Compensation for my dodgy Magneto Was Right t-shirt getting (predictably) kicked off Cafepress: someone put me into Wikipedia, in an entry called (get this) “Everyday Life in the Marvel Universe”. Thanks, 205.188.117.12!
[ tags: wikipedia, magneto, comics, x-men, marvel, pop-culture ]
I’ve been meaning for a while to revisit Walter Benjamin’s manly refusal to be “drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello,” but I was too confused. But recent comments on “subjective destitution” versus “desubjectification” in V for Vendetta have brought me out of the woodwork. Still confused, but to hell with it.
When I noted earlier that Benjamin’s thinking is “informed by a kind of masculinist and heroic fantasy of the subject that needs inverting,” my point in using the words “kind of” wasn’t to downplay Benjamin as “kinda sorta a bit masculinist,” but to assert that that it’s “a type of masculinism that demands intervention before we can think of using the concept that it’s informing” — to take both his macho posturing and the radical potentials of his conception of historical materialism with the gravity they deserve. I actually think a bigger danger would be to leave the less obvious phallogocentrism of “historical progress” to its own devices, uninterrogated. Liberal democratic (or Stalinist) teleologies aren’t always accompanied by metaphors of whores and manly prowess, but I reckon that by and large they’re actually more implicated in dodgy, unspoken masculinisms. Meanwhile, the real question begged by Benjamin — what does it mean to “truly” act? — isn’t going away in a hurry.
So when Melissa asks what I mean by “inverting” Benjamin, I guess I’m arguing for a “deconstructive” approach to him. To invert his macho blasting of history is really to see how people might collectively be historical-materialist “protagonists” that are able to radically push events out of their additive linearity, but in ways that have nothing to do with traditional ideas of philosophical or political “presence”. I’m not really sure what relationship this kind of collective political subjectivity might have to other models, but like Benjamin’s Messiah (whose radical virtuality belies its manifestly heroic trappings), it would certainly arrive outside the macho discourse of mastery in which he is otherwise immersed, and might be virtually suspended in moments of collective pain or horror, rather than invested in Benjamin’s confident strong-man figure.
I think those moments would be ethico-political in nature. Not in some patronising “recognise the Other’s pain” way, which is the way ethics usually seems to be situated, but as ethical opportunities for those feeling pain — a coming-into-collective-subjecthood against the grain. More perversely (and I’m thinking of “Cronulla” here), you could say that people who are affected by racist violence have ethical “obligations” that are as important as the obligations of those who perpetrate it. Of course (and before I’m misread), this ethical opportunity has nothing to do with somehow needing to “calm down” in the face of racist provocation, or the liberal injunction to forsake “retribution”, but is about engaging with one’s own collectively traumatic moments in order to stop them being yet another episode in the historicist aggregation of incidents.
A little while back, Ange wrote something quite interesting about how trauma, ethics and “the world” might be connected:
Levinas argued that trauma is an encounter with the other and an opening toward the ethical. That insight might be shifted from its philosophic register to suggest that such traumatic moments are also the manifestation of the world, both the cracks of the world and the possibility of an opening toward it.
Now, at the risk of reopening a sore point, the manifestation of “cracks in the world” brings to mind the argument that Az and Glen had in the wake of “Cronulla”; according to Az,
There’s a moment when the world cracks open and all the invisible wires holding it in place become visible. Cronulla is one of those moments.
But for Glen, such apparent moments of revelation are a Lacanian fallacy such descriptions of the event are mistakenly “Lacanian”:
[t]his is a description of a classic Lacanian-type event and whether you intended it or not is irrelevant… The ‘in/visible’ distinction you make is very useful for those who think people (ie the ‘masses’, not ‘the people’) only need to be informed about what is hidden, etc. that is, what is really going on. If you haven’t actually noticed the people that need to change themselves and stop acting like fuckin idiots know exactly what is really going on because they are there, they are the ‘on’ that is currently happening. Yes?
[Link to original comment broken — added fuller quote from an earlier draft to compensate.]
Rather than being “Lacanian”, isn’t that the model he’s ascribing to Az merely a bookish, perversity-free fantasy-land populated by a trillion Noam Chomskys? But more importantly, what I think Glen effaces here is the possibility that Az’s revelatory crack in the world might mean something other than a communication of Chomskyian facts — that the revelation of “the world” to people might instead indeed be important and concern affect, and act as a traumatic, desubjectifying fissure that demands a new kind of engagement and action. An engagement with horror is more necessary than ever; against the wilfully naive politics of scandal, too many ultraleftists are performing its mirror image — a studied unsurprise at the latest appalling incident that comes along, letting it simply be a symptomatic confirmation of “the system”, and letting history become what Benjamin hated: one fucking thing after another.
Those on the receiving end of the violence of racialisation are often corralled between these false choices, but are always in the process of escaping them. For example, I got the distinct impression that the paternalistic forces of liberal/socialist anti-racism piously imagined their own position as having organised the Sydney rally against the Cronulla riots “for them” (i.e. people “of Middle Eastern apperance”), and were somewhat miffed when very few Arabs at all turned up. Were “they” being ungrateful? Were “they” apathetic? Instead, I’m reminded of what it felt like to be Asian during the rise of Hansonism in 1996: I didn’t want to leave the house. Not because I was naïvely surprised by people’s racism, but because I was reminded of what people thought of me all the fucking time. I got the memo. And it was visceral, and nothing to do with domain presumed in Glen’s idea that everyone “involved” in racist violence “knows exactly what’s going on”, whatever that might mean. In any case, I’ve written about how this moment of trauma and disappearance was a lost opportunity for me, but looking back again, I want to emphasise that this opportunity had nothing to do with regaining some kind of footing in “the public”. For me, the public response to Hansonism meant the strangely privileged, hollow, school-debate posturings of those Labor Left rhetoricians I’d sparred with in an earlier life, who were busy defending the principles of tolerance just after their party masters had implemented the most racist border control measures since their own White Australia Policy earlier that century.
Meanwhile, back to Cronulla: when young Arabs started smashing shit up in a somewhat understandable response to one of the most spectacularly racist local events in decades, they were characterised by television reports as “gangs terrorising the public”. When the entire discourse of public political participation is structured in these ways, is it no wonder that those acting outside or underneath it have effectively “disappeared”? It is a painful… opportunity. Of escape. Of negotiating trauma. “We” are outside this “public” now, and that violent act of marginalisation is horrifying. But what would it mean to stay disappeared, and to fuck things up further, not as recognised subjects? How can we perversely find a kind of enablement in this, an opportunity to become different, to escape the radar of politics? How can we open collectively to a desubjectified ethics of acting in the world without being a citizen? What would it mean, now, to act? To blast this moment out of the continuum of history, but not as Benjamin’s confident, masculinist historical-materialist hero? But as a traumatised and despersonalised vortex of affect that heralds a new kind of subjectivity which lacks the stamp of approval, from either the capitalist State or the revolutionary Party? Surely this would be the real state of emergency?
In part, I think it means to become an Invisible, to “disappear” as a Revolutionary Actor. Which is why all this hubbub about V in V for Vendetta meting out the revolutionary training of torture and presenting a spectacularised, heroic politics to the masses seems rather strange to me. Yes, there is something interesting going on with Evey’s appalling process of “subjective destitution” at the hands of a V who “knows better”, but I think it’s only interesting because it needs to be inverted into a more generalised ethics of trauma rather than its crudely populist instrumentalisation at the hands of V — in the same way that Benjamin’s vocabulary of whorehouses, manliness and mastery needs inverting.
Update: I’m aware that my “argument” can be read to suggest a kind of religious “nobility of suffering” and martyrdom schtick, for which I apologise. That’s not it at all. I’m talking about the absolute deterritorialisation of subjectification, rather than the mystification and resacralisation of some kind of symbolic martyrdom. Clear? :)
Updated again for clarity around the Glen Fuller quotes, which no longer exist online.
[ tags: cronulla, desubjectification, invisibles, pauline-hanson, subjective-destitution, trauma, v-for-vendetta, violence, walter-benjamin ]
Badly shielded cabling is the spookiest thing ever. One of the places where I work has a lot of digital video stuff going on, all the time. So when video from one computer ends up playing on the LCD display of a video camera that isn’t hooked up to it, we freak out, big time! It’s enough to make me wanna go see Katee Sackhoff and Nathan Fillion together in White Noise 2! Lesson: expensive Firewire cables are expensive for a reason. Note to self: in this stupid economy, buy expensive cables.
[ tags: firewire, nathan-fillion, EVP, katee-sackhoff, white-noise-2, video ]
And when this building is on fire
These flames can’t burn any higher
I turn sideways to the sun
And in a moment I am gone
That’s the price of love (that’s the price of love)
Can you feel it (can you feel it)
If we could buy it now (that’s the price of love)
How long would it last (that’s the price of love)
— New Order, “World”, Republic
While contemplating if it’s my fate to lose my mind, I just bought a Strongspace account to do online backups of my files when I’m in Hong Kong. My most important data is now mirrored in six different spots:
Only last week I told my friends in my postgrad office that the ideology of hypertext, the Internet and contemporary computing in general has inherited Project Xanadu’s quixotic desperation to avoid loss — to never forget anything; a kind of suture to maintain the integrity of one’s own subjectivity. Looking at my own manias, I can now only laugh.
[ tags: backups, loss, strongspace, xanadu ]
A new venture:
Someone with a pen or pencil can be a tracer. So can a radioactive substance introduced into the body to make certain processes visible for diagnosis. And a bullet that acts like a flare. Stay tuned.
[ tags: cartography, design, geography, mapping, networks, space, spatiality, tracer ]
