The Fascist Within

There’s a certain amount of investment that goes into writing these blog posts – I’m always convinced there’s something better I could be doing at the time, and can only reluctantly sit down and write these. This is, however, not without its rewards – I get to sit down later and chuckle at my own witticisms, and sleep soundly knowing that history will have a testament to my genius.  Maybe not that, so much, but at least in part a record of what I was thinking at some particular time. I think there’s a very syncretic aspect of memory – it’s hard to remember outside of your epistemology – and I often have a difficult time remembering when (or perhaps more importantly, why) I used to think Israel was good and drugs were bad, or that love wasn’t real, and then that it was, and then that it wasn’t again. If anything, these blog entries are a bulwark against time, against reason. A testament to rationality, perhaps. Or maybe against it – because really, how much sense does it make to leave these testaments behind? If you can tie a common thread through them, great, your author function is preserved. But if not? Whoops – what if you didn’t use to think the way you did now? What if the brain that makes a “you” now isn’t the same brain that made a “you” earlier? 

I’ve been fretting a little bit about what I want to actually study once I land this professor schtick – apparently you aren’t allowed to just sit in a leather chair and offer pithy remarks – you have to actually produce something. I read a couple works about libidinal economies for a couple of my papers and ended up really falling in love with the concept, more generally, of Eros  and by extension the dissolution of consciousness. One of the most poignant sentences of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (which I’ve been meaning to finish, but am simply intimidated by) was the one where, after describing the process through which binaries are created through some sort of  slowing of the libidinal flow, says “Don’t ask why – to ask why is to return to the realm of the Zero, to look for meaning.” This has been a bit stymieing for me, because while ultimately proving the source of my Nihilism, there’s an implication that the intellectual endeavours themselves are a bit of a false consciousness – a “We should know better, but we’re doing it anyway.” This is the primary difficulty I have with arriving comfortably at some sort of hedonism as a paradigm – I can’t justify it, which throws me right back into the spin cycle of “Why try and justify it?” which is in itself a sort of attempt to find justification. I’ve yet to find an exit that I’m satisfied with, although beer seems to help. And sex – I find that sex is good for resolving a lot of these ontological difficulties, although I suppose in a roundabout way it’s reproducing them. *Snort*

Dani told me recently that my blog wouldn’t cut it as a real publication because if I wanted to make something out of it, I would have to take out those sort of narcissistic asides: the bad jokes and even worse puns that I find amusing (and secretly suspect you do too) if not a little bit lacking in journalistic integrity. Also ensuing from our discussion was the way in which this blog offers insight into my personality. I’m somewhat split on this account – of course it does, because anyone who reads this is aware that I am over-educated and under-exposed to the dirty materialism of real life, somewhat pretentious, incredibly self-absorbed, and (obvi) devastatingly charming.

 

There is, however, the “belauschen” aspect of a blog, what Dani termed the false earnestness of it. I’ve long suspected that people who keep journals (particularly confessional ones) do so with the purpose or at least the awareness (however repressed) that they may be read some day. I’ll go one step further, and declare that the sort of tertiary subjectivity of writing something and reading it when you write it, in the vein of impulse thought review, has a built in theatricality. There is, of course, the Derridian aspect here linking the voice and the sign, but what I’m really getting at is the attempt to generate meaning itself through signification; there is a creation of consciousness necessary to express an I in a text, and a certain degree of Herrschaft that eventually determines which words and ideas will pop out the other end. What I’m trying to get at is that embedded within free speech (and, implicitly, most expression) is a bit of fascism – the decision to express in one medium and even in some sort of order and most significantly at any amount of length is by all means a repressive act, and one which unquestioningly subscribes to some sort of belief in meaning or transcendentalism or at very minimum something, or else why am I writing all this shit and not watching television or jerking off or any number of things more pleasant than pecking away at a dimly lit LCD?

 

This is getting muddled – I tend to forget that these are blog posts and not essays and end up mentally masturbating my way into a corner. Let me summarize: I am intrigued by the creation of a subject implied in expression; we intuitively sort, order, and repress certain feelings and thoughts to form the appearance (at least on the exterior) of a whole – a consciousness that is an “I” and not an “Us”, when the fact of the matter is that there’s a battle for every syllable – and even before that, when the decision to write is made. Interestingly, German people don’t make decisions – they meet them, as if some sort of LHC in their brains shoots around consciousness electrons and they eventually hit upon an idea.  Lacan says the unconscious is structured like a language. Sometimes I try and think without words – never works very well, except for these sorts of primal emotions. Maybe there’s something to take from that – words aren’t the source but the symptom of repression, which we arrive at in the constitution of Self.

 

I hate it when Lacan is right.

Deutsch? Na klar!

I had a somewhat startling realization the other day -I was in the middle of listening to my gazillionth German podcast, which I’ve alternately interpersed with arguing about German grammar on the internet, and it struck me. I speak a foreign language. Well, sort of. I understand a foreign language – speaking it is going to be the difficult part. It’s an odd sort of benchmark to reach – I’ve been undergoing all sorts of psychic distress about how I didn’t learn a foreign language young enough, and my Boca’s region never split in half, and I’ll never understand like a native speaker, and… You get the idea. Precisely the sorts of thoughts that led early man to discover alcohol.  And then I realized I’m actually doing it, and it didn’t really take that long. Granted, I’ve been spending 4-5 hours a day doing this since the summer started, but that’s really only been 2 weeks or so. Amazing – and simultaneously depressing, because with every accomplishment, I’m forced to reckon with its inverse; If I could do such and such in such and such a time, then what the fuck have I been doing until now? Why have I been wasting all this time? This argument holds for traveling, reading, writing, foreign languages, fucking, working – everything! It’s a distressing epistemology, and I’m not sure what induces it, nor how to rid myself of it. Maybe this is why people get religious – because you don’t have to worry about running out of time anymore. Or maybe not. I can’t help but feel that this anxiety isn’t intrinsic; it’s induced, exogenous, or at least surmountable. I suppose their may be biological difficulties to overcome: organisms that feel happy or content probably don’t get their genes into the next round as often as ones that don’t. But hey, I tell myself, that’s what SSRIs were invented for, and wind up right back at Lexistentialism. 

 

I’m somewhat amazed by psycho-pharmacology in this regard, for two reasons. One: Humanity has advanced to such a point that it can medicate itself well enough that it’s no longer subject to the burden of progress. I would not be entirely unamused if civilization just stopped at the invention of the SSRI – perhaps even more humorous would be if the unmedicated third world caught up to and surpassed the now indolent West. It’s a funny thought, really. Perhaps a bit pedestrian, but if people became content with what they have, the whole system would break down. Of course, the system would also break down if people became too upset about what they have (or rather, don’t) and decided to even up accounts with the rich a little bit. Maybe the balancing act is a little bit more complicated than I thought: on the one hand, hunter-gatherer; on the other, French Revolution. 

I can’t help but wonder what sort of a role advertising has played in this. I was having some sort of bizarre discussion with my mother recently about whether or not kids get fat because they eat too much, or because they don’t exercise. My mother is very good (bad) at being myopic and self-selecting in perceiving faults – the issue at hand this time being whether or not my little sister needs to be forced to begin to do something with herself a little bit more demanding than changing from Disney to Nickelodeon. My father is of the opinion that she needs to start playing a sport, where as my mother’s self-righteousness gene (and confirmation bias) kicks in and determines that it’s my father taking her to Dairy Queen that will ultimately be the deciding difference. Now, barring engagement with the actual argument (although I think my father is right; plenty of American kids eat junk food and remain skinny, because they do things), I want to focus on something my mother said afterward. She was engaging in some sort of nostalgic remniscence of her childhood, and said that her family didn’t stop for “junk food” the way ours did now. I pointed out that this simply wasn’t possible then, because she’s a dinosaur and McDonald’s never offered McSaurusburgers, but also that it’s simply an unavoidable part of our world. More now than ever before, you’re bombarded with advertisements telling you about McDonalds and Starbucks and organic cereals; real men drink Coors Light (unless they drink Heineken – being a ‘real man’ is suddenly so much easier and so much harder.)  She responded that this was in fact not the case; while there weren’t fast food outlets, there were snacks and things sold – chocolate, popcorn, icecream, etc. 

I pointed out (and remain of the opinion) that the situation then was entirely different – a Starbucks drink now is an accessory, just like any other. Things aren’t marketed now -they’re branded. And what’s more, we’ve been taught that these brands are how you create your identity. It’s an odd sort of simulacrum: beyond even “you are what you buy,” we’ve arrived at a point of “you are because you buy.” The market place is loaded with brands and the information that they convey – purchasing decisions become identity decisions. It’s unavoidable, too – there is information conveyed in shopping at a thriftstore, or second hand, or sewing your own clothes, and it’s unavoidable – everyone knows it, and as a result is beholden to it.  In short, self-expression requires conscious choice about brands, and our next generation of consumers must be aware of this. And consequently, I think my little sister has to play a sport – if only so she can buy Nike shoes, to show that she’s goal-oriented and upwardly mobile, and drink Jamba Juice, to show that she’s relaxed, can kick back, and not overly body-conscious.

If You Hate The Internet I Probably Hate You

This post could have been a number of things – if nothing else, I never have a shortage of material that draws my ire. I had briefly considered keeping a running count of “Things I like and Things I hate” on this blog, but abandoned the whole project when it became clear that it would be terribly one-sided. Also, I haven’t got the time nor the dedication to write on the only other even remotely ‘real’ topic I’m mulling over, so what you’ll see here is my forte: A contrived situation out of my real (or imagined) life, hopelessly expanded and abstracted until I can morph it into a bit of amateur philosophizing. If this were a book, that would be a killer introduction. 

In perhaps the most pretentious move ever, I’ve begun keeping a mental list of things that need genealogies and words that need to be deconstructed. Any competent psychologist would quickly recognize this as evidence that I am insane, and any prudent peer would suggest that this sort of narcissism is provoked by either having entirely too much or entirely too little sex. However, my laptop computer, as a non-sentient (*crosses fingers, fears Singularity*) being, can do nothing to stop me elaborating on this shit at length. So: I’ve had it up to here with this ‘nature’ bullshit. One of my roommates had a big issue with technology; in particular, the internet. He hated it, and hated the way it had changed things,I’m told far more frequently than I ever desire to be that ‘the world moves too fast these days’ or that ‘the internet removes the personal element of life.’ This is ridiculous. It’s one thing to admit that you aren’t very ‘good’ with computers – this is admitting ignorance, which is OK with me because I’ve long suspected you of it. However, it’s another thing entirely to dislike technology. This is not only shortsighted, it’s absurd. At the risk of being terribly bourgeois and condescending, things in the United States are, by all quantifiable measures, better than they have ever been before and better than nearly anywhere else in the world. People have more material happiness here than perhaps 95% of the world – excepting the white upperclass existence in Western Europe that has us beat, if only by a tick. This sort of relative luxury is our domain purely because of our ability to dominate others in the realm of information. Western nations have, for quite some time, been able to control global flows of information (oftentimes directly generating them) and as a result, offer the average American the ability to have computer knowledge limited only to Facebook and msn.com, while still maintaining an eminently superior quality of life. 

Now, big questions: Why? Well, if Jared Diamond is to be believed, it all started with dumb luck – western Europeans got the right grains and the right animals, and as a result, our 12 year olds get obese on Jamba Juice and Their 12 year olds sew shirts. All day. And not for themselves, either. And you know what? I bet people that aren’t trying to escape their “stressful job enviroment”, where they’re chained to a Blackberry all day (“you have nothing to lose but your chains”) would be pretty fucking excited to be able to use a computer and speed up the pace of life.

Yes, I’m aware that there’s a risk of projecting my desires onto others, or assuming that they want the things we have, but isn’t this risk balanced by it’s counterpart, an Otherization which assumes that sweatshop workers or rural peasants have some sort of idealized, bucolic lifestyle that’s free of our Western hustle-and-bustle? Of course it’s free of hustle and bustle; we have implemented a system that makes them an underclass and means they’ll never be able to afford it. This is what really irks me about this democracy all over the world bullshit: you can pump democracy all you want, but becoming a democracy does not mean becoming materially wealthy. What’s more, we see the evident conflict of interest at work here – there can only be so many democracies, because once people get rights, they don’t like being fucking slaves. The US had to support Pinochet, had to support Aristide, had to support all the bizarre south east asian leaders we’ve installed that rule with iron fucking fists. Why is that? Because when you give people access to information, they find out that they’re getting fucked. 

 I’ve been having these very surreal experiences here with my family, who are quintessential petit-bourgeois, where we walk into a grocery store and it just makes my head spin.  There’s one unbelievably pretentious grocery store (excuse me, “Gourmet Market”) in Chapel Hill (also a theme park for the bourgeoisie)  that has an entire row of the store filled with different variations of truffle oil. Across from it, they sell truffle products. What, precisely does this mean? Truffle popcorn ! At $10/2 oz.  bag. If the rest of the world ever figured out that these things exist, they would hang us. Every one of us. And they should, too. Can you imagine the arrogance of a country that spends less than .5% of its GDP on foreign aid, drives Mercedes, and complains about leading a high-stress lifestyle? Unbelievable.

For one of my classes, we read an interesting deconstruction of the German term “Heimat” – a word which, roughly translated, means “native land”, complete with all the bullshit baggage about belonging, ancestry, autochthony (the greek term for born of the land; central to Plato’s Noble Lie) and so forth.  What the article reveals is that contrary to being some sort of eternal longing, “Heimat” was a term invented during the rise of modernism, as a way to combat psychic distress from urbanization and industrialization. People didn’t believe in this shit 300 years ago, they didn’t want to go “back to nature” until exactly the moment at which they no longer had to live in nature – our luxuries only seem like burdens precisely because they are luxuries – this idea of being connected to the land had to be invented, precisely because they no longer were. It’s very Oedipal – that what is forbidden to you must be what you desire, because it’s forbidden. It’s an absurd delusion, a bizarre paradox – you can’t actually leave the computers and the technology and the information behind, because it’s what ensures your dominance and ensures your agency: you can leave computers precisely because you have computers. We are the masters and we are the slaves.

 

Edit: Last line isn’t quite right, because it marginalizes the plight of people who actually are slaves. We enslaved ourselves with the illusion of choice.

On World Series and the Homo-Social

So, I’m back home for the summer, which means no more frantic paper writing, no coffee binges, no white rum binges, and perhaps most significantly, lots of spare time. Because I am a curious (self-absorbed, narcissistic) person, this gives me a lot of time to reflect on the trajectory of my life up to now. Where do I do all this soul-searching? Why, on the couch watching ESPN, of course, because as a general rule, that’s all my father likes to do with his spare time. 

This has led me to a profound realization: It’s probably good that I’ve decided to go into academia, because I simply can’t stand most ordinary people. Being out of the university has left me stuck in a world of inane conversations that generally consist of batting averages, the weather, and favorite foods. I would never confess it to Matt, but I miss his company. One of my favorite Matt moments was when I invited him to a party and he asked if anyone would try to talk to him about sports. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing most straight men consider safe to talk about with one another is Sportscenter, precisely because it allows you to flesh out a value-system without ever engaging in any of those awkwardly homo-social moments of personal expression. People who like the Red Sox are probably fan boys and obnoxious, people who like the Yankees are either Italian or pretentious, and people who claim to just enjoy the sport without a favorite team are either liars or liberals (this may be splitting hairs.)  

This is an interesting social theory I’m stumbling upon here; one of my favorite Foucault pieces is one where he writes that men are gay because they desire relations with other men – that is, homosociality. It’s somewhat amusing that these sorts of things are forbidden in our society; I think it’s foolish to deny the presence of misogyny or at least sexism, yet male-male bonds are generally frowned upon as well. If men are so much better than women, how come we can’t just hang out with one another? Perhaps more interesting than this as a general rule are the exceptions to it- certain microcosms,  little homosocial Utopias  - binge drinking, sporting events, the military. All of these areas are of course rife with homophobia, and a disavowal / telos assigned that makes them emphatically not about male bonding (i.e. competition with sports, athetic prowess to get women; drinking/bars to get laid; military as defense organization), but the truth of the matter is that these institutions are fundamentally about the generation and preservation of inclusive male experience. Maybe that’s why my dad watches sports so much – he’s either not sure how to relate, or sublimating it into contextualized fields in which the expression is permissible. Now I feel like a shitty kid for not watching the World Series with my dad.

 

To this, however, I would suggest one more realm – academia. Again, one fights by proxy, because direct expressions aren’t allowed, but through an intellectual avatar constructed of favorite authors, texts, films, etc. men are able to develop profound, lasting relationships with one another. Maybe this is why Langston hates me – he and I as real people get along alright, perhaps even well, but our avatars  (mine of post-structuralism, his as… some sort of ambiguous german Marxist-Idealism) , our real representatives of self, outside of bounded, structured communication norms, are diametrically opposed. I suppose this is part of why I want to be a professor: I hate the trivial shit that most people talk about. I suspect this is because people are 1.) afraid of conflict and 2.) reluctant to lose face by potentially backing the wrong horse. This is what makes proxy-war so great: Instead of you and I arguing, Heidegger argues with Kant. Instead of you and I fighting, the Tigers battle the Mariners. I’ve made it clear already that I think men are more interesting than women (not, of course, as an absolute rule – see girlfriend, but certainly as a general guideline), and I can’t help but suspect that to be a motivating force in my desire to enter an intellectual arena. I don’t particularly like dumb people either, so sports and the military are out, and the weaker avatar of political discussion means that people are generally afraid of discussing absolutism, which makes being a nihilist less fun. Thus, theory, where one develops interpersonal relationships with smart people that pull no punches.

Signs of the Impending Apocalypse

I live in simulacrum.

I found out today from my dear friend Ginia that Slavoj Zizek has a twitter account. What’s more, he converses with a character calling himself sfreud.

http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks

http://twitter.com/sfreud

Zizek is pretty awesome as the Lacanian version of M. Night Shamalayan – you thought you were having sex with a real person, but instead it’s just a masturbation fantasy! You thought you were free, but this is truly your greater unfreedom! You thought you knew the unknowns, but what about the unknown knowns!

Anyway, Reality is too real for me right now. I’m off to project onto Nature (no, really – quote from his Twitter. Reality is a double Virtual. Self reflection of the One = 2)

I think there’s a direct correlation between the number of times you resort to the first person and how shitty your blog gets – this is probably because if the internet is nothing else, it’s a way to figure out that 1.) everyone is miserable and wants attention and 2.) the internet is sensationalist, and unless you are a pro basketball player or a pimp, no one wants to hear your first-person narrative. 

This has traditionally been a strong point of my blog – I indulge my narcissistic tendencies by writing long treatises on relatively trivial matters here, then re-read them, smirking, whenever I have a crisis of self-confidence (or just can’t get to sleep at night.) This doesn’t always make for the most memorable entries, but at least I don’t talk about my own boring life. 

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what I’m about to do – I think that I need a medium to jot down a couple of the things flying around right now, and the internet + my loyal fanbase is just going to have to suffer through it. 

I’m currently procrastinating, avoiding writing more on an enormous paper that I have due in approximately 24 hours. This is a bit confusing to me, to be honest – I enjoy the topic, I enjoy the texts, and I generally enjoy writing essays. Perhaps it’s the scale of the work that’s intimidating (20 pages), although I have sufficient material to fill up that much space. I think the real difficulty is that the interesting part of the paper is, to me, all involved in the research – I’ve read approximately a gillion journal articles, secondary texts, etc. and quite simply have no interest in producing a(nother) piece of literature on the topic that no one is going to read except a scant few members of my family and friends that I can coerce into doing so.  I question the motives of academia in this regard – the professor who had initially agreed to read my paper has informed me, that despite being a Deleuze scholar (the primary concern of my essay), he won’t be reading any of the undergrad pieces. I suppose that’s fair, given that they’re likely going to be shit, but it makes me wonder why we’re required to write something in the first place; it seems that if the goal were simply to develop a better writing style, there are more effective ways of doing that (exercises, stylistic ventures, etc.) than producing a single, very large paper. It’s like training for a marathon – nobody runs the full 26.6 until the day of the race. Of course, there aren’t a lot of bone-thin Kenyans producing grad papers, but the metaphor still has some weight. 

Anyway, so I’m producing a paper that I don’t really want to produce for two professors that don’t really want to read it. This could be my bias as an econ major here,  but I can think of a couple ways to improve efficiency in this situation. And by a couple ways, I mean one, and by improve efficiency, I mean give myself less to do.

This reluctance is no doubt also inspired by the fact that I received my first B+ a few days ago. I would be slightly more distressed, but the ego-syntonic life support systems kicked in a while back, and I’m convinced the professor is a jerk – which, to be fair (to me), he is. This is not simply a case of mis-recognizing or failing to recognize my brilliance (although that’s a part), but a result of me trying to approach people who either have too much or too little systemic nihilism to fall in line with what I want them to do. Case in point: he insists that B+ is a good grade, and nothing to be concerned about. This strikes me as absurd, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the statement “B+ is a good grade” makes no sense. Perhaps that’s not quite right – it’s not that it doesn’t make sense, but that it bears no relation to the real world.  I don’t want a good grade – I’m not in the habit of simply collecting grades; I’m trying to use them to do something (namely, become rich, take models on my yacht, and use money as toilet paper.) Whether or not I take models on my yacht has absolutely nothing to do with the reception or non-reception of subjectively “good” grades – it has to do with getting As. In this sense, in any sense,I don’t care what you, as a professor, think of me, nor your (lackluster) evaluation of my performance in your class. I just want an A. Where does the nihilistic element come in? I made the distinction previously between being too much or too little nihilist – I’m riding high in that golden in-between area, but it seems likely that this character ( who shall remain nameless, because I’m still trying to get him to give me an A)  is either still locked in the realm where he believes in things like truth and justice and equity (can’t abide by those people) and wont’ just give me an A, because it would be unethical OR he has somehow out-nihilized me, in which case he is a more fearsome opponent than I expected. I’ve yet to really be out-nihilized, because I’m generally the craziest person I know, but I suppose it’s within the bounds of comprehension. In this case, he simply doesn’t give a fuck about what sort of grade I get in the class, and may be giving me a B just to fuck with me. This would, obviously, be a bad thing.

 

 

Also, here’s an excerpt from my Deleuze paper. It’s mostly non-sensical.

Michel Foucault’s introduction to Anti-Oedipus begins by invoking one Reich struggling with another, establishing the biunivocal link between fascism and desire that underlies the entire Oedipal complex. “How,” Wilhelm Reich asks, apropos of Hitler, “could the masses be made to desire their own repression?” This question, as the point of departure for Deleuze and Guattari’s text, holds a multiplicity of meaning that allows it to be addressed, redressed, repressed – implicit in Reich’s question are issues of the Subject, of desire, of repression and compulsion and power; in short, all the concerns of a libidinal economy.[1] Foucault answers Reich a few pages later, declaring that our oppressor isn’t Fascism, isn’t Empire, isn’t the Self or the Other or the Object – it’s daddy-mommy-me. “Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what gives us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own repression. Everybody has been oedipalized…everybody wants to be a fascist.”[2]

                The problem that Deleuze and Guattari address, however, isn’t Oedipus itself – Oedipus is a symptom (to be certain, a dominant symptom, but a symptom nonetheless) and not a cause. This sleight-of-hand demands then the question not of “How Oedipus?” which psychoanalysis had previously sought to answer, but instead, “Why Oedipus?” Not the pedestrian why of “why do we desire in an Oedipal manner,” which is really to ask why is it that I desire my mother? That’s remaining entirely within the tyranny of the Zero, that’s a how spelled with a W, that’s just repeating Freud and Lacan. Who is the ‘I’ and who is the mother? “In reality, global persons – even the very form of persons – do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them, any more than they exist prior to the triangulation into which they enter: desire receives its first complete objects and is forbidden them at one and the same time.”[3] The schizo doesn’t name; he is all the names in the universe. The re-territorialization on the subject is just the sort of bulwark that Oedipus creates – it’s already within the Oedapized framework.   This is the displaced-represented[4], the only image we can create because something must be created, you can’t just sit there can you well don’t just sit there  instead, instead,  you must demand you must desire  is our desire always-already inscribed within the triangle of daddy-mommy-me? This is the question at the heart, the soul, the anus of the libidinal economy: Why the limits, the borders, the territories? Why aren’t we schizos? This is the answer to “Why Oedipus?” -  the Trinity, the Theatre, the Representation – these are the one axiom of Kapital: exchangeability. Capital flows are unchained, are decoded, are vast sick seas of deterritorialization. Oedipus must inscribe the Self, must re-code the family where Kapital leaves only desire. Writes Lyotard,

“[Anti-Oedipus] spreads the image of a decoded capitalism full of contemporary circulations or even more intense potential circulations that only a series of dikes (“reterritorializations”) can restrain and keep within the banks, only a whole battery of repressions led by the fundamental State: the Arch-State and its Oedipus.”[5]

 

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[1] Intro, xvi, Anti-Oedipus

[2] Intro, xx, AO

[3] AO 70

[4] AO p115

[5] Energumen, p 16 of Semiotext

We’re Back

Some of you have been waiting longer for this than others – by some, I mean the only person who continues to read this, my best ex-patriot friend Sam. At the great risk of sounding like a bad Casablanca outtake, this one’s for you, Sam.

Times, they are indeed a-changin. I’m not particularly moved by any niggling ideological spurs, so maybe I’ll just provide a brief update on my life, and in so doing, re-evaluate and lapse into a self-critical funk. Oh boy.

The career move has been pretty much solidified – the one where I go from a job that actually makes money (literally – finance pun!) to a position where you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the opportunity to be denied any number of entry-level positions. Ah, academia. Can’t wait. Some day, when I’m the world’s best educated unemployed person, I’ll look back on this decision and shudder. At least I didn’t sell out, right?

I’m currently trying to figure out the right field to enter academia in. My real interest lies in theory, but then, whose doesn’t? Apparently you aren’t allowed to just tell a grad school that you want to be a pompous intellectual; you have to sneak that in the side door. I find this notion of smuggling quite amusing – the professors in my Utopia class have mentioned a couple times that the Italians keep “smuggling”  Heidegger into humanism. This is, of course, absurd on a number of levels – first and foremost being the insanity of talking about “smuggling” Heidegger anywhere, as if the very statement itself isn’t designed to alienate 99.7% of the people listening to it. One of my favorite parts of academia is hearing about the bizarrely petty politics that seem to emerge when you pack 300 quadrameters of ego into a 30 quadrameter office – Flaxman related the story of Jacques Lacan calling a young Gilles Deleuze into his office, but not before making him sit in the hallway for an hour. Upon finally granting him entry, Lacan says to the immer berühmter Deleuze “I already have an heir (Jacques-Alain Miller, although it probably had more to do with his sycophantic behavior than a common first name), but you; I could use someone like you.” Essentially, if Deleuze would take back his critique and support Lacan, he would enjoy the blessing of almost exclusively Lacanian French psychoanalytic legions – in short, the body of the king. Deleuze turned down the offer, “buggered” Lacanian analysis, and now enjoys (well, enjoyed, comments on the Afterlife not withstanding, since he’s dead now) his own legions of followers. Lots of people think this sort of behavior is unappealing, or shallow, or pretentious, or whatever – frankly, I think it’s fascinating (and I’ll confess to more than a little bit of suppressed glee at the notion of a lifetime spent playing mindgames.) Why would anyone who wants to study psychoanalysis eschew psychological warfare? 

I’m working on two research projects right now that ought to lend a little help in choosing an academic department – one is a comparative examination of the Turkish experience in Germany, and the other an investigation of libidinal economies per Lyotard, Deleuze, Marcuse et. al. I’m a little bit frustrated by my experience with writing or proposing an abstract – people keep telling me that my projects are too broad, or too bold, or too expansive. “Pick something small and prove it.” This is precisely the sort of negative dialectic that I’m trying to get away from – the notion that I talked about here has only grown stronger, particularly in light of Marcuse’s commentary on the thanatological nature of the negative dialectic – Western epistemology says that you take ideas, set them in conflict with one another, and let one trump the other. There’s no room for multiplicity, no room for non-linear relations. It’s shitty – it makes the production of knowledge into a dick-measuring contest, where the goal is no longer the production of new knowledge or ways of thinking, but merely replacing one ideological adherence with another. Like Foucault says, regimes of Truth – liberal arts scholars are happy to do philosophy of science, but the real reflection is still yet to come. 

This particular beef is in response to a paper I’m supposed to be writing on ethnically “Turkish” people in Germany, and the sort of inter-cultural experiences they create. The class discussion revolved around what the two groups have to give up to integrate – what do the Germans lose, what do the Turks lose? – which I think is a total obfuscation of the real point, and a sort of gross reductivism that, while perhaps letting you write a paper that is “significant” in the current climate, offers no real insight or new avenues of exploration into the issue. My take on it is this: To say that there exists such a thing as Germans in Germany who have to give something up to the Turkish Turks is to miss the point entirely – namely, that capital flows and markets have exceeded the boundaries of the nation-state in which the state was originally conceived; the time when the concept of the “modern” (read: European) nation-state was constituted was an attempt to control or balance the market that existed at that time. Now, we have global capital flows that exceed the boundaries of a single nation. Why are the Turks in Germany in the first place? They’re a labor flow, because American capital investment made Germany an economic powerhouse to such an extent that they had to import labor. The good-paying jobs don’t exist in Ankarra; they’re in the West. This is basic international trade economics, and not terribly revolutionary. Why are Germans pissed at Turks? Because they’re taking “their” jobs and taking “their” benefits. What the Germans don’t realize is that these jobs no longer “belong” to them – they’re trans-national, globalized businesses that put their capital wherever it’s going to make the most profit. Both of these groups are struggling against the same phenomenon, but they aren’t aware of it: globalization, and late capitalism. Is this a pretty expansive idea? Yes, of course. But does it offer a little bit more insight into the issue than a paper which brackets out all of these economic issues? Yes, of course. This is like the Heisenberg principle of Cultural Studies; sure, you can bracket out enough variables that you can come to a conclusion, about say “Turkish women’s cultural productions in Berlin theatre, excluding economic, sociological, and religious factors.” It’s like pre-Copernican astronomy; we don’t talk about the real orbits, because that defies Church doctrine. Here, we can’t talk about all the factors at work, can’t establish a network of potential connections just to consider them and their implications; that would be a blasphemy of the Church of the Academy, where the only thing you can prove are things that stay entirely within a department so small as to be entirely incapable of proving anything significant. 

 

Why? Because it’s dangerous to let people know too much, and if you could actually work, study, and learn in all these fields at the same time you would realize what a sham the whole system was. People are compartmentalized because it’s dangerous to put them together. Nothing holds the collectively carceral society in place better than individualism; we are atomized and fractionated. We are individuals, and it will be the death of us.

Poem Idea

Ich nenne meine Dusche Jesus Christus, denn

 aus Wasser macht er  mich rein.

Ozymandias

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” 

 

I have mixed feelings about life right now. I’m walking this very narrow line between reckless narcissism and falling into abject despair. I’m not sure if this is an SSRI thing or an existential crisis thing – my “Lexistentialism” is undoubtedly complicating things (I think), but I’m not entirely ready to discount the possibility that somewhere in my travels, I’ve stumbled upon a fatal text or two. I had the realization, in a previous post that never made it online, that I’m a high candidate for suicide. I’ve been considering the actual physiological mechanisms behind this for quite some time, and ended up butting my head against some interplay between Freud and Darwin, or perhaps better put, between psycho-analysis and biological determinism.

Spectres

I am at a point in my life where must either kill myself or develop an extensive drug habit.

 When I was younger, I had this recurring fantasy that I would die at a young age. I’m not particularly sure what brought this about; mostly an inability to imagine myself as an adult, or at least, in any of the transition stages of being an adult – the ones where I don’t yet have a bazillion dollars, super-powers, a yacht, etc. There was a period where I grew out of this although only in the negative sense – the fantasy stopped recurring, although I was still left with these spectres (traces, if you will) of my non-future. As a current inhabitant of that non-future, I’ve started putting a little bit of thought into what my future is going to look like. It’s not good.

 

“Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough”

 

-Sartre