating a state of “aesthetic bliss,” a phenomenon of the self opening a new “sense of being.” Aesthetics, accordingly, offer a new window into the self, and therefore provide an opportunity for ontological, not moral, thinking. Nabokov developed this conception of aesthetic bliss while writing Lolita, a beautiful novel about a repulsive man. Indeed, the tension between aesthetics and morality is made explicit in this novel, where the reader is hopelessly seduced by the ecstatic sublimity of Humbert Humbert’s narration, but repulsed by the immoral subject of the narrative itself. Literature, he aestheticizes, can impel a state of almost mystical transcendence and contemplation, but is disconnected from and even opposed to morality. Indeed, literature can provoke a moral crisis, forcing the reader to reflect in discomfort. Lolita beautifully captures the friction between literature and morality. Aesthetic bliss, suggests Nabokov, opens the self to a realm of being higher than the moral.

Schopenhauer, writing a century before Nabokov, outlined an aesthetic theory that anticipates Lolita. Aesthetics, he argues in The World as Will and Representation, offer a sphere of being and contemplation removed from the will. Indeed, the power of aesthetics is that it can wrest subjectivity away from the self, still the cries of Cartesian doubt, and immerse one into a more authentic aesthetic world. The virtue of art and literature is that it offers a selfless and pre-rational engagement with the world. Constructions of morality are tacked onto humanity, but are not essential to humanity. The task of art, therefore, is to recover this essentially human mode of being, an ontological state that is higher than the everyday. In such a schema, aesthetics occupies an ontological plane over-and-against the moral and the individual. Aesthetic bliss is a route to transcendence.

Nietzsche, strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, seems to reinforce Nabokov’s valuation of aesthetic bliss in his appeals to the Dionysian ideal of art. Nietzsche conceives of constructions of morality as hostile to life, as indicative of a slave morality. The necessary virtues of art, therefore, are in its celebration of life and its denial of false and inhibiting constructions. And society is at its strongest when its art is particularly tragic and passionate, when art is particularly immoral. Oscar Wilde agrees, "All art is immoral." Art is uniquely capable of destroying false illusions of selfhood and melting boundaries of good and evil. Writing in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that the Dionysian, the wild celebration of passion, allows the individual to immerse oneself in something more profound and more authentic than everyday consciousness. The boundaries between selves, between humankind and nature, and between moral categories are melted, and humankind is able to ascend to a higher mode of being, to “become a work of art.” Nietzsche’s aestheticizing of existence is a force to cope with the absurd and tragic reality of human life itself; art, therefore, assumes for Nietzsche a quality of transcendence that he finds lacking elsewhere. Art, according to Nietzsche, is fundamentally opposed to morality. The value of art is in its melting away of divisive categories, in the possibility for the individual to engage in a higher realm of being.

In discussing the false connection between literature and morality, it is necessary to remember that the foundation of Western literature, arguably contained in the disparate collection of the Hebrew Bible, is itself not a moralizing text. Although many seek moral instruction in the Hebrew Bible, its intention is not morality, but, to again cite Nietzsche, a celebration of life at its purest. Nietzsche repeatedly identifies the Hebrew Bible as a “heroic” text, a towering celebration of “what man once was” (Beyond Good and Evil).

Nietzsche, writing later in Daybreak, develops a provocative reading of Macbeth and morality, in which he continues his conception of art as an immoral and subsequently life-affirming force. He writes, in “On the Morality of the Stage:”

“Whoever thinks that Shakespeare's theater has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. Can the poet have felt otherwise? How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does his ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime! Only from then on does he exercise ‘demonic’ attraction and excite similar natures to emulation—demonic means here: in defiance against life and advantage for the sake of a drive and idea. Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it? This would be to stand the poets on their head: they, and especially Shakespeare, are enamored of the passions as such and not least of their death-welcoming moods—those moods in which the heart adheres to life no more firmly than does a drop of water to a glass. It is not the guilt and its evil outcome they have at heart, Shakespeare as little as Sophocles (in Ajax, Philoctetes, Oedipus): as easy as it would have been in these instances to make guilt the lever of the drama, just as surely has this been avoided. The tragic poet has just as little desire to take sides against life with his image of life! He cries rather: ‘it is the stimulant of stimulants, this exciting, changing, dangerous, gloomy and often sun-drenched existence! It is an adventure to live—espouse what party in it you will, it will always retain this character!’ — He speaks thus out of a restless, vigorous age which is half-drunk and stupefied by its excess of blood and energy—out of a wickeder age than ours is: which is why we need first to adjust and justify the goal of a Shakespearean drama, that is to say, not to understand it.”

Kafka famously argued that literature “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Indeed, the highest plane of literature is uniquely capable to pose ontological questions, consider the mysteries of human existence, and invest an absurd life with meaning. Literature can allow the human access to a transcendent ontological plane. An existentialist perspective on aesthetics posits art as a force to ease the Cartesian and Sisyphean terrors of existence. As Adorno and Horkheimer write in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Art begins where knowledge leaves humans in the lurch.” Art is necessary for a more complete sense of being. To demand it do anything else only cheapens it, and reduces literature to propaganda. In order to reaffirm the possibility of aesthetic bliss in the contemporary condition, we must be willing to give ourselves up to the possibility of transcendence. We must be open to reconsider our beings. To "become a work of art."

Reading Lolita does not make me a more moral person or a more civilized person or a better person. But it does inspire aesthetic bliss. Therein lies its highest good.

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the vonnegut review: irony and authenticity in the american imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 02:25:00 +0000

the following is my opening essay for a newly minted project, The Vonnegut Review

“In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the countless solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the ‘history of the world,’ but a minute was all it was. After nature had drawn a few more breaths, the planet froze and the clever animals had to die.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” 1873

“What memories for mud to have!”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963

Recurring throughout Vonnegut’s imagination and fiction is an impulse of ironic distancing and deflection. Vonnegut’s fiction is motivated by an awareness of the tragic and existential absurdity that underlies the human experience, and this awareness functions as an elliptical center of his narratives. Irony functions in Vonnegut’s novels as a defensive posture, establishing a critical distance allowing Vonnegut to apprehend the absurdity of the human condition. For instance, the firebombing of Dresden, the ostensible subject of masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, is a void through which he is unable to communicate directly. Dresden functions as a synecdoche of cyclical suffering, of violence and death and war, and of the ultimate absurdity of existence, which he attempts to communicate via the recurring and critical deployment of what has become his most identifiable ironic reflex, “So it goes.” He identifies this novel as a failure, as it was written by a “pillar of salt” — one, as Lot’s wife, who was cursed for attempting to look into the past and is therefore denied narrative comprehension and disclosure. Vonnegut suggests that the existential absurdity of the human condition deflects narrative and defies comprehension and communication. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” so Vonnegut must employ an idiomatic language of irony. And that is true not only for the massacre of Dresden, but also the distinctly human terror of history. Irony is the only approach available to Vonnegut. “So it goes” repeats so many times throughout the novel because Vonnegut can only approach such absurdity through a distancing and defensive irony, allowing Vonnegut to critique the absurdity of human existence without yielding to despair. Furthermore, irony functions in Vonnegut’s imagination in order to create critical distance between the reader and the narrative. Vonnegut’s shattering of linear narrative and the recurrent phrasing of his irony both function to decenter and discomfort the reader. Ultimately, this irony serves a reflexive function for the reader, forcing the reader to reconsider the human condition and approach it more critically.

Irony offers two aesthetic and ethical options, both grounded in a radical deconstruction of the human experience. One option concedes that life has no transcendent meaning and is thus arbitrary and purposeless, that life signifies nothing. This direction portends a capitulation to nihilism that some mistakenly identify in Vonnegut’s writing. Ostensibly, Vonnegut’s comparison of humans to mud clods or to unfortunate and tragic animals seems deeply misanthropic and cynical. The second option, and the ethic pursued by Vonnegut, is to accept this radical meaningless of life, the ultimate absurdity of the human condition, and use it to motivate a paradoxical humanist ethic. Indeed, Vonnegut’s first assumption is the lack of transcendent meaning to life, but in that dearth of purpose Vonnegut finds love and liberation. Vonnegut accepts that life ultimately signifies nothing, and uses that as an impetus for a profound ethical engagement with the world. After conventional narratives of meaning are stripped, all that remains is humankind, lonely and lost and searching for purpose. This stripping away of narratives of meaning — exemplified in Slaughterhouse-Five when the weighty teleology of World War II is deconstructed, and the grand march of history and freedom is reduced to sad animals, or baffled children, playing war-games in the snow — the suffering to which culture has inscribed so much meaning fails to remain transformative. Billy Pilgrim, the narrator of the novel, must destroy his meticulous and color-coded timeline while Vonnegut himself must shatter a coherent literary narrative. Without such a structuring narrative, the human individual is unmoored from conventional processes of meaning construction. Progress is untenable for Vonnegut’s postmodern pilgrims. All that remains is an obligation to cultivate happiness, which Vonnegut identifies as his ethical imperative — “God dammit, you’ve got to be kind.” Repeatedly, Vonnegut champions this humanistic ethic, this deep and profound love for human life and humankind. His reflexive irony, far from acting as a negative or cynical impulse, actually serves as the foundation for a transcendent ethic of human love. Because human life has been unmoored from conventional meaning, suffering and evil are reduced to meaningless postures. All that remains is the imperative of love. His irony cultivates his humanism.

Significantly, Billy Pilgrim learns his ironic stance from the Tralfamadorians. These aliens propose “so it goes” as the appropriate response to death, and their “telegraphic schizophrenic” narrative style informs the sly and sublime tone of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut typically relies on this cosmic perspective, this insight from the Other, to relativize the human experience. This cosmic perspective allows Vonnegut to use irony as a scalpel, deconstructing postwar narratives of progress, satisfaction, consumerism and capitalism, American innocence, et cetera. Viewing these constructions through the critical eyes of the Other brings Vonnegut’s satiric urge to the forefront. He defamiliarizes the reader with the everyday in order to impel a critical stance. If human life is absurd, what possible meaning can arise from the slaughter of 135,000 people and the destruction of Dresden, the lovely “Florence of the Elbe?” If humans are made of “mud,” what possible purpose could violence or suffering adopt? Imagining our dehumanized and arbitrary worlds through the perspective of the Other allows Vonnegut to emphasize its absurdity. “So it goes” allows Vonnegut simultaneously to laugh and to weep at the absurdity of the world.

An aim of Vonnegut’s fiction is to cultivate this radical love of the human. To return again to Billy Pilgrim — who functions as a stand-in for the author in so many ways — the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is an optometrist: his hope is to help people to see the world more clearly. And, after his odyssey with the Tralfamadorians, he continually attempts to inspire people to see in four dimensions, to see the true nature of the cosmos. To see clearly, as Pilgrim hopes, is to look beyond our dehumanized present and cultivate a radical humanism. Vonnegut’s role as an author is much the same. He attempts to inaugurate new modes of seeing in his readership. To do so, Vonnegut invents a new American idiom at the intersection between irony and love and in a tone that is at once alienating and intimate. This irony allows Vonnegut to defamiliarize readers with the everyday while asserting the paradoxical beauty in meaninglessness. Life is absurd; life is beautiful. Like Kierkegaard's existential knights, Vonnegut must insist on making meaning in the world by virtue of the absurd. Vonnegut jostles readers into radical new consciousnesses.

Vonnegut’s vocation is to help people to see the world, including imagined worlds, more truly and more generously. Adopting the Tralfamadorian perspective, Pilgrim suggests that humans, due to improper vision, derive unsatisfying purpose through an mis-interpretation of history. "It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever." Vonnegut's narrative strategy is to break this string and scatter these beads. Only then can the individual forge new connections and derive more authentic meanings — the individual must bead one's own ontological string. Imagination, not history or happenstance, is the fertile soil of the self. "We are what we pretend to be," Vonnegut would famously assert. Vonnegut uses irony to deconstruct the world in order to rebuild it on a human scale. Vonnegut's fictions dare to imagine new histories, new times, and new modes of being. Through irony, Vonnegut polishes our imaginative lenses so that we may see the human more clearly.

Ultimately, the relativizing direction of his imagination allows Vonnegut to deconstruct the present and to reassert the centrality of the human. If human life is absurd and humans molded only from mud, it is our collective imperative to love the human. Despite his recursive irony, an Edenic impulse beats distinctly in Vonnegut’s imagination. His latent cynicism allows Vonnegut to distill something innately beautiful and authentic amidst the tragedy of the human condition. In a memorable scene in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim recognizes Adam and Eve reflected in a leather boot. Vonnegut implores us, like Billy Pilgrim, to imagine transcendent modes of being that flow alongside or underneath or inside our dehumanized worlds and consciousnesses. It is precisely the dehumanization of (post-)modernity to which Vonnegut so slyly objects, and he seeks to re-invigorate our ethical imagination. In an utterly sublime passage of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut describes watching a World War II film in reverse — American planes "suck bullets and shell fragments" from soldiers while bombers gather bombs back into themselves. These bombs are returned to the United States to be deconstructed and their materials buried so as to prevent future war. Narrating history in reverse situates Vonnegut to re-tell history as a narrative of redemption instead of catastrophe and tragedy. History, suggests Vonnegut, is flowing in the wrong direction.

Vonnegut views the purpose of art through an optimistic and humanistic lens. While military science treats humankind as “garbage,” (and, he concedes that “military science is probably right about the contemptibility of [humankind] in the vastness of the universe”), the revolutionary virtue of art is that it places the human experience at the “center of the universe.” In the rocky soils of hopelessness, Vonnegut sows tremendous love. This is the quintessential movement of Vonnegut’s worldview — Vonnegut works through a bitterly ironic deconstruction of the world in order to erect something far more lovely and sublime. He must pass through a postmodern skepticism in order to assert something beautiful. Vonnegut demystifies the world so as to mystify anew.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus presents the eponymous figure as an absurd hero. His absurdity arises from the tragedy of his fate; the gods have sentenced him, for attempting to elude Death, to exerting himself forever to push a fated stone up the mountain of history. Sisyphus is an absurd hero who — like Pilgrim, like Vonnegut — insists on significance by virtue of the absurd. Sisyphus' heroism arises from his awareness of absurdity and in his paradoxical insistence on meaning. Like Vonnegut, Sisyphus chooses meaning over despair. The moment of Sisyphus' tragic awareness is in his return down the mountain, chasing his stone. This moment is his "hour of consciousness," and in that moment Sisyphus is superior to his fate and superior to the gods because he has claimed his fate and chosen to make it meaningful. In this awareness of absurdity, Camus locates tremendous pathos and sublime heroism. Sisyphus cultivates a new awareness of himself and the world, and, in that superior ontological and epistemological framework, he chooses to imagine happiness and beauty. Camus concludes that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." So too must one imagine Billy Pilgrim.

David Foster Wallace, in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” his seminal discussion of the cultural and aesthetic logic of postmodernism, critiques what he sees as a pervasive and crippling ironic reflex of contemporary culture. Wallace interprets irony as a increasingly negative and self-contained force, as an attitude and approach to life that is unremittingly cynical and destructive. Irony served a vital function, he argues, in deconstructing the particularly noxious mythology that cripples the American consciousness, such as American innocence and exceptionalism, postwar prosperity, the American Dream, et cetera. However, when irony becomes institutionalized as an end-in-itself, and when postmodern cynicism is absorbed into a totalizing aesthetic of cool, irony itself becomes poisonous and imprisoning. Postmodern posturing can mask a hollow and heartless core. In order to move beyond this negative irony, Wallace calls for the inauguration of a new American idiom. The new transgressive aesthetic and the new subversive artist, Wallace suggests, will be one who is unabashedly sincere and unapologetically sentimental. “The next literary rebels,” he argues, “might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels... who have the childish gall actually to endorses and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.” Such an artist may be rejected as naive or foolish, but would be creating on a higher and more urgent ethical plane. Such an artist may cloak their work in apparent cynicism, but use that in order to inform a sublime humanism. Such an artist who, perhaps, as Vonnegut confesses of himself, still believes in junior civics.

Vonnegut is still such a timely and necessary writer because of his fluidity in bridging this gap between irony and authenticity, between cynicism and sincerity. Vonnegut’s irony is never self-enclosed or hollow, but rather directed towards cultivating human flourishing. Simply put, Vonnegut is a subversive writer, and must be recognized as such. He always approaches humankind with the utmost reverence and with a radical love. "Literature," he piquantly quips, "should not disappear up its own asshole." A note of harmony between Vonnegut and Wallace is their deep respect for the human individual in response to the ravages of an increasingly dehumanized world. Both authors drew inspiration from the Serenity Prayer, referenced repeatedly in both Slaughterhouse-Five and Infinite Jest. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference." This prayer functions in Vonnegut’s imagination as a mantra that impels his empathizing perspective. Emerson defines the human as a "god in ruins," and Vonnegut recognizes this same sense of tragic sublimity in the characters that populate his dreamworlds. Among Vonnegut's virtues is his earnest and paradoxical insistence on embracing the timeless beauty amidst the absurdity of human existence. In a manner truly befitting an artist so intrigued by the experience of becoming “unstuck in time,” Vonnegut is still today’s most ardent humanist writer. As the world continues its pointless march toward abstraction and dehumanization, Vonnegut, broken-hearted, implores us to reconsider our priorities and reconsider our humanity. Vonnegut’s love, cloaked in irony, remains a potent aesthetic and ethical tool for re-imagining our worlds and re-creating our beings. Hi-ho.

"God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!"

- Last Rites of Bokononism, Cat's Cradle, 1963

read Matthew Gannon's opening essay for The Vonnegut Review, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

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boston, the limits of language, and the unmaking of the world

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:28:00 +0000

"Pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language."

- Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862

“Runners were coming in and saw unspeakable horror."

Boston is a tear in experience. Boston is a breach in narrative. Boston is a rupture in the imagination. To sift testimonials from last week's Boston Marathon Bombing (BMB) is to be assaulted with the unspoken, or, to be more specific, with subjects attempting to communicate an experience of incommunicable horror. (Macabre collections of testimonials are available at NPR, The New York Times, and The Boston Herald.) Boston is a place, a living city and community, located in time. But Boston is also a signifier. There is, mapped unto the real Boston of streets and waterways, schools and homes, an imaginary Boston, a Boston of the mind, now immersed in blood and mediated by violence. The BMB rips the temporal and imaginary fabric of the city and of the nation. Violence ruptures bodies; violence ruptures consciousnesses; violence ruptures syntax. To speak about Boston is to speak around Boston -- the unspeakable horror is a gash through which we cannot immediately speak.

“Nothing too dramatic, until the first explosion. Then, everything changed.”

Chilling testimonials reference this experiential and epistemic gash of the BMB. To narrate is to render communicable, to bring order unto chaos. The inexpressible, that which cannot be contained or communicated through language, bears an unreal power. Violence exposes the limits of language and of thought, and the only viable mode of communicating the BMB is as a breach in narrative, as an ellipse, as a violent disruption in reality, as an unmaking of the world. A significant factor in the horror in Boston has resulted from this sense of disruption. That is, it is not only the slain three and the injured many that weigh upon the minds of those attempting to communicate the BMB, but also the sense of randomness and disruption of the everyday. In his 1989 Discourse and the Construction of Society, Bruce Lincoln argues that the human world is a linguistic creation of imaginative narration. Anomalies must either be absorbed into the narrative or excluded. The BMB not only disrupts the marathon; it disrupts our narratives of reality and our weak attempts to make meaning in the world. This disruption bears existential trauma, revealed in the collective anxiety of coherence. Humans weave together narratives to forge identity, locate selves in time and space, and forge communal solidarity. Identity is little more than a linguistic assemblage, and violence rattles these individual and collective fictions. The only way to communicate or comprehend something truly horrifying is as a rupture. Violence -- literally, linguistically, imaginatively -- unmakes the world.

“I said out loud, 'This is how my life is going to end.'”

Commentary, in the immediate wake of the BMB and still, obsesses on the imperative to "make sense" of "it all," to tame the violence of the BMB and to rationalize the violence of the BMB. Because, at first, the BMB seems random, it seems meaningless, it seems overwhelming. And, if we remain unable to communicate a coherent narrative thread running through the BMB, the BMB will continue to carry unreal power. Narrative provides a veil of safety. Ordering an event into a narrative serves a two-fold function of rendering the violence less random and less horrifying while rationalizing it. As real as violence is, as bloody as violence is, it maintains a destabilizing surreality, threatening our uncertain modes of existence. Violence that cannot be adequately comprehended is called "terror" or "terrorism." These words -- which are essentially meaningless but carry tremendous weight -- have been used to describe the Tsnarnaev brothers. They have also been described as "evil."

"It was so surreal."

To define one as "evil" -- a word and worldview weighted with cosmological and eschatological import -- is a highly intentional linguistic act of negative exclusion, functioning on two levels. First, "evil" immediately excludes. To be defined as "evil" is to be rendered Other, to be rendered outside the boundaries of imagination, morality, humanity, and our construction of reality. "Evil" excuses incommunicability because the evil do not speak in the same language, as it were. The inexplicable becomes evil to mitigate the threat of incommunicability. Furthermore, Othering one as "evil" preserves the coherency of an exclusive narrative. Accounts emphasize the Chechen roots of these American brothers. The narrative coherency of innocent and decent Boston, and of America in general, functions only with the negative establishment of Othering boundaries of evil. As I wrote in December, "For who are Americans but those who are not They, and made sacred by it?" The American ideological project depends upon the exclusion and Othering of dangerous counter-narratives [I have also written about the American ideological project and narrative construction in "War at Christmas"]. In the deliberate and perpetual process of national narrative construction, the Tsarnaevs are Otherized and Orientalized, and America and Americans are defined by exclusion. The American ideological project relies upon this discursive blindness, where narratives are silenced in order to preserve the coherency of an exclusive national story.

"I can’t believe it happened here."

Truly horrifying, what these narratives must not admit, is that the Tsarnaev brothers are assimilated Americans. This violence is not from a foreign land. America cannot go to war against the existence of domestic terrorism as America did against Al Qaeda and the War on Terror. The true horror of Boston, the reason it can only be communicated as rupture, is that this violence, as much as Americans construct flimsy narratives to protect their own coherence, is written into American society and imagination. The horror of Boston is not that the Tsarnaevs desecrated American narratives with violence, but that violence is woven deeply into the American narrative. The horror of Boston is that it happened here. But, as much as the BMB is a rupture in a specific national narrative, the violence enacted by the Tsarnaev brothers made sense to them -- they did not believe themselves to be evil. To define these brothers as "evil" is to exclude their own motivations and their own narratives. Whatever happened in Boston, however little sense we can make of it, it made sense to them, and that is where an inquiry must begin. Through the ideological American narrative courses a dark vein of blood and death, a vein which is highlighted by the Tsarnaevs. The tragedy breaking into the everyday reveals the tragedy written into the everyday.

“Everything was fine. Then all of a sudden, we just heard one explosion, huge. Everything stopped."

When violence becomes everyday -- when our everyday is suffused with the violence that is only dramatized when it manifests itself as a rupture of particular intensity, as seen through Boston, through Newtown, through West, TX, and through all of the sites of bloodshed that overwhelm our consciousness and breach our narratives and increase the rate of perceived time -- we must reckon honestly and earnestly with the meaning of America. As Dzhokhar Tsarnaev identifies the War on Terror and on Islam as an impetus for violent response, the nation as whole must seriously reckon with the underside of our national narratives. As Matt Gannon at The Angelus Novus Blog has argued, an honest appraisal of Boston requires a grappling with the violent imperialism America brings unto the world. The image of the nation, for many, is an image of violence. Furthermore, an honest appraisal of Boston also requires a grappling with the violence inherent to capitalism and to the national project at home. Alienation, poverty, and dispossession are deliberate acts of literal and imaginative exclusion -- individuals and communities are systematically and violently disenfranchised from what is commonly referred to as the American Dream. And those groups sometimes respond with self-assertive violence. The most complete way to respond to violence is to solve the problems that lead to violence, to love thy neighbor and to cultivate flourishing communities and change the meaning of America. If, as James Baldwin suggests, America is something to achieve, it is necessary to consider what that achieved America will mean. I do not intend to excuse the Tsarnaevs for their violence, but it must be contextualized. America is an increasingly violent place because America is an increasingly unpleasant place -- an increasingly inhuman and dehumanizing place. Only through the difficult process of critiquing our own national narratives and ideologies can horror be mitigated. To invert a Nietzschean aphorism, to avoid achieving the monstrous, we must fight with the monsters within our stories and within our souls. In order to achieve justice, we must speak directly into and out of the abyss.

"Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself
become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe."

- Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

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and please see another essay discussing ideology and violence, "war at christmas"
and please see Matt Gannon's discussion of Boston, "To Kabul, from Boston, with Love"

gay is the new black: on the discursive limits of marriage equality

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:30:00 +0000

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

- President Obama, "Second Inaugural," 21 January 2013

"The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and 'psychic hermaphroditism' made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of 'perversity'; but it also made possible the formation of a 'reverse' discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified."

- Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality, 1976

To pronounce "gay" as the "new black" is a highly regressive move, especially in light of the assumed progressive impulse the equation implies. The discursive elision of Stonewall and Selma is inherently problematic and, more insidiously, limiting to both the black and queer freedom movements (as well as the incredibly complex feminist movement reified in "Seneca"). Of course, President Obama has always attempted to situate himself rhetorically at an imagined intersection between the state apparatus and the struggle for human rights, and even to locate his own ascension somewhere within this assumed and constructed narrative arc. (Although, in his present position, such rhetorical posturing is untenable.) To weave together the movements assumed to be reified in the totem of Selma and Stonewall is problematic in at least three principal ways. And, more importantly, this equation, and what it suggests about rhetorical and political claims of queer rights advocates, especially when coalesced into the popular, legal, and judicial move for marriage equality rights, advocates a pernicious sublimation of sexuality and identity into a state superstructure. The contemporary focus on legal equality has been at the expense of a comprehensive rhetoric of human rights and true equality of identity, and to reduce the ongoing and urgent struggle for queer rights into a juridical debate about marriage and states' rights ultimately serves to silence the voices of the oppressed and co-opt and absorb potential threats to the bourgeois aegis, by which I mean the ideological and aesthetic construction of the idea and image of the bourgeoisie under late-capital. [I have most directly discussed this conception of the "bourgeois aegis" in my essay, "law and order and bourgeois guilt."] (I should also clarify that I fully support the expansion of marriage rights to all who should seek them -- and am not opposed to a more radical questioning of to whom marriage rights are extended -- but acknowledge that the argument for marriage equality, as it is currently imagined and understood, is a fundamentally conservative argument.)

First, to reduce the long and continued history, the longue duree, of either movement to an alliterative totem promotes a dangerous fetishization of these multivalent and fragmentary crusades. Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall are three distinctive movements which must be discussed independently (but allowing room for comparison) and as diachronic discursive assemblages. Second, to link these three movements so glibly is to acquiesce to a particularly hegemonic eschatology of liberal humanism; to weave, as did the President in January, all counter-hegemonic narratives and movements into one grand march of history and humanism and progress serves ironically to re-entrench the state apparatus and silence the revolutionary agency of these paradigm shakers. Thirdly, the attempt to map the discourses of the Black Freedom Movement onto the Queer Freedom Movement further serves to reify both movements, to render them each a zombie discourse, as opposed to letting each speak to our present political moment. Likewise, the reification of both movements suggests that the Black Freedom Movement has reached its political and epistemological endpoint, and that it has been historically irrelevant for some time. To suggest, as do these optimistic progressive humanists, that the Black Freedom Movement has ended, that the Civil Rights Movement and its after-shocks have spent their last energies and that blacks have achieved and now enjoy full and equal protection of the law, and that the same must now and is now happening with the Queer Freedom Movement, is an insidious and retrograde move of bourgeois quietism. Whether or not the Black Freedom Movement can be agreed to have reached some indeterminate terminus, the fallacious claim that blacks have achieved full justice and equality in the United States is self-evidently unsound, and masks a terrible reality of dispossession and suffering in the United States.

But this post is not intended as a deconstruction of the assumptions that underly misguided claims such as "gay is the new black," but rather to deploy these deconstructed assumptions against contemporary discourses of marriage equality. Reducing a conversation on equality and human rights to a focus on marriage equality is another highly regressive move, and, importantly, one that purports to gloss over a culture and structure of queer dispossession with a marriage vow and wedding. No amount of wedding-white fondant can sweeten a rotting cake, and it is necessary to critique the underside of marriage equality ideologies. Why is marriage equality framed as a contemporary iteration of the Civil Rights Movement, and, more importantly, what is obscured by this assumption?

Of course I support marriage equality. But I also assert the urgency of divorcing gender identity and sexual identity from concepts of equality. True equality should be one in which gender and sex, or race, class, etc., cannot factor negatively, either ethically or legally. We are all embodied, and those bodies should not be a locus of discrimination or exclusion. (However, it is urgent to use our embodied-ness as grounds for critique, and we can never discredit the body. On the contrary, our embodied-ness should be a positive source of strength, inspiration, and solidarity.) More important than this legal expansion of marriage is the disconnection of discourses of sexuality from state power. We can only be free when the vicissitudes of embodiment serve to enrich, rather than limit or determine, subjectivity and identity.

I am not interested in essentializing queerness, or in attempting to lock queer sexualities, or any sexuality, into a fixed historical or a-historical standpoint. The San Francisco of the 60s and 70s is gone, and Stonewall is in the past. Whereas queerness was (and for some still is) an affront and rejection of bourgeois norms, queerness is now being absorbed into the bourgeois aegis. There are limits to trafficking in sexual essentialism, in stabilizing queer sexualities as a negation of bourgeois norms, and in only thinking about sexuality in structural terms. Structural imagination is necessary, but we cannot ignore the actual lived experience of individuals, and it is bigoted to declare that queer sexualities may only occupy one fixed meaning as a rejection of the bourgeois aegis. The task is to think in hybrid terms, thinking both structurally and existentially, in constant imaginative sympathy with the oppressed. This is the task of the leftist humanist (or post-humanist). This is the task of historical thinking.

The Queer Freedom Movement contains multitudes and cannot be reduced to a single voice. To do so, as I have suggested, is retrograde and reductive. However, the movement as whole does contain certain strong threads within it. The celebration of queerness is itself an affront to bourgeois sexuality and property rights. Inasmuch the development of capitalism and the bourgeois identity is dependent upon property rights, Marx teaches that the construction of property rights is inherently tied to heterosexual coupling. The long development of private property is dependent upon these unions between men and women, and, therefore, the consolidation of private property is paralleled by biological reproduction. Marriages were imagined as legal contracts to systemize reproductive sexuality and private property, both for the ultimate benefit of the capitalist superstructure. Sexuality was and is a force to be managed, to be sublimated into the state, in keeping with Michel Foucault's discussion of "biopower," which he defines as "the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy." According to Foucault, the modern state is dependent upon managing populations through biopower for the purposes of constructing a superstructure that is both totalizing and individuating. When Margaret Thatcher proclaims that "there is no such thing as society... only individuals and families," she is drawing on a prominent conservative and statist construction of the family as the basis and locus of democracy. And, in keeping with Foucault's concept of biopower, families themselves are loci of sexually charged power relations. And, for some conservatives, these power relations manifests themselves in a gendered power disparity in keeping with patriarchy and misogyny. An unspoken conservative rejection of gay marriage is grounded in the uncertainties of power relations in a home where so called "traditional gender roles" are untenable. Conservatives fear homosexuality because they cannot understand power dynamics in a same-sex environment, because power, for conservatives, is gendered, and sexuality must always be contained. Homosexuality is an affront not only to heteronormativity, but also to patriarchy. While the conceptual foundations of marriage have shifted for many, it is necessary to divorce marriage, or at least sexuality, from institutions of patriarchy, capitalism, and state legitimation.

The Human Rights Campaign, the LGBT advocacy group, has effectively reduced the Queer Freedom Movement to a legal discussion on marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign, in part through its pernicious misnomer, has framed marriage as the pinnacle of equality. In so doing, the HRC funnels queer discourse into an exclusive construction of bourgeois sexuality and property rights and explicitly buttresses marriage as the social / sexual norm. It normalizes a specific thread of queerness, while defining other threads as deviant. Marriage favors cisgendered bodies and discourses, and focuses a multivalent movement into a pseudo-heteronormative sexuality. Opening the institution of marriage to include cisgendered homosexual bodies serves to strengthen the bourgeois aegis of the state and society and reduce the availability of social / sexual alternatives. "Equality" should be a motivating goal, but equality is a goal far greater than marriage rights or other pieces of legislation can offer.

In 2010, Lady Gaga donned a dress composed entirely of meat, sewn out of raw flank steak, in alleged protest of the US Military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. This bizarre act sheds light on the often misguided effort to promote queer equality. Her meat dress, furthermore, is a highly equivocal and potentially ironic symbol. Gaga and others protested DADT with an appeal to equality. However, expanding the human base for the military does more to support the military-industrial complex of American imperialism than to promote sexual equality in America. Unless clarified, any protest of DADT offers implicit support for American imperialism. Gaga's dress, therefore, functions not as a support of equality, but as a horrid and grotesque reminder of the slaughter and carnage inherent to the hegemonic military-industrial foundations of the American superstructure, whether she intended it or not. Such a critique highlights the perniciousness of "homonationalism," a term borrowed from Jasbir Puar, which criticizes the discursive elision of nationalism and queer acceptance, an overlap that serves further to reinforce the tentacles of state power through this recourse to equality. One must appeal to "equality" while simultaneously critiquing the state and structures that simultaneously offer and benefit from this expansion. So too must we approach marriage equality. It is obvious that marriage must be expanded, but, simultaneously, we must problematize marriage and the social / sexual norm it helps legitimate.

While I fully support expanding legal and imaginative conceptions of marriage (and I myself am married), I must immediately problematize such a narrative. I do harbor hope that expanding marriage rights to homosexual couples may serve not to normalize queerness, but to queer the bourgeois aegis and the public square. It is necessary to disconnect sexuality from discourses of power and subject-formation, and simultaneously celebrate sexuality as embodied beings. Michel Foucault has historicized sexuality, arguing genealogically that contemporary understandings of sexuality and subjectivity are modern constructions. And, as Deleuze and Guatarri suggest in Anti-Oedipus, the capitalist state sublimates sexual desire into complacent consumerism; the patriarchal power of the state is dependent upon the libidinal economy. Managing sexuality through marriage and the libidinal economy becomes a central tenet of state legitimation. The project of modernity, beginning in the Counter-Reformation, has succeeded in defining individuals through their sexuality. The ongoing modern project has resulted in subjects constructing individual identities through sexualities, normative or non-normative. Indeed, the construction of sexual norms is a necessary component of biopower. If so, queering the bourgeois aegis must be our collective project. Queering the bourgeois aegis entails the celebration of non-normative sexualities and uncertain sexualities, indeed of all sexualities (and the destruction of the idea of normalcy), and of divorcing sexuality from discourses of power and identity. We must grant sexuality both less power and more. We must disinvest sexuality from identity in order to re-invest it with a celebration of being -- to queer the bourgeois aegis.

I also hope that the expansion of marriage will lead to a parallel imaginative and ethical expansion in the American state and subject. However, it is necessary to remember that, as important as marriage equality is, expanding marriage to gay couples also serves to paper over more essential and existential issues of sexuality and subjectivity in America. What does it mean that queer individuals are more likely than any other group to be the victim of hate crimes, which increase in frequency each year? That queer youths are more likely to suffer depression or commit suicide than any other group? To suffer from estrangement, alienation, and exile? That 40% of homeless youth identify as queer? And, given the HRC's blatant normalization of cigendered homosexuality, what will happen to alternate sexualities? If cisgender homosexuality becomes is absorbed into the bourgeois social / sexual constructions of the state, what will come of non-normative queerness? While expanding marriage is a necessity, it must be problematized, and sexuality must be divorced from state power, and from the social / sexual construction of the bourgeois aegis. The aegis itself must be destroyed, or at least deconstructed.

Although I have belabored the distinction between the Black and Queer Freedom Movements, I do think that comparing the two can offer certain insight into contemporary debates about the managing of sexuality and biopower, through theoretical methods delineated in my second paragraph. In particular, I am troubled by the sometimes tenuous connection between true equality and progressive legislation. Legislation is imperative, but we cannot forget that legislation is a political act, an act that legitimizes the state apparatus. True equality transcends political equality, and true equality must come from a cultural / ethical foundation. The expansion of political equality can change culture, but it is limited.

Specifically, I am troubled by the short gap in historical time between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Moynihan Report of 1965. The Civil Rights Act is a landmark of legislation which outlawed racial and gendered discrimination and segregation. The Civil Rights Act represents the zenith of the legislative component of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, the Civil Rights Act represents the structural thinking of the United States polity, where racial inequality is a systematic, not incidental, injustice and a historical reality which must be mitigated through aggressive and structural legislation. Equality, in this sense, is a goal that political legislation can and must cultivate. Furthermore, the Civil Rights Act suggests that political and economic injustices are to blame for continued inequality, and that the government must play an active role in promoting equality, which is within the responsibility of a just government providing for general welfare. Structural problems must be alleviated through structural intervention.

However, in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Johnson, wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," which is commonly referred to as the Moynihan Report. The Moynihan Report represents the transition from structural thinking about inequality to thinking socially about inequality, a transition from thinking materially to ideologically, and assuming that poverty and inequality are incidental, not inherent, to the machinations of the American state. It is a transition from Liberalism to neoliberalism. Whereas the Civil Rights Act suggests that structure determines inequality, the Moynihan Report vilifies black culture and black families as the source of inequality. The Moynihan Report, and the type of anti-structural and anti-materialist thought that this represents, indicates the cessation of the legislative component of the Civil Rights Movement and the uncertain path toward true equality. After the Moynihan Report, the Civil Rights Movement petered out and fractured, and blacks still suffer from structural and systemic inequality, and poor are routinely victimized and vilified for their own determined fate. The silencing of the structural imagination portends dispossession and estrangement, and stultifies our empathy and, by extension, the fate of democracy.

While we wait for the Supreme Court's decision on DOMA and Proposition 8, it is important to problematize the relationship between legislative equality and cultural equality. Despite still waiting for broad legislation promoting marriage equality, I fear that our cultural imagination too closely resembles the myopic and bigoted thinking of the Moynihan Report, which refuses to think structurally and instead blames the dispossessed for their own poverty, or the non-heterosexual for their own non-normative sexuality. Such imagination is evident in conservative rhetoric about the supposed choice to embrace a non-normative sexuality, debates about whether sexuality is cultural or genetic, and the quixotic search for a "gay gene." Such limited and offensive thinking vastly oversimplifies sexuality, and demands that sexuality remain an individual choice and a component of individual identity. It also papers over the truly fraught and deterministic relationship between culture and the individual, and suggests that culture cannot determine individuality, or that the so-called individual is not culturally bound. This ideology presents the individual as an essential, a-historical and stable front, as opposed to an unstable and shifting narrative function. Not only is sexuality inherently cultural, in that it flows between bodies and beings, but our definitions of sexuality, and our demand that sexuality be essential to identity, is obviously a cultural demand. "Normal" and "deviant" are cultural constructions, which conservatives attempt to define as essential and individual choices. Conservatism and neoliberalism rely on this boiling down of structural issues into individual and familial choices in ways that obscure material and structural determinants of the individual. As Marx corrects, however, "life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." The task of the leftist is to re-invigorate discourse with structural, materialist, and historicizing thought, blended with existential empathy for the individual. To both contextualize the individual and individuate the context, and always to question what may be obscured through discourse.

Expanding our national conception of marriage is necessary. More urgent, however, is the need to problematize, deconstruct, and destroy the ethical and imaginative construction of the bourgeois aegis and the social / sexual norm. We must re-invest discourse with existential concern built on structural and materialist foundations. And, in light of this debate over marriage equality, strive to queer the bourgeois aegis through a simultaneous celebration of sexuality and rejection of sexual-identity essentialism. To celebrate unconstrained sexuality as part of our beings, but not to allow forces of cultural determination to contain our fates. To sing ourselves and celebrate ourselves while shearing our labels. Perhaps this should be part of a postmodern (or Whitmanian) approach to sexuality after the deconstruction of the totalizing subject-formation inherent to modernity. Whatever the Supreme Court decides, it is obvious that it will not and cannot go far enough toward manifesting equality. Legislation, no matter how progressive, is a limited means to an elusive end of true equality. And, our contemporary discourse surrounding marriage equality obscures certain assumptions about sexuality, about the state, and about the bourgeois aegis. While marriage equality is necessary, reducing the construction of sexuality and sexual norms to legislation cannot truly advance a politics of transformation, or what Nietzsche and Martin King refer to as the "transvaluation of values." The true task of transformation, then, lies with the leftists.

"Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is
hardly different from myself."

- Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

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tarantino's gold watch: the postmodern condition, pulp fiction, & messianic time

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 17:50:00 +0000

"This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather during the first world war. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee, made by the first company to ever make wrist watches. Up until then, people just carried pocket watches. It was bought by Private Doughboy Ryan Coolidge the day he set sail for Paris. This was your great-grandfather's war watch, and he wore it every day he was in the war. Then when he had done his duty, he went home to your great-grandmother, took the watch off and put it in an old coffee can. And in that can it stayed 'til your granddad Dane Coolidge was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Germans once again. This time they called it World War Two. Your great-grandfather gave this watch to your granddad for good luck. Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as good as his old man's. Dane was a Marine and he was killed along with all the other Marines at the battle of Wake Island. Your granddad was facing death, and he knew it. None of those boys had any illusions about ever leaving that island alive. So three days before the Japanese took the island, your granddad asked a gunner on an Air Force transport named Winocki, a man he had never met before in his life, to deliver to his infant son, who he had never seen in the flesh, his gold watch. Three days later, your granddad was dead. But Winocki kept his word. After the war was over, he paid a visit to your grandmother, delivering to your infant father, his Dad's gold watch. This watch. This watch was on your Daddy's wrist when he was shot down over Hanoi. He was captured and put in a Vietnamese prison camp. He knew if the gooks ever saw the watch that it'd be confiscated; taken away. The way your Dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes were gonna put their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. And then he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you."

- Captain Koons, Pulp Fiction, 1994 [watch the video here]

"A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal image' of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history."

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History: XVI, 1940

Now does not seem an auspicious time to discuss Tarantino's 1994 opus Pulp Fiction, but the unstable accumulation of historical time and the prodigious palimpsest of his ouvre offer certain retrospective insight into Tarantino's definitive treatment of pre-millennial postmodernism. Tarantino's aesthetic and theoretical interests are dense and varied, and imbue his pieces with a paradoxical combination of cinematic opacity and a multivalent fragmentation. Tarantino presents a distinctive incoherence and tension to the viewer. His films are deeply unsettled, and deeply unsettling. And the subject by which Tarantino is most viscerally unsettled, for all of his pop-cultural bailiwicks, is history. And, in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino's concern for history manifests as a passionate critique of the postmodern as he shatters the simulacrum of American history and culture, exploding the 'empty, homogenous time' of the postmodern present through the critical narrative of messianic time.

One can read a clear schism in Tarantino's cinema, where the historical event and image of 9/11 functions as an epistemic fissure in his films. In his pre-9/11 films, including Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Jackie Brown (1997), but most resplendently in Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino grapples playfully with the postmodern condition, exploring referents and pasting together scraps of cultural history into jagged and anxious films comprised of witty and highly-coded language, a troubling degree of both oppressive and cathartic violence, uncertain identity and masculinity, theories of performance and meta-theatricality, highly deliberate and often dissonant choices of music, et cetera. Tarantino toys with aesthetics of identity, performance, and authenticity; his early films are playful, cyclical, and circular. Violence in his pre-9/11 work is generally anti-hierarchical -- freely flowing and universal, divested of judgement and historical weight. While his post-9/11 oeuvre is constructed with similar playfulness, his new obsession -- read through Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Django Unchained (2012) -- is retributive violence. 9/11 functions as a point of epistemic breakage for Tarantino, and his violence is teleological and clearly invested with moral and historical judgement. In these works, Tarantino confronts systems of total power -- patriarchy, Nazism, and American slavery, respectively. He invests his oppressed characters with world-historical violence and the potential to change history. The Basterds and Django each harbor apocalyptic visions and millennial imaginations -- rejecting the end-of-history 'inverted millenniarism' of postmodernism (Jameson). Blood flows through Tarantino's post-9/11 films as if a dam had been opened -- flowing blood is Tarantino channeling the currents of history through the violent and vengeful uprising of the oppressed (but whether he successfully channels this is uncertain). After 9/11, Tarantino still constructs his films as pastiche, but his primary concern is vengeance. Another shared characteristic of his post-9/11 films has been the anxious quest to tame history, which, in addition to his shattering of history and creation of new narratives, is also illustrated in his locating his films further and further into the historical past -- into a period of time and period of consciousness less colonized by the image; the premier filmmaker of the rootless imago must search for a pre-historical referent. This history-shattering impulse is most clearly seen in Basterds, but can also be read through Django (which is to be the subject of a forthcoming essay). And Tarantino first toys with this desire to shatter history -- to throw a stone through the simulacrum of American pop-culture and atrophied American consciousness -- in his prescient and messianic Pulp Fiction. Thus must Pulp Fiction be read as Tarantino's first effort to construct dialectical narratives that destroy totalizing systems of the eternal present. Pulp Fiction offers a lens into Tarantino's entire cinema. Pulp Fiction provides a key to his psyche.

History furnishes Tarantino's simulated playground, and Pulp Fiction bears witness to his cinematic enthusiasm for historical and cultural reference. Pulp Fiction is an energetic pastiche, a wild melange of referents and signifiers. While the film seems to be set in the mid-1990s, its temporality is uncertain -- Tarantino generously sprinkles floating images of cinematic and historical reference throughout the swirling gallimaufry of signifiers. Which is to say that Tarantino, in Pulp Fiction, is not expressly concerned with lived history but in the history of the image. Pulp Fiction is meticulously constructed as a series of fragmented sequences which create, together, a hermeneutic circle of the recycled image and cyclical time; Pulp Fiction is a gratuitous carnival of post-war pop culture. To engage Pulp Fiction is to be threatened to be overwhelmed by and drowned in the 'total animal soup of time,' of history, and of the image. The opening sequences are vertiginous in their postmodern homage, which affronts the viewer as an unstable and overwhelming totality. Tarantino assumes an aggressive stance toward the viewer, as he does in all of his films, challenging the audience with a disorienting pastiche of pop-cultural Americana. Tarantino simultaneously summons arcana from each decade of post-war America to construct an uncanny collage of cinematic assemblages. Indeed, the historical and cultural incoherence of Pulp Fiction is so destabilizing that the viewer struggles to locate the film in any recognizable temporal setting. Seemingly every aspect of the film's construction is crafted as reference -- even the unexpected casting of John Travolta, himself loaded with cultural signification of American cinema. Travolta's character -- sipping soda pop in Jack Rabbit Slim's (the diner as 1950s pastiche) with the cocaine-addled wife of gangster Marsellus Wallace -- correctly identifies the authentic Marilyn Monroe simulation out of several costumed performers. A philosophical assassin earnestly quotes Ezekial before killing unexplained targets and after consuming their fast food, the Big Kahuna Burger and Sprite. Bonnie, a minor character, is inadvertently killed in the midst of a one-sided theological debate about miracles. Characters arrange and confirm scrupulous and oblique plans of action with their backs to the camera, foreclosing identification with the viewer. The same characters remind others to 'stay in character,' to perform themselves. The virtues of any character are muddled and uncertain. The entire film is bizarre, destabilizing, and alienating to the audience. The impossibility of authenticity, where America's cultural past comes swirling back as ahistorical and cyclical pastiche, where seemingly all the characters admit to the performed fiction of their identities -- Tarantino's postmodern impulse -- distinguishes Pulp Fiction as a film interrogating the postmodern condition, identified by Lyotard as an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives.' The consumerist, cultural, and historical worlds elide in Tarantino's imagination into a flattened pastiche and celebration of the image. Tarantino's cinematic world is one that has abandoned a sense of historicism, where past and present exist simultaneously -- one can never forget, one can never remember, and none can dream of a future. Tarantino pours the cultural consciousness of post-war America into a grinder, presenting to the viewer an semi-coherent mess of pulp.

Indeed, Pulp Fiction exposes such Lyotardian incredulity in Tarantino's aesthetic. The film itself is meticulously broken into disconnected sequences, micro-narratives which yield to interpretation only in retrospect. The atemporal and ahistorical catastrophe of the film piles upon and alongside itself inconsistently, without context, explanation, or apology. The viewer is disoriented and alienated from the film's interiority, and must examine the fragments of the catastrophic film to consider it. The first scene is also the last scene -- the entirety of Pulp Fiction reveals itself as a self-referential circle of recycled images and fractured narratives. In Tarantino's summoned phantasmagoria of the eternal present through pastiche, 'by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts..., [he] effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project,' to quote Fredric Jameson. Tarantino's ahistorical and flattened pastiche functions to foreclose against the possibility of a future. Jameson refers to postmodernism's inability to envision the future and its simultaneous impulse toward the pastiche as an 'inverted millenarianism.' Pulp Fiction summons a postmodern end of history, where the recycled images and nightmares of the past weigh on the brains of the living, to paraphrase Marx. The past and uncertain present intermingle. As if to dramatize this postmodern intensity of the image, Uma Thurman's character graphically overdoses on cocaine to conclude the first third of the film. Thurman's overdose parallels the overdose of the viewer, overwhelmed by reference, performance, and pastiche. And, as Thurman's resurrection foretells, the viewer seeks an escape from and alternative to the postmodern house of mirrors, the simulacrum of cultural stagnation and nostalgia.

Shortly after Thurman's cocaine overdose -- her death and resurrection -- Tarantino provides the key to unlock Pulp Fiction. The magisterial 'Gold Watch' sequence glows as Ariadne's thread through the labyrinthine and opaque postmodernism of the film; the 'Gold Watch' sequence wraps the entirety of the film around itself. The watch warps the temporal fabric of the film, and, peering through the watch, one can discern the mechanical gears of the film's construction. The 'Gold Watch' sequence, nestled scrupulously beneath layers of film-sequence, is actually the final act in the fragmented temporality of film-time. Between each portentous ticking of the gold watch opens, to quote Benjamin, a 'gate through which the Messiah might enter.' The inevitable ticking of the materialist watch links the past and the future in a redemptive eschatology; the messianic time it bears leads Butch and the viewer out of the claustrophobic present and into the future. Through the watch flow the currents of history. Simply put, the 'Gold Watch' sequence blasts open Tarantino's summoned postmodern simulacrum and, through the sheer momentum of its own narrative urgency, propels the film and the viewer into the uncolonized future.

Tarantino introduces this golden thread of messianic time through a monologue by Christopher Walken, in which the actor stares directly into the camera, directly addressing the childhood Butch alongside the viewer. The audience, which had been denied sympathetic identification with the film, is thereby interpolated into empathetic identification with Butch. Walken's soldier, in bestowing the child his late father's gold watch, connects the artifact with a personal and national historic past. Walken's soldier, offering this gift of time memorial, is blessing the child with the gift of history, memory, and future time. In his effort to blast open the continuum of history, Butch and the viewer must enter the current of historical time. In a film rendered so opaque by Tarantino's obsession with the postmodern eternal present, Butch's 'Gold Watch' storyline offers narrative liberation from the swirling eddies of fragmented cultural pastiche. The gold watch is a reification of redemptive eschatologies. Butch, portrayed by Bruce Willis, bears the current of history into the uncertain future. He, and his grand narrative, shatter Tarantino's simulacrum of the eternal present. Butch and his gold watch inaugurate a new grand narrative that blasts open Tarantino's pastiches and propels the audience into the future. The gold watch, and Willis' character more broadly, cracks open Pulp Fiction, weaving a liberationist ethos coursing through the continuum of history. For Tarantino, the totality through which the gold watch must blast is the eternal present of postmodernism itself. Therefore, Pulp Fiction, as much as it is a postmodern film, must also be read as a critique of the postmodern and an appeal to liberating grand narratives. Narrative, as an aesthetic and political form, is one that can offer counter-memories and counter-histories, one that can blast powerfully into the future.

Butch is presented with the watch as a child by his grandfather's friend, thereby inaugurating the watch as a totemic and material representation of a historical and messianic narrative. The watch had already linked individuals and enterprises across lines of history, race, and nationality. History, reified in the watch itself, is thereby interred through bodies, carried in multiple anuses in its route through catastrophe. Furthermore, Butch's quest to recover historical time allows him to save Marsellus Wallace, the gangster who had arranged Butch's assassination, in the midst of a brutal rape by a white cop (and this scene must be interpreted as a literal synecdoche of the racist prison-industrial complex). The body, therefore, is the locus of redemptive history and messianic time as well as hegemonic state power, realized in the sado-sexual fascism of the repressive police state. Only through reclaiming this collectivist history, suggests Butch, can we destroy oppressive structures. As Hegel's Spirit, the gold watch moves through human bodies in a collectivist enterprise to transcend history itself. Apart from Samuel L. Jackson's character (who I will cover shortly and who also desires to transcend the postmodern), Willis' character is the only figure who can be said to believe in anything grand or holy or transcendent, to believe in the redemptive possibilities of history. And for his character, Butch, that redemptive or messianic potential is reified in the totem of the watch itself. And, as the other characters swirl about in the aesthetic eddies of postmodernism, Butch insists upon moving forward and baptizing new ontologies and new modes of being for himself and for his lover.

Butch's freedom dreams impel his transcendent imagination. At one point in the film, while leaving his final boxing match in which he incidentally kills his opponent (to quote Adorno, 'the recent past always appears as if destroyed by catastrophe'), Butch rides in a cab, propelled forward by the inevitable march of time; unlike the other characters, Butch rides into the future. Behind the cab is spliced black and white footage from an old film; Butch, his totemic watch ticking the seconds of historical time, peers resolutely into the future. And, upon realizing that his gold watch --and with it his connection to history and therefore his identity -- has been forgotten in his apartment, he risks his life to reclaim himself. Butch's impulse to recover his own history and identity distinguishes him from the other characters in the film, with the eventual exception of Jackson's character. And his dangerous quest to recover himself allows him to move beyond the stultified micro-narrative aesthetic and structure of the film as a whole; his success in recovering his individual history allows him to bound into the resplendent future. After reclaiming his history and saving Marsellus, Butch and his lover ride into the future on a motorcycle named 'Grace.' Butch's storyline, his messianic grand narrative, stretches as a golden thread through the otherwise serpentine film. Butch, having reclaimed history and now propelled by grace, blasts through the pastiche of Tarantino's eternal present and restarts historical time. Butch wants to return to the site of catastrophe, to make whole what has been smashed.

A major criticism of Tarantino, especially in reference to Django Unchained, revolves around his propensity to mold his films out of pulp (and this is the crux of Spike Lee's critique of Django), as if his unapologetic adulation of genre film is anathema to intellectual or political cinema. Tarantino, relying on fragments of the cultural dustbin, does create serious and intellectually challenging films. In this way, Tarantino is a figure also looking into the past for inspiration and to reclaim the liberationist thread of history. Pulp fictions can be molded to provide a liberationist framework, a dialectical grand narrative of redemption.Tarantino, the curator-creator, finds his aesthetic parallel in Butch's messianic attempt to reclaim history. And the ultimate goal of Tarantino's work is the forging of new narrative structures which can explode Benjamin's continuum of history. Tarantino is a resolutely eschatological and apocalyptic thinker, focused not on the end of history, as Pulp Fiction at first suggests, but on reclaiming history, and on forging new histories. History for Tarantino is not only a playground but an opportunity for new creation; eschatological narratives and pulp fictions offer a thread of redemption and a promise of new futures. And only through reclaiming redemptive kernels of the past, symbolized in the gold watch, can Butch and Tarantino blast open the continuum of history and dare to imagine future alternatives. And in this way, one can read Tarantino's recent works into Pulp Fiction, in which he confronts the totality of postmodernism through constructing a liberating counter-narrative, a pulp fiction, which dares to shatter the simulacrum of the the eternal present. It is reductive, then, to limit Tarantino as a postmodern filmmaker, when, as much as he relies on postmodern tricks and techniques, his films betray a liberationist impulse that seeks to transcend the problems of the postmodern present. Any narrative is a counter-narrative in the fragmented culture-scape of postmodernism, and Butch's 'Gold Watch' offers a trajectory through which one can blast through the piecemeal labyrinth of the eternal present.

While Tarantino identifies himself in the messianic narrative of Butch, Tarantino ultimately situates himself into the film in the mystical optimism of Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winfield. Winfield is, like Tarantino himself, a philosophic peddler of violence, but also an eschatological thinker concerned with redemptive narratives. He works as a hitman for Marsellus Wallace. When confronted with and saved by a miracle, Jules too exits the cycle of history. While his exit parallels that of Butch, Jules' narrative occurs at the conclusion of the film but in the midst of the film's temporal narrative. He, with Tarantino, is truly exiting the cycle of historical time in search of nirvana, although Tarantino dramatizes the cycle's continuity after Jules' salvation, following Travolta's Vincent through his own death. Jules exits the film and exits history, following an impulse to 'walk the earth' as a holy man.

Near the tense and cathartic conclusion of Pulp Fiction, Jackson's Jules opens his infamous briefcase. From it emits an otherworldly and mesmerizing glow. Inside the briefcase glows the promise of new futures and redemption beyond the present, the desire to blast open the continuum of history and re-invigorate the present with splinters of messianic time. Tarantino, despite his postmodern foibles, nurses within his film and within himself a transcendent imagination, a yearning for lost authenticity, and, ultimately, an desire for and impulse toward glorious and unrealized futures.

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eye tiresias

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:28:00 +0000

"And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead."

- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

America, designated by Tocqueville as an 'Empire of the Mind,' has metamorphasized into an Empire of the (Evil) Eye. The optics of imperialism, facilitated through the ruthless panoptics of the drone, see and realize death. As the carrion or vulture circles above the site of death, the drone circles above a site of future death premeditated and delivers violence foretold. I wrote in my previous treatment of drones, 'Predator Ontologies,' that a schematic shift wrought by the drone is the abstraction of death, where the digital and simulated mapping of empire takes imaginative precedent over the physical mapping -- the drone flies in a simulated world, but traffics in real death. American imperialism is one partially constructed through optics, through the mechanical eye of the drone. Imperial optics find their dialectical counterpart in blindness; and the American drone program lies behind a veil, behind which it sees, judges, and enacts violence on the world. The drone lies behind a veil inscrutable; the drone and the human occupy different modes of existence, which precedes and determines essence. The drone is a teleological instrument that asserts the supremacy of Empire through the mechanical eye, and the human is blind in comparison. The panoptic bears an inverse relationship with truth. But the dichotomy between seeing and blindness also carries within in the weight of prophecy, and the prophetic voice, the voice of Tiresias, is amplified in the oppressed. The supernatural power of the oppressor is one of panoptics; the blind shall inherit the earth.

Abdullah Fadiq discovers his two cousins incinerated by an American drone strike in Yemen. Only their eyes remain to haunt the present. "We found eyes, but there were no faces left." In these eyes burns a prophetic power; in these eyes burns the transformative power of judgement foretold. These eyes carry dialectical sight. These are the eyes of Tiresias.

I am haunted by the imagery of these eyes in remainder, these prophetic eyes burning dialectically from the dust and desert scorched. As a terrible mockery of God, the drone sees all, the drone knows all, and the drone rains fire from heaven. But the drone cannot create, the drone cannot protect, and the drone cannot redeem. We must look, then, to the prophet -- into and through the prophet's eyes -- to redeem the past, awaken the dead, and march into new unspoken and unseen futures. These eyes remain to bear the weight of suffering. These eyes remain to foresee and foretell the future. Though blind, Tiresias' prophetic voice burns through history, through ancient and the modern; the voice of the prophet is itself a current of liberation. Tiresias foretells that Oedipus will rise up and kill his father and reign justly as king. Tiresias, even after death, offers Odysseus counsel from the Underworld and helps him return home to Ithaca. The voice of the prophet is simultaneously nostalgic and liberating, a voice ushering in new freedom while inviting one into harmony with the world. A voice redeeming the past and realizing the future. Urging one to rise against the oppressor, urging one gently home to paradise. The voice of the blind prophet transcends history, transcends time, transcends death. Tiresias; living and dead both, male and female both, past and future both, seeing none and foreseeing all. Tiresias, within whom the dialectic and prophetic impulse beats urgently still. These eyes judging from the desert are Tiresias'; the eyes of the oppressed are Tiresias'; the liberating current of the future is foretold by Tiresias, woven by the Fates, and realized through the dialectical soul of humanity. Humanity, though blind, must peer prophetically into the future and imagine new creations.

As the panoptic eye promises superhuman domination to the oppressor, the prophetic eye must offer critical judgement and a promise for a new future. When the blind speak history quakes. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," again to quote Eliot's Tiresias. We among the living must carry within us the dialectical and prophetic sight of Tiresias slain, Tiresias whose soulful voice beats up from below, Tiresias whose eyes are full of blood, Tiresias whose voice is full of judgement, Tiresias whose tongue is full of pain. We must allow the prophet, blinded and slaughtered, to see and to speak new worlds into existence. The prophet in the eyes forsaken in the desert burns an enduring judgement into the panoptic veil of empire. We must allow Tiresias to imagine and to foresee and to foretell the future.

"My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes
of worlds."

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

and please see another essay in my drone series, 'predator ontologies'
and please see another essay in my prophesy series, 'a dream deferred'

the photo above comes from The New York Times, 'Drone Strikes' Risks to Get Rare Moment in Public Eye,' 5 February 2013

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a dream deferred

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:42:00 +0000

"Deep in my heart, I do believe
that we shall overcome someday"

The King remembered is too often a King forgotten. And, as we celebrate the second inauguration of America's first black president, on the day consecrated for the living memory of the slain King and in the city and nation that has since cast King in stone, we must reject any facile connection between Martin King and President Obama. Obama's second inauguration on Martin Luther King Day offers a window to discuss the ahistorical reification of King in the Age of Obama. President Obama is symbolic of a flattening of King's dream; his Presidency a bargain -- a pragmatic sublimation of the radical black tradition into the White House. As King argued in 'Beyond Vietnam,' his vitriolic 1967 speech against President Johnson, against Vietnam, against American injustices, and against the corrupted matrix of American hegemony -- 'a time comes when silence is betrayal.' So too must the American left resurrect the memory of the fallen King, the true and dangerous memory of the slain prophet, the living memory of counter-hegemonic imagination and mobilization, and refuse to be satisfied by the insufficient balm of pragmatism and the tainted wells of compromise. As King argued in the same speech, America's soul has been poisoned by the 'giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.' Only through resurrecting the insurrectionist and idealistic impulse of King can the soul of America find redemption.

While it may be true that President Obama has realized the narrow dream of a fetishized King -- a King in stone, an ahistorical and Liberal (and libertarian) King only concerned with voting rights and shallow integration -- it is necessary to explode the myth of Obama as the realization of King's dream. King was and must remain a fiery and radical critic of American hegemony, indicting the twin injustices of domestic and foreign policy. How can a nation claim to protect liberty and justice while raining fire on the oppressed? How can a nation claim to defend liberty and justice while protecting corporatism and patriarchy, to the detriment of the people, both at home and abroad? King's unanswered questions still resonate today, in a terrible age of drone warfare and escalating poverty and dispossession. Toni Morrison identifies 'racism, patriarchy, and capitalism' as the contemporary triplets that prevent the blossoming of what King imagined to be the 'beloved community;' King's intersectional specters haunt us still.

Martin King and President Obama are both recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. However, Obama speaks in the voice of the state -- the state that gives credence to a military-industrial apparatus which escalates drone wars in deserts, while doing little to protect the dispossessed (globally or locally), the climate, or halt the zombie creep of corporate capitalism and income inequality. Obama speaks in the voice of the same American state that King identified as the 'greatest purveyor of violence in the world.' Furthermore, President Obama does not, in word or deed, speak for black America or poor America, which have both suffered inordinately during Obama's first term. Conservatives point to President Obama as the realized dream of King purely because of his race. It is necessary, however, to remember the suffering legions of America and of the world as anathema to King's dream, which transcended racial categories and sought nothing less than a transformation of the American society and state. Whereas King in the Liberal imagination offered little beyond a bourgeois ethos of idealistic and uncritical integration into the capitalist superstructure, the true King saw far deeper into the corrupt American psyche and sought creatively to destroy it. King began to adopt a mantle of transnational liberation from oppression, developing a radical DuBoisian outlook on the intersectionalities of oppression through capitalism, racism, and imperialism. Obama does not speak for black America or poor America, and, while he has individually risen to heretofore unrealized pinnacles, he has not given voice to any latent impulses toward solidarity or the collective. Martin King pounded on the terrible paradox of the American experiment -- that in the richest nation in the world, ostensibly founded on the ideals of democracy, freedom, and justice, so many should suffer from poverty and systematic oppression. And this systematic oppression continues -- cruelly, terribly, tragically -- through the presidency of Barack Obama. President Obama can only be the realization of King's dream if that dream is one in accordance with neoliberalism, imperialism, and individualism; therefore, no dream of King's at all; rather, a nightmare.

President Obama does not speak for the oppressed. He does not speak truth to power. Barack Obama has sacrificed the black radical tradition for the Presidency, and now speaks in the voice of power. The prophet, as Samuel and as King, must speak from a position outside of the ideological apparatus. The prophet must speak from a place of exile. And, when Martin King's memory has been yoked to the reactionary urges of Glenn Beck, when the ruling classes attempt to re-route King's 'mighty stream' of radical justice into the shallow eddies of bourgeois conformity, it is necessary to take up King's cross and march against the 'grain of history,' to cite Walter Benjamin. To conflate King's memory with political or imaginative conservatism, either through Beck or through Obama, is to cast King in stone and silence his memory. Although King was killed in 1968, he continues to speak to our present and to our future. King cannot be imprisoned in the past and must speak again, for silence is betrayal. Through the angry memory of King resurrected we must reclaim the past in order to build the future. When Martin King accepted his Nobel Prize, he accepted it as commission on behalf of the oppressed across the world and as a commitment to continue working for the 'brotherhood of man,' the 'beloved community.' This is the King we must remember -- the King imagining and mobilizing against intersectional oppressions, working to restructure and transform the corrupted and decadent American society and state. He demanded a 'radical revolution of values;' this revolution yet eludes us and his dream is yet deferred.

We cannot allow the 'dangerous memory' of King to be sublimated into the patriotic bombast of the Second Inaugural or an uncritical embrace of President Obama. President Obama is not the embodiment of King's dream nor its realization. Nor can he be. The Prophet and the President cannot be so easily elided. King's legacy transcends the individual, transcends politics and nation, and, ultimately, must transcend History. It resides, as Hegel's Spirit, in the dialectical soul of humanity. We must resurrect the counter-hegemonic legacy of the Once and Future King in order to imagine and mobilize a future without war, without suffering, without hunger, without oppression. We must resurrect the counter-hegemonic legacy of the Once and Future King in order to explode the eternal present and march in solidarity into the future. We too must recognize that silence is betrayal; we must give voice to the voiceless and power to the oppressed and build toward the beloved community of unalienated and resplendent humanism. The dangerous dream, still deferred, of the Once and Future King beckons us into a transcendent future and transcendent being.

"This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born."

- Martin Luther King's Acceptance Speech, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, 10 December 1964

addendum, 26 January 2013: I have only now become aware of this statement of Cornel West, a true hero, in which he explicates his outrage over President Obama taking his Oath on Martin King's Bible (an action of which I had previously been unaware). West articulates the necessity of allowing King's prophetic and subversive voice to rise again and not be co-opted by power. As West argues, King was willing to die in order to give voice to the oppressed and dispossessed. That urgent voice must be heard again.

and please see another essay in my 'prophesy' series, 'eye tiresias' and a king fragment that I posted on 4 April, 2012

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predator ontologies

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:46:00 +0000

"And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed."

- Revelation 13: 11-15

"Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself."

- Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944

Predator's uncanny moment of mimetic laughter at the violent denouement of 1987's military-industrial Predator simultaneously reveals the insidious dialectic between organic and technological agents of terror as well as exposes the dubious contours of humanity, colonized by the machine. Kevin Peter Hall's cyborgian and mechanistic laughter, ironically mimicking Schwarzenegger, mocks the hopelessness of the human enterprise and inversely reflects the human through violent negation. Schwarzenegger, hearing his own laughter in mockery, questions his own determinacy. For Predator, laughter is an aggressive intrusion, mimicking the human through that which distinguishes the human. This messy film, patrolling the undersides of imperialist ideologies, critiques the doomed telos of technology, where the encroachments upon the human by the predatory technological threaten human ontologies. And while Predator most directly offers a critique of United States imperialism through the Monroe Doctrine and Iran-Contra, the film offers itself more subtly to an anticipatory critique of United States imperialism in the age of Predator drone warfare. Predator exposes the uncertain definition of the human in an era of violent machines and cyborgs, and offers a critique against the literal war machines of United States imperialism. Predator is a reification of anxiety and indeterminacy in the Empire and in the individual. Predator reigns, an agent of invisible terror, in the jungle and, to quote Baudrillard, in the 'desert of the real.'

The Predator beast and the Predator drone are linked in their mechanistic and hegemonic violence. They both reveal themselves through violence and are made visible only through violence. And they only respond to violence in return. The mechanical, ironic laughter of the beast harmonizes with that of the drone, identifying and seeking to supplant the human. Laughter, a human state of joyful being, assumes a deathly ominousness when shared with the machine. Predator laughs with post-modern irony; Predator's laugh is joyless. The laughter of the Predator follows Fredric Jameson's concept of post-modern pastiche in that it performs a 'blank parody' of the authentic, wearing 'linguistic masks' and laughing at death. Predator speaks and its voice is that of death. Predator mocks Schwarzenegger, imploring, 'What the hell are you?' -- Predator's question resonates. When the technological attempts to identify with and supplant the human, the human must question its own status and mode of being. The technological defines a limit of humanity, and when the technological encroaches upon the human so violently through mimicry, the determinacy of human ontologies is shattered. The damning teleology of the technological condemns humans to a constant state of fear, terror, surveillance, and mockery. And although the machine's laughter is ironic, the machine cannot comprehend irony; the irony exists in the relationship between the human and the machine. The machine inverts and negates the human, and its laughter portends the inevitable death of the human. In fact, the negation of the human is only route of the Predator for self-disclosure and self-knowledge. Predator's existence is at odds with the human, and Predator's reign is inevitable. The telos of Predator is death. Predator grins, dialectically, revealing iron fangs.

In addition to rendering indeterminate any concept of the human through violent victimization, the deployment of the Predator also inverts the human status of the oppressor. While the origins of the Predator beast are hinted to be extraterrestrial, the Predator drone is a bureaucratic and scientific triumph of the United States military-industrial apparatus. The Predator beast and the Predator drone are metonyms of United States foreign policy and imperialism -- an invisible agent of arbitrary and aerial terror, a mechanistic surveyor, and a robotic beast of global hegemony. The Predator drone allows the United States a position of superhuman and supernatural dominance, dramatically re-writing modes of human interaction, diplomacy, justice, and war. The Predator drone is a capriciously unfair instrument of regional terror, making more violent and less human dynamics of global power. Through the Predator, the United States re-maps the world more fully and more flatly as a locus of exploitation and imperialism. Furthermore, the bizarre indeterminacy of the Predator drone in United States doublespeak -- where the drone is both a tightly guarded secret (Bradley Manning still suffers in prison for disclosing the war-crimes of the Predator regime) and the pride of rational and calculating United States apparatus protecting its 'security and interests' (even when that includes unconstitutional assassinations of American citizens abroad) -- suggests anxiety surrounding a new global role for the predatorial superpower. Predator is the violent and rational face of the Empire Mechanical, as the human agents of that empire kill algorithmically from computer banks and cubicles. Predator watches, coldly from the clouds, raining fire from heaven.

As to the hammer the world appears as a series of nails, to Predator the world and its citizens appear as a flattened series of potential targets and opportunistic nodes of hierarchy. Predator maintains a monopoly on violence. And when Predator hunts, Predator assumes a superhuman status; the resplendent and living world reveals itself virtually and flatly, humans reduced to targets. Predator self-identifies in a simulacrum -- coldly floating in the atmosphere over a flattened and abstracted map of the world, awash in numbers and referents -- but acts in the real world concretely through violence. Killing for Predator is an opportunity for self-disclosure through human negation; Predator is invisible until it kills, and must kill in order to realize itself. Empire, too, must kill in order to realize itself. And the Empire is reduced to a blank and blind parody of human ontologies because it has left them behind in its pursuit of the hegemony of aerial terror. In its rush to abstraction, the Empire, acting as and through Predator, has relinquished its humanity. Empire, acting as and through Predator, operates under a dangerous and damning illusion of unreality, performing fascistic fantasies of omnipotence in a simulated world, ignoring that the simulation is itself a delusion. The simulation supplants reality; the illusion can only be shattered, as in the film, through counter-hegemonic rebellion against Predator. In a simulacrum, no one can hear you scream. And Predator hunts, virtually and vicariously, but drawing real blood and bringing real death.

The violent human creates the machine to perform and maintain hegemony through violence; the machine in turn enslaves and laughs at the human. The mechanical Predator is itself an index of existential anxiety under late-capitalism; any analysis of contemporary culture or politics in the United States is insufficient without a discussion of drones. The drone is the hidden underside of United States culture and politics. The indeterminacy of the human subject, encroached upon by myriad processes of globalization and the profound estrangement of late-capitalism, is reified in the technological, in the drone and, concurrently, in the smartphone (which is to be the subject of a forthcoming essay). The technological is an index of anxiety. The drone is the reified inversion of the anxieties of a waning superpower; the smartphone is the reified inversion of the anxieties of the uncertain and precarious human under late-capitalism. The smartphone is dependent upon the same ideology and technology that makes possible the Predator; drone warfare, and the bureaucratic administration of mechanized death that it supports, is the extrapolated logic of the smartphone writ large and programmed to kill. The smartphone is the (seemingly) passive inversion of the violent mechanics of the drone. The relationship between Empire and Predator drone is the same relationship between the uncertain human individual and the smartphone. All anxiously elide under the Predator regime of late-capitalism, itself symptomatic of what Adorno and Horkheimer identify as the 'compulsive character of a society alienated from itself.' And, as we hurtle toward abstraction and toward a post-human future, wherein shall we find our soul? Predator awaits, in our pockets and in our skies.

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disaster triumphant, the fully enlightened earth, and the occupation of sandy

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:22:00 +0000

"We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind."

- Jean Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, 1961

A noxious and barometric air of disquiet gathers in the plains and deserts and oceans and poles, in tenements and in temples and churches, in trains, mosques, and universities, in streets, in cafes, through forests and through mountains. Our epoch has been termed the anthropocene, in which humans are the ostensible catalysts of the geological history of the world, and the world-bearing responsibility threatens now and forever to crush us. In ancient times, world-threatening events such as hurricane or famine would be interpreted as divine punishment; humans would respond, appeasing accordingly -- sometimes, in accordance with myth, through sacrifice. But now that we have usurped the gods and made ourselves sovereign, and we have no opening for appeasement or for hope. The violent irony of the anthropocene is that humans, at their zenith of collective sovereignty and power, because of this idea of sovereignty and power, now shudder at the brink of total ruin ('not with a bang, but a whimper'). Our sovereignty is imaginary, and Nature, reasserting her agency, will violently wrest the earth from our grip; we must one day relinquish this world to the unconcerned march of geological time. We still cling to myth -- to myths of control, to myths of reason and science, to myths in progress to faith in the human enterprise, and, of course, to the totalizing myth of capitalism -- but to no avail; to quote Adorno and Horkheimer, "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." And these crises open opportunities to shatter myth.

Climate is inevitable; the stock market is not. Yet intersections between the two lie in their shared capriciousness and unpredictability. Both are unimaginably complex processes that reject any attempt at human control. Both foreclose against human agency, and, in so doing, expose the relativity and dependence of the human enterprise more broadly. Of course, climate is an intrinsic component of the cosmos; the irony of the stock market lies in its constructedness, its creation by humans to serve capital -- it now obeys only the inhuman and uncaring forces of capital, for the benefit of the one percent. Climate makes humans aware of their place in a much more powerful world; capitalism attempts to situate humans above the world. Climate destroys solopsism; capitalism actively courts it, even relies on it. But both are forces that vastly transcend humanity, and that establish limits on human sovereignty. Capitalism and climate are two intersecting forces of suprahuman power. And their crashes and catastrophes can bring destruction and despair upon millions. We must reckon with the reality that hurricane and famine are no longer symptoms of divine punishment, but partially wrought through Western decadence. The stock market crash of 2008 stands in direct parallel to climate change and environmental degradation; Occupy Wall Street (which I have written about more directly here) stands in similar parallel to Hurricane Sandy. The oppressed gathers at the epicenter of destruction and demands reparations. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind."

Wall Street, that awesome synecdoche for the terrible engine of US and Western capitalism, with all of its constituents and components -- the real and symbolic center of Western capital, politics, and empire -- expands with the proliferation of capitalism. Capitalism expands globally to the detriment of the poor and disenfranchised, the non-Western, and the climate. Capitalism is the most totalizing force constructed for the extension of human sovereignty over the world, and the carbon-spewing scourge of capital spreads as a cancer over the enlightened earth. Climate change is directly related to the expansion of capitalism. Wall Street, overseeing as a sorcerer the vast mobilization of capital and the concurrent destruction of the environment, directly plants the seeds of its own destruction. Capital's reliance on carbon fuels, the deliberate exploitation of the earth and the literal burning of its geological past and destruction of its future, are quickly courting widespread ruin. Unimaginable environmental cataclysm will become dreadfully routine as the West continues to rely on carbon fuel and disregard its role in a much larger ecosystem. Hurricane Sandy is merely one in an increasing (dis)array of environmental catastrophes as we boil over the environmental pot. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind."

Hurricane Sandy devastated New York City and the surrounding region (as well as much of the Atlantic coast, from the Caribbean to Canada) in October 2012. Its terrific and terrible nickname 'Frankenstorm' attempts to speak to the superstorm's unimaginable scale, fury, and, most importantly, its supernaturalness. Mary Shelley composed Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in 1818 as an indictment of human overreach over nature, the doomed exploitation of natural forces, culminating in the unholy creation of an uncertain and supernatural force. Dr. Frankenstein's creation, of course, is an oversized and superhuman monster whose feelings of disenfranchisement and alienation compel him to react violently with the world into which he was placed. The appellation 'Frankenstorm' is even more fitting than its coiner, Jim Cisco, imagined. The Frankenstorm is a supernatural and violent reaction to total forces of human exploitation and overreach through the profligate machinations of cancerous capitalism, an equal and opposite reaction to the waste and destruction wrought by Wall Street. (Of course, a major part of the tragedy of Sandy results from the fact that the storm, as most natural disasters, disproportionately affect already impoverished communities. [And it is imperative not to ignore the human suffering that Sandy wrought.] The lights were turned back on in Wall Street weeks before destitute areas of coastline, further evidence of the evils of the way wealth and resources are distributed.) Supernatural responses, in the form of superstorms, parallel devastating crashes of careening Wall Street, the latter also effectively considered through the analogy of Frankestein. Wall Street is a human construct that has surpassed human control and wreaks havoc against communities and individuals. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind."

So, when Hurricane Sandy forced Wall Street to close and blacked out the financial district of New York, it achieved a terrible and symbolic triumph over financial capital and the profligate decadence of capitalism (although, as mentioned, it also brought untold suffering to millions of individuals and communities), exploding the forced dichotomy between nature and civilization. It enacted, through immense violence and human loss, one of the goals of Occupy -- Hurricane Sandy closed Wall Street and brought darkness over the epicenter of Western decadence. However, in one particular, intersectional way, Occupy and Sandy must be theorized as twin phenomena. They are both organic and opposing responses to the evils of Western opulence and the solipsism of capital. There are entire worlds of communities and ecosystems destroyed by the systemic cabal of big oil, big banks, et cetera, and ignored by weakened structures of neoliberal governance. Occupy Wall Street, which opened in September 2011, thirteen portentous months before Hurricane Sandy, is the human response to systemic disenfranchisement and alienation, and in direct relation to the Great Recession and the stock market crash of 2008. To distill my main argument into an analogy -- climate change : crash of 2008 :: Hurricane Sandy : Occupy Wall Street. And this was dramatized when Occupy Sandy led the local relief efforts throughout much of New York City in the post-Sandy ruin. Occupy Wall Street is the human and humanistic counterpart to Hurricane Sandy, calling on Wall Street to reckon for its injustices. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind."

(The word 'decadence' is perhaps overused but under-considered; it's nuanced meaning approaches both the opulence and immorality of Western capital and imperialism, as well as the impending and self-wrought decay of those systems. The word 'decadence' is a most fitting word for these times. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind.")

And now, the debts rise as the oceans rise, the lingering sense of dread continues to gather across the nation and the world. Individuals describe themselves as 'drowning in debt,' speaking to the inhuman and alienating processes of global capital, and approach the parallel between catastrophic climate change and catastrophic capitalism. Occupy and Sandy, as well as climate change more broadly, have left the national consciousness in favor of empty bluster about national debt and fiscal cliffs, and the threat of austerity sparkles wolfishly in the eyes of lawmakers hoping to maintain the unjust status quo. We cannot let the tides turn; we must seize this opportunity to remake the world anew.

At the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief, Bruce Springsteen bellowed righteously through his "Wrecking Ball," a song irrevocably of and for these times. The song and album were originally released in solidarity with Occupy, and now speak to Sandy as well, a timely and multivalent piece. Springsteen imagines his oeuvre as providing a triumphalist voice for the voiceless and ignored, the oppressed and disenfranchised. And his headlining performance at the relief concert spoke directly to and for those suffering, both from Sandy and from decades of estrangement and alienation "Wrecking Ball" resonates through the nation torn asunder by supernatural and economic processes through its multi-layered appeal to collective solidarity, alleviation of suffering, and the possibility for transcendence. "Hold tight to your anger," he yowls in refrain, which is a necessary and under-appreciated message for these times. In the face of the wrecking ball of malevolent neoliberal capital and furious superstorms, the disenfranchised must arise victoriously and channel a collective rage toward creatively dismantling the present in order to build a new future.

In the calm before the storm and in the eye of the hurricane emerge the possibilities of creating new worlds. The fragmented shards of ruin glimmer in the sun and point toward a new future, a future free from the shadows of the past. The responsibility of limited sovereignty in the weight of bearing the world opens the dreadful consequence of destroying the world, but we can also build the world anew. We must seize these opportunities, these periods of low-tide and peace, to reckon honestly with the world as it is. And we must seize these opportunities to remake the world anew. All we have are these fragments of possibility, and, to quote T.S. Eliot, we must use these fragments to 'shore against [our] ruin.' For more storms gather across the lands, the financial and natural seas continue to rise, and nature must collect her debts. In the still ruined shards of New York, the possibility of a new world shimmers auspiciously in the sunlight.

Today, 21 December, is the alleged date of the Mayan Apocalypse. While the world will not end today, we must on this day and on all days reckon with the world as it exists and dream dangerously of new beginnings and of new creations.

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spielberg's lincoln, spielberg's obama

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:02:00 +0000

"I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'"

- President Obama quoting President Lincoln, speech to the Democratic National Convention, 6 September 2012

It is impossible to ignore Barack Obama while watching Spielberg's Lincoln. The re-elected president, his idealism tempered and defeated by intransigence, wearied to the bone and driven to his knees, is the invisible axis around which Lincoln revolves, its subject in shadows. A question plagued me during my viewing of the film -- how would Lincoln be perceived if President Obama had not won re-election? And how is his re-election (or, alternately, would his failure to win re-election be) perceived through the framework of this film?

The film poignantly opens with Union soldiers, including a black soldier, reciting to a slumped and exhausted President the soaring and pregnant oratory of his "Gettysburg Address." The concluding words, delivered by a doleful black soldier slowly walking away -- "that this nation...should have a new birth of freedom" -- establishes an inspiring and idealistic bookend for a mostly dour film, and seems to resonate in the President's mind. This mimetic recitation draws a strict juxtaposition between Lincoln the dreamer and Lincoln the war-ravaged realist, which opens itself to the central metaphor of Spielberg's Lincoln as a representation of President Obama.

Lincoln is not a film concerned only with Abraham Lincoln. It is instead a film about Barack Obama, and must be read as such.

The film references and pays homage to Lincoln's rhetorical powers, and hints at a possible connection between this and his immense popularity, but does not depict Lincoln as a hero or as a dreamer. Instead, the Lincoln in the film is humbled, attempting to scavenge and scrap together votes for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He is at the mercy of Congress and historical contingencies, most notably the Civil War and the question of peace and eventual reconstruction. He is beat down by history. And the certainty of his inevitable assassination hangs over the film like a pall.

Lincoln has been extensively, and justifiably, criticized for its ahistorical silencing of black voices and its presentation of an inverted teleology of white politicians granting slaves freedom, rather than an organic movement, led by slaves, freedmen, and abolitionists, which ultimately worked to realize black freedom. History is a dangerous tool for it can be easily and subtly shifted to defend the status quo. History, of course, is always murky. Spielberg deliberately constructed his film in a certain way, and notably cut Frederick Douglass from the film entirely (a shame -- "power concedes nothing without demand," Douglass famously argued; a centrality of black agency ignored in Lincoln). It is not and does not explicitly attempt to be a historically accurate document -- it is instead a film about Barack Obama, and must be read as such. The "Lincoln" in the film is a cinematic construction, and functions as an explicit stand-in for President Obama.

Both men, Lincoln and Obama, are embroiled in ambiguous wars and pursue extra-judicial means of managing them (suspension of habeus corpus; drone warfare, NDAA). Both men are hampered by a mantle of race. Both men further carry within themselves a sea of melancholy, and a bulk of Lincoln attempts to convey this "damp, drizzly November" of Lincoln's soul. He is a president who aptly quotes Hamlet -- "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a / king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams" as an attempt to communicate his incommunicable gloom. (It is this phenomenal representation of the melancholy Lincoln, through Daniel Day-Lewis, that most enchanted me about the film.) Both men are plagued by doubts not merely political, but existential. Both men, at their core, are ciphers.

Spielberg's Lincoln is a deeply introverted pragmatist, rebuked by both the left and the right for his a) overly pragmatic gradualism through a betrayal of ideals and b) tyrannical overreaches. In one climax to the film, radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens must publicly support the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery while denying racial equality, with the further knowledge that the Amendment hardly goes far enough toward guaranteeing justice. The Thirteenth Amendment occupies familiar terrain in American politics, being too moderate for the left and too progressive for the reactionary right. (However, the Thirteenth Amendment still was far more radical, far more transformational, than anything President Obama has yet done. The amendment, as Alexander Stephens notes in the film, effectively destroys the economy of the South.) Stevens is the true tragic hero in this epic; he must sacrifice himself and his ideals to the milquetoast pragmatism of Lincoln. His heroism is framed through his sublimation of his own will for a higher purpose, despite his insistence that Lincoln does not go or see far enough. For this reason, Lincoln is depicted as a resigned pragmatist, scraping together what votes he can to pass an ultimately well-intentioned amendment, but who must nonetheless acquiesce to historical realities. Whereas Thaddeus Stevens is primarily motivated by what is right and just, Abraham Lincoln is motivated by what is possible. And the film celebrates that sublimation, that urge to compromise. And the film, in turn, attempts to foreclose against the questioning of the value of that compromise.

This re-capitulates a tired argument surrounding President Obama's first term, and his failures and successes as orator, as President, and as politician. Lincoln depicts the Presidency as a demanding job without great power, which renders Lincoln's soaring oratory an ultimately meaningless flourish. This is the same way that many observers interpret President Obama -- as a gifted orator and (former) idealist, but a man ultimately contained by historical and political realities and who must find a viable political strategy in order to move forward. This strategy must include compromise, as too many centrists, rightists, and far too many liberals argue. (David Brooks, predictably, loved the film.) But the criticism, if absurd, remains -- that President Obama had not earnestly pursued consensus, that President Obama had not internalized the responsibilities of leading through compromise rather than inspiring, that President Obama lacked political sense, that President Obama was unwilling to play the political game. That he was too narcissistic, too naive, too dependent on his own oratory, and too neglectful of the cumbersome act of forging compromises and gathering support, both from politicians and from the polity. Most of the center and right criticizes President Obama along these lines, suggesting that he is too ideological and refuses to compromise. The obvious farce of this argument does not warrant structured repudiation; compromise is fetishized in many circles. (A more fitting criticism is that President Obama has not been assertive enough, and has not maintained the transformative audacity for which many hoped.) And, if the President had not won re-election, this film would be read along such lines as a major criticism of the putative failures of the Obama Administration. That he had not sufficiently embraced this compromising and realpolitik Lincoln as a model.

Alternately, now that Obama has won re-election, he is positioned similarly to Lincoln in the opening of the film. He has won in November, but faces a divided nation, an intransigent Congress, and intractable political, military, economic, and social quagmires (tellingly, since Obama's re-election, citizens in all fifty states have amassed official petitions for succession -- the issues of the Civil War are not resigned to the past). Lincoln passes the Thirteenth Amendment through a pliable lame duck Congress, though it is suggested that this Amendment may be a waste of his newfound political capital. The President finds himself in a similar situation, still fielding complaints that the Affordable Care Act was an unrealistic and bullish, on one hand, or misguided on the other, a squandering of early political capital. Obama is perhaps aware that his Presidency will be ultimately judged on how willing he is to push initiatives through an obstinate Congress, and, therefore, how willing he is both to compromise and to involve himself in the gritty business of politicking and coaxing votes. He enters now a portentous period of reckoning. The terrific urgency of passing legislation through a body of corrupt politicians that scarcely recognizes his legitimacy claims the foreground, and his inspiring rhetoric and idealism are now in the past. The oceans rise and the world burns; the President must make a move.

President Obama has publicly and repeatedly articulated his admiration of President Lincoln. He has identified Lincoln as a model for his own aspirations, and awkwardly invoked Lincoln to defend his own policy decisions. Spielberg and Brooks would argue that the success of President Obama's second term depends on the extent to which the President is willing, like Lincoln, to seek pragmatic compromises at the expense of any ideals or appeals to justice. Indeed, Lincoln seems to suggest as much. But as Spielberg's film silences Frederick Douglass, the living left must remember Douglass' words and refuse to be silenced. A major component of President Obama's successes and failures in his second term must be how extensively and specifically the left today pressures him and his administration toward true progressive and transformative action. But a call to action was not really my motivation in this piece. Nor am I comparing the two presidents. I wanted more to meditate on the connections between Spielberg's Lincoln and President Obama, and pose the lingering question -- how is the film read through President Obama's re-election, and how is his re-election read through the prism of Lincoln?

Because, watching Lincoln, it is impossible not to consider Barack Obama.

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noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:18:00 +0000

"In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud.

And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among us, slaying that old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows of the bridges, killing the great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo and heavyweight champions of the world. And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism. Painters lift the easel to scrawl their innocence on walls and manifestos. Symphonies died on crowded roads. Novels served as furnished rooms for ideology."

- Pete Hammill, 1974, liner notes to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks

reckoning

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The President weeps when he reads The Giving Tree to his daughters and feels absolved.
The President carries their pictures in his wallet to remember.
The President took several art classes in college and still yearns to create spontaneous beauty.
The President loves his dog, who always and only sees him as a Good Man.
When The President looks in the mirror, he sometimes sees himself, and he sometimes sees The President, and he tapes a faded Polaroid to the mirror to remember.
As a boy, The President dreamt of his future and of one day becoming The President. He also dreamt of becoming an astronaut, a ballplayer, or a musician. He has since ceased to dream.
The President has been called a fascist, a socialist, a savior, a tragic hero, and, of course, a baby-killer; and sometimes he agrees.
When The President kisses his wife, he is kissing a memory, and she too kisses a memory.
The President once captured the imagination of the nation, and now anyone who meets The President will tell and re-tell the story with frequent and cliched embellishments.
The President has stopped believing in justice, freedom, and truth.
The President awakens in the middle of the night shrouded in sweat and screaming.
The President inherited a war on the opposite side of the globe that he has been unable to resolve.
The President is haunted by doubts of God, fate, poverty, redemption, and the meaning or purpose of life.
The President has a few happy moments in his day (such as meals with his family, mornings with his dog, light and sudden laughter for no apparent reason), but they are crushed by an omnipresent and indefinable weight.
The President struggles to recover some true humanity within, underneath, or somehow obscured by The President, and often doubts that he can, or that anything substantive remains.
The President will win a second term after touring the country, making speeches, and praising the troops. He will be more or less managed the entire time, and will often yearn for stillness.
The President will eventually retire, move to the coast, have heart surgery, and maintain a rigorous speaking schedule for the next fifteen or so years until his inevitable death.
The Former President and his wife will still be united by the sweetness of happy memories, and will have a few happy moments besides.
The Former President will still weep when reading The Giving Tree, but his daughters will have moved to the West Coast, married, and had children themselves, and these children will grow up to have dreams of their own and children of their own.
The Former President’s bestselling memoir Reckoning will consist of untold anecdotes and grave musings and will attempt to convey or maybe to conceal some true humanity within, underneath, or otherwise obscured.
Biographies concerning The Former President will interpret his life as inevitable and profound, which it wasn’t, until it was. They will struggle to communicate something real and true about The Former President.
The Former President’s dog will die and he will find another dog, and again another.
The Former President will finally possess stillness and this stillness will become unbearable.
The Former President will remain tortured by memory and will still sweat and scream in the night.
The Former President will pray for forgiveness and for peace.
The Former President will still yearn to create spontaneous beauty.
The Former President will be afraid, at the end, that his life has signified nothing.
The Former President will be sad for when he was a boy.

This was my entry to NPR's Round Nine of 'Three Minute Fiction,' a national story contest in which all entries are limited to six hundred words. Round Nine called for submissions regarding a real or fictional US President (and aren't all 'real' Presidents also fictional?), with the expectation to uncover some authentic personage. I did not win.

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eat your spinach: corporate personhood and the politics of patriachy

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:59:00 +0000

"Mr. Siegel added: 'I really wanted them to know how I felt four more years under President Obama was going to affect them. It would be no different from telling your children: ‘Eat your spinach. It’s good for you.’'"

- David Siegel, quoted in Steven Greenhouse, "Here's a Memo from the Boss: Vote This Way," The New York Times, 26 October 2012

This is how the democratic subject is imagined in a nation of corporate personhood. The calamitous passage of the 2010 Citizens United case has made porous any boundary between democracy and neoliberal capitalism, and the apotheosis of the corporate is embodied and legitimized in the shambolic huckster Romney's Presidential bid (or is it an auction?). In addition to unlimited corporate campaign contributions -- and the insidious equation of capital to speech, in order to dispel any doubts that we are living in a post-democratic, capitalist dystopia -- Citizens United also allows corporate heads to dictate the voting choices of their subjects. The assumption that a laborer must vote in the best interests of his or her company underscores the shift in the democratic paradigm. The individual is no longer a citizen, but the subject of capital. Citizenship, and its (putative) promise of voting rights, has been sold and re-written as corporate subjecthood. If we no longer vote as individuals, contextualized by history, race, gender, finances, interests, etc., but now vote as per the dictates of our corporate holders, we have dramatically revised the democratic assumptions of governance.

I am also interested in the particular phrasing of David Siegel, excerpted above. His first assumption follows a standard Republican motto, enshrined by Calvin Coolidge -- 'The business of America is business.' A laborer should vote in the interests of his or her company, because, ultimately, to do so is in the best interest of the laborer, in a typical conservative inversion. The only way that four more years 'under' President Obama will affect them, as individual citizens, is through a supposed increase of corporate tax rates. The individual citizen is now primarily a corporate subject, and should vote as such.

His second assumption reaffirms the foundational patriarchy of American conservatism. George W. Bush in 2000 campaigned on the paradox of 'compassionate conservatism,' which enshrines a condescending benevolence coupled with strategies to dismantle welfare. That a capitalist can liken laborers to his own children highlights this patriarchal assumption. The poor, and even sophisticated laborers and successful businesspeople, are no wiser than children, and must be guided by their corporate masters. There is a straight line from the patriarchal slaveholder, who viewed his black slaves as naive children in need of benevolent white guidance (and these arguments were used to assert the basic human goodness of slavery before and after the Civil War) to the patriarchal capitalist, who still views his employees as children.

Furthermore, the line suggesting that employees vote as a conservative bloc is like telling children to 'eat their spinach' approaches the crux of the Citizens United fallacy and the conservative imagination. Many will remember the right wing backlash to the Affordable Care Act, specifically the outcry that the government will next demand its citizens 'eat broccoli' for the health of the democratic body. 'Nanny state!' they yowled. 'Broccoli!' they howled. Of course, these paranoid utterances are unfounded. No representative of government demands that citizens eat particular foods (although some foods are rightly regulated).

Central to the illogic of American conservatism is that the corporation is a superior actor than the government. It is why Romney's destructive tenure at Bain is considered advantageous for his presidential credentials, and why he can claim that 'corporations are people too, my friend.' It is why Citizens United passed in the first place. It is why our governmental and political structures are continually being bought out by corporations, and where corporations hold outsized political power. It is why the United States is facing a crisis of privatization in all areas of public life, including benefits, schools, prisons, and the military. And it is why a mouthpiece of corporate capital can suggest that its employees are children and that voting Republican is like eating spinach, no one disagrees. When a government (never) suggests that its citizens eat broccoli, it is a tremendous crisis in the state of democracy, but when capital suggests is subjects eat spinach, it fits perfectly into the conservative imagination. Corporations have claimed sovereignty from the government, and now sits at the head of the table. Welcome to the new politics of the vegetable.

please also note the eloquent response by Angelus Novus, "A Response to The Wilsonian: The Anti-Democratic Patriarchy of Conservative Ideology"

intrigued by this essay? consider subscribing to thewilsonian or following @wilsonmagoria on twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 04:48:00 +0000

"The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself."

- Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right," 1843

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:30:00 +0000

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

reconsidering the mideast riots

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:02:00 +0000

I do not have an essay or thesis planned, but I want to capture a few scattered thoughts quickly as I watch the world burn in riots. I am not particularly immersed in discussions and debates over foreign policy, other than my awareness of and skepticism toward US imperialism, and I rarely comment on current events.

Awesome photos of these riots wash through Western media hubs as a bloody tide of history. Huffington Post's headline yesterday, set in bold red capital letters superimposed over a snapshot of a protester setting light to an American flag, read "CHAOS." It was intended to alarm and reaffirm Western supremacy. These region-wide riots, really hemispheric, echo the recent riots in Benghazi, which resulted in the unfortunate death of an American ambassador, Chris Stevens. And although these riots all immediately followed the eleventh anniversary of 11 September, most Western commentary instead chooses to blame the riots almost entirely on a misguided and juvenile and altogether stupid internet video entitled "The Innocence of Muslims." Blaming these riots on the video serves a two-fold function for US imperialism.

First, and more basically, the video and its adolescent ideology is protected in the US by the First Amendment. (However, the video in question does veer well into hate speech, for which the legality is much more hazy.) That there is not an equivalent civil liberty (especially regarding Internet usage) in these rioting Middle Eastern nations serves imperialism by underscoring a supposed constitutional Liberal and Rational superiority. We see the fatuous 9/11 argument, 'they hate us for our liberties,' repeated, to some extent, here. While Western commentary does not explicitly defend the video, the discussion of the video and the footage of the riots erects a lens of Orientalism dividing West from East. Furthermore, reactions from many, including The Onion, focus instead on how this supposed tradition of Liberalism and Tolerance and Reason prevents riots in the US over such trivial matters. Blaming these rioters for overreacting is another way to reassure ourselves of our superiority, that we know how to Take a Joke and that we have a full grasp on Reality and Politics and Economics and What Really Matters. The flip-side of this, that perhaps the West is suffering from imperial alienation and decadent malaise due to the Lightness of our History, and that, perhaps, our default cultural stance toward a sheltering irony may be an inappropriate response, is not addressed. The Onion photo and cursory discussion, intended to be humorous, strikes me as simultaneously offensive to the extreme (not to Jews, Christians, Hindus, or Buddhists, but to Muslims) and deeply sad.

Secondly, and more insidiously, placing the entire blame for these videos, while not digging for what the video truly depicts in the context of geopolitics, obscures the true and underlying evil of Western imperialism. Simplifying the complex and justified anti-imperial attitudes of these rioters and flag burners (which, like the production of the video, is also protected under the US Constitution) to a stupid video reduces the entire history of Western imperialism to a harmless digital clip of streaming bits. The video does, in the eyes of the protesters, reaffirm deep suspicions that our imperial ventures are not intended as a humanist project (as suggest mouthpieces for imperialism), but instead for crude oil and as a crude continuation of the Crusades. It depicts America as a violent, powerful, and assuredly anti-Muslim force, which is reaffirmed in history. What it comes down to is not the video, based in the cloud, but the history, written in blood and dripping from Western fangs. To condense the terror of history and the imperial project into this video reaffirms the patriarchal justification of imperialism.

at one year - a glance back, a wink, and a leap forward

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 02:29:00 +0000

the wilsonian is now one tender year old!

I have some developments in mind for the second year of the wilsonian, so keep reading, o patient and faithful readers!

I also hope to re-commit myself more earnestly to maintaining this space while posting more honest and thoughtful content. I want to keep stretching my mind and my boundaries, and to engage with this blog in a deliberate and more direct way. I hope to keep growing and stretching and deepening and sharpening. To look more directly at myself and at the world around me, to be more willing to follow myself and challenge myself and expand myself. To be a transparent eyeball (to quote Emerson gratuitously) and, when necessary, relinquish the burden of mediation and embrace the freedom of experience. To explore the nodes and waves of perception and increase the discipline in my criticism. To criticize more often, to criticize more honestly, to criticize more urgently. To grow as a writer, as a reader, and as a thinker.

Until then, dear readers.

Read the opening post

Explore the archives

Tumble with me

"Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are

crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the

distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised

and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread,

crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the

passing of blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and

dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the

eddies of the wind,

A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs

wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the

fields and hill-sides,

The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising

from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd

the earth much?

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the

origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are

millions of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor

look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the

spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things

from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."

- from Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

labor day 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:22:00 +0000

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

- Eugene V. Debs, 1918

thoughts on the loss of my notebook

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 22:19:00 +0000

A journal is not to be written or composed, but, rather, to be kept, a task distinguished by constancy, intimacy, and by the strange logic which allows the journal, endowed with uncertain and flickering life, to reciprocate. I, on Sunday, attempting to think through or cope with or generally comprehend a small-scale domestic tragedy, attempted to return to my journal. The deed was done. Agony leaked from our skin. Our tears had mingled with the deprived and dusty earth and made it thick again. Our eccentric and eager and endlessly loyal cat Cote, white and reddish and hazel-eyed, had been killed by barking and wild dogs and now lay ensconced inside the earth. Unable to locate the black bound Mead notebook, with its plastic cover and college-ruled lines filled mostly with blue ink, I continued instead to spin, restless and unmoored. For the journal functions best as a mooring vessel. My journal, that stacked and scattered ash-heap of disaffection and uncertainty, had been under-utilized of late, which had filled me with a lingering guilt, as if I had been neglecting some part of myself. I had, I feared, run out of things to say. But my inability to locate it, and the impossibility of reflecting properly and deliberately and in writing, filled me with unnameable disquiet. Because the journal best reciprocates when I am feeling particularly free-wheeling; or, perhaps more accurately, displaced, or without a place at all; when I am missing.

This black now faded Mead notebook was one of my first acquisitions upon returning home from college, returning to my parents' suburban home, and was a useful and willing companion as my mind settled into a new period of exploration and self-criticism. Released from the restrictive pressures of college, my mind expanded to new depths of introspection and periodic loneliness. It is a strange and unwelcome sensation to find oneself moving back into one's childhood bedroom. I wrote most consistently during these first few months, as I attempted to place myself again in uncertain terrain, again to forge some coherent sense of identity, and my mind became re-reacquainted with itself. In this way the journal could be best read as a series of valleys, offset by unseen mountains, in perpetual twilight. Filled almost entirely with shadows and self-doubt, the journal must be read in the light of the ambitions and dreams providing a phantom juxtaposition. The journal is a particular textual form, born between reflection and inspiration, and occupies a hazy limbo space for a writer's self-reliant, self-referential, and self-conscious mind.

We rescued two cats through a benevolent shelter downtown; they had been originally discovered beneath an abandoned and boarded Memphis building in mid-winter. In a city so wracked by poverty and stagnation as Memphis, to rescue two kittens, as we did in December, inspired in us a life-affirming feeling that we were grasping onto something real and good and hopeful and true. We named them Otis and Cote.

In Orwell's 1984, Winston corresponds with his contraband journal in order to shore up the fledgling sprouts of his own identity. There is, Orwell suggests, something vital and human in the act. Journaling can be a form of existential and intellectual bloodletting. It can help mitigate the unpleasant dyspepsia of modernity and carve out a small, private space in which to think and live truly. A journal, immune to the panoptic eye of the digital world, further operates as a private space, humble in its smallness and affirming in its closeness. The journal is a lens by which one can focus on the fluidity of the everyday, in all of the private glories and Cartesian pains of subjectivity. The personal notebook is free from the eye of the ubiquitous reader as it is free from the self-critical eye of the writer. It reminds oneself of the occasional virtue of myopia and the urgency of focused reflection. A journal is refreshingly un-indexable, un-searchable, and helps free the mind from its own omnipresent burden. It is a tactile and analogue pleasure; a testament to the intimacy of the physical. I could write in a parenthetical streams of indulgence, in despair and in delight, and, folding shut my notebook, continue on against the currents of the world. In the journal I was free from myself as I thought myself through with deliberate abandon. The journal is an agent of memory and an agent of forgetting. It can act as a centering agent, a focusing lens, and a mooring vessel. The journal can occupy a paradoxical imaginative space as both a paean to the self-conscious and peripatetic mind as well as a reprieve from it.

A good cat resonates, it seems, in much the same way.

in loving memory of Cote, December - August

it's not you; it's me: precarity and paralysis in seinfeld

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:17:00 +0000

Elaine's uncanny recognition of her own self-alienation, reified as a mannequin in an upscale Manhattan clothing boutique in Seinfeld's season five episode, "The Pie," sparks in her deep feelings of displacement and paranoia and suggests to her and to the viewer that contemporary life is one of increased and inevitable commodification and estrangement. The unalienated human subject is now an anachronism, as humanity as a whole is increasingly exploited by the global machinations of capital. State structures, weakening underneath the levianithic global market, choose to reduce their role as a protector and maintainer of its citizenry, while corporations, seeking stray pennies, shift the burden to workers. Society is atomized, social bonds dissolve, and the individual is left, alone, to contemplate the absurdity of modernity and locate themselves within its dubious hierarchies. Elaine repeatedly attempts to reappropriate her destabalized human identity, which becomes increasingly overshadowed by the plastic. She cannot live alongside this reification, which functions as a reminder of her unfreedom through her total, irrevocable submersion into market capitalism, which molds her and defines her.

The oft-quoted break-up deflection, "It's not you; it's me," runs as a verbal thread of thematic continuity in Seinfeld, which, while ostensibly serving as a blanket statement of a shallow romantic rejection, an admission, above all, of benevolent non-interest, more deeply functions as an enigmatic attempt to summarize the ennui and stagnation of the 1990s and the precarity and paralysis of late capitalism. A television show whose writers abided by a mantra of "No hugging, no learning" consciously rejects the serial and tidy presentation of characters and the convenience of themes, plots, or narrative momentum. Indeed, another essay could and should and probably has been written on the broken narrative arc of Seinfeld, in reference to Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition." (Perhaps this essay, or, as I will argue, the entire sitcom, should be alternately entitled "The Neoliberal Condition" [or, indulgently, "Much Ado About Nothing."]) The show, in concept a "show about nothing," was envisioned as a show about real life, about the contemporary human condition in all of its disappointment and aimlessless, could be imagined as a sustained piece of gritty realism. According to Lukacs, realist art is a fertile ground for revolutionary consciousness and mobilization. Seinfeld's subtle politics draws no such clear demarcation, but it nonetheless functions as an ironical critique of neoliberal assemblages and rootless structures of capital. Seinfeld is an encyclopedia of the post-modern precarity of an incertain subject.

[For a succinct analysis of precarity in neoliberalism, please refer to The New Inquiry's "Precarity and 'Affective Resistance,' by Rob Horning.]

"It's not you; it's me"

Seinfeld has been well-discussed for its tonal and thematic trafficking in nihilism, absurdism, and post-modernism (indeed, as Lukacs argues, "Kafka was a realist" -- Seinfeld can be understood as a realist exploration of the absurd), but this essay aims for an analysis of the material conditions and threats lurking just beyond the scope of the cameras, the threat of alienation hiding just behind the glint in George Costanza's scheming eye. What is that ominous vacuity underneath the blind laughing of the studio audience? Seinfeld captures the gestalt of the 1990s, as the social order of the country is deliberately dissolved for the benefit of the myriad processes of globalization, enacted by the destructive economic policies of the late twentieth century, which have continued into the present. The tangential effect of this economic rootlessness is represented in the show vis a vis the confusion swirling around the opaque structures of society and the doomed attempt of the characters to locate themselves within. The series concludes with the arrest of the four "perverts," solidifying their placelessness in the late twentieth century and underscoring their powerlessness and precarity in society, as well as their inability to defend their identities from the bureaucratic definitions of the ideological state apparatus. Seinfeld, then, chronicles the attempts of it's four disintegrating characters as they struggle to build epistemic foundations in a crumbling city- and nation-scape around them. Elaine's uncanny displacement and literal reification in the mannequin suggests the underlying paranoia of Seinfeld -- that modernity has outpaced itself, that humans occupy an uncertain position (at various times, all main characters but permanently precarious Jerry form a part of the standing reserve army of the unemployed) within a new neoliberal assemblage, and that the human has now entered the dubious and precarious category of commodity. Seinfeld depicts the uncertain individual struggling to come to terms with financial deregulation, unrestrained capitalism and globalization, and their new identity of individual as an atomized and marketable commodity as they yearn, not for transcendence, but merely immanence -- the right to live fully in harmony with their world and themselves. The tagline of neoliberalism, if it were as self-aware and knowing as Seinfeld, would also be "It's not you; it's me."

Seinfeld is a show about gaps. Gaps in conversation, gaps in communication, gaps in understanding. Literal gaps in time -- entire episodes are devoted to waiting: waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant, waiting to find a car; characters in a putative "show about nothing" with minimal plots could be said to be waiting entire episodes, entire lives, for something meaningful to happen. Gaps in etiquette, gaps in manner. Gaps in society. Gaps between the world of adulthood and adolescence, and where the characters find themselves. Gaps in the very idea of adulthood, now that the established bourgeois sensibility is collapsing (as seems to happen in every generation.) Gaps and cracks after the death of God. Perhaps most poignantly, in a vein that opens an Occupy reading of Seinfeld, the show is about gaps in social expectations and social reality, and the powerless attempts to build meaning from these tatters. Gaps that are ontological and epistemic, and position individuals in a condition of absurdity, attempting to forge anew structures of meaning.

The show is built upon this experience of living and forging meaning in this lurch -- Jerry's stand-up routine, informing and informed by the television show (his occupation as a stand-up comic, too, situates him in a vulnerable position of precarity), is built upon highlighting the absurdity of modern life, these gaps in expectations and understanding. And doesn't his position as a comedian drive home the precarious roles of post-modernity, where all of the characters must self-promote, self-market, and entertain others for survival? Quickly written off as a banal "have you ever noticed this, ever noticed that" script by others, his comedy is deeply committed to leading a way out of this neoliberal predicament. Unfortunately, and this is a theme of the series as a whole, any route out of this predicament is uncertain and uncharted. The characters are left paralyzed, constantly pointing out these gaps, aware of the tragic absurdity of their condition. Awareness, Seinfeld suggests, is the highest development of political consciousness remaining, and this impotence runs through Jerry's comic routine. And thus the birth of a largely plotless and experimental series, with the redundancy and eternal recurrence latent in late capitalism itself. There is no way out, nothing happens; no cohesive political movement can be built to lead out of this mess. The precarious confluence of hyper-awareness and powerlessness defines the show's tragic ethos. Furthermore, this awareness is restrained to the individual; any meager attempt to form a collective politics is foreclosed by the atomizing logic of neoliberalism. In this way, the scrutiny of the characters is relegated to minutiae; no attempt is possible to connect the paralyzing awareness of absurdity to a broader social or political awareness, or to an evaluation of the material conditions that produce these epistemic and ontological gaps. The modern world is rife with such gaps, and Seinfeld's Knights of Infinite Absurdity are paralyzed to effect change and struggle to maintain bonds of meaning. Elaine, in "The Cafe," inexplicably and repeatedly shouts "Cassus belli!" -- the source of her frustration hidden, her recourse blocked, but her revolutionary frustration growing. This is the unstable revolutionary under late capital. The impetus of war is unknown and unable to communicate. George, in "The Limo," bungling a quotation of worldly transformation, ineffectually asks Jerry, "What do you say when you see things?" (The proper quotation, from George Bernard Shaw, is, "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?") He is unable even to articulate a missive of resistance or of change, or even comprehend a foundational issue, and reverts to his paralyzed state of paranoid and verbose bemusement.

A typical episode of Seinfeld devotes a great deal of time to representing the hedged complaints against these aforementioned gaps in understanding, in expectation, perception, and reality. The four characters -- who begin as sketches, are breathed to life, and dissolve back to caricature over the nine-year span of their recorded lives -- gripe about social injustices, real or perceived, but generally minor. Importantly, the social issues of the show, while veering into discussions of poverty and homelessness, flow from the perspective of the white, educated, urban bourgeois. The realm of the show's politics is ostensibly limited to minor grievances of manner and etiquette, but always with a questioning and subversive wink. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer debate whether to arrive to a dinner party with a gift, and, if so, whether it would be more appropriate to bring the unpretentious Pepsi and Ring-Dings or the urban-bourgeois wine and bobka (the Jewish roots of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's humor are never far from the surface); the personal politics of re-gifting, of un-gifting, of double-dipping; the etiquette of dating (the parade of sexual partners through Seinfeld arguably parallels the zombie wanderings of global capital, relentless in its pursuit of exploitation, anahedonic in its self-alienation and libidinal and unquenchable lust), breaking up ("it's not you; it's me"), the unstable institution of marriage, and, of course, sex -- Seinfeld wears the sustained and omnipresent eroticism of urban modernity on it's sleeve (echoing, in a Deleuzian frame, the libidinal power of capitalism) and many plotlines revolve around the eroticism of the mango; the orgasm, real or faked; the uncertain mechanics of sexual foreplay and sexual intercourse; contraception; phallic schizophrenia and shrinkage; the agonies and ecstasies of embodiment, and the anxious physics of sexuality -- the quitodian logic of consumerism, in the form of Junior Mints, Drake's Coffee Cake, cereal, the merits of particular diners; and the cyclical drama of the corporate setting, whether it be the New York Yankees, real estate, Pendant Publishing, or the J. Peterman Catalog; the slippery etiquette of dinner parties, cocktail parties, engagement parties, housewarming parties, birthday parties; funerals, wakes, brisses, confirmations; unorthodox holiday celebrations, the airing of grievances, the aluminum pole, mobilizing shopping mall santas; the habitus of pony-owners; traffic; the corporate annexation of public spaces as imagined through the quantity and accessibility of public toilets; negotiating parents and family; contemporary corporate media systems, including the movie theater and its discontents, the video rental store, cable television, book publishing, magazine publishing, coffee table book publishing, appearances on late night television shows; vacationing; welfare (before Clinton's dubious reforms); sandwiches; airports; the healthcare-industrial complex (as well as a number of other plausible and justified conspiracy theories stewing in Kramer's curlicued mind); lawyers, architects, industrialists, marine biologists, and a host of other invented professional identities -- Art Vandelay, Dr. Van Nostrand, H.E. Pennypacker; telephones; bakeries; homelessness; inscrutable modern art; inscrutable and supposedly comedic scribblings; inscrutable recordings on rape recorders and answering machines; subways and taxicabs; yearning; the United States Postal Service; race, including changing meanings of whiteness; gender, including changing meanings of masculinity; politics; fat-free frozen yogurt; corporate and commodity names for George's progeny ("corporations are people, my friend" hisses neoliberalism); immigration; soup, soup-mongers, and the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary fascism; post-Soviet communism; the transition of a New York City neighborhood to a corporatized urban no-place; fashion; operas, orchestras, and the theater; the existential emptiness of contemporary life, articulated through the spat between Elaine and the phone man ("I could have killed you and no one would have known"); the daily machinations and frustrations of, to quote the obstinate George Costanza, "living in a society": the contours and structures of American life dissolving under the zombie weight of late capital and the brainless expansion of American empire.

Seinfeld depicts, at its most primordial, the uncertain individual attempting, and failing, to build and to sustain a total logic of unalienated human existence. The characters are mostly obsessed with rules -- they examine social bonds and social etiquette with a microscope -- by which they can locate themselves in the uncertain terrain of neoliberalism. The show can be read as an existential critique of neoliberalism due to the character's attempt to create and sustain rules of existence even after the societal structures have been torn asunder by global capital. They are vulnerable in their individuality and embody a state of precarity, anticipating the rise of the global precariat. Their powerlessness to effect change, even on a personal level, is sublimated into their growing unease and escalating paranoia. It is about the attempt to live meaningfully, to live fully, and in accordance with some imagined totality as they attempt to situate themselves in the hyperreal urban phantasmagoria. Their squabbles about rules expose the deep paranoia and placelessness from which they suffer and their inability to forge a way out. These thatched together modes of being are a fruitless attempt at salvaging their unalienated humanity against the encroachments and annexations of global capital, which has emerged victorious. They know that they live in a absurd situation in an ossified simulacrum of hegemonic neoliberalism, but their creation of epistemologies speaks humbly to their humanity. Hopeless, they nonetheless beat on against the torrential riptide of neoliberal hegemony. There mode of being has melted into air. Their endurance is itself a sustained act of rebellion and an assertion of their species-being. "Without rules, there's chaos!" asserts Kramer in Season 6, and these individuals must impose some human order upon the chaos in order to maintain their humanity.

Kramer exists in the Seinfeld world as a threat and promise of permanent unemployment, the fulfillment of a Marxian promise of the eradication of alienating labor structures, and as such functions as a direct challenge to the neoliberal order. Kramer is a subversive character and a thorn in the total mobilization of capitalism. In his vintage clothing, irrepressible coif, and impulsive freedom, Kramer forgets his past and disregards his future, following (and often forgetting) his various passions in a state of permanent and semi-solipsistic innocence. Kramer rankles his friends, rankles society, through his refusal to "play the game" -- he tells the truth when inappropriate and chooses to disregard social etiquette. Castigating his three friends in Season 6 as "yuppies" with a "go-go corporate lifestyle," Kramer at times embodies Herbert Marcuse's concept of the Great Refusal. He offers a playful criticism of everything existing; he, winking, denounces unjust power structures. He is anti-ideological and can see behind the curtain of fraudulent modern society. His slippery identity eludes stable categorization and his playful approach towards life blazes an existential path of freedom through skepticism and through the celebration of his humanity, his species-being.

"Do you ever yearn?" Kramer plaintively asks George, tragically aware of his imaginative loneliness in the barren waste land. Seinfeld, tragically depicting, in all of its realism and absurdity, the precarity and paralysis of the neoliberal subject, is unable to blaze a path towards redemption. This is the neoliberal condition. The subject recognizes him- or herself in the plasticized machinations of capitalism, but is unable to reassert an unalienated human identity; dissatisfied neurotics shout "cassus belli!" at passersby, but are unable to articulate a politics of resistance; we trade jokes for bread and are thus trivialized. We are left, yearning, in the lurch, unable to reclaim our identities, unsure of the corporate world into which we have fallen. Our profound displacement can only be approximated in paranoid scrutinizing, in the hopeful tragedy of awareness, further disturbed by the dooming suggestion that, for all of our absurd sufferings, that "it's not you; it's me." And thus we must laugh at the absurdity of the world as it is.

intrigued by this essay? consider subscribing to thewilsonian or following @wilsonmagoria on twitter

july 14, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 21:00:00 +0000

"That she and I may grow old together"

- Tobit 8:7

july 5, 1852

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 17:19:00 +0000

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."

- Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", 1852

june: an impromptu poem in prose

noreply@blogger.com (Wilson) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 21:15:00 +0000

sipping coffee all day morning reading by the window at the table i pass my june in sinuous continuous resplendences in sandwiches tabasco avocado fried eggs and toast and glasses of milk in paperbacks surreal postmodern disaffected hemingway hyperreal and cheap beer is there any more here in small apartments heat-woven streets and wrathful traffic cockroaches exploring the contours, and i am happy