This Is What A Dissertation Looks Like

To the right of my computer is a full glass of water, a few bracelets i took off so they wouldn't clang against the keyboard as i type, Marci Blackman's novel, Po Man's Child, which i'll be teaching for tomorrow's class. To the left and straight back i have a stack of partially graded student papers, a mechanical pencil from Muji, a black plastic recipe box full of notecards covered in messages such as,"...the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all." (Postmodernism xvi), a copy of Stone Butch Blues on top of Lenin and Philosophy, on top of Zami, on top of Funhome, on top of Undoing Gender, on top of How Sex Changed. A pair of sunglasses are wedged underneath the Autumn and Winter issue of Fantastic Man, the one with Mr. Bryan Ferry on the cover. To his right are two pairs of headphones: one for sitting, one for jogging. Oblique Strategies is there too, to keep me moving. To my immediate left are the Cliffs Notes on Community Action Center: "Your key to the classics." There's an heirloom pumpkin at the end of the table, and outside? There's Gainesville.

We are too little to lose each other

From Karen Coats's Looking Glasses and Neverlands:

"Recipes for stories are passed across cultures and generations. In industrialized countries, they can become standardized and bland in their mass production or even fortified with things we have been told are good for us.... From our first beginnings, we are fed stories, embraced by stories, nourished by stories. The only way we come to make sense of the world is through the stories we are told. They pattern the world we have fallen into, effectively replacing its terrors and inconsistencies with structured images that assure us of its manageablility."

Yesterday I bought ten Japanese children’s books on my way to work. A woman was having a sidewalk sale on Bedford, and she had a cardboard box full of old board and picture books. When I purchased them, she asked: you can read Japanese? I can read these, I said in English--shy of my atrophied spoken Japanese. One book illustrates the hiragana alphabet, another juxtaposes pictures of animals against their names in Japanese and English. My favorite one is called Hiraku: Open it! One page shows a closed flower or bean pod or shell and says, “hiraku.” The next shows the inside of the object and gives its name.

Nonetheless, upon a second and third flip-through, the pedagogical problem exposes itself: how to avoid the false binary? And the nagging question: what do the smallest things teach? In Hiraku, why don’t these objects get names until their alleged insides are exposed? What about objects that never open? Or of outsides that are always (already) inside? Or if you don't exactly believe in the outside? How can you teach a five year old that the supposed learning technique of inside/outside is a pernicious fallacy that is, as Karen Coates might have it, a kind of management or containment? Couldn't something as early and as simple as a board book instigate necessary disruptions of the kind of knowledge children are idly presented with? After all, what good is radical theory if we wait to inform readers of its importance until they are in graduate school? What sort of initial undoings are also possible?

And then i read Hiraku again, and decided that the imposition of a construct was my own. After all, it's strategy requires opening--not inside and out. Its last few pages also take an interesting turn. The instructions continue:
furoshiki. hiroku to jyuubako.
mata hiroku to gochisou.
Mata hiroku to jyuubako mou hitotsu.
Itadakimasu.

Furoshiki (a cloth used to bundle lunchboxes other packages).
Open it and jyuubako (an elaborate lunchbox/bento).
Open again and treat/feast.
Open again and another jyuubako.
Enjoy.



The reader is given an object wrapped in a furoshiki. Then he or she sees there is a lacquered box inside. Then the box is opened and a feast of sushi and other snacks is revealed. Then another layer beneath the first is exposed. The book's final instruction is for the reader to enjoy the meal.

The furoshiki complicates the open-and-see process. Like language, and like pedagogy, the furoshiki is a process rather than an exposure. A representation of the movement that the exchanges between a and b invite; however, it is also its own sign, a sort of standstill of meaning. It is an object whose purpose might be unproductive: an adornment, a postponement, an end in itself. Additionally, by complicating meaning-making as more than open and shut, hide and seek, the furoshiki calls attention to the complexity of the work of making (ideology) visible. More than a simple "structured image" that assures us of the world's "manageability," it introduces a place of uncertainty.

from Barthes's Empire of Signs:
"These phenomena and many others convince us how absurd it is to try to contest our society without ever conceiving the very limits of the language by which (instrumental relation) we claim to contest it: it is trying to destroy the wolf by lodging comfortably in its gullet. Such exercises of aberrant grammar would at least have the advantage of casting suspicion on the very ideology of our speech."

Only Bleeding

Eladio Dieste: The resistant virtues of the structure that we make depend on their form; it is through their form that they are stable and not because of an awkward accumulation of materials. There is nothing more noble and elegant from an intellectual viewpoint than this; resistance through form.

Nicolai Ourossoff of the NYT on the new Times building: Even so, you never feel that the building embraces the future wholeheartedly. Rather than move beyond the past, Mr. Piano has fine-tuned it.

Ourossoff on the new New Museum: But not since the Museum of Modern Art rattled the foundations of the city’s art establishment in the 1930s has a museum seemed so in touch with the present.

In my neighborhood, someone has spray-painted the outlines the shadows of objects on the sidewalks--such as stop signs or fire hydrants--cast at certain times of the day. Every once in a while, when i'm crossing the street to the laundromat or walking to work, the shadow fits exactly inside its trace, and you wouldn't believe how happy this makes people. i've seen whole families stop and point, smiles all around. The scribbles they step over every day suddenly make sense, and the combination of form and content is an oddly satisfying communion. i could go on about impossible fixity and the stories we tell ourselves, but that would be coming from someone who has the word trace tattoed on her arm, which is basically the same gesture as the one made by this sidewalk artist: hopeful nostalgia.

Svetlana Boym's Future of Nostalgia offers a more succinct parsing of nostalgia into two categories: reflective and restorative. Reflective nostalgia is "grounded in longing, contemplating, and remembering," but importantly is not a restorative attempt. "It's a positive force that helps us explore our experience, and can offer an alternative to an uncritical acceptance of the present." Restorative nostalgia, however, often attempts to restore a fantasized lost tradition in order to mythologize the past.

I'm Not There, the new film by Todd Haynes, is an exercise in (hopeful) reflective nostalgia. The film's title declares its polemicization of the fantasy of the self-same subject. By refusing biographical veracity or completeness, Haynes isolates the allure of the Dylan metamorphosis: he illustrates the difficulty of the attempt to give form to the total bind of desire. The film proposes that Dylan's startling admission that 'there is no sense in trying' is much more complicated than nihilism. I'm Not There suggests that Dylan came to this acknowledgement precisely through trying, and by recognizing the complications of resistance. That he also turned, like many contemporary critical thinkers, to the question of desire, does not mean that he opted out of politics. It means he became more careful. His philandering between god/no god, one woman/tons of women, freedom-fighting/self-absorption, might make us uncomfortable, but this waffling is actually a kind of consistency. In interviews Haynes explains his preoccupation with Dylan's interstitial subjectivity as a larger interest in androgyny; however, a more precise way of wording this is to say that Dylan's iconoclastic masculinity upsets conventional sex/gender correlations, and Haynes's choice to have an actor audiences will read as female portray Dylan at what could be argued to be his most radical period underlines this disruption/admission of necessary ambivalence.

The film renounces first person perspective in order to position this narrative as an insistent challenge to conventional biography. The multiple fantastic narratives are a concession to the extreme difficulty of representation, something Dylan's music, celebrity, and "private" life all suggest. Rather than idolizing the myth of the genius individual, Haynes rewrites Dylan in order to productively mobilize the potentially productive possibility of (Dylan) nostalgia.

Bob Dylan, made by Haynes into a metonym for the (post)modern condition, is at once a conduit for engaged nostalgia and the (im)possibility of the new, or, non-complicit resistance. The film presents its argument by fragmenting one "character" into six. The combined alter-Dylans of Marcus Carl Franklin/Woody Guthrie and Richard Gere/Billy the Kid (nostalgia), Ben Whishaw/Arthur Rimbaud (self-reflection), Christian Bale/Jack Rollins (failure), Heath Ledger/Robbie Clark (desire), and Cate Blanchett/Jude Quinn (the new) suggest the problem with conventional forms of biography: they assert an impossible cohesiveness. Haynes sidesteps this problem by creating a film that uses its nostalgia to re-orient its viewers to their own present, rather than trying to recreate an irretrievable past.

A politics of reflective nostalgia would account both for the pleasure of seeing a shadow neatly confined by its outline and for the necessarily brief nature of this exchange. The gaps, waiting, and complete loss of control acute feelings of desire are bound to elicit enact an undoing of the self, a blurring of what or who "I" was before "you" exposed to me to my lack of boundaries. Haynes's rewriting of Dylan in order to tell a story about desire enacts, if we use Boym's model, a reflective engagement with nostalgia.

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.