Mayday is coming. The organizers of Occupy have done a pretty bang up job as far as organizing and hyping up the day. There are marches and music, and calls to stop doing the things that you hate for a day. There are calls not to shop, not to work, not to go to school. And I am finding myself increasingly disturbed. I am not disturbed by mobilization, by uprising, by change, by violence. These things are part of the way. What I am disturbed at is my own conclusion, which is something that I think I and many like me would much rather shake off and forget, than acknowledge. It is an homage to blasphemy, an homage to workers from another world. We are not those workers, we are in precarious spots. More than precarious, we are in an age devoid of consequences or rife with suffering. The mediator between me and the street is the four hours of work that I put in a day. If I don’t go, I’m fired. If workers don’t work, there’s no group to save them. This is more than “realism” because it’s always going to be hard. This is a reflection on the structure of the movement and those who work to create it. It’s hard for me to post this. But I get the feeling that the mass of support of the most “radical” kind is going to be the support and strikes from the students. And since I’m going to be a student, myself, in the near future, I don’t mean to say this in a hateful way. But there is not so much at risk for the student culture. Yes, they’re poor and disenfranchised and disrespected and unnecessarily in debt. This is true and we should strike in solidarity with them. There is a difference between missing a day of class–a week of class–and missing an hour of work in a precarious labor position. We haven’t thought about the implications of leaving the children untended, of paying the rent for the single mothers working three jobs. We just haven’t planned for those things, and it’s more than unjust, it privileges the workers who are unionized, who have social connections, who are hemmed into a semester. I just don’t know how well a tribute and a mobilization inspired by an historical idea is really in line with the meaning of the idea. Workers in Chicago and New York in 1886 knew what what on the line. It was their life. It was their home. What are the stakes that we’ve set out for ourselves? I’ve still got people bossing me around saying that all of our protests are nonviolent. I’ve got people telling me this shit is still about love. What are the stakes? It’s an unpopular thought, even in my own head. But how much of ourselves are we really demanding when we demand everything?
Author Archives:
Beyond the Last Exit.
Bookchin’s particular moment in history, marked with a fascinating combination of anarchist demands for a decentralized and free society at the height of Nixonian repression, is worth looking in to. This is the same political and social era in which Pynchon’s Vineland takes place. Similarities between the two works allows the reader to establish a mutual core of shared problems and converging opinions on the meaning and matter of social consciousness in the final decades of the 20th century. In Pynchon and Bookchin there is a demonstrable failure in the activism and revolutionary quality of the 1960’s. It is difficult not to stuff words into the authors’ mouths and say that “the time was not ripe,” but the urgency with which these writers expound narrative and critique, lead one to the contrary. In Vineland, the narrative arch is structured as a coming of age story without a protagonist in the strictest sense. Only over time and through destruction and selling out after the golden days at the university, are exits, offshoots, and possibilities for a salvageable future cemented over. The twin characters of Frenesi Gates and DL evolve together from their embryonic stage inCalifornia, filled with trauma and sickness passed down for generations: after the operation gets shut down, Frenesi goes with the government, with external oppression as the agent of oppression. There is no greater trauma in her life than during her days in the family unit. DL, on the other hand, turns the mind’s eye inward even when matters call for something else. Whose story are we reading there? The childish golden goo crusts over and makes the children blind. Before 1968, before Nixon, there was Utopia, the image or hope for Utopia, at least. There was color. There were sports cars that didn’t make you a suit. Afterward it was all an illusion and from zero to sixty the superhighways were driving us out into the explosive atomic gas of destruction, total and irrevocable destruction. Afterward, Utopia was a dream, a joke, a car speeding fast under bridges and highway lights. It seems like the story ofAmerica.
A full rereading of the book would be necessary, but a distant memory still haunts me with the dread of loss, or of awakening to loss that has long been with us. Realization is another element that constructs Pynchon’s reading. In order to move on, however, I will note the similarities that I have found in Bookchin’s readings are nuanced and take seriously the problems and cultural roadblocks that are only demonstrated in Pynchon. The contrasting tones or layers in tonality serves as a type of warning to the reader of a sudden break or bleakness in urgency and practicality in these issues. Vineland is written in 1990, while Bookchin’s Toward an Ecological Society, was first published in 1979, and while it underwent many revisions in the 1980s, the core message of immediacy reaches from its first drafts. It is the author’s deepest and most hopeful stance that the failed movement of the 1960s can be revamped by the ecological, feminist, and public planning facets of cultural mobilization. Bookchin’s approach is explicitly cultural because of his belief in the cultural foundation of society, rather than the economistic ones propagated by Marxist ideology.
Bookchin’s introduction names the simple and straightforward purpose of the volume, which is to recover the idea of a radical critique of social life. He asserts that there is no authentic revolutionary movement in North America or Europe in the late seventies (and presumably during the 80s through each new revision and addition), saying that the memory of bona fide revolutionaries is spectral, full of artifice and stuffed with reified bourgeois content, and meaningless. Radical life is a shadow of the direct action movements, social ideals, and demands of earlier generations.
Hypothesis: Bookchin’s nuanced mode of critique of (his) contemporary political climate seems entrenched in a certain veil of nostalgia. When the author denounces sloganeering, private “stances” that are ultimately reducible/comparable to a consumer choice, Bookchin counterpoises the rich anarcho-syndicalist tradition of the 30s, the French Revolution, even the revolution of 1848 in order to emphasize the foolish and grandiose view that most “revolutionaries” have of themselves. It is hard not to get lost in this nostalgia and judge Bookchin for it. However, in the early pages of his introduction and the collection of essays as a whole, it is important to remember Bookchin’s message that those other movements also failed, were also incomplete and feable, but they were at the very least authentic. The question of authenticity in Bookchin is an important one, since it might be riddled with presuppositions and particular demands local to Bookchin. Perhaps not.
What does the modern call for audacity mean? Bookchin compares the embarrassingly bourgeois call for audacity in shame against Danton’s demand, a demand that foreshadowed his own death.
Bookchin acknowledges the antagonistic and contentious view that he holds, and justifies it with his concern for the inherently radical issues that society is faced with during the time he is writing. There a connection between the failure or utterly inauthentic radicality of contemporary social movements and the urgently radical and dire nature of authentic social and ecological crises which emerge contemporaneously with dummy progressivism.
The three pillars of Toward an Ecological Society: ecology, feminism, and community control. What are these things? And what does Bookchin hope that they will foster in specific relation to a radical cultural movement?
Immediacy against the cemented bourgeois sensibility permeating even radicalism pervades Bookchin in many of the same ways that I remember Pynchon’s novel did. Bookchin first sets up the end of the century as a type of heuristic device, maybe as a marking of time or the very end of the ‘last exits’ that I have mentioned earlier. Nearly twenty years to the conclusion of the millennium, Bookchin writes in a tone that desperately calls to forestall an apocalypse that must or might strike in the 21st century. This is a sentiment that is easy to swallow in rhetorical terms, having lived through the turn of the millennium, but from a critical—dare I say authentic—standpoint, it is harder to accept precisely because we believe ourselves to be living in end times. One must question the origins of this belief in relationship to the physical mobilization and cultural movements that have developed at the proverbial end of the world. In fact, this last exit strategy that’s damned us all calls into question the teleogical conceptions and misconceptions of culture, ecology, and society. What could we have missed if we have always been just here on the highway, speeding, chasing: movements are not dreams, liberation is not a mirage. But time does not have a beginning or an end, and the manifestation of that movement, of this or that “last chance” revolution misses the point. It is still clinging to something in the past, or to the hope of what the present could have been if we were still approaching it from the past.
Perhaps it is hardest to grasp this concept of the last exit, the exits that sealed up before I was born, because these older and yet apocalyptic “last” messages are from another generation. Now, more than ever, we are critically and culturally cast off, cut out, of history. We are the children of a broken universe and yet we face the same problems on a magnificent scale, we have been robbed of the sentimental and benign resting places, the green patches, even the safety valves to which Bookchin alludes.
Reblog from “addressee unknown” Occupy-Time-Lag on 10/04/11
Solidarity is more or less about time. In the occupy wall street protest, there is a lot of potential; perhaps much of the anxiety that people on the Left feel emerges from the horizontal quality of the meetings there. Horizontal means that there are Ron Paul supports there, that there are Main Street Americans, that there are Anarchists (for better or for worse) and there are Leftists… not to mention a bunch of anachronistic hippies and general peace-loving liberals.
Cornell West called it a moment of democratic awakening. Perhaps. But for me, that’s not enough. That’s not even that valid (in and of itself) in conscious-based revolution. I was at the protest on Sunday and there was a sign that said “don’t be afraid to call it REVOLUTION,” and I do believe that I am quite nervous about it. Quite. I’m tremendously anxious about this pre-figurative event because of its amorphous potentiality. That is not to say that solidarity is not one of the more important commitments that a committed Leftist should hold up, but it is worth noting that this is not the event, folks.
Hm, even there I feel that I could be completely wrong. To find any sort of coherent mode of imagining the vicissitudes of political action in time, especially political and social action that is rooted in the experience, is an anxiety-ridden matter for us theoretically minded activists, or non-activists.
At what moment does an event that was previously vacuous (of determinate political content aside from the reactions to police brutality, etc) or at best amorphously anti Wall Street, transform or have the transfigurative powers of a real riot? I mean to ask: should this action that has no determinate force or meaning other than its potential to “awaken” and kindle political relationships and bodies that will act concretely in the future, be taken for a revolution?
What is the level of ethical and political solidarity that the (ultra) left can really engage in? My partner said it one way: “I will talk to students and people I see about it. I will talk to them about what it means and how this event might affect things, or at the very least what questions it makes people think about. Yeah, I’ve gone to the protest, but for me, I don’t think I agree with the protest enough to camp out over night.”
I, however, instead of approaching the event as something that I needed to support with outright political solidarity, felt that politically-ethical solidarity does more to define the potentiality of that movement. That is to say, I would camp out there overnight as a sign of solidarity to the potential of the moment and of the eternal possibility of the event. I am now thinking that “ethics” is not the right way to categorize what I am trying to express. I am trying to express an anxiety about political and ethical experience in the lag of history.
In five years, ten years, or in a narrative version of all this, one might be able to point to this event in the prologue of events. It might be the event that sparked a violent protest in Texas or the Midwest, and that was where we finally had some political boundaries drawn in the sand. It might be said that this was the event, itself, because it really was the first emergence of protest to reach the American main stream. It might not be remembered. It might be called a hippy dance.
In truth, and in expression, there is a fear about time and theoretical expression in time, it’s about wanting to act and show and be in a place where its inhabitants cannot see the surrounding geography. It is a land illuminated by the dust of yesterday’s sun and the anxiety to do the right thing, even if we never see the light of day again.
And yet, we know that we will.
Previous Post
I should have something to say. I should have some feeling on my youth and I should shine up to some greater truth about America. I should fight for our future or even fight against fighting for anything. Yes, I did that for a bit. But now, I know that I have something too share with you all, but I forget how to speak. And I am so very immeasurably tired. I have been awake for so long, since at least the middle of the 90s. I have never walked the grasses and the cities with grit in all their sparkling possibility: I can talk about the vital characteristics of Neitzsche and of Pynchon, and I can contemplate the Dharma Bums with sobriety. Damn it, I’m so tired. And if I could just get out of bed from fear and my computer screen, I might go out and find myself a friend or two and we could start a revolution. Or we could start a social scene with an attractive insurrectionary aesthetic.
We’d talk about America and we’d recast the cavalier critiques of our grand-uncles when they were our age. The sixties passed our bloodline, but the younger ones that don’t show up for birthday parties or graduations, I think that guy was involved at Strawberry Creek College. But I’ve gotten this diploma, you see, and I’ve been working nearly 50 hours a week ever since, you see, and I’m bloody tired and it’s a Saturday. There’s a rally against the austerity measures in Greece and it’s organized by some anarchists who model themselves after Italian autonomy, but I’ve got a couple more hours of online work and at least three loads of laundry… so I’ll see you at the next one. But don’t worry, we’re all part of the future of electro-communism: it’s easier to tally IP addresses, anyway.
there is a little patch of sky above me, it will go away when I die.
In the process between the self and the community that self-replicates and ever-mutates, day by day the patterns are jutting out here and there. Without order, history is made in upsurges and flying ice picks are mistaken for birds with wings. But the stories we tell, that I have been too afraid to tell in my quiet clearing, are stories told in a great order and it is true, there’s truth ascending! For history is happening with or without the positive poles of madness, but we speak of it in yeses and nos, assigning meaning of oppositions in the story of our clattering and our efforts and our woes.
cosmopoly
my deepest moments of depression and sadness are made in a moment of relapse and despair. they are impressions of the world as I have inherited it and I have no time for its silly shapes and horrendously boring narratives. I cannot stand to look at it anymore. I cannot stand to grope around like a disfigured mime as if love were really possible if only interior landscapes were as stable as a hut on the coast of a Degas print. there is something lacking and profoundly stupid about the despair and anxiety that I feel is a mandatory part of being alive and in the world today. wherever one might seek immersion there is instead a more demanding work schedule. happiness and love become mutilated limbs of routine and I cannot stand it. there is no room for existence in everyday habits and it kills the fibers in the lungs of concentration. in the pattern of acceptance one wears a chastity belt to passion and to discovering the hidden cracks of the universe that are the salt pilings of our pitiful urbane existence. I cannot accept it. and in the profound loss of life and time sacrificed to the death temples on those salt pilings, I rage against them in constancy and anxiety, reminding myself that men who lay bricks and build cities can think of other things. I understand now that they must, for the sake of fury and of community that is greater than the peripheral landing strip of hair around our sex organs, for power that takes its labor for its own rather than pouring out its veins into cupped hands, begging to the pieta for mercy.
Demonstrated Power: Please Read and Forward in Support of Longshoremen in the Northwest
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the clever and convenient thing
about getting a job in a capitalist firm as a young person is that one doesn’t have to think too hard. the deep and expansive tundra of emotional waste, of intellectual poverty, and of loneliness is relegated to the fantastic flights of adolescence. relationships and love and sadness all find their motifs in the decor and in white leather that feels like human skin compiled, layers upon layers.
une petite question sur le sujet d’expression
Chapter One of Capital has proven itself more enjoyable on my third read than previous ones (including my painful initiation in the Spring of 2009 “Marxist Literary Theory,” when it took me about 20 minutes a page). Now, I have the chance to focus on Marx’s methodological choice in organization. I read Harvey’s introduction to the book, and the brilliance in the first section is Marx’s primary attention to the commodity. I do have several questions that are perhaps only answered or made more coherent with an expanded scope of economics.
But, for now, I will confine my remarks and questions to the minute amount of text that I have read thus far. In order to stick to schedule, I am due to finish chapter one by tomorrow, but section three is full of so many rich examples and illustrations that I overlooked before in my anxiety to reach and comprehend the famous fourth section.
In the third section, Marx inches closer and closer to money, the symbol of abstract human labor. It is a wonderful approach too. This section is the first time that the word money is even mentioned. The mention of money-form comes into play when Marx gives historical account of Aristotle’s formulation of value, which does not distinguish the money-form as being anything more than a complex expression of relative value.
Relative (exchange) value is saying as much as 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, where a coat is a fixed value for the purposes of this formula. The meaning of this formulation lies in the absence of fixed value; ie it is possible that in a market where these two commodities are fluctuating in the same direction (“going up in ‘worth’”), where the relativity of this particular commodity relationship is only uncovered in light of a third indicator… we haven’t gotten there yet but this seems to be a good segue for money to come in.
BUT WAIT! It can’t be! You know why? Well, Marx is just about to show us with Aristotle’s conception of exchange. Namely, Marx wants to illustrate that money (although… WE ARE NOT THERE YET) is not a relative expression of value, but is itself the commodity of itself, it is the representation of congealed labor. Marx writes:
“5 beds = 1 house is indistinguishable from “5 beds = x $”
Aristotle writes: ” There can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commesurability… It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurate.”
This shows that Aristotle had no conception of ubiquitous or absolute matter of value; his belief in the impossibility of this expression belied his inability to recognize the value of labor, itself. Obvious ideological implications of Greek society‘s foundation on slavery and hence unacknowledged labor are apparent. However, Marx names this limitation a historical limitation and not a limitation of Aristotle’s genius. Rather, he formulates this failure as a historical contingency as something which hindered his genius. We are getting closer to the heart of the matter.
In this moment, we have moved away from the concrete explication of the commodity and its relationship to money and into the realm of historicity. Marx continues:
“The secret of the expression of value could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.” (Marx, 152)
This moment of popular acknowledgment in universal human equality is the very moment of the bourgeois revolution. It is the moment of industrialization and “equality” insofar as man is equal in civil society (in the Hegelian sense). I stopped my reading here for the moment to reflect on the implications of what Marx is writing. The ability to recognize and presuppose the foundational equality of men at the very moment that this relation between men is what determines value in capitalist exchange suggests that knowledge and historical interpretation have hitherto been contingent on historical framework and context. Like Hegel famously noted, knowledge was fated to come after the event.
But with Marx, even in this first chapter, we are liberated from the chains of contingency with the capacity to comprehend the social character of labor and the origin of social character, in our own moment as well as in the past. In this way, I am tempted to say that Marx viewed his own achievement in the execution of explanation but not in formulation. It is not mere historical accident or teleological necessity that we are now able to comprehend the social nature of commodity production, but capitalism signifies the zenith in contradiction of the concealed nature of value.
From the rooster’s crow in solitude we have found our laying hens; will we go hungry again?
On “Science as a Vocation”
I read this lecture delivered by Max Weber last night, which was delivered on November 7, 1917. There is so much that I want to say, but do not pretend to know, to understand, to have thought through thoroughly enough. Today, I will limit myself to a few elements of his lecture that were most striking and which are outlines for another project.
As I had written in an earlier entry, I am also reading my way through Capital, a task entirely different and even subsuming Weber’s lecture. In chapter one, section two of Capital, Marx goes in depth about the division of labor in capitalist society. In some modes of production, the weaver is also the tailor, but in capitalism, they are different. These distinctions are not naturally made, since even the tailor must vary and distinguish various types of labor that he is to undertake from day to day, hour to hour. Weber’s lecture outlines two component parts of “Science” (also understood as Knowledge”) as a vocation, proper: scholarship and teaching. He offers no illusions about the coincidence these strengths have in determining what kind of teacher and scholar one might make. Neither does he offer any justification of the university as something other than an aristocratic regime. At the same time that he invokes this strange division of one’s intellectual labor, he also compares the German and the American academy. In this way, Weber points out the obvious capitalization of the university. But aside from talking about apprenticeships and positions as a professor, he largely turns away from the question of the actual state of affairs in order to talk about another vision of the vocation.
Before I continue on to those points, I imagine that Weber’s own conception is a bit blind as to the motor of history (he says that we live in an age of intellectualization and of science, but he does not tie the withering away of the vocation as such with any historical development. Indeed, I found myself thinking that the division of the scientist-professor is sort of an arbitrary relic. For today, at least in the state-run universities that I have studied a little, I don’t know that teaching and scholarship are necessarily as bound into professorship or the university as they once appeared to be. I imagine that the changing environment of the university yields a sous-assistant who is not even able to research, who cannot even teach because he has not the time to be a scholar in search of income. It seems to me that this underclass of graduate and adjunct labor proves that the vocation as it is interconnected and dependent on the university is outdated and only feebly survives in its institutionalized form for older professors because of the exploited intellects a generation below them. I am not sure whether one might say that this is a bona fide division between the categories that Weber himself insists on, but rather that such categories are mistakenly bound up in the university institution as a permanent, or at least self-replicating, structure.
Anyhow, I will continue, assuming for a moment that such a thing as a vocation still exists when it comes to Knowledge. I was struck by the resistance of Weber’s thoughts to his own actions. It seems that only placing them side-by-side offers a complete reading. It seems that teaching is done for its own sake, and it cannot be confused with all of the other work and research carried out as a scholar. I think then, about the teacher who I have had. Weber inconveniently mentions that teachers are often viewed by young people as a sort of host-savior in the modern age. While I cannot understand much of Weber’s framework, I do think that this element of teaching and apprenticeship is valid, for it is not contingent on the university, while I must admit that I was taught in the university and had my most profound learning experiences there.
Weber differentiates between a teacher and a leader. How many times had I wanted a supernatural leader to confirm knowledge to me! It is the most childish of all the steps in education. The great teachers always insist on the incompleteness of their knowledge and of their capability to answer or effect the implications of their questions. It is unfortunate and even embarrassing that it had to be said. This is at the heart of what I took from Weber as a lesson. Teachers consciously operate in a realm that is neither knowledge nor failure when they are teaching. It is so hard for fledgling students not to think that our teachers are not goading us on to definite truth. Very often, teachers push us further than we’d like to go ourselves, knowing that they cannot save us, that it was never in their power to save us.
And I, who do believe in knowledge, not for choices to be made between a multitude of choices, but in that unfashionable word “truth,” thank my teachers who taught me early that a broken spirit is an illusion. That I have already been carried out far beyond their reach, that I must work for a lifetime to understand their questions in response to my own, and even more alarmingly, what forces droves us to speak.
I reject youthfulness
Youthfulness is an object inattention to real conditions, to consequences, to that actual state of affairs. Its elixir is romantic notions in gentle orange light, heightened drama that finds its articulation on the brilliant idea only half understood, and therefore, mystical. In youth we are supposed to “live a little,” if living means experience as if it were authentic and as if time did not exist and as if we might always be this way.
If in the process of being young we are instead fighting for our freedom we must be acutely aware of the freedom we wish to seek. Do we wish for sexual freedom and at what cost have we won it? At the cost of being merely sexual, or what is worse, being fully sexual to the most mutilated degree possible in our society? If we fight for democracy, are we fighting for the whole sale opportunity for selection?
What power do young people have other than to ignore the consequences because they have not come to terms with the hstorical contingency of their era, which amounts to little more than the mindless replication of shortsighted, mystical, and unscientific narratives about “human experience” that will spoil another generation of the soil, spill blood in spite of our ambitions, against our natural inclinations for leisure. The impulses by and for which we fight are little more than romantic dreams meant to fail without that unfortunate task of work.
Our power is to demand everything. But how do we know everything? What is the nature of everything? Do we wish merely for the unlimited accumulation of products, including the accumulation of rights?
I reject youth and its disinclination for working, for its demand on me to praise it, to name it as the time in which life was most possible when it was precisely the moment when the conditions that determine existence were least understood, before I had the time to study it carefully. Recently, I saw a ridiculous little sign hanging in the home of a notoriously delusional family.
It read:
Recipe for Success
1 cup of good ideas
1.5 cups positivity
2 tablespoons of luck
1 tsp. smiles
4 cups perseverance
The one thing that was missing from it was the one thing that is actually attributable to any sort of achievement, which is, of course, good work. In fact, by buying the sign, perhaps the commodity that listed the ingredients for success evacuated the need for work, as if work itself could be purchased for us. The reason why I mention this example is because all things that are to be achieved, all things that were previously considered to be the product of knowledge are now excommunicated to the arcane, the boring, the esoteric product of hegemony if they are not made immediately accessible to us and to our “impulses.”
I reject moments of inspiration. I reject notions of ephemeral beauty. I reject the historical nature of what I am perceived to be.
Capital, a reading project for the last year of civilization
Well, it’s officially 2012 now, and starting at the beginning of the week. That smells like a delicious opportunity to begin a sizable reading/blogging project. For the first few months of this year (January-April, with God‘s help), I’ll be reading Marx‘s Das Kapital along side David Harvey‘s A Companion to Marx’s Capital.
My goal is to read a given portion each week, which I’ll name as the week comes. I will write general reflections and issues on the blog, and post an out-line of my notes for those people interested.
This is meant to be an exercise in close reading at the end of the world. After all, the planets are aligned… isn’t it a good time?
In 2012, meditation on togetherness
We were over a friend’s house last night for a little new year’s celebration. We managed to turn the television on right as the ball had dropped (we almost missed it). There were all sorts of second-rate “celebrities” kissing in blue Nivea Company hats. I was laughed at for being rather embarrassed by the tonguing. Anyhow, I really do like New Year’s Day.
It’s a day of unified remembrance of experience in time. It offers us a mutilated sense of universal consciousness. We reflect, the lights sparkle, we are reminded of our status together in a world we cannot quite name; we are all standardized to the minute stroke. Last night walking up Broadway in a quiet West Side neighborhood, almost every group that we passed was conscious of the same things: a. what time it was and b. were they close to getting to “the rest of the people.”
New Year’s highlights the desire to subjectively experience the unalterable state of post-modernity. It’s too difficult to say that all the party-ers in a given time zone are all counting down together in common for very long. Certainly, we become standardized in our thinking somewhere after the 26th, increasing in intensity at around 9pm on the 31st. Even the final seconds are garnering number-chanters. Perhaps standardized experience of passing time is really about one second of the year. It is about the last second, the “11:59″ rather than the 12:00am on the 1st. It is a time that is easily skipped over in our minds and songs, but is the moment of highest anxiety. Will it come?
The stroke of midnight is already crowded out with a re-set spectacle (the kissing, the glitter, Mayor Bloomburg safely reminding us that it’s good to be alive, especially in New York). By then, we have dispersed radically from one another: all of our meditation is now about the party and vague sentimentality, the immediate conditions surrounding us. We have received pardon for another day, another year, another second. Our commonality was a ruse, and the anxiety for the future and momentary acknowledgement of history and also death was a clever trick that, after we’ve survived it, gives us all a heightened sense of individuality.
We become aware of ourselves in front of a blurry backdrop, as if someone really was filming us all along.
Happy 2012.
Why Does Everyone Love “A Dangerous Method”
I don’t write much on this blog these days, but I had to take twenty minutes of my day to write down why “A Dangerous Method” is *not* a dazzlingly brilliant film. The plot circles and winds through turn-of-the-20th-century Switzerland and Austria, recounting Carl Jung’s early treatment of Sabina Spielrein, his repressed and unhappy wife Emma, and the arch of his relationship with Sigmund Freud. The film has been touted by many critics and viewers as a subtle masterpiece engaged with historical giants of the earth. But Cronenberg’s film, to me, falls flat at all points meaningful.
I get it, I get it: Jung is the metaphoric representation of the ego in both sexual and intellectual registers in the film. He engages in a lusty masochistic id-affair with Sabina (Knightley) with all of her dramatic conclusions that wreak of acting rather than mania. Yet, Jung is unable to abandon his wife Emma, the “foundation of his home” and superficially idealistic woman. Professionally, he is the awe-struck, contemptuous, and blatantly reverent-while-blind chosen one of Frued’s. He attempts to find some more attainable and spiritual version of psychoanalysis than the high-highfalutin rigidity with which Freud attempts to cauterize the field. But, his professional and psychiatric relationship with another prominent analyst, Otto Gross, sends him into a tailspin: to fuck the patient or not?
Throughout the unfolding of this movie, subtle and delicate as it may be, I think that my issues with this movie are more with the lack of follow through in “historical representation.” Throughout the movie we are practically beaten to death with the Jewish question in Jung’s biographical life. Viggo’s Freud tells Sabina to trust the Aryan Jung, 20 minutes to the credits, because we are both Jews, and Jews we will always be.
Again, at the end of the film, when Sabina meets Jung for the last time at the eve of the war in 1913, she asks him about his new mistress. She asks if she is similar to Sabina: “is she your patient? is she Jewish? is she studying to be a doctor?” Jung smiles and saying something about perfume in the air, tells Sabina about his dreams that Europe will be bathed in the blood of bodies and death.
AND THEN THE MOVIE ENDS! What a let-down. I think that the dynamics between Sabina and Jung and Freud could have been so well dramatized and problematized for us
if THE WARS weren’t supposed to be the silent and already-understood breaking-off point of society or meaning. So look, if Freud and Sabina are both Jews, and Jung has this inexplicable attraction to “The Jewish” perhaps the metaphor grows more complex: perhaps the ego drive is at war with two “others” who can cope and exist with each other without destruction. Only when the “human” ego comes into contact with these forces is there conflict, violence, and death. The motor of life and death is a uniquely human struggle.
Then again, in an epilogue, the film explains that Sabina and her children were murdered by Nazis, that Freud was forced out of Vienna by the Nazis in his old age, dying of cancer, while Jung lived until 1961, dying peacefully and alone. BAH but the film completely disregards Jung’s fascist fan boys, those brown shirts. His “human” theory is left hanging clear of his historical liaisons with the Nazis and the Aryan unconscious. What would this mean, carried out in film, if we were to see how the rational, the human, the middle roading ego lapses, quite easily, into fascism and exploitation. All of a sudden, the viewers would have been implicated in the sea of blood that they dreamed about, the war and the culture that died with it that somehow contemporary culture still valorizes.
What would that have meant? But instead, we are left in the shadows of history, of the personal dilemma. We are left to identify with with historical pre-programming.
hmph
Rather missing the point, but interesting. http://web.archive.org/web/20071215041107/http://www.benjaminhoffauthor.com/essay.htm
