The Archival Failure of the Finale of Lost

/ Bradley J. Fest / 7 Comments

With what was probably a fairly predictable final image—Jack closing his eyes and dying—so ended last night one of the most ambitious television shows ever to appear on a network.  I have been following Lost (Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof, 2004-10) fairly voraciously and adamantly for quite a while now, and have refrained up until this moment to comment upon it at all.  The major reason for this is that the extremely large majority of any writing or thinking done about Lost has been mostly in the realm of speculation, conjecture, and theory.  Though the show has wonderfully pointed toward, and at times even required these sorts of activities, I personally have never been very interested in predicting what would happen on the show.  Perhaps this is merely the narrative scholar in me who is able to begin and end most narratives in a fairly short amount of time (i.e. less than 6 years) and consequently feels no reason at all to speculate (i.e. it is a futile and worthless endeavor); or perhaps it was the very strident statement by the show’s creators that they knew how the arc would play out, how it would end, and that they were writing toward it.  Well, we now have that end, and I, for one, am quite disappointed.

What follows is in no way a referendum on the show.  If anything, despite Cuse and Lindelof’s admission that they ended the show how they wanted to, I think the pressures of writing in such a massively popular medium such as network television (and who knows, the pressures from ABC or Disney executives) dictated the easily accessible, touchy-feely, fairly non-complex, overly-emotional ending we received.[1] To have the entire “sideways” world of season 6 be purgatory, and not just any purgatory, but one where all the characters had to come together so that they could move on to “heaven,” well. . . what more could we expect?  This is television, after all, and not just any television, but network television.  The recent trend w/ such slapdash shows like Flash Forward, V, and others—shows attempting to achieve Lost’s complexity and SF aspects—clearly demonstrates that the formal dictates of network television simply aren’t kind to this type of narrative.  (In terms of SF, can anyone imagine Battlestar Galactica or the recent, and surprisingly good, Stargate Universe working on a network?)  Needless to say, the creators of Lost gave a heroic, epic effort to attempt to make good network tv, and despite my qualms w/ the ending, they should be commended for this.

That doesn’t let them off the hook for the finale though.  To paraphrase a contributor to one of the many comment-forums I was surfing through last night to see how people reacted,[2] the finale revealed that all the SF, physics, time-travel, weird twists and turns, etc. etc.—anyone who watches Lost knows what I’m talking about—all of that was a mere prop for what ultimately proved to be an emotional, character-driven soap opera.  I don’t think I’m alone in saying I didn’t watch the show for its character development, let alone its acting.  W/ the exception of Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), and Ben (Michael Emerson), I think anyone would have to agree that the acting was pretty wretched on the show as a whole, at times bordering on the wholly melodramatic.[3] The characters were fairly “stock,” and were shallow enough, even w/ the massive effort put in to making them complex, that they felt like a prop to all the interesting mysterious stuff.  Well, we should’ve known better.  The whole format of the show—flashbacks, flashforwards, and flash-sideways—always privileged character development, so of course the show ends on this.  I’m not surprised per se, just disappointed to realize that I’ve been invested in what I thought was a fascinating show, w/ massive intellectual ambition, only to discover that all that intellectual ambition was a mere prop, mere window dressing to a fairly normative narrative—i.e. redemption (gag).

Furthermore, this is not a rant about the “questions” that may or may not have been “answered.”  No, what I am trying to suggest here, is that the appeal of Lost was always, I think for the majority of people—i.e. why people watched it rather than other dramas, be they doctor-related or not—an intellectual appeal.  The show didn’t dumb itself down, but did the opposite.  It asked its viewers to really strive at their mental limits in terms of narrative construction (see all the theorization and speculation).  Though I wasn’t expecting a James-Bond-villian-type-explanation for all the mysteries of the island, it perhaps would have been more satisfying intellectually.  They really could have used a page from detective fiction, noir, or even Sherlock Holmes on this one.  But what last night’s finale so clearly emphasized, was that the show was never really about its intellectual aspects, at least to its writers, but rather about these poorly written, poorly constructed characters, who I always gave the benefit of the doubt to b/c of the show’s intellectual ambition.  I, and most viewers—all the people who poured out complex theories, the cult of rabid fans, the Lostpedia, etc.—we were all duped.  And I’d like to briefly suggest why this may have been so, though I’ll leave a more fully fleshed-out commentary for elsewhere (or later).

Basically, the appeal of Lost for, I would like to suggest, most of its really hardcore and even casual fans was an archival appeal.  The show was probably the most reference-heavy popular artifact ever (?).  Characters were unapologetically named after philosophers, literary figures, and scientists.[4] References to literature, film, music, science, math, politics, and pretty much anything one could think of were more than liberally inserted into the narrative; the show was inundated w/ them[5]; the show required its own wiki.  And perhaps no other single popular document inspired as many searches through Wikipedia than Lost.  And all this intellectual allusiveness was fun.  If Lost was so popular, this was the reason.  The show was hyperarchival par excellence.

What got really completely abandoned in the finale and the last season as a whole was the archival nature of the show.  The plot boiled down to protecting some “light” (the source of life in the world) and a struggle b/t good and evil (sorta).  All the intellectual, archival, referential, postmodern work the show did ended up being completely empty.  I read recently somewhere that the relationship b/t Lost and its viewers was an unprecedented one, fostered by the internet like never before, and that this was adversely affecting the show.  This is perhaps true, but what we surely didn’t receive last night was a gesture toward the fans (though it unapologetically was trying to do that, to thank the fans for watching).  Rather, we got what should’ve been apparent the whole time.  None of the intellectual stuff mattered.  Cuse and Lindelof were interested in one thing, and one thing only.  Telling a story.  And this, if anything, is what should really be taken from the show.

Lost was a masterpiece in narrative form (even if it had horrible dialogue).  For any aspiring writer, Lost would be a good place to start w/ investigating all that is possible w/ narrative.  The show’s writers really pulled almost every narrative trick out of the hat—seriously, time travel, flashbacks and forward, fragmentary narrative, cliffhangers, near perfect narrative arcs, etc.—and they did so w/ a clear end in mind.  In terms of narrative, the show is incredible.  That is, except for the fact that the entirety of the show, and esp. season 5, was shown to be ultimately unimportant.  The show was always, and still was w/ last night’s finale, about its teleology.  The purposes of characters, their “destiny,” what the island in fact is (or was)—these were the things, intimately linked w/ the Lost’s hyperarchival nature, that drove the show.  To end in the afterlife on a gooey note of camaraderie and community simply departs from the show’s narrative thrust.  The ending was not faithful to what had been constructed.  And I mean this statement formally.

For example, all of season 5 boiled down to whether to detonate the nuke or not,[6] whether destiny, time, etc. could be changed, whether eschatology was written in stone.  And w/ the opening of season 6, we thought that it wasn’t: that we were given two worlds: one in which the bomb did its work, one in which it didn’t.  B/c of the need to end, however, the bomb had to not work (sorta).  So much effort was put into getting the characters where they were at the beginning of this season, but ultimately, so little of it was necessary.  Did the narrative really require going back in time?  No.  Did it require leaving the island?  Not really.  Lost perhaps went through more gymnastic narrative contortions than any other network television show ever, only to end in the most simple manner.  And I have to look at this as a failure.

Lost was an incredible opportunity to really do something quite amazing w/r/t narrative, archivization, and eschatology, and it totally balked at all three, taking the most normative, cliché, redemptive way out possible.  The show could have proven that not only are most viewers far more intelligent than the networks would have us believe (seriously, one more cop show and I’m going on a tv hiatus), but that most tv viewers are starved for intellectual stimulation, and thus perhaps a more rigorous ending could have shown a new path to tv execs for making shows.  In short, I don’t think we can lay the blame for the ending of Lost at the feet of the show’s creators, but rather the very popular culture it is so stridently situated in.  It was an impossible show to begin w/, and the ending only reveals the failure of its impossible ambition.  Given two options, between Entertainment that sublimates our own individual “emotions” and a rigorous, intellectually demanding, narrative experiment, network television will always choose option one.  It sells.  Consequently, Lost is entertainment plain and simple.  Extremely well-made and captivating, yes.  (I refuse to write off the whole show b/c of this end, btw.)  But it provides what we want: that there is “meaning” to life, that everything will turn out “okay” even though we all die, that our relationships w/ people matter in the grand cosmic picture, that our own individual struggles and qualms really are important.  Lost had a chance to take tv into the realm of art, and it failed, and this was ultimately an archival failure.  We should not bemoan this.  We should simply perhaps learn the lesson that ends are far more difficult to do well than virtually anything else in narrative, esp. when those ends are coming for so long and so ambitiously.  The one thing everyone wanted that watched the show, what drove the whole damn thing, was “how is it gonna end?”  Well, now we know, and perhaps if the show really achieved anything, it is the revelation that we should collectively stop caring about ends so much, any ends.   Whether it be the end of the world or the end of a beloved television show, we need to be more archival and become non-eschatological.  And if Lost is able to show this through its ultimate failure, then hats off.

[1] Let me also include the words sappy, cliché, heart-string-pulling, safe, easy, and perhaps even lazy.

[2] For the most part, even the people who appreciated the ending, don’t really have that much to say.  The people who were slamming it, mostly didn’t even really watch the show, or were hyperbolic like: “Lost has wasted the last 6 years of my life.”  Yikes.  Like all the other disappointing cultural crap they were imbibing wasn’t just as worthless?

[3] For instance, Harold Perrineau’s performance as Michael was particularly awful.  If I never hear “WALT!” again it will be too soon.  Perrineau is esp. interesting w/r/t acting b/c he was excellent on OZ (Tom Fontana, 1997-2003), as was Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje who played Mr. Eco on Lost.

[4] Though I did appreciate Kate’s “really!?” when learning Christian Shepherd’s name.

[5] Even if these references were most often of the “pop” variety.  For instance, the scene of Benjamin Linus reading Ulysses on the plane.  Of course Ben is reading Joyce. . . .

[6] Important for this here blog, but I will refrain. . . .

Los Suns

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Everyone and their mother needs to read this article: “Kerr Finally has Suns in Right Place.” It was provided to me by one Charles Engebretson on some social networking service.  If they go up 3-0 tonight, I think a massive amount of jaw-hitting-the-floor-in-that-I-“expected”-this-years-ago-but-gave-up-and-am-finally-seeing-what-I-always-knew-was-possible-but-didn’t-believe-would-ever-happen-joy will be occurring.  Go Los Suns!

More Pop Apocalypse

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Another great quote from Lee Konstantinou’s Pop Apocalypse:

“Given the strategic interests of the Freedom Coalition, and the total certainty of the Foresight System’s battle scenario analysis and forecast, we have concluded that you, the peoples of the TransArabian Caliphate and the Federation of Imamates, have two objective choices in this geopolitical situation.  Please select one of the following two options.

“If you would like the Dome of the Rock to be fully bulldozed and the Third Temple built in its place, please phone: +234343 3432 09232.

“If you would like your civilization destroyed and the radioactive moonscape of your remaining lands occupied by an army of infidel invaders, please phone: +234343 3432 09233” (249).

Perhaps the best part, is how close the phone numbers are. . . .

The Apocalypse: Greatest Business Opportunity EVER

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

I’ll probably be writing something up about Lee Konstantinou’s recent Pop Apocalypse (New York: Ecco, 2009), but I cannot pass up posting this fantastic passage, in all of it’s self-conscious Bond-villain glory:

“Stan seems suddenly bored with Eliot.  ‘Well, okay, I don’t have a lot of time, but here’s the elevator-talk version.  Given the current geopolitical situation, the Apocalypse I just outlined to you will happen, one way or another.  This year, next year, whenever.  Take that as a given.  If it happens by accident or is initiated by people who do not claim their intellectual property rights, then the world will just get nuked and no one will make a cent off the whole thing.  Now, if some person or group figures out that there’s money to be made off the destruction of the world, then that person or group will be within reach of an unprecedented business opportunity.  Again, given the geopolitics of the matter, this is really low-hanging fruit.

“‘It is, therefore, immoral not to take advantage of this knowledge, because if the end of the world doesn’t come about by accident, then some other, more malicious group will take advantage of this knowledge.  On behalf of our investors, we’re obligated to take every step we can to ensure that we corner the Apocalypse market before anyone else does.  And we’re prepared to use part of our profit, after dividends are paid out, in a very charitable way.  We’re not only going to be the most profitable corporation in history but also the greatest philanthropists the world has ever known.  As good corporate citizens, we have an obligation to the whole world community.  We’ll help rebuild things, pick up the pieces of our sad and broken world.  Make sure these kinds of unstable geopolitical situations can’t happen again'” (180).

Pure, unalloyed, disaster capitalism gold.

The Culture Vulture as Hero: Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (and Slavoj Žižek)

/ Bradley J. Fest / 1 Comment

I picked up Jonathan Lethem’s newest novel, Chronic City (2009) for perhaps two reasons: 1) it had an interesting dust jacket,[1] and 2) his name is one of those vaguely familiar ones I’ve heard bandied about for awhile now so figured it was about time I read something of his.  W/r/t many of the concerns of this blog, there are a number of interesting things about Lethem’s most recent effort, but for the purposes of brevity I’ll focus on one particular aspect: the hero as culture vulture.

In my mind, Chronic City is perhaps singular and original in casting its protagonist, though not its narrator, as, for lack of a better term, a “culture vulture.”[2] What I mean by this term (and I, of course, am not the first to use it[3]), is a person who (sorta) mercilessly picks at the refuse and detritus of culture for their own ends, literally a cultural scavenger.[4] The “culture vulture” picks apart culture, finding it where and when they can (if at all. . .), filling themselves, gorging themselves on “culture,” and, after some amount of digestion, shits something out that combines everything digested.  Unlike other definitions of “culture vulture” (see note 3), I make no distinction whatsoever b/t “high” and “low” culture here.  Everything is on the table, from—to allude to my titular parenthetical—Wagner to “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.”[5] Again, w/r/t to my titular parenthetical, perhaps one of the best formulations of (perhaps) what I mean by “culture vulture” is given by Slavoj Žižek in his “Preface” to Looking Awry:

“Walter Benjamin commended as a theoretically productive and subversive procedure the reading of the highest spiritual products of a culture alongside its common, prosaic, worldly products.  What he had in mind specifically was a reading of the sublime ideal of the love couple represented in Mozart’s Magic Flute together with the definition of marriage found in Immanuel Kant (Mozart’s contemporary), a definition that caused much indignation within moralistic circles.  Marriage, Kant wrote, is ‘a contract between two adult persons of the opposite sex on the mutual use of their sexual organs.’  It is something of the same order that has been put to work in [Looking Awry]: a reading of the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacque Lacan together with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture: not only Alfred Hitchcock, about whom there is now general agreement that he was, after all, a ‘serious artist,’ but also film noir, science fiction, detective novels, sentimental kitsch, and up—or down—to Stephen King.  We thus apply to Lacan himself his own famous formula ‘Kant with Sade,’ i.e., his reading of Kantian ethics through the eyes of Sadian [sic] perversion.  What the reader will find in this book is a whole series of ‘Lacan with. . .’: Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Colleen McCullough, Stephen King, etc. (If, now and then, the book also mentions ‘great’ names like Shakespeare and Kafka, the reader need not be uneasy: they are read strictly as kitsch authors, on the same level as McCullough and King.)”[6]

Lacan’s formula—which Žižek exploits so mercilessly (though not ineffectively) it might be put over the doorway of all his work—“Kant avec Sade”[7] might describe the limits of what I mean here by “culture vulture”—i.e. there are few, and the boundaries which are present spread out so widely as to be Nietzschean horizons rather than limits at all (or maybe “Foucauldian limits” . . .).

Another way of looking at how a culture vulture might operate is to recall the excellent Japanese video game: Katmari Damacy (2004).[8] [9] The point of the game is simple: roll your “katamari” (a ball) around, running into things.  Anything you run into that is smaller than yourself will attach to your katamari, thereby making it bigger and it becomes subsequently possible to pick up bigger and bigger things.  Basically, by mercilessly, gratuitously, and non-selectively rolling around, you will pick everything up, becoming, w/in the game’s logic, bigger than the earth-/solar-system-/galaxy-/universe-/etc.-/itself.  After this is done, you have two options: 1) hoist this katamari into space to make something new (planet, nebula, constellation, etc.), or 2) explode the katamari into star-dust.  Either way, the random accumulation of objects—all sorts of objects (really, play the game and try to think of objects they don’t include. . .[10])—is directed toward the end of becoming something else.  The objects are merely consumed, absorbed, and “rolled-up” so that the stars that have fallen down[11] can be reconstituted; in other words, new forms of “meaning” can again be introduced into the universe.[12] (I also am aware of how much I harp on this game, but hey, it takes one to know one. . . .)  Basically, this is a “pure” sorta “culture vulturing.”  Nothing is off-limits; everything can be combined.  And Lethem’s creation of Perkus Tooth in Chronic City is a representation of a culture vulture par excellence.

Perkus smokes massive amounts of marijuana,[13] imbibes a constant stream of coffee, and basically never leaves his house except for the daily necessity of eating.[14] He is an out-of-work rock critic who, for reasons that are left (mostly) unexplained in the book, basically just sits around and absorbs culture all day, every day.  And all kinds of culture: film, music, literature, “art,” celebrity, political-stuff—you name it, it is part of Perkus’ cognitive mapping of the world.  More to the point, he is fascinating.  He talks.  He absorbs and talks.  Eats and Regurgitates.  Scavenges and shits.  Best of all, Lethem only gives us fragments and moments of these talks, allowing “us,” through the narrator, to merely get a sense, an atmosphere of what he is talking about.  Everything he says seems important, the result of a deep engagement w/ contemporaneity, and a fluid, dynamic, and quick intellect that, through constructing various networks b/t cultural products, is also eminently creative.  (Suffice it to say, he is a living, breathing archive who produces more entries into the archive.)  For anyone familiar w/ Žižek’s work or his public persona,[15] it is quite possible that Lethem constructed Perkus on the model of ole’ Slavoj.  A lengthy passage from the very early in the novel I think displays all this quite well:

“So if I had a secret, it was that I had conspired to forget my secret.  Perkus eyed me slyly.  Perhaps it was his policy to make this announcement to any new acquaintance, to see what they’d blurt out.  ‘Keep your eyes and ears open,’ he told me now.  ‘You’re in a position to learn things.’  What things?  Before I could ask, we were off again.  Perkus’ spiel encompassed Monte Hellman, Semina Culture, Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, the Mafia’s blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists, Chet Baker, Nothingism, the ruination Giuliani’s administration had brought to the sacred squalor of Times Square, the genius of The Gnuppet[16]Show, Frederick Exley, Jacques Rivette’s impossible-to-see-twelve-hour movie Out 1, corruption of the arts by commerce generally, Slavoj Zizek [sic] on Hitchcock, Franz Marplot on G.K. Chesterton,[17] Norman Mailer on Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer on graffiti and the space program, Brando as dissident icon, Brando as sexual saint, Brando as Napoleon in exile.  Names I knew and didn’t.  Others I’d heard once and never troubled to wonder about.  Mailer, again and again, and Brando even more often—Perkus Tooth’s primary idols seemed to be this robust and treacherous pair, which only made Perkus seem frailer and more harmless by contrast, without ballast in his pencil-legged suit.  Maybe he at Jackson Hole burgers in an attempt to burgeon himself, seeking girth in hopes of attracting the attention of Norman and Marlon, his chosen peers.”[18]

A series of fairly random quotations from Žižek should make clear the affinities here (I literally just sorta opened the book to any page):

“At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meets Pascal: ‘Fake it until you make it.’”[19] “So the idea was formulated that, just as people sign a form giving permission for their organs to be used for medical purposes in the event of their sudden death, one should also allow them to sign a form for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs to play with. . . . Is not this proposal the perfect illustration of how the PC [politically correct] stance realizes Kierkegaard’s insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor?  A dead neighbor—a corpse—is the ideal sexual partner for a ‘tolerant’ subject trying to avoid harassment: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed.”[20] “A kind of musical equivalent [Schumann] to the Heidegger-Derrida ‘crossed-out.’ Being.”[21]

Though again, there are many things about Perkus (esp. w/r/t the fact that he may be Lethem’s fictional Žižek) which are interesting, one thing stands out (perhaps) the most: Perkus feels like a kind of “perfect” postmodern subject/character.  He is at the center of the narrative while never being clear—i.e. he is a thoroughly opaque character who always seems to exist in a kind of pure present.  He absorbs everyone—esp. the narrator—into his circle; and the entire novel becomes simply how the other characters orbit within this circle—i.e. the narrator, despite being a fairly famous ex-child-actor, is very clearly a kind of Everyman who is also thoroughly opaque, kinda dumb, and just as fascinated by Perkus as the reader is.  Most importantly, the only thing that really makes him interesting, gives him any kind of “fictional roundness” or complexity. . . the only thing that makes him a character at all is that he is a vast reservoir of cultural knowledge and production.  If Žižek is one of the most famous, fun, and widely read theorists right now (for [whatever/good] reason), then this simulation of him into a fictional form completes the (parallactic) circle of Žižek’s project.  In other words, Perkus, though being himself a product of (ridiculous) cultural production, a node where various cultural products meet and are clarified in their relationship, and (of course) a commentary on the position of the postmodern subject in a hyper-mediated cultural space—despite all this, there is something weirdly, disturbingly, and comfortingly familiar about him.  We all have a friend like Perkus, if in fact we are all not Perkus himself.  Our encyclopedic desire to consume culture, to culture vulture everything, is not only expressed in Perkus, it is expressed sympathetically and tragically.  Yes, of course he is a symptom, but he is a parasitic symptom, a figure who is simultaneously both the cure and the disease.  (And don’t think the narrator’s many musings on the subject of Perkus are so off w/ my own. . . .)

Furthermore, he dies offstage.  We get no answer of how to get “rid” of this symptom/disease/cure, nor, and this is most important, is it really so important that he dies at all.  In other words, because of his ambiguous and ultimately meaning-less/ful death, there is something eminently tragic about this figure disappearing.  We don’t know how or why, don’t know what forces could possibly get together to make such a thing happen.  The book (sorta) suggests it is some kind of conspiracy, that amid Perkus’ myriad cultural re-in-digestion he has happened upon the “truth” and that the forces that be cannot abide such insights; but really, and this is kinda the point, he “cannot be killed,” for he is himself endemic, and his death is really not symbolic of anything whatsoever.  We both “need” Perkus and we “need” him to die.  But his death cannot be seen to be at the hands of anything (except his own internal workings and hemorrhagings).  The clear Baudrillardian simulation-stuff[22] in the novel perhaps call into question if Perkus ever indeed existed at all, that he was a kind of pure simulacrum, a simulated product of what is already a simulation, but I think this is perhaps a bit too easy.

Ultimately, what Lethem has done, as said before, and I do think this is a fairly singular and emergent expression,[23] is to make the culture vulture into a hero.  The massive, hyperarchival over-accumulation of (the) “culture” (industry) combined w/ (perhaps) the failure of cultural studies has made anyone attempting to confront it always already into a kind of Perkus.  His Sisyphean task to understand, well. . . anything merely through what we “have” (i.e. culture), to “read” texts, to “find connections,” etc. etc. etc., and then to employ all that shit in any sort of meaningful way to our own specific historico-cultural moment is doomed to fail; and not only doomed to fail, but it will fail offstage, no one having heard what the cause of the failure was, nor the voice when it was speaking and alive.  Perkus functions as a kind of perfect allegory for the grad student/academic right now.  We know there is something incredibly important about, say, Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando. . . but what?  We’ve written stuff up, published it, other people have responded, etc.—but that doesn’t mean we still don’t die offstage.  This might be a little corny, and perhaps ridiculously politically irresponsible, but Lethem has constructed the grad student/academic[24] into a tragic hero.  But the tragedy here lies not in the hero’s death, nor even the hero’s quest, but in the very fact that it is now possible to imagine this type of figure as a hero! Perkus has no great antagonist, no great struggle, no great conflict.  His conflict is Bartlebian (at best).  And it is this that is tragic and why I think that Lethem’s novel is so interesting for, though I will refrain from going into it here, he truly does attempt to understand what the antagonist of this type of figure may be.  And though I think Lethem ultimately fails (and knows it), the amount of nodes he introduces as possible sites, even if they are feedback loops operating w/in the totality of a system w/o origin or end, draw the rolling katamari forward, but this time, perhaps w/ some sense of direction.

[1] Seriously, I’m a sucker for a pretty book w/ interesting blurbs, and now totally disagree w/ the ole’ “don’t judge a book by its cover” cliché.  In this day-and-age of even small and university presses producing ridiculously attractive books, I’m beginning to think perhaps the only way we can judge a book is by its cover.  This contentious observation, however, will have to wait to another time for anything resembling full-development (that is, if I ever remember I said this or get around to it).  A corollary of this is that we might refuse to judge books w/o covers—i.e. e-texts; but again, for another time.

[2] I’m sure it’s not, but nothing is readily suggesting itself to me at this moment.  I’d be interested to hear of other, as singular, examples.

[3] For instance, the “free dictionary” (.com), says it is an idiomatic expression meaning: “someone whom one considers to be excessively interested in the (classical) arts.  ‘She won’t go to a funny film. She’s a real culture vulture. They watch only highbrow television. They’re culture vultures.’”  This definition is (perhaps) supported by http://www.culturevulture.net/.  That said, I would like to use this term in a far more inclusive (and perhaps even more exclusive) manner.  See above.

[4] Btw, it is in no way lost on me that I am a culture vulture (so is virtually everyone I know to some degree or another).  In other words, I don’t necessarily mean this term in a derogatory manner, but rather in the sense of: I don’t know how it’s possible to be a “postmodern subject” and not be a culture vulture in some way.

[5] See Slavoj Žižek, “Why is Wagner Worth Saving?” Journal of Philosophy & Scripture 2.1 (Fall 2004): 18-30, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), respectively.

[6] Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacque Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, vii).

[7] Žižek, in his classical reversal, develops this formula more fully in The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006): “This is also why we should reverse the standard reading of ‘Kant with Sade’ according to which the Sadeian perversion is the ‘truth’ of Kant, more ‘radical’ than Kant; that it draws out the consequences Kant himself did not have the courage to confront.  It is not in this sense that Sade is the truth of Kant; on the contrary, the Sadeian perversion emerges as the result of the Kantian compromise, of Kant’s avoiding the consequences of his breakthrough.  Sade is the symptom of Kant: while it is true that Kant retreated from drawing all the consequences of his ethical revolution, the space for the figure of Sade is opened up by this compromise of Kant, by his unwillingness to go to the end, to retain the full fidelity to his philosophical breakthrough.  Far from being simply and directly ‘the truth of Kant,’ Sade is the symptom of how Kant betrayed the truth of his own discovery—the obscene Sadeian jouisseur is a stigma bearing witness to Kant’s ethical compromise; the apparent ‘radicality’ of this figure (the Sadeian hero’s willingness to go to the end in his Will-to-Enjoy) is a mask of its exact opposite” (94).

[8] Which, according to Wikipedia translates as “clump spirit,” though I have also heard “dung-beetle of love,” which I very, very much prefer.

[9] I also don’t think this is the first—nor will it be the last—allusion to this game I make.

[10] Well of course they can’t include everything (which is also kinda the point. . .), but the sheer amount of things they do include is staggering. The game even contains an in-game-archive of all the objects you’ve collected.  Try to collect them all! for a sense of virtual accomplishment (and genocidal mayhem).

[11] The metaphorical and allegorical gravitas of this should not be underestimated.  (Also see Theodor Adorno’s book, The Stars Down to Earth).

[12] That said, try getting any “meaning” out of the conversations b/t the Prince and the King (or pretty much anything in the game, and this is, again, sorta the point); Hamlet had a better time than your little avatar.

[13] Thus part of the “chronic” in Chronic City.  I know, it’s kinda dumb, but the book saves itself on this one for “chronic” becoming other things as well. . . .

[14] Do not think it is lost upon this author, btw, how this, minus the marijuana, resembles himself. . . .

[15] See Žižek! (Astra Taylor, 2005).

[16] I think it is very important that throughout Chronic City, the Muppets are constantly referred to but, for what I presume are copyright reasons, they are always the “Gnuppets.”

[17] Žižek also writes on Chesterton: see The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

[18] Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 13, my emphases. Though Žižek is a bit buried here, I think it is very clear that one of the figures Lethem is modeling Perkus on is the “Giant from Ljubljana” himself.

[19] Žižek, The Parallax View, 353.

[20] ibid., 309.

[21] ibid., 365.

[22] The book feels a bit dated, btw.

[23] Again, if it isn’t please let me know.

[24] Or perhaps I am simply over-identifying w/ all this shit right now.

The Archival Erotics of Repo Men

/ Bradley J. Fest / 2 Comments

(So first off I’ll fail to apologize for only now realizing that I have not posted anything on here for over a month, and that my continual engagement w/ Otis Nixon should not have perhaps been heading this page for as long as it has—which is to say, hopefully there will be a slight flurry of activity re: this blog on my part in the near future, as I hope to have posts on a bunch of new work from people of some eminence: Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, John Ashbery’s Planisphere, and perhaps a piece on a short story from the March edition of Harper’s, “The History of The History of Death.”  But for all that, I thought I’d start w/ a film I saw recently that legitimately surprised me in more ways than one.)  (Also, like all my posts, there will be spoilers galore.)

I in no way intended to see Repo Men (Miguel Sapochnik, 2010).  Like many other things in my life recently, I’ve inexplicably taken a break from my frequent and unapologetically saccharine foray into commercial cinema.  So a few days ago I realized I desperately needed, for whatever indefensible and inexplicable reason, to see Hot Tub Time Machine (I did, btw, but snuck in after Repo Men).[1] The reasons for this are probably more complex or simple than I would like to pursue, but suffice it to say, the film was peculiarly suggesting itself to me.[2] I also very much wanted to see Scorsese’s new effort, which was playing ten minutes after Time Machine.  Due to an inexplicable lane closure for construction that was nowhere apparent as being done, there was a familiar intensity of traffic over the Homestead High-Level Bridge and I arrived, of course, too late to see the beginning of either film.  Not wanting to wait around, my only chance for immediate darkness infused cinematic bliss was Repo Men, and even though I’d thought little-to-nothing good about the previews, I decided—hell, why not; it couldn’t be worse than Hot Tub Time Machine.  And I was right.

I should’ve known better than to dismiss this film so off-handedly as just another vehicle for Jude Law’s increasingly weird and inconsequential career (which I’m tempted to say isn’t inconsequential at all).  I mean, Forest Whitaker is in it for christ’s sake.[3] From the previews it appeared to be yet another Fahrenheit 451 rehash: agent of the oppressive dystopian police force turned resistance sympathizer, etc.  Don’t get me wrong, it is that.  And it very easily could have been very little but that, despite the interesting and complex friendship b/t Forest and Jude, the commentary it is so obviously making on our current economic crisis, and its portrayal of late-capitalistic posthuman cyborgicity.  Basically, I should’ve known better b/c of the fact that many recent SF films have been deceptively incisive and captivating despite their mundane genre trappings and crappy trailers.  In other words, unlike, say “comedies,” or even Hot Tub Time Machine specifically, in which all the best, funniest, most worthwhile moments are portrayed in their trailers, this type of film is fairly exemplary of putting none of why it may be interesting in the trailer.  The typical contemporary comedy often feels simply like a device shuttling you from one recollected moment of the trailer to the next.  We’ve already seen many of these films, for like most jokes you hear twice, they simply aren’t as funny on the second go-round.  At first glance, Repo Men appears to be doing just this.  It’s political, social, aesthetic, and economic stakes are clear: a 451 for the cyborg generation.  It looks exciting, action-packed, violent, bloody, and perhaps just complex enough w/o being too difficult to garner some mild amount of attention.[4] And of course it is these things.  But why Repo Men is worthy of some attention is for completely different reasons.  (Say, in the same way Steven Shaviro finds Gamer interesting.)

For my own purposes, the readily suggestive reading of the film is an obvious one, but the film’s specific archival engagement is only grounded upon this blatancy.  Basically, the premise of the film,

is that a massive corporation—sterile, all-encompassing, and totally ruthless in its pursuit of the bottom-line[5]—has cornered the market on artificial organs, enabling them to charge extravagant prices for them.  As a majority of these organs are vital [sic] for the customer’s continued existence, of course. . . they pay, and they pay w/ credit.  Inevitably, they miss a few payments, at which time the repo men repossess these organs, often killing the customer in the process.[6] There are clear things at stake here: 1) an engagement w/ our current mode of late capital and a critique of consumer debt; 2) a surveillance society in which the body is literally marked w/ its own potential death; and 3) a clear engagement w/ the (hopefully soon to be) aftermath of the wars of the early 21st C.[7] If this were all the film did, I believe it would still be worthwhile as, even though it is grossly heavy handed, it raises some important questions about the role of capital w/r/t the body in both the future and the present.  But ultimately it would be so heavy handed as to be eminently dismissible—yet another dystopian, paranoid speculation on an idea taken to its obscene limits.

Repo Men avoids simply being another generic entry into SF’s archive for two reasons: 1) the important, yet obvious twist that occurs in the film; and 2) the frankly incredible scene at the heart [sic] of the Union corporation: its organ reclamation center.  And, for reasons that will soon become apparent, I’ll address the second of these first.

The film (of course) culminates in an all-out-assault on the Union Corporation’s headquarters, w/ all the necessary Matrix-esque action, gunplay, and some pretty gruesome (actually) knife-wielding by a small band of people to topple the very structure that makes the Corporation run.  At the heart of Union, behind an (appropriately) pink door, is the database of all the people w/ artificial organs and, if one were to delete the database, everyone who currently had an organ would be “free” to “enjoy” it w/o worrying about paying or missing a payment.  Like so many of these films, Law’s character has descended into the underground—that of course gets brutally wiped out[8]—and the only recourse to possibly getting off the grid is attempting a last-ditch desperate effort to destroy the corporation which manufactures the very thing keeping him alive.[9] But none of this is the point.

The point is that when Law and his girlfriend make it behind the pink door, sealing themselves inside, there is no keyboard.  Instead, all there is is yet another sterile white room w/ scanners to literally scan the barcodes of the organs into the database.  In other words, there is no way to delete the archive.  The basic thing Law and his girlfriend confront in this scene, is not only that humanity has become totally and utterly archived, at the most bodily, vital level, but this archive’s logic is impenetrable: it can’t be burned (i.e. deleted w/ a keyboard).  The body throughout the film is always at the mercy of the most brutal of archival processes.  Your specific, numbered organ’s “time is up,” it must be put back into archival circulation to be repossessed again and again, and all through this process human bodies are piling up.  This, in many ways, is more sinister than everyone being implanted w/ RFID tags or barcodes.[10] The very thing that marks and distinguishes these bodies, that archives them in the state’s (or capital’s) panoptic gaze is absolutely essential to the continual existence of the lives of those bodies.  What appears clearly at stake w/in the context of the film is an extension (and perhaps complication) of Giorgio Agamben’s comment on the notion of survival w/r/t biopower:

“the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make survive.  The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.”[11]

Agamben says this mostly w/r/t Auschwitz, but I think it is equally applicable here.  This making survive is in capital’s best interest, in the case of the film, as it will funnel the last available resources out of the subject trying to survive.  They will go into debt so deep it causes death—the final logic of capital.  Most importantly, this making survive takes the form of placing directly into the body the very limits of its survival.  The artificial organ simultaneously makes survive and when biopower no longer has use for this survival, reclaims it to begin the process over.  As long as you are surviving and paying exorbitant amounts of money to survive, the corporation will let you.  Once you cease to do this, biopower no longer has any interest in continual survival.

The archived nature of this survival, however, I think slightly extends or complicates Agamben’s notion of survival.  Survival here is wholly dependent upon being w/in the systemic archive (i.e. making one’s payments) or else going off the archive’s grid (not making payments and “running.”)  Either way, however, when Law enters this room and realizes there is no way to ultimately delete one’s presence in this archive of survival, something is made very clear.  When the very processes of the body become the site of archival logic and the interest of biopower in survival, there is (virtually) no recourse.  The archive and survival become synonymous.  Nothing is outside the logic here and everything is caught w/in the camp.  Consequently, and this is what is so important about this film, for all Law’s Matrix-esque shenanigans, there is nothing to be done.

Sorta.  And what Law and his girlfriend do, and what director Sapochnik portrays so well, is an alternative.  Law has an artificial heart, his girlfriend some ten (or so) artificial organs, including lungs and kidneys.  Obviously they cannot simply cut these organs out and scan them, for their very survival would be compromised.  Instead, Law sees that the only recourse they have, the only way to get off the grid, to get out of the archive, is to cut into each other’s bodies and scan the organs while they’re still operating, while they’re still alive! (And furthermore, this is perhaps one of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever seen in any film.[12])  Anesthetizing each other while making out, Law’s girlfriend, actress Alice Braga, cuts into his chest, inserting her hand all the way to his heart to scan it, to take him out of the survival archive.  This ultimate act of love, freeing the other from biopolitical control, however, requires this ultimate penetration of the body (and it is, of course, important here that it is the female penetrating the male body, and not just anywhere, but precisely at that point [the heart] where it is most vulnerable).  Then it is Law’s turn to “scan” Braga: her eyes, her ears, her throat (he pushes his hand to the back of her throat), her knees, and ultimately her lungs and kidneys, mirroring and complicating her own penetration of himself.  Blood is flowing everywhere, their bodies intertwined, “passionate kisses,”[13] etc.  And, less it be unclear, this act is neither sadistic nor masochistic.  The only power over the body that is expressed by either sexual party is the act of getting rid of power over the body.  No pleasure is taken in the inflicting or receiving of pain, but rather in liberating the other’s body.  No genital sex takes place here, and this weirdly pure, violent, horrific, gruesome act of lovemaking may very well be what Gilles Deleuze had in mind when he talked of “non-genital sex.”

The point this scene seems to be making w/r/t the film as a whole is that, though the very survival of the body may be inscribed into the archive in totality, the body’s sexual role w/in this constellation defeats this reification through what I would like to call “archival erotics.”  The act of deleting one another from the archive, is the erotic act par excellence.  This is not sex as: two people simply masturbating w/ each other.  Rather, sex here becomes a liberatory, vital act of not only survival, of emancipation, but of escaping a totalizing archival logic.  And most importantly, there is no other option available w/in the space of the film. The “way out” is only available through a radical re-imagining of two bodies relationship to each other at the most primal level.  Bodies interacting ceases to be procreative and becomes liberatory.  Sex (w/o genitals) becomes a mode of escape.

But of course, and this is why this film is so interesting, that is not the end of the story.  Whitaker bursts through the door to perceive Braga and Law in post-(non-genital)-coital bliss, revealing he has a bomb.  Since Braga and Law have entered their organs into the archive, the machine is asking for those organs to be placed into a receptacle.  Conveniently, Whitaker’s bomb is placed in this receptacle, which is then taken into the archive where it explodes, deleting the archive.  The characters then sit back against the door, laughing.  And it is this laughter that is so captivating.

If they had just let Whitaker in a few moments earlier, this entire erotic scene would have been unnecessary.  Perhaps they are laughing at the absurdity of what they were forced to do.  Or perhaps they’re laughing at something else.  What I would like to suggest is that they are laughing at the absurdity that it is only after such a violent and poignant moment where biopower’s control over them is displayed so keenly that it becomes possible to literally penetrate the archive and delete it through, of course, technology.  In the space of the film, the laughter is important.  It not only signals that something is (perhaps) slightly amiss w/ this whole spectacle we’ve just witnessed, but that this act has been procreative.  The technology (of the bomb) was produced in this act.  What Law and Braga have given birth to is the very technological tool w/ which to delete the archive.  And this is fucking hilarious.  But it is hilarious because it is ultimately false.  Pain is funny, and the pain we’ve just seen was ultimately for no reason whatsoever.

And this brings me to my first point of why this film is interesting.  Long before the scene I just described, there is a “final showdown/confrontation” b/t Law and Whitaker during which Whitaker hits Law over the head w/ a chain(-thingy).  Immediately after this, the screen goes blank (evoking Law’s voice-over of “being knocked out”), and then Law’s life flashes before his eyes.  The twist at the end of the film is clearly perceptible here.  Throughout the film, a system that would preserve consciousness in the case of catatonia is repeatedly referred to, and it was at this moment I realized that Law “died” and that everything that was to follow in the film was taking place in his catatonic-consciousness.[14] And, as the film closes, this is precisely what is revealed: the twist.  Everything we’ve seen b/t this moment and now was pure simulation.  The whole moment of archival erotics was simply a projection of Law’s (un)consciousness.  Consequently, his badassness in killing virtually everyone while storming the castle is revealed as pure fantasy.  In other words, the laughter following the amazing, erotic scene is nothing but the acknowledgment that this sort of narrative, poignant and incredible though it may be, is impossible w/in the system all the characters are inhabiting.  And this is why Sapochnik’s first feature-length is so incredible.  He simultaneously gives us an incredible, gorgeous, brutal “answer” to the whole problem while acknowledging that this answer, this “way out” is complete fantasy.  Furthermore, it occurs in a kind of hyperarchival [sic] mode.  Law has become totally subject to the survival archive.  His very consciousness only persists w/in its logic.  This “survival” will now only be maintained by Whitaker continuing to repo organs (i.e. this life-after-life is very expensive).   Whitaker asks: can we know what he’s thinking, and of course the answer is no.  Survival here, and indeed consciousness itself, becomes only a function of the dominating totality of the archival logic.  Not only is there “no way out,” but there are further ways in.  Consequently, the entire amazing, incredible scene b/t Law and Braga becomes merely how archival erotics themselves get absorbed into the system.  Something posited as a way out only is possible by being more thoroughly w/in the system than one ever was before.  Love and sex are merely (hyper)archival expressions.

And this is why Sapochnik’s vision is so much more terrifying than merely a rehash of 451.  There is no alternative here.  The only, quite provocative alternative is ultimately presented as part of the whole damn thing.  Even resistance is a function of archivization.  And if this is terrifying, it should be, for it presents us w/ the truly terrifying prospect of the only solution being a fantasmatic one that can only come as a result of being so thoroughly plugged into the machine that we cannot survive w/o it.

[1]This is also of course to suggest that part of my unapologetic enjoyment of commercial cinema is seeing multiple movies for the price of one.

[2]I also have absolutely nothing to say about it.

[3]Also of impressive note, is that Repo Men is director Miguel Sapochnik’s first feature-length film.  How he got Forest and Jude, I presume, would be an intriguing back-room Hollywood story if I cared to do any research.

[4] For how little attention it may have indeed garnered, however, it need be noted that I was the only person present in the fairly major cineplex during its screening—something I always thoroughly enjoy b/c it affords me the opportunity to smoke cigarettes and see the smoke rising in the light of the projector.  Mild crimes like these are strangely enjoyable.

[5] I.e. the film goes as far as to suggest that the company desires people to have their organs foreclosed upon as it insures that the Union company can re-sell that specific organ to someone else.  The fantastic scene in the seemingly endless, sterile, white manufacturing center of Union also appears to suggest that this company is doing very well indeed.  (On a side note, the Repo Men also give a semi-hilarious twist to the notion of the body w/o organs.  In the case of the debtor, their bodies are w/o organs b/c they’ve quite literally been removed.  A tangent to this is that in the opening scene Jude Law is, by law, required to ask the “patient” whether or not they want a doctor or ambulance present.  This is totally absurd, as Law’s character clearly perceives, b/c he asks this of the “patient” after he has been stunned unconscious, of course implying that a body w/o an organ, in this scene the liver, clearly will very soon have no need of a doctor nor an ambulance.)

[6] It also need be noted that there is no affinity whatsoever b/t this film and the fantastic punk classic, Repo Man (1984).

[7] Law and Whitaker are both veterans of (presumably) the Iraq (or some other) war.  They are highly trained soldiers who have found the perfect venue for their training, and b/c their actions are clearly sanctioned by the state, they can approach it as “just a job.”  One of the most important parts of the film is that both Law and Whitaker are portrayed as not terribly intelligent; indeed, there is a quite hilarious flashback where they are shown to be specifically bodily suited for operating a tank: they have large heads and small brains, the better to prevent concussion.  They’re just dumb, “normal” guys who are violently carrying out the whim of capital.

[8] The aftermath of this scene is actually quite affective as Law’s character walks over piles of corpses.  The resonance w/ other genocides is quite clear here.

[9] Oh, btw, predictably, Law’s heart fails and has to get an artificial one.  He of course misses the payments now that he can empathize w/ his victims and subsequently doesn’t make any money.  (Also of note, how weird is it that these dudes work off commission, like some sort of used-car salesman death squad.)

[10] I distinctly remember one techno-industrial-kid who worked at my local zia in t-town, AZ who had a barcode printed on the back of his neck—the “subversive” irony of this I thought was dumb then, and I surely do now, btw, if you’re interested.

[11] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 155.

[12] W/ the exception of Marina de Van’s Dans ma peau (In My Skin, 2002).

[13] Mary Chapin Carter had no idea her “Passionate Kisses” may ever have been used in such a manner.

[14] Thus the penultimate scene on the beach is obviously a pure dream-construction.

Repackaging the Archive (Part I.v): A Meta-Commentary on the Archival Phenomenon of “Otis Nixon” and his Networked-Being

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

So there is no possible way I could have predicted that when I wrote: “A node. Nothing more” slightly over a year ago that I would one day feel obliged to comment further on the figure/phenomenon that can only come under the heading “Otis Nixon” (see “Repackaging the Archive, Part I”).  Since that time his name has never been terribly far from my digital reality.  Without fail, no matter the day or time of year, if I deign to check my “blog stats,” a search for his name has inevitably turned up this here blog in some distant galaxy far to the right of the many google “Os”; furthermore, wordpress does its due diligence to let me know that someone has searched for Otis Nixon and that it very well may have led them here.  Nothing, and I mean nothing and no one has caused as many “hits” on this site as has Otis Nixon.[1] In fact, there may be a good chance that you yourself are reading this post b/c you’ve entered “otis nixon” into your google search bar and, after scrolling through umpteen-pp., have finally arrived here, and for that I thank you, for you prove my point.  This is not about Otis Nixon the baseball player, the very good lead-off hitter, his fantastic catch robbing Van Slyke of a homerun, his cocaine/crack addiction, nor the way he turned his life around toward god, started a ministry, and is doing, well. . . you can see for yourself.  No this is about “Otis Nixon” the baseball card.  Otis Nixon the archival phenomenon.  The networked-Being of the emergent singularity that, for lack of a better term, we will call: Otis Nixon.  (Otis Nixon, “otis nixon,” “otis” “nixon.”)[2]

To be clear, I suppose the fact of Otis Nixon’s near archival ubiquity here, his ability to form a significant node linking so many disparate things together (for everything here is always already under the sway of Otis Nixon first and foremost), is ultimately a result of the sports figure who also goes by the name Otis Nixon—that, no matter how popular post-apocalyptic stuff may be nor how in demand ridiculous archival theory, sport, in terms of archivization, perhaps lends itself more easily to producing such networked-Beings (think Vince Carter).  That said, however, it is significant that it is “Otis Nixon” that I am designating as the proper name of this networked-Being.  It isn’t Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, Tiger Woods, or Venus Williams.[3] No, it is Otis Nixon who most clearly articulates an existence that is wholly and exclusively archival.  This is not the Otis Nixon whose book is Keeping it Real.  This is the Otis Nixon who needs no book, for it is always already Keeping it Hyperreal.  This is an Otis Nixon who has, for a great many years now, been the most visible emergence of the archive organizing itself into higher orders.  “He” is a singularity.  And Otis Nixon is becoming ubiquitous.  Furthermore, there is no reason this phenomenon need be Otis Nixon, but that is the point of archival organization: it is dependent upon both chaos and order working profoundly together to create, well, Otis Nixon.  If a post-singularity is even remotely on the horizon, it will be called Otis Nixon.  And for those of you searching for that “other” Otis Nixon, well here you go.

[1] Btw, I’m going to be using his proper name about as much as I can to foster this phenomenon.  For those of you who may be interested, you can visit his website.  His book, significantly for my purposes, is called Keeping it Real.  It is seemingly only available through his website (though understandably, I only checked amazon).

[2] It should be obvious what my goal is here.

[3] I also know that in even writing these things down I may be digging myself into a further hole. . . .

I Cannot Help but Think. . .

/ Bradley J. Fest / 1 Comment

Recently I’ve noticed a disturbing and yet curious trend in my writing, and specifically in my academic writing (though I’m surely guilty of it on this here blog as elsewhere).  I’ve been using the phrase: “I cannot help but think that. . .”[1] followed by an assertion, usually an interpretation of some sort, far too much.  As in: I want to start off virtually every sentence (including the one that will follow this one) w/ “I cannot help but think. . . .” I cannot help but think that my use of the phrase “I cannot help but think” is somehow important, maybe even interesting, while simultaneously something I cannot help but think is me being lazy, a crutch, a tried-and-true verbal formulation that, well, gets my thinking down onto paper (easily).  It has been so bad recently that I’ve actually had to go back through whole documents, searching for “cannot help” and deleting or reformulating sometimes far too many sentences for me to be comfortable w/ my own ability to write—as in: I can’t (write, that is [again]).  (Wow, look at that, even here I’m developing a new one: as in, I just wrote “as in” above.  Will this ever stop?  As in: will I ever get to a place where my prose flows freely w/o so much language that could easily be thrown away?)  We all have these verbal and grammatological tics (lord knows I have had them, currently do, and will for the foreseeable future).  You know (again), those little stylistic quirks that aren’t quite necessary but always seem to be suggesting themselves.  The ones you use over and over again, almost unconsciously.  These short, relatively meaningless phrases that allow our thinking to transition from one syntactical unit to another[2]. . . I cannot help but to use them (though I could have written: “I cannot avoid them.”  What the hell).  And I’m usually perfectly aware of myself when I’m writing like this, even if it takes me a while to recognize it; and yet I cannot help (again) to use them.   In the past some of these have been, for myself, a gross and almost embarrassing reliance on the phrases: kinda, with regard to, furthermore, basically, in short, vis-à-vis, grounds,[3] namely, and yet, articulates, in other words, i.e., formulates, expresses, etc. etc.[4] This list could go on and on, and if I were to be exhaustive in this list, I might perhaps (another one, “perhaps,” that is) come to the horrifying realization that I am a robot.  Yes, you heard me right, a robot (or perhaps [sheesh, again] an anthrobot[5]).  I may very well be nothing more than a preprogrammed vocabulary who does nothing other than stitch together whatever amorphous rules of English expression I may have a shaky grasp upon in order to attempt to articulate (sheesh) whatever it is I am “thinking.”

I know that the usefulness/quantity of these types of words is largely to facilitate understanding, that they serve as moments to pause, breathe, signal the importance or lessen the impact of a statement.  They mirror verbal speech—i.e. no one speaks in (H.) Jamesian prose nor Derridean deconstruction (or maybe they do, and I just have the wrong friends [or the right friends. . .]).  These grammatological tics serve to mark, at the same time, that writing is trying to mirror spoken language while calling attention to the very construction of its inscription.  But for all that, they feel like cheating to me, like inserting something that I know will make the sentence “flow” (or break. . .) w/o having to think terribly rigorously about how I’m using language.  Perhaps this is b/c—at least I console myself w/ this fiction—that I’m trying to be “clear” (i.e. a bunch of unnecessary words eases the readers eyes and ears. . .), but is it really b/c I am lazy, uninventive, un-attentive, and—the real kick-in-the-pants—stupid?  That I should get in another racket while I’m still young and have something to sell the world?[6] Or is it something else?  I cannot help but think that this most recent tic—and there will be others, I’m sure—is significant in some way, that it signals something, and that what it signals is precisely (maybe) how these types of tics work.

So I’m sitting there at any of my various word processing machines (sometimes, though not often including the pen), attempting to communicate,[7] or whatever, something I’ve been “thinking” about, attempting to use words to encapsulate something I’m not terribly sure is a purely linguistic phenomena (thinking)—though this is also to say that I’m not terribly sure it isn’t purely linguistic. . . get back to me—and though the words might be struggling to get to the page, when they do come, I can’t help but think that they are midwifed in some way by the “I cannot help but think,” that they are eased into the world by this specific sort of nonsense.[8] In other words (again), “I cannot help but think” functions precisely as it says: I am thinking, I am attempting to write that thinking down, and it is the interaction b/t these two things is happening on an automatic level that I cannot understand.  I literally cannot help it.  I don’t know how.

Taken purely in-and-of-itself the phrase “I cannot help but think” might even be said (shit, again) to be (mildly) ontologically profound.  I am.  I cannot help but to be.[9] I am the thing that thinks.  I being I, I thinks, regardless of whether I want to or not.[10] I cannot help but think.  What I’m thinking is what I’m attempting, oh so poorly, to convey to you.  My not being able to telepathically mind-meld w/ you, I’m forced into this other thing,[11] this action of thinking for a long, anxiety producing, and never static time cannot help but find its way onto the page, into this form.  Writing “I cannot help but think” becomes the grossest and most accurate tautology for the whole process.  I’ve tried helping it, really I have, thinking that is; and furthermore, I’ve tried thinking other things, at length and laboriously.  Anyone familiar w/ academic labor (a few people), or thinking (hopefully everybody), knows what I’m talking about.  I’ve thought a lot, and this is where I wind up.  I can’t help it.  I can doubt it, question it, revise it, etc. etc., but ultimately, this is what I’m writing down, so this is what I cannot help but do.  Yes, I could do otherwise, but then I couldn’t help but think whatever it is this otherwise would be; it would amount to the same thing.  I suppose this is why Zen Buddhism is so attractive—it is attempting to not think.  Perhaps a good mantra for it would be “I can but help think.”[12] End of sentence, document, oeuvre, writing. Of course my overly-Westernized sensibility realizes this is a contradiction and paradox in-and-of-itself: thinking about not thinking, trying to help but not think is still a thinking, which, I guess, is the whole damn point and why I failed so miserably those times I tried to meditate (for real, and at a meditation center).  But writing is in absolute contradistinction to this.  One cannot write the not thinking.  This is not an experience that can be conveyed.  It simply doesn’t work.[13]The minute you try to help explain not thinking by putting it in writing, there is a thinking.  (This is also why surrealism and Dada ultimately fail, btw [perhaps, damn, again!].)  Surely to be able to help thinking, to not do it, is a complex, respectable, and fascinating goal, even if I’m not sure it can be reached, but it does me no good when writing, esp. when I “have” to write something.[14]

So I cannot help but think that I should refrain from using “So I cannot help but think that” ever again.  (Of course I will use it again.  I’ll be writing a long time, hopefully, and it will inevitably pop up.  The nature of my thinking is that I will have forgotten ever having written this, and it, or any number of other grammatological tics will seep like Tracy did into the soil the other night in the Heroes[15] finale into my writing.)  In other words, it is an ultimately meaningless, empty, needless, and tautological phrase.  In fact (again), its real evil might be that it obscures and prevents thinking at all.  “Better” thinking.  “Better” prose.  For it is a fact that I’ve just now spent a few hours writing about this rather than the writing I should be doing.  It, quite literally, has prevented writing and thinking.  Even if one takes writing as an emergent self-articulation of thinking onto the page, we don’t need to hear about it, have it crammed down our throats (or in my case, I’m doing the cramming).  So, in the interest of verbal tic-ery and its proponents everywhere, I’m in the market, on the search, w/ my ear to the ground for a new throwaway phrase to heedlessly put into my writing.  Right now I’m thinking about “viz.,” but am open to other suggestions.  Perhaps “It should be freaking obvious that. . .,” or “anyone who isn’t Sarah Palin would clearly comprehend that. . .,” but those would be perhaps slightly inappropriate and would wear out quickly.  For now I’m simply left w/ the hope that one day I will have developed and cultivated such a large fecal mountain of these types of phrases that they will go unnoticed, but for now I’m only left w/ the hope that I can be aware of them, delete them when they occur too often, and reconcile myself to them like I have so much else, viz. if you can’t help but mobilize the “can’t help but think(s)” of the world, why not join’em at their orgy and whatever it is that occurs afterward.  (Seriously [yet another one, I can’t stop], what happens after the orgy?)[16]

[1] It should be understood here that “I cannot help but think” also stands in for all the variations on this phrase: i.e. “this cannot help but to suggest,” and others.

[2] Whatever I say (or don’t) about language below, I firmly believe that we don’t think syntactically.  Though I can only “believe” this, like having faith in my own statement “I cannot help but think. . . .”  What if I could help it.  And isn’t this really the whole point?

[3] As in: grounded in, upon, etc.

[4] And, sad to say, my poor students probably bear the brunt of these throw-off grammatical tics in the comments they receive from me more than anyone else.  For this, I apologize (even if I don’t see it changing. . .).

[5] wink.

[6] Another (empty) consolation I tell myself: every writer ever has asked themselves this question—not consoling at all.

[7] It should also be noted that (again!, look how similar this is to note 1, which was actually written after this note!) I have similar, if wholly different tics, when it comes to poetic composition, as opposed to prose.  That said (again), I will not tell anyone what these are, though they’re obvious, for the thought of uttering that type of candid statement about my own poetics is one that makes me mildly nauseous, in that I’d-be-nauseous-at-myself sort of way, which, of course (another), I already am.

[8] This is also the moment I’m realizing that this entry perhaps has no place on this blog whatsoever, is overly self-indulgent (like anything I do isn’t!), and really would be of no interest to anyone whatsoever.  Which, of course, is also to say that (look how many words I just used that were wholly unnecessary in this sentence already, and then, to top it off, I wrote a whole gaggle of more words that were unnecessary in this parenthetical [something, btw, I’ve grown perfectly accustomed to and comfortable w/ tic-wise w/r/t myself, so now just bask in my ability to make an aside about an aside about an aside], and am still doing it!). . . even this self-indulgent footnote is a product of my anxiety over feeling self-indulgent about my anxiety about writing about my self-indulgent interests and anxieties, in a place where I try to attempt to understand the nature of the expression of anxiety w/r/t the biggest cause of anxiety of them all: the end of the world.  In other words, anxiety, for me, is a fundamental aspect of any eschatological formulation (again), and consequently, perhaps fits quite well, considering the degree of anxieties which are in play here, w/in The Hyperarchival Parallax which is above all about the anxiety over the (over-)accumulation or destruction of writing, of the archive, anyway.  Furthermore (again), the reason this is even being written in the first place is a result of the anxiety I’m feeling about not writing something else that is decidedly not self-indulgent though does make a fair use of “I cannot help but think” and is thus producing this anxiety, both the anxiety of what I’ve written and the anxiety of not continuing to write it; and at this point everything is probably getting pretty boring for anyone reading this (here, a link to something else! Okay, that one probably is absolutely the wrong thing to be linking to here [look esp. at the post “Does Nietzsche’s Grocery List Constitute Writing?”], so here! Couldn’t have said it better myself.), which, of course, is producing more anxiety.  Perhaps what I’m trying to say is (again), that instead of whatever I’m suggesting “up there” (wink, wink to all ya’ in the know down here), these grammatological tics are really a way of coping w/ the anxiety of writing, or something.

[9] Well of course I could, but then I wouldn’t.

[10] I’ve found solutions, but they’re largely chemical (I think), and have much more to do w/ memory, or more precisely a memory lacking, than thinking.  Or perhaps I should be valiantly striving to go Rimbaud’s way: Je est un autre.

[11] I know there ain’t much terribly profound here, but I cannot help but think I have to say it anyway.

[12] Or something.

[13] You may feel free to disagree w/ me here, and even show me an example of what you would call such a writing, but again, my overly Westernized mind would simply respond: “prove no thinking was involved,” or even worse, “of course thinking was involved, I’m reading someone’s writing.”  Actually, I’m kinda fascinated by this.  Maybe I take it back.

[14] I.e. I cannot help but think that there would have been an adverse reaction had I handed in my PhD project exams w/ simply the line: “I can but help think.”  (I still think there is a far better way of formulating this, of writing this, of expressing it, but that’s sorta the point.  It doesn’t spring to mind (unlike “I cannot help but think”).  I cannot help but to think that helping to think cannot but help to be put in writing, which of course is a “cannot help but think.”  But again, if anyone can formulate [literally, third time, what is wrong w/ me] it better, esp. b/c out of the context of this writing it actually doesn’t make much syntactic or grammatical sense (again, the point), get in touch; even if it just sounds cool.  Btw, one of my more-favorite blogs, if only b/c it is by a PhD student at pretty much the same place I’m at, studying, disturbingly, many of the same things I am, has a recent post on the whole doubt/anxiety/writing/etc. thing, that I’m perhaps merely expressing after the fact of my most recent and specific submersion into that realm.  Please check out “Winter Snows, Doubts, and Donna Harraway,” at Jason Ellis’ Dynamic Subspace.

[15] Lord, how I hate how that show is always promising in for its futurity rather than its present.

[16] I’m stealing this from somewhere.  I can’t help but think it’s Baudrillard.

Return to Snow(mageddon)y River

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

This is a fantastic clip critiquing the over-use, over-saturation, and ridiculousness of apocalyptic rhetoric in the media from Stewart the other night.  Both him and Colbert have a long tradition of throwing barbs at the eschatological hyperbole of the media, but this one is simply amazing.  And it is esp. appropriate for both this here blog, the weather outside (how frightful it is),[1] and the fact I wrote on this exact thing a couple of days ago.  Enjoy.

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Not to be outdone, the Baltimore local news also got involved.  I don’t know which is better.  Fox et al or this attempt at emulating their apocalyptic and absurd fear mongering.
All I know is, the snow outside ain’t going anywhere, but, then again, neither is the media.  It has to make you wonder how they would react in the face of an actual apocalyptic scenario.  It wouldn’t be anything like the movies.  But then again, how much more ridiculous could they get.  They might have to get all calm and, idk, objective.
[1] Esp. according to the woman I talked to (completely randomly) on the street yesterday.  She, quote, “hate(d) this shit.”  Why I appeared to be an appropriate person to express this to, is perhaps unimportant, but it is to emphasize that everyone is thinking exactly how frightful the weather is and feel that they have to inform whomever may walk by immediately.  (As if I’m gonna say, “What the hell are you talking about.  This is delightful!”)  That said, I firmly agreed w/ her, and said so.  There is something remarkable about how weather, and more importantly talking about it, creates socialization and connection b/t two people who would never talk to one another otherwise.  This whole week I’ve been experiencing smiles, knowing looks, and a sense of community wholly lacking at other points in the year.  We all agree on one thing, and it brings us together: we hate this shit, and yet. . . , I think there is something good in this agreement.  This is also one of the reasons I like sports.  Esp. in pgh, one always has a common ground from which to begin a conversation w/ a stranger.  Usually talking about the weather is banal to the extreme, the old cliche, that thing that, strangely, causes disconnection b/t people.  But when the unusually strong snowstorm hits the ‘burgh, its like the freaking Superbowl (of conversation starters–and of course the SB coincided w/ this past weekend).  Of course this is great and all, but lord I miss the desert.  At least there the weather didn’t shut down a city, even if it was just as much a part of the conversation.  And it is always apocalyptic, though one never hears about “heat-wave-ageddon,” or “four-months-w/o-rain-Judgment-Day.”  Though that would be hilarious.