Author: Bradley J. Fest

On Beginning; or, Finally Defining the Name of this here Blog

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Beginning the Fragment or Fragmenting to Begin—“They” say that the Fall is a time for new beginnings, a time when Americans choose to change.  Beginning only means being in thrall to the past while anxiously casting away one’s more-than-likely future, like being surrounded by a roomful of books you’ve read but cannot remember a single word of and choosing where to start your reading over again.  For my part, I’ve started dressing nicer recently.  By “nicer” I still mean jeans.  Jean Baudrillard, Jean Claude van Damme, Jean Grey, Gene Fest, Wyclef, Sartre, Rousseau.  (Searching my .docs, there is no satisfactory origin for the concept of origin.  Either a “Riot Grrrl History,” a bunch of lonely sexual ramblings, or Yaphet Kotto.  Oops.)

Beginning Again—This is more like it.  Origins are categorically onanistic.  How much seed need be spilled in pursuit of beginning something that must inherently end?  Like when Eve recounts her birth, Milton inscribes the myth of Narcissus upon her before she even meets Adam.  Before the beginning (what else is Paradise Lost about?) of human history, we have a being obsessed by its encounter w/ the mirror-stage, its beginning of self-awareness of the other (self), before the sad descent into history.  I’m sick of: the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end, the end of the end, the beginning of the beginning, or the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning.  It’s why humans drunk-dial/-text.  At least in America.  TFLN (Txts Frm Lst Nght[1]) is only the most conspicuous aspect of this: we collectively cannot remember how “last night” ended, and thus, waking up (beginning) in the mo(u)rning, we are shocked to learn that our present has been inscribed by a past w/ no present whatsoever.[2]

Beginning over Again—Ugh, how Derridean.  The proliferation of forms has made formalism de trop.  Perhaps we should start teaching our students about the impotence of form, about the form that comes from not taking Viagra  (Wow, that’s in my spell check!).  As in: logorrhea is a form in-and-of-itself. . . if not the form.  Is hyperarchivization anything less than this logic?  Like in Paradise Lost (again) when Adam and Satan both complain about the fact that neither had any say in the manner of their creation.  Oh, the wisdom of Silenus.

A Perhaps Even More Pressing (Form of) Beginning—Can I only write as if it were about to be immediately posted to the interwebs?

(Apocalypse) Now Begun—To those who perhaps do not understand the liminalities of this here present undertaking, let me be frank in my reference: “These are the two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achievement”[3]; “the hypothesis we are considering here is that of the total and remainderless destruction of the archive,”[4] or the total infinite accumulation of that archive w/o end.  It is b/t these things, b/t these two ultimate limits, impossible in their irreducible extravagance, where we attempt to locate ourselves in the HYPERARCHIVAL PARALLAX.

Let me attempt to be clear: any writing, any writing whatsoever, occurs b/t these two poles.  These are the poles which inscribe any attempt to write, in all its banal euphoria.  So, on the one hand, the hyperarchival parallax attempts to incorporate everything, but on the other, to destroy everything, to destroy everything it incorporates, and thus it is able to exist b/c it is aware that it can never reach these untransgressible limits.[5]

When Foucault writes on transgression, he says that “the twentieth century will undoubtedly have discovered the related categories of exhaustion, excess, the limit, the transgression—the strange and unyielding form of these irrevocable movements which consume and consummate us.”[6] The hyperarchival parallax seeks to undo the 20thc’s discoveries.  Not that F. was wrong, far from it, but rather b/c it seeks a transgression of the gap b/t liminalities.  “The first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent ‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself.”[7] Consequently, if the “ONE” is the “ARCHIVE,” the hyperarchival parallax seeks to highlight the fact that the archive is never the archive: it is always hyperarchive.  The two sides of its coin are (perhaps) the interwebs as infinite accumulatory archive and the interwebs as an archive that is always undergoing the process of its own destruction infinitely.  If these are untransgressible limits, they are only so b/c we don’t have an AI strong enough to breach them, or our posthumanity has not caught up w/ its reality yet.  “We should therefore also assert a gap between life and meaning, analogous to the gap between truth and meaning—life and meaning do not in any way fully overlap.”[8] Thus. . . .

To Begin Again, Anew—Thus, “Sun is shining, / Birds are singing, / Flowers are growing, / Clouds are looming and I am flying.”[9] The shit has been defined, and, whether or not the birds are singing tomorrow b/c its pgh and the sun don’t shine, it (the sun) will rise tomorrow (hopefully).  But that’s the whole parallax, right?  The birds surely sing when the sun goes down.  I got these birds in my more-or-less-backyard that for periods of time make a squawking, quaking type of noise every day when the sun goes down.  I think they’re related to the blackbirds/crows that used to perch there/fly across the sky every eve at sundown.  Or else, “the sun has gone down for the last time.”[10] But that still ain’t a solution to beginning.  We’ll see.

[1] How Hebraic.  YHWH-damn.

 

[2] The first instance of this that popped up when I visited this site on 10.24.2009 was: “You were so drunk last night you typed http://www.face.come/cheese.com as if you were logging into facebook.”  Point.  Win.  Though I will admit this is a fairly banal case-example/-study of what I’m talking ‘bout.

[3] Derrida, Jacques.  “The Book to Come.”  Paper Machine.  Trans. Rachel Bowlby.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.  15.

[4] Derrida, Jacques.  “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead (Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).”  Psyche:   Inventions of the Other.  Vol. 1.  Trans. Catherine Porter & Philip Lewis.  Eds. Peggy Kamuf & Elizabeth Rottenberg.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007 [1984].  400.

[5] For instance, “Otis Nixon” is the most hit-upon reference in this archive.  Destruction!

[6] Foucault, Michel.  Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.  Trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon.  Ed. Donald F. Bouchard.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.  49.

[7] Žižek, Slavoj.  The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.  7.

[8] ibid., 182.

[9] M83.  “Birds.”  Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.  EMI, 2003.

[10] Milemarker.  “Sun Out.”  Ominosity. Eyeball Records, 2005.

Let there be a Postmodern Drip; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Milton

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[Note: my problem w/ footnotes still remains.  Sorry.]

So I just accidentally caught a bit of PBS’ art:21.  Not having ever really seen the show, I cannot comment at length other than to say I’m mildly surprised by a few things about it.

1)  Its existence.  That, despite the slashing of budgets around the country for publicly-supported arts—perhaps most notably in our public school system—PBS has devoted an impressive amount of time and funding to archiving the contemporary art scene (or at least an institutionalized take on it).  2)  The speed of whatever (might still be said to) come(s) under the heading “avant-garde” in its ability to slink into the “mainstream” of public television.  For instance, I only sat and watched long enough to get what the show was trying to do: interview artists, show their work, talk about their process, etc.—all in a more-or-less banal fashion—but was immediately struck by the “painter” and “sculptor” Jeff Koons sitting and talking to the camera while the shots of his work being created resembled factory floors with many laborers toiling to produce surplus value, and the owner (read: artist) was nowhere to be seen except talking to the camera.  If this is the avant-garde, like a video I watched of the making of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) in a undergrad women’s studies class, at least we don’t have the myth of the lone, toiling, individual artist to contend w/ anymore—it is a collective, Stalinst endeavor, a 5-year Plan, if you will (. . .); and it is formally sanctioned by PBS (better than FOX I suppose).  3)  Baudrillard was “right” (perhaps, at least in this regard) when he wrote:

“Therein lies all the duplicity of contemporary art: asserting nullity, insignificance, meaninglessness, striving for nullity when already null and void.  Striving for emptiness when already empty.  Claiming superficiality in superficial terms.  Nullity, however, is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by just anyone.  Insignificance—real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning, the shedding of sense, the art of the disappearance of meaning—is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it.  There is an initiatory form of Nothingness, or an initiatory form of Evil.  And there are the inside traders, the counterfeiters of nullity, the snobs of nullity, of all those who prostitute Nothingness to value, who prostitute Evil for useful ends.  The counterfeiters must not be allowed free reign.  When Nothing surfaces in signs, when Nothingness emerges at the very heart of the sign system, that is the fundamental event of art.  The poetic operation is to make Nothingness rise from the power of signs—not banality or indifference toward reality but radical illusion.  Warhol is thus truly null [yay to living in pgh], in the sense that he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image [my emphases].  He turns nullity and insignificance into an event that he changes into a fatal strategy of the image” (“The Conspiracy of Art.”  The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays.  Trans. Ames Hodges.  Ed. Sylvère Lotringer.  New York: Semiotex(e).  2005 [1996].  27-8).

4)  The final spoken line of Mary Heilmann’s segment, which filmed her “finishing” a work: “let’s leave that postmodern drip.”

And this brings me to the point that has been on my mind all day: how is simply leaving a drip, an “accident,” a self-referential awareness of the artifice one is creating postmodern!?  (Has Cervantes taught us nothing?)  Heilmann, here at least, is intentionally inscribing postmodernism not into her painting itself, but into her filmic inscription of that painting, into the institutionalized, publicly accepted portrayal of her artistic process.  This is not really to comment on her art at all (a visual practice that perhaps reached its peak in Mondrian—oops, that’s a comment in-and-of-itself. . .), but rather to suggest that this perhaps off-the cuff, highly edited comment is both obscene and untimely.  Obscene b/c it attests to her own self-aware position as a filmic representative of 21st-c. art, in all the excessive surplus of her reification.  Untimely, b/c I couldn’t help but to inscribe my own current teaching of Paradise Lost upon it—i.e. I am weirdly and perhaps desperately attempting to locate some sort of hip, postmodern take on Milton to “dazzle” my students w/, and am simply not finding it.  Milton is an incredibly drippy poet, this is a given.  But where is that postmodern drip!?

Rather, and I know this is quite an unexpected (except for the title) left turn, but it is precisely the traditional, canonical, and established take on the aporias of Milton’s text which are fascinating me right now, which are dictating my pedagogical approach to something I probably have no right to be teaching in the first place.  For instance, over the past two classes, we talked about light, the Word, language, gender, freedom, predestination, Satan’s status, good vs. evil, authority/discipline/sovereignty vs. the individual, etc. etc.  And it has been kinda gettin’ my rocks off.  I don’t know what it is.  Perhaps it’s the old dead white-guy in me (I’m one of those things, and approaching [the] (an)other[s]), but some of the most enjoyable things I’ve taught in the past couple years, of course w/ some notable exceptions, have been, for lack of a better term, canonical.  Where does this come from?

Well, that is probably a pretty damn (stupid-)easy question, in oh-so-many ways, so let me rephrase it.  Why do I, as someone who has for so long valued the new, the minor, the interstitial, the subversive, the alternative, the marginal (or was I just deluding myself before . . . !? [oh no; damn]), all of a sudden get this supreme satisfaction for engaging, teaching, and in some cases writing about, such a text?  And not even in some sort of new or interesting way? but in the same-ole’ way my a-bit-more-than-slightly-overweight undergrad Miltonist did?  (Seriously, take a look at his page.  He literally looks exactly like what one would expect a corpulent Miltonist to look like.[1] And yet I’m realizing what an incredible debt I owe(d) him.  So I apologize if this is a bit adolescent.  Hell, one of the best things my students said today was that Paradise Lost was like a simplistic teenage drama, w/ Satan as the rebellious son.[2] Sheer gold.)  Is it possible that PL has certain universal resonances that not only myself but my students can appreciate, understand, be frustrated by, and work w/?  Or is this simply yet another case of the ability for PL to be, in short, Blakean?

Or is something entirely different going on?

Like, where’s the postmodern drip?  If Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin is the major contemporary reinterpretation of PL (and of course, I’m drawing upon his introduction to the second edition of Is There a Text in This Class for the title of this piece. . .[3]), it would appear there is still an ample amount of work to be done w/r/t this question.  And so of course it is here rather than somewhere else that perhaps even an inkling of what this work might consist of can be posited.

In other words, if PL is anything, it is a case of absolute archival over-accumulation, excess, abundance.  It splits its seems.  There is simply too much textual, historical, critical, and classical crap, which it holds gravitationally w/in its constellation, to dismiss its archival logic, its hyperarchivization.   The manner in which it has presented itself to me and the manner I cannot but help to present it to my students is wholly reliant on the fact that it is a significant node w/in the archive, not least b/c it is something I have decided to take into close-account.  Though the archive’s logic may be dictated by virtually anything but oneself, that is perhaps the entire point of PL: I’m Satan; I dictate my own goddamn archive.  No law rules the freedom of my textual play.  I cannot be subsumed systematically.  My freedom spreads, and it is an archival spreading, not necessarily subject to any authority whatsoever.  The Fall is a realization.  Humanity enters historical time, archival time w/ man’s first transgress; holy crap it would’ve been boring otherwise.  The very thing that makes possible the thinking, imagining, or writing of PL is the subject of itself.  W/o the Fall: no archive, narrative, history, art:21. . . no postmodern drip.  No Jayson Green screaming “I am Nietzsche!”  And so for a brief moment, is it perhaps alright to, I don’t know, love Milton a bit? to be all Christ-y w/ him and break the law (in more ways than one, if you know what I mean)?

Walking home from the liquor store tonight, reading as usual (re: walking, not the liquor store), I was pointed to/reminded of a text I’d forgotten about w/r/t the Fall: chapter 3 of Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf.  Re-reading it tonight, thinking it would offer me that postmodern drip, the only thing that really stood out (as it often does in the case of that Slovenian) was a joke in a footnote:

(Before the footnote (i.e. in the text proper): “In a wonderful alternative history essay, ‘Pontius Pilate Spares Jesus,’ Josiah Ober entertains the hypothesis that Pilate did not yield to the pressure of the mob, and spared Christ, who survived, and thrived to a very great age as a successful preacher, supported by the Roman authorities against the Jewish establishment; his sect gradually became dominant, and also became the Roman state religion, albeit in its more Jewish version, without the Cross and Redemption by Christ’s death.  The coincidence of Fall and Redemption makes this hypothesis strict sensu beside the point.”)

“This also makes meaningless the well-known Christian joke according to which, when, in John 8:1-11, Christ says to those who want to stone the woman taken in adultery, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!,’ he is immediately hit by a stone, and then shouts back: ‘Mother!  Didn’t I ask you to stay at home!’” (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.  Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.  77, 181).

And perhaps therein lies the ultimate lesson of any take on PL.  Subverting it ultimately, imagining that therein (and, by proxy, in Genesis too) Eve (and Adam) never eat that fruit, but remain in Eden forever, happy, genuflecting, praising God, and fucking/multiplying in the most holy of ways (read: w/o pain)—what would be the point of that?  The reversal of the Fall, unlike the reversal of so many other things that we encounter in the phenomenal world, isn’t funny.  There is no irony possible if Eve doesn’t eat the fruit.  No laughter at all (Dionysian or otherwise).  Unlike most jokes, which require some small amount of distortion from the “real,” the only thing that is funny about the Fall is the Fall itself rather than its inversion.  There is no humor in an unfallen world.  The Fall literally produces the possibility (and thus the instantiation) of laughter! And this is perhaps the real question of PL: what is happiness w/o laughter?  What then is the more privileged human quality: freedom or laughter (and of course we get both in the Fall)?  Happiness isn’t even an issue here—its question is ludicrous.[4] Freedom or laughter, or are they not synonymous?

I cannot help but to think here of Jubal Harshaw’s response to Mike from Mars’ question: “What is ‘Man?’” in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.  Faced w/ the near impossible task of defining exactly what makes humans human, Harshaw responds to Mike that “Man is the animal who laughs.”  “Because man is the animal that laughs at himself.”  Ultimately for Harshaw, this ability to laugh resides in our ability to feel pain—we laugh ’cause it hurts.  To watch Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Jim Carrey and laugh, is to laugh at the pain they are having inflicted upon themselves.  And, at least for Heinlein (here), this is the most fundamental aspect of being human! In other words, Milton’s great ambition (perhaps not realized in something like Paradise Regained) may have been, in a very real way, to write the comedy of the West, the narrative which produced laughter (perhaps as a by-product of freedom or vice-versa).  W/o the Fall, w/o transgression, pride, knowledge, etc. etc., there would be no laughter.  And this is why I am so stricken w/ PL, b/c I want to end on a question akin to: “and is it possible to be human w/o laughter,” when in fact this is a very traditional/canonical/normative question to ask when faced w/ a text such as PL, and, indeed, one which has been asked in far more subtlety, detail, and complexity quite a while ago in Nietzsche.  But I cannot refrain.  Is perhaps the postmodern dripping I am so eagerly and desperately seeking not simply this: wtf does PL have to do w/ laughter?  This: is there any the difference b/t Adam and Eve laughing gloriously at their fall and the final scene of Dr. Strangelove, w/ that dude waving his cowboy hat while straddling the bomb, laughing gloriously?  And yet, still no postmodern dripping. . . .

[1] Btw, take a look at the image on his desktop—priceless.  Esp. w/r/t myself and its archival resonance.  In other words, my moms had a bunch of cheap art books in our massive library (which was of no interest to my young self b/c it was all—except for these art books and a few others—my pops’ English history before 1800 [if only I’d’ve known!]), and one of their covers was that image, one which weirdly assailed me at every point.

 

[2] i.e. “Fuck you Dad,” you don’t understand me!  I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!

[3] To say absolutely nothing of Kubrick, the apocalypse, or the bomb. . . .

[4] Like when someone responds to the question: “what do you want out of life,” w/ “I just want to be happy.”  Yeesh.

Nomadology (I); or, This Concerns All of Us

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Nomadology I

Roberta Gentry, This Concerns All of Us, Write and React, Arts Incubator Gallery, Tucson, AZ, May 2008.

Recently found this gorgeous semi-collaborative piece Roberta Gentry painted for a poem I wrote a few years ago.

Nomadology I(; or, This Concerns All of Us)

This does not concern the silent emissaries
floating in their homemade boats of warehouse shelving
floating toward Yuma and Dubai, and
the rescue of senusalists everywhere.

They are, indeed, not heralds of anything whatsoever.
So this concerns my wandering.  For when it will pass,
for what it will traverse, for the alleys soon locked
by failed transmissions and succeeding parentheses.

This is a forgetting.  One small leap in space
with porous limits and ill-defined rules.  Where
if the cantankerous restlessness pouring out my eyes
is to be believed as the impossibility of universal consent,

then the throwing motion underneath bronze shields
is both an opening and closing to one hundred hands clapping.
But it is not.  There are a few busted filaments, cracked
tires, broken needles, and blown speakers; maybe

thousands of paradoxes inspired by the conundrum of:
high-jumping the state line or roadside Jesus look-alike contests.
Or maybe this is an affirmation of passive reception and
active errantry, lost when the planets first collided,

a sitting still and motioning weakly toward the window–
fallowness another name for meditation.  The balm for
over-traveled feet rests in a god’s medicine cabinet
where it is slowly approaching its expiration date.

There were only a few short yarns spun yesterday.
And the failure to evince the proper emotion
accorded them was something prepared for.
I fall into song and cannot return.

Media and the G20

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So the G20 was in Pittsburgh last weekend.  I don’t really have much to say about it beyond the fact that the massive police presence (4000 police)–many hired specifically for this occasion from other departments around the country, also including national guard, etc.–appears to me like a clear case of (over-)accumulation to prevent the movement and realization of an alternate, or subaltern, history.  (Archivally) over-accumulate police!  Then no Seattle!–I suspect was the thinking behind this.  Original estimates planned on something like 35,000 protesters.  The actual amount of people at both licensed and unlicensed protests was more b/t 3,000-5,000.  (By all accounts, there may have been more police than protesters. . . .)  I don’t know if this says something about pittsburgh, the current state of things, or whatnot, as I cannot lie about a general kind of ambivalence toward the whole thing–i.e. if the G20 had been somewhere else, would I, in my cloudy-haze of academic self-absorption, even have noticed beyond a passive reading of the news?  But all in all, it was one of the more-interesting times to be living here in my now going on 6 year tenure.  Many of the shots from television and such occurred only a couple blocks from my house.  The town was shut down, martial-law style.  (One guy said it was like Kent State mixed w/ Mardi Gras.)  And commentators couldn’t help but overly-stress how pgh has bounced back after the disaster of the late-70s and 80s.  It is a lovely town to live in, yes.  It is cheap, livable, and has fared better than many places during the “recession.”  But come on, it’s still pittsburgh, and any perusal of much of the town will reveal a past which it is desperately trying to escape, a city defined by antagonisms: a mixture of weird post-apocalyptic ruins and Banana Republics; an infrastructure which is barely being held together mixed w/ SF-like health-care; complete geographical racial and economic segregation mixed w/ exciting sports championships; yinzers and state-o-the-art education.

—

So, some media:

That said, my friends and colleagues Molly Nichols and Katherine Kidd, two quite amazing women, were more-or-less literally taken off the streets to appear on the Sean Hannity show.  Watch the interview here. It is awkward, to say the least.  Who knew that being a lit. PhD was a way to get on tv, and Fox News no less.

—

This recent story on a judge’s ruling in favor of the city police, a lawsuit brought against the city by Seeds of Peace, literally occurred right outside my window.  The day they towed the SoP bus away from its location on Melwood Ave., parked in front of no one’s property, and not hindering traffic flow in any way, I was sitting at my window working and overheard the entire discussion b/t the police and the owners of the bus.  I can say w/o compunction that the police were unnecessarily harassing the owners of the bus, had no reason to be there (i.e. I guarantee none of my wonderful neighbors called them about the bus), and were quite obviously abusing their power.  I can’t help but think that the police said to themselves something along the lines of: “oh, there’s a dirty anarchist bus.  Let’s get rid of them.  Otherwise they might disrupt the G20.”  In terms of what I overheard, they towed the bus b/c either a) the owner was not present, b) the owner could not produce documentation that s/he did in fact own the bus, or c) one of the people involved provided false identification.  Whether or not any of those things are true, they might as well tow every car on my block.  It would be as justified to randomly come up to me and ask me to prove that I own my car when parked on the street.

—

Lastly, on a slightly lighter note, please visit hotmetalbridge.org, as our new call for papers just went up.

Let there be sports

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So my good friend, Ms. Adriana Ramirez, has decided to blog about the Pittsburgh Steelers, to immerse herself in the wanton black-and-gold which dominates so much of the burgh.  Please check it out, as it is titled (so nicely referring to myself): “Watching the Steelers w/ Brad.” I am going to try to accompany her occasionally on writing, as I will almost definitely be watching every game (w/ her), but hell, I’ve watched nearly every single Steeler game for the past 5 years, so if I do, I assume it will be in the mode of this here blog–i.e. a send-up of my relationship w/ the Steelers of the past, which were mostly the always disappointing Steelers of the 90s, Bubby goddamn Brister, Yancy Thigpen, Louis Lipps and other names which would never even occur to Pynchon b/c of their outlandishness (though they do have a current player named Ziggy Hood).  Regardless, I am very happy foozball season is back.  It is embarrassing how ridiculously enjoyable watching football can be.  First game: Steelers 13, Titans 10, w/ yet another great 4th quarter comeback from ole Big Ben.  That and a classic 19 yard sack that took them out of field goal range in the 1st quarter which was completely his fault.  He has got to learn how to throw the ball away.  C’mon!

Repackaging the Archive (Part III): TMNT; or, the Cultural Logic of (Late-)Toys

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So hopefully the nearness to my last post might be read as a sign that I will actually update this blog on occasion, combined w/ the fact that I feel very good (and still guilty) about getting whatever apologia I felt was necessary out of the way.

I suppose it is a curious case to write about one’s childhood, to mine that terrible well of rosy-colored (or not, as the case may be) memory.  Not only am I sure there is probably a glut of scholarship, theorization, and practical investment in the specific aporias which accompany this type of activity, the activity of creating significant nodes out of the past which not only seem to inform one another, but also to inform one’s present (of course), but I am also sure that the distinct lack of this type of writing in my own various practices immediately renders me simultaneously incapable of doing it (I have a general aversion to “Children’s Studies,” no reason), while being perhaps uniquely situated to offer something, even it be completely useless or lacking in value.  The reasons for this aversion, reticence, and honestly general glee, should perhaps be generally apparent even in a fairly uncomplicated notion of “archive.”  Archives require selection—what will get in and how?  Where does one draw the line for inclusion?  Does the term “hyperarchival,” one I have at the moment failed to define in this space, suggest some kind of infinite, meta-, or self-aware archive?  (I hesitate to suggest a too ready affinity w/ something like Baudrillard’s “hyperreal,” if for no other reason than I think boiling down the unthought-through (at the moment) neologism “hyperarchive” to something like “more of an archive than an archive,” is not only redu(ctive)/(ndant), but quite simply wrong.)  Or is it, in this case, that the whole point is to withdraw as many markers, boundaries, limits, or definitions upon what actually does get in?  This point/question demands further development, as I have long been invested in theorizing (or perhaps fantasizing) an archive w/o the dimension of selectivity, but perhaps the current entry may function as an entryway into how/what this might look (like).

So anyway, I’ve been meaning to write about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (hereafter TMNT) for quite some time, and honestly, at this point, I am unsure if any of my initial desire or reason to do so remains.  What does remain, is that I am going to write about them, which in-and-of-itself may be the important thing anyway.  The Turtles, created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1986, for the then quite small, independent comic book company Mirage Studios, were initially quite crude, beer-swilling, incredibly violent, sexy, well. . . mutant teenage turtles, who were named for Renaissance painters (and sculptors), and were, of course, very highly-trained ninjas.  Looking back at the first issues of the initial run of the comic, they barely resemble the cute, cuddly, Saturday morning cartoon characters, and their later live-action version, which was to become their familiar presentation.  Shredder was just a dude.  There was no (at least initially) intergalactic dimensional movement, no Krang, no other mutants.  This is probably general knowledge for most people my age, as the heights the TMNT reached during their heyday infected virtually everyone I knew, male and female.  (I distinctly remember arguments on the playground over who got to be which turtle.)  So I won’t bewail their history other than saying their popularity was pronounced, long-lasting—there are still TMNT stuff today, but I am far from nerdy enough to find it for inclusion here—and in some ways inexplicable; there was a whole rash of “ninja” related stuff when I was a kid, perhaps the best was the Ninja Gaiden series on the old NES.  This in-and-of-itself probably deserves and has had attention elsewhere, so I will refrain.  What specifically interests me about them, was and is the logic and my relationship to their toys.

I had a ridiculous amount of toys when I was a kid, which was probably the result of an overzealous imagination/desire, far too generous (or spoiling) parents, an ability to be immersed in worlds of what I thought then were my creation, but really just me reenacting the capitalist narratives I’d been presented w/ already, my general archival impulse manifesting itself at a ridiculously young age, a combination of all these, or something else, which I’d probably have to go to therapy to figure out.  Either way, I had a lot of toys, a lot of different types of toys, video games, books, board games.  I could entertain myself until the world ended w/ the amount of shit I had (none of which remains. . .), and honestly, probably didn’t need any of it for that end.  (I’ve realized now that most of the antagonism b/t my younger sister and myself ultimately resulted from her feeling left out.  I could entertain myself for hours w/o her, but she’d feel whatever it is little sisters feel [still figuring that one out], and hence: fights.)   Most importantly though, for my specific relationship w/ the Turtles, was that it was ultimately encyclopedic.  I somehow felt I couldn’t actually play w/ them as effectively unless I had every one (again, I was probably also a spoiled little shit).  For my unending gratitude, or anger over enabling which only a true addict can feel, my mother was more than willing to indulge this specific problem I had—i.e. one Christmas, when TMNT was still fairly new, I basically received the whole archive of every one that had been released until that point, even a lot of the vehicles and other accompanying shit.  I can’t say I look back fondly on my younger self which felt this genuine archival lack in his ability to play, in having the desire to fill that lack, as well as the means, but hell—I was immersed in an orgy of late-80s/early-90s consumer culture which I not only didn’t have the means/knowledge to critique or resist, but had no idea there was an alternative (which I’m still not sure of. . .).  This was the era of the $600 (or whatever) Neo-Geo, the Sega Genesis which released a Sega CD and Sega Saturn, and some other crap—which makes the thing look simply ludicrous—Virtual Boy, the TMNT stage show, Saved by the Bell, and a host of other ludicrous nonsense which I could list until the eternal return of Casey Jones.  (Note: the above hyperlinks are to videos by The Angry Video Game Nerd, who I find to be actually quite a perceptive and illuminating critic when it comes to this era, if a little crude.  Also see his review of the first TMNT game.  I thought I was wholly alone when I just couldn’t get past the third [or whatever] level in it as a kid; I thought it spoke to a general inability in myself, rather than realizing, as I should have and now very much do, that, for all practical purposes, that game was transcendentally impossible.)  In short, I did, for a short time anyway (more on this later) have access to the entire “published” archive that was TMNT toys, and some of them were quite rad.

Though I may have been a bit spoiled, I truly did have a respect, almost a reverence for my toys.  I took extremely good care of them—usually had all the little annoying accessories w/ nothing missing, kept them housed and organized so no cross-cultural miscegenation would occur b/t worlds (wouldn’t want Optimus getting in w/ Dick Tracy, the lines of flight would shatter).  Furthermore, my mother would notice this, which probably didn’t hurt on the whole accumulation front.  But most importantly, I PLAYED w/ them.  Ad nauseam.  All of them.  I had a weird anthropomorphizing bent, where I would feel guilty (!) if I didn’t play w/ certain toys over a certain stretch of time; whether I thought they had feelings, or I was self-aware of simply how many I had and consequently could only justify the massiveness of accumulation by Catholic guilt play (again, therapy), they did not just sit there in boxes like they do for collectors (read: archivists) today.  I was always a bit thrown off by my friends’ lack of actually playing w/ their toys.  It just seemed like accumulation w/o the glorious release of true, fun play.

It would take me hours too.  I would invent these ludicrously complex narratives during play.  Usually they would be sketched from some initial conception of the field of the narrative, and then, once established, it would be permitted to take interesting, spontaneous, and at times disastrous turns.  There was always a battle royale, and everyone usually ended up dead.  They were practically Sophoclean.  I remember one time, over the course of weeks, I played out an entire scenario for Optimus Prime’s return from the dead, but I had to arrange all the political affiliations and betrayals which would occur, including the messianic ascendance of his son.  And I was like 7 when I did that.  These were not just objects to me, and I don’t think good/real toys ever are for those who really and truly play w/ them.  They were distinct, singular beings, often w/ a narrative history, whose object-status was put into play so as to facilitate the larger demands of the worlds I was constructing.  Perhaps my lack of any religious upbringing whatsoever necessitated, on some James Frazer-esque level, to reconstruct origin myths or whatever in play.  Or perhaps there is something inherently narrative about play, or vice versa.  Either way, the thing which sticks out to me so much about TMNT was the will toward total archival object possession so that this type of play could really take place.  There was never really a possibility w/ other toys—I arrived too late.  G.I. Joe had been around forever, and the Transformers was by then an impossible archival institution (and they were really expensive).  But w/ TMNT there was a brief, shining, early moment when one could actually—w/in the bounds of reason, sense, and a parent’s pocketbook I didn’t really understand—have all of them.

And I did.  For like one season.  See, the whole logic of action-figure toys, of Barbie, really any toy whatsoever, is that you can’t really be a successful toy company unless you are constantly making it impossible to own all of them.  (Of course there is a lot to say about desire, etc., here.)  A toy company that released a line like TMNT and, say, made thirty toys, and no more, would fail.   Esp. if the television show, live action movies, etc. were still being made.  This doesn’t even seem like a point to belabor very much, as it is banal to even be saying it.  But something about TMNT, for a short while, made it seem possible to do just this: own all of them, the entirety of the plastic archive.  Perhaps it was the fact that the four main characters all had exactly the same body mold—i.e. super cheap and easy to produce and get the “core” of the brand.  Perhaps there was something like treasure hunting: certain figures were quite a bit more rare than others, and finding them always felt like a coup.  Perhaps it was the fact that certain really rad looking toys appeared which had no correlative in the cartoon or comic.  Perhaps, after having read the really excellent comic (makes the cartoon look like what it was, for kids), and finding characters that had appeared there, and I knew who they were also felt like a coup.  Perhaps it was so many objets.  Whatever.  For that brief moment when it was possible to play w/ the entire archive—those are my most fond memories of toys.  The times when I, for lack of a better term, “knew what I was doing” w/ toys and play, even if I never could have articulated it.  W/ baseball cards, there is never even the possibility of total archival achievement.  Never.  W/ a new(ish) brand of toys, there was.  Plain and simple.  The logic of each is the same.  The archival play and archival jouissance is the same.  But one can never get at the totality of the archive of something like baseball cards.  To even do so would be to suspend what makes them enjoyable—their status as always partial archive, as always in need of supplement.

Of course the ending of this story is predictable.  Very shortly, TMNT kept releasing toys, and they got increasingly stupid, and in my young mind, unnecessary for addition to the archive.  (Sewer Surfing Michelangelo suggests itself.)  I think, and here my memory is hazy, that just the fact that my archive was “once” complete was enough to render the rest insignificant.  And then I grew up and forgot all this.  I think I eventually gave them all away to Goodwill (which I don’t regret in any way).  And probably ultimately sublimated on other things that could be archived: obscure power-violence, post-structural theory, reference books.  But never again will I have the complete archive of something, unless it be a single author, but even then. . . .  Nor do I really have that same desire anymore.  It is like, having achieved the complete archive of, well, at least something, one never really has to concern themselves w/ totality in the same way ever again.  You’ve seen the promised land, been there, cavorted through the trees for a while, and then realized there was an infinity beyond it, even though it was sufficient in-and-of-itself, so left, not looking back, but were able to retain a few fond memories, and perhaps even nostalgic, throw-back blog posts for a project you didn’t realize you were formulating, but now, after all these years, can accept.  Or perhaps I was just a sucker.

There will be more parts.  The archive will always be repackaged.  It is never total.

(foot)NOTE(!):

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

For whatever reason(s), which I have neither the patience nor know-how to figure out at the moment, the footnotes stopped working on this page like they used to–i.e. they (are/) were all being sent to the second post.  Something must have changed, but I can’t figure out what, so, rather than removing the footnotes, going through the arduous task of changing things in HTML, or other not-so-fun things, I’ve decided to re-edit the second post (the one’s where all the footnotes were being sent), so that the footnotes there now don’t work either.  I know this makes for a slightly less friendly interface, but I am so footnote happy, and will continue to be, that I figure it is easier for everybody if you as the reader just treat the footnotes like endnotes–i.e. it is a pain in the ass to constantly flip back and forth in a book to their endnotes, so either dog-ear the page (i.e. open the same post in a new tab and click back and forth), ignore them, read them at the end, read them first, read some and not others, etc. etc.  Basically, I feel very strongly that you used to just be able to roll over them and view them w/ this software, but that has ceased for whatever reason.  So until WordPress.COM (not .org, I could fix it w/o HTML if that were the case) comes up w/ a better way of doing this, you will just have to deal w/ this specific hassle, of this specific archive–which is the whole point anyway.  Sorry, for the rant, but I’ve spent far too much time trying to figure out how to change this–w/o HTML, I use too many footnotes for that to be any fun (i.e. the whole point of footnotes is that they are fun. . . not a hassle. . .)–to not feel like I owe an explanation for why the footnotes don’t “work.”  (Actually they do “work,” as in they “exist” and may in fact “signify something,” and they really aren’t “that hard” to read, but they don’t “work” in the “traditional” electronic sense.  Christ.  Hyperarchival or what?  Since when is this the traditional way footnotes worked anyway!)  Also, this has all delayed the writing of “Repackaging the Archive (Part III),” so congrats to whoever changed the software (unless its my fault for just being stupid).

Repackaging the Archive (Part II): Inhabiting Rama

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

This was an astonishing piece of luck, Norton told himself, though he felt that he had earned it; they could not possibly have made a better choice than this Illustrated Catalog of Raman Artifacts.  And yet, in another way, it could hardly have been more frustrating.  There was nothing actually here except impalpable patterns of light and darkness.  These apparently solid objects did not really exist.

—Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

Having recently had my project proposal approved,[1] and being faced w/ the slightly daunting task of actually reading (for reals, not for fakes[2]) Being and Time,[3] I’ve been mildly—and I stress only mildly, b/c in my mind right now, everything relates . . . —irresponsible in my reading.  Like some (or perhaps most/all) irresponsible acts, however, it emerged from some other fundamental need, obligation, or responsibility, which is, namely, actually finishing all (of the projected 3, but perhaps more) of the parts of “Repackaging the Archive” which have been so wonderfully neglected these past months.[4] Which is to say that I’ve been on a bit of a SF bender of ridiculously relevant books w/r/t/t notion of “archive” recently: Neal Stephenson’s recent and wonderful Anathem(2008), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye(1974), and Arthur C. Clarke’s opaque Rendezvous with Rama(1972).  Though all probably deserve a lengthy entry here, for the purposes of actually “repackaging this/some archive” I will only mention the absolute centrality and necessity the archive plays in the world/civilization (re)building which occurs in every one to some degree or another—i.e. the archive in each novel is a physical instantiation which presupposes and protects against catastrophic, world-wide collapse, so as to rebuild or repair said world (though it is slightly more ambiguous in Rama).  These are active archives, defined by (perpetual) crisis, which are ultimately the only tools to provide any stability to the functioning of the species in its (cyclical) “project.”[5] (Is this not how archives operate always?)  So, for lack of another kind of “disclosing,” it would have felt irresponsible (heh) to not mention this at the outset of something titled “repackaging the archive part II (!).”

In his ridiculously brief discussion of Rama in Archaeologies of the Future,Frederic Jameson[6] writes: “Clarke’s alien mystery story is somehow uniquely more satisfying than any of those with solutions (including his own later sequels) and suggests that God’s creation is best imitated by the invention of questions rather than answers.”[7] He does so in order to locate what he calls Clarke’s “agnostic . . . representation of alien otherness” as opposed to Stanislaw Lem’s wholly atheistic representation.  What is more surprising about Jameson’s statement, however, is that though the crew members of Endeavor didn’t have time to find any “solution” to the “mystery” of Rama before it rocketed out of the solar system[8]—as seen in the epigraph above—at least the possibility of all those answers were right at their fingertips, something that Jameson more-or-less ignores.[9] It is fairly clear that Rama is, among other things, a giant archive, potentially housing all of Raman culture w/in itself—in the form of a holographic (but ultimately a networked/digital) archive; and furthermore, this archive appears to have the express purpose of “re-seeding” that very culture.  W/r/t Jameson’s discussion, what is esp. relevant here, is the fact that the unknowable, alien, radical (or elsewhere formulated “wholly”) Other, literally appears as archive.  The “South Pole” of cylindrical Rama is one giant checkerboard/patchwork of various “crops” (or something, here the mystery is clear[ly ambiguous]), presumably for use by the “biots”[10] whose role it is to maintain and repair Rama.  Rama’s “sea” contains all the necessary minerals from which to construct these biots.[11] And indeed, Rama’s primary goal for tarrying through “our” solar system is to “store-up” enough energy from the sun by “flying”[12] ridiculously close to it, so as to slingshot out into the void of inter-galactic space.  In other words, everything “mysterious” about Rama, whatever there is to be “solved,” is right there on the surface and close-at-hand.  Whatever detective work there is to be done is merely the act of sifting through and deciphering the rules of the archive.  The “wholly/radically” Other finds itself here under the simple nomenclature: archive.

I point toward Rama here under the heading of “unknowability”[13] b/c it appears that something quite essential about the simple act of “archiving” is in play[14] here, something which, though it hasn’t been “ignored,” forms a certain kind of ground for both understanding archives themselves, and, more importantly for myself, describing my own archival foundations, tracing, as I traced my relationship to baseball cards earlier, the paths and limits of “archival-being” (or perhaps “Archsein”[15]).  For this reason, rather than immediately attempting to formulate, theoretically or otherwise, what this foundational thing may be, I feel a few more anecdotal accounts of my own relationship to archiving(-play) may be quite useful here.

It is difficult for me to remember a time when archival organization was not an essential part of my relationship w/ material objects.  Any guest of my current home will surely be aware of my penchant—bordering on (if not wholly a symptom of) an obsessive compulsive disorder—for putting the objects around me “in their place.”  Every single one of the thousands of books I own are organized by category,[16] alphabetized, and—if they haven’t been removed and placed back on the shelf too often—chronologically ordered if I have more than one work by a particular author.  The same goes for my records, divided into “rock,”[17] “classical,” 7”s, and “other,”[18] as well as my DVDs, vids, files, and clothes.  A notable absence at the moment is my lack of CDs or tapes, as they languish in boxes in my basement, mostly b/c those archives have been wholly absorbed into the digital.  (There is no need for their physical presence when they all exist on my computer and iPod.)  The same goes for my file system on the computer.  I literally still have every single thing I’ve typed since I was in about 7th grade, organized incredibly idiosyncratically, w/ many gradations of “filing.”[19] Perhaps one of the more depressing things, is that all of this fits on a 256mb flash-drive.  Thus I am constantly carrying my entire written archive whenever I go anywhere.  (For the extreme logical extension of all of this, look here.)  Otherwise, my living space is quite spartan.  Beyond a few images on the walls, a couple of strange statues,[20] and the necessary furniture and play-back devices, there are very few objects anywhere.  Furthermore, a couple of visitors to my home have noticed this.  Everything around me is highly functional, geared toward “ease-of-access” and a “lack of clutter.”  I do not hoard.  I am not a packrat.  And I would like to think that there are very few extraneous things around me (though why I’d like to think this is up for debate).  In other words, my dwelling, my home, my space, is one of a highly complex order of technicity, various singularities of pattern emerging from a lifetime of (often times random) accumulation.  Why is this?  Where does it come from?

To suggest that this isn’t precisely the case w/ other people would be completely wrong, but that would also ignore the fact that I am more-often-than-not completely baffled by how other people organize the objects in their space.  To see a bookshelf on which the books are organized hurdy-gurdy—that the bookshelf is simply a container and not a logical system—often gives me the howling fantods.  In my younger days when CDs were still in play, seeing them strewn everywhere, w/o cases, oftentimes incredibly scratched b/c of this, confused the heck out of me.  Operating other people’s computers, and for some reason esp. Macs, always feels unheimlich, as their interface is not completely crafted, prioritized, and organized for efficiency and ease-of-access around me (or seemingly anyone else).  Though there is something very important here regarding individuation, subject construction, and my own relationship with various Others, I don’t feel competent to pursue this at the moment b/c of either the threat of a spiraling narcissism or else b/c the questions involved are too complex to pursue answers in this forum.  Either way, this all suggests something about my own relationship to archiving and objects which must be pursued to provide the necessary framework for this entire project, for attempting to explain why this archival accumulation is happening at all.

It is, of course, one of the most difficult things in the world to explain oneself, either to yourself or to other people, and completely ignores the necessary psychoanalytic presence of the Other in doing so, but, as will anecdotally be seen, this isn’t necessarily a vain pursuit (though it might be self-indulgent, but that’s the whole point of blogs anyway, right?).  In other words, I am interested in giving an account for the precedence in my own life of this archival tendency, of providing the same kind of background around baseball cards w/ other things, if for no other reason than the fact that this precedent exists, and may illuminate the present (project).  Hence this (perhaps necessary) apologia for what follows in subsequent parts.  In other words, I am going to talk about Teenage Ninja Turtles and such.  This entry was meant to discuss that, but has now been sitting here unfinished for too long, and now must be posted.  Hopefully it stands (more-or-less) on its own.

[1] The project is pitt’s version of exams.  I don’t even really wanted to get started on how it relates to The Hyperarchival Parallax.

 

[2] This is not even to approach jargons of authenticity.

[3] as opposed to starting it, getting about fifty-to-one-hundred pages in or so, and getting distracted, oh . . . about five times.  Though I must say I’ll probably finish it tomorrow.  This is not to mention the other 110 or so books on my list.  If Heidegger has the presence of mind to say: “and that means that Da-sein as such is guilty” (Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Time.  Trans. Joan Stambaugh.  Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.  263.), then I for one feel no compunction at all echoing something an old teacher of mine said w/r/t just this problem of not feeling like one is doing enough because one is irresponsibly doing all this other shit (all while doing a thesis on Nietzsche)(i.e. reading): fuck guilt.  And this is all to really say, that this entire entry is now being finished over two months later for just the same reasons as just mentioned—i.e. I finished B and T in MAY!

[4] And have been further neglected since I wrote this.

[5] I feel like I hear the words “difference and repetition” floating around somewhere.

[6] Who was at pitt about a month ago and gave 3 incredibly lucid and (I feel) important talks on realism.

[7] Jameson, Frederic.  Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.  New York: Verso Press, 2005.  107.

[8] and though I agree with Jameson’s assessment of the novel as “satisfying.”

[9] Presumably because he was talking primarily about Stanislaw Lem rather than Clarke.

[10] Biological Robots.

[11] Freud’s notion of the “oceanic” as archive?

[12] is that the right word for what a cylindrical archive/spaceship/world does in space?

[13] Indeed Jameson’s title for this chapter on Lem/Clarke is “The Unknowability Thesis.”

[14] I use this word quite deliberately here, as will become clear.

[15] And it is perhaps not a coincidence that I realized tonight that “archive” comes from “ark.”  How did I not see this before?

[16] Currently those categories are: SF, Fiction (“Literature”), Poetry, Drama, Essays, Philosophy, Art (History/Crit.), History, Biography, Lit. Crit., Science, and Reference books (much gets placed under this category, including anthologies, dictionaries, thesauri, style guides, almanacs, religious lit. [Bible, Koran, Dead Sea Scrolls, the Rig Veda, etc.], periodicals [less b/c they’re reference books, and more b/c they are closer to “anthologies,”], and “miscellany”).

[17] quite loosely defined.

[18] 10”s, my skull shaped Orchid 8”, Three Mile Pilots propeller-shaped record.

[19] For example, some of the fundamental categories of this particular archive are: “as close to the real world as you’re going to get,” “closer,” “functional important shit,” “useless shit,” “ALL WRITING DOCS,” “a lifetime of petty tragedies,” etc.  I do not envy the person who ever attempts to sort all of this out, but I, of course, know where everything “is.”

[20] One of Jesus teaching a kid how to play golf, but looking more like he’s giving the kid a reach-around.