To Mars

Carceraglio makes ready to move to Colorado, a place Carceraglio has never seen but imagines thus:

"...[Philip K.] Dick's Mars is the prototype of his characteristic desert of misery, in which the most dismal features of a provincial 1950s Amercia are unremittingly reproduced and perpetuated against a backdrop of ecological sterility and the intensive use of low-yield technology."
--Frederic Jameson, "The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism," in The Novel, Volume 2, Forms and Themes.

Or thus:

Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog
Betwixt Damietta and Mount Casius old,
Where whole armies have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
--Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II.

Coconut School

From Kenneth Koch's "A la Coconut School"

Oh, to go back to the Schools
With all that we know today!
The teachers we thought were such fools!
The hours and hours of play!
On était un peu ridicule
And went riding about on a mule
With a pleasure undreamed-of today
Bonheur aujourd'hui même pas revé!

[carceraglio thanks Martin Browning for pointing out this poem]

*

From Matthew Stadler's Reading Notes to "Don't Take Any Jobs," describing a writing class he taught in his apartment:

We drank, ate, and played a lot of games. Class made us happy. The other thing we did was read together. But we never read our own work. “Workshop critiques”—submitting your own work for critique by the group—had only ever confused me, disastrously so in graduate school, where the workshop was full of articulate, educated people who knew a thousand ways to describe failure. I think great writing is, de facto, indefensible. It’s great because the writing is its own only argument—nothing further can be said to explain the pleasure it brings. Throw that kind of meat in front of a pack of hungry wolves, and the results will be predictable. Instead, we read great work by other people and marveled at their successes. We read closely, desirously, word by word, trying to understand how the writing we admired did what it did to us.

I marshaled these citations to write something about graduate school, but I'm not sure what that something is.

Here Goes

JM Coetzee's novella The Vietnam Project begins with an epigraph by Herman Kahn:

"Obviously it is difficult not to sympathize with those European and American audiences who, when shown films of fighter-bomber pilots visibly exhilarated by successful napalm bombing runs on Viet-Cong targets, react with horror and disgust. Yet, it is unreasonable to expect the U.S. Government to obtain pilots who are so appalled by the damage they may be doing that they cannot carry out their missions or become excessively depressed or guilt-ridden."

In Zoo, Robinson Devor's & Charles Mudede's new film, the late "Mr. Hands" emerges occasionally as just such a guilt-ridden character.

Mr. Hands was an aircraft engineer at Boeing; the quasi-documentary Zoo suggests he worked on an ultra-secret military project. Mr. Hands (the name was his chat-room pseudonym) was also a "zoophile" who died in consequence of one his sexual encounters with a horse.

In the film, an interview with Chalmers Johnson plays on the radio as Mr. Hands drives to his rural trysting place. The secret that few in the audience are likely to share with Mr Hands--having sex with animals--doubles for the secret nearly everyone in the audience does share with him: complicity with the war in Iraq. (A war that is still a secret, even though everyone knows about it; since the "end" of the war, "the United States has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of cluster bombs in Iraq." The war in Iraq presents the paradox of the public secret.)

This structure of the secret is there, but to read Zoo in this way leaves out some things. Who was it who said that In Cold Blood begins with the murderers' boast that they put the Clutter family's brains on the walls, and that the tension of reading In Cold Blood derives from waiting to see that horrible scene -- from waiting for what you know is coming.

Something similar occurs in Zoo (another work of high-art reportage)--perhaps to its detriment. The film teasingly, gleefully shows and does not show the man-and-horse sex act. Darkness keeps falling, the zoophiles keep swooning into heavy-lidded sleep, barn doors shut and the screen goes black. In one scene, the police screen an impounded DVD for the barn's owners, who never dreamed such goings-on were going on in their barn. As the sex scene unfolds out of our sight, we hear lots of grunting and straining, we see the opera buffa reactions of the nauseated barn-owner and his weeping wife, and then we do see a few seconds of tape. Unless my imagination merely supplied the footage, having repeatedly been promised it in so many fades-to-black.

***

Post-script: One of Hermann Kahn's RAND papers, Ten Common Pitfalls [of Military Planning], gives Kahn's own theory of sexuality. "Modelism," page 12: "In the illustration we see a young man dancing with a dummy. He is either desperate or guilty of Modelism. ... It may or may not be desirable for a young man to construct his love life around fantasies, but the mature heterosexual male wants a girl! There really is 'nothing like a dame.'"

Final post-script: this Coetzee essay, which I think I got from Ads without Products.

Interview with Alain Badiou

From Diana George and Nic Veroli, Carceraglio received this previously unpublished interview with Alain Badiou.

Alain Badiou gave this interview when he attended the "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" conference at University of Washington, in February, 2006. The interview was commissioned by a Seattle newspaper; the first few answers address readers who might not know Badiou's work.

___________________________________

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

That was the beginning, the subjective beginning. In the political field, the correlation with ideologies --Marxism, Cultural Revolution, Maoism and so on -- is subordinate to the subjective conviction that you have to do politics directly, to organize, to be with others, to find a way for principles to exist practically.

Q: What is your idea of fidelity?

Badiou: That's already contained in the first answer. For me, fidelity is fidelity to great events which are constitutive of my political subjectivity. And perhaps there is also something much older, because during the war my father was in the Resistance against the Nazis. Naturally, during the war, he did not say anything about it to me; it was a matter of life and death. But just after the war, I learned that he had been a resistant, that he was really in that experience of resistance against the Nazis. So my fidelity is also a fidelity to my father. At the beginning of that war, very few were in the resistance; after two or three years, there were more. It is the same lesson, if you like, this lesson from my father.

Generally speaking, my fidelity is to two great events: the engagement against the colonial war, and to May 68 and its consequences. Not only the event of May 68 as such, but also its consequences. Fidelity is a practical matter; you have to organize something, to do something. This is the reality of fidelity.

Q: You've said that there has been a rupture, that the entire question of politics is currently in great obscurity. Also, you have written that we must think a politics without party. After the saturation of the class-party experiment, what next?

Badiou: I think a fidelity does not really finish, but sometimes it is saturated; that is my term for it. There is a saturation; you cannot find anything new in the field of your first fidelity. Many people, when this is the case, just say, "It's finished." And really, a political sequence has a beginning and an end, too, an end in the form of saturation. Saturation is not a brutal rupture, but it becomes progressively more difficult to find something new in the field of the fidelity.

Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity.

For my generation, it's a choice between saying, on the one hand, "Nothing is possible today in the political field; the reactionary tendency is too strong." That's the position of many people in France today; it's the negative interpretation of saturation.

When the fidelity is saturated, you have a choice. The first possibility is to say it's finished. The second possibility is this: With the help of certain events-- like the events in South America today-- you find what I name a fidelity to the fidelity. Fidelity to the fidelity is not a continuation, strictly speaking, and not a pure rupture, either. We have to find something new. When I was saying yesterday that "from outside, you can see something you don't see from inside," that's merely a rule by which to find something new.

Q: If I can press you further about the something new: After the saturation of party politics, what now?

Badiou: If the answer to that were clear, the discussion would be finished, too. You have to find that out; it's not so clear. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field -- not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find -- with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts -- the new synthesis.

I think our situation is much more similar to that of the 19th century than to that of the 20th. Nearer Marx than Lenin, if you like, metaphorically speaking. Lenin was really the thinker of the new concept of revolutionary politics, with the idea that we could be victorious, that the revolution was a possibility. That's not exactly the situation today; the idea of revolution is obscure in itself today. But we can do as Marx did--it's a metaphor, an image. You have to think the multiplicity of popular experiences, philosophical directions, new studies, and so on. You must do these things as Marx himself did.

The situation today is also similar to 19th century in the brutality of capitalism today. It's not absolutely new; capitalism was of a terrible brutality in the 19th century in England, with the laws against the poor and so on. Today, there's something violent and cynical in capitalism, very much like the capitalism of the 19th century. In the 20th century, capitalism was limited by revolutionary action.

Today, the capitalists have no fear of anything. They are in the stage of primitive accumulation, and there is a real brutality to the situation. That's why I think the work today is to find a new synthesis, a new form of organization, like our predecessors of the 19th century. Our grandfathers, if you will, rather than our fathers in the political field.

Q: I'd like to ask about the current global situation and of the relationship of the US to that situation. Is the US simply a privileged node in a network of global sovereignty (as Hardt and Negri argue) or is the US playing the role of a traditional imperialist power in Lenin's sense?

Badiou: I don't completely agree with Negri. It's a very complex theoretical discussion, but, in a few words, I think Negri's perception is too systemic. Empire is a system, finally. Negri's conviction is always that within the system there are also resources for something new on the side of revolutionary politics, or politics of emancipation. There is always in Negri the conviction that the strength of capitalism is also the creativity of the multitude. Two faces of the same phenomenon: the oppressive face and, on the other side, the emancipatory, in something like a unity. Not exactly a dialectical unity in the Hegelian sense, but still a unity. So there is no necessity of an event in Negri, because there's something structural in the movement of emancipation.

I don't see the situation that way; it's not my conviction. It's not possible to discuss this precisely here and now, because it's too technical. But one consequence for Negri is that the great question in the political field is the question of the movement. Movements are certainly of great importance. But the real question today is not the relation between the movement and the state. The real question is, what is the new form of organization after the party? More generally, what is a new political discipline?

People who have nothing--no power, no money, no media--have only their discipline as a possibility of strength. Marxism and Leninism defined a first form of popular discipline, which was trade unions and party. There were many differences, but finally that was the form of popular discipline, and the possibility of real action. And today we cannot hope that this form will continue. The real situation is that we have no discipline in the popular camp, and so we have a great weakness. In fact the best situations today are ones where the state is not really in the hands of the reactionaries, for example, the situation of Chavez in Venezuela. But that's not a complete change of the situation; it's a chance, a local chance, nothing more. It's something, but it's not the solution. The solution of the problem in the long term will be the invention of a new form of immanent discipline in the popular camp. That will be the end of the long weakness of the popular camp after the success-- but also the failure-- of the form of the party.

Q: Philosophy has a long history of alternately including and then excluding mathematics. You, almost alone among your contemporaries, include it. You have also stated that your aim is a new articulation of politics and mathematics. Apart from any biographical, contingent factors that might explain your own relationship to mathematics, what's mathematics got to do with politics today? Why do you see a hope today for, as you've said, "a new articulation of politics and mathematics"?

Badiou: The political question of the new discipline is also, philosophically, the question of a new logic. The question of a new logic is always also the question of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Because mathematics is the paradigm of deduction, of formal rationality; not of empirical rationality, not of concrete rationality, but the paradigm of formal rationality. During the phase of party politics, the logical paradigm was the Hegelian dialectic; it was the theory of contradiction. During the entire development of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, the theory of contradiction was the heart of the logical framework. In my conviction, that is also finished. For the same reason as for the party, dialectical logic in the Hegelian sense is saturated today. We can no longer simply use the paradigm of contradiction. Naturally, there are contradictions; it's not a question of fact. But for the definition of a new discipline, we cannot directly use the logic of contradiction; we have to find another paradigm.

Mathematics is not the paradigm itself for me, but it's the possibility of finding a new logical paradigm in the political field, and finally in all fields of new human experiences.

(As you may know, Marx himself was very interested in mathematics. There are long manuscripts by Marx about the differential calculus and so on; it was something he studied for himself.)

In the search for the new logical paradigm, we have something to learn from mathematics. So my use of mathematics is not only a family obligation or a Platonist imitation; it's a real necessity.

Q: In a recent issue of the journal Positions, in an essay on your post-Maoism, Bruno Bosteels quotes you as having written, "Maoism, in the end, has been the proof for me that in the actual space of effective politics, and not just in political philosophy, a close knot could be tied between the most uncompromising formalism and the most radical subjectivism." But in your own philosophy, this knot seems to be looser. It is the uncompromising formalism that comes through in your philosophy.

Badiou: I think the discussion with Bruno Bosteels is about the distinction between philosophy and politics. Radical subjectivity is a matter of politics; when I speak of Maoism, I speak of politics. Philosophy is not politics, which may not be clear to Bosteels, or to some others. Naturally, philosophical formalism--to use that word-- can help to open some possibilities in the political field. But it is not the political solution; the political solution is never found inside the philosophical framework. So I agree, in the philosophical field, we can find a formalism adequate to radical subjectivity. But we cannot find radical subjectivity itself there, because radical subjectivity is a matter of action, of engagement; it's a matter of politics, finally.

The question of Maoism, of radicality, is a political one. In the philosophical field, we have to find the conceptual framework--the formalism, if you like--which is a disposition of thinking that is adequate to the possibility of a radical subjectivity. So philosophy is more or less in the situation of compatibility with politics, but it is never a substitute for politics. There is no unity between philosophy and politics; instead, there is something like compatibility between philosophical formalism and radical subjectivity. I think that in Bosteels' interpretation there is something like a circulation between politics and philosophy, which is not exactly my vision of the correlation of the two.

A word on the expression "post-Maoism": My interpretation of post-Maoism is that Maoism is the name of the last experience within the framework of classical Leninism. Maoism is not the same as Leninism; it's a creative development, but it's the last form of revolutionary politics, the last attempt in the field of revolutionary politics. After that, the framework itself is saturated. If we have something like post-Maoism, it's because Maoism itself is the saturation of the field. We can interpret the work of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, that's all very interesting, but we cannot forget that it's also the end of something, much more than a beginning. But an end is also something new. It's the beginning of the end, the newness of the end. After that, though, the field is saturated. And so post-Maoism is something very important. We are in something like post-Marxism, post-Leninism.

Q: Some people on the left argue for direct democracy as a response to global neoliberalism, sometimes under the heading of a Spinozist concept of 'multitude' and sometimes under the heading of anarchism. But you seem quite critical of democracy. Can you explain your critique of democracy?

Badiou: The question of democracy has two parts. The first one is the question of the form of the state. That's the classical, contemporary definition. There are governments, and you have to say which ones are democratic, which ones despotic, and so on. That is the common definition, the definition of Bush, and also of the majority today, finally. Democracy in this first sense is a form of the state, with elections and so on.

The second possible definition of democracy is what is really democracy within politics, in action. Hardt and Negri's concept on this point is that democracy is the creativity of the movement. It's a vitalist concept: democracy is the spontaneity and the creative capacity of the movement. Ultimately, Negri's concept remains inside the classical opposition of movement and state.

We have on the one side the definition of democracy as a form of the state, and on the other, democracy as an immanent determination of the collective movement. But I think the classical opposition of state and movement is saturated. We cannot simply oppose state oppression or the oppressive system, with, on the other side, the creativity of the movement. That's an old concept, not a new one. We have to find a new concept of democracy, one that is outside the opposition of formal democracy (which is democracy as form of state) and concrete democracy (which is the democracy of the popular movement). Negri remains inside this classical opposition, while using other names: Empire for state, multitude for movement. But new names are not new things.

Q: I'd like to ask about the politics of identity, which can be summed up in the thesis that for every oppression there must be a resistance by the group which is being oppressed--otherwise the oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc...) will remain unaddressed--this politics of identity is something you are quite critical of.

Badiou: The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It's the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of no-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities. For Marx, "proletariat" was the name of something like that. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that the very nature of the proletariat is to be generic. It's not an identity. It's something like an identity which is non-identity; it's humanity as such. That's why for Marx the liberation of the working class is liberation of humanity as such, because the working class is something generic and not a pure identity. Probably that function of the working class is saturated. We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class. Without something that was a connection between particularity and universality, because that's what the working class was. The particularity of the working class was its location in a singular place; the working class was generic. The solution of the problem for Marxism was the human group which is not really an identity, which is beyond identity.

We have to do the same thing, but probably without that sort of solution. We cannot say that today this group is the generic group and that the emancipation of this group is also the emancipation of us all. So we have to find something more formal. Why formal? Because it's less inscribed in the singularity of a group. It's a relation between principles, between the formalism of the new discipline and all identities in the social field. It's a problem now for which we don't yet have the solution.

Marx's solution a sort of miracle: you find the group which is also the generic group. It was an extraordinary invention. The history of this Marxist invention, in its concrete political determination, was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party. The crisis now is the crisis of representation, and also the crisis of the idea of the generic group.

When you see that a sequence of politics of emancipation is finished, you have a choice: you can continue in the same political field, or you can find the fidelity to the fidelity. It's the same thing here: If the idea of the working class as a generic group is saturated, you have the choice of saying that there are only identities, and that the best hope is the revolt of some particular identity. Or you can say that we have to find something much more universal, much more generic. But probably without the representative generic group.

Commemorating Terror




"Recently I had a dream that capitalism invented terror to force the state to protect it better. Very funny, isn't it?" --Policeman in Fassbinder's The Third Generation.

read the rest

Try to recognize the dotted line. And kiss it.

This blog is signed up to participate in the porn symposium instigated by Infinite Thought. I have no entry written yet.

As a placeholder, and to link to The Measures Taken's sexpol essay "I Still Dream of Orgonon," I offer a link to this sexpol cinema in-the-making: Oakie Treadwell's Maggots and Men.

Donate early and often to Treadwell's film.

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War Theory

As I write this, the US Air Force's Blue Angels airshow is being rehearsed in the sky over the University district. Thanks, Petrodollar-Weapondollar Coalition! That's entertainment!

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pour l’élimination du malheur

In the category of sentences/novels I wish I'd written: Antoine Volodine's Dondog.

In the following passge, Dondog has just left "the camps"; he may or may not be dead. In a block of flats-built-upon-flats, where the streets have become a warren of connecting sky-tunnels, he is questioning an old woman about a certain Jessie Loo. The old woman says, 'Do you know this Jessie Loo?' Dondog says 'No.' Then, Dondog explains:

"Mois, je ne la connaissais pas, mais ma grand-mère, oui, dit-il. Il y a très longtemps. Dans les années trente. Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses. Elles faisaient partie de la même unité. La vie et les camps ont les séparées, mais un jour ma grand-mère m’a dit qu’elle avait revu Jessie Loo en rève, et qu’elle m’avait vu, moi aussi, tel que je serais à la fin de mon existence, au sortir des camps. Dans son rève, Jessie Loo habitait dans la Cité et elle avait toujours ses pouvoirs de chamane. Et elle m’aidait à retrouver la mémoire et à..." [Dondog stops speaking just then.*

I love something I see in Volodine’s work, which I may be wrong about, but I think there is something delicate about the irony with which he treats "the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness." It stops short of satire, and is not without sympathy for the project. Dondog's grandmother is not Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House, improving Africa while neglecting her own children. Both projects go awry--saving Africa, eliminating unhappiness--but there’s more pathos to the failure in Volodine's texts. As though someone, let's say Volodine, wished it could succeed.

I wonder if it's a tone that’s possible in America. Think of Frederic Tuten's wonderful Tintin in the New World: "Signor Settembrini... edits the renowned, but of limited circulation, Review of Human Suffering..." The world-improvers Tintin runs into are fools, and they are dilettantes. –-Or compare Dondog to Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis: however much sympathy you might feel for Portis's bungling templars, you can't possibly wish to live in their Atlantean age, could they bring it about.

*This is the sentence I wish I'd written, the one in bold: "They were friends, they were together in the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness. They interrogated the enemies of the people and they shamanned together. Stuff like that."

Rhapsodes

[What follows is not clear. It's too technical-sounding, and I garble Colebrook's lucid argument. Maybe it will come out clear when transmitted on the Internet. Like that moment in The Crying of Lot 49 where a man interviewing the heroine Oedipa Maas says "Thank you, Mrs. Edna Mosh," and then assures Oedipa "it'll come out OK on the air."]

In the the April 2006 issue of Actual-Virtual Claire Colebrook lectures on the secret. How far Deleuze criticism has come, that someone should speak so lucidly about the positivity of the literary in Deleuze and Guattari, instead of rhapsodizing about rhizomes. Colebrook talks about the positivity of secrecy in two chapters or plateaus of the 1000 Plateaus: "Three Novellas" and the "Becoming-Animal." She contrasts a mode of reading that asserts "we are already in an order of signification, such that we always necessarily ask, what is the secret?" or such that we always fantasize that the Other has (or is) the secret. --She contrasts that mode of reading, which she assigns to Butler, Zizek, and Felman, with a Deleuzian mode. In the "Three Novellas" chapter, D&G say that in the novella "something has happened," whereas in the tale we want to know "what is going to happen." Just so, the literary text in general is one that says that there is secrecy. Not: what is the secret, but just, "there is secrecy." She traces this out in a discussion of Henry James's What Masie Knew in the "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Anmial" chapter of 1,000 Plateaus.--more below.

In another lecture in that same issue of Actual-Virtual, Ray Brassier wrestles down the "perversion of Kant & subversion of Bergson" that is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, to ask, in the end:

For what has Deleuze's unyoking of difference from the fourfold shackles of representation achieved, if these diverging channels of actualization and ontological differentiation remain tethered to what Kant would have called a merely rhapsodic catalogue of factultative distinctions on the one hand, and, an equally rhapsodic enumeration of the different senses of being on the other?. ... If Being is going to be differentiated, then the point is to show that these differences are necessary, they're not merely arbitrarily generated on the basis of empirical distinctions. ... If Being is said in a single and same sense of everything that is, and that of which it is said differs, what is the status of these modal differences in everything that is?

Oh, I started citing too soon. He goes on to say that Deleuze uses Bergson to synthesize Spinoza and Kant, and that Bergson's method of intuition ends up being sort of flimsy to occupy this keystone space. ... I sort of fall behind the level of Brassier's discussion here.

(I return to a hobbyhorse of mine, rather than discuss Brassier) -- In Deleuze's perversion of Kant, Deleuze puts Kantian critique out of work. Reason in Kant's first critique has something like a schematism ("the idea of reason is an analogon of the schema of sensibility" A 664, B 692); reason's proper job (in the speculative interest) is demanding unity of principles in the understanding's objects. In the perverted Kant of Difference and Repetition there is still something like a schematism (a sub-representational, sub-understanding emergence of differences: "the agents of differenciation are the spatio-temporal dynamisms which act within or beneath [the understanding], like a hidden art" (D&R, p 218). Now that Ideas don't have to bother with keeping house for the understanding, they are free to incite everything, every faculty, not just thought, to its transcendent exercise.

Is there a place where Colebrook's investigation and Brassier's the hobbyhorse could be made to converge? Colebrook speaks of "the molecularization of the secret," the multiplication and dispersal of secrecy: that is, in context of Colebrook's lecture and D&G's book, Henry James's multiplication of the "imperceptible perception of the secret" in What Maisie Knew. Is there not also a "molecularization of the secret" in Difference and Repetition-- the "hidden art" (the secret) of this quasi-schematism is dispersed, multiplied, in the "dream or drama" of the Ideas:

"For if the dynamism is external to concepts-- and, as such, a schema--it is internal to Ideas --and, as such, a drama or dream.
......................................................
Dramatisation takes place under the critical eye of the savant as much as it does in the head of the dreamer. It acts below the sphere of concepts and the representations subsumed by them." (D&R p 218).

Just as the novella says "that there is secrecy," Deleuze's Difference and Repetition says "there is a hidden art," and is singularly untroubled by that hidden-ness. It does not compel Deleuze to critique, to the winnowing down of reason's fancies. It's an unemployment of reason's proper employment; a new sense to the phrase, in D&G's Kafka book, "Criticism is completely useless."

I remain at the pre-critical level of rhapsodizing about Deleuze's wildness.

Toni Negri on Heiner Müller

Drucksache was a series Heiner Müller used to publish when he was director of the Berliner Ensemble Theater. In issue number 1 of a renewed Drucksache project (1999), edited by guest editors, Toni Negri writes about Müller: about reading Müller along with Felix Guattari, who had less German than Negri; about an unpublished text Müller dedicated to Guattari, Mommsens Block; and about the difference between Brecht's and Müller's didacticism: "Brecht scolded science; Müller tortured the body."

Defending Müller against certain of his admirers, Negri writes:

"In the paradise of penitents that is Italy today, you can actually hear people excited about [Müller's] raw and wild description of reality -- as if it could cement cynicism into politics; the penitents of socialism are masters of cynicism. They say, 'In the night all cats are gray -- that's what Heiner Müller teaches.' Nonsense. Müller's cats catch their mice, they hunt them, play with them, and then devour them. Not all didacticism is the same: Brecht scolds science, Müller tortures the body. It's the unavoidable consequence of a [theater of] didactic alienation confronted by a society in which capital traumatizes bodies. To accuse Müller of cynicism is like blaming Velazquez for the ugliness of the Habsburgs."

Why do you need to know?
Get yourself a copy of 3rd Bed, issue 11, last ever on the face of the earth. At newsstands now or soon. Includes, among other good pieces of writing, Brian Evenson's "Fugue-State."

Evenson's story "Fugue-State" is in part a mutation of Tony Burgess's novel Pontypool Changes Everything (ECW Press). Both concern plagues that hollow people out by destroying or damaging their ability to speak or understand speech.

In Evenson’s plague-strain, the forgetting of the proper name is key. "What is your name?"/ "Why do you need to know?" is the basic unit underlying most of the story's dialogue: a diagnostic question or test made from an ordinary piece of conversation, parried by a defensive ruse that's both linguistically competent and subjectively vacant. In this, the first paradox series in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense reads like a protocol for "Fugue-State":

The loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout all Alice’s adventures. For the proper or singular name is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir. The latter is embodied in general names designating pauses and rests, in substantives and adjectives, with which the proper name maintains a constant connection. Thus the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God. This is the test of savoir and the recitation which strips Alice of all identity.

The test in "Fugue-State" often boomerangs back on the questioner, somewhat as in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s film Cure, where the mass murderer drives his interrogators mad by blankly repeating "Who are you?" But there is also an unhinged series of doubles here; as the character Arnaud puts it, "How many of the one of you are there? Two?" As though doubles had lost even the uniqueness of being the only doubles, the doubles here proliferate without end. Plague victims collide, infect one another and carom off to infect again with their questions.

Deleuze, again, doubling the fugue state: "For what can one do, vis-à-vis doubles, reflections, simulacra, other than speak?"

***
addendeum: fugue-state. There are no explicit theses about the state in this story, as there might be in science fiction. But there are hints--interrogation, quarantine, clean-up--of biopolitical functions. The phrase "fugue state" also echoes nicely with "rogue state;" fugue state, a demented or blank sovereignty. Finally, the blandness of "what is your name?" and "how are you feeling?", though they do not explicitly relate to torture, are almost the only way to represent torture in today's biopolitical fugue state. Any depiction of state torture that relies on the battle of wits, the malign but super-intelligent interrogator, the chess game, the dark hints about "our methods"--none of that is even remotely plausible today, if it ever was.

I am stupid

When I say I am stupid, I do not mean what Deleuze meant when he wrote about stupidity as lying outside the image of thought—-stupidity suggestive of, if not constitutive of, nomad thought outside the strictures of what everybody knows to be true. No, I do not mean that, and I do not mean whatever Nietzsche meant when he said, in the grip of paralysis progressiva, "I am stupid because I am dead."

I just mean... I don’t know. Maybe I mean that I’m dumb. Mute. This place I’m at, this so-called phronistery, that is what they call it in the promotional materials, is designed for isolation. I will not bore you with the obvious reading of its mid-century modern houses: the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, all without curtains.

On good days in the phronistery—-days when the weather is not too appallingly beautiful, say—-you can imagine that the time you pass here without speaking to anyone is granting you a phantom childhood: inwardness, genius. As Guy Davenport writes in his essay on Balthus, "Balthus' children are as complacent as cats and accomplished in stillness... Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting, we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not driven to succeed where there parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, a somebody."

On other days, the mute passage of time has brought you to nothing but the bad bargains of interiority: ____. Whatever they are; I am in no condition to enumerate them. Too. Stupid.

And on the other hand (though I was just now comparing days, not hands), maybe weeks of muteness bring you to an a-relationality. The "revolutionary inaptitude...for sociality" Leo Bersani writes about in Homos. Though I haven’t gotten very revolutionary, since I just elided the words "gay desire" from that quotation.

S.R.I., R.I.P.

The SRI disbanded over a meal yesterday afternoon. M + C are off to England; N to Bali and then shortly thereafter possibly New York. C-prime is busy making films. S is writing a book.

Our ambitious talk about the new politics was perhaps only a death spasm.

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his envirnoment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricties, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence... Life is a habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals... Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adapatations represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being...
BECKETT*

(*I don't know where the citation is from. I found it in an introduction to Charlotte Bronte's Villette. --I'm leaving town for a few months. To suffer being.)

Mansex Agitprop Seattle

The SRI's last public event--last, as in most recent, and last, as in, that's the last of the SRI -- went all right. Contra my fondest wishes and secret hopes, it was just all right.

I had thought -- without thinking it through -- the event would be like this one in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, both in structure and intensity, if not in the actual sequence of variety acts:

Whether it was because my illness grew exacerbated by the incense, or owing to sheer excitement, I felt it wise to slump to the floor so as not to excite my nerves more than I knew they would be excited by what I was about to undergo, and I allowed my head to rest against the boots of a young white gentleman who told me not to think of formality but to make myself comfortable...

"Are you a bosom friend of the Mime?" the young man whispered in my ear. "I feel I am losing consciousness," I told him, "you may have to care for me." But my lightheadedness didn't seem to alarm me somehow or my companion either, who merely went on humming the tunes he heard played on the piano.

....................

While this was going on, I had not realized that the young man next to me had almost entirely undressed me. My overcoat was gone, and my trousers and shorts had disappeared. Thinking he was about to enjoy my body, I turned to question him but he had of course disappeared.

...when the Mime, unable any longer to be standing unheralded in the wings, leaped out and seized Millicent for his partner, and began doing an unparalleled two-step with her, to the fresh enthusiasm of the audience, for it was suddenly apparent she needed only his guiding hand to be brilliant. Indeed, their duo bid fair to be the hit of the season at the Arcturus Gardens when suddenly, from the back of the theater, somebody shouted "Po-lice!" Purple in the face and puffing from their exertions, Millicent and Elijah nonetheless danced on, gliding into a tango. The bluecoats had arrived through the broken front door, with their nightsticks twirling, and, thinking they could only be coming for me, I dashed bare-assed for the fire escape, and then just as I was descending I heard gunfire...

I did harbor a secret desire that our gala should culminate in audience members disrobing, or fainting, or repairing to the gender-undesignated bathrooms, and then finally that the police should arrive, "nightsticks twirling," to bust up our exhibition of this 'unrated' film in which Smith college students re-enact the boys' prep-school novel A Separate Peace.

Volodine

From Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels:

Across a half-kilometer of sand you enter a neighborhood where, for two dollars a year, the nouveaux-riches employ a woman to sweep out their rooms and wash their shirts. This woman, Rachel Carissimi, has killed several capitalists, but she didn’t eat them. Not far away begins an avenue full of potholes, lined with a string of vacant apartment buildings. In the third building on the odd-numbered side, there nevertheless resides a man who has memorized every one of Varvalia Lodenko’s speeches, and can recite them on demand. At the northern end of the avenue, you stand near another cluster of abandoned districts. When I say you, I’m thinking mainly of the Untermenschen, for instance Oulan Raff, which is to say me. Over thousands of hectares a blue-tinged blackish color predominates, and slag, and wind, and, just after that, to the southwest, an expanse of tundra opens up before you. If you follow an east-southeasterly course for some three thousand seven hundred kilometers, you will end up at the place known as Spotted Wheat, where a handful of veterinarians once corralled some old women who never died, who never changed, and who couldn’t be eaten. The nursing home was far from everything, even the camps. They say these immortals committed a grave error that they never stopped trying to repair. The story goes that they brought a man of rags up out of nothingness, and that he reestablished the circulation of dollars and mafias on the earth. If, instead of choosing that distant destination, you decide to come back toward the [bridge], you will first enter a courtyard where a windmill wheel squeaks mournfully day and night, connected to nothing. This is where Oulan Raff lives.

This novel, composed of "narracts" (Volodine's word, though also it is the novel's word), is not always narrated by Oulan Raff; he appears only here, in this one narract. Not all the narrators are so anti-capitalist as this one, though many of them grieve, in an ironic mode, for the failure of communism ("all those who built that ideal brick by brick in spite of the wars and the massacres and the privations and in spite of the camps and the guards in the camps, and went on building it heroically until it wouldn't stand anymore, and even until it would never stand again.")

How much is dropped, cast aside, in the narracts! Torrents of incident (narract/cataract); vast geographies of waste; grief at the demise of world revolution; and one narrator after another after another. (Waste: a chief narrator is named Scheidmann, calling to my mind Ausscheidung, elimination; Scheidmann is plagued by sloughing, scaling skin.) An extravagance, but not a showily cool, affectless extravagance. Waste on a prodigious scale, but in a somber key. Loss, perhaps, rather than waste.

Mansex Agitprop



Watch the trailer of Oakie Treadwell's amazing new film, Maggots and Men.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film "Pulse" as allegory of the more or less worldwide reach of reactionary forces in the present historical conjuncture and of the necessity to "keep going"

Toward the end of the film, after the plague of nihilistic zombie-like people has swept Japan and possibly the rest of the globe, two characters are alone on a huge ship. After a crane shot that shows the ship alone in a trackless expanse of ocean, the film cuts to the two travellers.

Woman: Will we keep going then?

Man: Yes. We'll head to South America; we're still getting signals there, although they're weak.

Indeed.

What defines industrial art is not its mechanical reproduction but its internalized relation to money

For the film Weeping Meadow, Theo Angelopolous built a village only to drown it. The word "village" doesn't quite evoke the immense labor that's everywhere evident in WM: the hand-made bricks, the terra-cotta tiled roofs, the two-story manse at the heart of the village--- the whole sweep of the thing, more than two dozen hand-hewn houses on a vast river-plain.

Every film of course shows evidence of its production costs. What is of interest here is the film-within-the-film that works as an allegory of film's relation to money.

In Welles's Lady from Shanghai, a picnic becomes a film-within-a-film; the three pleasure-cruising characters (the yacht-owner, his wife, and Welles's character, the captain) decide to go ashore for a nighttime picnic. There is shot after shot of local laborers paddling canoes, laying in supplies for the night's party. In the dissymetry between the many laborers and the few picnickers, in the vast quantity of things brought ashore, and all for a few hours' celebration, that picnic is about the industrial production of an entertainment, and the tremendous capital required.

The village in Weeping Meadow is flooded; the villagers flee. (In "artfully aged boats," as my friend E noted, boats whose oars bob uselessly while an underwater tow-rope, the filmmaker's special effect, thinks E, makes the whole flotilla proceed at a uniform, stately, lugubrious pace appropriate to the great sorrows of that troubled nation, Greece.) As they come ashore and build a fire and chant and pray and wave Greek Orthodox icons, the villagers are a perfect mirror-image to the pleasure-banquet of Lady from Shanghai. The bonfire of the refugee villagers, like the banquet, is a kind of film-within-the-film whose every shot evinces "the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money."

That quotation is from Deleuze, in Cinema 2 (as is the title for this entry). The hinge between the movement-image of Cinema 1 and the time-image of Cinema 2 is money. Deleuze comments on cinema's "curse" just once, to dispense with it right away. Money, says Deleuze, makes its appearance in the film at the moment cinema reflects on its own death; instead of dying, though, cinema's internal relation to money sets up a rising, spinning, ceaseless and dissymmetrical exchange which is foundational for the time-image:

This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal exchange or the impossibility of an equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money; in Marx's formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange... In short, the cinema confronts its internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation... The film is movement, but the film-within-the-film is money, is time.

--[Cinema 2, emphasis original, ellipses mine]

It's a beautiful move on Deleuze's part, to not be halted by the worm at the core, but to redeem that evil through the power of the false; the time-money equivalence does not ruin film (or time), but instead launches a dissymmetry in film, an impossibility of equivalence that keeps the time-image spinning.

...I don't know how to get here with what I've constructed, but: Weeping Meadow is a god-awful film. The character Eleni suffers outrage after outrage; war is visited on all the characters as from without. Eleni murmurs over and over, "the uniforms change [but the war goes on]." Apart from a half-hearted nod to trade unions, the film has no political stance, except that parties and armies have ravaged beautiful village life and beautiful villagers like Eleni. The ceaseless parade of outrages visited on Eleni grows unwittingly comical; one begins to wish for the savagery of a Justine, for the humor of The Good Woman of Szechuan.

To end on another tangent: there's a shanty-town in the film Machuca, and I suppose it might have been built for the film. But where Weeping Meadow is all about a tiny lost happiness crushed from without by the immense war, Machuca is micro-political, so that every moment of the Allende government and the putsch that ended it can be seen in the friendship of two schoolboys.

time please

I asked my friend J, who's Welsh, if British pubs are like they are in the movies; does everybody really sing songs together?

He said, "Only as a prelude to mind-shattering violence."

Review revue

Why did The Nation print this review of Rick Moody's new novel? The reviewer starts by listing all Rick Moody's recent public appearances and non-fiction essays & forewords, and then sums up: "One might be forgiven for being more familiar with Moody's guest appearances than with his major works themselves."

There's no mention of Richard Yates or Thomas Bernhard; I haven't even read that much of Moody's fiction and I can think of a literary (as opposed to celebrity) context in which to review his writing. If you want to come to the judgment that he's overrated, as the Nation reviewer does, you could try to get there with a critique of the work, not with an airing of "one's" own resentment of his success.

***
And, in other news, a very smart review of Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson:

http://www.sfbg.com/39/52/lit_munson.html