You said something

i thought i would write something about Thanksgiving. i wanted to compose a sort of mini-mythology or even a Lover's Discourse-like entry as a way of wrapping my head around this year's experience, so i went to the bookshelf. i happened to be at Paul's, and he doesn't have the Barthes i was looking for, but he does have The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, which i'd never read.

From the jacket introduction:
"...this writer teaches us to look at the world no longer with the eyes of a confessor, a physician, or of God -- those significant hypostases, as he has said, of the classical novelist -- but with the eyes of a man walking in his city with no other horizon but the spectacle before him, no other powers but those of his own eyes. And the voice in which the teaching is, significantly, performed, is unique in that it is intimate but not private, responsible but not officious, convincing but not accusatory. Barthes is the Ariadne in the labyrinth of our cities, and the clue he affords is the paradoxical one we could expect from no one else: to get out, go in deeper.

And from Barthes:
Like Monsieur Jordain confronted with prose, every visitor to the Tower makes structuralism without knowing it (which does not keep prose and structure from existing all the same); in Paris spread out beneath him, he spontaneously distinguishes separate -- because known -- points -- and yet does not stop linking them, perceiving them within a great functional space; in short, he separates and groups; Paris offers itself to him as an object virtually prepared, exposed to the intelligence, but which he himself must construct by a final activity of the mind, conveyed by the tourist's modest glance, has a name: decipherment.

i lost Thanksgiving and came back to New York. If, in New York, there is no single structural equivalent to the Eiffel Tower, no iconic dialectical perch, then what are we looking at? From rooftops in Bushwick, and the park on North 8th, and (in 'the city') the top of the building where you work, riding our bikes over the bridges, and the epic overwhelm of DUMBO park, there is the panorama. And we go, in our heads: there's the Chrysler Building, there's Con Edison. i can sort of see where Sunnie's house fits, and Tschumi's blue blob that everyone bitches about distracts me when i'm riding under the Williamsburg Bridge to work. Every once in a while someone speculates about the what the colors of the Empire State Building are meant to signify this week. Stopping and actually looking is sublime: it is a constant reminder of what's different here, because it is different here. The little planes and little boats and the water -- all of it -- to know, as you're watching, the tiny spot inside of it all where you were 2 or 3 hours ago, and where you'll be again tomorrow. No birds-eye view, but a kind of map. If, once upon a time, deciphering the view from the Eiffel Towel was a way of performing structuralism, what is the contemporary equivalent?

No Love Lost

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler injects the possibility of "subversive" self-narration with a dose of productive skepticism:

"When the 'I' seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the "I" seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.The reason for this is that the "I" has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms. (8)

Which is not unlike this lassoing of ideology by Jameson:

Postmodernism: "There is...a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as "the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence....The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. (Jameson 51-52)

Which nicely echoes the Foucault from yesterday:

"Real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation."

The Butler might be read as one possible step that could follow the provocations from Jameson and Foucault. She is offering a way of tracking this gap between Real and Imaginary, between Real and fictitious. By clouding the obviousness of the "I," Butler complicates the possibility of self-reflexivity and, concomitantly, of agency.

Jameson is also asking, if subjection is dependent upon the illusion, the fictive relation upon which real subjection is built/the imaginary relation to Real conditions of existence, then is it possible to map this relation, and redesign it? Furthermore, if this mapping is not only a proposal, but also a metaphor for practices of reading, then the narrativization OF this process--in other words self-narration or first person narration, and a careful attention to the way in which self-narration is performed, is crucial to what we are ultimately capable of seeing.

To consider a more specific model, if melancholia requires a sort of substitution of the ego for the lost object as a necessary exchange in order for mourning to occur, then what happens if this subject position, that of the ego, is refused? Is this also a refusal of the "I" and, concomitantly, of the conceit of self-narration? Could adolescence function in a similar way? In other words, is it possible that one could, in a process similar to melancholia, refuse adulthood? If this kind of narration is never offered and adolescents are only ever presented with confident self-narrations, will they never think to consider the teleology of adult (pre)occupations? Furthermore, if a narrator cannot distinguish between inside/outside, self/other, might she be inhabiting a truly queered subject position? Are there young adult texts that provide this sort of narration? Might a melancholia in the form of a resistant/prolonged/permanently inhabited adolescence be mobilized as a response to trauma that finds trauma’s foregrounding of the conceit of the self productive? Could a pedagogical attention to the narrative of adolescent fiction suggest to its readership more creative possibilities for subjection? If the "I" could somehow not only be the story of its specific set of relations to a set of norms, but through that narrative also inflect a way of rethinking those norms, might this reflexivity to what we like to pretend is a self be repositioned as subjectivity?

One way to start might be through a pedagogical attention to the differences amongst these beginnings. In other words, when teaching these novels, we could begin by arguing that each narration offers a very different way of thinking about subjectivity, about the possibility of a narrative response to ideology.

The Outsiders (1967): “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
The Bell Jar (1971): “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
The Catcher in the Rye (1945): “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Buddha of Suburbia (1990): “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.”
Rose of No Man’s Land (2006): “People always say to me that they wish they had my family.”
Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999): “Dear Friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.”
Weetzie Bat (1989): "The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. They didn't even realize where they were living."
Housekeeping (1980): "My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher."

unwanted consonance

Begin re-reading Discipline and Punish (out of guilt) while waiting for the train. Now that I’m on board, and have to stand, I can no longer read because I have too many things to carry. My free hand is keeping me stable, and my other hand is holding a mint green umbrella, which is an exact match for the back cover of Discipline and Punish, also mint green. I’m just staring at the train window in front of me, so I should put my book in my bag, but I am feeling too lazy to complete another motion; however, the realization that I am accessorizing with Foucault just bums me out. I know this is the L, but this is too much. I put the book in my bag and take turns between staring at the guy sleeping in front of the window and examining the back of my hand.

Postmodernism 42: “...and this is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content.”

Me: How can postmodern adolescence not be fundamentally different from its modern incarnations? How does adolescence attempt to consume itself? How is this understood as creation/production? What does this have to do with stages? What kinds of innovation are refused when modern forms are (un) self-consciously used in postmodern storytelling?

Complete one small thing each day (cross something off your things-to-do list on the day it was intended to be completed, finally mail all of those past-due birthday presents, take vitamins, clean the toilet, whatever). This will remind you of what finishing something feels like.

Need a copy of Paterson.

From the little mint book: "Real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations... He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance."

An Aesthetics of Failure

A queer theoretical approach to adolescence via a problematization of the teleology of growth.

A dismantling of the idea of a life in “stages” which turns on the multiple meanings of that term.

Darstellung something
Both ends Burning (Roxy Music/Edna St. Vincent)
start collecting more definitions of "adolescence"
start reading Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way
shopping hates your dissertation


I’ve chosen a curious tactic for the completion of my dissertation: i moved from the small, affordable, minimally distracting town that is home to my university (and its libraries and teaching opportunities and my committee) to, umm, New York City. Brooklyn, actually.

After a few months of sitting down to “work” and proceeding no further than sentences and scribbles such as the ones you see above, I’ve decided to get started again. I never really felt that I wasn’t working--because I read almost every day--but there’s been no writing. Nor has there even been much talking about the project. Instead, my days run something like this: huh. Luc Sante’s using a Foucault epigraph in the Sunday NYT Magazine for an article about cowboys? Jesus. Huh, where is my copy of Discipline and Punish, anyway? This thing he’s pulled out about outsiders might actually be pertinent to the dissertation. In fact, Discipline and Punish could be crucial to the dissertation.

Walk to bedroom. Examine bookshelf. Realize that goddamnit Discipline and Punish inexplicably bit the dust with hundreds of other very expensive academic books I spent ten years collecting while working at a feminist bookstore--initially for the feminism, and when that got confusing, for the discount on books. (My rule when i left was that if it didn't fit into the rental car, it was no longer mine). Wonder, not for the first time, how I could not have anticipated that I would someday need that book again? Tell myself: Well, how can I possibly work on this without Discipline and Punish? I’d better go replace it, but god, where should I go? They don’t have it at Spoonbill and Labyrinth is too far away and Barnes and Noble is out of the question. Paul looks at me like I’ve just thrown up on his feet. Uh, St. Mark’s? I still haven’t been. He just keeps staring at me. Come on, I haven’t been. Enough. How do I get there?

Go to St. Mark’s Bookshop. Happily locate both the book I came for and the new Jameson. Start reading the new Jameson on the train on the way home. Spend the next two weeks reading the new Jameson. See how this goes? I still haven’t started writing, much less isolated the argument that was so vital from Discipline and Punish. And if I’m not careful, next Sunday’s paper will get me started on another (absolutely crucial) wild-goose chase postponement.

Well, that’s how it's been since June; however, to be honest, I just bought The Modernist Papers yesterday. I did indeed spend most of the day and early evening reading, but I woke up this morning and wanted to both continue reading and to actually write something, thanks to such passages as:

"The American small town is not mythic or poetic in any of these senses (nor is New Jersey to be sentimentalized a la Sherwood Anderson: the fact that the figure does not work and one cannot imagine how to go about 'adding up' separate people or separate lives--that unworkable fact is itself the poetic datum at stake here, and it is understood and reemphasized again and again by remarkable figural structures which equally do not work either."

But more on not working later, right now I have to go to work.