Author: Josh Lind

I’m interested in the question of ownership in relation to 9/11.  My first response to In the Shadow of No Towers was a negative reaction to the extreme self-centeredness of the narrative.  There’s something immediately off-putting about not just “I live on the outskirts of Ground Zero and first saw it all live – unmediated” (1), but the dramatized third-person delivery of “He remembers that morning yet again” (4).  It’s as if, through his narcissistic dramatization, Spiegelman seeks to own 9/11 for himself.  He pokes fun at his own narcissism (2), but there it is nonetheless; whether or not Art Spiegelman has a beard is suddenly a crucial fact when considering 9/11.  In a sense, this is just a better “where were you when…?” type of story – better because he was a closer observer than us.  But the “where were you when…?” phenomena itself is perhaps more interesting than Spiegelman’s recounting of his day and his later political disgust.  The readings from South Atlantic Quarterly were especially useful in examining this phenomena.  Slavoj Žižek hits on selfishness when he talks about Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint; the world as you know it is a sham put on for your benefit.  We each live in an individual bubble of illusion.  But Žižek points out that the nation is a collection of bubbles and is only protected by the continued suffering of the third world.  Fredric Jameson makes an elegant move to the collective when he discusses as a “collective delirium” the public’s ability to be “devastated by catastrophe in which they have lost no one they know” (298).  Jameson suggests that Americans are held together not just by collective mourning, but that this mourning is circulated and enforced by the media and ultimately forged into a therapy called war (299).  Susan Willis then tracks this therapy back to the individual in the form of an attachment to the American flag as a signifier of protection: “Americans show with our car-mounted flags that we know the ‘war on terrorism’ is the code phrase for the preservation of our interstates, cars, suburbs, and the petrochemical octopus that feeds and clothes us” (380).  In terms of Žižek’s essay, the flag acts to keep us plugged into the matrix rather than exposed to the ‘desert of the real.’  So, in one sense, Spiegelman’s book works as a plaintive cry that his emotion cannot be his own.  His own fear and pity are caught up in the ongoing significations of ideology that mark them with the inevitable falsity of political spectacle.  But I’m not entirely convinced.  The “where were you when…?” phenomena exemplifies the selfishness of American culture by privileging our own experiences and anxieties above those who happened to be in the towers.  (I suppose I can’t have it both ways, but I’ll leave the post as is).

I thought it was interesting that the protagonist (Jack?) could only be content in situations where he could witness or cause pain in others.  In the support groups in the beginning, he was surrounded by the pain of others, all with the knowledge that he was not condemned to die in the way that they were.  At the same time, he gained their sympathy.  He curses Marla for revealing his subterfuge: “Oh, this should be so sweet, the remembered warm jumble of Chloe still in my arms and Chloe dead somewhere” (27).  In this sense, he seems to be vampiric or parasitic (and it’s interesting that a few of these support groups were for people suffering from parasites).  He feeds on their pain.  The fight club itself ostensibly reverses this tendency in the sense that Jack himself experiences pain.  It seems that his own pain cuts through the anesthetized condition of consumer capitalism.  But a more remarkable difference is that Jack is unsatisfied by the static and received pain of the other support groups.  Instead, fight club generates and extends pain, causing pain where none existed before.  Jack describes the first night that he and Tyler punched each other: “both of us knowing we’d gotten somewhere we’d never been” (44) – and the reaction is similar to that of the addicted consumer: ‘cool’ and ‘I want another.’  The narrator gives the following reason for fight club’s success: “Most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight.  After a few fights, you’re afraid a lot less” (45).  This seems to empower them, but in a way, fight club acts as a release valve for social despair, a torture chamber that allows one to better deal with the regular world – but it doesn’t effectively change the world.  Pain and violence become the commerce of the new system.  When it extends outward in Project Mayhem, it seeks to change the capitalist social order, but really only in the amount of pain and violence active in the world.  While the novel is clearly critical of the fascism of Project Mayhem, the effective result seems to warn against social change in general.  In many ways, I agree with Giroux’s reading.  He writes that “Fincher is less interested in fighting oppressive forms of power than he is in exploring the ways in which men yield to it” (14).  The film acts a bit like a warning light in the dash of a car: it makes it very clear that there’s a problem.  And although it may seem gratuitous to complain that the light doesn’t actually fix the car, the film’s reception warrants Giroux’s criticism, in the sense that so many viewers have responded to the warning light as just another light show, provoking that same “Cool” from the mouths of a new (masculine) generation.

First of all, I thought Julie/Jules does us all a service by digging beneath the surface of the narrative.  I think films lend themselves to a type of pleasurable consumption, maybe because we watch them rather than read them.  It’s like a critical switch is turned off.  Of course, that could just be me.  But I was trying to make this point when I said of Memento that it was soooo cooool.  The ‘visual pleasure’ of a film is sometimes irresistible.  The first time I watched Donnie Darko, the same thing happened.  I thought it was pretty far out; radical, even (in its true 80s usage rather than its political meaning).  Actually, the problem I’m having might be best articulated through the dual meanings of that word, ‘radical.’  It feels like the film is too ‘totally radical’ and not politically radical enough.

I’ll use the Sparkle Motion scene as an example.  As a festival of light and sound, it was just so inviting — quite a radical spectacle.  The audience members, including the teachers and judges, start clapping in unison, bobbing their heads, and generally becoming swept up by the whole thing.  But then comes the eerie disruption of that performance; with a sweeping rumble, the picture cuts to Donnie in Jim Cunningham’s house, the dancers slip into slow motion, and shots of the delirious audience are interspersed with images of the burning mansion.  The viewer is positioned to scorn the dance spectacle and all its hypocrisy.  That is, the talent show audience roars in appreciation at the sexualization of pre-pubescent girls while Donnie burns down the Cunningham’s “kiddie porn dungeon.”  Case closed.  The film effectively criticizes a dangerous cultural trend.

But the viewer’s dissociation from the spectacle threatens to open up its own spectacle.  The narrative doesn’t hang together in a sustained critique.  In some ways, the film seems to enact the spectacle rather than disrupt it.  The pleasure of Donnie Darko isn’t in the spectacle so much as a spectacle that ironicizes the original spectacle.  One way it does this is to service the (adolescent male?) viewer’s fantasies.  From “Sit next to the boy you think is the cutest” (female attraction); to “He asked me to forcibly insert the Life Line exercise card into my anus!” (telling off authority); to the fact that  the entire fate of several characters hinges on Donnie (megalomania).  His actions can right the universe.  But strangely, it’s not his actions that actually ‘right the universe’; it’s his death.  In fact, the entire movie, from his escape of death to his actual death, is essentially an aberration, a not-real, a fantasy.  And it pulls in the viewer.  It disturbs us, but we’re not quite sure how.  And, without being able to define the difference, we aestheticize the unsettling experience.  Off-kilter narratives merely titillate a different pleasure center.  But is it radical?  At one point, Gretchen asks, “And what if you could go back in time and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?”  But all they come up with for ‘something better’ are images.  Which prompts one to ask, are the images that make up Donnie Darko paradoxically these better images?

I’m interested in the snippets of dialogue spoken by the television and radio in White Noise.  I think these snippets are examples of the proliferation of meanings rather than the breakdown of meanings for which postmodernism is known; or maybe the breakdown is the result of this profusion.  This connection can be seen in two separate quotes from the novel.  The narrator says that “The world is full of abandoned meanings” (184); Winnie Richards, the neurochemist, says that America “still lead[s] the world in stimuli” (189).  It seems like stimuli lead to abandoned meanings.  This can be seen in various conversations throughout the novel in which scientific knowledge is contested by pop cultural knowledge.  For example, the conversation that begins with a question about outer space gets diverted by the objects pushed on them by the television.  When the sun’s corolla is mentioned, Steffie says “I thought Corolla was a car,” and Heinrich responds that “Everything’s a car” (233).  In this sense, the advertisements on radio and television perform a doubling procedure, twinning everything into a mess of overlapping meanings (one for each thing and one for the car-version of that thing).  It’s interesting, too, that Dylar entered Babette’s life through an advertisement she found in a trashy tabloid.  Dylar is a proposed cure for the fear of death, but it seems more like a metaphor for television.  It is “delivered at specified rates for extended periods” (188).  It is “technology with a human face” (211).  “In a very real sense it doesn’t matter what is in those tablets.  It could be sugar, it could be spice.  I am eager to be humored, to be fooled” (251).  But rather than the protection from death, the modern mass media provide the ‘stimuli’ that bring about the death, as well as the death of meaning through its very profusion.  And Wilder is the only character who seems to recognize the falsity of its promise: “The small boy remained at the TV set, within inches of the dark screen, crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells, as Murray took notes” (105).

I’m interested in the emotional trajectory the narrative takes – always away from the characters.  Zamora is introduced in the beginning, then drops out until his corpse reminds us he inhabited the story; Lina addresses us directly in a standoff-ish but affecting way, then becomes a ghostly companion to another dissolving character, Vincent Moody.  Each enters the story at perhaps their most intense emotional moment, receding from there.  Rather than building characters and scenes into a grand emotional pinnacle, the narrative diverges, breaking down around a series of disappearances.  This lack of a payoff is exemplified by the fizzle of the tiger on the movie set: “‘Aw, phooey,’ Jesse Pierce said. ‘That was lame’” (270).  The implicit promise of lurid action is not just deferred but is structurally impossible in Hagedorn’s narrative, and this seems to be one thoroughgoing aspect of the postmodern text.  Indeed, there’s almost a distraction of desire, as if no one can see things through.  The metaphor here is the film itself, which takes forever to shoot, gets written and rewritten by director and cast alike, and results in miles of footage without anyone knowing how it fits together into a meaningful whole.  Perhaps this lack of a coherent trajectory is inevitable in a postcolonial tale that gets senselessly hijacked – like the Philippines itself: on a course diverted first by the Spanish and then the Americans, all the while constructing images of its own pre-colonial history in the Taobo.  And, if we accept Kwame Anthony Appiah’s split between postmodernism and (post-)postcolonialism along some aesthetic/political divide, then Dream Jungle is clearly an example of the former, for the novel sacrifices (political) solidity in favor of (aesthetic) dissolution.  But then we’re caught in the same old double bind we always are when discussing the politics of a work of art: Does it subvert or merely reflect what it presents as the status quo?  For Appiah, the sculpture Man with a Bicycle is politically salvageable because it refuses to ‘Otherize’ – or commodify – what it represents.  It moves beyond delegitimization and makes “an appeal to an ethical universe” (353).  But I’m not convinced that Dream Jungle makes the same move.  Instead, it seems to wallow in its representation – not of the commodified Other – but of the hopeless case, the pitied object, the world-weary chronicler, the imaginary past, the speaking corpse.

It’s interesting that Benjamin’s essay attempts to be positive about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but it reads so negatively.  Is that because we’ve all become a little jaded about how ‘the film’ (which we now know includes commercial television) works?  While it may destroy the commanding aura of the original and elite object, I think we’ve all come to understand that it effectively creates its own aura as well.  Any good Marxist knows that commodities are fetishized by the dissociation of use-value and exchange-value, and that the laborer is alienated by the separation of one’s labor from the object one creates by the fact that one is paid in dollar bills.  Obviously the next step in the triumph of capitalism is to make impossible the tactile relationship one might have with the fetishized object; the object is an image.  Benjamin sets up the actor-in-the-room and actor-on-the-screen binary in order to suggest that the film audience can somehow become more critical because of the actor’s absence, but it seems that the ‘shock effect’ of the camera’s work is more open to the inflated, uncritical, desirous gaping that accompanies the image of “breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry essay.  What’s even more scarifying – and yet something that we as a filmic culture have accepted with amazing pluck and aplomb – is that the system of reproducible images has changed the very way we perceive.  Benjamin’s thesis rests on a crucial ‘should be,’ when he states that “the shock effect of the film […] should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind” (238).  Even with his allowances for the intellectual laziness of the masses, Benjamin’s perspective on ‘distraction’ as a means toward critical perception sounds rather…I’m sorry…I got distracted by the cheerleaders on Monday Night Football…where was I going with this?

Note: This post was written before I was able to read any of the other posts, and so I didn’t realize that most of the class read Benjamin as being negative about film and reproducible images — and that there would be such a rousing defense of film.  I guess we’ll probably start with this discrepancy in our class discussion tonight.

In keeping with this week’s theme — deep uncertainty and an attendant tentativeness — I’d like to make a quick observation that’ll certainly bear reconsideration as soon as I click "Publish."  I’m not so sure I agree with much in Haraway’s essay, for many reasons.  The first is that, as Jarrod pointed out, the style is unnecessarily mushy.  Any call to arms that declares itself a "manifesto" might have been more effective if written more clearly.  [It’s possible that Haraway is attempting to avoid the phallogocentricism of most academic arguments, but then she might be essentializing a ‘feminine’ discourse that people like Russ are so intent on satirizing].  At any rate, that’s not the main problem I had with the essay.  I wanted to see a more thoughtful examination of how the blurring boundaries Haraway outlines lead to oppositional opportunities as opposed to an unwitting support of transnational capitalism — especially as it concerns the boundary between "animal-human (organism) and machine" (152).  When I think of cyborgs in contemporary society, I perhaps incorrectly think of the person walking along with an iPod in one ear and a phone implanted in the other — or maybe those people caressing silvery, fetishized objects upon which they push buttons in order to play some video game as they walk zombified through campus.  [I’m a Luddite, of course…].  My point is that the blurring of organism and machine seems to service the economy, in the sense that people don’t use cell phones to foment revolution; they use them because they’re a status device with cool ring tones, and perhaps they can’t bear their own thoughts for the few minutes it takes to get from the parking lot to the classroom (which becomes inevitably dull, unless you sit in the back and play that video game).  In short, I’m inclined to believe that the blurred distinction between humans and machines "is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet" rather than "about lived social and bodily realities" (154) — and Haraway hasn’t really given me any reason to believe otherwise.

One could suggest a parallel between Leonard’s ‘condition’ and ‘the postmodern condition’ as formulated by Lyotard, such that reality goes the ill-fated way of the metanarrative, allowing for the elevation and ossification of a subjective narrative (such as a reassuring conspiracy theory of murder and its warranted revenge) that structures action and belief, and consequently a wish becomes real, a simulation of investigation leads to a certainty of innocence – all because (one could suggest) subjects are encouraged to live in a hyperreal landscape in which they are trained to refresh their expectations with each pleasing new commercial, obliterate their knowledge in a deferred and ultimately unsatisfying orgasm, and forget the historical immaterialism of consumption in late capitalism, the very disappointment of consumption (the prototype being Sammy Jankis, who is wiped clean before each grab at the electrified silver pyramid, shocking in his repeated attempts at jouissance within parameters defined and conditioned by a mild-mannered sadist with a clipboard full of market research), but when the viewer realizes that Sammy is a fabrication – or at least a conflation of identities – called into being by Leonard’s guilty complicity in fashioning a comfortable lie, the viewer pushes this guilt onto Leonard-as-the-convincing-representation-of-ourselves-who-is-not-ourselves and at whose lie we are shocked and thrilled enough to call this a pretty true and repulsive film – but it has nothing to do with us, we who are wiped clean when the screen goes black, the delivery of truth-as-our-real-relations-presented-to-us-in-imaginary-form (a la Althusser) a mere filmic residue, or perhaps it is even something we overlay with the identity of John G., whom (one could suggest) we hunt down and kill because it is something that threatens to unveil truth by its very obfuscation, or finally, it could be killed by the appellation of coolness, as in “that movie is soooo cooool.”  Totally.

The Intuitionist complicates the simple binary between ‘surface’ and ‘depth,’ taking the discussion in a different direction by focusing on postmodernism as a reaction against the Enlightenment project.  Instead of suggesting that modernism emphasizes depth and postmodernism emphasizes surface, the novel reverses the links by pointing out that empiricism is built through a methodology of surfaces, in the sense that surfaces are tactile, measurable, ‘real.’  Because they appear so obviously real, surfaces are comfortable, and in fact the whole system of objects rests upon them.  The trust that empiricism places in its own senses – that seeing is believing – opens up the danger of a reversal, a reflexive property in which believing leads to seeing, a scientific axiom used to support a received racist cultural axiology.  Late in the novel, Mrs. Rogers reveals Fulton’s purpose in writing Theoretical Elevators, his joke that undermined empirical epistemological tenants: “these are his words—‘They were all slaves to what they could see.’ But there was a truth behind that they couldn’t see for the life of them” (239).  This takes an explicit racial direction when Lila Mae responds that “They looked at the skin of things” (239).  Intuitionism, in the novel, at first appears to be an attempt to recover the depth beyond the observable surface, but rather than burrowing into this depth, the novel postulates elevation and expansion as the direction of intuitionist possibility.  Elevation is the novel’s overriding metaphor, a metaphor for human potentiality and social transformation.  The snippet of Theoretical Elevators beginning Part Two of The Intuitionist looks beyond “the dull obviousness of biology” (221) in order to move beyond the surface – not into depth but above surface.  Fulton’s theoretical elevation posits a postmodern subjectivity in which race is abandoned as a meaningful distinction, a movement in which people “lose solidity in the verticality. At ninety [stories], everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating” (222).  The medium, the surface, the body, the skin – they all disintegrate in the rise of potentiality.  Naturally, this “critique of essentialism,” as bell hooks calls it, is open to criticisms which lament the loss of authentic black experience as a touchstone for collective political action.  I don’t presume to have any answers, of course, but I imagine we’ll have a spirited debate on these antithetical positions in class on Tuesday.

Carl Malmgren, in his essay “Meta-SF: The Examples of Dick, LeGuin, and Russ,” points out that George Orr continually recreates Dr. Haber in all of his dreams. Despite Orr’s power to erase millions of people through his effective dreaming, he doesn’t erase Haber. Malmgren goes on to discuss what this means for LeGuin as an author. For Malmgren, The Lathe of Heaven is a work of meta-fiction in the sense that the whole novel acts as a comment on the role of the SF writer. What’s more interesting to me, however, is the complex psychological economy opened up by Malmgren’s initial insight. Despite his seeming anxiety, Orr ensures that Haber survives, suggesting that Haber is crucial to Orr’s psychological well-being. In fact, one could argue that Haber isn’t a real person at all, but simply a portion of Orr’s psyche. Within Freud’s structural psychodynamic theory, the Haber figure seems analogous to the superego – an interior, often putative construct fashioned out of social regulations and added to the restrictions enforced by the individual’s father. But instead of demanding that the individual abide by society’s rules, the superego in the novel seems to demand that society conform to its own ideals. In this way, Orr can be seen to offload his visions of social reformation onto a villainous, anthropomorphized aspect of himself. Perhaps this drive is partially due to the growing fatigue with collective social movements in the 1960s that, although infused with positive goals, could be seen as a cause of civil unrest. Balance this leftist version of social transformation with burgeoning Nixonian conservatism and there become two world-transforming visions in conflict. Honestly, I don’t know where this is going, but sometimes it seems like the novel is also unsure. The book seems to be in great conflict with itself. One thing that can be said is that LeGuin, through George Orr, seems to emphasize the importance of honest though sometimes imperfect communication (as seen in Orr’s efforts with the aliens) and local connections (e.g. with Heather Lelache) over a theoretical ideal that tramples the particular. At the end of the novel, an alien tells George “You have lived well,” which underscores the importance of lived life over the concept of life.

It’s quiet in here, so I thought I’d make a quick post about the dramatic and lyrical scene in which Oedipa meets the old sailor during her long dark night of the soul. She imagines the old sailor’s passing, a fiery death in which his mattress burns up around him like a funeral pyre. When the sailor is lost to us, we no longer have access to “the quantity of hallucination belonging to just the sailor” (95). Subjective perception — hallucination — is the hallmark of distinctive human life. And the change in time (dt) is the supplanting of one hallucination by another until all record of it is lost in death. The Crying of Lot 49 is in some sense an examination of hallucinations as they increase their pace, Oedipa flitting from one hypothesis to another. In the end, what seems most troubling to Oedipa is that each passing hallucination is a loss of life, that ‘change in time’ is actually the loss of the specific delirium that is both innocence and stability. At the risk of beginning a categorical Modernism/Postmodernism debate, I’d say this episode in the novel pursues its alienation in a more ‘modernist’ way than many other sections. But now it’s time for bed. See you all tomorrow.

I’m most interested in Fredric Jameson’s discussion of ‘expression’ and its reliance on the centered subject. He suggests that postmodernism solves the problem of alienation by doing away with the subject entirely, which means forgoing expression. But it’s interesting that Jameson seems to quickly replace the concept of ‘expression’ with an interest in feelings, emotions, and affect. The ‘waning of affect,’ for Jameson, is tantamount to the complete loss of expression. I think this is because Jameson privileges alienation as an appropriate display of emotion, while the ‘euphoria’ that replaces alienation is inappropriate to the late capitalist socioeconomic situation. Euphoria, then, reifies the prevailing economic logic. It’s not a stretch to consider this view a bit dour. For Jameson, the centered subject acts as an anchor that keeps one from drifting, providing a stationary place from which one can begin the project of cognitive mapping, Jameson’s antidote to postmodernism. I don’t think many people would argue against cognitive mapping – after all, what’s the matter with attempting to create “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system”? – but what happens when someone actually attempts such a mapping? I think Thomas Pynchon shows us in The Crying of Lot 49, and in the process challenges Jameson’s perspective by problematizing cognitive mapping. The novel begins with a jokey quality that steadily dissolves into the anxieties that attend an unrewarded search for epistemological certainty. In the early going, the story of the Peter Pinguid Society (rife with the same or’s or possibly’s in the DeLillo story we read in class) exemplifies the sort of euphoric free-floating indeterminacy Jameson criticizes. But the novel takes a turn when Oedipa tries to root out the truth about Trystero/W.A.S.T.E. Her attempt to gain a sense of her ‘place in the global system’ reads like the kind of dark descent that only an anchor can provide. In other words, the attempt to map so alienates her that it becomes ridiculous. Despite the darkness of the descent, we realize that her object is a mysterious postal service, after all. This zany detail allows the novel to poke fun at the uses of committed alienation – in direct opposition to Jameson’s tack (i.e. taking seriously the euphoria of postmodernism). This opposition condemns the novel to charges of political what-me-worryism, but it also opens up a sharp critique of the attempt to totalize society or ‘euphorize’ alienation.