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.

under the siege of placeless and hapless poses

I have hurt and been hurt so recklessly, and have blighted hearts and sunny memories with the silent tides of changing passions without any clarity. Without any fairness to myself or onlookers or sufferers of fateful pain it has struck us all. It has struck us all in the rape of our illusions and our shadow-evening’s dreams; gone with it was the idle consolation of childhoods. A pearling husk in high July’s day hides the rotten kernels of young life, wilting and falling away implacably with the hours of the day. From inside out, it is not the myths we might embroider into our housework that can save our own hands from hurtling us through the windows. It is the painful patchwork of becoming ourselves; the solitary grafting up of ripped wounds we slashed into our wintertime enemies in selfish despair. We must now repair these wounds in washing under their clotted surfaces. We dare to gasp out words rather than scream in feckless tones against the long monotony of train rides and of mindless things, in indifference without a name. We call these things the flow of things, and face ourselves in the distention of our bloated frames bending out of agony on the fetid streets for sweet action that  will right us and the time that has since forgotten all our hollow houses.

aversion to diversion

I graduated college last week. I started working. Now that structure has largely evaporated from my life, I am left with political sentiments, goals, and fields of critical inquiry without much a mode of organizing them. Not to mention, I confront all new possibilities of reading, studying, technical refinement with an increased apprehension for plunging into diversions. I have too many choices, as it is. And one might as well highlight that methodology, clarity, and ubiquitous engagement are not my strong suits. I must learn to learn when there is no seeming end to it. All that is well and good, perhaps it is a mere trifle of this “transitional period.” I have not written seriously in about a month. I have serious grammatical issues to work out, I must learn and refine methods of critical analysis in my interpretations of books and in my responses to critical works. I must learn my own language of critical engagement, and am determined to let go of all the gratuitous and vapid sign-posts that I used for so long. Borrowed language is a fraud.

Perhaps language has no original–I imagine words and letters blowing softly on the ground in yellow sunlight, ruffled gently under trees and in intersections on the edges of cities, rolling over one another with intangible delicacy, and crushing all hope for reflection in the spectator. I do imagine the endless sorrow with which Werther walked in the rolling valleys and quivered with the leaves, and feel my arms tighten under the pressure of the empty word. Left only with the phrase; I must abandon Werther for Geothe.

There is so much that I need to do, and so much of it must happen, as always, very slowly, and better than I have had occasion to execute in the past. I must become a better writer. I must learn how to research properly; I cannot make broad and sweeping claims as I was so anxious to do. I must re-take standardized tests that I used to be good at, but have since lost the patience to interpret. I must remind myself of the political struggle that is almost always buried beneath the “ostensible goal.” So much reading, and responding, and preparing.

I imagine my life, from time to time, and wish that there could be periods of isolated inquiry. I would learn about music and history and philosophy with all of my being. I might forget about time. I would perfect my French, rub-out the little marred tendencies in my English writing. I might even run a half-marathon instead of huffing through three miles of hap-hazard exercise. But time–that consciousness of passing time–forces me under the waves of self-conscious reflection. And my fear of failure pulls me into the muddy waters of indecision.

And I am reminded of Frederic in L’education sentimentale, and become tolerably disgusted with myself, flitting from drawing to writing, to oration. The education of sentiments, the sentimental education is not an education but the wanting of it, and I must persevere in spite of threatening storms.

The narrator’s fiery trial: A note on Flaubert’s mise-en-scene

“The Fiery Trial”

And Antony sees in front of him animmense basilica. The light projects itselffrom the lower end with the magical effectof a many-coloured sun. It lights up theinnumerable heads of the multitude whichfills the nave and surges between thecolumns towards the side-aisles, whereone can distinguish in the woodencompartments altars, beds, chainlets oflittle blue stones, and constellations painted on the walls.In the midst of the crowd groups arestationed here and there; men standing onstools are discoursing with lifted fingers;others are praying with arms crossed, orlying down on the ground, or singinghymns, or drinking wine. Around a tablethe faithful are carrying on the love-feasts;martyrs are unswathing their limbs to showtheir wounds; old men, leaning on their staffs, are relating their travels.Amongst them are people from the countryof the Germans, from Thrace, Gaul, Scythiaand the Indies–with snow on their beards,feathers in their hair, thorns in the fringesof their garments, sandals covered withdust, and skins burnt by the sun. Allcostumes are mingled–mantles of purpleand robes of linen, embroidereddalmatics, woollen jackets, sailors’ capsand bishops’ mitres. Their eyes gleamstrangely. They have the appearance ofexecutioners or of eunuchs.Hilarion advances among them.

Like a play if it were all stage direction: Flaubert is painting a picture. There is no movement in the outset of the chapter. Even when men are discussing things, they have their fingers up-pointed in a state of continuous motionlessness, as if they are being portrayed as talking; we are not able to see that they really are. In place of free indirect discourse there is a thick layer of lacquer over the movement and description in this book. Flaubert seems desperate to capture immensely full temporality and can only do it at the cost of prolonged periods of lifelessness. The scene begins without a subject in spite of the narrator’s attempts to put Antony at the fore.

Antony is incapable of fully recognizing what is truly in front of him. All that we are sure Antony “sees” is the immensity of the basilica; all the rest slips into description that is clearly the construction and acute “perception” of the narrator. The enormity of the building is set out. Then, there is a jerky introduction to the crowds. Then we move closer and see a select group of men, who are doing other things, and will be the actors in the next scene. Then we are introduced to Hilarion, who enters the scene. Instead of merely introducing Hilarion and having a character whose narrative voice is able to express or recognize his environment, Flaubert relegates characters to the absurd. It is only the narrator who can recognize, describe, and maintain consciousness. The story is never as interesting as the movements. The ability for characters to “recognize” is the central theme in chapter four. When Manes explains the essence of the soul, of heaven and of hell, as well as the earth, Antony is unable to trace meaning from the aesthetic form of Manes’ description:Then Manes makes hisglobe revolve, and, attuning his words tothe music of a lyre, from which bursts forthcrystalline sounds, he says:

“The celestial earth is at the upperextremity, the mortal earth at the lower. Itis supported by two angels, theSplenditenens and the Omophorus, withsix faces.”At the summit of Heaven, the Impassible Divinity occupies the highest seat;underneath, face to face, are the Son ofGod and the Prince of Darkness.”The darkness having made its way intoHis kingdom, God extracted from Hisessence a virtue which produced the firstman; and He surrounded him with fiveelements. But the demons of darknessdeprived him of one part, and that part isthe soul.”There is but one soul, spread through theuniverse, like the water of a streamdivided into many channels. This it is thatsighs in the wind, grinds in the marblewhich is sawn, howls in the voice of the sea; and it sheds milky tears when theleaves are torn off the fig-tree.”The souls that leave this world emigratetowards the stars, which are animatedbeings.”Antony begins to laugh:”Ah! ah! what an absurd hallucination!”

The scene is constructed as a meta-critical moment on the subject of representation and critical recognition from its outset when Manes holds the globe under his arm. His entire explanation of good and evil and of souls in unity (although the soul-channels are ostensibly unaware of their unity until they meet again in the vast spirit-sea) is a concept that is the foundation of Christian belief in the after-life. To qualify this, the disparate souls are legitimated as being one with Being (external God) and validated as a whole only after recognizing that they are other than whole. This conception slides away from what Manes says, which is that the rivers are in-themselves animated beings who validate the Being, and who compose the Being. Manes aesthetic and metaphorical approach to conceptualizing the soul as well as soul-unity (geist, or what you will) is an explanation of the soul and self that does not approach unity from the Being-out in a mystical way, but seeks to highlight the ways in which the soul and unity is a concrete operation (of rivers flowing into seas, and stars animating themselves…). This, Antony outright rejects.More than reject it, Antony calls it an “hallucination”. The very fact that he is unable to see that Manes merely describes the concrete events for what they are, instead of externalizing them, demonstrates his incapability to recognize the real, to notice the world around him. For Antony, everything is a hallucination and it is only from the narrator’s point of view that we can see the ironic turn in this chapter. Since most every episode that we watch is the total illumination of an hallucination, the fact that Antony is shown truth in the midst of a fantasy and rejects it as an impossibility, shows his distrust in characters, especially religious ones. And in the place of religion, one might also say that Flaubert distrusts characters in general to function as the mimetic device precisely because he has plastered them under such a heavy  mise-en-scene from which they cannot escape, but merely fold under the letter-turrets that Flaubert himself created.

Here it is, folks.

Am I supposed to see how many holes there are in this? My senior thesis: Thesis_full_text

proper postings

Just what is a proper piece of writing? I won’t go in to the whole thing, diagnosing nonsense criteria in an attempt to flesh out what it means to live ethically in theory. To treat theory as a way of life.

But this question, the question that links ethics and theory, has me wondering. Is it at all right to think about everyday life as something that should be ethical? What I mean is, does the category of ethics bar one from reaching and contemplating more extensive sets of problems and questions? I suppose it depends on what one would call ethics, doesn’t it? There are a lot of different conceptions about the term: in a specifically Marxian-Hegelian line of thought, ethical modes of living from day-to-day are tenuous to say the least. I say that they’re tenuous because “everyday” connotes a certain type of banality, repetition, and in some ways it might slide into a practice of dogmatic theory. But then, this idea doesn’t hold any weight if the terms of “everyday practice” are necessities of a rigorous program to live revolutionarily. This seems to open up even more trap-doors into the netherworld of dogma.

There’s a rise and fall, the moon is dead but it is never really dead in language. Language; it’s the thing that I always come back to. Language itself is not revolutionary, it is political, for sure. But it’s political nature is rooted in its employment and not in any in-itself property. More than language, I would suggest that writing is a fundamental element to this everyday ethical practice of emancipation. A lot of people tell me not to conflate emancipation with truth: this is a really hard thing for me to do, but that’s another entry.

Rather a ramble, but I’m now I’m thinking.

Red moon, blue sea, empty house

the hopeless and interminable feeling of artistic surges over in an expressive force, like the desire to speak to the boy who was left alone too long. left alone far too long and without a letter. the impression that stifles every refined word that i could drum up but haven’t learned, any project or open-road is closed-off by my idea of tomorrow’s hours, all-accounted and necessary, obligations and seasonal rifts. i wonder if tonight, the copper moon will cast a crooked shadow on a buckled sidewalk crack and let me see the trees and tiny snow flakes, burning against the full highland sky, heath freezing over like a weaving of icicles. and i could see stones moving in ghostly shapes, and what would it mean if i saw a face? a human face? this heavy and blunt despair falls away into the absurd gray hues of this computer screen and the wall opposite me and the person across the room, even shadows have lost their mystery–they wear the weight of bored and hunched shoulders.

i can only think by what i cannot say, i have no words that are mine and i don’t have the practice or precision to form them against the uniformity of a shaping knife. blind, surging spirit and feeling have spilled me out somewhere from first high, and now i spin a rabble of trash into glass, inviting others inside.

i still swell up like a bloated fish against the pitfalls of a well conditioned routine. everyday commonality is a phrase that means banality and my community has poisoned itself with false, fleeting dreams that are always smoking off glowing embers somewhere over the horizon–the romantic volcano would burn us in the street if we came too close to it. and oh, how we love our feet and fingers.

we see that we are on the land above the sea. we walk on water not by faith but by stones, pavement poured over and into the water like shell mounds that will not die.

and i am polluted by agreeing to regurgitate words before i’ve understood them. i stand choking above a toilet just after the second course– gagging and nauseated but i signed up for more, more, more, for the promise of more.

it’s clear to me, the politics of continuing the meal: we fall away from praxis and push it further still by force, pointing out until we have become masters of self-deception, of proving lacksis. we reaffirm just what we tell ourselves we patiently wait to fight against. we sit weak and sick on our own acids, at the grand meal of tastefully selected paradise in the dumps of New Jersey, where even the tomatoes are grown in cement.

more, more, more;

it was perhaps the worst slogan–
“WE WANT EVERYTHING,”

of course you do.

The empirically aesthetic fiction of politics

so  many more things can go wrong on a computer than on a type-writer. and yet the typewriter has me stumped. The ribbon is twisted. It’s making me completely angry… not at the typewriter. It’s a different kind of technical problem. I think if I tried to survey all of the different kinds of “technical problems”, or the estrangement that I have with italicizing something, it makes me very uneasy.

I didn’t realize it until a little while ago. Here I am, staring out my window, but I’m writing, with as much confidence and fluidity as if I were laboring over the lines. And if I make an error, something will highlight it for me. If I need to imprint the words or shift a letter, all I have to do is push a button. It’s not about the typewriter, either. That is just the thing that came before this… they are made of the same sentiments. What I feel, though, is the separation of my thoughts and their production. Is this real? Cloud data somewhere, and as long as we have this, it will be around well after my youngest sister has her last grandchild. Of what I made in a cloud, it will be seen in the numbers that make the image of the cloud, and the final product is a virtual list, fluidity, production.

I was talking last night with some friends. One said that he feels pure theory is self-indulgent crap, and that there has to be some empirical use for it. I had a hard time understanding his comment. Of course, I see that theory can be self-indulgent, like that presenter at Cornell a few months ago who said that his theory only worked in theory. (He was talking about some post neo anti fascist babble about the blood and the earth relating to the Hobbsean myth of humanity. For this I can submit Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach.) But his own argument seemed to preclude itself from theory, full stop. If something only works in theory, it seems to me that it is a mere fiction. And that something is a fiction, it must be understood both empirically and theoretically. Which leads me to my second critique of my friend’s statement, that the aesthetic may or may not really be an empirical use of theory. But theory is not to be used empirically. At least, not in any pedestrian sort of way. Like the man who said that his theory works only in theory, I would say to him that he was writing fiction, and that it would best be left to the theorists to make sense of his fiction. And to determine that his fiction was in fact a fiction and not a theory, one must inhabit the uses and abuses of imagined theories and sorts of other fictions from the empirically theoretical, and not the theoretically empirical, which is always a fiction.

And so it seems that theory is not a theory unless it is used in such a way that allows us to see the “empirical” (which is a fiction, as well, for various reasons, not the least of which is the very need to “find” the empirical).

I wonder, though, about the uses of a theoretical standpoint in the empirical production of aesthetics (forgive me if I start to sound cute). In the last day of the Idealist Tradition, we were having a stupid man’s discussion of the intersection between aesthetics and ethics. I should say that my understanding of the whole thing is a little stupid, but all in all, I think that the class was useful, even if only negatively. Okay, so we were ending the Idealist Tradition on a bit of sour note with Nietzsche. I really do need to spend time finding out just why I hate him so much…

The Idealist tradition “dies” but for me, it only dies insofar as it is ignored. I can’t go much deeper into my analysis of N right now, aside from the fact that he can neither be an anarchist nor a fascist. His fascism is impossible because it demands a rejection of all structure, and he cannot function as an anarchist because his anarchism depends upon the hierarchical construction of a united society. So, forgive all of my childish antics and my trite tone and lack of style when I say that Nietzsche seems to me like the crystallization of modern hysteria. This idea is malformed though, and I’m sure that someone has already written on it.

Here, I’m pulling myself back in to the discussion of the aesthetic and the ethical. I do see that the Fascists could have been great modern artists, insofar as they have precluded themselves from the real implications of being a fascist. In short, they were never really fascists, and if they were fascists in the way that people love to categorize them as Nietzschians, they were just scaley-eyed followers from the get-go. They did not know or posses the theoretical knowledge of their own aesthetic kernel. They might as well have made boots in Berlin.

I don’t know if I’m saying what I mean to say, and that’s because I am really undecided about the matter. No, I am not saying that Nolde was not Nolde, rather that he did not posses the means, empirically, that made him great. In a sense, i do understand that the aesthetic seems to be subsumed in the political, since it best operates (on an empirically functional level) when the actant is not aware of his situation. At best, he is only partially aware. In literature, I am thinking of Flaubert.

So, if aesthetics are not the mediatory device, and are instead understood as the kernel within the political, at the very worst, as something half dismantled from the political, what can I have to say about the production of art?

The way we move beyond both the “aesthetic” and “the political” to the first degree, is t borrow Fredric Jameson’s mathematical metaphor and kick it to the next power: we enter the realm of theory to deal with the empirical realities of imagined theories and politics.

From the merely aesthetic, just as the merely political, it is impossible to see which one is the empirical application of what, and at what time. It is also impossible to see the break between artistic greatness and technical skill, whose inspiration lies elsewhere. Theory, then, is the positing of these competing “first valence” phenomena, and placing them against not only themselves but against history and their contingent places in “empirical” reality. If you would like to call the theoretical a vacant category of metaphysics, you’ve got to be kidding yourself.

For an entry on the proper designation of theory and its production as “aesthetic,” I might need to eat some lunch, first.

Causes are frames for the heartless

Poetics has no secondary note that illuminates its meaning. Philosophy has no subjective commentary to marginalize itself into an everyday comradery. Everyday comradery is the face that holds the fakeness of our eyes together. Talking to people, trying to find out where they are in their facebook-framed universe isn’t worth the trouble. I hate these fuckers who want to talk to  me about graduate school, people who love to throw names around to make themselves feel closer to the spirit of things. The drones of the universe desire most to be elevated and respected, the people who chew so fast they bite their tongue and swear. The pigs sniffing for more butter. They’re not even polluting, they’re just part of it, part of living. They’re everywhere and I’m one of them. Still hate it.

Maybe, instead of stumbling over nothing mumbles when a box-man talks to me, I should answer my own questions in the matter. Stop trying to translate myself with vigor and politeness into 2-d language. My language is already 2-d, I guess. Chalking it up to superiority is too easy. And it’s wrong.

Causes and commitments. Commitments don’t have causes and causes that solicit commitments are highly suspicious; one hundred years of the middle-mind.

Composition is contingent on its time period, but its meaning isn’t. I’d have to say that melody is mastered between the bookends of the twentieth century–the 20th century… doesn’t it read like the end of the universe to you, too? Anyway, the hardest translation is between music and language. Rachmaninoff composed with such lightness and comprehension for the penultimate climax that every tremendous thunder rush began with a hollow of silver light in the night time. Like Baudelaire’s moon woman, the gentleness of expression against a tumult of artificial passions and releases was held back until the very last moment. He teaches anticipation. The climax rushes over the strings of the piano and tumbles over the pianist’s hands like a cloud whose molecules are big enough to see. Ice and dust combinations colliding down to the floor like dry ice on speed.

For Elliott Smith, so many songs are built on a lyricism that begins backwards, I think. The core of his songs are equi-distant from start to finish. The flood gates have been open and run-over for decades and there’s no end in sight. Born under the black wave in the universe. You can’t talk writing method like it’s just a construction process. We’re not building a house. The method is even harder to understand than the actual song–but it’s not enough to say that it’s a miracle, either. The method is contingent on getting though the cause of being born in a land where the language is for selling everything with a time-stamp. You’re born into the language of your own oppressor. The epic and the banal cross over each other and they remind me of my own humanity. My own capacity to feel, a thought that slipped away when I was sitting alone somewhere in Copley after school–

Why is it that people believe more in the tradition than in the spirit of its attempts? Fight for standards that rely on a specific name-sake? It seems like the easy way out of understanding anything. Seems like nothing’s at stake from the inside of the house. I sit by the fire in agony, feeling the illusions of my own comfort.

please someone tell me yes no maybe…. rough thoughts

The missing subject

Hegel’s explication of the concept of the individual in the Preface to his essay Philosophy of Right correctively refocuses the Kantian position of the subject in relation to the concrete world. He says,

I leave out of account every particularity such s my character, my temperament, knowledge, and age. ‘I’ is totally empty; it is merely a point—simple yet active in this simplicity. The colourful canvas of the world is before me; I stand opposed to it and in this [theoretical] attitude I overcome its opposition and make its content my own. (PR, 328)

Here, Hegel effectively outlines the compressed Kantian point of subjectivity as a self-referential framework that works to exclude exterior objects and concepts in exchange for a self-fulfilling prophesy of interchangeable subjectivity. The movement is as follows: the transcendental subject is only capable of marrying the otherwise incommensurable categories of existence (the natural and the moral) only through imprinting his already-existing interior framework necessitated in a narrative myth of à priori wholeness from which the individual has emerged, but can only access from this point of inwardness. Hegel exposes the missing subject of ‘I’ that is ultimately responsible for overcoming these categories as the very ideology from which Kant attempted to free the individual. Essentially, the Kantian ‘I’ is the use and metaphysical belief in the à priori. The tentative state of the absolutely individual Transcendental Subject can only posses its infinite subjectivity against the hidden embers of a mass web and a denied sensuousness. Karl Marx puts it best in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach, when he explains that the soul of humanity is paved over by a dumb generality; the genus of humanity retroactively reunites the individual though a type of imagined origin. On myth that American schoolchildren and high school students learn about are those primordial scenes of brutish society in Hobbes and Locke. The viciousness of the purely natural life is taken as the horrible root—or true soul—of humanity lives within each individual, and was managed and preempted through the formal relegations of the united (self-destructive) sprit into the mechanistic whole that is only manifest as a herd of individuals. Here, it is more important to contemplate the significance of this narrative as a narrative, rather than excavate its architecture. If this core is the Essence of man that must not only be comprehended, but also, dumb after its comprehension, there is only one conclusion to make from Marx’s thesis. This myth has been impressed upon the real collective spirit only after it was arbitrarily splintered through social machinations whose reproduction is only possible through inherent and unbridgeable social agitations. Thus, the narrative of the silent and violent whole manifested in the individual is true insofar as this violent kernel is the entirety that feels inherent alienation between its spirit and its outward functions. In a diversion from material and class-based conflicts, the static individual might only believe himself to be absolutely transcendental if he believes in the closed-categories of his historical existence.

The subject seems to be evacuated of its particular qualities and cannot be put in relation to other subjects except in that relation the self paints on the other. It is simple yet active in its banality in that there are not direct any direct challenges to this individual in its universal incarnations because of its “simple” overwriting of the exterior world. Hegel’s corrective uses for Kant lie in his treatment and contextualization of the subject to the objects that surround him. The relationships that objects colorfully animate are only apprehended through the concrete, itself—but that this concrete meaning is not in for itself; rather, it is the concept which illuminates the form of the object, and in turn illuminates the subject who perceives this relation. So, where Kant’s framework (inadvertently) calls for a static revision of the concrete world through the self-referential category of ‘I’ (that comprises anything and everything it cares to, abandoning all the rest without consequence), Hegel instead shows the contextual relationship that the subject has with both subjects and objects. For Kant, the point of origin for the transcendental subject is rooted in an impossible transference of Absolute knowledge from a subjective perspective, a situation where the subject functions situationally as his own god. This situation is a practical impossibility once à priori categories are dissolved in the sense that the cohesiveness of the subject’s overwriting his surrounding objects exposes its tautological roots. This is the fatal error of Kant’s critique—its theoretical postulations are completely destroyed in the face of the concrete.

In Kant, the very mode by which the realm of the metaphysic is left behind is the very thing that instantiates it as a metaphysic in the last instance. Kant’s à priori categorization is conceptually seen in the lack of definite context—that is, the objective and the concrete. Kant’s model of the individual is only viable insofar as it does not come under attack of the determinate concrete sphere. For example, a modern subject lives in a nation-state and takes part in commercial processes. He does his business in the public, votes his piece in the elections, and holds property. In normal economic, social, and domestic circumstances, the subject can function at least nominally within the Kantian framework of the transcendental subject. In isolated, minor issues of business, he is able to rationally identify the proper components of his decision, and extract a seemingly legitimate result, for which he advances upon a “moral” framework. However, in the face of a systemic economic, political, or moral crisis, the subject is unable to advance any decision in a coherently rational way, since it has been severed à priori from the concrete, that is, the contextual. This is all to say that the transcendental nature of Kant’s theory of the subject is in a static state, and that Kant’s critiques are valid insofar as they occur within the normative bounds of the ideal, itself. The logic of the individual, then, is really thinking the thoughts of the normative order: in economics, it will follow the law of capital, in politics, it will follow the tide towards a democratic republic, and in morality it will do its best to place the crown of infinite rationality on its head. But in the non-normative, (the real) systemic problems of every kind throw this fragile framework into disarray because of the subject’s fundamental inability to situate himself concretely, or to situate the categories of his existence in concrete relations with each other.

In terms of the individual’s mythic narrative, the very moment that a high school student learns about their silent and violent origins in the tangled mass of human nature, is precisely the moment that highlights the fallibility of this myth. The contemporary individual cannot function as an isolated individual because is relation to others has been proven time and time again, the most recent and obvious example being the global financial crash that surfaced in October of 2008. And yet, the very most devastating possibility for the imaginary individual subject and the system in which he lives would be to discover a. the genuine unity of social humanity, b. its constituent antagonisms, and finally, c. that his “individual” identity is really a specific class situation at the basis of his own permanent suffering.  In contrast, the real self that emerges through this disintegration turn out to be closer to the individual’s spirit that transform his everyday life because those false forms of reality are shed in exchange for a larger identity that historically reaffirms not only his singularity, but also his singularity’s reality in a universal sense. This position of self-awareness has many valences that extend beyond the binary of singular and universal of the human and spiritual corpus, and into the historical and utopian incarnations of the real Mass and Spirit. Today’s “leftist” political discourse is fragmented along many of the twentieth century’s hangnails, each progressively cutting a deeper rift between the historical and the utopian. This rift is also understood between the political and the aesthetic: today, there are dogmatic Leninists who write in the old high-rhetoric of the Vanguard Party, composing thoughts that are based on a polemical mode of thought. The problem with this, most obviously, is that between the utopian truth and possibility that the Leninist position spoke to circa 1917, but also the impossibilities for a reoccurrence of those social conditions that led to it. In short, one on hand, there is a devastating inversion of theory and practice in today’s Left, where the rhetoric and historical unfolding of Marx-Leninism are taken for the universal theory of the revolutionary spirit. This misstep is easy enough to make, since the lines between historical fact and significance are easily trodden over without so much as a passing glance. But the real cause for this retroversion toward dogmatic Leninism is paralleled in the same type of contemporary hauntological cultural formations that conjure up the 1960’s as a radical origin of social change. These two moments are evidently and indisputably important moments in revolutionary theory and practice; but something happened to them. There is some imaginary scar that we suffer from; some invisible cross that we bear from both of these moments, and it is here that we should remember Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

This line is so often quoted from Marx’s corpus that it verges along the border of reified philosophy. Nevertheless, this phrase is the key to understanding the invisible trauma of our times and its significance as the imaginary genus of post-modernity. The cultural moment of the sixties is sometimes called the moment of rupture, that instant that history opened up and provided history with its own (and last) exit strategy for emancipation from formalized limits of human relationships. Likewise, there are certain factions of the Left that are organized around the political and economic anachronism of the Russian Revolution. These two groups point to a moment of legitimate social and political truth and trauma that have affected common political and social discourse to this day. But, I would suggest that these two moments in particular have stuck in our radical cultural memory as the genus to our own impossible identity. The contemporary imagination and project is scattered and weakly coordinated in political discourse precisely because it is a genus that we have adopted after-the-event, perhaps without even knowing it. These images, symbols, and lines of change have been flooded by the very apparatus in which it was to effect change. The Russian Revolution and subsequent political theory distilled in Lenin’s corpus highlight the (nominal) realization of the utopian imagination. It is a philosophical body that legitimates the communist project in the dominant and modern world’s own terms. It was the premier moment of political praxis, in which centuries of subaltern voices and resistance was recognized in the same sphere as the dominant capital discourse of hegemony. But, in every shining moment of the universal, there is also its contingent counterpart of the contextual: there is no one line to summarize the entire political, economic, and ideological history of the U.S.S.R. as a governing body. There is no need. What is important to recognize is the critical importance and meaning of the Russian Revolution as an event, both political and intellectual, that speaks to the spirit of possibility. In addition to universal potentiality, it is crucial to delineate the measure marks between political and theoretical manifestation and the point at which it was washed out by the waves of happenstance. Thus, we move from utopian event to the gray shores of the everyday. The only way that we might overcome the politically, economically, and socially impossibility of reincarnating the Soviet Revolt of 1917, is through a re-examination of the universal spirit of the revolution and its face.  We must name the real narrative myth in which radical politics has allowed itself to become an individual enterprise, as just one other choice in a world of limitless options. In order to do this, the other valence must re-emerge, that universal consciousness of the utopian.

The question of delineating a coherent line of thought between the spirit and form of the radical body and its imagination is complicated further when the possibilities of social engagement—both personal and formal—exists largely within the sphere of the sixties aesthetic determinations and social coincidence. For many contemporary activists and leftists, the everyday ethic, or lived relation to the revolutionary imagination, the sixties are regarded as the cloudy origin and missed exit of our epoch. Here, we must use the intellectual blue-print of the dialectic to free ourselves from our imaginary relationships to an imagined past, to an origin that does not exist in the utopian imagination save in the universal. Yet, this relationship is only viable and reachable in a concrete and achievable program of everyday living if we rigorously examine our deep cultural predication from a Marxist perspective. This is to say, in order to free the radical imagination and actualize its everyday appearance in this historical moment, we must break free of the happenstance of the twentieth century events.

This cannot be reached through a pseudo-science of exhaustive and extensive reading of the philosophical and political canon, but through an understanding of the “static” contemporary moment, full of contingencies and a thousand invisible shards of glass in relation to its trans-historical context. In short, we must return to Hegelian dialectics, and retrace our own contemporary “leftist” identity in a relentless exercise against the present. Too long has empancipatory discourse been designated by the faded possibility of the communist state. Perhaps it is time to announce that all hitherto existing incarnations of communism have “failed” insofar as the radical imagination has failed to see them as moments in a trans-historical project rather than the political state. In a word, the radical imagination has forgotten itself in the infinite negativity of self, without a care for its contextual and trans-historical meaning and relationships.

 

nichol avenue

I walk down the street. I can’t say that this November’s storminess hasn’t excited some hope for the gothic romance. But this is my first season of maturity, and so I hope for nothing, and resist that warm ache in my arms exacted by the cooling wind. I see a tree next to my old building. It’s an ugly building. It was an ugly time, there. But this tree had every manifest shade of red. I said to myself as I walked past it, that it was too red, held too much in its shaded depths to be real, and that it was just like all the best pictures of a tree that I had ever seen. I stopped, and remembered suddenly that this was not a moving picture. And that I was walking under this slowly ebbing sky which refused to relegate its heavy blueness to a pallid gray. I thought not that this tree in the falling moments of autumn was made for me. And that, like this tree, I might really shade over from the drab brick wall into real life. I walked toward someplace and the side streets cascaded down to the lower reaches of town. Leaves, rich with the color of dying, blotted the sky, one by one, until they hit the dirty street, the hedged grass of an old city. And it was in this promise of hard winter, when I was still afraid of only ever rotting away in the green of June, when I looked at the dirt in my fingernails and dove into that blue withering mist and thought perhaps I really was made in and for this world.

 

now the question is, where do i put my iced tea?

I haven’t written a decent thing in a few days. I suppose it’s only normal under soul-crushing pressure. And while Lukacs can write about the merely psychological, I think that it should be at least appreciated for all of its nice dismantling qualities. All you really need is a fragile psyche in order to render an otherwise productive person totally fucked. I wish that Elliott Smith were alive; but the more I’m learning and feeling and putting them in their proper places, I understand that the music is the only thing that can really teach me anything. Everything else is merely psychological; Elliott was broken psychology with purpose. Sometimes I think that there will be a way to make it so he could be undead, that my teachers might still be alive in some way. Yes, they are… but the problem with conversations that have not yet happened is that you never know what the first speaker will say back, nor can I anticipate what I will say when I am ready. I can’t even say “perhaps nothing” anymore. There is no time to drop out; there is just exhaustion and shitty thesis chapters–how do I know if I am saying what I should be saying? The real issue is not that they are dead but that I am not quite living.

before you’re lost between the notes

In this way, philosophical science will also show itself furthest removed from the hatred which the vanity of superior wisdom displays towards a multitude of circumstances and institutions– a hatred in which pettiness takes the greatest pleasure, because this is the only way in which it can attain self-esteem. (Philosophy of Right: Preface)

There are those who hear a language and find it beautiful, without ever knowing why. There are some who hear, know nothing, and continue to learn in spite of this lack of apparent progress. There are those who speak a language, use its idioms and phrases with great ease in conversation, cracking jokes and pointing out the failures in others. There are few who can follow its syntax, invert meaning and subtly mold the paths of those committed but beginning students. And there are some who are only language; and for them most everything is lost–they must be decoded, translated, and dispersed for all their worth.

As a “leftist” or a “student” or whatever you’d like to call it, those who are always committed to learning without pretension are those who ultimately understand the best: they make translations, and if lucky enough, can easily traverse between worlds–feeling one valence’s greatest freedom and relaying that in teaching. But there are some who do live in hatred, a pettiness born out of a mediocre relationship with truth and its procedures. In a cafe, how often might we really overhear some conversation in the self-replicating fabric of movies, facebook, and text messages and make fun of them? from our throne in the left corner and love affairs with other “philosophers.” How long can we really laugh at people’s misfortune–those who did not stumble on the best of teachers, on the richest of books, or the sweetest of friendships? Is it not our duty and our project to engage in mindless conversation for the moment we can plant a seed in the delicate nuance to a prejudice? Is it not in this way that we learned, ourselves?

When we make fun of the world, rather, when we make fun of all those lives that might be changed, are we really not making fun of the same joke over and over again. And–isn’t that what we love to mock them for best of all?

Roots from the absent mountain

*Popular ___ian discourse exists as if in an a priori disconnected entity from its interiorized but untouchable ____ian culture. So, how does the latter constitute itself radically from within the boundaries of its own regeneration? It is a radically spontaneously formed identity that

*You are “___ian” in the hegemonically interpolated sense of regeneration. (We ___, ____, and most importantly ___.) That is to say, identity that relies on the Kantian problematic of a complete and infinte universe (cultural history) which is irreconcilable because that identity can never allow valid constitution since it is a priori aleatory from its own history. Which might lead us to contemplate that

*There is no outside to the incommensurableity between the dominant ____ian discourse and your puny____ian metaphysical identity around which to radically re-orient spontaneously. Since there is no outside, there also cannot be a bridge that leads into constitution of identity. From this perspective a “cultural liaison” would result in the speculative ‘arming’ of the ___ian minority (who has been half-constituted by the very liaison to which it appeals), in a gesture against itself. At best the ___ian is at play in a larger context of adopting culturally relative forms of identity politics through a Western lens. Really? In order to be genuinely revolutionary, you constitution must be built on the necessity of radicalization; know thyself. i.e. — to be constituted within history.

Meaning,

*The subject (of history) cannot orient itself within cultural or communitarian identities blocked by local phenomena, but must instead orient itself within the context of a properly Hegelian perspective. That is, the history of “____ian identity through history.” But to what end? And still, even if you have linked in to the otherwise “eternal and complete” universe, how might you escape the realm of metaphysics (dare I say, identity politics). From this (tentative) perspective, the ____ian can change his ‘qualitative’ identity while still replicating and constituting himself in a material way.

But

*The perspective of “experience” or “knowledge”through history is problematic if it is not directly engaged and determined by and with a historically material perspective, which ensures the validity of such a self-constitution, at least in the somewhat a priori hermeneutic of “development models” which unfortunately permeate the left in many unflattering ways, often reverse of their economic content. But, it is a physical (re)orientation, and therefore is always-emancipatory. But maybe not at all how we thought. No, we think the same.

Three snarky comments, sitting in a tree

Today is Sunday. It is raining out. There is some yarn sitting on this desk. I’m thinking about all of the books that I’ve read, and I’m thinking about how I got down to Ocean Avenue this morning. I didn’t always live with the Internet. In fact, I might have had one of the longest non-internet lives in my generation. Didn’t even have cable. Maybe that’s what really did it. These days, especially in the would-be writer community, cultural kitsch is the premier frontispiece. You gotta know obscure and you gotta know a lot of it: where the hell did people get all of this time? It makes me wonder about the quality of musical analysis that might be going on, because it all sort of sound self-referential in the sense that there aren’t really any markers that specifically address context and cultural epoch. That’s not true, I’m just saying that. But still, I’m not very good at research. I was listening to the radio today and heard an interview with Craig Finn. He sort of intruiges me but not really. Musically, he seems to be sort an anachronism, and even more than that, he uses the same narrative structures and musical arrangements over and over in order to tell a different story. And I’m not hating on the Hold Steady, I think they’ve got some good stuff. The real issue is something more wide-spread than the Hold Steady; it’s an over dependence on variety by enumeration instead of variety by qualitative differentiation within the work.

I’m thinking about my childhood and how I didn’t watch much of a variety in my TV. In a lot of ways I think the only real skill that I developed when other kids had the money to play the piano or run five miles in a youth soccer league was learn how to think critically. And more than that, I learned how to tell myself stories. I became overly familiar with public TV movie reruns, and therefore the archetypal movie structures. I was always trying to imagine stories where the “mood” was just right and eternal. I tried to live my somewhat dreary 9-14 year-old life inside a mood, but they never lasted because the daylight always changed so damned much. It was impossible. Then, somehow, my friends started listening to “cool music” in New Jersey and I was just this podunk weirdo from Ohio. At first it seemed like a linear progression in high school, because by the time I was graduating I’d gotten involved with a kid whose entire room was filled with obscure cultural artifacts from that in-between the 80′s and the 90′s, which I’ve started to piece together as the two-year nuclear radius around the Fall of the Wall.

Why is it so bad not to like research, not to like kitsch? I’m an outsider of my own generation. I’m never going to have a lot of friends, a lot of connections, and I’ll probably always look at you kind of funny when you one-up me in the book conversation at the party. I just can’t get involved with that shit, but sure makes creative writing hard in 2010. Nobody wants to read you. And now I’m starting to think that I’m even too obscure to read my own stuff.