Category Archives: The University

The empirically aesthetic fiction of politics

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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.

flower chains

Posted by Whatever Color Flag on

Is it really that much more difficult to refrain from feeling petty things? Is it a matter of soul or of situation that meetings, friendships, projects, take on the look of an a-political social club? At the fuzzy locus point, is the real belief and hope to get laid, get friends, get together, all masquerading under the equivocated “education of peers?” Or do we know why we’re here. Perhaps there has been some confusion. I used to think that feeling this way (which is less of a feeling than a confrontation), wanting things to be different in the world, and seeing them differently from others obliged me to make decisions that didn’t all together “register” in the liminal world. It was okay to break this or that “friendship;” I knew when to work and when something was performative and should be left behind. But slowly, and fearfully–and I should say–with regret enough to pass it by–that the world of thinking differently and writing and even of “being radical” has slipped under a twilight.

Projects written alone in an attic reached fewer people, were still the practice of a novice, sure. But it was there. And now, writing cover letters and personal statements and finding this or that writer “totally unintelligible” has become the norm. I can’t pretend to say that these more, oh I don’t know, middle class woes have highlighted the failing inability to really discuss politics, philosophy, ethic, spirit. Yes, on a very real level, I am behaving like a foolish child: but really, I can’t bear the thought of working this hard for entry into some tight-lipped institution with a bunch of self-loving hypocrites whose political affiliations from the get-go have already been dismantled. There is something to say for education; there’s quite a lot to say about it. On the other hand, real education is often held in the least aesthetically-appealing bits of town, on the back streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey; it’s drinking the dirty water and swimming in it, letting hair turn hard from the polluted swirl.

In spite of everyone’s (radical) best intentions, are we not living in the brain-dead day-to-day? We’re just boying this or that shirt for this or that event, driving late at night, mixing our contemplations of love and production within our veritable “inboxes.” If we–and here, I mean I–look deeply enough, it is perfectly legitimate to note the movement of the contemporary young person in search of radical vocation as:

1. Shocked, radicalized, bare, completely rejecting the opportunities and categories of this world
2. A slow concrete shadow, a fear of the tradition, a period of groping, of constant thought, isolation (in university context)
3. Friendships, company, respite from the depression of it all
4. An imagined agility; acceptance of context, of performance, of “system navigation”

But like those who say “you can be radical on facebook, it’s all about the system,” isn’t it high time we let ourselves in on the bad joke? That we have allowed ourselves, our impulses, our power, to be contained in the ideological? Perhaps this isn’t just facebook; it’s graduate school and the Friday night party, drinks after class… we have turned our company into a cycle of repeating consumption. Because what are we changing, versus what are we allowing to change us?

Marx said

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

I see lots of chains, lots of ironical statements from people who know better. And I feel them. We know what we’re looking at. We know that there’s “no radical break available.” But what are we moving towards? And how might we even say we know what we long for, anymore? To never feel that sparkling pain blazing in the skies above us as truth and not as a bleeding heart! We wear our commitments like good little boys and girls, writing the pamphlets, passing the papers, organizing the events. But our lives, and everything we see for ourselves, must once again reject this long-term melancholy of retreat. Love must be seen as a matter of course and not a highway exit (else we might miss it, forever!) in the way we live our lives, with the hope, clarity, and grit conferred upon our every day existence.

We have decorated our homes and hearts in a garland, and admire our great courage to bear it all in the face of such dismantled beauty. But we are still in our homes , as the fields of flowers outside our windows are paved away in gridded squares, our hearts closing in on themselves.

an addendum: even fascists have Utopias

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So that in addition to immunity from the law, another selling point for hiring on would turn out to be this casual granting of the wish implied in the classical postcollegiate Dream of Autumn Return, to one more semester, one more course credit required, another chance to be back in school again–yes, as long as it was paid for in services useful enough to them, the FBI even put you on the time machine if that’s what you wanted, is how heavy those coppers were even back in those days.

Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Rube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this sotry, Brock saw the deep– if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They’d only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.” (268-69)

Vineland

Spending some quality time with Pynchon changes a lot of easy pre-suppositions about his writing style, about his philosophical point of view, and about his engagement with “nostalgia;” but what Vineland really conducts is an exhaustive search for the Utopian in all of its hiding places. And for that very reason, Pynchon is also irrevocably engaged with the American ideological “apparatus” (although this suggests a structuralism that I’m not at all implying). The casual granting of the Dream of Autumn Return exposes that even fascists have Utopian impulses that must be managed. Well, if in fact the lesser participants, or “symptomatic” characters like Frenesi are not properly fascist, they are at least indoctrinated into a system of exchange that acknowledges a security-blanketed space between family and government.

I think that the real killing point here is not at all that there is a sort of ideological blinder. Brock knows his opponent because he shares in the same impulse. Who was it exactly who got to play out postcollegiate fantasies if it wasn’t Vond, himself? Often times, there’s a sort of idealized causalist relationship that the Left has with the Right. This might be a fragment of a certain type of pre-causal, even structural conception of the Left, but really, what Pynchon really seems to be hazarding is a type of admission. What if, against all of our hopes and fears, that the blind Utopian impulse, the impulse to rebel, to “youth revolution” in the 60s really was just “unacknowledged desires for” order? This isn’t a vlaue judgement on the absolute status of the Utopian impulse in itself, but the way in which ideology is permeated in the Left as it is the Right, as an interchangeable weapon, as always an ideological apparatus that contains the Utopian. In granting the wish to return to the university, DOJ Polical Intelligence Office is already completing the first half of “immunity.”

What about the university is more appealing from an outside perspective than its implications for social immunity? The attitudes, the desire to be more than a profession or a strictly quantifiable unit of (ever-increasingly imaginary) production in a larger cog of production and free time, are rarely offered outside the limits of the university. This is no poster for Experimenting in College; what I’m talking about is a real and hard look at life that can’t be immediately quantified in dollar amounts, where there is at least an opportunity (perhaps if only heuristically) to learn for learning’s sake. In a university setting, we see a doubled effect of what Pynchon narrates as the Utopian purblind effect. In the university, it is possible to imagine that the Utopian agents of the university are safeguarded and “passed down” through a process of inversion: the students revert into an ever-extending time-capsule that we call graduate school, and with much holdings back of the gates, manage to preserve this or that period and specialization only to represent it as a real alternative, which it cannot be in late capitalism (this is the place where if I were writing an essay I would write another essay and then cite it in a footnote). So, what I mean to demonstrate here is that the Utopian purblindness cannot take into account the ideological apparatus that in fact dominates it at every turn; so that “finding a crack” is impossible, or at very best, unsustainable, because it can always be reintegrated into the ideological apparatus through previously “unacknowledged desires.” These “desires” are of course more than just a notable feature of Western Capitalist Culture, but rather the foundation for a world economy.

What Brock Vond–indeed, what post-sixties ideology–is really commensurate with is the project of re-remembering the real revolutionary impulse that in its truest form destroys ideological and dogmatic binds for a Utopian sense of being as an already-read bedtime story about ideological massage and transmission. When Pynchon says “if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family,” that exposes an alternate Dream. Up to this point, it’s relatively difficult for an already-Left reader to walk away from the projects of revolution (in Pynchon’s terms) without a type of nostalgia, or at the very least without a desire to defend nostalgia and impulse.

The dangerous thing about Impulse here is not that the Utopian will always crumble into the fold of the dominant ideological apparatus, but that it somehow always locates itself in a Left that imagines itself to exist outside of it. In that sense, Pynchon’s discussion of the Dream of the Autumn Return is not answerable in mashed terms of DOJ nor in the campus revolutionaries of the Film Collective. In fact, what this passage really gets at is the all too strongly commensurate ideological undercurrent in the 1960′s counterculture.

So the question, for Pynchon and for the university (maybe even revolution) more generally, becomes a question of  impulse and of Reckoning With the Opposition. I don’t think that many people on the Left would seriously contemplate  an Enlightenment Style of ideological stripping: even if this stripping were somehow spontaneous possible (the systematic deconstruction of a capital universe) still always presupposes a type of re-arming or educating. And here we see tactical parallels with Vond’s Political Reeducation Project. The university can only become a true Utopia once is comes to terms with its own qualifications in capital society. The possibilities and Dream of the Autumn Return are only secured as far as the semester that binds us, and we are bound by the “one more course credit required.” But even that validation is a dead give away to the fact that we are all in essence a type of Thanatoid cloud in the dusty hallways, ever more expensive to study in and ever fewer positions to transmit what really might be the only thing to save us.