Malle and Postwar Murder

Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957), like much of the film noir it references, is structured by a criss-cross: a young couple joyrides in the car of a murderer, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), and winds up committing more murders under his name. What’s exchanged seems to be not only their actions, however, but also possible motivations for killing more generally. The victims of both crimes are older men implicated in the legal atrocities of the postwar period: Tavernier’s victim, Simon Carala, is not only his employer and the husband of the woman he loves (Florence-Jeanne Moreau) but a global businessman at one point described as an “arms dealer.” Tavernier shoots him after turning in his last assignment as an employee, a dossier he has compiled labeled “Exploitation des gisements de Djelfa” (above). The principal victim of the joyriding youngsters, meanwhile, shot by Louis, the surly, Brando-esque half of the couple, is a sixtyish German “tourist” named Bencker. Bencker is old enough to have held high positions in wartime, and acts like a victor in the postwar. He drives a Mercedes, the official Nazi car, carries a gun, and enjoys a much younger girlfriend; he laughs off everything with bottles of champagne, and we understand that his false bonhomie is awash in creepy cash. Following the highway drag race that throws them together, a champagne afterparty enacts the postwar’s compulsory democratization of criminality. “My dear Mr. Tavernier, you are my guest .” “I can’t accept.” “But you must--I am the sporting kind . . . and besides, we nearly died together.” These two singularly unapologetic victims, Bencker and Carala, are potentially linked by the name of Djelfa, a district in Algeria but also a town in that district where an internment camp was located. The transition of war into postwar transforms a camp into an oilfield.

A familiar plot device, then—using unattractive victims to allow the viewer to sympathize with criminal protagonists—pushes a little further, as though to ask to what extent crimes of passion actually deliver messages of history ignored by law. Julien and Florence murder her husband to be “free,” as the saying goes (with his money too, though they don’t say that); Louis murders Bencker for reasons more difficult to express, yet these motivations are also forced to cross as though by some compensatory economy. By killing Bencker while calling himself Tavernier, Louis is also killing Tavernier, and he has a motive to do this because his girlfriend, Véronique, idolizes Tavernier and is basically always telling him he’s no Tavernier. And Tavernier in turn is implicated in colonial war not only by working for Carala but by having served in Indochina. If he seems disillusioned now, that’s mostly because he kills Carala—by killing Carala, he acts upon a disapproval that may be the audience’s incentive for not feeling sorry, but is not his own main motive. Louis satisfies a generational political hostility that is, this time, his own—he is even aware of it--yet which takes a detour through his contradictory admiration for the sports cars of his hated rivals. The joyride gone awry makes for inarticulate terrorism, and suggests the nascent political quality of crime set against, and itself corrupted by, the oblivion of living high in the postwar. Photographs of Florence and Julien smiling together, images of the freedom for which they kill, appear on the same roll of film that incriminates Véronique and Louis by showing them drinking champagne with Bencker—as though the desire to be “free” in the postwar could only be trailed by the whisper, free with criminal money.

And yet

It’s been almost two years since the entry of dread into Work Without Dread, dread which for me felt like the impress of the society outside WWD upon WWD, in the form of thoughts about things that ought or ought not to be said in response to events in that society. Thinking such thoughts has been a lose-lose game for me, in which I worry about feeling coerced whether I do or do not write. Even writing this now is easier to the extent that I assume that, after a long hiatus, fewer people are reading—my version of the Dickinsonian secret that writing loses its limits as it loses its purpose as communication. Local readers have been more inhibiting than faraway readers; concretely, I was more upset by the experience in 2008 of going to a really horrid talk by a colleague in another department, having a lot to say about the issues involved therein, and not feeling it ethical to write them, as they would be read and their object recognized by her students, than by any other single thing related to writing or not writing here. The failure I’m talking about is a failure of the idea of the university, of course, in which it should be possible to debate anything rationally. (Man, was that a terrible talk; nor did I feel rational; more than offended, I felt traumatized by that talk.) Everyone knows that’s not true: the space of the university has never been the neutral space of the analytic session or the disinterested space of aesthetics—if these are ever neutral or disinterested in the first place. Whether you’re worried about losing social purchase, retaliation, or just about hurting others’ feelings, the result is the closing of a space. I feel like writing now because finally, at the University of California, there are explicit conversations about the question of open space in the university and along its margins. They take place in another vocabulary, the vocabulary of infrastructural access, but these very public discussions, never figured in psychological terms, brush against questions that could be posed in those terms—questions about which interests can be private, shared, addressed conspiratorially, broadcast publicly, or addressed without direction, as things now stand. The secret, the open secret, and the communication disseminated to the point of dissolution are possible modes, but not in every instance possible in the university or in writing done in the university as we know it, nor “here” either, nor necessarily anywhere at all. And yet . . . I didn’t say at the talk what I’ve said here.

Photo: U.S.-Mexico border, New York Times

Nicely Situated Houses

We may see the meeting of working-through with the registration of perception in general in Melanie Klein’s major essay “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940; in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945 [New York: Free Press, 1975], 344). Here Klein sets forth her idea that “the child goes through states of mind comparable to the mourning of the adult” and resolves its mourning through “the testing of reality.” Klein, like Freud in “Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911; Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols., 12:219), believes that the registration of any perception of a piece of reality implies resistance and therefore a foregoing process of overcoming resistance. Klein’s child, having attained during weaning a sense of the mother’s fragility and separateness as a person, mourns the loss of the breast and the future loss of parents. The child negotiates mourning by discovering through reality testing how to compare fantasy objects to external ones and so to some extent “disprove anxieties and sorrow relating to the internal reality” alone (Klein, "Mourning" 346). The “internal reality” is a reality; but it requires a different relation, a different handling, than external reality, and it cannot be treated as a dominant reality. Klein’s view is pessimistic epistemologically in that the goal of the continually self-splitting self falls short of lucidity. It is to establish a set of pragmatically helpful, reasonably stabilized fantasy objects and, using these objects as ballast, to carry out its self-splitting “on planes which gradually become nearer and nearer to reality” (350). Working through, then, is synchronized by Klein to relative emotional stability and the slow achievement of proximity to reality.

In discussing how adult experience revives infantile experience Klein offers an example that draws on her experience of the death of her adult son Hans. In April, 1934, when he was twenty-seven, Hans Klein lost his footing while walking in the mountains and fell to his death. By the following summer, Klein was organizing her ideas on mourning in “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1934)—a remarkable paper that confronts some of the most violent fantasies in psychoanalytic literature. Six years later in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” Klein looks back on the ordeal:

If, for instance, a woman loses her child through death, along with sorrow and pain her early dread of being robbed by a “bad” retaliating mother is reactivated and confirmed . . . . The reinforcement of feelings of persecution in the state of mourning is all the more painful because, as a result of an increase in ambivalence and distrust, friendly relations with people, which might at that time be so helpful, become impeded. The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning thus seems to be partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing. (353-354)

Like Freud writing about the unnamed death of his daughter Sophie in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in these pages Klein gives an intense rendition of the mourner’s inner states—the flashes of “manic” elation “due to the feeling of possessing the perfect loved object (idealized) inside”; the secret wish for revenge against the loved one who is already dead; the “great relief” from reminiscences of his kindness, also partly reflecting the suspect “reassurance” of his idealization (355). She explains that mourning means ultimately “regaining trust in external objects and values” and thus regaining confidence in the “lost loved person” to a realistic, rather than idealized, extent (355).

At this point, Klein “give[s] an instance” to “illustrate the ways in which a normal mourner re-established connections with the external world”:

Mrs. A., in the first few days after the shattering loss of her young son, who had died suddenly while at school, took to sorting out letters, keeping his and throwing others away. She was thus unconsciously attempting to restore him and keep him safe inside herself, and throwing out what she felt to be indifferent, or rather hostile—that is to say, the “bad” objects, dangerous excreta and bad feelings. (355)

This passage begins a narrative of about four pages in which “Mrs. A.” sorts the letters (Klein notes here that some people move furniture around, and points out the obsessional dimension of such actions); appreciates time spent with a very few close friends; has two dreams about her son’s death, one remembering a humiliation suffered by her brother in childhood in which her hostility predominates, and another in which a boy’s disappearance is at least upsetting, although she’s glad to have survived herself. Klein remarks that during this time Mrs. A. “did not cry much, and tears did not bring her the relief which they did later on” (356). After the dreams, in the second week after her son’s death,

Mrs. A. found some comfort in looking at nicely situated houses in the country, and in wishing to have such a house of her own. But this comfort was soon interrupted by bouts of despair and sorrow. She now cried abundantly, and found relief in tears. The solace she found in looking at houses came from her rebuilding her inner world in her phantasy by means of this interest and also getting satisfaction from the knowledge that other people’s houses and good objects existed. Ultimately this stood for re-creating her good parents, internally and externally . . . . Thus her fear that the death of her son was a punishment inflicted on her by retaliating parents lost in strength, and also the feeling that her son frustrated and punished her by his death was lessened. The diminuition of hatred and fear in this way allowed the sorrow itself to come out in full strength. (358-359)

Klein believes that feelings of sorrow are “held up in certain stages of grief by an extensive manic control.” To work through resistance to sorrow therefore involves releasing the controlling feelings of “hatred and fear” (359). Mrs. A. stops needing to feel that her brother/son deserves what he gets and triumphant that she herself is still alive, by a route that is more or less cognitive: she realizes that those feelings are irrelevant because no one is persecuting her through her son’s death. She realizes this, in turn, by comparing several ideas and things with one another: things that seem “indifferent” and things she likes; dreams of hostility and memories of affection mingled with jealousy. The idea is that by noticing the differences between her various representations of experiences and objects, Mrs. A. realizes that certain of her feelings are not to the point; that their function is rather mostly to control her grief. If one wants to know how her realization occurs, the principle that connects realization to diminuition of resistance, or makes them two sides of the same thing, is difficult to discern. We are reduced to saying over again that Mrs. A. notices the friction between the world of her dreams (of her fantasized internal objects) and that of her memories and present. Klein registers friction, difference, and thereby an opening for a rearranged reality, the possibility for it to be this way or that way, through the banal observation of her perceptions. She feels this friction to be compelling; not so much that it requires a response on her part, but that it already comprises one—comes with its inbuilt effect of psychic reorganization, which is the very flexibility of her reality. Klein’s registration assists a realization, so smoothly that it’s hard to say whether registration and realization are the same.

Let’s move backward from Klein’s registration of difference to a single registration, that of the nicely situated houses. The former emerges from comparison between Mrs. A.’s various actions and experiences: going through the letters, spending time with friends, crying little and ineffectively, dreaming and thinking about the dreams, looking at “nicely situated” houses, and crying “abundantly.” Cumulatively, Klein exemplifies her own theory: Mrs. A. indeed places her internal and external objects in relation to one another “on planes which gradually become nearer and nearer to reality” (350), relying in this on her crucial registration of the fact that they are different from one another, of their various individual properties. In the instance of her taking pleasure in looking at the houses, the fact that she is better than she was appears in her very ability to perceive the houses as well-sited (the favorite phrase of the Blue Guide). The breakthrough of the houses’ seeming nice, followed by her greater grief, is also a consolidation, prepared by recent reflections and experiences in which the working through must already have been done in order for the houses to appear nice. In Klein’s symbolic interpretation, the houses are associated metonymically with family relations (“good” internal objects), contribute to her “rebuilding” of her inner world, and perhaps also figure containers of her complicated feelings. But these symbolic aspects find their ground in the basic “knowledge that other people’s houses and good objects existed” (358; my italics). The near irrefutability of this knowledge that the houses are able to provide differentiates the episode of the nice houses from the other experiential elements of Mrs. A’s working through, and exemplifies the prosaic quality of registration: the main thing that the houses do is “exist.” Klein finds she can still get “satisfaction from the knowledge” that they exist, and her satisfaction brings what she calls “gratitude”—that is, her satisfaction constitutes a “reparation to her parents” for her persecutorial fantasies (358). Under these circumstances, to perceive that a nicely sited house exists is to wish to make others happy. And the wish to make others happy, although it would seem economically to be just another emotion competing for space with her grief, does not stand in the way of grief as “increase of distrust” does (359).

If Klein’s ability to work through to abundant tears depends on her openness to pleasure, and her openness to pleasure depends on her openness to perception, her ability to register the difference between internal and external objects, the problem is that this ability can fail, has failed in the first place, as Mrs. A. founders in persecutorial fantasies that deflect her sorrow from what Klein figures as its natural course. Why she is able to tell the differences between these things again after having lost the ability, Klein cannot explain to the last degree. Thus in the story Mrs. A. seems to find a lucky break, a contingent contribution from outside, something that catches her attention in the right way. This outside is not a radical outside, opposed by definition to what she is or can know, but a happenstance outside, like a country house glimpsed through a train window whose handsomeness can still attract the eye. Censorship has a hard time defending against such a thing. For a psychic system that once has failed may also fail to fail. Feeling a little pleasure may enable us to feel grief if we make the most of it, and any approach to reality holds the hope of something satisfying to look at. That any such moment is potential fulcrum for action, can legitimately give hope.

photo: toys used by Melanie Klein in her analysis of children; from the Melanie Klein Trust

Sleeping in the Library

[In honor of over 1,600 UC Irvine students in favor of occupying the library unless the University restored 24-hour library access for finals week, this reflection on library rules. The protest is part of UC-wide protests against 32% fee increases and the privatization of the University of California system.]



If singing was ever allowed in the library, no one can remember it; likewise drinking and sex.

Talking aloud became difficult early in the library’s history, certainly by 1300,* or perhaps as soon as a public appeared.

The common prohibition of eating may have been more recent, and of course of photography, as it became a security risk.

The Fresno Public Library specifically rules out “bathing.” Also “giving speeches or handing out literature.”** In Ann Arbor there can be no board games, “except . . . when such games are provided by the Library as part of an organized activity.”***

No one can sleep in such places. Nor, in Washington, D.C., may there be any “lying or placing head on tables or on the floor.” You’re allowed two bags: “the official Airport standard ‘carry on’ size—9”x 14” x 22”—will be applied to the large bag.”+

California libraries aren’t open long enough for dreams. In practice, you might sleep there for a short time, without a blanket and on the condition you’re not homeless. You must show your identity card (if asked) to the campus police.++


What are we going to say to the notice
that there’ll be no more studying in the library,
that reading and writing will no longer be allowed?
--Meet you at the library, the one named
after the real estate tycoon. No one has ever seen it
after closing time. Inside every book
is someone’s lost place,
between the books an out of order
democracy.


*Scott Douglas, “Dispatches from a Public Librarian,” Dispatch 23, McSweeney’s, 8/14/06
**www.fresnolibrary.org/about/conduct.html
***www.aadl.org/aboutus/policies/behavior
+www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/28/AR2008122802176.html
++www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6465592.html

Crisis of Unity

Around the time Lehman Brothers fell, and thinking about the topic--Crisis--chosen by graduate students for this year's Comp Lit Graduate Conference at Irvine, I figured I should look up what Marx had to say about crisis. In The Marx-Engels Reader, some pages from Theories of Surplus Value are gathered conveniently under the rubric "Crisis Theory." The occasion for Marx to bring up crisis, here, is his refutation of an assertion by Ricardo that there can be no such thing as "over-production." Very very loosely, their debate concerns whether markets are self-correcting, in this case by being mutually compensating (463). Marx argues that there being too much of something is not an absolute condition (one that we measure in relation to absolute needs) but one relative to ability to pay. And economic crises, crises in the ability to pay, he observes, are crises of syncopation: "if in the interval between [purchase and sale] the value has changed, if the commodity at the moment of its sale is not worth what it was worth at the moment when money was acting as a measure of value . . . the whole series of transactions which retrogressively depend on this one transaction, cannot be settled." Money functions within a given frame of time: "the crisis occurs not only because the commodity is unsaleable, but because it is not saleable within a particular period of time" (456). Last fall, some analysts similarly explained that crashes of the NYSE were occurring not when people were panicking for psychological reasons, but when people were forced to sell to pay bills that could be deferred no longer; they not only had to pay, they had to pay now.

Marx's idea about the temporal form of crisis is the most narratively resonant of his arguments here, but his most fundamental one is that crises are outbreaks of "unity." The passage is a great illustration of a dialecticized idea, of how thoroughly an idea can be dialecticized and self-differential for him:

If, for example, purchase and sale--or the metamorphosis of commodities--represent the unity of two processes, or rather the movement of one process through two opposite phases, and thus essentially the unity of the two phases, the movement is essentially just as much the separation of these two phases and their becoming independent of each other. Since, however, they belong together, the independence of the two correlated aspects can only show itself forcibly, as a destructive process. It is just the crises in which they assert their unity, the unity of the different aspects. The independence which these two linked and complementary phases assume in relation to each other is forcibly destroyed. Thus the crisis manifests the unity of the two phases that have become independent of each other. (444)

Purchase and sale, because they are two angles on the same event, form a unity. Although their coming apart for a while (as in the syncopated story above, when value abruptly changes) is necessary for crisis and is "the elementary form of the crisis" (445), the fact that they come apart is not itself the crisis, and disjuncture is not the meaning of crisis. The message of the crisis is that things that have come apart cannot stay apart; what cannot be deferred is their collapse back into a unity they can't escape.

Meanwhile, back in Irvine, Comp Lit 144, Politics of Crime, watched Ridley Scott's American Gangster. There's quite a bit to say about this not exactly "good" but interesting film, and I hope to come back to it and to many other things that happened in Politics of Crime, a wonderful undergraduate class that kept me going the last several months. For now I'll only recall the scene in which the two protagonists of the film, detective and criminal (Richie and Frank, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington), set eyes on each other for the first time, just as various factors, including the end of the Vietnam War, have brought about a crisis in Frank's globalized business of cocaine distribution. (The cocaine industry and the war industry are explicitly aligned and, in the plot, materially connected.) Since the occasion of their meeting is Frank's arrest, it marks a break in the film; the logic of the film up to that point culminates in the scene and has to shift afterward. Shots of police raiding the sites of Frank's enterprise are intercut with views of Frank and his family emerging from church, and "Amazing Grace" plays over the sequence. Who was blind and now sees when the antagonists look at each other for the first time and with recognition? They are about to become allies, and in many ways were made to be so. The kind of seeing that is done here occurs when you step outside the church door, outside the fantasy of the enclosed family. Although there are redemptive overtones in the idea that losing everything could be the best thing that ever happened, the gain isn't because the psyches involved will now be different--they will prove to be markedly unchanged--but because of the sudden reconnection of worlds that thought they could live without relation to one another.

Image: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Fallen Sky (2006)

Style is Cheap, or, George Kuchar

At the L.A. Film Festival there was a large, blissed-out audience at the Billy Wilder Theater for ten short films by George and/or Mike Kuchar. The Kuchars, twin brothers from the Bronx, began making 8 mm films starring their friends and families as children in the fifties; the films shown at the Festival were made from 1958 to 1963. These are mostly silent, except for pirated music, and use intertitles. George Kuchar went on to "experimental" films in the same DIY-smart aleck vein--a little artier, and with a gradually increasing component of explicit homoeroticism, but no different in spirit from the childhood projects--in 16 mm and digital video, and since 1971 has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. (A selection of George Kuchar's films is available on UBUWEB.) L.A. seems to be afloat on Kucharmania. The festival audience would¹ve been delighted to stay all night--the authorities at the Hammer had to ask the audience and the Kuchars to leave. Cinefamily is screening a series of camp films curated by George Kuchar and two nights of his mid- and later films that more or less take up where the Film Festival left off. The second of these evenings, covering his work in San Francisco, is August 3.

George and Mike Kuchar were present for the Wilder screening, and George commented on each film from his chair in the dark as though we were watching home movies, which we were. On a budget on which you could either make a film or buy a toaster, Kuchar plugs friends and neighbors like "the Leibowitz family" into the rudimentary formulae and--to a startling degree--the elegant shots of the Hollywood genres, especially over-the-top melodrama. While the storylines often head straight for chaos, textbook specimens of minute compositional conventions shape almost every frame: the turning doorknob, the dolly back to reveal you¹ve been looking out a window, the alienation of TV antennae, the shadow of the fistfight on the stairs, the pathos of the windowsill, etc.--each one a compact myth. Almost none of the films is missing its neo-Sirkian mirror shot. In Hold Me While I¹m Naked (1965), a beautiful woman comes through a door three times to answer the same ringing phone, an effect that reminds me of the repeated zoom toward Delphine Seyrig's outstretched arms in Last Year at Marienbad (1961).



In Knockturne (1968), guests at a party, including Edie Sedgwick (!), peel away from the center of the screen finally to reveal Warhol's Jackie on the distant wall.

The narratives run at 78 rpm, the dialogue is pulpy, and the music is usually a painfully crude '50s pop. The acting is "bad" and therefore Brechtian, as in profound schlock like Edward Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. Watched on their own time, the films are hilarious. Viewed as a series of stills, the images have lyrical melancholy, even when they're deranged, like outtakes from Godard. The audience does not feel this as a contradiction; one level doesn't seem truer than the other.


(Hold Me While I'm Naked)


(Mike Kuchar in The Corruption of the Damned [1965])


(Mike Kuchar in The Corruption of the Damned)


(Hold Me While I'm Naked)

In a mainstream melodrama like George Stevens's Penny Serenade, pathos comes from the distance between what the film is able to do ideologically and what it seems to yearn to do, as the Time Out Film Guide notes in its summary of the film:

A classic "women's picture" in every sense: an emotional/sentimental switchback, nostalgically framed (Dunne, on the point of leaving Grant, reminisces the family-romance narrative to gramophone accompaniment) and a construction of the "ideal woman" (fulfilled in motherhood, naturally) so upfront as to be almost disarming--though not, as in similar work by Douglas Sirk, pushed quite so far that it might be construed as being critical. Either with it or at it, or more likely both, you'll weep.

With it or at it. Melodrama becomes interestingly difficult when you cry not only with it but at it, since the film¹s limitations then unwittingly reinforce its characteristic theme, the restriction of a character by society. When you cry at a melodrama, it's pointed you mutely to what it can¹t acknowledge--outdone itself. Camp embraces its inabilities, but that may not rule out lament. In Warhol, only approach the paintings traditionally as portraits of the outer and inner states of their subjects and you feel like busting out, because you realize you're in the graveyard of the reified. In Kuchar, the film takes so much pleasure in being a film at all that it's hard to say what limits the film either claims or has.

The meta-film Hold Me While I¹m Naked argues, classically, that cinema is the sublimation of reality, well of course! A director, played by Kuchar, is forced to suspend production when his actress decides (correctly) that he's only a pervert who wants to see her in the nude: he had asked her to remove her bra "because the mysticism of the stained glass window and the profanity of that brassiere do not go well together." Stranded, he applies lipstick to a plastic doll and literally wallows in his own wasted reels among intercut scenes of "real women" having sexual interludes with other guys. In some cases, though, it¹s not clear whether these women (the rebellious actress, for example) are getting it on in the present, in the director's morbid and cinematic imagination, or in scenes of the lost film. An ordinary life appears--the director twirling in the shower alone, sitting in the kitchen with his battleaxe mother and her awful cuisine--that is the very melodramatic image of "unmelodramatic life." The film seems to differ not from a social reality that limits it but just from the unfilmed. The unfilmed is an unknown state altogether, something we can't assume anything about and that the films don't want to know anything about.




(...the beauty of the space between Kuchar and the doll....)



At the end of Hold Me Kuchar looks into the camera and asks, "There's a lot of things in life worth living for. Isn't there?" Things "in life" are unspeakable and feared dead, like the untransmogrified matter on the dinner plate. In Kuchar's virtuostic editing, almost every shot comes as a huge surprise. So much so that an equally huge fear of sameness is implied. In George and Mike Kuchar's Town Called Tempest (1962), an ex-prostitute whose new life of pious service risks being unmasked by the reappearance of the film¹s protagonist, an old acquaintance, comes up with a grenade and lobs it at him in the second she perceives the threat. No hesitation--goodbye, protagonist. This was one of the most uproarious and delightful moments at the Wilder. Who would go so far? (Early Fassbinder? Godard in Every Man for Himself, when the director starts shooting with a pistol as well as with a camera?) We noticed the same narrative originality in the mini-stories Kuchar emitted in the dark. Of the Leibowitzes, for example, he said: "The parents are dead, of course. And the animals. But Larry is still alive. And the house is a complete mess." The little story is edited for unpredictability. Like it, the films realize the resources of disloyalty, distraction, and anticlimax. The cliche, "the house is a complete mess," in the wrong place is euphoric. The films can feed on their own self-destruction, they burden classic shots with material--events, words, clothes, bric-a-bric, settings and human substance--that's dross and needs to be dross so that the films can show their lack of obligation to it. That any thing can be as interesting on film as any other is repeatedly proven by filming crap in a state of flux. (As Kuchar noted in the theater, he's also been "typecast," as he put it, as literally a photographer of turds.) Some of Kuchar's recent projects sound as though they move from playing with rhetorical obstacles, obstacles representing "recalcitrant matter," to a kind of minimalism that plays with lack of resistance--"weather diaries" in which he travels to Oklahoma to observe cyclones but films whatever happens, including nothing. The question that never gets answered is what has worth when not filmed. What's not filmed is dead meat, or so we're afraid. But that doesn't need to concern us as long as we're filming or watching films, and composition costs nothing. Style is cheap; life is cheaper.


Image of Kuchar that appears at the end of Wild Night in El Reno
(1977).

Acknowledgments: Thanks to comrades at the screenings for dialogue: Eyal Amiran, Joe Mahoney, Daniel Tiffany, Toshi Tomori. This post was written for Oh! Industry, and appears in similar form there: thank you to Karen Tongson and Team Oh! Industry.

Hemisphereless James

Years ago I ordered William James’s Principles of Psychology ([1898]; ed. George A. Miller; Harvard University Press,1981) and Niels Bohr’s Philosophical Writings . . . 1933-1957 (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1978) in the same batch of books, and was very surprised to discover that the former was about 1300 pages and the latter 100. James took twelve years to write the Principles, but Bohr’s interest in writing philosophically at all was apparently not that strong, even over twenty. The essays are really occasional pieces, while James’s work, it's no secret, is intensely personal and reflexively organic. It becomes a moralized cosmology of life, a guide to living in the guise of a description of the properties of being alive. (I’d be interested in knowing about readings that track James’s personal investment in detail rather than just noting that he wrote it after a breakdown and in the mode of self-analysis.)

Like Descartes, James searches for a zero degree from which to start living. It’s notable that he takes the trouble to justify his exclusion of inanimate entities, as though the line between inert and living matter were not obvious enough to assume. That when “we pass from such actions” as are performed by magnetized iron filings “to those of living things, we notice a striking difference” which consists in living things’ caring to move and act (20), does not so much define the biological as raise the possibility—as Descartes does by positing mechanical animals—of the appearance of life without the desire for it. Although the first differences James notes are between iron filings and Romeo and Juliet, between “chopping the foot of a tree” and “the foot of a fellow-man” (20, 25), he proves the difference where it matters by vivisecting a series of conscious beings, ascending from hapless frogs to dogs, monkeys, and lobe-injured people. We know we are conscious through privation (as Freud would agree):

If, then, we reduce the frog’s nervous system to the spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection with the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but with a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breathe or swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a normal frog, sit up on its fore-paws, though its hind-legs are kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately resume this position if drawn out. If thrown on its back it lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog. (28)

While dissatisfaction spurs the action that lets us know we’re alive, the effect of the experiments, and of the diegesis of the early chapters, is to move in the opposite direction, showing how the living thing can suffer the vegetable condition of not caring about itself. “Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary hemisphereless frogs” (32); they no longer make choices, so that “copulation occurs per fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often with dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway” (35). The explicit shock is now the one latent in the example of the filings, of how much of the capacity for, and therefore the appearance of, action can be preserved without there being any self or meaning in it: “if . . . we take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordinarily cut out for a lecture-room demonstration[,] [t]here is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the inner promptings seem deficient, and when left to himself he spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his head sunk between his shoulders as if asleep” (32).

The pathos of the recumbent animals serves the function--cutting across the narrative order of events--of stimulating the vivisector and the reader to care on their behalf, and discover their own aliveness by contrast, at the price that aliveness is relativized and contingent for all. Here the nineteenth-century relative freedom of convention in scientific writing allows James—and not only James, since it’s interestingly pervasive to the time, in the material he cites, for example—to express for the hemisphereless animal what it cannot express for itself, a desire that, further, James expresses on its behalf before he goes on to do so on his own. From the substrate that James keeps calling the “ordinary" brainless organism (and more precisely, his ability to feel something for them), he rebuilds to account for the almost equal disturbance of possible and partial repair. Although strictly speaking it can't restore a loss, the hemisphereless animal can create new actions for old purposes, and force a cognitive path through cortical obstructions: “e.g., the sound of ‘give your paw’ discharges after some weeks into the same canine muscles into which it used to discharge before the operation” (78). The good news is that a lot of capacity, even for consciousness, is built in, and that every action that happens makes it easier to do that action again; the bad news is the same—that “the original organization . . . must always be the ground-work of the psychological scheme” (141), on which “every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar” (131).

Image: Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided, 2007

Communicating, Not

It’s July 1 as I write this, the date in the dream in the my last post, but not as hot as the dream July 1.

The Winnicott essay that used to be most important to me is “The Use of an Object,” the one that explains that a relational object is discovered to be independent when it survives its “destruction” (the omnipotent imagination’s assumption that the object will not live alone, and its consignment of it to this expected fate). Lately the one that’s most important is “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” [1963] (The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development [Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1965). Here Winnicott "stak[es] a claim, to his surprise, to the right not to communicate" (179). For split egos, he writes, but also in "the healthy individual" in a parallel way, the self comes to gain the "feeling of real" to the very degree that it withdraws from contact. Non-communication becomes a figure of the self's realness because through intrusive parents and other social experiences "communication so easily becomes linked with some degree of false or compliant" behavior (184). In this way, Winnicott understands non-communication in the session as progress toward trust, a variety of the deep aloneness that he argues can be experienced paradoxically only with others in the room ("The Capacity to Be Alone," also in Maturational Processes, 29-36). Winnicott also believes that cultural phenomena mediate between communication and the "subjective objects" which we convene within ourselves only when we are not communicating. He gives the examples of diaries and lyric poems. For Winnicott these instances of language overheard assume a social contract with the audience receiving items placed in the ambiguous transitional space—an understanding that, as in play, there will be no serious demand.

But of course some of us never get the balance, and in addition to just not communicating, with and without others, we use non-communication to negate discourse, and so communicate by means of non-communication, which, if you ask me, is the worst of both worlds—although it may very well be what there is to say (see Ann Smock, What is There to Say? [U of Nebraska P, 1993]). I've thought about starting over anonymously (and a circle of known readers sounds even more inhibiting), but I think this might be naive or circumlocutionary. I might soon find myself back in the same place, not because of things that would or wouldn't feel different but because a complaint about communicating is after all one of the things I most want to utter. The beauty of published writing is its taking care of the delicate social/asocial contract by its very form, as I mention below (January 4, 2008). But real-time writing plays the game for desperate stakes, like Winnicott's nine-year-old patient with her "stolen school book in which she collected poems and sayings . . . . On the front page she wrote: 'What a man thinketh in his heart, so is he'" (186; Winnicott leaves tactfully unresolved the question of whether she invents or finds this citation). What does it mean for the nine-year-old girl to keep this book in her own house, when "rape, and being eaten by cannibals . . . are mere bagatelles as compared with the violation of the self's core, the alteration of the self's central elements by communication seeping through the defences" (187)?

Image: Stephen Cannon, Camouflaged Moth

University of Dream

“I just had the most terrible nightmare,” my friend (white male full professor at another institution) rang up to tell me.
“What’s that?”
“I dreamed I was a female graduate student!” The female graduate students were kept in a sort of razor-wired pen, from which they were drawn periodically to be raped by faculty. Sometimes they walked through a place from which they could see where the tenured faculty lived. There they were drinking and laughing.

Inspired by this, I embarked on some variations on the theme. I dreamed that a white male graduate applicant from anthropology was a black African woman. She and I walked on a beach and I was very sorry that we didn’t have more funding to offer. I dreamed (on another night) that it was July 1, and so hot that our senior French theorist walked by wearing a dress. To be specific, a sleeveless black top with a rounded neck, and a brown tube skirt. (Eyal: “What kind of shoes?” “Flat, black leather slip-ons, gender-noncommital.”) It was understood that this was purely pragmatic, just because it was so hot.

Last night I was going to give a talk to an audience of historians. One of them, a middle-aged woman with glasses, was looking over a copy of the paper in a café beforehand. There were a few references to Aristotle in the opening pages. “Are you an Aristotelian?” she said.
“No!” (Did I have to be?) She continued through the paper and asked another question, something about factual evidence. I realized with despair that she was going to demand empirical historical work to footnote each noncontroversial historical claim, and flung my cup of lukewarm tea at her. She wasn’t nearly as upset as you might expect. She was upset, but I was a lot more upset. It wasn’t clear that I was disinvited from the engagement, although it wasn’t going to go off quite normally either. About 40 minutes after the talk was to begin I saw people still waiting in the library-like room where it was to take place. I told them I’d make some phone calls and find out what was going on (they didn’t realize I was the speaker). I could maybe still give this talk although it would be late at night. In the meantime people were reminiscing about a lavish banquet that the former chair there had staged for an emeritus colleague too ill to appreciate it; there were huge plates of cold poached salmon, berries and fruits of the season, and probably twenty other dishes laid out on a white tablecloth. “That’s the worst thing that Phyllis ever did,” one of them said. Then I was in an apartment in the Midwest with a colleague with whom I did once share an apartment building, though not the unit, in Ann Arbor. I saw various little tchotchkes that belonged to me in the apartment and, feeling an urge to get completely out of there, started putting them in my bag. She said it was convenient to keep an apartment in the Midwest. “Who is on the lease of this apartment?” I asked. “That’s not clear,” she said quickly, as to say, “Good point.” Then my phone rang and I saw on the screen an alarm notice to let me know that it was 9:00 and I had missed my flight. It was news to me that there was a service that notified you if you missed your flight. I’d have to try to make the redeye, but I had a feeling I was going to miss that too.

The great academic dreamwork, though—apart from Adorno’s Dream Notes, which includes many university nightmares—is Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944), in which Edward G. Robinson plays a New York City professor who falls in with a femme fatale and commits crimes for her. At the end of the film, Robinson wakes up in the faculty club. Throughout the film, the clues that Robinson is dreaming all pertain to his profession. When his car is stopped by the police—a corpse in the trunk, of course—and he hands his i.d. through the window, the cop responds: “Professor, huh?” (It’s printed on his i.d.!) “Assistant!” Robinson squeaks, as though that were ameliorating. Which it is. (Edward G. Robinson is in his 50’s at the time of the film: is he lying to the cop?) At another point, his being named chair of his department—an occurrence in contradiction with the other scene referencing his status--is printed on page two of the New York paper. I’m not sure whose joke this all is: did Lang, or the writers (Nunnally Johnson, based on a novel by J.H. Wallis) know enough about the university system to know that these moments puncture the realism of the film? If so, then these are the moments in which Robinson almost awakes, when the anxiety provoking the dream pushes itself almost to the point of unbearability: the moments connected to his profession. On the other hand, the wake-up scene is itself compromised by the fact that it comes at the moment when the whole game that is the film is up, when there would be the most motive—as in Gilliam’s Brazil--for Robinson to go psychotic and dream of an alternative space, in a falling asleep of reason. To be able to recognize the more plausible of these interpretations, it helps to be one of him; you have to remember that an academic’s profession isn’t printed on his driver’s license; it just feels like it is.

Support Tenure for Andrea Smith

NOTE: Thank you very much to Jed Rasula, who pointed out that I had conflated The Woman in the Window with Scarlet Street (which shares its director and cast) in the earlier version of this post. I'll let the still from Scarlet Street stand as a memento to the paraprax!

Image: Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street

Reverb

Apparently, it’s common for a blog to go through a “crisis.” Often, it has to do with uncertainty of audience. The art blog Anaba, written by Martin Bromirski, had one last June. Bromirski described his longing for a “motivation transfusion”:

Sometimes I get kind of blah about this blog.... like... what is the point, who cares, nobody comments anyway, artists are not taking control, this is too much effort on my part, i want to focus on PARKOUR now, etc. . . .

Plus, and related, someone mentioning something negative about blogs appearing self-promoting.... aargh, that bothers me. I am ALL FOR artists promoting their work, in whatever way they best know how... whether that means moving to NYC and networking, or putting your shit on a blog.... just hate the hangups and hypocrisy people have about it, acting blase... the stealth shit. SORRY, I am not trying to be confrontational.

A couple of Bromirski’s friends wrote in: “Martin. Screw it. Just do it.” “Think of all the new friends you've made, Martin.” The crisis passed.

My contribution to the crisis genre, which at least provides some comic relief, seems to be my continued perplexity at having readers. It may be that the goals and questions phrased at the outset could have been better pursued in anonymity. Writing to people you know, social obligations hover. To a group at UC Irvine, I’d find it strange never to mention common experiences and problems, institutional issues, people we know, and the like, and stranger still never to use direct address, never to say “you” or “we.” Yet I wouldn’t want to duplicate or intensify here the exchanges I already have—to do that, there’s no need to write. This conflict, if that’s the right word, hasn’t resolved itself; I don’t resolve it, I set it aside. Meanwhile, it rained, the garden got wet, the cultural offerings contracted, my mother got no better, the work got denser, my hard drive expired. A friend with glaucoma and an active but largely invisible inner life identified with the protagonist in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly--“There aren’t many films about people who live out of one eye”--and decided to have a baby with a co-worker. It’s like a post-Symbolist poem, "Spleen" V or VI or VII or "2,000 Light Years From Home." These are the cypress trees in our yard, these pages are from this postmark.

Hydraulics of Cinema History

It’s hard to understand, and I’m not sure I do, how Paul Thomas Anderson can have made a film so apparently straightforward as There Will Be Blood, so almost transparent, out of materials so crude, at a date so late as this, that is so powerful in its effects. I can see why people are going back to 1940s films for comparisons; so why doesn’t Anderson’s movie seem nostalgic? It isn’t quite transparent, although it lets you see it that way or want it to be; it conveys historical self-consciousness, not through what usually goes by the name of irony, but in all but invisible ways that serve similar functions. Daniel Day-Lewis’s manipulation of his voice, for example, into something artificial that’s broadcasting all the time, makes clear that his character, Plainview, has at some point we never see poured himself into a mold. He’s beside himself from the beginning, remote-controlling himself from an undisclosed location. Day-Lewis method-acts a method actor character. Everyone has only residual spontaneity; they’ve paid out everything human before the plot begins. Plainview’s child, H.W., shows the process in motion, soft matter being shaped into a businessman. Dealing only with calcified objects—including Lewis's dusty novel—Anderson can afford to evoke the fluctuating life inside these objects. (This is a film about hydraulics, of course, like Written on the Wind and Chinatown, that suggests that psychic and kinship logics underlie and even explain economics.) Because the forms are not “revitalized” but treated as dead, the emotions seem to be outsize because they have to be to penetrate the crust that has formed over everything. Anthony Lane’s review of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men just misses a similar point, complaining that the Coens taxidermize classic U.S. film genres (New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2007). They do, and that’s what allows their films to be so creepy. Similarly Stephanie Zacharek in Salon (Dec. 26, 2007): "There Will Be Blood" only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought,” etc., etc.--when its "really" being elemental and raw would cover over the lethal reification, the difficulty, and with it the counterforce.

One of the tropes of There Will Be Blood is the lengths to which people will go in the attempt to recover, or cover over, a loss; thus the apt comparison to Citizen Kane. Anderson gives the content of the loss in the opening scenes, before we know what the film is about and what to look for, so that we have the equivalent of an unconscious memory of it. Plainview (we don’t know who he is yet, we can’t even see him clearly) in a mine shaft, under great duress, checks the silver particles inside a stone and says “There she is, there she is,” self-soothingly as you’d say “There, there.” “She,” when people will ask throughout the film where his wife is, and the closest anyone comes to mentioning his mother is “I’m your brother with a different mother.” While their absences are conspicuous, we’re liable to miss completely “her” presence in the rock, as does Plainview himself, in a way. The grammar conceals the particular in the conventional, but it’s a scene of necrophilia. Every scene but the last two take place inside the ravenous deprivation of the desire to raise the dead or live with them. The last ones correspond to a historical jump that marks, more importantly than a number of years, a shift in eras. There, with the thematization of modernity, it’s as though the film’s self-consciousness comes forward, alligning itself with the audience to look back at the preceding film, and confesses itself to be a long, cold perspective like Stanley Kubrick’s. The very last scene reminds me of the final interior scenes of 2001, which take you as though to the place where the film was made (not a very habitable place)—here, after all the film's obsessing over the turn of the 20th century, in the end it might as well be 2501. From there you’re offered a view of what has been given to see and what has been giving it to be seen, but it’s likely to be more than you can absorb.

"Desert Flowers"

Is there a film that aligns itself more fully with what Erving Goffman calls “the normals” than My Darling Clementine (1946), the scariest film I saw last year? There must be a thick literature on Ford’s interest in foundations of various sorts, and on his racism—observations on this can’t be new; so why is the film still surprising? It’s unimaginably upfront about the costs of what it depicts; it’s all in the daylight. It’s very early on that Henry Fonda/Wyatt Earp gets himself nominated marshall by slipping into a dark saloon to deal with an armed “drunken Indian” whom no one wants to confront, and emerges dragging the inert body, which he proceeds to insult and abuse before shoving it permanently offscreen. The power of this self-nomination to “proper authority,” as he calls it, radiates from Fonda’s sensitive, precise body language in long, silent shots as he hangs out, doing nothing, on the porch, and is elevated by Ford in symbols that go deeper than “religious imagery.” Fonda’s natural morality, for example, is figured in the wildflower fragrance that the barber spritzes on him and that people comment on thereafter (“The air is so clean and clear! The scent of the desert flowers!” “That’s me. Barber”). He’s anointed with oil, but he’s no Jesus type; he’s something better, he’s the pagan stud that preceded Jesus,who doesn’t need to be saved. (“Nobody with a good car needs justification” [Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood].) The central scene in which the citizens gather without a minister for a secular dance on the foundation of the future church uses the same logic, implying that we’re looking at something more ancient than any religion, from which religions evolve; and Wyatt Earp’s and Clementine Carter’s walk down the sidewalk in the sunshine, shot head-on and faraway to look like a walk down the wedding aisle, is fresher than any wedding—it uses the future wedding to make us nostalgic for the present. (This is a totally magical cinematic moment, like the carriage-house kiss in Vertigo.) There’s a little of this nostalgia in the use of the title song, which is temporally disruptive; it plays before Clementine is introduced, and at the same time the Clementine in the song is dead while Ford’s is young and alive. Ford presents the time of the film as a momentary eternity, even altering the refrain of the song in its last rendering from “You are lost and gone forever, / Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” to “I’ll be loving you forever, oh my darling Clementine.” But it’s plain enough that they can have only a short time. It’s only the loss of the civilization left behind that exposes the layer of radical purity in which the film is invested, and which gives it its “sweet” air, so in a way, the normals are working against themselves by community building—or at least, they will experience declining returns. If law and church were already established, Wyatt Earp and Clementine Carter would be invisible, which is why they like it out there in the territory even though they could be more comfortable and wealthy back East. Fonda’s soliloquy over his young brother’s grave, claiming that the point (of ejecting and slaying the unfit, or dying yourself to do so, as amply shown) is that kids like him be “able to grow up and live safe,” does nothing to account for why you’d want to go to the Arizona Territory to do that. So, discontent with the limits of civilization gets sublimated into the fantasy of civilization-creation, which comes with the bonus of seeming to get to stand outside it for as long as the construction lasts.

Image: Henry Fonda in John Ford's My Darling Clementine, 1946

Filling the Graves, or, The End of the Iliad

Abraham and Torok observe that the melancholic often imagines the lost object feeling the pain that she or he actually feels because of the loss of object: the melancholic “pretend[s] that the suffering is not an injury to the subject but instead a loss sustained by the lost object” (Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” The Shell and the Kernel [U of Chicago P , 1998], 127). Maybe unexpectedly, this is one of the most intuitive, easily exemplified points in psychoanalytic literature. The lover imagines her ex to be suffering terribly, to be unable to bear the information that she has a new lover, but in keeping this secret, it’s she who shields herself from the finality of the loss of the former lover. (Dean Wareham, who’s tough on erotic illusions, may be getting at this when he suggests instead that “the lost glove is happy.”) The most spectacular example of Abraham and Torok’s ”endopsychic encryption” is Achilles in the madness of non-mourning, who insists at one point that he cannot give up Hector’s body because if he did, Patroclus would be angry. It takes a while for the magnitude of the distortion to sink in: Achilles, the paragon of outsized rage, who has been dragging Hector’s corpse around for days, claims that the problem is that Patroclus, who is dead, might get angry. Achilles comes out of it through a radically banal series of maneuvers whose main function is to get Achilles to acknowledge his, and Patroclus’s, place in an economy of substitutions in which Priam, representing outside interests, also participates. Priam quantifies Achilles’s grief and his own in the ransom of “gifts beyond number” that he is willing to pay for Hector’s body (XXIV:504), and by the way reminds Achilles that he has a dead father as well as a dead companion, so that “"Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos" (510-511). Achilles accepts the ransom by promising himself to "give [Patroklos his] share of the spoils" (595). Under the safe pretext of service, however, the subject being served slips from the the dead to the living body. Achilles eats again instead of being “eaten out” from within by Patroclus; and Abraham and Torok’s “false I,” able to speak only in the borrowed voice of the dead, is exchanged for one that takes up its “divine right” to live (“The Lost Object—Me,” The Shell and the Kernel 155-56). Simone Weil and Sharon Cameron in her essay on Weil comment that The Iliad treats bodies as flesh and parts subject first and last to the laws of physics. Their writings (Cameron’s essay intensifies Weil’s) point to an unspoken connection between positivism and the prosaic procedures of funerary rites: in both, necessities are separated from desires, not so that we should give up desires, but so that they could be recognized as desires, stripped from the facts in which mourners attempt to conceal them. In the interlocking structure of Book XXIV, a direct barter in losses is the only thing that interrupts the killing. The soft, suspensive ending of the poem seems to drift off in the preparations for Hector's funeral. The Trojans have a truce of a limited number of days to perform these, then it''ll be back to the business of their annihilation, but the poem never goes back. (Aesthetic suspension? There's a fantasy that as long as one is writing or reading or reciting a poem, one isn't doing something else, such as hurting or being hurt.) Mourning without end, here, though, looks less like melancholy circulation than like the infinity of desires imprisoned by melancholy and liberated by mourning, as though contact with those desires and war were incompatible.

Acknowledgment: still spring 2005 (SK, TT, JN), also winter 2006

Image: Cy Twombly, Synopsis of a Battle, 1968

Meta

I was considering writing a New Year meta-letter reflecting on nine months of posts, on such topics as whether there is a provisional “answer” to my “question” in the right column; the scarcity of the first person in these writings; mixed feelings about their relative restraint and polish; the sense I can’t shake that optimally, ideas in this format should be created for this format (so that it seems not enough to have had ideas in some other place I was and write them here, but rather that I need extra ideas beside any others I might have had), etc. And I’m still considering it. Briefly: wanting a space to be deliberately less than other spaces (less weighty, less read if not less written, less determined) is almost indistinguishable from wanting it to be more. And if my hopes for this lessness get too developed, they actually become more prescriptive than my hopes in other areas where I expect “more.” The idea was to leave things for others to pick up or not, and notice how often it doesn’t make any difference. It is literally true that it doesn’t make any difference. But instead I often hope for nothing, which is a hope that’s sure to be defeated. Not only has there been little first person, there’s been no second person, except in comments-and-countercomments initiated by a particular person who can be addressed individually. That’s been deliberate, because the overuse of a rhetorical second person in many blogs is glaring—“you,” and more strongly, “everybody,” as in “OK, everybody . . .,” get hailed hopefully, as the writer fears lack of audience most of all. Casual language is part of that: the meaning of “OK, these are just a bunch of thoughts but I’ll post them anyway, here goes” is mostly: Anyone who talks like this must be speaking to a group, as you can see. And this rhetoric of the largeness of the group stands in for the phobia that no one is there at all--not really there. The trompe-l’oeil of Work Without Dread is, rather, negative-theological: it’s “Reader, I’ll never call you ‘Reader,’ but I’ll hint that you don’t need to reveal yourself, and thereby that you exist; your nonappearance will never be able to prove your nonexistence, so it’ll often be as though you were there, but only as though; and you’ll have none of the disadvantages of presence or absence.” This fantasy is important for writing; all writing, by which I mean the possibility of any writing, gives access to it and to its momentary relief-effect from society. Those of us who have it, like to write a lot, we just can’t get enough, it’s very easy, and that’s a secret that people who are pained by the lack, or possible lack, of audience never get to know. The best thing you can do to produce writing is to feel the extent to which it is not a mode of communication. We couldn’t live without the possibility of noncommunication, and, though it may never really be lost, writing instantly and blissfully gives its knowledge back to us. In practice, though, and in a way that may be especially clear in this format, and which I’d like to follow up on in future, the main thing about you, reader, is that you’re there. That it’s not up to me to do anything in particular about that—that’s what’s so hard to understand.

Image: http://www.12k.com/steinbruchel.html

"Asplenium and the Lizards"

“Asplenium and the Lizards,” a dream recounted by the nineteenth-century philosopher of psychology Joseph Delboeuf, is cited by Freud as a heroic feat of oneiric recall. The dream involves the Latin name of a fern:

He saw in a dream the courtyard of his own house covered with snow and found two small lizards half-frozen and buried under it. Being an animal-lover, he picked them up, warmed them and carried them back to the little hole in the masonry where they belonged. He further gave them a few leaves of a small fern which grew on the wall and of which, as he knew, they were very fond. In the dream he knew the name of the plant: Asplenium ruta muralis. [According to Freud, “its correct name is Asplenium ruta muraria, which had been slightly distorted in the dream.”]

The dream proceeded and, after a digression, came back to the lizards. Delboeuf then saw to his astonishment two new ones which were busy on the remains of the fern. He then looked round him and saw a fifth and then a sixth lizard making their way to the hole in the wall, until the whole roadway was filled with a procession of lizards, all moving in the same direction . . . and so on. (SE IV, 12)

This Escherian sequence is about generation and animation, making more out of the same. Delboeuf is taken aback by the Latin name in the dream because “when he was awake, Delboeuf knew the Latin names of very few plants and an Asplenium was not among them.” “Sixteen years later,” Freud writes,

When the philosopher was on a visit to one of his friends, he saw a little album of pressed flowers of the sort that are sold to foreigners as mementos in some parts of Switzerland. A recollection began to dawn on him—he opened the herbarium, found the Asplenium of his dream and saw its Latin name written underneath it in his own handwriting. (SE IV, 12)

The incident combines sensory clarity, conceptual intelligibility, and a sense of the marvelous in a recovery of language. The herbarium highlights the objectlike quality of a name: the name identifies the sample plant and the plant exemplifies the name, the noun level with the thing. Although Freud stipulates that words that occur in dreams are memorial pictures of words, not working language, this picture of a word seems to go along with a feeling that in waking life does accompany working language.

The Asplenium dream, that is, engages a kind of circular satisfaction that accompanies language use and may itself be one of language’s main uses. In the dream the classic notion of thing as name and name as thing orchestrates a drama of understanding, of obscurity brought to light. What requires explanation is the dream’s ability to use a word that the dreamer doesn’t know he knows. This name, Asplenium, seems unusually memorable. Not only does it stick in a corner of the dreamer’s mind without his permission, until it reappears in the dream; he also remembers that reappearance sixteen years later. “Asplenium” is memorable because of its unaccountability; it had been a “mystery,” Freud writes, that remained unsolved. The story of finding the herbarium is presented as a solution to the mystery. It features the phenomenology of understanding, the “dawning” feeling. Yet Delboeuf’s understanding is never actually miraculous; it’s something he knew already, in “his own handwriting.” (This uploading of previously known blocs of information is what leads Freud to propose that language in dreams isn’t really thinking, moving forward.) It seems miraculous only insofar as he forgets what he knows; his having forgotten is what actually demands explanation and remains unexplained by the story. When Delboeuf finds the herbarium we are “driven to admit,” writes Freud, that “we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking memory” (SE IV, 11). The moment is striking for its simultaneous climax and anticlimax: we begin with a sense of extra insight—which we might be tempted to attribute to superstition, or “overstanding”—and exchange it for a scientific explanation. Delboeuf remembered the name of the fern before he remembered that he had forgotten it: nothing has been gained for the mind’s capacity (no foreknowledge or visionary knowledge), yet every bit of wonder given up to the explanation is replenished by the wonder of re-experiencing what one already knows. This re-experience registers with all the impact of gain, but has the structure of trompe-l’oeil. This is also what Freud calls “cheap thrill”: civilization is a cheap thrill because it loves to “solve” problems it creates, as when one puts one's feet outside the coverlet on a cold night to enjoy the pleasure of pulling them back in again.

Freud’s point in retelling this dream is not to interpret it psychoanalytically but to characterize dream language: Asplenium, an artifact of linguistic memory stored as an image file, embodies the recycled character of language in dreams, which appears very insightful because it is very plagiaristic. If Freud wants to make this point aboutdream language, though, it’s hard to keep it from spreading to language per se at its most basic, its pairing of word and concept, which can seem to explain things simply by pairing them (“That fern is an Asplenium.” “So that’s what it is!”). How often is the feeling of mental discovery nothing more than this? And, turning it around again, maybe this nothing, this non-thought, is what thought is made of, and is really something. The temporary occlusion of familiarity when language appears in a dream is enough to activate a vivacity, an animation effect, that belongs all the time to language as such, as the other side of its standardization. “I know this word!” is most of the excitement—an excitement that all of us, at some early point of development, must have felt, and still can feel. Dream language recovers amazement at the thing here that really is amazing--that there is language at all.

Notice: Islands of L.A.

I've never posted a news item before, but am particularly happy about this: islandsofla.com. It came to my attention today when I stopped at a light near Glendale and Berkeley. . .

Like an Animal

Is there a word missing between “animate” and “anthropomorphic,” for stones and plants that look like animals, not people? And for people and actions that recall animals, but not pejoratively as in “bestial”? “Animate[d],” like “vital,” stays on the level of motion and transformation, a principle without a shape; wind can resemble anima, but “animate” is no good for describing a tree pod that looks like a sea urchin. Why is a landscape usually thought of as anthropomorphic rather than animal-like? As an adjective for a human being "animal" virtually means “bodily,” only with a connotation of active energy, and fails to carry the identification that arrives for better and worse with “anthropomorphic”; “X is an animal," or "X's animal presence," makes less of X (less thought, less compunction, less depth) rather than clarifying X’s shape. For that we say “feline,” “bearlike,” etc., at which point personality denied to “animal” comes back in. So, are animals supposed to be too varied to be referenced as a group? Too redundant with the anthropomorphic to be worth mentioning, as though lacking a particular wavelength? (Yet encounters with the animal-like do have a special character--they have all of the solidarity and less of the uncanniness that characterizes the “anthropomorphic” [cf. David Berman’s song, “Animal Shapes”].)



Image 1: cholla, Joshua Tree National Park: zoomorphic?

Image 2: Wang Fu, Ju Yong Pass (Ming): anthropomorphic?

Kafka's Combinations

You can see why Blanchot gets caught up in Kafka’s headache-inducing Letters to Felice, because they have the kind of narrative involution and recession, and precision about indescribable feelings, that Blanchot wants in his fictions. Blanchot would like especially to draw a general insight from the logical trap Kafka builds for himself by trying to “convince [Felice Bauer] of what he is”:

to say everything . . .means to tell how he will make her unhappy or, more precisely, the impossibility of communal life to which he is condemning her; and this with nothing to make up for it, so that she may accept it and see it precisely as impossible, from which it will follow that none of the answers that she gives him can satisfy him. For if she says to him, perhaps out of levity, out of affection, perhaps also out of a proper concern for nuances: "You speak too abruptly about yourself," or else "things are perhaps as you say, but you cannot know that they will not change when we are together," this hope that she maintains despairs him: "What do I have to do? How can I make you believe the unbelievable?" . . . . This on the one hand. But on the other hand if, convinced or eventually hurt, she takes her distance, becomes reticent, formulates doubts, writes less, then he becomes all the more despairing, for he has the feeling that she misjudges him precisely because she knows him, thus deciding according to the knowledge he gives her of himself, instead of deciding, not blindly, not by weighing the reasons, but in all clarity under the attraction of the impossible. There are, he says, three answers; there are no others that she can make: "It is impossible, and therefore I do not want it." "It is impossible, and for the time being, I do not want it." "It is impossible, and therefore I want it." This third answer, the only correct one (which might, inspired by Luther, take this form: "I cannot do otherwise, in spite of everything"). (L’Amitie [1971], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford UP, 1997], 274)

Blanchot believes Kafka pursues something like the sublime and wants Bauer to do the same; he tries to convince her the whole thing is impossible not so that she will leave him, but so that she can want it for the right reason, because it’s impossible. The fact that Blanchot is so invested in formalizing the logical possibilities of Bauer’s answer is interesting in itself—as though Kafka and Bauer had to work to the end of a symbolic problem to settle their affairs. Blanchot’s “therefores” are also interesting, because they show the way that Kafka interpolates cause and effect into what may be just preference. Both of these formal features support the idea that Kafka is looking for support from some unknown law of nature. But the three “answers” that Blanchot says Felice Bauer might give aren’t the only ones. First of all, the second answer, the one with the temporal hedge in it, isn’t really a separate possibility and isn’t really an answer. And there are two other possible semantic combinations that Blanchot doesn’t mention.

Kafka does consider the combination normal people would prefer, but it’s his worst nightmare, so I understand why Blanchot doesn’t bother with it. If Felice seems to think “It is possible, and therefore I want it,” then Kafka tells her, “You lack true insight into my wretched personality, disregard my confessions” (Letters to Felice [ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth; Schocken Books, 1973], March 6-7, 1913; p. 215). If she thinks it’s possible, she doesn’t know him, so it’s impossible. The second non-answer, the one that decides “only for the time being,” only waits for the first, pragmatic possibility to come about: “you . . . may think that at some time I might yet turn into a useful human being with whom a steady, calm, lively relationship would be possible. If this is what you think, you are under a terrible misapprehension” (Kafka 215). These answers are only the other side of the other thing that sensible people think, “It is impossible, and therefore I do not want it.” That formulation is better than “Possible/Want it” because if Bauer were to think it, at least her observation would be credible, she’d be talking about the right person. That’s why Kafka keeps thinking that this must be what she really wants to say. And, although he hopes that she may want it because it’s impossible, that seems like too much to hope for, and would also leave him in the situation of wanting her to want it because it’s impossible, even though this would mean her commitment to a life of misery; that she can say it doesn’t mean she should say it. She would have to be actually unable to say anything else, i.e., be persuasively as hopeless, as incapable of anything better, as he is . . . which strains belief. So, Blanchot’s answers--negative/negative (waiting/not answering) and negative/positive—and one other, the worst, positive/positive.

But logically, one side of the square is still missing: positive/negative, “It is possible, and therefore I do not want it.” Isn’t this one really the best, from Kafka’s perspective? It’s the only one that gets him off the hook, because if Felice isn’t motivated by compassion (something that worries him a lot), her judgment that “It is possible” would suddenly be credible. Being followed by nothing, it would bring no ethical anxieties about her future; and being non-utilitarian, Felice would be joining him in “a relation of strangeness” (Blanchot 275) that couldn’t be perceived as calculation. Kafka would be validated and free. He practically instructs her to say it: “And now, dearest, take me as I am, but don’t forget, don’t forget to throw me out at the right moment!” (Kafka 216).

Image: Elena del Rivero, Les Amoreuses: Elena & Rrose, 2001

Post-Totalitarian

Having taken a long time to get around to seeing Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se, Jie), and admiring some things about it, and wishing to acknowledge that it is not nearly as shocking as Zhang Yimou’s totalitarian Hero . . . nonetheless, the film is “post-totalitarian” in its affinities, for better and worse. Its legend is “We were so naïve.” This line is spoken by the heroine, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei) in reference to her participation in a student group of freelance “resistance” fighters. But the phrase belongs paradigmatically to the post-Tiananmen era (even though Ang Lee is from Taiwan: the film is about Chinese history, and the sentiment about the supposed naivete of Tiananmen has been repeated globally). She means that it was innocent for the group to have imagined that, as unconnected amateurs, they could succeed in assassinating Yee, a high official of the occupation government (Tony Leung). As she utters the phrase, she is being recruited back to action by a colleague and possible love interest from the former group, who tells her that three years before, they “were being watched” by a more established terrorist unit for which he now works: would she like another try at the assassination? This second attempt is even more “naïve” than the first, as it turns out that (being a more professional group, more susceptible to notice) they, too are being monitored, this time by the occupation government itself, and have little chance to accomplish their goal. What’s not naïve is Wang's existentialist gesture, in the last minutes of the film, of throwing her life away to protect the skin of the fascist Yee, who for the middle forty minutes has devoted himself to impressive sex with her. Given this, what does it mean that Reuters/Yahoo! News can locate the film’s “controversy” in the fact that “some [decry] it for being too long” while “others [are] critical of its graphic sex scenes”? Lee’s logic, and Reuters’, seems to be: you’re going to end up in the quarry anyway, so there’s more point to sacrificing yourself on the altar of good sex—very good sex—than of any political hope. Post-Tiananmen, we’re no longer naïve. We’re “post-totalitarian,” sophisticated enough to understand this. And to prove it, we are happy to show you Tony Leung’s testicles. That’s how sophisticated we are.

Image: from Xu Bing, Tobacco Project, 2000. For updates on June 4, see chinadigitaltimes.net

Ideology and the Infra-Thin

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism (Oxford University Press, 1999) describes itself as a study of the emergence of a society that attempted to accustom itself to the pervasiveness of the Soviet state. With other histories of everyday life, it “shares . . . a focus on practice” (2) over ideational statement. This logic extends to the title of the book, in which “Stalinism” serves “as a shorthand for the complex of institutions, structures, and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the Stalin era” (3). The book's effort to register forms of life that express themselves in practices as much as in words and thereby to accumulate a more holistic sense of the experience of Stalinism, however, is immediately in tension with the idea of totalitarianism itself. Because “the state was a central and ubiquitous presence” in 1930s urban Russia, Fitzpatrick feels justified in “defin[ing] the ‘everyday’ for the purposes of this book in terms of everyday interactions that in some way involved the state” (3). But if the state was pervasive, as seems noncontroversial, then there should be no need for this restriction. If “an ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality—that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself” (Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology [Verso, 1989], 49), then everyday Stalinism would potentially reveal itself most in experiences that do not explicitly involve contact with the Soviet state. Poets engage this problem when they write in “dark times” about petty love affairs, window reflections, and the sky—such topics indicate neither evasion of the censors nor escapist imagination, but intent to document the inextricability of the political through the route of the hardest case. Even explicit ideologies of the imagination, such as Eugenio Montale’s claim that what was important about being a poet was that at any time, while standing in line at the post office, he was apt to think about something unconnected, some non sequitur (I promise to fill in this reference . . .), are remarkable for their assumption that in the twentieth century the occurrence of a disparate thought has become surprising. Since the zero degree of ideology remains amnesiac, the most unprepossessing exchanges that someone still feels like recording measure the “infra-thin”--Duchamp's term--distance between the interior and the limit of the state. (This returns us to the genius of photography and minimalism.)

Image: Andrei Tarkovsky, Myasnore, Polaroid; a view from his house in the town of Myasnore. More Tarkovsky Polaroids at film.guardian.co.uk