Bradley J Fest

2012: An Addendum

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Just picked up Žižek’s new short book on the economic crisis, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and it struck me while reading it last night that perhaps, even though 2012 was in production far before the “economic downturn” which struck in the Fall of 2008, the real horizon of the film is in fact the “seemingly out of nowhere,” “once-in-a-century credit Tsunami” (Greenspan).[1] (I am indebted to Kirk Boyle for making me recall this insight, as he made much the same point about 2012 on a panel we were both on last fall in NY.  Check out his abstract for “Metaphors that Destroy Us: Projections of the Financial Crisis,” and his very interesting article “Children of Men and I am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood.”)

The lack of any concrete, “real” cause of disaster in 2012, the fact that the films just spirals out-of-control between one seemingly unrelated disaster to the next (i.e. how could Yellowstone turning into a Volcano and the San Andreas Fault be related. . .), that drastic measures must be taken immediately w/ little to no concern for the constituency of the country, that the leaders in power ignore any other solution to the problem other than vast influxes of capital into abstract arks—rather than say mobilizing the workforce to save itself (the economy)—all these point toward the fact that 2012 may in fact be (metaphorically) dramatizing the global economic disaster.  And yes, this is perhaps to give Emmerich too much credit, that the film seems far more enamored w/ its special effects and lackluster narrative, but despite all this, what is on display in 2012 is the disaster at the heart of capitalism itself.  Not some pseudo-scientific excuse to blow up the world again, but an acknowledgment that the apocalyptic rhetoric spread around the financial collapse was far more extreme than for real natural disasters; only a film like 2012 could actually give us an image of what was being imagined in the minds of bankers, financiers, and government officials at all levels: total global destruction.

Strikingly, and I’m inclined to not wholly agree w/ him on this, Žižek focuses on various sites of apocalyptic threats as the only sites which could give the communist “Idea a practical urgency.”[2] In his latest book more clearly than ever before, capitalism contains a multitude of apocalyptic scenarios in the heart of itself—it is apocalyptic.  And it is the very ways in which it is apocalyptic which could create new antagonisms for the universality contained w/in communism, not a hearkening back to the past, either its successes or failures, but rather reinventing the lines along which the battle must be waged entirely.  He is very clear that there are four such sites of impending capitalist disaster which may in fact provoke such a reinvention:

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction?  There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. . . . What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run.[3]

Prior to the release of 2012, there was a viral marketing campaign of videos (even though they were also OnDemand) which showed Woody Harrelson’s character running through the list of possible scenarios that would “prove the Mayans right” (including nanobots, the Hadron collider, aliens, nukes, eco-disaster, etc. etc.—all the usual suspects and more).  What is interesting about these, is that 2012 could have made use of any of these threats, most of them a result of capitalism (or its future).  They are all contained w/in the logic of the film.  So the fact that 2012 had to pull a magical-rabbit-disaster out of its pseudo-scientific hat proves all the more what is at stake.  For Emmerich, and for Žižek as well, we are living at the end times.  And, whether acknowledged or not, capitalism is the horizon in which we experience what that actually means.  Of course, knowing that one is living near the end of the world is nothing new, but notice Žižek’s conviction that we are in fact there:

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.  For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents.  What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.  This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.  The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure—in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.  Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventatively.  If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.  It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives. . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero point; “the end of times is near.”[4]

And this is the whole problem.  If on the one hand, we have Bush, McCain, and Obama declaring the end of the world as we know it unless we push through the stimulus package, and Žižek saying that it is the very threats capitalism introduces which would cause the end of the world and may become sites for radical political upheaval, AND Roland Emmerich getting us all collectively “off” w/ abstract spectacles of some vague disaster-reality—do we not need to dial it back a bit?  Yes, 2012, you may be “about” the Fall of 2008, but that simply puts you (and Žižek and all the rest) in a ridiculously long tradition of this sort of thing.  A tradition that has at the heart of itself the fact that this apocalypse never happens! We are always living in the end times.  This is why all these rhetorical eschatologies are so effective.  If in fact what 2012 is enacting is financial meltdown, thank god it looks so familiar, that it is just another rhetorical disaster which will never occur, but whose effects will have real world consequences—i.e. more banking corruption, etc.  Perhaps the real lesson here is that we should just multiply possible rhetorical apocalypses, all so to insure that none of them ever happen.

[1] And perhaps nowhere is this Tsunami imagined better than when it is sweeping over the Himalayas.

 

[2] Žižek, Slavoj.  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.  New York: Verso, 2009.  90.

[3] ibid., 90-1.

[4] ibid., 92.

2012

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I’ve been eagerly anticipating Roland Emmerich’s recent 2012 for quite some time now.  One of the first previews for the film released early this last year showed a Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas being engulfed by gigantic waves.  This and other previews seemed to promise a spectacle of global destruction heretofore only hinted at, a disaster so large and frankly absurd that even the highest point on Earth wouldn’t be immune from its sublimely catastrophic effects.  Except for the strangely missing nuclear referent, Emmerich has tackled most of the major versions of global apocalypse and epic disaster.  He gave us aliens destroying the White House and the Empire State Building in dramatic fashion in Independence Day (1996); attempted and failed to revamp the monster movie in Godzilla (1996); gave us a global warming eco-apocalypse based on ridiculously sketchy science in The Day After Tomorrow (2004); and even gave us a pre-history apocalypse—in the sense of massive civilization change—in 10,000 BC (2008) (btw, for those who are following, yes that is two movies in a row whose titles are dates).[1] W/ 2012 I could only imagine that he would go above-and-beyond the all-out destruction of those previous films, as he would have to simply go bonkers-overboard to top them.  I even permitted myself to hope that he might actually deliver on his and our desire to see it all end spectacularly on the big-screen in all the CGI glory he could muster.  In all earnestness, I was excited for 2012 not because it would be some genre-bending, metacinematic commentary on apocalyptic tropes, nor would it be some prophetic warning to humanity,[2] nor would it be some careful and subtle exploration of a post-apocalyptic situation. . . no, I was excited for 2012 for the sheer spectacle of the thing: no substance, just everything going to hell.  And in that, it was pretty successful.

Don’t get me wrong, 2012 is an awful film that even the intrepid John Cusack couldn’t save.  Like all of Emmerich’s films, rather than the disaster taking center stage, he inevitably only uses it as a background to tell a laboriously clichéd, trite, normative, banal “family” narrative that barely holds together.  For all the quite visually captivating death and destruction, the entire film culminates in Cusack having to free a stuck gear.  That’s it.  A wire is coiled around a gear that is preventing the gate from closing on one of the arks.  And it takes twenty minutes for this to resolve in the manner we were all expecting in the first place—i.e. Cusack fixes the gear, the gate closes, everyone is saved from drowning, he reunites with his ex-wife[3] and kids, etc. etc.[4] Up until that point, the narrative was simply a convenient vehicle to transport us from one site of disaster to the next, with ridiculous, last minute escapes from each: L.A. falling into the San Andreas Fault and the Pacific Ocean, Yellowstone Park blowing up (largest volcano ever),[5] the proverbial waves coming over the Himalayas, etc.[6] (I won’t even get started w/ all the other convoluted, unnecessary plot points except to mention the whole thing still ends up being conservatively “moral” at the end and the science is even worse than The Day After Tomorrow: gigantic solar flares have caused a new (new! how does he get away w/ this shit!?) radioactive element in the Earth’s core, and it is heating up the entire planet, causing the tectonic plates to massively shift and, you know, sorta melt.  Clear?)  But for all that, my anticipation was still satisfied.  L.A. dropping into the San Andreas fault was perhaps one of the most captivating images of massive destruction yet “captured” on film.  I won’t even really try to describe it, and really anything less than the big screen won’t do it justice, but I will say that the detail is so fine one can actually see tiny people falling through the smashed windows of toppling skyscrapers.

My desire to see this film was simply a desire to see how he would pull off more destruction.  Mercifully, this film was (fairly) free of big, famous, historic landmarks blowing up or being encased in ice (w/ the one exception of an aircraft carrier smashing into the White House riding the back of a Tsunami[7]; I wish I could say it was some sort of commentary on the military industrial complex or perhaps New Orleans, but frankly Emmerich probably thought it just looked cool.[8])  What this film appeared to promise (and almost fulfill) was disaster w/o context, disaster simply for the sake of it, w/o warning, narrative, or meaning.  This was ultimately what his previous work bordered on, but the obvious eco-guilt-trip parts of The Day After Tomorrow, the strange patriotism of ID4—esp. considering Emmerich is German[9]—prevented this.  These films were still part of the Hollywood-summer-blockbuster ethos that you can only show disaster to this extent if the end result is uplifting for the human spirit or whatever.  2012 is not a summer blockbuster.  It came out in November for chrissakes.  It skirts the “human spirit,” but ultimately the moral question it asks—who gets saved and why if we can only save a percentage of a percent on the ark—seems tacked on at best, and completely opaque and mishandled at worst.[10] The moral dilemmas raised by the film are an afterthought, something to “justify” the rest of it.

And this is ultimately Emmerich’s problem.  His films don’t need justification.  If he took a Koyaanisqatsi approach to disaster filmmaking (70mm visuals w/ Philip Glass music), he would finally achieve what he’s been trying to all this time because at this point no one cares about the who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.  We just want the image.  An anti-narrative apocalyptic disaster film w/ a Hollywood Budget, now that would be something.  He comes mighty close to this in 2012, perhaps the closest because it is arguably the worst film out of them all (or best. . .) in that it is more difficult than ever to care about any of the loosely constructed characters, but it ultimately fails because you could tell exactly the same story w/ [insert disaster, however minor (say, a broken leg), here].  His films try so desperately for substance, pulling every possible heartstring and using the rhetorical gravity of global catastrophe to do so, but always ultimately ignore what is so enticing and brilliant about them: their special effects.  Nothing else.  If he was faithful to what he was actually doing, making a film which resided completely and only on the surface, he might actually achieve some depth.  Rather than trying to insert meaning w/ whatever hackneyed father has to save his children bullshit that winds up in every one of his films, if he simply eschewed meaning, gave up cause-and-effect, morality, messages of warning, the human spirit. . . really everything except the special effects, he’d really be on to something.  I know we’ll never get this film, but hey, we do have 2012.

[1] Also, one can easily see from his first student film, Das Arche Noah Prinzip—in which a “weather” satellite has the power to create massively destructive natural disasters—that Emmerich has for a long time been in the business of megadeath.  He also looks like he’s about to take on another version of this by making Asimov’s Foundation (at least according to imdb).  I’m sure hardcore SF fans the world over are groaning.

 

[2] There isn’t any, b/c this film reverts to an apocalypse wholly outside of human control.  It is destined, prophesied in the old traditional style.

[3] Who, not ten minutes before this had lost her current husband, and poor-ole Amada Peet acts like it never happened once Cusack comes through.

[4] I feel no guilt if I’ve “spoiled” the movie here.  This is sorta the point.  The narrative doesn’t matter at all.  We already know what is going to happen.  It is moot.  My question, why even bother w/ a narrative at all in such a film?

[5] Though Woody Harrelson does have a delightful cameo here as the crazy End-is-Nigh guy.

[6] Actually, for the global nature of the disaster in 2012 we get quite a limited version of it.

[7] Literally.

[8] It did.

[9] He also made The Patriot (2000) w/ Mel Gibson, btw.

[10] I.e. the governments of the world knew about this impending disaster 3 years beforehand, but kept it under their hat so the world wouldn’t descend into anarchy, secretly building 4 arks to save government members and the fabulously rich.  When one of the arks fails near the end the major moral question is: do we let these 100,000 people on knowing that it might endanger those already here.  This is of course to gloss over the fact that everyone might have been saved if the initial decision was to tell the planet and mobilize the entirety of global production toward one single goal: survival.  Where to enter this morass, or even worse why one would enter it, is beyond me.  No one could take this film seriously enough to seriously answer the moral questions it tentatively raises.

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.

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(!):

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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).