wuhan scraggly arequipa threaten malpractice

nightcap bootes advice? threaten, symposium polymer.
mirfak adsorb naive technion indefensible then, symposium
filbert filbert shatter odysseus virtuous.

jagging abbot scraggly

polymer wondrous bootes? spoonful, assay infant.
assay bootes carport confiscate arequipa assay, symposium
nightcap wondrous staff assay straddle.

mirfak technion marco

odysseus amanita onetime? investigate, anhydrite lafayette.

mcmillan amanita

***

***

At 1:40 p.m. on August 3, my friend Tony received the poem-like block of text above in an email from one “Anderson Petty.” Formally and from far away, the text looks like poem fallen from The New Yorker—visually reminiscent of a particular sort of Glück, maybe—losing in the fall the tiret that precedes the author’s name and all its capital letters, but otherwise conforming quite nicely to the conventions of contemporary verse. Over the years, Tony and I have made a habit of exchanging spam emails that point outside themselves to a phantom author, usually a phantom poet, in the way this one does, emails whose forms suggest premeditation and whose distinctive juxtaposition of words and phrases seem to want to insist that some organizing consciousness, however inept or addled or incoherent, answers for their creation. Positing in jest that each of these texts exists a creation of a particular consciousness allows us to imagine, to caricature, the minds of these phantom poets as postmodern wastelands of cliches, curios and all things kinky. In reality, of course, even the more interpretable and provocative of the spam emails we exchange have no authors. The onus and responsibility of making meaning from them lies squarely within our own cluttered postmodern mental wastelands. At least until we can track down the artificial intelligence writing under the pseudonym McMillan Amanita.

***

***

***

Jürgen Habermas‘s lecture at Stanford in commemoration of Richard Rorty on November 2, 2007, was a lucid recitation of Rorty’s career as a linguistic and political philosopher. It was the best such recitation I’ve come across in print or in person (a point made by the chair of Stanford’s philosophy department in a fawning non-question question during the Q&A), but given the colon-rich title of the event—“And to define America, her athletic democracy: Richard Rorty: Philosopher and Language Shaper”—I was expecting synthesis rather than summary. More specifically, I anticipated that Habermas, with his unique perspective on Rorty’s work, would make an attempt to elucidate (or, depending on what he took to be the sophistication of his audience, problematize) the stuff astride those conspicuous colons. But he didn’t. Between the two idioms in which the event was advertised—as a “lecture” (an academic idiom) “in commemoration” of Rorty (an elegiac idiom)—Habermas chose to lean heavily toward the second, the elegiac, in the form of hewing to Rorty’s life and work to the exclusion of other topics and ultimately to the extent that Habermas could have been anyone, a generic if eloquent deliverer of Rorty’s biography and intellectual lineage. Habermas wasn’t Habermas as Habermas, the thinker with unique ideas that engage uniquely with Rorty’s; he was our leader in group tribute. And so man who asked Habermas, at the conclusion of his remarks, a question about his relative silence on how the new prominence of new media might affect his thinking about the public sphere was told, by Habermas, that such a question was inappropriate, that we were “here to talk about Dick” [1].

Habermas’s resoluteness in forgetting himself as himself was pointed up by a parallel phenomenon in the woman sitting to my left, who, in the presence of Habermas the man, ignored the man to seek his image, or rather dozens of his images. She scrolled through her search results, eyes flitting from photo to photo, periodically lurching incredulously to the stage and the man and spilling just as incredulously back down the pictures. After ten or so minutes of this, apparently unsatisfied, she closed her laptop, and after a final glance at Habermas the man, or rather at Habermas the anonymous but articulate medium of tribute, she nestled her head between the shoulder and chest of the comely man to her left and fell quickly asleep.

***

[1] Intellectually, this is a perfectly fair question to ask Habermas, who has not said much on those matters, but on whose theories the world’s changing dynamics of communication do unquestionably have an impact. Perhaps the questioner was a Habermasian seeking a supplement to Habermas’s theories, a palliative to ease his doubts about Habermas’s technological fluency until Habermas himself could get around to demonstrating the relevance and facility of his theories in our new media environment. Whether hostilely skeptical or just seeking that palliative, the man was put down by the crowd’s collective groan, whose displeasure at his existence was palpable.

***

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

***

Mt. Hope Elementary School, c. 1990

***

The first iteration of my elementary school, Mt. Hope Elementary, located in an unincorporated pseudoagrarian area of St. Charles County, Missouri, was built from logs in the mid-1800s. That building now stands as a touristy testament to the grit of pioneer life, on the site of the historic Daniel Boone Home in Defiance, Missouri—a half hour or so from the school’s original site, which is close enough to allow for field trips, though we never took one there.

Mt. Hope Field trips in my time there were feverishly anticipated. “Six Flags?” someone speculates in November, still stuck in summer. Scenarios offered in the winter land us indoors: the Magic House, the Science Center, Tumble Drum, or—horror of horrors—the St. Louis Art Museum. With the spring came a desire to see something I approximate now as nature-in-action. Grant’s Farm (formerly Ulysses S. Grant’s actual farm; for our purposes, a large petting zoo), the St. Louis Zoo (one of only four in the country to not charge admission, and one of the best), and the Missouri Botanical Gardens were frequent springtime conjectures.

I think now that the springtime tilt toward nature in field-trip predictions articulated of sort of commonly felt envy of nature’s ability to haplessly entirely remake itself, to move forward fast enough that the transition must be noticed (which is to say it must be rapid enough to resist perception); the transition, or rather the lack of a clear account of the transition, the stubborn absence of transition, must “surprise” us as the disparity between a “before” weight loss picture and an “after” drastic weight loss picture “surprises” us: we are forced to observe and speculate about the absence of transition. In precisely the same way, when you are on a stroll and come upon a tree that only two weeks ago, when you took same path, sulked beneath piles of snow built up on its branches over the winter, and if today, on this second stroll, the tree offers up hundreds of tiny budding dogwood flowers—if that happens, you cannot but take notice. Cycling through our juvenile psychologies, spring’s flashy burgeoning of life was enviable in its constant material reiteration of its own centrality and importance, immodest in its ability to drastically transform. The transition between winter and spring is unable to be ignored in the way that elementary schoolers want themselves badly to be.

And so nature’s masochistic springtime exertion of near-absolute power cycled through our juvenile psyches and manifested itself as a shared ethereal impulse to get as close to nature as possible, to see if we could cozy up to her, maybe ask her what her secret is—which meant, tangibly, to rub the heads of baby goats at Grant’s Farm or see sea lions do flips and tricks with balls for stinky fish at the zoo. We shared an animal attraction—in our own structured, sheltered, school-sanctioned ways—to the omnipresent, apparently effortless renewal, the blossoming and birthing and beastly humping, the transformation that went everywhere unrivaled, that everywhere successfully insisted on itself. We sought it the way we seek the protection of a schoolyard bully or the friendship of an admired acquaintance or the attention of a crush: approaching slowly and with one eye on the other, taking care to observe convention, to suck up to the bully, to show the acquaintance admiration only indirectly and not appear overly-interested, to ascertain your crush’s interest or lack of interest in you with a cryptic, meticulously folded and carefully placed loose-leaf note. We sought it as we seek the other nebulous things we don’t understand (strength, friendship, love): with institutional insulation; with permission slips.

Unlike nature, we kids were everywhere unsuccessfully insisting on ourselves. In at least one of any number of ways, especially in the later grades, each of us was long done with childhood and straining against its restrictions. Brittany just knew she could make it as an actress if her parents would let her try. John protested that math had nothing to do with the monster trucks he would drive as an adult. Jennifer, bored to tears by remedial lessons, read her own book, Anne of Green Gables or something similarly retrospectively protofeminist, nested in her lap. Billy had for weeks been getting a lot of something called “head”—a concept still unclear to most but by all accounts delightfully transgressive and unbelievably exquisite and therefore the ideal adolescent act—from middle-school girls in some back alleys at the mall. Whatever our reasons, we each longed for nothing so much as we longed for time to speed up so we could set our own agendas—or, at the least, not be condescended to as children. We wanted to just get on with it already: wanted our lives to get to the damn point. The coming of spring enacted for us, made it impossible to deny, a compacted version of the very accelerated maturation and metamorphosis we wanted—and did so with astonishing beauty. It is impossible, especially as a child, not to be awestruck and envious in this situation; impossible not to wish for yourself the transformative power of spring.

Rubbing the head of a goat, seeing sea lions do tricks for stinky dead fish: these weren’t just daylong excursions. They were our consolation prizes for enduring anonymity, for suffering pointless distraction, for wanting to get off by methods other than furtive, feverish masturbation; they were our Thanks for playing! toasters and microwave ovens, our compensation for not being invited to join what seemed to our egocentric psychologies to be an otherwise ubiquitous revolution. In short: they were important.

Or at least I came to think so after fourth grade, during which, a few weeks before field-trip time, Mr. Gettman, our jolly, talented and kind but stern teacher, announced that instead of us “going” on our field trip this year, a field trip would be coming to us—and further, that it would be coming to us in a field. Which meant that “pioneer times” reenactors were to set up shop in the expansive field behind the school and treat the fourth grade to day of butter-churning, washboard-scrubbing, candle-making and outhouse-using. “But that’s not really a field trip Mr. Gettman,” somebody protested, “’cause we’re not really going anywhere and you have to go somewhere for it to be a field trip. Like, somewhere that’s not behind the school…?”

When the day came we went reluctantly out to the field and learned all about pioneer culture. Most of us managed to enjoy ourselves, but the damage, for me, had been done long before the day had begun. The problem wasn’t that we hadn’t physically gone anywhere (though that was the gripe I was best able to articulate at the time). The problem was that in addition to suffering the indignity of not going anywhere—in addition to not having a destination as such—to the extent that we had a “destination” it was a farce, an enactment of the history we’d been reading about and bored with for years. Rather than a recess from our studies, this day was a material projection of them. The actors were contracted to embody historical stereotypes. This they did well, but were still nonetheless clearly fakes: too much like us, wearing too many clothes, too plainly speaking with labored southern accents.

A goat’s head and a trained sea lion presumably remain a goat’s head and a trained sea lion long after you depart the farm and the zoo, but at the end of our fourth-grade field trip, the pioneers stripped off their costumes, toweled off some stinky sweat, scrubbed their hands and faces in the portable miniature Old-West-style well, loaded themselves into two Ford F-150s, a Chevy Malibu and a Toyota Supra, assured the administrators that someone would be back for the large prefab log cabins, and left. What was left wasn’t nature. It wasn’t even history. It was a soccer field dotted with antique wagons mass-manufactured in the mid-80s. Our best chance to finagle a hit of whatever awesome shit nature was on, or at least to take solace in our ecstatic proximity to the awesomely nebulous power of natural transformation, had been stolen from us and supplanted by a bad pun whose excess of abstract meaning only served to underscore the day’s emptiness.

The material remains of that day amounted to the misshapen yellowy candles we’d made by repeatedly dipping lengths of thick string into hot wax. Mine would fit into no candleholder or other suitable vessel I could find in our home. It would not stand on its own, either. I put it in a drawer and didn’t think of it again until five years on, when I visited the Boone Home, in Defiance, for a statewide high-school leadership ra-ra fest. There I saw for the first time the original Mt. Hope schoolhouse, which was so hyperbolically bucolic as to appear itself a patent fake. That night, at home, I got out my shitty, shitty candle, forced its stubborn waxy base into an old dijon mustard jar, and lit it for the first time.

***

schoolhouse, Daniel Boone Home, Defiance, Missouri

***

Always precarious and almost indistinct, real action exists in such a way that it has to be pointed out and emphasized by loud proclamations, rather like the circus ringmaster amplifies his calls and orders a drum roll so that a pirouette on the trapeze—novel and daring, but also extremely fleeting—will not be ignored by the public. Ultimately, the aim of all these constructions is to devote every energy to the present, even if the subjectivation of this present sometimes gets bogged down in the rhetoric of hope. Only the recognition of the fabrication of a present can rally people to the politics of emancipation.

—Alain Badiou, The Century

[T]he Right and the Left are not fighting at the same level. On the one hand, there is an attempt by the Right to articulate various problems that people have into some kind of political imaginary, and on the other hand, there is a retreat by the Left into a purely moral discourse which doesn’t enter into the hegemonic game. [...] The main difficulty of the Left is that the fight today does not take place at that level of the political imaginary. And it relies on a rationalist discourse about rights, conceived in a purely abstract way without entering that hegemonic field, and without that engagement there is no possibility of a progressive political alternative.

Lakoff’s conclusion is that, instead of abhorring the passionate metaphoric language on behalf of the couple of rational argumentation and abstract moralizing, the Left should accept the battle at this terrain and learn to offer more seductive frames. Near the end of his Don’t Think of an Elephant!, Lakoff writes that conservatives “have figured out their own values, principles, and directions, and have gotten them out in the public mind so effectively over the past thirty years that they can evoke them all in a ten-word philosophy: Strong Defense, Free Markets, Lower Taxes, Smaller Government, Family Values.” He proposes a similar ten-word philosophy for liberals: “Stronger America, Broad Prosperity, Better Future, Effective Government, Mutual Responsibility.” The weakness of this alternative was also already noted: while the conservative formula presents what appears as clear choices that demand from us adopting strong and divisive positions (strong defense against the proponents of disarmament; free markets against state regulation; lower taxes against tax-and-spend social programs…), the liberal formula consists of general feel-good phrases nobody is against (who IS against prosperity, better future, effective government?) – what only happens is that violent-passionate engaging rhetorics is replaced by shallow sentimental rhetorics. What is so strange here is that Lakoff, a refined linguist, specialist in semantics, can miss this obvious weakness of his positive formula….

Given her and her husband’s opposition to the Iraq War, the thousands of soldiers and [600,000 Iraqi] civilian deaths, the substantial lessening of the prestige and gravity of the Presidential office, the institution of policies that limit individual liberties, it would seem this should be the moment she’s least proud of her country.

 

Cindy and John McCain

 

***

The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. [...] However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.

with revulsion about prostitution after he brought suit against a Queens company suspected of planning sex tourism trips to Asia. The agency, Big Apple Oriental Tours, had been accused of arranging tours for men seeking sex with prostitutes, some underage, in the Philippines, Thailand and Cambodia. “The company purports to be a traditional travel agency, but through its actions promotes prostitution and the abuse of young women,” Spitzer said.

Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants. And now that his legs have been blown off by a suicide bomber in Fallujah, he never will.

***

Yesterday’s issue of the Washington Post carried a piece on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s recent decision to ask Disney to train its employees to be more sensitive to patient needs after its recent scandal involving manifestly inadequate care for the wounded soldiers it serves. (That the quality of care for U.S. soldiers on U.S. soil is in question in the first place is a testament to the bureaucratic negligence—the Mickey-Mouseness—of this administration.) The enlistment of Disney is momentarily touching but becomes disturbing: at least one thing that is occurring here is a commercialization of the already-controversial Patch Adams school of medicine, whose efficacy has diminishes with institutionalization (i.e., if we try to make everyone laugh no one will “laugh” in “the way we do now” because everyone will always already be laughing—or whatever). We have here not only institutionalization of the Patch Adams school but also, to borrow a corporate solecism, its “monetizing”: making sick people happy now serves simultaneously as a revenue source for Disney—”The Army,” says the Post, “is paying Disney $800,000 to help revamp attitudes at the hospital”—as an advertisement for Disney, and, in that advertisements produce revenue, as a potentially perpetual, self-replicating revenue source for Disney. Yes, I know: it is clichéd and reactionary to lambaste Disney as some sort of capitalist wolf in sheep’s clothes here. But in a very serious way that is at the least an essentially accurate, if admittedly hyperbolic, caricature of what is in fact ocurring: “A video montage of Disney-related images, ranging from Mary Poppins to Pirates of the Caribbean to Hannah Montana,” the Post contines, “was meant to demonstrate the sheer expanse of the Disney empire” (a statement with which the Post itself announces and reiterates that “sheer expanse”). The expansion of that empire is at least as important here as improving patient care. That the Army wants to improve its care for our wounded soldiers is clearly a positive development. But the notion that the foundations of good patient care are best imparted by a theme park tour guide (“Donnelly, who started working for Disney in the summer of 1986 as a guide on Disney World’s Jungle Cruise ride, warmed up the crowd. ‘We’re going to kick it off today with what we call “Sizzle,”‘ he said. ‘Here it comes!’”) is conspicuously, excessively obfuscatory. Walter Reed’s teaching its employees Mickey-Mouse “sizzle” (at considerable profit to Mr. Mouse) here stands in for substantively improving care as such. Big mouse ears cover up rather than cure iniquities. So if you find yourself at Walter Reed, be thankful (and proud) that our federal government has hired an American institution like the Walt Disney Corporation to make you smile while you wait for you substandard healthcare. [1]

***

NOTES

[1] This final sentence was adapted from a similar sentence penned by a good friend of mine—one of my campaign co-chairs, actually—so, people, please: lay to rest right now any ideas you have about discrediting my authenticity. And, okay, to be entirely forthright, the sentence also rings of Atul Gawande’s final paragraph in his July 2007 review of Michael Moore’s Sicko. I have, at much potential risk to myself and my future political career, not sought Gawande’s consent for said ringing. Call it a sign of my moral courage.

***

I – Psychosis

paradigmatic abdication of responsibility

Don’t blame me!

***

William James puzzles through contradictions in the dark

***

There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep-seated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our comprehension.

 

—Terry Eagleton

***

One asks the psychotic, who, like each of us, makes commitments of varying degrees of severity and emotional weight to other individuals, but who, unlike most of us, is dangerously inured to breaking those commitments, “Why are you not doing that thing you have committed do [for me]?”—let’s call this thing “x”—and the psychotic answers unironically (as sincere irony is too conspicuously insincere a conceptual space for psychotics; inhabiting it overtly would be tantamount to advertising psychosis): “Well, to my credit, friend, you know, I’ve never failed to do x except when I was doing things other than x.”

Such a response is not an answer, for it speaks not at all to the question of why the psychotic has not fulfilled his obligation to do x, but instead functions to reinforce the legitimacy of whatever the speaker was doing instead (emailing, smiling a lot, lying, fucking around, stealing, etc.), relative to x or to other, more trivial things he could have been doing, such as, say, watching the Power Rangers kick bad guy butt (“All right, so maybe I wasn’t x-ing,” says the psychotic, “but at least I wasn’t doing something lame like watching Power Rangers!”)—and reinforce it in a way that allows the speaker’s statement, a value-claim, to masquerade as an argument: “This thing other than x was important to me,” the psychotic says, “and because I’m a freethinking post-Enlightenment multiculturalist subject, endowed with ‘sovereignty’ and ‘rights’ and all that, you must except my response! To refuse it would be to insult me as a fellow subject, a fellow player in our egalitarian societal project of engendering perfunctory, unprincipled respect for cultural and individual diversity—so that soon we might be entirely at ease around people of other creeds or colors or sexes or sexual practices)!” Now this—to reinforce particular mindless axioms of contemporary liberal democracy, those of blind employment, of misapplication, of Enlightenment ideals (“equality!” “rationality!”) and identity politics (“As a black/Filipino/Québécois Kansan/lesbian/man, I…”)—is not the aim of the psychotic. His aim is merely to convince that us his actions are justifiable, to get off for not having done x. But clearly, our psychotic’s value-claim, or his employing it in lieu of an argument—the fall back onto himself and his subjective moral sense disguised as an appeal to the universal (“Well it’s not just me…anyone wouldn’t have done x if Power Rangers were on…)—is nothing more than a lark. The psychotic’s psychosis consists precisely in his being unable to recognize this lark for a lark—or, should he recognize it rightly, in his suppressing the prick of conscience he feels at that recognition, in the paralysis created as the psychotic perpetually works to suppress his prick. Psychosis is thus a state of either perpetual ignorance or perpetual disingenuousness; or, rather, it is a slide from ignorance into disingenuousness. And because this disingenuousness has developed in concert with the psychotic individual, because its evolution from ignorance coincides with his evolution from innocence, the psychotic has no recourse to escape.

And so the psychotic’s response here, that he has failed to do x only because there were more important things to do, is a blatant sidestepping of the question—it is a statement about the importance of those “other things” made as though that importance were somehow in dispute. Yet that importance—whether or not watching Power Rangers is an “important” thing to do—is, regardless of whether or not that importance is in dispute, besides the point. Whether we agree that what he was doing other than x is valuable is irrelevant to the question of whether he has done x. In this way an issue that is only tangentially related to the question of what-has-been-done becomes controversial and thereby relevant in a way that consistently relieves the speaker of having to take responsibility for anything. A flashy non-issue (the relative importance of some thing other than x) distracts us from our primary concern: the psychotic’s failure to fulfill his commitment to do x. We have here in the psychotic the psychological equivalent of the small child who, having broken an expensive bottle of wine and stained his mother’s white carpet, points frantically out the window to his licentious older brother, whose fortuitously nonchalant skinnydipping in the neighborhood’s manufactured lake with his latest “homework buddy,” the child hopes, will make his lusty brother, and not himself, the focus of their mother’s ire. The question, to extend this analogy, is not whether the older brother is canoodling with the neighbor, but whether the younger brother has broken the bottle and ruined the carpet. Like the worthwhileness of watching Power Rangers, older boy’s sexcapades, though potentially captivating, are not germane: they are argumentatively immaterial. So our problem with the psychotic is not the obvious one defined in the fable of the boy who cries wolf—in which the lonely boy calls for help in fending off a nonexistent wolf so many times that when a real wolf comes along it is able to gobble him up, for no one now will heed his liar’s cries. Our problem is not that the boy lies. Our problem is rather an inversion of the fairytale’s result: that the psychotic, after “crying wolf” for so long despite there being no wolves, begins himself to believe in the reality of the imagined wolves. Our carpet-staining young child really does see his brother out the window. The psychotic’s bathing-brother equivalent is, in contrast, entirely illusory—and that is precisely psychosis: a mistaking of illusion for reality.

What happens then with our psychotic? Wolves must appear everywhere to corroborate his belief in them, and so he romanticizes the wolves, tells all of us they’re beautiful and in distress and worth saving (for now they’re being attacked! save the wolves!), that saving them is an excellent reason to not do x. He spends such energy in creating and defining his fantastic wolves, on pointing frantically to his fake fires and muggings and kitties-up-trees and skinnydipping siblings, that his focus has become the very distractions he has manufactured. His delusions occupy more and more of his time and his mind, and because each delusion is enmeshed with a real-world situation—i.e., the breaking of the wine bottle—they intertwine with memories and impressions to create a set of disingenuous but seemingly accurate recollections for each given situation, recollections that the psychotic sincerely calls upon and relates to interlocutors when challenged. He insists on the integrity of his recollections—just as anyone else would insist on the integrity of his own. The simulated diversions he creates in excusing his not having done x have become his material reality. For the psychotic, apparitions replace human beings to whom he has committed himself and become his moral reference points.

I am developing an appreciation for the subtlety of psychosis’s proliferation and maintenance. When the psychotic comes upon evidence that he’s operating poorly in the world, he already has a ready-made set of associations to look to for support; and while it may be somewhat clear that relying on them for support is a “bad idea,” in whatever sense, it is a far better idea, or seems so at that time, than completely and forcefully, through an act of will, dismantling that comfortable, supportive network bit by bit. If I were him, confronted with the choice of using a teleportation device to reach the other side of a mountain or, alternately, climbing over it, I would choose the teleportation device, too. For the psychotic, now, the question is no longer whether something is true, but rather how well it fits into his answer to the question “How things are in the world in relation to me?” That is the right question to ask, I think, but the problem is that he doesn’t understand that’s what he’s doing; he doesn’t understand that what he’s doing is building a narrative about how he relates to everything that needs constant reassessment and revision. He has recognized the utility of denying Reality when necessary and constructing one’s own operating-narrative as a pragmatic “replacement,” but he has convinced himself that his operating-narrative is Reality—because he has convinced himself that to admit simulation would be to efface his identity. Insofar as identity has replaced income as the primary marker of difference among groups—insofar as “identity” has maneuvered itself into synonymity with “reality”—in a perverse way, in his eyes, he is being more faithful to reality than anyone else. Remember, his simulations have taken on the weight of the material for him, so that for him, to deny them under pressure would be to do precisely what we accuse him of doing as a psychotic: mistaking/lying about How Things Really Are. In other terms, the psychotic’s postmodern rearing provides him with the tools to tear Reality apart, but the weight of the Enlightenment, of newly-radical Christianity, and, hugely, of Platonism, prevent him from seeing what he’s doing as such, recognizing its moral dubiousness, the adopting a worldview that allows him to be both confident and wrong and pushing forward as a healthier individual. This is the trap from which the psychotic cannot escape. (Just as in politics, literal non-entities like “flip-flopper” take on materiality in effect, they are given the weight of issues actually based in the material—like “healthcare,” which while unquestionably abstract as an “issue,” can be crystallized easily: say, as, a baby dead of a bacterial infection that his parents, for want of insurance, didn’t even try to treat.) The psychotic is a liar who won’t admit himself a liar—not because believes himself to be truthful, but because his spin machine is always already at work in his brain. He lacks the cognitive capacity to recognize the dishonesty and disingenuousness at the center of his thought because that recognition would necessarily need to spring from a thought process defined by the very dishonesty and disingenuousness it ostensibly denounces.

To operate in the world, and especially to speak about it, we must find a middle ground between fidelity to reality and saying something about reality (asking someone to hand you a predominately-blue coat from off the back of a chair, for instance, you likely ask for “the blue coat” rather than “the predominately blue coat,” if not just “the coat”—in short, one can never be faithful to reality because all representations are necessarily distortions). The psychotic employs this sort of postmodern pragmatism just as the rest of us do, but he will not, or if asked to would not, admit to himself that it is a “pragmatism” he is employing. In the name of getting things right, the psychotic has like William James (in Holmes’s words), “turned down the lights so as to give miracles a chance.” The psychotic has done, without irony or reservation, with self-righteousness rather than self-consciousness, something that can only be done responsibly by one whose self-scrutiny reaches paralyzing, Jamesian heights. The psychotic is incapable of sincere (or sincerely severe) self-scrutiny, and is thus incapable of thinking of himself as both a pragmatist and as one who is faithful to “the Real” without feeling uncomfortable about the apparent contradictions. This is another way of putting the primary delusion of the psychotic: that he, as subject, is really the sole object. In his eyes he cannot be merely pragmatic, he cannot see everyone and everything as just so much stuff to be “used,” for that would be too trivial, too “pomo,” too little rooted in his particular Reality—which is to say, too little rooted in the simulacra that have, for the psychotic, usurped concomitantly upon his material reality and his interpersonal commitments. To deny his Reality would mean for the psychotic an ontological seismic shift of the sort suggested by Terry Eagleton: a perniciously subtle rewriting of the very criteria by which the psychotic evaluates his Reality. This transformation would be by definition so radical that were it to occur, the psychotic would not have even noticed his progression from psychosis to the default mode of the subject, the mode occasioned, in a way we will subsequently explore, by universalized psychosis: the paranoid mode.

The year is 1907, one hundred years ago….READ PRINT UNDER PICTURE

Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907 :

Every American citizen needs to read this!

PLEASE KEEP THIS MOVING

***

Independent of its political content, this email and others like it epitomize an historically American of sloppy thinking. Set aside Teddy Roosevelt’s ignorance and narrowmindedness, which is excused by history as a product of his age (set aside, that is, the political dispute over immigration that inspires emails like this one). Set that aside and we still have a ridiculous argument being made here: You should believe such and such because a person (dead or alive, usually long dead) whom we respect or respected in some respects believed such and such. As though it makes any rational sense to substitute the judgment of a man, any man, from 1907 for our own in evaluating massively complex, global social issues like immigration, problems that are themselves products of postmodernity! To put the matter strictly in terms of being clear: “immigration” doesn’t mean in 2008 what it did in 1907, and to endorse Teddy’s “argument” is to implicitly make the absurd assumption that the two are in any way the same thing when scrutinized. They are not. Seeking Teddy’s opinion on this matter makes about as much sense as asking the captain of a 1920s ocean steamliner for advice on how to free the U.S.S. Enterprise from a gravitational eddy. Which is to say it makes so little sense that anyone who suggested it would probably be sent to sickbay for a few psychiatric scans. Ulysses S. Grant’s diagnosis: “It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for those who come after them…. We could not and ought not be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different….” [1]

Yet this sort of absurd “reasoning” simply pours out of conservatives in places like Missouri, which is why it’s increasingly difficult for me to take anything political I receive from (most, certainly not all) people I know in Missouri seriously. That someone would earnestly send along that Teddy graphic with that text indicates at best an intellectual laziness on his part and at worst a disregard for rationality, perhaps a malicious disregard. I don’t think it’s malice, but rather the tendency to passively receive and mindlessly forward nonsensical emails like this one, the tendency to take rhetorical husks like this email to be any sort of evidence of of anything.

Yes: I understand that this particular email might well have been meant to be nothing more than humorous. But how distinct is the line between humor and earnestness here? And where precisely do we locate the humor? In the funny picture? In Roosevelt’s historical ignorance? In the naivete of whomever put it together in the first place? Where? I’ve been listing ways of finding humor in this that mock the email and the original maker—rather than ways that find the email or its maker funny—because I honestly can’t see how else it, that is the email as such, could be in the least funny. Of course we can’t say objectively why this or anything is funny. But I am confident that if you asked most people who forward this to people what precisely they find funny about it, it would not be the feebleness of the email’s message or the thickheadedness of its creator. I imagine that most people who forward this to family and friends don’t find it at all funny—more likely, they find that Roosevelt’s sentiments mirror their own. They don’t think it’s funny, they think it’s correct. But whether or not Roosevelt is “correct” isn’t at issue here; we can’t even speak of “correctness” in this context—Roosevelt has never been to the 21st century, he has no opinion, valid or otherwise, on our current immigration situation. This Roosevelt email is pernicious not because Roosevelt’s sentiments are “wrong” in any grand, atemporal sense, but because it encourages readers to jettison their critical judgment and take Roosevelt’s opinion on this matter seriously as a guide to political and moral engagements with the questions of immigration policy. I do find this dangerous to our ability to seriously address immigration (a political and policy concern); but I find it even more dangerous to the intellectual fiber of our country (a moral concern). Every time someone forwards an email like this one, we all get a little dumber.

***

NOTES

[1] Vollmann, William T. Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Freedom, Violence, and Urgent Means. New York: Ecco, 2003. 307.

***

Just how easy is it to snap Barack’s neck?

***

John, I am blown away by your cogent, rigorous, and truly eloquent (albeit in the Judith Butler sense) response, which came as a relief after the undercooked, logically bereft, and ignorant “argument” to which it was in reply. Reading sentences like this one—“The disjointed rant above is a reactionary, hip response to a moment in history that does not readily fall prey to the cheap and easy cynicism of the disaffected youth who have, for too long, postponed their political responsibilities”—I can see that you not only make your assertions, but have considered the serious arguments against them with as much impartiality as can be expected of anyone, and discarded them for intelligent, substantiated reasons. That sentence and many of your others, do something very much like what I tell my students to think of the word “incontrovertible” as doing: it telling us not only that something “is”—that is, it not only makes a positive assertion, it not only posits something as “veritable,” but carries with it the battle scars of having been tested—it has been challenged with a “contro” and successfully negated the challenge to itself with an “in”—it not only makes a positive assertion: it shows us the process by which it was proven legitimate—just as John shows us in his sentence structure the process by which came to his conclusions, so we may judge not only the conclusions themselves, which are verifiable and unverifiable to equal and therefore negligible degrees, but we may judge also the basic premises that ground those conclusions and the rigorousness of the thought process that undergirds them. This sort of intellectual transparency and goodwill toward ideas, if not their purveyors (the American Apparel comment is pretty low, John, regardless of its accuracy); this sort of convicted, well wrought, solid argumentation is to my mind the hallmark of good thinking.

To it, compare the following response, by Adrienne, to John’s suggestion that Clinton has attempted to coöpt Obama’s “change” mantle:

“He was the candidate for change…so she tried to establish herself as the candidate for change.” This is just untrue, especially with no citation. First of all, any Democratic candidate is campaigning under the assumption of “change” in the context of the nation’s current political climate in Congress. Any Democratic candidate’s proposals for “change” are, by definition, propelling him or her under the campaign for “change.” I am afraid I don’t buy into Obama’s monopoly on the word.

To begin with, we must note that what John says about Obama’s adopting the admittedly purely rhetorical term “change” prior to Clinton doing so is not “just untrue” but absolutely true by any relatively objective measure, as is his contention that Clinton adopted the change mantra only after it was shown to be politically expedient for the Obama campaign. To evince the absurdity of Adrienne’s rejecting that point of John’s for his failure to cite a source, I offer up the this Google search for “clinton adopts ‘change’ obama”—with its approximately 104,000 results (perhaps 20 or so of which are relevant)—as a hypercitation. I imagine a search with verbs other than “adopt” would yield more results, but I think “adopt” alone is sufficient demonstration of my point. To refute John’s account of these candidates’ respective adoptions of “change,” one would have to outright disagree with most all the factions in the American media, not to mention the Canadian and British media. Once can certainly do that, but only at risk of shutting down the conversation altogether on the assumption to everyone else, from the Washington Times to the Times of London, is just plain wrong. I am forced to conclude that Adrienne is either misinformed, informed by biased sources, or intentionally disingenuous in her presentation of the widely-agreed-upon facts. She is here ignorant at best and intellectually psychotic at worst.

That was to begin with, and I don’t really want to go much further. But to be fair to Adrienne, I should actually address her point as such in addition to her introduction to it. She says that Obama doesn’t have a monopoly on the word “change.” This is true, and John doesn’t address it, but the fact that John does not address it is precisely the point. John takes as a premise the meaninglessness of “change” and its multifarious equally-empty buddies. His argument is beyond questioning rhetorical vacuums, which he has long since learned to accept as a defining characteristic of our political discourse and of the postmodern era more generally. What John says is that Clinton saw that that void of a phrase was working for Obama and so adopted it herself. That doesn’t mean that “change” isn’t as meaningless coming out of Obama’s mouth as it is coming out of Clinton’s, and John doesn’t say that it does. Yet you wrote a response to that, to precisely the argument that John did not make and would not make, because to do so would be intellectually irresponsible. It would be immature, that is, to exploit the cliched tenets of most accounts of our postmodern/late capitalist society—that political rhetoric is empty (as in this case); that there is an irresolvable gap between reality and representation; that cause and effect don’t operate in the ways like to think they operate; etc.—as rhetorical tools in themselves. Sadly this practice all too common among people who are intelligent but simply haven’t thought things through rigorously; and it is Adrienne’s practice here. Rather than responding to John’s assertion that if she is upset about Obama’s bankrupt rhetoric she is thereby intellectually bound to be equally upset by Hillary’s equally bankrupt rhetoric, she routes us into the nebulous space of indeterminate rhetoric: “But what does he mean by that?! He’s not really saying anything!” True, but none of them ever say anything. John’s point is that Clinton stole Obama’s not-anything only after she saw it working for him—not that Obama is somehow entitled to a monopoly on the term, nor even that the term is anything but rhetoric. Adrienne exploits the indeterminacy of political rhetoric, a problem and a fact in every political discussion, to indict one single politician. Yet if you want to think critically about these issues, you need to adopt notions like “political rhetoric is radically indeterminate” as premises, not make arguments railing against them as though they’re a novel phenomenon—not fuss and futz around in them as one would in a sandbox—whether out of intentional dishonesty or innocent immaturity.

This is not, to be clear, a personal attack. I don’t think I’ve ever met Adrienne, and I imagine that if I were to, we would get along perfectly fine. (We could, if nothing else, discuss Beckett.) I mean simply to say that if Adrienne—the Adrienne, again, known to me solely from this exchange, who could be entirely unrepresentative—wants to have a serious discussion about this and be taken seriously by intelligent people who take these things seriously, she must rise to a level of argumentative rigor that she has clearly not risen to at present. The idea that we need to be “inspired” by someone in an entirely consuming way (or even to agree with his policies, for that matter) to support him for principled and even policy-oriented reasons, is just nuts, and until that realization becomes a cornerstone of the thought of people like the Adrienne of this note, they won’t have anything legitimate to say about our national discourse. Their understanding of the political and sociological principles that inform that system—again, that the media do x y and z to this and that and what have you; that opinion polls are inaccurate yet perversely have an effect (though we cannot consistently say what effect!) on voting; that people, all people, all of us, usually do not know what we want, and if we do, we probably don’t know how to best go about getting it, etc.—their understanding, in short, of the bedrock principles of our global sociopolitical media ecology, is simply too clumsy.

Adrienne seems to think that I need to “believe” in Barack Obama in some holistic way, to find earnest and unequivocal expression of my spiritual and ideological beliefs and policy desires in his “inspiration,” to be of the opinion that he has significant potential to change this country to an extent most of us have never before imagined to be actually possible. You can deny that possibility all you want, and you may well be right in thinking it will lead nowhere. But—and I excerpt this from John again because, again, I think it’s both a tour-de-force of a summary of the demerits of Adrienne’s argument and a downright beautiful sentence—“The disjointed rant above is a reactionary, hip response to a moment in history that does not readily fall prey to the cheap and easy cynicism of the disaffected youth who have, for too long, postponed their political responsibilities.” I don’t presume to tell anyone what his political responsibilities are, but to the extent that intellectual responsibility coincides with political responsibility in this particular exchange, Adrienne’s argument is one of the least politically responsible pieces of writing I’ve come across. Or, perhaps better, I should say that it is one of the least politically responsible arguments I’ve come across penned by someone who is obviously not a dolt. I’ve made a sincere attempt to take Adrienne’s points seriously, but because they are poorly researched and reactionary, I cannot. This does not mean I think the arguments she’s trying to make—especially those for Clinton’s undeniably stellar qualifications—cannot be made and made well. It means that she does not do them justice.

***

Shortly after posting the note from which this was adapted on Facebook, I was sent an insightful analysis from Kai Stinchcombe that indirectly addresses aspects of Adrienne’s, John’s and my notes with frankness and moral bravery. It is well worth reading.

On All Saints’ Day, seven days out and half the journey accomplished, God boarded the Purdue Victory and acted: Camilla was stricken with acute appendicitis.

The ship’s surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string. The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally been made, with all of false economy’s drear deception, of coated cardboard. After many launderings they persisted as a row of gray stumps posted along the gaping portals of his fly. Though a boutonniere sometimes appeared through some vacancy in his shirt-front, its petals, too, proved to be of paper, and he looked like the kind of man who scrapes foam from the top of a glass of beer with the spine of a dirty comb, and cleans his nails at the table with the tines of his salad fork, which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla’s difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin. That was in the morning.

In the afternoon the Captain came to fetch him, and was greeted by a scream so drawn with terror that even his doughty blood stopped. Leaving the surgeon in what was apparently an epileptic seizure, the Captain decided to attend to the chore of Camilla himself; but as he strode toward the smoking saloon with the ship’s operating kit under his arm, he glanced in again at the surgeon’s porthole. There he saw the surgeon cross himself, and raise a glass of spirits in a cool and steady hand.

That settled it.

I call this site “Wyatt Gwyon” only because the name of Frank Sinisterra—Wyatt’s popcultural and economic analogue in the forging of fraudulent masterpieces; the individual masquerading as a ship’s surgeon in the passage above, and thus the murderer of Wyatt’s mother, Camilla; and one of my literary heroes—is, surprisingly, taken. Using Wyatt’s name does present one advantage: of these two characters, both born of William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, Wyatt, as the ostensible focus of the novel, is by far the more widely known. Other than that, Wyatt is a poor choice. Each man counterfeits masterpieces—paintings in Wyatt’s case, currency in Frank’s—and each is obsessed with meticulous reproduction of the original. Each is a perfectionist in a way that I like, in that each emphasizes an obsessive fidelity to the world over human concerns—as though working extraordinarily hard to replicate creation somehow makes up for the conspicuously immoral aspects of their enterprises. Each, that is, prizes perfection over people, a prioritization that is at once immoral and appealing for the way in which it implicitly asserts that adherence to an ethic of rigorousness excuses ignoring more interpersonally and societally salient ethical concerns.

But Wyatt is whiner than Frank; he is deterred from attempts toward rigor by his inclusion in the elitist but empty 1950s New York literary culture for which Gaddis had such broad and interminable contempt. Wyatt can’t keep his mind on his work absorbed as he is the sexual and artistic effeteness of those who move in that circle—most of whom are Jews, homosexuals, hacks. Wyatt is neither Jew nor homo nor hack, he certainly fits those bills in some senses, in the ways Gaddis means to imply by placing him in the milieu he does; Wyatt is, to borrow from Camille Paglia, a beautiful boy—the classical equivalent of today’s Playboy pinup with respect to desirability and submissiveness; he is the young Hanson brothers stripped naked and provocatively posed. But Wyatt is not a boy in fact—he is too old to be a Hanson (as, for that matter, are the Hansons). Yet given his failure to spawn original artistic or biological work, he cannot properly be called a man, either; he is barren. Wyatt is in all senses stuck. His stymied creative impulse is simultaneously sexual and artistic, driving him to what can only be described as frantic artistic masturbation.

There’s nothing wrong with masturbation. Frank knows this, and this is why I like Frank. He is comfortable with repetition and self-pleasure; he needs no external justification to validate his work. It is true that he compares his work to that of others, subscribing to government-published newsletters of counterfeit bills such as Counterfeit Detector Monthly (which notes only the best of the best frauds), but the perfection he finds within them serves as a motivator rather than an inhibitor. Recapitulating and improving another’s work by making it, somehow, more itself is not a problem for Frank. Quite to the contrary, he is emboldened by the task. Frank as a whole seems to suggest such masturbation is all that can be done, and that we should give up on the new and shoot, instead, for an ideal of perfection. (A personal ideal in Frank’s case, but one that could be easily reframed as a collective ideal; see, for a caricturish but apt example, Nazi Germany.) Frank simply makes nothing new. Otto, another acolyte of Gaddis’s effete New York culture, illuminates this in Frank when, in a chance meeting in a bar, he mistakes Frank for a long-lost father. No, Otto: Frank shoots at perfection, not at ova; he concerns himself with fidelity to the already-generated, not with genesis itself. Frank fathers nothing. [1]

Wyatt doesn’t father anything either, but not for lack of trying, as he, unlike Frank, remains invested in the notion that there is a way to unburden himself of theft and idolatry and deceit, and invested in the consequent notion that in so unburdening himself, he can and will create something new. Admirable in principle, but in application (if we could even begin to describe what such an application would look like) all we can say for sure is that’s it naïve, or, more generously, that it’s no more likely to be true than it is to be hogwash. Wyatt occupies himself with his imperfection (he is the not-quite-beautiful boy, the aged Hanson, the sterile immoral homosexual, the plagiarist, the hack) to the exclusion of all else, when forcibly working to dissolve (rather than solve or absolve) that imperfection by reconceiving creation could well work well for him. But we’ll never know, because he never does. Frank on the other hand will try anything. He floats nonchalantly through Gaddis’s 956-page book, doing what he must when he must and worrying, we gather, very little, if at all, about anything he does. Need free passage across the Atlantic, Frank? Just pretend to be a surgeon.

My endorsement of Frank here “over” Wyatt is not to be mistaken as an endorsement of Frank’s immorality. A person should not, I think we can agree, slice open another human being to maintain the illusion that he is a medical professional, especially when allowing that illusion to fall away would likely mean nothing worse for that person than a week’s confinement in an oceanliner’s brig. There is no question that of the two, Wyatt is more moral; he may try to screw you, but he’d probably tell you about it first, after agonizing over it for weeks. If the three of us crashed a small plane in the Andes mountains, Wyatt might try to eat me when we ran out of rations, but not without compunction. Frank would sneak up and shiv me the first time his tummy grumbled.

But the meaningful question for me about a given approach to anything is pragmatic, not moral. Actions can be moral or immoral, but approaches are neither; they have no place in discussions of morality save in predictions and analyses of their practical effects. If negative effects of an approach can be prevented or otherwise rendered moot (if, to return to our caricature, somebody had convinced Hitler to content himself with being remembered as the guy who rebuilt Germany after World War I)—if, to return to Frank and Wyatt, we force ourselves to adopt an ethic of rigor while conscientiously and ardently combatting the dogmatism and closedmindedness that ethics of rigor tend to foster—the practical downsides to that approach are vanished.

Frank, with his unabashed allegiance to nothing and no one, with his inexhaustible and inexhaustibly versatility, is for me a material analogue to the intellectual who has come about half that far, but no further—one who has come to and embraced a principled relativism, but has stopped short of acknowledging the way in which a rigorous application of his relativism would seek first and most vigorously to undermine itself, to show its own faith in itself to be as “relative” as any of its other convictions. The relativist’s seeming intellectual obligation to eat his own tail if he wishes to remain a faithful relativist is, of course, the problem with relativism as it’s normally discussed; relativism not only implies but models its own undoing. Which is why “relative” has become an intellectual curse word thanks, at least roughly speaking, to the academic counterparts of the journalists, political operatives, and religious leaders who’ve worked so successfully in recent decades to vilify the term “liberal” in popular political discourse by self-consciously tying it with less savory and even less understood “movements” such as libertinism and nihilism. Standing over the ailing Camilla with knife in one hand and fresh spirits in the other, Frank can either put down the knife and inform the captain of his deceit—or even put down the knife and just fabricate some excuse for being unable to operate; there’s no need to come clean even—or he can proceed to drunkenly slice and dice. Frank falls prey to the relativist danger of self-deconstruction, choosing to maintain his relativism, to keep up the game, rather than to put down the knife and, oh, catch up on back issues of Counterfeit Detector Monthly.

We must recognize, though, that Frank’s choice in this matter is an illusion, at least if we believe that for someone to rightly be said to have “choice” in a situation, there must be differences in the consequences of one selecting one option over another, and those differences must be clear enough to the chooser to allow him to weigh options and make an informed decision. Frank does not have that luxury. Although Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern relativism (I use both phrases loosely) are clearly opposed and could even be styled antitheses, the rationalist worldview—one that all serious contemporary thinkers are expected to adopt as a starting point—is just as “responsible” for Camilla’s death as Frank’s “anything goes” relativism. That is, the demands of Enlightenment rationalism lead Frank to perform an act of moral relativism; they demand that he kill Camilla.

Enlightenment rationalism demands consistency over correctness. Of course it demands that we have clear, well-argued points that correspond as cleanly as possible to “reality”—of course it demands a “correctness” of a sort. But that demand is fueled by an unspoken but enacted faith in the notion that there is a material world waiting to be objectively discovered. That world is one against which, for rationalists, propositions can be checked and confirmed or denied. Rationalism in this sense connotes not rigorous thinking but something quite the opposite—a process by which contradictory explanations of multiple phenomena take a backseat to broad phenomenological generalizing; correctness, in other words, takes a backseat to rationalism’s desire to see the world as a comprehensive whole. Rationalism is, on this view, an attempt toward cohesiveness and consistency.

We know that for Frank, hovering over Camilla, the relativist thing to do, the way for him to remain ideologically consistent, is to take a stab at the surgery. But what is the rationalist thing to do? If he spares her, he’s letting rational good sense come to the rescue—all well and good, seemingly sufficiently rational. But if he kills her, his endorsement of relativism is also despite himself a deeply rationalist act, insofar as the murder is motivated by the impulse toward consistency that sprouts from Enlightenment rationalism. Killing Camilla is bad, sure, but not killing her is tantamount, for Frank, to admitting that his entire worldview is and has always been incorrect. Not killing Camilla would satisfy the demands of rationalism—but then again it wouldn’t, in that not killing her not only invalidates Frank’s existence as a devoted relativist, but also, in devaluating adherence to the material, invalidates his claims to rationalism as well. Killing her, on the other hand, satisfies the demands of both the extreme relativism that characterizes Frank throughout the book and the rationalism demanded of him by the Enlightenment and the crew of the Purdue Victory—but them again it doesn’t satisfy either of them, in that killing her is, at base, not a “rational” thing to do in any way that does not incorporate a discussion of adherence to relativism as a profoundly rationalism act; and in that it is also not a relativist thing to do, in that doing it constitutes a tacit endorsement of the materialistic foundation of rationalism. Regardless of what Frank does, he can be said to have betrayed both the relativistic and the rationalistic.

That is nonsense, but it is nonsense produced by a paucity of intellectual approaches, and by the poverty of those that do exist, rather than by anything outside the realm of abstract intellectualization. My previous paragraph might be characterized by some as little more than wordplay—rationalism is functionally the same as relativism? pshaw!—but that is in a sense the point. The problem here is not that we have some sort of contradiction between two things that cannot by definition contradict. The problem is that we have quixotically made lack of contradiction (Enlightenment rationalism has quixotically made consistency) the core criterion for evaluating the usefulness of an intellectual approach. Under this rubric relativism clearly loses big according to most, but as Frank showed us, rationalism itself works in some cases to preclude rather than foster consistency, so rationalism nails its own grave shut as well. So what should Frank have done with Camilla?

Relativism and rationalism are so readily contorted and conflated here because neither is sufficiently conscious of its own undeniable blind spots. Relativism, if only because of the beating it as a term has taken from cultural conservatives, needs to go. Rationalism, at least in the very specific way I’ve chosen to define it, is equally bankrupt, deconstructing itself just as relativism does, inundated with the enunciation of its own principles. But it doesn’t end with rationalism and relativism and the critical approaches they encompass. That every ism has blind spots we will all readily agree in theory; yet in practice we must not truly believe it: how else to explain the continued prizing of consistency and cohesiveness over correctness? How else to explain the persistence of Robert Nozick’s “hedgehog” intellectual, for whom each intellectual engagement is an opportunity to test and confirm and strengthen his worldview? How else to explain the fact that we haven’t yet applied to the analysis of culture and literature what Louise Glück calls “poetic intelligence,” an intelligence that “lacks..focused investment in conclusion, being naturally wary of its own assumptions” and “derives its energy from a willingness to discard conclusion in the face of evidence, its willingness, in fact, to discard anything”? [2] We must be able to mix and match aspects all these of isms, to use what we find useful and discard what we don’t, without regard for whether those aspects will naturally arrange themselves into a consistent personal philosophy—just as Frank must be able to discard his knife without betraying anything. That is the lesson of poetic intelligence.

Another way to put that lesson is to say that prioritizing analytical rigor over consistency—to my mind, the mark of intellectual honesty—not only implies but demands a strict adherence to the sole tenet of poetic intelligence; it requires an ethic of rigorous and perpetual provisionalism, or, in other words, a willingness, indeed even an eagerness, to discard anything.

***

NOTES

[1] When we consider the classical and pagan tradition of worshipping the young male physique, there is much more to be said about Wyatt’s being, in his role as a marred beautiful boy, an embodiment of the marred perfection Frank achieves in his artistic attempts; and there is more to be said about the implications of that analogical framework for readings of the novel that cast it as a critique of a capitalist system (see Gaddis’s second novel, J.R.) or an indictment of any or all of the host of human sins that thrive in and are perpetuated within such a system: selfishness, collective cruelty, collective indifference, perverse rejection of empathy as a vital individual and collective goal. I may revisit this line of thought and say these things later.

[2] Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories. New York: Ecco, 1999. 94.

***

So the gap that forever separates the domain of (symbolically mediated, i.e. ontologically constituted) reality from the elusive and spectral real that precedes it is crucial: what psychoanalysis calls ‘fantasy’ is the endeavour to close this gap by (mis)perceiving the pre-ontological Real as simply another, ‘more fundamental’, level of reality—fantasy projects onto the pre-ontological Real the form of constituted reality (as in the Christian notion of another, suprasensible reality). [1]

Žižek makes this claim about fantasy in The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology. It is given concrete expression in the following excerpt from a farcical and fictional legal decision (pertaining to a dog’s entrapment in a public piece of modern art and the subsequent mutual accusations of the artist and the dog’s owners) printed in its entirety in William Gaddis’s 1994 novel A Frolic of His Own. The underlying presumption of the decision (that is to say, the residency regulations which the judge must observe) is that the physical presence of the defendant is necessary for the societal/ethical injunctions in question to be rightly imposed upon him. We must in other words have a material substance present in order for the injunctions of the social as such to produce the the material effects they are supposed to directly effect:

As was held in an earlier case before a district court in Pennsylvania, in which the plaintiff accused Satan of ruining his prospects by placing obstacles in his path, thereby depriving him of his constitutional rights, the complaint was dismissed for its failure to discover Satan’s residence within the judicial district, or instructions for the U.S. Marshal needed to serve the summons, and the failure to meet legal requirements necessary to maintain a probable class action, since the class would be so numerous that getting them all together for this purpose would be impractical. [2]

But what if the need for a physical defendant were dispensed with and we could simulate his trial and hanging to great simulated fanfare—producing an effective force not only despite but because of his being virtual (as “he” is really nothing other than the social consciousness of his wrongdoing, capture and punishment)? In that case his lack of materiality, lack of what we understand as being in the world, becomes the very source of his power: his paucity of being in the world yields an overflow of being able to induce action in the world—that is, his ability to affect material substance is positively correlated with his lack of materiality. The more elusive he is, that is, the more power he wields. This is precisely the role in which the west has cast Satan, but it is also the role in which the west has cast fantasy. Does fantasy’s ability to affect our makeshift “constituted” reality not increase as its claims become more fantastic—more ludicrous, more radical, more revolutionary—precisely as Satan’s power increases the less definable and less palpable, the more ubiquitous, he becomes? More, does not the west’s treatment of Satan, as an abstract negativity hung repeatedly, perpetually, spectacularly in abstentia and to great fanfare, not the same as the west’s treatment of fantasy, as a derided depository of our frustrated attempts to pin down a pre-ontological Real, a suprasensible reality of the sort that Christianity posits (generally for Žižek; specifically in the form of Satan in Gaddis)? Realizing a material Satan, getting our hands on the defendant, is impossible in the same sense that it is impossible to reach a “more fundamental” reality than the mutable makeshift account any given subject can construct of it.

A contemporary fantasy—that of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Armus, a tarlike entity created by the people of the planet Vagra II to absorb their immorality, hatred, violence, etc.—imagines one form of the obliteration that such impossible encounter with pre-ontological Real would occasion. Like the satanic and the fantastic, Armus is a repository of abstract negativity. But the Vargans, unlike the west, succeed in purging themselves of their abstract negativity and embodying it in the corporeal Armus. Material manifestation of the abstract, and thus objective access to a pre-ontological reality, is possible for the Vargans in a way that it is not for us; for us, access to such a reality would mean the dissolution of individual subjectivity and thus the annihilation of the subject. Unfortunately for the Vargans it means the same for them: Armus rebels.

***

the pre-ontological Real

***

NOTES

[1] Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 2000 (1999). 57.

[2] Gaddis, William. A Frolic of His Own. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. 377.

Great Value: this is the bargain brand produced by and for, and marketed at, Wal-Mart. Under its name is sold spaghetti and sauce, salted soup crackers, canned pears and peaches, toothbrushes, cauldrons, cough suppressants: anything that can be made generic. Such as a thermal tote.

Great Value products read, underneath the abbreviated “GV” version of the brand’s logo (tailored for narrow surfaces like the spines of pasta boxes), “When quality counts.” This is Great Value’s slogan; pause on it. A brand whose name means “inexpensive without being cheap” is represented by “When quality counts”—when quality counts, it tells us, buy that which is inexpensive but not cheap; when quality counts, seek out a Great Value. Yet does this not completely unseat the characteristic of “quality” from its presumed place as an at all important characteristic one evaluates when choosing a product? Does not “value,” precisely because it is used to simultaneously gauge quality and cost, deemphasize quality to the point of its disappearance as a genuine criterion for purchase? Is not quality dissolved altogether by inclusion in this doubly-abstract term “value”—a characteristic that is always dependent more on an item’s relative cheapness than on that its relative quality? How can we earnestly speak of “quality” as a virtue at all in an atmosphere in which all major discernable goals, that of the producer to make a profit and that of the consumer to spend as little as possible, have money, rather than taste or comfort or innovation or functionality, at their core? What does “quality” then denote in this atmosphere, in which quality is conflated with cost?: “value,” which makes no tangible statement about quality whatsoever. That exalting of money may be a “value” of a sort, but it’s certainly not a “great” one. Nonetheless, it is the value that’s quietly battered into to each time you pass those colorful 50-cent Sam’s Choice soda machines, exchange pleasantries with an elderly woman, and enter Sam Walton’s Hobbesian, postmodern, uniquely American wonderland.

Think Obama is raising “false hopes”? You’re just lazy intellectually.

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My recent post in support of electing Mike Huckabee president of the United States prompted a number of questions about my attitudes toward the Democratic candidates, most of whom I would support in a general election before suporting Huckabee. I’m split between Barack Obama and John Edwards. (Hillary I find neither savory nor objectionable; Richardson is teddy bear.) Point-for-point, Edwards’s positions are more in line with mine, and I have greater confidence that he’d try to fight the fights he says he’ll fight than I do that Obama will do the same. Nonetheless, I’m leaning heavily toward Obama for two reasons. I’m worried that Edwards’s reputation as a hothead could impede his effectiveness, first; second, and far more important, an Obama presidency has the potential to alter preconceptions and biases we have about ourselves, one another, and the world—the potential to kickstart a genuine revolution in social welfare. John Edwards will fight the good fight, no doubt, harder than Obama will. But Phenomenon Barack Obama, Obama as pluralist intellectual and political inspiration, will persist, and work to make progressive change, for decades after President Barack Obama had left office.

President Edwards wouldn’t be so lucky, I think. His passion and forthrightness are his best qualities, but they can easily turn or be made into “Dean Screams.” We should pause here to remember that Dean Scream was itself, deliberately or inadvertently, a manufactured event. It did not, strictly speaking, happen: Dean was speaking to a raucous audience for whom his excessive volume was not only appropriate but required. The crews filming him, though, elected to edit out nearly all background noise—applause, screams, cheers—so all we hear and see is Dean gesticulating and shouting to a seemingly empty room. This point is essential: Dean’s nutjobiness was entirely fabricated, a fact that was made public shortly after he gave his speech, yet we continue reference it as though it were an actual political event whose dynamics we can somehow use to understand current and future political events. The Dean Scream is not an actual event, and readings of recent and future situations that utilize it as though it were enact the absurdity of our politics, using a known lie as an interpretive dominant, using a known lie as as the avenue for getting at the truth of whatever today’s debacle happens to be. Lies can be useful for getting at truth, but only if we aggressively highlight their dishonesty while using them. To talk in earnest about the pseudo-events like this one as an instance of a politician gone mad is flatly absurd. It is to adopt acceptance of dishonesty as a premise—which is precisely what we call disingenuousness—before any discussion of politics, much less any discussion less of policy, has even begun. The Dean Scream is an especially visible version of this phenomenon, but the acceptance and eventually assumption of dishonesty we find at its core animates all political interaction in our contemporary discourse. After decades we have inured ourselves to all this—not to the dishonesty, which we do not encounter directly—how could honest people such as we stand for such a thing?—but to the disingenuousness that shields the dishonesty from an open and vigorous interrogation. Because much of President Edwards’s time would be taken up with taking on corporations with telecommunications ties, people who could influence his public appearance with a few well-placed emails, an Edwards administration could be one long Dean Scream, a one-term national delusion.

So I see a dispirited President Edwards at his desk, one year since since he began his attempt to begin to attempt such a vigorous interrogation, his throat dry and cracking, a palliative of hot tea with lemon and honey in one hand, Times opinion page in the other, grimacing, wincing, tearing up even as he comes to David Brooks, who praises him for his ardent dedication to the country’s lower economic quartiles, but describes him with words like “bellicose” and “truculent” for his habit of calling politicians and corporations on their bullshit and not backing down when the spin machines that are set up to protect his targets retaliate. This is only likely to happen if President Edwards were to push as hard as he says he’d push, but if I thought he would prove a paper tiger I wouldn’t be considering him in the first place. I feel for this President Edwards, but ultimately my vote must be based on whose election I think will most effectively remake the country into something I want to see it become. And while I don’t doubt his conviction to attempting to begin a genuine upheaval, I do doubt his potential to be effective. In our reductive political discourse, words become definitions and rallying banners—think of how both parties’ candidates’ use of “change” has evolved in the past few weeks—and words like “bellicose,” don’t go look good banners that are supposed to inspire people. Words like “change” and what our media chooses to do with them have far more electoral influence than that policy, that hallmark of banality. Who really wants to read those proposal thingys? Nobody, or not enough somebodys, so in electing John Edwards, we might easily up a with president who, for all his trying, changes little more than the White House upholstery, and is, rightfully, pissed as hell at everyone.

My second and primary reason for preferring Obama to Edwards is less speculative: he would be not only the first black president, but the first intellectual president since Kennedy or even Wison, and both his color and his intellect would have profound psychological implications for our national consciousness. Those two firsts, black and smart in a way that is likely to energize other intellectuals, are symbolically important on their own, but think about their resonance together: an intellectual president who’s also black? Think about that being on TV every day for four to eight years, what that would do stochastically but undeniably to the sense of possibility for someone like little seven-year-old Yellanjello, resident of slum-stricken East St. Louis, Illinois. (An actual person; her twin is Oranjello. The girls’ mother likes jello). Now think about the parallel effect an Obama presidency would have on us, on you intellectuals, artists, and public servants, etc.; on all segments of society whose standards for success, have at least in theory, very little to do with money. Presidents who are lawyers (and MBAs) inspire lawyers and MBAs—by which I mean that the country more or less believes that the economy improves under their stewardship. Analogously, Obama’s election has the potential to kickstart a gradual but undeniably impactful revolution in American intellectual life, a revolution he would steward, if only symbolically. Not only would a serious thinker be thinking about and making the serious decisions we need intelligent people to be making—not only will have better decisions being made—but the serious thinker will be black.

Our misguided taboos about talking about race in this country perversely prevent us from trumpeting how important Obama can be as a symbol—as though to say his blackness could be a boon to him would be to take away credit from him personally; as though that would be a sort of affirmative action, which, at least in this form, we are all, disadvantaged whites and condescended-to minorities alike, supposed to despise. How often people stop themselves from making comments about intelligence or acumen or skill to or about people of color for fear of being misunderstood and thought some shade of bigot! That implicit prohibition right there, that injunction to shut up about race, is one tangible effect of our country’s last 40 or so years under the sway of groups organized around common victimhood (a tradition with its clearest origins in second-wave and subsequent feminisms): even implying that the victim has benefited in any way from that which marks him as a victim (his race, his religion, his sexual preference, et al.) is tantamount, in our culture, to discrimination at best and racism at worst. Victimhood in these scenarios becomes synonymous with minorityhood. It’s hard, though, to think of the president of the United States as a victim of anyone other than maybe Helen Thomas. Instead of cow-towing to the victim wings of minority movements—or more likely while cow-towing to them—a President Obama could show, simply by going to work each morning, that the persisting centrality of victimhood is repressive and undesirable. He could, just by going to work, do much to set “black culture” on the path toward something like Bill Cosby’s reductive but astute and influential idea of what it should be: a segment of society like many others, where each child feels he has a number of life options that do not involve crime or violence. He could even be president of the United States. That possibility-broadening alone would radically shift the way majorities view minorities, the ways minorities view themselves, with one almost certain trend characterizing that change: a movement away from victimhood and rights rhetoric; a genuine a transcendence of social categories—because now “transcendence” isn’t just a word, it’s a face, a big, smooth black one with elephant ears and a goofy grin staring out the tube at Yellanjello and her racist neighbor Jim Bob alike, daring them to accept received wisdom about race when evidence so strongly denying it is, well, staring them right in the face.

Now multiply that moment—when it clicks in Yellanjello’s and Jim Bob’s heads that maybe, just maybe, they were wrong about everything—out over eight years, during which 100 million new kids will have grown up with a black intellectual president. Maybe Yellanjello by then is in in community college rather than sweeping hair off the floor at her cousin’s friend’s salon for six dollars an hour, and Jim Bob, well, Jim Bob’s still a racist prick, but how can he tell his son with a straight face black people are inferior, that they’re in any way a detriment to “our” country, when the wildly smart and successful chief executive of our country is a black man? Jim Bob may still tell his son that, but the chances his son will believe it are far slimmer than if Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, or John McCain had been president over those past eight years. A ubiquitous President Obama—even if all he did was to hold up the presidential curtain up a bit better than it’s currently being held up—would through his mere existence force our prejudices into the national consciousness; he could make racism disappear by making the moral conflicts it poses it impossible to avoid. And, especially if he’s only slightly better at the job than our current employee, he has to potential to make racism poitively un-American. He would also be poised effect a long-due reunion of the liberal intelligensia with what has become of the working class. Disadvantaged Americans and disillusioned American intellectuals us are two groups that have been shunned, albeit in different ways, by our farce of a politics. A President Obama could bring these groups if not necessarily together then into concert, engaging and even enjoining the disillusioned to solve our collective dilemmas of disadvantage.

Yellanjello’s little brain as she’s watching the TV: that’s where this all starts, and Obama’s potential affect on it offers such promise in my eyes that Edwards’s appeal withers for reasons that have very little to do with Edwards. Like every other mental construct, Yellanjello’s sense of possibility is formed analogically. She compares what, how and where she is with what, how and where others are; she intuits similarities and distinctions, she reassess her situation, and she progress with her own models of interaction forged from the experiences of many. Impossibility, at a basic cognitive level, can be described as the inability to make an analogy that sticks to what we want it to stick to, the inability to make an analogy that allows us to move forward. Electing Barack Obama, whose bright caramel skin looks something like the end result of a successful “Let’s all have sex till we’re the same color” campaign, would instantly double our national analogical lexicon. Anybody can be anything, because, damn, our president is everything. The psychological effect of that doubling would be incalculable. In fifty years—if not eight—the United States would be an entirely different country.

“If it’s true,” PBS’s Gwen Ifill asked Obama Monday night, “that people can look at you and say he’s naive, then do you understand what Senator Clinton means when she says that you are raising false hopes?”

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Oh, that I completely reject. I mean this notion of false hopes—I, I reject the entire premise. I think this crystallizes what this campaign is about. I mean there’s so many people who are telling us what we can’t do…. [That] the politics always has to be mean and nasty and personally destructive, that, you know, the poor will always be with us [...] You know, I mean…that’s not being realistic. That’s just being lazy intellectually.

Everybody put on your thinking caps.

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