Magnets and Babble
Falling in love also conforms frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done. –William James, on conversion
* * *
BOB: Well, what are you waiting for?
LITTLE KID ON TRICYCLE: I don’t know. Something amazing, I guess.
BOB: Me too, kid.
–The Incredibles
* * *
This is intended merely as a sketch. It certainly is not about Gothic subculture; for more on that — the winsome, charming population I call army noir — see this post from September.
There is a popular misconception that entering adulthood means giving up on the ideals of youth. In other words, it is commonplace to speak as though adulthood, with its almost hopeless list of responsibilities, and its hard-won experience of the world, is a time when life is worn down to the simplicity of the practical act. One cooks food, changes tires, changes diapers, wakes up too early, entertains relatives, sends holiday greetings, and manages the remote corners of the house: the closets, the cabinets, the photo albums.
This is hopelessly misguided. Youth is actually the period of exploration, reversal, and lambency; age brings with it the increasingly powerful temptation of ideology. Without breaking any confidences, I can say that part of “adulthood” has been watching friends get caught up in ideological movements; in fact, people in their mid-twenties tend to become converts if they do not marry. A source of conviction becomes essential.
Marriage is a humanist bulwark. It brings in its train a host of consuming problems, including the practicalities of the wedding ceremony, as well as a truly serious merging of financial, residential, and professional interests. Couples begin to plan around living together. Their plans stretch out to years ahead; to children, even. Marriage affirms the fundamental rightness of the myth of romantic love; it binds and suspends whatever uncertainties or lacks each individual previously suffered, particularly in the continually uncertain territory of romance. Although it is not a panacea, it is the story of the end of uncertainty.
In the absence of that vow all bets are off, by which I mean that the marriage vow is probably the only act in our society still granted sufficiency. (Of course, most every story published in the New Yorker disputes this claim, and follows the aesthetic pattern of rupture outlined below via the adultery plot.) The rest is insufficient until the conversion experience, which is actually identical with the Barthesian aesthetics of rupture.
This rupture is supposedly the jamming of ideology, the loose stitch in a packet of received ideas. Pulling on it, one supposes, unravels the norm. Thus in Camera Lucida Roland Barthes informs us that the best photographs are the ones in which the smooth functioning of conventional tropes is disrupted in grotesque fashion: for example, a picture that would normally manifest only the dead iteration of “family” and “slavery” and “hardship” reveals an enlarged hand, ugly and abnormal. The hand draws the eye irresistibly; it mocks the rest of the photograph, cutting it loose from belief. In the end, the grotesque hand is what persuades us that the photograph is real, and that it shares in the uncollected, uneven script of real life, and the easily readable tropes are revealed to be the illusions of convention.
For as long as I have been keeping a blog, I have been writing about the value of the radical break; admiringly, I noted that Alain Badiou describes St. Paul as writing from a subject-position of continual negation, enacting a continual “break” with what is. Now, in considering what that break can be — its ugly, pedestrian possibility — I am afraid of it.
In the moment of conversion, one acquires a new vocabulary: a vocabulary of self-realization (self-help groups), a vocabulary of recovery (support groups), a vocabulary of method (schools of philosophical, political, or religious thought). I am looking right now at the copy of the Derrida documentary on my desk: “What if someone came along who CHANGED not the way you THINK about everything but EVERYTHING about the way you think?” This is not Derrida’s fault; he didn’t write it. There is nonetheless a blantant similarity between this promotional moment and the self-help rhetoric of “starting from scratch.”
In other words, the moment of adoption is the moment when language becomes force, which, in fact, is exactly what it is (and how he idealizes it) for Derrida in that opening salvo of an essay, “Force and Signification.” The young scholar comes upon a particular thinker — Lacan, or Rorty, or Derrida, or de Man, or Foucault — and the reading of that work becomes the Year Zero from which the scholarly project commences. Meanwhile, “campy” bad art is the bliss of the canon.
Beck is a Scientologist. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist. The fact gnaws dimly at a corner of our consciousness, baffling us. A friend sent me an article today, which noted that Jennifer Lopez may be a Scientologist, and Jim Carrey may be a Scientologist. Tom Cruise goes insane in front of a live television audience, insisting that psychotherapy is criminal. He writhes hysterically, caught up in his faith. We watch fascinated, in part because every ideological moment produces this automatism and compulsive re-framing.
In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes takes the next logical step in developing his theory of the rupture. He identifies the rupture with jouissance, with pleasure beyond pleasure, with the splitting open of the self in a moment as luscious as the splitting of fruit. That is what we are witnessing, watching the Scientologists: the bliss of the undeniable. In Six Feet Under there is the continual spectacle of these ruptures: weird intrusions of faith, including the personification of Life (a big black woman) and Death (a mordant old white guy), and quotations from the Bhagavad Gita. There is The Plan, a fictional version of life coaching; just as easily as she adopts and discards The Plan, Ruth Fisher starts a “new life” by cutting and arranging flowers, in imitation of the flower arrangements that the funeral home is obliged to provide for the dead. It is a knowing symbol, since the “new life” is always built on the foundations of the previous, exiled life. It is built on the exultant feeling of a symbolic murder. Every living member of the Fisher family takes Ecstasy, intentionally or not (there is a lame plot device where it gets mixed in with aspirin), and experiences a rebirth.
The modern omnipresence of compulsiveness: for example, the urge of the collector. I remember growing up with the phrase “Collect ‘em all!”, and I suspect that phrase is still used to encourage toddlers to buy things. That rhetoric disappears after a certain point, replaced by the rhetoric of the break: “A sleeper hit!” “In a year of uninspired hip-hop records that preached a disposable confidence, this album dared…” “If you see only one movie this year, see…” The collector begins searching insatiably for the One.
The cult of ideas of force: in Pynchon’s Against the Day, his fascination with forceful discourse makes Tesla a central figure with hypnotic eyes, studying the “magnetic resonances” of the earth. Deuce Kindred, outlaw, murderer, is a mentalist also. The gods and scripts buried in Northern ice magnetically compel the crew aboard a hot air balloon to set an ancient evil loose in the world. (Yes, Pynchon is writing about ancient evils. He’s a sensationalist.)
My friend R. Sheehan mentioned one day that the hooded figure of terror, one incarnation of the evil psychiatrist in Batman Begins, resembles the blue-faced monster behind the diner in Mulholland Drive. Well, Nolan and Lynch mirror each other: the amnesiac Rita in Mulholland Drive mirrors the amnesiac Leonard in Memento. But there is also a correspondence between the apparition of the monster, and the apparition of the naked Rita as an object of Betty’s desire, and the original illusion of the new life in Hollywood when Betty arrives in a state of dewy excitement. Jean Genet once wrote, dazed with love, “The Absolute passed by in the form of a pimp.” That is how the Absolute manifests: it is thrust, ecstatically, between the ribs of the ordinary. The television show Lost begins with the explosion and the crash.
Thus we re-live the Gothic. The Gothic world is one in which the self, and the world, are the sum of their forces, the dangerous effects of multiple magnetisms; it is the Gothic that gave us Jekyll and Hyde, and the Gothic that gave us Trilby. In their place we have the Cylon Sharon, trying desperately to point out a source of available water, even though her Cylon nature resists helping humanity.
And wherever there is no eruption of pleasure and loss of integrity, there is idiocy and echolalia. If the dominant trope of pleasure is the reveal, the triumph of force over the expected, the dominant trope of certainty is the mad structure — dark, prison-like rooms, apparently underground. Staying with Battlestar Galactica for a moment, there is the vision of Starbuck walking cautiously through the eerie ruins of a museum on Caprica, until all that is interrupted for a battle. It is fitting that the metaphors for Ruth Fisher’s self-help program should be building metaphors, and that the symbol of her husband’s madness should be his subterranean, emergency shelter. In Mulholland Drive, Betty’s tenuous hold on identity merges with the dark wood interiors of the house, and her appropriation of Rita begins with the question What are you doing in this house?
I think here of the idiocy of Lacan, alongside his formidable psychological insight, which comes through in his odd confidence in diagrams, and especially in his references to Freud, to what Freud was “really” saying, to the truly rigorous reading of Freud. At the peak of his own originality and influence Lacan still refuses to describe himself as less or more than Freud.
I don’t know where precisely how to begin to win language back from the idiotic materiality of structure, and the magnetizing worship of force. But perhaps it begins with an immersion in the old Gothic, as we know it through Poe, and Radcliffe, and James, and the rest. In mapping those labyrinths, who knows? Perhaps we will recover the present.
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Ok, finally finished reading this. Elaborate please: “Nolan and Lynch mirror each other: the amnesiac Rita in Mulholland Drive mirrors the amnesiac Leonard in Memento. But there is also a correspondence between the apparition of the monster, and the apparition of the naked Rita as an object of Betty’s desire, and the original illusion of the new life in Hollywood when Betty arrives in a state of dewy excitement. Jean Genet once wrote, dazed with love, “The Absolute passed by in the form of a pimp.” That is how the Absolute manifests: it is thrust, ecstatically, between the ribs of the ordinary. The television show”
Are you saying Rita = pimp=absolute? i can see that. how is leonard like betty? only in the form of infant, idealistic bliss? these seem tenuous at fore but maybe there’s something i’m missing. Nolan is very diff than Lynch – Lych for example, is full of shit in a more sinister way than Nolan. Lynch has committed to surrealism; Nolan is structured and literal. He is ostensibly surreal but not really. heh heh. my articulateness dies in the last parts of sentences.
I think the last bit is compelling. hm. totally related to my henry miller paper. he was all about death as mode of survival. i guess he used transcendence through psychic death as a means of fighting “idiotic materiality” – but do you think that’s bad faith? are you saying marriage is a form of bad faith? that ideological constraints are stupid?
Miso, Leonard is not like Betty…he’s like Rita, the brunette who stumbles into Betty’s apartment. They mirror each other because both of them are amnesiacs; both of them are victims of trauma (kin to the disguised trauma of the blissful rupture) and both of them are sources of trauma (Leonard is a murderer, and Rita is an intruder/love object for Betty/Diane).
Here I am focusing on commonalities between Lynch and Nolan, commonalities that point to cliches of postmodernism: lack of identity, fractured narrative, ironic melodrama. What you say is true: Lynch is much more subversive.
I haven’t read anything of Miller’s except Tropic of Cancer. In truth, I enjoy Miller’s commitment to his bohemian lifestyle more than I enjoy his philosophy; for example, the ideal of ecstasy in his works is rousing but not very rigorous or original. (Compared, say, to the astouding ecstasies in Whitman.)
I do think that putting too much weight on “psychic death” can be a form of bad faith, since one and one’s psyche should probably be allowed to live. That said, death can be a reasonable metaphor for a great change (as Kenneth Burke discusses in A Rhetoric of Motives).
I see marriage as less “bad faith” than simply as a break with some of the uncertainties of growing up. One’s life begins in a new way at that point. Marriage does tend to have a highly conventional side to it, and to impose convention on both people. They become more closely connected to two extended families; they tend to stop moving around; they tend to regulate their schedules more; and so on. But I’m largely in favor of convention, even while I go looking for alternatives.
Sorry to post such a belated comment – I’ve been involved in some fairly intricate discussions elsewhere recently, and couldn’t gather my thoughts for my reaction to your posts here (which, by the way, I think have been developing a very interesting line of thought…)
I am still feeling a bit scattered, so apologies if I’m grabbing at something not that relevant, but I was struck by this observation:
The reason I find it striking is that you’ve interpreted these experiences as generational (and so, for example, as something that develops as a result of a process of aging), rather than as historical. I did some work some time ago on the ways in which the ’60s social movements were similarly interpreted by, for example, social scientists as an expression of a generational phenomenon – an approach that may have its elements of truth, but which can also serve to mask the historically specific elements of a social shift that generates distinctive kinds of social movements.
In the case of your observations of a particular generation turning to “ideology”, I’m similarly struck, as I’ve tended to think there was a bit of an historical break in the 1990s (exact dates, as Scott’s recent discussion on periodisation at The Valve indicates, can be debated…). I’ve been wanting to do some more precise work on this shift, but that a shift took place was noticeable across academic, political and popular cultures (in somewhat different ways), and I remember thinking at the time that something like Fukuyama’s work was particularly ironic, given that the shift should re-open issues of ideology, for good and bad – that it involved a relegitimation (after a period of at least relative fascination with flux, experimentation, fluidity, etc.) of stronger assertions of transcendent values and groundings for identity…
This is all very gestural, and probably a fairly naive take on the historical shift on my part, but it raises interesting questions about the ways in historical shifts interact with generational shifts – and the ways in which the one can serve perhaps to mask or deflect attention away from the other, with consequences for how we understand historical causation, and for how we develop a sense of appropriate political strategies…
No particular direction I’m intending to go with this – just thinking out loud…
N. Pepperell, what a fantastic point. On the most general level, your comment speaks to the ambivalence that fueled the post. I see myself as someone who wants to be other than a anti-foundationalist, post-structuralist thinker, which does mean making ethical and moral claims about the world. At the same time, I’m not comfortable with the kinds of ethical and moral claims that I see presented as possibilities — for example, the whole range of claims I would categorize as “self-help,” or those we might call regressive religious identities (re-discovering the faith of one’s childhood, for example).
It is almost a truism to suggest that there is a large historical pattern of the “generation gap,” which has been a major phenomenon for at least a hundred years in Western culture, and which combines in various ways with cross-generational ideological trends like those you identify from the 1960s onward. (Traces of the “generation gap” go further back, to the Romantics, and even to certain articulations of the family in Shakespeare.) In other words, all of this is historical, with the truest picture probably involving overlapping histories with different dureés.
I agree that Fukuyama’s work is beset by irony; in fact, I think Fukuyama is emblematic of a very common kind of reverse argumentation that one also finds in Richard Rorty. Fukuyama attempts to convince ideological people that they are somehow “backwards” or “outside of history,” and will probably continue to do so no matter how ideological the world scene becomes, or how much “history” is made by new versions of old beliefs in places like the Middle East.
Finally, going back to the first paragraph, I want to express some discomfort with the preference for fluidity and experimentation as it played out in the real social context of America in the 80s. While the environmental movement did come into its own during that period, the terms of discourse were largely set by the Reagan and Bush administrations, and not by the deconstructionists at Yale and elsewhere. (This includes traditionally academic disciplines like economics.) The failure of the academy, among other institutions, to successfully engage with social problems helped allow reactionary ideologies to gain terrible momentum here, in the decades that followed.
My most dominant emotional memory from the ’80s was the vast sinking sensation that came from watching these enormous economic and political shifts taking place, while so much of the academy turned in on itself… (I don’t mean, in saying this, that the academy reacted more inappropriately than other institutions – one just feels a greater sense of disappointment when aligned with an institution – I wanted to academy to live up to what was, in retrospect, an unrealistic ideal…)
I don’t think the turning inwards of the academy was specific to movements like deconstruction – these have to some degree become the poster children for what I suspect can probably be understood as a broader disempowerment. Universities were heavily under fire in this period, with substantial material challenges alongside the cultural ones.
In this kind of context, sometimes the cultural battles can see, easier to fight; sometimes there is a sort of paralytic incredulity that this is “really happening”; sometimes the natural impulses of the academy can work against it: so much valiant research was directed, for example, to disproving specific empirical claims implied in Reaganite policy – which was beautiful, except that, by the time the empirical work was done, the policies were passed and, in any event, the dispute was never really fuelled by empirical ignorance in any event – the Bush administration may have articulated the notion that the “reality based community” was a pejorative concept, but the underlying attitude has a much older history…
This is very gestural – I don’t intend what I’ve said here to be taken as any kind of serious historical or theoretical analysis – more a set of personal reflections on the dismay I felt watching it all unfold at the time…
Obviously, I do think we need serious alternatives to thinking about shared, but non-transcendental, ethical standards – this has been the motive for the collaborative discussion with Larval Subjects… And, yes, I share your distaste for the various attempts (Habermas could be included here, as well…) to use the concept of historical “regression” as a critical category – I think we have to face the modernity of the movements we also want to criticise, and reflect carefully on what that implies… But this has probably grown a bit cancerous for a comment, and feels a bit scattered (little comments boxes make it difficult to write something that is coherent, when you blab on for as long I tend to do)… ;-)