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It would be hard not to notice the numerous rapid descents in the Dark Knight which, while uncommon for filmic representations of superheroes, seem particularly frantic and well done. I would argue that this is indicative of the film’s content as well as its form: the Dark Knight is not so much the recognizable ‘descent into madness’ but more the repetitive chaos that threatens the apathetically sane post-capitalist world. [Spoilers Follow.]
Katerina Kolozova’s The Real and the “I” is a brilliant text which complicates Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy with post-structuralist feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and various continental philosophies. Like Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Kolozova’s project is a heretical reading of Laruelle’s philsopy which, while maintaining the basic tenets of his system (unilateral duality, vision in one, the Real, transcendence and immanence as distinct) pollutes the non-ness of his arguments. Unlike Brassier however, Kolozova is ultimately concerned with the experiential, with the aspects of non-philosophy which touch on existence as experienced by subjects (or strangers in Laruelle’s parlance). Jumping from Judith Butler, to Rosi Bradotti, to Drucilla Cornell, to Derrida, to Lacan (with thinkers such as Badiou, Derrida and Deleuze sprinkled throughout) Kolozova formulates a breathtakingly lucid and powerfully political, theoretical and social system or, at least, the possibilitly of such. My goal here is to introduce and problematize (albeit slightly) Kolozova’s text which deserves serious interpretation and continued engagement.
After critiquing the rampant textuality and playfulness of postructuralism as “hysterical denial” (p. 6) Kolozova goes on to point out how the much hated One (or Real) is cautiously encircled but ultimately denied across a broad spectrum of feminist texts. Kolozova claims that not only do theorists such as Butler and Bradotti unconsciously invoke the Real, but that they unknowingly perpetuate dualism by opposing deconstruction to traditional metaphysics (p. 7). Berrating Butler for her overly cautious rhetoric (which seems in line with Zizek’s humorous comments in Astra Taylor’s documentary film) Kolozova points out that Butler’s disavowal of Real returns in her placing the Real (of power and deconstruction on the whole) in the body itself (21-22). [I have, in the past, critiqued Butler along similar lines here]. In many ways, Kolozova appears as a Speculative Realist version of Joan Copjec.
Kolozova, via an engagement with Laruelle, goes on to show that Butler’s various oppositions are exploded via Laruelle’s vision-in-one which, is always already a unilateral two (42-48). Echoing Brassier’s critique of correlationism, Kolozova points out that all crisis, whether dyadic or not, is domesticated by deconstruction, purported as non-discursive and hence impossible (p. 52). Kolozova then goes on to articulate the dominating political problematic of our era that, in a deep echo of Zizek, is the name and existence of democracy (p. 65) and, in the most interesting passages, discusses how, the non-philosophical subject (as the stranger, the human in human) interracts with the Real via transcendental materialism (the being of language and experience).
While Speculative Realism has been more than slightly ambigious as to its relation to psychoanalysis and its derrivative transcendental materialism (save Brassier’s two swipes at Zizek in the footnotes of Nihil Unbound), Kolozova is clear in that the two doctrines are not opposed but that Laruelle’s system works with the Real whereas transcendental materialism (or what Laruelle denotes as non-analysis or non-psychoanalysis) thinks the human once it has been caught in the worldliness of the world. Whereas Brassier discusses the Real as only impossible, Kolozova acknowledges the varying modalities of the Real (a la Zizek and Zupancic) and how the Real is captured in our singular fragments of being.
One troubling ambiguity is exactly the role of the unconscious, a term that is limply deployed in Brassier’s texts and absent from the works of other Speculative Realists. While Kolozova discusses Butler’s dismissal of a romanticized unconscious as a wellspring of radical intervention (p. 23), she does not herself comment on its use or being. Reading between the lines of Kolozova’s Laruellian formulation, I would argue that the unconscious would be the moment where the human in human is first experienced as an exteriority (and therefore becomes being or transcendental in Laruelle’s formulation) and the Real speaks to this transcendental material (the symbolic) but in a language the subject doesn’t understand (p. 102). The unconscious may also speak to the lived-ness of the stranger, that life is a fiction which escapes language and both allows for and restricts our freewill (p. 44).
Kolozova argues that, despite Laruelle’s objections, some interface is needed in which transcendence operates on the Real - that the transcendental material of a specified subject (stranger) carries a particular formulation of the Real which, in the end, means that our various subjective anxieties are both Real and Transcendental (101-103). The political implications of this formulation seem to fall somewhere between Badiou (whose concept of evental sites Kolozova utilizes) and Zupancic/Zizek in trying to act according to or be an instance of the Real (p. 65). This formulation is what allows Kolozova to make claims about the aforementioned Real of democracy, which appear similar to Brassier’s comments about capital in his works prior to Nihil Unbound as well as Zizek’s discussion of capitalism in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality.
If, as Kolozova suggests, the body is the nearest bearer of the Real of our being, how do we articulate a politics which is different from the tired attempts of identity politics? If we carry the real with us, and our experiences can touch upon the real, what is to separate a politics of the embodied Real versus an identity politics? The difference that Kolozova ends on is that since identity is always a failure to grasp the Real and sense the World, as experiential, is what forces and faxes the Real of such materialism, we can only remind ourselves that such a world is not-All, that the World can never grasp identity as such let alone any singular human in their automatic solitude. The strength here is that Kolozova seems bolder than Badiou in dismissing the pre-Evental non-subject and more optimistic than Transcendental Materialism in that not only can the subject think the gap that it is but that the gap does the thinking, that the Real itself desires to be transcendental to, in a sense, be political.
Kolozova gives as a subject that is both always already in tune with the possibility of the evental and the dishiscence of the drive.
Let us make a decision - cut one half of the vicious fluid from the other - for our purposes slime is an organic substance and is different from waste in that waste is what the organic sheds to shed whereas slime harbors a stronger claim to the core of the organism - it’s functions or its essence itself. The beginning of slime is the beginning of life itself - the clutter of pools, some millions of years ago, in which nucleic acids danced and chained together birthing life itself. Amniotic fluid, stolen by Victor Frankenstein by the bucket full (in the most true film adaptation), the glistening trails left by verminous life forms and so forth. There is the move from slime as the trace of life (either as primodrial or putrefaction) to the innocous artificial slime, that is, the stain of life instead of its trace. This domestication of slime, in its severe popularity, seems to coincide with the environmental upshot of the late 1980s and early 1980s - no doubt fueled by the Chernobyl incident, the Antarctic Ozone Hole, as well as the spill of the Exxon Valdez. The cultural explosion seems apparent in the likes of Captain Planet, TMNT, Toxic Avengers, The Stuff, and various Nickelodeon compounds such as Gak, Floam, Goooze, Skweez, and Sqand. Artificial slime would not meet our first definition but to call it sludge would suggest a disintegration of the organic or inorganic and not a purposefully created non-Newtonian fluid.
Might this creative sludge be akin to a zombie populism - a deterritorialized flesh a la Hardt and Negri. As Steven Shaviro wonderfully illustrates, capital has claimed, and will not let go of the monstrousness of things. This is why, in the best zombie narratives, exemplified by Romero’s work, humans are always more of a threat to one another then the zombies, simply because they cling to what capitalism has taught them. We could also later their use of the Golem in relation to characters such as Swamp Thing and The Heap and Man Thing.
We can relate this view of politics back to the explosion of the environmental concern of the late 80s and early 90s - particularly in relation to Captain Planet. Created by Ted Turner, the show was a strong supporter of globalization and NATO as the singular governing body (obviously with the United States as the unofficial center). While writers such as Mike Davis (Planet of Slums) has pointed out globalization’s output of ecological disaster, the moment of Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, signaled the beginning of the end for the USSR. Limp leadership and the failures of Afghanistan and the like, were evident of the eminent collapse and hence, it was a no-brainer that a logic of the global in the sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ and globalized markets, would be wed.
Thus we have the move from the slime that promises either life or death to the slime that gives us the always-already cohesive - that no matter how much one prods the material, it strengthens for the worse. In essence, globalization marks the deterritorialization of the monstrous social - where the more one struggles to escape the faster you sink. Instead of situationist recuperation, we have a meta-recuperation - where the excess of capitalist recuperation is posited as an escape from banality and this escape is codified in terms of new pleasures - Zizek’s supereogic demand of ‘Enjoy!’
Opposed to this false hope of futurity we have the equally misguided false nihilism, of Badiou’s image of the punk rocker who screams no future! Zizek’s Bartleby politics may error towards such useless negativity or may even equate if such a refusal is seen as anything other than a ‘clearing of the field.’ Lee Edelman’s No Future, is a perfect example of how a ‘politics of the Real’ can be misleading. Edelman seems to either conflate or confuse the Real Real and the Imaginary Real - the Real as disgusting void and the real of the narcisstic self, the in oneself more than oneself. How can a politics recognize a horrible sameness, a stupid materiality (such is the meaning of the word golem taking into its various interpretations in Hebrew) without resorting to defeat or romancing an unbearable life (fleshy zombic multitudes somehow outside capital) or blank futurity found in ‘the children are our future’ which is oppressively heternormative and, biological true.
To return to our divided slime that is the trace of life (the zombic) and the promise of life (the baby’s face) how might we bring this to the Real or bring the Real to them without creating a facism of the face (a la Edelman) or a hollow utopian creature (a la Negri and Hardt)? If Zizek represents a more nuanced version of the first then it would seem that Badiou would fall in line with the latter at least in terms of ostensible negativity and positivity. But, in terms of pragmatism, both of these thinkers are consistently critiqued for being too obtuse when it comes to politics coming into practice. While I believe there is some use in synthezing the two in a kind of looking awry at the event, the longevity of Zizek’s disruptive negativity seems to falter as does the murk of Badiou’s pre-Evental time.
Assuming that we are only ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ can there be a politics which is true to our finitude without falling into a hip nihilism which only engenders narcissism or, even worse, Randian objectivism? The closing pages of Nihil Unbound, leans towards what might be a politics, in that, jumping from Freud’s theory of the drive as repetition, there is an inherent will-to-know in humans that is, contrary to most of the universe, negentropic. As mentioned in the last piece, Brassier ignores half of the equation - the axis of alteration - the way in which the external world, whether this externality is something happening to the subject (from the physical outside) or an inexplicable unconcious thought causes a somatic state which is then connected to a consciously experienced externality. We could say that the synchronic axis of alteration is akin to Badiou’s evental politics whereas the axis of iteration is bound to Zizek’s politics of the act.
Bruno Bosteels puts it best when he says the political difference of psychoanalysis and Badiouian politics is “a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou).” However, as Zizek notes here, it is not simply that the break of the act for Lacan is the Truth opposed to Badiou’s fidelity to the event as truth, but that, for Lacan, truth lies after the fact in the response to the act. For Lacan (and ZIzek) truth is a form of already existant fiction whereas, for Baidou, the event is absorbed into a new structure. Zizek critiques Badiou for separating event from being and that keeping the multitude from the crystallizing one of the event, he maintains a naive oppositional stance - the building of a new structure intsead of an internal rupture.
To return us to slime, Badiou’s politics is the very move from the biological to the synthetic that is, politics is forgoing the trace of life, whether rotting or promising, whereas a psychoanalytic politics embraces the excess of the slime as life, as life being naturally unnatural - hence the negentropy of the drive along the axes of iteration and alteration. The quick political jump, which is the error, is to then proscribe a politics which happens by the very nature of the fleshy multitude, the slime of being. The question becomes: how does one account for the genesis of the multitude in a non-vitalist way, in a philosophically realist way, that does not occlude the possibility of politics? While speculative realism provides a step in the right direction, it that it illustrates the radicality of thought by ‘immanencizing’ the transcendental by binding it to the object, this remains a strong articulation of what Freud called material truth without giving any weight to historical truth - the truth of the unconscious, of affect, of implication.
Brassier, in his texts prior to Nihil Unbound, suggests that Laurelle’s non-philosophy, taken as philosophy, gives as a possibility of thinking capitalism as a decision - that the pre-capital can be thought. While the objects of a pre-capitalism (objects including subjects can be thought) one cannot simply remove the noetic trenches that capital has dug in our gray matter: our relation to capital centers on whether surplus value is Real, ontological or experiential. If capital invented surplus value, if it serves as its objet petit a (as Zizek argues) then how do we account for Harman’s discussion of object’s inherent allure? Or does this equate an excess that is hidden in the object versus an excess that is exuded by the object - that is, since Harman’s allure centers on the hidden depths of the object, can we separate capital’s surplus value as the possibility of the social, the social itself as object? Where Marx stated that the glow of the object relied on the suppression of its material history, the invested labor, doesn’t Harman’s objective allure have to do with the historical truth of objects, that is, there unknown relation and not there unknown being? That is, although Speculative Realism demystifies the object, it essentially mystifies the relation of objects via the occasionalism of Harman, the loss of cause and effects’ linkage via Meillassoux, the objectification of the subject via Brassier and the material excess of ontology a la Grant. This demystification highlights the gap between surplus value (the non-object, or in Laurelle the decision) and the fantasy of endless productivity.
Hence, the implicit politics in Speculative Realism is found in its return to slime as the trace of life, that the smudge of materiality cannot be idealized away, not even in the most basic form of relation itself, in the notion of currency and exchange. This zero point of being is, in a sense, a paradoxically deanthropomorphized bio-politics - that matter matters in that it can think itself as such without recourse to the reflective structures of ethics or democracy. Speculative Realism exposes that the zombic hunger of Hardt and Negri’s multitude is a form of thinking and not a form of being. The psychoanalytic contribution here is that capital, while inhabiting the drive’s mode of iteration, is still subject to alteration. In thinking capital as object we highlight the objects around it as possibly dissociable from it such as democracy and the social.
Speculative Realism is first and foremost a philosophy of depth:
For Brassier it is the hopeless depth of nihil, for Harman the demanding depth of objects, for Grant the seething depth of nature and for Meillassoux it is the depth of Hyper-chaos. In this sense the speculative realist has a downward momentum into the abyss of existence and, where the correlationist would rely on the inexistent short-ranged bioluminesce projected by their own consciousness, the former would toss flares of realism beneath them at regular intervals. This descent has no purpose, it is by definition, unreasonable. Its cause, if it can be said to have one in the proper sense, is none other than the result of ham fisted matter colliding into the object (that thinks and is, in the sense of being, nothing at all), into the darkness - pulled by the anchor of time.
While the correlationist would think nothing of the experience of the descent, the speculative realist learns as much as possible knowing that, in the end, there is only an un-poetic death. If Meillassoux is right in claiming that humanity’s great ability is that of being able to think a time (or place following Brassier and Harman) where there is no thought, what is the final result? If human existence is brutally riven from the machinery of the universe and our sense of telos writhes at our feet, then how does one approach the materiality of the immaterial?
Both Brassier and Meillassoux are currently engaged in topics which appear to concern the world ‘for us’ - taking on issues of epistemology, experience and representation - but there is little indication of the consistency of the for-us. While Speculative Realism is eager to celebrate our capacity to think the non-thought or non-thinkable, it is less clear how it would approach the solidification of relation. As with my last entry, my concern here is one of speed. One cannot help but notice how despite their radicality - Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier effectively glaciate their chaotic axioms - classifying them as eventual - leaving us to ask about the immediate experienciable. The most obvious avenue here, which would be to the philosophy of Badiou, is one that Brassier shuts down in Nihil Unbound. This is an odd move by Brassier and, while worth investigating, we will approach the issue diagonally via other ‘deep’ approaches.
While telos should stay dead - does this mean that time itself can and should be, be completely spatialized? Or put more in relation to the preliminary scenario - how might we investigate depth without obfuscating the temporal dimension? The work of DeLanda, Massumi and Zielinski may give us an interesting set of alternatives. Zielinkski’s approach in particular, while spatializing, still maintains a sense of time that is non-linear. Non-linearity is not the same as a completely spatialized time since non-linearity allows for breaks, irruptions and gaps to form. The narrative then, would only exist in retro as a kind of phenomenal or evental text or body. Zielinski’s technocultural archeology, which seeks out the new in the old, simultaneously celebrates and delmits the human subject via the character of the inventor. Massumi, who also thinks the inventor, argues that invention is that which proceeds its own utility - that retroactively creates necessity. How can these thinkers be placed alongside DeLanda who excises the subject from history? DeLanda participates in the objectification of the subject, throwing it into the cauldron as another materialist variable but what does it mean for this to be a thinking object?
The specter that is haunting the aforementioned discourses is that of Althusser and his process without subject and without object. An immediate problem arises however if, taking Badiou’s comments in Metapolitics to heart, there is even less of an object in Althusser’s work then there is a subject - the object is merely a mirror for the subject. Thinking Althusser’s “Contradiction and Overdetermination” may give us some idea of how Meillassoux and Brassier can let us begin a Speculative Realist buggering/deepening of Althusser:
Althusser begins his well known work by discussing the ‘mythical shell’ which Hegel’s specultive philosophy has made of the dialectic. While the dialectic is eschewed by Brassier and Meillassoux, we can take Althusser’s overdetermination of contradiction and run with it thereby exposing what is in Althusser more than Althusser himself. Might we push the multiplicity of contradiction to such an extent that it contradicts the very container which bears it - that of the totality of a society and perhaps totality itself? Taking overdetermined contradiction away from the dialectic makes it, as Althusser fears, at the mercy of philosophy. However, Althusser’s overdetermination must also be sawed from various superstructures -such as that of economics which always determines the contradiction (in language similar to Laruelle) in the last instance. The issue that rears its head here is that of the materiality of historical materialism or, perhaps more basically, the materiality of the social itself. Contradiction, loosed in such a fashion, might manifest in terms of a reversal of Meillassoux’s hyper chaos in that it would function as a contradictory it-self prior to the existence of humanity or the social. In other words, Althusser’s antihumanism is, while partially destroying the subject it is, more directly, destroying individualism and egoism in favor of the masses and hence his definition of the object as a reflection of relations.
Looking back at DeLanda, we should argue that structures are created after contradiction - contradiction does not operate within systems (since this would suggest the existence of contradiction in the form of an entity which, by logical definition, cannot follow) and sociality, as a form of structure, would be a kind of sedimentation of forces giving rise to contradictions. This formulation begs the question - what happens to chaos or the impossibility of contradiction in the realm of the social if the social does not subsist on entities but on relations? The issue here for Specualitve Realism then is to what extent can relations be said to exist? Ultimately our problem may boil down to that of phenomenology as articulated (though not as explicitly as in Meillassoux) by Graham Harman: that of understanding the relation of primary and secondary qualities. If our relations to things are incomplete, and such relations are a kind of inconsistent plenum flooding the spaces between objects, then how does thought strike?
The materiality of the social may lie in the specificities of Brassier’s mutation of Laruelle’s unilateral dualism, in the connection of thought to object. Without going into the almost endless details of Brassier’s articulation, we might venture that the non-dialectical yet twoness of Brassier’s formulation might explain to us how relations, emanating from material processes, attempt to materialize themselves in the form of the social. Our, to put it in terms of our mutiliated Althusser: thought attempts to seal the errancy of hyper chaos by closing contradiction in a system (whether economics or not) but, taking Meillassoux into account, the unthinkable is primary and hence no system can contain it since, that very system (a la Massumi and DeLanda) was birthed from that chaos and said chaos does not disappear after the fact.
The impossibility of contradiction then is the very possibility of potentiality and, against the coupling of potential and actual, I would replace the latter with loss. While adding objects to Althusser’s processes may lead one to assume actuality - this would forget that sedimentation and death are the ‘most actual’ things get. If, as Harman argues, objects are relations and relations are objects, then the social is the field immersed in relation moving towards the object. Science, or perhaps more specifically technology, might be the counterpart in that it sets out, from the invention of new objects, to redefine relations.
In a recent episode of Lost entitled “The Constant”, Desmond, a character who up until the previous episode had believed to be clairvoyant, begins jumping back and forth through time - his visions acknowledged as incomplete memories. Desmond eventually learns that he has become ‘unstuck’ in time - his consciousness begins to swing back and forth over a span of eight years. By talking to the island’s local physicist he learns that he must discover his constant - an object or person that is the same in both times thereby stabilizing his rapidly decaying being. What brought on his shifting is unknown - only that it occurred when he left the island where, at least so far in the story, there seems to be some sort of time dilation or other spatio-temporal disturbance.
What makes the episode so interesting is that Desmond’s constant is Penny - the love of his life who after he has seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet - spares no expense in finding him (of course there is her name connection, Penelope to that of legend - the woman who waited endlessly for her husband to return from the sea). Why is this interesting? I want to argue that love, by its very nature, is that which sticks us in time and is, paradoxically, what unsticks us, what submits us and raises us above temporality itself.
One of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, point that Zizek makes in The Sublime Object of Ideology is that ‘love is a forced choice.’ He explains this by simply pointing out that one cannot choose who one loves nor can one be forced into loving someone, instead what happens is that the loving subject realizes that they have fallen in love, having already choosen, only after the fact.
Love is, fundamentally, a freely chosen act of unfreedom. It is a choice, made without one’s knowledge that forecloses further choices - particularly when it is considered a ‘thought terminating cliche’ (here we might interject Badiou’s claim apropos Fernando Pessoa that love is a thought) or something with ‘absolute value’ as Russell put it. One can also interpret the anchoring or ’stuckness’ of love in the usual derogatory comments about marriage - in particular husband comments about wives - such as the ‘old ball and chain.’
Despite the negative examples of love’s stuckness, there is unquestionably an appeal to an identitarian anchor when existence is, undeniably, lost in a Heraclitean river of constant change. Hoftstadter, discussing identity, brings up Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus:
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
The question becomes one of the persistence of identity and how plastic our notions of being are. The strongest attempt at solving the paradox is to simply think of the ship as a four dimensional object - taking time into account as a dimension and as part of the object, maintains the object’s self identical nature. In effect any object is made of up three dimensional slices of time which causally effect one another - of course there is the issue of relativity - who is observing the changes, what does it mean to change over time for the observing others? The question of sameness is messy - where does the persistence of a person’s identity break down and they change ‘too much’ - where is the validity of ‘you’re not the person I fell in love with.’ Even four-dimensionalism says nothing about the substance that the ‘I’ refers to or the ‘you’ for that matter.
Love continues to complicate matters in that it changes basic numeracity - the numerical thing that I am, this object in relation to other objects, disavows the possibility that I could fundamentally become a thing that does not fall under the category of my name and yet what happens to the numericity when there is the radical twoness of love by way of Badiou? One might find it useful to dive a bit into the philosophy of Whitehead and argue that the substance of metaphysics is, in fact, not a substance at all but a kind of solidified occasion - a collection of windows - Whitehead’s materiality is an organic one - he reverses Kant - the world isn’t grasped (imperfectly) by the subject the world births the subject as such. Whitehead’s metaphysics however, seems to validate Deleuze’s One-All which dangerously induces a full material nature, a completeness which, under the lens of psychoanalysis (and our own voidal subjectivity) is porous.
To return to the event of love then, how much are the particular spatio-temporal qualities of the lovers involved in the recognition of love as such? If, as Badiou argues, the object of desire, the objet petit a, serves only as the guiding star of the encounter, then it seems that the storm of change surrounding and penetrating the identities of the lovers is of little or no concern as long as the fidelity to the truth, found in the intial encounter (the chance of fate where the lovers met) is lived up to/worked through.
In this sense, and to return us to the force choice of love and “The Constant,” love’s defining feature is that it plasticizes everything around it (hence the cliche ‘love conquers all’). When one says ‘I love you’ it is often followed by, at some time or another, ‘I will always love you and I have always loved you.’ One can read these statements both dichronically and synchronically. ‘I’ve always loved you’ usually means that despite our difficulties my love for you was never nulled and yet, more radically, it can also mean that before I even knew you (experientially) I loved you. In terms of I will always love you - this can be taken as regardless of ‘what happens my love for you will not change’ and also that ‘beyond my and your existence my love for you continues.’
Again it is worth mentioning that, at the beginning of Zizek!, Slavoj says that love is formally evil because you place a fragile person or thing above all else. What makes it formally evil, and not just evil in the standard sense but in the Kantian radically evil sense, is that it is not about an attachment to a particular thing (a love) but the real fragment of that person, that which does not change in the other over time, the very gap of the beloved’s subjectivity. The other side of the coin here would be the event of love, instead of being an amorous encounter a la Badiou, would be given an external justification (or master signifier) - we were meant to be because why else would we be together?
To return to Lost, the show constantly enacts a battle between fate and free will - the characters are constantly refering to the possibility or impossibility of destiny and the events of the show seem to suggest that the gap of choice is tiny or non-existent. If there is to be a kind of choice it is our ability to ‘freely choose’ our destiny - to accept our fate. Ben, the former villain (or perhaps still a villain) saw his great strength in manipulating people especially in his ability to make people ‘freely’ choose what he wants them to do. Here again we have the formal equation of love and evil as freely chosen unfreedom - isn’t the standard war criminal response - ‘I was just following orders’ and doesn’t this, as Zizek suggests, outsource free will?
Contrary to evil however, while the destiny of love is registered in the the big Other, seen as the ‘answer of the Real’ (the universe guided us to one another), responsibility, as such, weighs upon us. Love is, as Badiou says, a slow march, a two-headed interpretation of the world. The test of love is obviously time since, as stated above, attraction is fleeting (as are various identitarian details) and the remainder of each shared shift of experience separates another glob of matter from the void of our being.
To anchor ourselves in the previous entry - how can we be sure that love is testing one’s fidelity to the event of love (or the attachment to one another’s identitarian je ne sais qua) and not simply an example of confirmation bias and anchoring - or put more simply: does love only continue when we are afraid of lonliness and because we are cognitively adept at putting up with discomfort? Or to ask in terms of “The Constant” - what is it about Penny that makes her Desmond’s constant, how is it that she can be the axiom of his existence regardless of time and space?
Stay tuned.
/1/ - Critical Separation
What is it that separates human beings from animals? It is a simple question in the most broad sense and one that is constantly answered and simultaneously unanswerable. The connective tissue is one immersed in violence - when humans are treated ‘like animals’ do both the torturers and the subjects of torture become less than human or do both become more human? Is the infliction of pain on another person a human act assuming its outside of survival, clearly human and is what makes us human in our suffering the fact that, a la V for Vendetta, there is that which can never be destroyed by violence, the inch of our unknowable subjectivity which grants us the possibility of immortality.
Such capacity for immortality is the only purely human trait according to Badiou’s Ethics. In an interview appendix of the text, Badiou is jokingly attacked by Peter Hallward for being too hard on animals. Badiou states that, in a sort of material sense, we are animals, we belong in the category of animals. What sets is apart on a base level is our use of mathematics and, as Badiou sees it, it is mathematics which is the language which allows us to understand ontology, to access the possibility of subjective fidelity to an event, to become a subject in the wake of an event. Badiou argues that the animality of humans is exceeded by a kind of grace of thought - though the event is itself only materiality, it is a materiality grasped in a way that cannot be reduced to the interactions of the material pieces of our animal brains.
In terms of history of course, the line is blurred through long years of horrific treatment. The institution of slavery, the popularity of humans-as-spectacle in various world’s fairs - the human zoo of the Paris exposition, the odd fame of the Hottentot Venus and so forth. Given that so much animal treatment has primarily to do with enclosure, it should be no surprise that Agamben constructs the difference between animal and human with spatial perception as the material. Following Heidegger, Agamben argues that the animal perceives a mess of small worlds whereas only the human being sees the open as such, the broad system. The chapter entitled ‘Tick’ is an excellent example - the creature is blind and only sniffs out blood to feed on. Nietzsche’s comments about animal memory in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, seem to come to a similar conclusion - the absence of history in animals leaves them in ignorant bliss.
/2/ - Contractual Interrelations
Waltzing through Manhattan instantly gives one an idea of how people will go for their pets emotionally, conceptually and financially. The anthropomorphization of dogs and cats in particular is evidence of the weight of anthrozoological relations. The domestication of the dog and the horse goes back tens of thousands of years and the use of live stock just as far if not further. Despite technological advance, services animals are still widely used to aid the blind and the deaf, and the benefits of human-animal contact for the sick and disabled is still popular.
A brief tour of reality television illustrates human investment in the pet - The Dog Whisperer, documents the inability of humans to control their pets as well as the relative ease of doing so. Interestingly enough, Cesar Milan’s approach is to instruct the owner to become a pack leader, an odd sort of Deleuzian becoming-animal if there ever was one. To become a pack is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to shift from the molar to the molecular, the embrace a sort of errant multiplicity. Dog Town, which tells various stories surrounding the animals and people of a giant rescue in northern Arizona, is evidence of the cost and effort that many are willing to put in to care for sick and homeless animals.
The notorious PETA is, of course, diametrically opposed to such relations. To say nothing of their activism, their media tactics have become increasingly ridiculously. Not too long ago they began a media campaign called the holocaust on your plate. The campaign juxtaposed large pictures of holocaust victims within camp walls with shots of animals in farm cages. The creator of the media argued that the same mindset allowed both to happen. The animalization of the Jews is, of course nothing new. Several of the Nazi texts, particular those that focused on the so called original races from mythological times.
In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, there is an interesting anecdote about the relation of mice to Jews. He writes: “With mice we should also keep in mind the connection in German (a verb derived from Yiddish for Moses, Mausche, and meaning to speak Yiddish or Yiddishized German, and by extension to speak in an incomprehensible way, and by further extension secret dealings, hidden afairs, decit).” (p. 208)
Art Spiegelman’s well known Maus, tells one man’s experience of the holocaust by using anthropomorphic animals: the Jews are mice, the Polish pigs, the Nazis are cats, the Americans dogs and so forth. While there are several critical essays on Maus, they have become hard to find and many focus more of their attention on memory then the animalization of the holocaust. The effect, instead of trivializing history, brings a tenderness through sheer difference that is increasingly hard to find in the plethora of holocaust tales. The likely explanation here would be that of the uncanny valley - that non-humans with human characteristics create a strong emotional response. A somewhat similar attempt is made, in regards to the Iraq War, in Brian Vaughn’s Pride of Baghdad.
/3/ - Deep relations
While several texts have emerged regarding human animal relations, Midas Dekkers’ text Dearest Pet: On Bestiality remains one of the few that critical deals with zoophilia. Dekkers makes a fuss over how despite the intent of affection we have for our pets we can carefully mentally eliminate the possibility of cross species contact. This fear, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, has quite a bit to do with theology - the witch, the devil et cetera, are always bestial, unnatural. D and G, in A Thousand Plateaus, confront psychoanalysis as unduly erasing the category becoming-animal, that it reduces the animal to the drives, to the bare biology, even pre-biological (p. 258-259).
Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Naughts (aka Zoo) follows two previously conjoined twins, Oliver and Oswald, whose wives die in a strange car accident. The two of them become obsessed with death, decay and the beginnings of life as well as strange coincidences surrounding the crash - the woman driving, who survived, was named Buick, and lost her baby after taken mercury in the past. She lost another pregnancy in the car crash - the car was a ford mercury. The accident was caused when Buick was distracted by a series of swans - the street she was on was swan lane.
The brothers soon produce time lapse movies of animals decaying, in an attempt to understand what happened to their wives as well as their own grief. Coupled with this is a fascination with amputation - Buick’s leg is amputated because of the crash and she later asks for the second to be done. This amputation, as well as Oswald’s and Oliver’s relationship, is mended through a strange appreciation of symmetry. The twins, both zoologists, relate their own state of being to the zoo in that, in previous times, conjoined twins would be deemed an oddity and locked up in cages, as was the aforementioned venus.
The films most interesting side character is, incidentally, Venus, a seamstress who sells her body and tells extravagant tales of bestiality on the side in hopes of one day being published. The large ominous blue sign of the Zoo, which simply says ZOO in giant blue letters, is seen backwards, as ooz or ooze, as that which all life returns to, as Venus goes of to either have sex with a zebra or die by it, it is not clear. By way of her unseen death, Venus provides a common connection of love and death as well as the knot of not being ever able to know how things end, the specifics of death (what the brothers are trying to understand) nor the beginning, the rising from the ooze.
If, following Badiou, we are capable of escaping the gravity of our bestial nature through a kind of errant immortality, then in what ways do we turn back to the animal?
/4/ - Battles or separation unraveled
The history channel’s recent special Life After Humans, wonders what would happen if every human on the planet was to up and leave. The show devotes most of its time to structural decay and the inevitable rampancy of animals after our sudden departure but also shows the severity of our current impact on them in myriad ways. For one, the special talked of how roads violently carve up the migration paths of many animals, most notably bears.
Warner Hertzog’s Grizzly Man is, at least partially, about a failed attempt to return to nature. The film follows Timothy Treadwell, an animal enthusiast who, along with his girlfriend, was found eaten alive by bears - his watch ticking on a disembodied hand. Treadwell, as well as various other animal hunters, many of which seem to care far less about conservation than he did, are written off, particularly when they die, as fools who tested the mettle of Mother Nature and hence none of us should be surprised.
Returning to Life After Humans, there is an ever present motif in disaster and apocalyptic/post apocalyptic films - that of the animals once enslaved, turning back to nature or perhaps, more accurately, reasserting their nature despite their bonds. The deer wondering through the abandoned school, the horse and carriage wondering without driver or passenger. Is this suggestive of a naive return to nature, to some harmony?
The very concept of nature itself, seen through the eyes of humans, is unnatural, such as when Lacan articulates the concept of antiphusis or anti-nature. As Lacanians such as Adrian Johnston and Lorenzo Chisea have discussed, human existence is shot through with the symbolic from the moment of our birth. Just as there is something always already ruined about humans (as animals at least) there is always the bit of the beast that cannot be erased from the animal - that glimmer of hunger or chance at escape which remains. The weighing question is the same that is at the end of the film Equus: who is it that really has the bit in the mouth?
/1/ - On education
Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster is a text that has been throughly dissected for its pedagogical uses. In the book Ranciere documents the intellectual adventures of Joseph Jacotot, a man who in the 18th and 19th centuries, struggled to further his views of intellectual emancipation.
Jacotot, who due to the dominating politics of the time, was forced to teach students who spoke a language he did not know. Using an interpreter Jacotot instructed the students to read a bilingual edition of a book and then, through their reading, he instructed them to write and think in the French language. Amazed at the results, Jacotot decided on three principles:
1 - All men have equal intelligence
2 - Every man has received from god the ability to instruct himself
3 - Everything is in everything
Jacotot singlehandedly waged war against the Old masters and, in particular, attacked the idea of explication. Jacotot questioned why one mind needed to explain a text to another mind - why couldn’t the mind of the student figure out the text, what did explication do? Jacotot went on to argue that parents could teach their children subjects they didn’t know - all that was needed was that these new instructors could verify not the details of the particular knowledge, but that the student is confident in their knowledge.
If there is one concern in Ranciere’s description of Jacotot’s intellectual adventures it is that the temptation towards home schooling is too great. Immediately the connection between Jacotot and the present arises in orbit of the sticky issue of ‘personal responsibility.’ Even a cursory glance at the innards of late capitalism makes it clear that governmental bodies have, in order to justify their disintegration of social programs, risen the stakes for personal responsibility when it comes to parenting. With the burden shifted more and more towards the parents, the governments operating within late capitalism can move more money into defense, war mongering and the like, despite their official stance of caring for American families and the ‘children of the future.’
Ranciere states that universal teaching, the form of education which emancipates the individual, cannot be systematized or set within the status quo in any way - universal teaching cannot be that which is utilized by the various orders of society. Can parents of children or any non-official orator successful take on the task of intellectual emancipation, how is it even possible that any sort of cerebral equality can be saved in the current moment?
/2/ - The desacrilization of everything
Jacotot’s first statement, that everyone is equally intelligent, appears as a pill harder and harder to swallow. The simple growth of population presents us with more and more opportunities to be in the discomforting position of being overwhelmed by stupidity. The vast media machines of late capitalism make this only more obvious via television and internet. While it may be more broadly further validation of Baudrillard’s paranoic warnings about ‘values last tango,’ the discursive treatment of love in the aforementioned media spaces is exceptionally troubling when it comes to knowledge.
VH1 may be the bastion of such worry - I Love New York, Flavor of Love, Rock of Love and so forth, expose the failure of individuals taking love seriously. Here Lacan’s early indictment of love as fundamentally narcissitic is apt - such non-subjects throw love in a piebald construction of sexual favors, games and contests. The sliver of truth here is the fact, that I have discussed on numerous occasions, that love cannot be approached directly. Such TV shows however attempt to provoke love accidentally.
The excessively pathetic competitions on such programs beg a stamp of simple stupidity on the majority of humanity and makes the audience question the Jacotot’s assertion regarding the equality of intelligence. All joking aside, how does one explain the behavoir of contestants who are willing to strip for a burned out rockstar who was in a one hit wonder band? The traditional response would be because ‘they don’t know any better,’ thereby invoking the standard Marxist argument - that they do not know what they do (to paraphrase christ). Zizek among others have pointed out the limitations of such an articulation of ideology and have suggested, in its place, a more fetishistic attitude as the core of ideology - that instead of ‘they are doing but they don’t know they are doing it’ it becomes ‘they know they are doing it but they do it anyways.’
This kind of distanced enjoyment is fairly obvious - we enjoy junk TV, tabloids, trashy magazines et cetera by maintaining a kind of superiority to the document - we assert that we are not the intended audience, that unlike the others who enjoy such garbage earnestly, we are enjoying it ironically.
So how are not simply in a cultural quagmire, a simple mess of decayed meaning? In Manifesto for Philosophy, one of his earlier texts, Badiou writes:
“for Marx, and for us, desacrilization is not in the least nihilistic, insofar as ‘nihilism’ must signify that which declares that the access to being and truth is impossible. On the contrary, desacrilization is a necessary condition for the disclosing of such an approach to thought. It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital: it exposes the pure multiple as the foundation of presentation; it denounces every effect of One as a simple, precarious configuration; it dismisses the symbolic representations in which the bond found a semblance of being. That this destitution operates in the most complete barbarity must not conceal its properly ontological virtue” (p. 56-57).
/3/ - Everything is in everything and everything is ruined
To take Badiou’s statement alongside Jacotot’s, we may find new fuel to pursue cultural studies, but with the fact in mind that the dissection of difference the pop cultural gestalt, is meaningless. What is important, and what is arguably the point of this blog, is to attempt to find the bits of junk culture that speak to various dimensions of ontology. Yet it is not simply ineffectual post-modernists who are the challengers here but there is also a group of several lesser known philosophers working in France who are an interesting threat to ontology as meaning or meaning as ontology as an equation.
Francois Laruelle’s work is proudly called non-philosophy, a philosophy that proudly ignores and rejects classic weighty philosophical issues such as ethics, aesthetics, being et cetera. Laruelle states that he is attempting to develop a science of philosophy, a transcendental approach to philosophy itself. Ray Brassier’s short introductory piece on Laruelle, “Axiomatic Heresy: The non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle,” categories Laruelle’s work as the zenith of formal invention, of being the best example of how a thinker is revolutionary because of how they same something and not what they talk about. Brassier ends his text with the following:
“Consequently, if non-philosophy can be contrasted to the postmodern pragmatist’s ’supermarket trolley’ approach to philosophy, where the philosophical consumer’s personal predilections provide the sole criterion for choosing between competing philosophies, and where the academy now figures as a sort of intellectual superstore, it is not as yet another theoretical novelty - the latest fad, the next big thing - but as a means of turning the practice of philosophy itself into an exercise in perpetual invention.”
In an interview, though really more a debate, with Derrida, Laruelle voids the distinction, made by several philosophers, most notably in recent times by Badiou, of classical philosophy from critical philosophy. The split is usually placed at the time of Kant’s self proclaimed Copernican revolution, his attack on both the rationalist and empiricist traditions which led him to create a more mind centered model of the universe.
Brassier himself is involved in an all together different philosophical movement - speculative realism which is similarly hostile to Kant’s critical philosophy and his belief that human thought is embedded in and determines the world around us. Quentin Meillassoux, another speculative realist, argues that Kant’s move allows philosophers to avoid determining the pre-human world, the ancestral world as he terms it.
/4/ - Swamp of Correlations
Both the approach of non-philosophy and the speculative realists, see too much connection, or perhaps too much unity, among various current philosophies. There does seem to be some currency in Brassier’s derogatory comment surrounding the academy - that it has become an intellectual super store, where students pick and choose based on their own ‘personal predilections.’ Yet, at the same time, Brassier seems to be stupefying the students participating in the academic machine. Taking Jacotot’s second and third axioms, doesn’t the cross pollination of various theoretical endeavors allow for some sort of infant novelty, doesn’t it open space for a thinker, in utero, to take a stab at the greats?
Furthermore, Brassier does not mention how the status of various modes of thought require a more or less indirect approach depending upon the academic institution. In the American higher education milieu, it can be quite difficult to study continental theory directly - often the only option is to approach it through another discipline such as literature, geography, social studies and the like.
It must be accepted that everyone is able, if not always willing, to instruct themselves, to learn. If, as Zizek quips in Astra Taylor’s documentary about him, ‘we all accept that global capitalism is here to stay,’ it is difficult to imagine a way in which the desire to self teach can be creatively galvanized. While capitalism, as Badiou says, makes the pure multiple clear, it also allows for the allusion of various non-events, in the case of random popularity and celebrity.
Ultimately there must be some radical division between personal responsibility and a feverish desire to self fashion. If there is any kernel of hope, or any seed of destruction in late capitalism, it is the capacity to increase the amount of one’s free time, as strange as that may seem given the connected state of business, and work towards something that doesn’t guarantee personal glory. At the closing of his interesting text Deep Time of the Media, Siegfried Zielinksi has an interesting example of this: the open software movement. To paraphrase him - there needs to be a search for ’serious wasteful activity.
/1/ - Zizek in Love
Previously, I have discussed the following, but while the initial concerns are the same, the passage thereafter diverges greatly.
At the start of Astra Taylor’s Zizek!, the manic philosopher, clearly over heated, explains how love is “formally evil.” Zizek points out that in love, a subject picks out another imperfect subject to raise above all else; everything in the universe is forfeit for the sake of the object of love.
Zizek also comments on how he finds the concept of “‘universal love’ disgusting” and that the only proper attitude towards the world is hatred or apathy. In his essay “A Plea for Ethical Violence,” Zizek goes as far as to say that a kind of radical violence, which cuts universally, is necessary to break through the false sense of universal love, of vacuous tolerance that dominates current discourse.
Sigi Jottkandt, in an essay in Lacan: The Silent Partners, writes that the response to this tolerant and empty form of universal love should not be an ethical violence as Zizek suggests, but more love. Jotkandt suggests that the sentimentality of a kind of ethical love takes the form of a superegoic demand of ‘Love me!’ Here the parallel to Zizek’s comment in Zizek! and elsewhere in his work that capitalism demands us to enjoy is of great interest.
Ultimately, Jottkandt’s response to the call for more love is to respond with ‘I will love you no matter what’ (p. 284). In the collection Sexuation, Alenka Zupancic states that Lacan’s definition of love is when the object you look at, the object of your affection, looks back at you, when it ‘winks’ at you. “You either run away or fall, that is, resubjectivize accordingly” (p. 283, Sexuation). To discuss love as a threat proper, we must move to the loving two.
/2/ -Object…
Discussing love outside the broader social context and speaking only of the two loving subjects: love is a violent act. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek states that love is a forced choice, meaning that it is a choice but one that only happens in retro. What is meant by a forced choice? Clearly love cannot be forced, you cannot be threatened into loving someone; what you would get is the appearance of love, the actions that accompany it without the actual state of love. Nor can love be a free choice; we cannot decide to love someone. Returning to Zizek, all we can say is that when we love someone we know that we have already fallen in love with them (p. 166).
The knot of love and freedom here is plopped awkwardly on the table of analysis. The question that arises is whether love is the very embodiment of free will or the very loss of freedom itself, albeit willingly. Here my commonly made point about freedom and Kant appears relevant yet again. As Kant put it, humans are born into a state of fundamental bondage, we are, whether we like it or not, at the mercy of space, time and a whole other range of phenomenal ravages. What gives us our freedom and makes us simultaneously noumenal and phenomenal is that we can choose, to some degree, which phenomenal things are affecting us at any given moment.
Now the complication rears its head: do we see our love as object or subject, do we say no to the object which demands us to love it, or do we as Jottkandt suggests, tell the hostage taker that we will love them beyond death?
As is well known, Lacan first articulated love as a narcissistic fiction which covered over the truth of one’s desire, which aggrandizes the plain, stupid objet petit a, the odd uncomfortable thing which strangely gives us enjoyment with romantic platitudes which wax transcendentally towards the eternal. Or, as the quote goes: “Love is when you give away something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t exist.”
Alenka Zupancic’s “The Case of the Perforated Sheet” in the collection Sexuation opens with a depiction of the moment of love from Lacan’s Le Séminaire livre VIII: Le Transfert:
“Lacan depicts what he calls the ‘metaphor of love’ with this poignant image: a hand reaches out toward a fruit, a flower, or lips which suddenly blaze; its attempt to attain, to draw near, to make the fire burn, is closely connected with the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, the blazing of the lips. But when, in this attempt to attain, to draw near, to make the fire burn, the hand has moved far enough toward the object, another hand springs up from the fruit, from the flower, from the lips, and reaches out to meet our hand, and at this moment our hand freezes in the closed fullness of the fruit, in the open fullness of the flower, in the explosion of the blazing hand. That which occurs at this moment is love.”
As was stated before, love for Lacan is a kind of subjectivizing of the object. Or, apropos Zizek’s statements in the opening pages of The Parallax View, ‘the object objects,’ and it does so in such a way that we must subjectivize it and recode ourselves.
/3/ - …or Subject?
For Badiou, while the objet petit a is imperative to love it is not the ultimate end of it; the object is completely subsumed by the event and the fidelity that potentially results. This is not to say that Badiou rejects the object completely as he designates it “the obscure star” that guides the encounter, but that the object is ‘beneath’ the scene or the dual interpretation of the world. Further explanation of Badiou’s system is necessary here.
According to Badiou, love is always a process of investigations that occurs between two indeterminate, incomplete and non-symmetrical entities which he designates man and woman. Love begins with a chance encounter, eyes meeting across the crowded subway et cetera, and then leads to a declaration of ‘I love you.’ The declaration of love for Badiou begins the labor of love which is neither “trivial nor sublime” (”The Scene of the Two,” p. 7). This labor takes the form of a shared investigation of the universe (p. 6). The “indeterminate disjunction” of the two is the dance of the subjects tarrying with the real of sexual difference as well as the fundamental gap between their separate beings.
In terms of mathematical formulae, Jottkandt and Badiou also clash over the connection between love and politics. Jottkandt states that love is a political act because it transforms the very relations of power. Badiou states a different relation at the end of his text Metapolitics: he states that politics begins where love ends (p. 151). Whereas love proceeds from the one to the infinite, politics moves from the infinite to the one of equality (Ibid.).
/4/ - What is Love?
Following the Lacanian positing and the Badiouian themes, love is somewhere between a trickery of semblance which covers over the vulgarity of desire and the pursuit of a pseudo-transcendental truth. In the first example, love is a form of hallucination whereas in the second it is a militant attitude. In both cases the experience of being in love, the feelings of love, fall out of our analysis - love as affect is lost. To love as Lacan describes means to love something ‘in you more than you,’ but what does that mean for me, the subject? And, in Badiou’s case, the two headed march of love is militant but what does it entail affectively? What we find here is an interplay of affect and sublimity. To address the former we have to loop back to Kant by way of Brian Massumi.
In Parables of the Virtual, Massumi discusses the relation of affect to the body through various thought and body experiments. Apropos cognitive science, Massumi points out that thoughts in the brain are backdated, that there is always a half second delay between our thoughts and our actions but our brains trick us into thinking that the two coincide in the same moment. The radical conclusion of Benjamin Libet was that the brain, in a sense, already thinks the feeling; it already takes steps towards experience prior to experience.
At first, as Massumi discusses, it seemed that Libet had conducted a study which had grossly threatened free will. Making a Kantian move, Libet found that free will was possible in the form of a veto, the mind’s ability to stop the unconsciously created thought from becoming action. It is in this sense that human beings are both noumenal and phenomenal - we are betrayed and saved by the kernel of our being which is directly inaccessible to us (p. 29).
This balance may be why love is love, to put it naively. The affect of love, to assume that affect is a ‘discharge of thought,’ as Copjec puts it, may suggest that love is the very experience of thought, the act of a truly novel idea, a realization of what has been in front of us the whole time. While such an experience is usually aggravating because the knowledge of what we don’t know limits our action, it is not so in the case of love because the lack of that knowledge propels us to act. This is where love as affect comes into play. Massumi again:
“Love: the driving quality of a person’s self-activity that cannot be contained without remainder in any particular domestic context (even in monogamist terms, where love still figures as a kind of qualitative life-glow, a global excess of desired and desiring effect in essential surplus over the banal actuality of life’s conjugal details)” (p. 249).
/5/ - The Sublime labor of love
At the end of “The Scene of the Two,” Badiou quotes the poet Fernando Pessoa: “love is a thought.” As mentioned above, love is, paradoxically, what could be called an obvious novelty, functioning as a kind of unconscious happiness, as Massumi’s ‘glow.’ Or, looking at another definition of affect via Massumi, love is an unconscious openness to emotion (p. 220). While Zizek’s connection of love to a retroactive choice does well for initiation of love, it is Badiou’s work which discusses love’s ongoing relevancy. If we settle with Lacan, love remains, as Copjec points out in Read My Desire, a deception, an ongoing belief that the Other has ’something more’ to offer us, that strange glow Massumi was talking about (p. 148-149). Or worse still, as Copjec discusses by way of Freud in Imagine There’s No Woman, love is at base narcissistic (p. 62). Copjec goes on to say that love, as narcissistic, places the subject in between their drive and the object of their desire.
Narcissism, as Alenka Zupancic has shown, is deeply tied to sublimity, and it is through sublimity that we can end up at Badiou’s view of love. As Zupancic argues, narcissism is not about thinking that one is better than everyone else but that they are better than themselves. In Kant’s description of the sublime, the viewing subject seeing something horrible (an approaching tidal wave, hurricane et cetera) experiences it as sublime because he is at a safe distance. This distance allows the subject to see themselves as above themselves, to effectively separate their consciousness from their body, to imagine their body as being subjected to the powerful force of unbounded nature.
Here is where Badiou and Kant meet. The self distancing, or what could be called mental evacuation, happens because the subject forfeits their mortality, or at the very least recognizes the weakness of their self. Badiou’s definition of love as a march effectively extends this motion of distancing outwards. Where the Lacanian reading of love can only be viewed in terms of subject to object or semblance to semblance, Badiou argues that love is an investigation into the very terms of subjectivity. For Badiou, subjectivity is not the empty form it is for Lacan but is the operator in a procedure, a chaser of errancy.
What separates this from Lacan’s remark that love is a deception covering over the stupidity of desire is that Badiou’s amorous subjects are pursuing the truth of their encounter via an investigation of the world. Such an investigation is objectless since for Badiou, the world is not an object that can be grasped by thought because, contra to Kant, the world is fundamentally incomplete. But, against our discussion of love, love is not at a distance as the sublime object is, but as close as possible. At such close proximity it becomes possible for the loving subjects to see through one another’s being.
Perhaps it is here that Zizek and Badiou come to agreement against Lacan. In a recent video circulating the net, Zizek, strangely dressed in construction worker attire, rambles briefly about love, that we love not despite faults but because of them. The subject is a subject of love because they do the work of love towards an interpretation of the world, and because they recognize, at some level, that the other’s love goes beyond their status as object, and that the subject’s love does the same.
/1/ - At Century’s turn
The very concept of the turn of the century, whether rendered in English or the French fin de siècle, is tethered to one particular time: the shift from the 19th to the 20th century. This temporal lurch appears more drastic then any other because of the technological advances of the time, advents that seem impossible to imagine being without in the current epoch - the radio, telephone, airplane, and the harnessing of electricity.
In contrast to this tectonic of clockwork, it is odd to consider how the passage from the 20th to the 21th century was barely felt. If anything, the eve of the century bottled all its excitement in the knot of anxiety surrounding Y2K. The possibility of the failure of technology seemed, while utterly ridiculous, also banal and quotidian.
Perhaps there is a kind of wide scale technological death-wish here. In the opening pages of The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell tells us that “there is no off switch to the technological.” The telephone expertly embodies this anxiety - it is the constant demand, as Ronell argues, that never leaves us; we are always ready to answer the call, to accept some form of debt.
But before engaging telecommunications too quickly, there is a concern to be raised: how has science, through its deterritorialization lost its very sense of invention, of novelty, of an irruption in knowledge itself?
/2/ - Materialization of movement
It would be difficult not to characterize the contemporary era in terms of a simultaneous fullness and emptiness, of pure excess but an excess of empty shells. What is the interplay between these elements? Let us make the wager that it can be found in the notion of process, or, technological transparency.
Why should we discuss a certain fascination with the sphere? The creation of massive globes (Richardson’s Weather Factory, Reclus’ inside out sphere, Mappariums et cetera) in conjunction with certain geological theories in the realm of pseudo-science (such as hollow earth) suggests a fascination with the materiality of the immaterial. One example is the temporalization of space such as “the great map of mankind”. Fashioned during Victorian times, this world map depicted non-Western countries not in spatial terms but more fundamentally in terms of time. This meant that the ‘less devolved countries’ were seen less as different cultures and more as located in various pasts of western culture.
In addition, theories such as phrenology, physiogomy, and craniometry attempted to materialize differences and, in particular, racial differences. What links these attempts at objective science to the shift from the 19th to the 20th century is their role in the search, as Alain Badiou puts it in his text The Century, for the new man. The errancy of the Fascist, the Nazi, and of all eugenicists was the possibility of a Promethean/utopian project. While Badiou points out how this was the wrong project, it was more noble than today’s science where there are no projects to be pursued but only problems to be solved.
While so many technologies birthed at the turn of the century seemed to eliminate space, they were, in fact, a greater affront to time. Despite the radicalness of such inventions, a certain amount of spatiality was respected. The phone was trapped in place at its desk or booth, small towns grew to service the needs of endless veins of locomotives, and the television and radio gave full rooms of families the injunction to ‘gather ’round.’ Again we have the sphere - the place which moves yet remains.
Perhaps that was the frightening aspect of Tesla’s experiments in Colorado Springs,the lack of wires, the moveability of science which surpassed magic. And to return to the aforementioned Promethean nature, doesn’t the very holding onto there being a place of the gods, keep technology bound to space?
/3/ - The Fifth element or Invention’s plane
While there are countless theories which have been superseded by scientific evidence, several hang about our imaginations. Here I am thinking of aether, and in particular the luminiferous one. The luminiferous aether was the posited medium which, in theory, allowed for the transmission of light. The concept that light could pass through the nothingness of space did not seem to be a possibility at the time. Aether, in a more general sense, was also the fifth element, the air of the god’s ‘clear sky,’ or as the embodiment of quintessence, the non-material material, life itself.
Here Paul Virilio’s almost poetic text Open Sky is of the utmost relevance. The book begins: “The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina. From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to ultra-sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency” (p.1). In a kind of reversal, Virilio goes on to argue that in the current time, contrary to the previous century, we have given time its own sense of matter; time has become the only sense of space.
Another venue to examine the relation of the material and the immaterial during the turn of the century is the awkward co- inhabitation of science and mysticism. Would it be completely ridiculous to find a connection between the rise of spiritualism, the belief that god and spirits can be directly communicated with, and the birth of the telephone?
To bring up an example I have used before - Hegel, discussing physiogomy in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, makes the odd statement that ‘the spirit is a bone,’ suggesting the coincidence of opposites in materiality and immateriality. As Zizek argues in The Sublime Object of Ideology, this coincidence has to do with the bone, and in particular the skull, embodying the very failure of being a subject, the subject’s deadness (p. 208). Spirit and materiality are seen through the act of ‘looking awry’ or through Zizek’s amended definition of parallax.
At the same time, the century seemed bent on the concept of the performance as sham, the grift, as well as the belief in magic as magic. This brings us to the film The Prestige.
/4/- The Secret or the Pledge, the Turn and the Prestige
While k-Punk has, some time ago, discussed The Prestige in terms of the secret, the most important aspect is of course found in the film’s end. The final lesson of the film is that we, in our current epoch, wish to believe the infallibility of science which, in a sense, divides science from the notion of invention itself. Without giving too much away, the film’s final point concerns our willingness to completely disregard magic and accept the logical explanation. But the important caveat here is that our viewing the film with a certain amount of dismissal of magic brings with it a view of technology - that it can no longer accomplish novelty - that it is only, in the current era, capable of slow, incremental changes, or as Badiou put it, fixes to a problem and not projects. How can we better explain how the appearance of novelty, of the Event, functions in the field of science?
For Badiou, science is one of four fields in which new truths emerge. The following is an extended passage from Being and Event:
“When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand — ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?” (p. 401).
The question that Badiou is asking, in his own terms, is how does one move from the indiscernible, from the obscure object of invention, to the undecidable, to the point where one must decide to act in regards to the truth of one’s discovery. Something is knowable in the situation, through some procedure (in the case of the above story calculation based on gravitational discrepancies) that connects what is known to the truth of the situation which is must be forced (Badiou borrows the term of forcing from the Mathematician Paul Cohen) into the situation.
To bring this to the category of invention, one need only take a brief look at the writings of Brian Massumi. In Parables for the Virtual, he writes: “a true invention is an object that precedes its utility [...] with invention, the perceptual direction of travel between the poles of necessity and utility, between the intelligence and instrumentality, possibility and reason, is reversed” (p. 96). An invention “precedes and produces its own possibility” (p. 96).
/5/ - The call, the ring of the phone
Taking another note of Massumi’s - invention- and, in particular, the process, is always analog (p. 147). Wasn’t the turn of the century about the revolt of process, of our rejection of process? The intimacies of process seem to fall close to the dreams of the project- the details of process instill in us the very impossibility of the project.
So where does this leave us: what is the state of invention? Near the end of his well known text Simulacra and Simulation, in the chapter Value’s Last Tango, Baudrillard suggests that all that we have is the foolish hope that the very territory where the transreal and the transfinite exist disappears. This is all we have if we wish for a kind of return to meaning, a return to value in a time of an excess of information.
Returning to Ronell’s Telephone Book, the notion of the call, and in particular the call to act, is paramount. Ronell works through Heidegger’s embarrassing Spiegel interview, relating it to his philosophical works. In particular Ronell discusses Being-guilty in relation to being-there. She argues that the call, which is both beyond and over one (p. 33) when answered makes one guilty (p. 37). To want to answer the call, one must already be in the state of being-guilty, one must be willing to, in a more literal sense, accept the charges.
Ronell makes clear that this being guilty has to do with a simultaneous over-proximity and great distance from the Other as such. Bashing ‘paranoid’ theorists of technology such as Virilio, De Landa, Zizek and Ronell, Jerry Flieger asserts that hypervisibility and technology are not capable of erasing human existence as it has been. Flieger states that the anxiety over technology is simply another example of ‘paranoid knowledge,’ of looking too awry at reality (Is Oedipus Online?, p. 88).
The greater threat, it seems, is not the human mind and body at the altar of cybernetics, but the very concept of technology as a threat to itself. It is not frightening how humanity and technology, how flesh and circuitry, will be melded, but how such a thought displaces the place of invention itself. The risk is science becoming primarily a technique of extension, instead of one of knowledge’s explosion.
/1/ - Exaltation of the Ordinary
What is so terribly strange about the musical film? Musicals, on one level or another, seem to sensationalize the mundane (to borrow a phrase from a friend), they galvanize the sad pointless tidbits of existence. Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg goes even beyond this in that instead of having musical numbers weaved into the narrative, the entire narrative is musical, every single piece of dialog is sung. Whereas musical numbers tend to appear to highlight a particular event or feeling, the sing song quality to every moment in Umbrellas suggests a celebration of the very attempt at normalcy, of the necessity of formalization, the need, despite potential tragedy and disaster, to keep the world at a proper distance.
The truly odd and amazing accomplishment of the film is that it refuses to explode in a typically tragic event - every step that would allow, and even demand, a kind of horrible occurrence is muted, the characters refuse to raise it to the level of the tragic proper. Yet, at the same time, Umbrellas is nowhere close to being a comedy - if anything the film is tragic in that it never reaches the heights to allow a tragic fall, it’s fall is from itself, from it’s own inability to elevate itself. In a sense Umbrellas is tragic in the same way Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is romantic - it is the circling of the frame of its given genre which gives it it’s power, the magic of the motions devoid of the common ‘material results.’
This elevation is mirrored in the very formal frames of the film itself. In the opening shot we see Cherbourg in the distance and then we move upwards and then look down as the rain starts (seemingly falling right from our point of view) as people begin to pass by. If one watches closely the scene tends to alternate between people with umbrellas and those without - most of those with presumably being female whereas most if not all the males are walking bikes (let it be known that the gentleman of the story, Guy, bikes to meet Geneviève who works at an umbrella shop) only in the last few seconds does an umbrella user and a bicyclist pass by one another ever so briefly. The crane shot is repeated near the end of the film, where after Geneviève and Guy see each other for the last time we ascend awkward backwards into darkness. The very shot itself echoes the larger feel of the film - a kind of ‘calculated charm’ as the reviewer Johnathan Rosenbaum puts it.
Is the formality of love then a kind of required misery - as shown in the character of Roland Cassard? Geneviève’s mother points out that he is a real man who ‘has lived and suffered’ (and, in fact, Demy’s previous film Lola, focused on the Cassard’s disastrous relationship.) This point seems to be raised any time a character emphasizes anyone of the particular bon jours or au demains in the film - the devastatingly casual just seethes under every surface. The last point to be made here as just as Guy and Geneviève lay in bed to have their one and only night together we get three shots of places they had stood previously and kissed. The places are doorways and hallways (a similarly odd technique is used when Cassard is describing his failed romance with Lola - the camera cuts away to an empty stair case and we get a long unbroken shot of the shops that stand at the top of it) again speaking to the feeling of simply ‘going through the motions’ in that they literally progressed to that point (Guy’s bed, that particular point in space) as well as following the ‘next step’ in a relationship - that of sexual intimacy.
/2/ - The absence of Dance
If the music of Umbrellas is a performance, something that is purposefully staged and set apart from the rest of the narrative, it should be no surprise then that the film is also devoid of one of the musical staples - the dance. Maybe dance has become too casual, the cerebral weight of it has dimmed a bit, it’s sunken into a crassness, in Marla Singer’s terms via Fight Club “A condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night. Then, you throw it away… the condom, I mean, not the stranger.” Alain Badiou’s spectacular text “Dance as a metaphor for thought” in his collection Handbook of Inaesthetics, argues for a relatively complex look at dance as a form of art. In a proper Nietzschean fashion, Badiou places dance as a kind of pure becoming, the art of ‘the body before the body’ the art of innocence. If one follows Badiou in this way, if dance is the ‘wheel which turns itself’ as well as a thought ‘before it is named’ than where do the massive displays of Busby Berkeley sit with us?
Berkeley’s extravagant and geometrically determined displays, have, in the eyes of many cinematic scholars, spoken to a kind of underhanded socialism, a proto-communism akin to the writings of John Steinbeck, where during the great depression the socialist/communist temptation was at its strongest. Badiou argues that, in regards to dance, that the music doesn’t necessarily support the dance, as the common perception might be, but instead that music marks the silence of the body. In other words, the music simply contrasts the nameless, silence of the dancing body, the music covers over the intense silence of the innocence of the dancing form.
Badiou makes an important distinction which is pivotal for our discussion here, a difference between theater and dance. Whereas dance completely disregards time in the wake of space, theater is utterly considered with time, the structure of the narrative. (Isn’t tragedy proper, as we’ve mentioned, always possible only through bad timing, the missed opportunity, the tragic miscommunication?) Badiou goes on to quote the poet Mallarme who states that dance is ‘a poem set free of any scribe’s apparatus’ and also that the ‘dancer does not dance’ simply because the dance is subtracts form itself, it is utterly formless. Badiou beautifully explains Mallarme’s statement in a passage that I will quote at length here:
“the ‘true’ dancer must never appear to know the dance that she dances. Her knowledge (which is technical, immense, and painfully acquired) is traversed, as null, by the pure emergence of her gesture. ‘The dancer does not dance’ means that what one sees is at no point the realization of a preexisting knowledge, even though knowledge is, through and through, its matter or support. The dancer is the miraculous forgetting of her own knowledge of dance. She does not execute the dance, but is this restrained intensity that manifests the gesture’s indecesion. In truth, the dancer abolishes every known dance because she disposes of her body as if it were invented. So that the spectacle of dance is the body subtracted from every knowledge of a body, the body as disclosure” (p. 66).
If music can be said to cover over the horrible silence of existence, (here is the safety of love, the comfort of its twoness) then dance is about the very invention that love brings, that which emerges as the very feeling of emergence itself - that which creates despite the familiar framework which love exists in. Here is the oddness of Badiou’s ’scene of two’, the twoness that defines love. But first let us move outwards to a larger kind of formalization dealt with by the musical genre, that of economic difference.
/3/ - Class and Love
In the aforementioned Rosenbaum review of Umbrellas, there is a very interesting observation:
“The name of the Esso station is Escale Cherbourgeoise; this means literally “Cherbourgian Stopover,” but if we consider that escalader means “to scale or to climb” and escalier means “stairway,” we can read traces of a buried pun: “a bourgeois step up.” Guy has become comfortably middle-class, Genevieve has become upper-class, and the class difference between them seems even more unbridgeable than it was before. And as for the Esso sign that gave me so much trouble, what better indication could there be of the Americanization of small-town France, a simple fact of everyday life that this movie treats like any other? Product placement or not, it has the ring of absolute truth.”
It seems almost unnecessary to mention how pivotal class difference plays into the role of the musical though at times it may seem secondary to familial/racial difference a la West Side Story. The notion of class difference in the musical can be seen in at least two major ways - in the literal level with My Fair Lady and as the dominant metaphorical undercurrent in The Wizard of Oz. In My Fair Lady, the pompous linguist Henry Higgins shows that he can raise a poor flower girl with a Cockney accent to the status of the belle of the ball. The ending of the film and the play differ in that Eliza, the flower girl, leaves Henry and does not return to him originally but in several versions, including the film version pictured above, Eliza and Henry seem to reconcile. The original ending is important to maintain and it places the work alongside Dickens’ Great Expectations.
In both works it is the very failure of the lower class characters (Pip and Eliza) to become ‘great’ or ‘upper class’ that makes them praise worthy. (Here we have Mladen Dolar’s argument apropos Althusser, and contra Butler, that the subject emerges not through interpellation but it’s very failure. The unique qualities of a person emerge at the point they fail to become a particular kind of person, or embody an occupation, role etc.)
In the musical film The Wizard of Oz the themes of class are submerged and do to some changes from the book to the film are almost erases altogether. The largest issue here being the change from Dorothy having silver shoes (supposedly representing the virtues of silver coinage) to ruby read (to appear more brilliant in contrast to the yellow brick road). Many folks have commented on how the text represents the crisis of the gold standard (oz standing for ounce) and how economic depression had hurt the farmer (the scarecrow, unable to think his way out) the worker (the tinman, dehumanized, without a heart) and the average naive folk (Dorothy, just trying to find her way home). Both historians and economists have argued that Dorothy attempts to take silver down the path of gold (the slippers down the yellow brick road) to get silver coinage to help the poor and, at the same time, to show the fradulent meaninglessness of paper money (the emerald city and the Wizard).
The strange feeling of the music in The Wizard of Oz seems to have that familiar effect of covering over the horrible. In a similar fashion the dancing in the film seems so stilted and robotic that in the wake of their situation it all seems to painful - it’s a film about all those caught in between the horrid industrials of the East and West. How do we bring this all back to love? The role of class in the musical illustrates the danger of love falling too far into the greater realm of society. Although all our existence is inherently social (looking at Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Freud etc.) there remains a severe danger for love to fall too far outside, to become an outside looking in. My thoughts on this have been expressed thoroughly here. Let’s begin our descent into the morass of love and the musical.
/4/ - Amorous procedures as dance numbers
In his difficult but breathtaking text Metapolitics
Probably the most beautiful notion of love that Badiou discusses is that it is an ‘investigation about the sharing of the universe’, it is a questioning of a shared disjunction. That is why love is never about ‘how is it that we are here together’ but more importantly ‘how is the universe how it is with us together, what does our twoness (which is a One but never a one without disjunction, disagreement) say about the world?’ Whereas in the psychoanalytic realm love is a sort of retroactive construction to give consistency to our desire, Badiou’s definition is an infinite striving towards an impossible consistency, an understanding of the world through the long march of love.
So what about the musical? The theater, as Badiou notes in The Handbook of Inaesthetics, is an amalgamation that is the ‘positive opposite of dance.’ Whereas dance is about subtraction, the theater (the musical here) is all about excess. Someone must of said love is a dance - while the motions are so familiar and rehearsed, every formation of love appears from out of nowhere, descends either clumsily or angelically from the void. The theater, the musical then, is about this gesture of unique singularity (the approach, the encounter of chance) being caught in the mess of the world - we compensate for its potential loss with music, we fear for the larger monsters that may claim us (economics, distance, time etc) but then why does the musical so often seem so happy, so unfettered by the gloom of potential impossibility? Isn’t this what Badiou means when he says dance is not an art but the very possibility of art embodied? The body, in dance, exhibits an ‘exact vertigo’ as he puts it, completely free but free because of its intense restraint. Isn’t this the same in the encounter, in that moment where all seems possible when the glance is exchanged, the other examined from far, isn’t it necessary that we proceed with caution, that we act as if we know nothing of the possibilities?
/5/ - To end incompletely
So let us return to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. If the film is a kind of self abortive tragedy (in that its great fall is its very own inability to achieve that height which to fall from) then does it really exhibit the excess of the theater that Badiou so lavishly illustrates? The film seems to celebrate not just the frame of romance, the sing song quality of polite conversation, the motions of living, but more the tension between the weight of the world and the strange and intense possibility that arises from our own hope and resolve. Because the film refuses to show us the proper beginning of Guy and Geneviève’s relationship as well as a definitive end (of sorts) we should take the film to be romantic in its very attempt at trying to be romantic. While the motions of dating (or how ever you wish to call the escalation of intimacy) can be trying and tired, the point is that the mode of transit is purposeful indirect, intentionally askew and sideways.
Neither the chance of the initial encounter nor the potential infinite and shared interpretation of the world can be encapsulated by the frame of formality, but they are insistently pointed towards, suggested and outlined through such frames. On one level, perhaps, it stops us from getting too carried way but on the other hand, it allows to speculate and it highlights our own romantic and wonderfully foolish inclinations every time we shake or shatter that framework. The formality, whether or not it is as colorful as it is in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, ultimately serves as the ground from which to divide ourselves in the start of the dance which leads us to the flurry of the musical, the theater.
The formalization of love stands as the island which allows us to tip ever so precariously towards the impossibility of the encounter which allows the potential labor of love o