the whorehouse, redux: escaping “subjective destitution”

by jebni on April 30, 2006

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.

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10 comments

This is an awesome post. Thanks for it. One thing now before I go off and think some more, a clarification (which I don’t think you really need): when I talked about the world cracking around Cronulla I definitely didn’t mean a situation for which the answer was knowledge, and I wasn’t posing the cracking as a solution. That manifestly didn’t happen, anyhow.

by az on 30 April 2006 at 2:29 am. #

invert(s), interventions, martyrs & heroic maculine fantasy? neat :)

i watched Derek Jarman’s St Sebastine a little b4 reading this post. So when i did catch your wourds it unintentionally sent my mind adrift into the world of homosexual inverts, trauma & ‘subjective destitution’ as you would say

anyways… a picture of st S appears in V’s home – interesting huh?

cheers & beers babe :)

by puppet on 30 April 2006 at 2:40 am. #

ben, I am not sure why you want to continue this attack of what I wrote. I must have surely pissed you and others off. Whatever! FUCK! I think if you actually read my substantial points that I make and have made on my blog in relation to the race riots and ethical conduct in general, then you will find that we are largely in agreement, about the role of affect and other things. (For example, see my actual post on the riots: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/2005/12/reactionary-nationlism-cronulla-riots.html ) If you want to stay angry, well good for you.

I have a feeling Az was pissed off because I allegedly didn’t recognise ‘difference’ to an acceptable level. That is, I apparently didn’t recognise the “fucking HUGE difference between feeling the constant threat of racialising violence on a beach because of the politics of skin colour, and feeling vulnerable about your body because you don’t like it.” Whatever! If people want to run around being the FUCKING fascist alterity/identity police, then good on them. If people also want to refuse a gesture of empathetic linkage, then fucking good on them. But what’s at stake? being ‘fat’ is not good enough because, of course, this isn’t about ‘belonging’ it is about ‘violence’. Sure, forget belonging, not important. Of course, there is no ‘violence’ to ‘belonging’. Never. But is the beach the only fucking space of potential violence based around identity? No? Ok, good.

For example, has anyone else ever worked and lived for on a union construction site without being a union member? And then joined the union because it is easier. And then have all this other shit happens (like winning a harley davidson!) so it is just better to leave the site because there is so much resentiment because you are a ‘university type’ even though you grew up in the same fucking suburb as some of the other dumb fucks on the job. of course, living and working with these assholes 24 hours a day doesn’t compare to a day at the beach. whatever. no, no one else, especially a fucking MASCULINE WHITEY, could ever possibly know what the threat of violence is because of something about one’s self that is permanent.

Anyway, the comment link you reference to on my haloscan account doesn’t work. i think you want to link to the post for which that haloscan link (which is actually a trackback link) correlates:

http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/2005/12/az-and-beach-bodies.html

however, that post doesn’t contain those comments that are being attributed to me!?!? I’ll assume i said that comment (???), because it does read like something I would write and I vaguely remember it. So, first thing: You are actually agreeing with my comment with the jist of your post here:

“The ‘in/visible’ distinction you make is very useful for those who think people… only need to be informed about what is hidden, etc. that is, what is really going on.”

“very useful for those who think”

ie those who think.

ie not glen who thinks this, but useful as a fulcrum/weapon for those who mistakingly think it is merely a case of informing the uninformed on what has been ‘invisible’ to them all this time.

ie IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF IDEOLOGY OR A MYSTIFIED BELIEF, LIKE AS IF WE ARE ALL PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS WHO KNOW BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE

that is what i meant in the comment.

Second thing: So WHY IS IT NOT A CASE of an invisible state of affairs being made visible? because “everyone involved” in racist violence “knows what they are doing”: not ideology, but affect. Am I not agreeing with you 100% here? NO! ‘They’ don’t need to ‘know’ it on a conscious thought level to “know it”, but ‘know’ it on an experiential felt level. I am assuming they can feel the stupidity and ethical badness of what they are doing in their body, in the situation. Maybe they don’t, I don’t know. Maybe the obviousness of one’s own affective disposition isn’t obvious to racist fucks. But I think it is obvious, and they revel in the righteousness of their own hatred and the associated affectivities.

The comment by Az presupposes a world ‘out there’ to which ‘we’ don’t belong. The hidden wires made visible when the ‘world’ cracks open. Well that very well may be for people who don’t know discrimination exists in the world, or who have never encountered such violence on a personal level, or whatever. something COULD be hidden from people who are either retarded or willfully ignorant. sure, why not. However, for the people who actually are racist and who actually have experienced racist violence, or even those people aware enough to pay attention to what is going on in the world in recent history, then IT IS NOT HIDDEN. NONE OF THIS IS INVISIBLE. You say you don’t want to “regain some footing in the public”, then fine, who the hell has the ‘hidden wires’ made visible to them if it is not the apatheic mass who couldn’t give a shit about you or anyone else who feels like they don’t belong because of racism or any other form of discrimination? It is not the apathetic mass that needs any sort of convincing, etc. by ‘public intellectuals’, they don’t care, they don’t need something rendered ‘visible’ for them. However, all this racist discriminatory bullshit is WILLED by those who weild it because it gives them MORE POWER. THEY WANT IT. IT IS NOT INVISIBLE TO THEM. THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON.

third thing: I am not sure if you were there for question time at the Toby Miller thing, because you left early but I can’t remeber when. I actually asked him (after much stuttering and stammering as is my way) why he relegated what he called the ‘passional’ to a single, passing comment (in opposition to ‘rationality’, if you remember, in his talk) and why there was an absence of any sense of an affective dimension to ‘cultural citizenship’. I invoked the example of sport, ie brian massumi’s thing on the political economy of belonging, which I have written about many times on my blog, and meaghan morris’ comment about how sport is the only domain of community left anymore. He misunderstood my comment/question to be about sport, rather than the affective dimension of any conception of citizenship or what I was trying to get at, belonging.

fourth: I have no idea what the lacanian comment is about. I am not sure lacan described or worked in fallacies. However, the ‘cracking open’ business is precisely an ‘event’ in the disjunctive lacanian sense. I would prefer to look at things on a much more delicate scale, but whatever.

Lastly, I am tired (5am, I have a tooth ache, drugs have started working), but this post reads, ie all the anti-masculinist-history-as-progress stuff and escaping subjecthood, etc, like a question/case of ‘becoming-minor’, but that is putting words in your mouth.

by Glen on 30 April 2006 at 8:47 am. #

Just proceeding by ignoring the previous comments from Glen, which don’t seem very sympathetic to the anti-masculinist project articulated in your great post Ben. Get some sleep before posting, Glen.

I think your aim of a deterritorialised subjectivity is clear (which is what makes people’s fixation on being quoted right funny to me as an observer), and I really agree with what I understand your critique of leftist strategy to be: it is the larger conceptualisation of history implicit in available left positions that is ultimately ineffectual for (what I usually call) a politics based on moments of mass empathy or trauma. That does seem to me exactly what Benjamin was on about in that essay, and why it has such an attractiveness to it.

One thing I guess I also find, when reading such a masculinst (to me misogynist) passage as the one you first cited, is the affective response I feel as a woman reading it. It is a different experience of embodiment which may or may not share the same anticipation of violence that attends racial difference, which is the issue you seem to most want to address with a reworked understanding of Benjamin. The writing cannot but make me aware of the linearity of history – that in a present day text it would not be appropriate to write in this way (which does not make me feel any less suspicious that misogyny continues today in less eloquent forms).

So I’d like you to write even more about this, because it seems to me you need to be more explicit about the layers of distanciation or alienation that need to be acknowledged in engaging with a mode of thinking that has such divisive capacities from a present perspective. If the objective is to avoid seeing history as linear, the question is how to read Benjamin without the presumption of contemporary feminism or anti-racism, or… whatever recent critical and political tools we take to be irreversible. Foucault would appear to me more useful for this task.

Anyway, sorry if this is going too far elsewhere, but this problem you’re working on is probably the biggest intellectual problem I struggle with too, and it is the basis for my ongoing inability to engage with the history of philosophy. If we can both work it out, ripper.

by MC on 30 April 2006 at 12:05 pm. #

Sorry, I truly don’t have much time to engage with your comment today, Glen, but I would remind you that it’s a bit much to use the label “fucking fascists” to describe people who criticise what I see as your compulsive and repeated attempts to universalise, at every turn, the embodied specificities of racism.

Anyway, I’m not particularly angry or interested in “attacking”– the references to our little collective shit-fight were taken from a draft post from around 13 December 2005, and yesterday’s post in particular stayed in draft form for several months, so I apologise if I seem to be bearing a grudge. If you take a step back and get over the idea that an insistence on highlighting the specificities of racism might somehow displace your own “masculine whitey” experiences of violence at a work-site, you might realise that my engagement with your comments is possibly the most dispassionate part of my commentary, and are there as a springboard for things that have nothing to do with Glen Fuller. Given that you no longer have access to your own original comment (which has since disappeared, so I’ve contextualised it by lengthening it from an earlier draft), I think you’re also misreading my intent. Obviously you’re interested in affect; but as far as I could tell, you ascribed Az’s interest in the revelatory aspects of incidents such as Cronulla to a mistakenly “Lacanian” model of the masses “only need[ing] to be informed about what is hidden”, i.e. in the sense of imparting facts about “reality”. Not only does the position you describe seem rather non-Lacanian, but I think it’s a significant misreading of Az’s original post. You suggested that everybody “involved” in Cronulla already “knows” all they need to know, and that it’s the personal responsibility of people in a racist mob not to be “fuckwits”. My entire post takes issue with this idea — not as an attack on you personally or your capacity for suffering at a union work-site, but as something in which I have a general investment.

And yes, I completely agree with you about “becoming minor”.

Mel, I have to go write me some abstracts right now, but I’ll be back later.

by jebni on 30 April 2006 at 12:20 pm. #

yeah sorry about the dramatic tone of my comment. I have been on serious drugs for the last two weeks cause of a dislocated shoulder only to find out when I run out of drugs that in the meantime I have a tooth/gum problem with my wisdom teeth so I am taking lesser drugs every 3 or 4 hours until I can see a dentist.

The original comment from me, that sparked Az’s ire, was intended by me in an quasi-ironic fashion to try to depotentialise the event. The affects I could see circulating, in the media and in your immediate blog post after the riots, were problematic for me. I could see that such circulation was not going to be good for any sort of progressive political movement whatsoever. I am glad we are in agreement with the becoming-minor thing because the response from those involved has been a becoming-major, including my comment above and including your blog post after the riots (and Az’s post for the matter). This does not correlate to a question of “personal responsibility”, it is a collective response from the dominant, but not only the ‘dominant’. To depotentialise the event is to reduce and slow down the circulation of affects that pertain to a prepersonal and collective reactionary desire (that is subjectively experienced). Your blog post, with the burning Australian flag etc was about as reactionary as you can get! So my response was to use examples from my own life to try to introduce some ironic humour into the situation. Obviously this manoeuvre spectacularly failed, in part because humour and so on only travels as far as good will on the internet. From my perspective Az spectacularly failed to understand what I was trying to do, or maybe others want to see their friends full of reactionary desire. I don’t.

From my perspective it is not a question of specificity of difference or of generality. I can see no sense in perpetuating the circulation of reactionary desire and any move to perpetuate such reactionary desire appears to me to be the living out the micro-fascisms (in the D&G sense) of a slave mentality (in the nietszchean sense).

Instead of depotentialising the event by slowing down such a circulation, all I have done, apparently, is add another circuit (or two) for reactionary desire to circulate, including my own. For that I apologise.

by Glen on 30 April 2006 at 1:23 pm. #

No rush to reply to me – I should have said more emphatically that I think you already do perform the trajectory of thinking I am asking for over the course of these two blog posts. But I want to read it all together in a longer form, like an essay or something, sometime when you get the chance/ excuse.

by MC on 30 April 2006 at 3:24 pm. #

Ben, you’ve likely seen this (pdf) on Federici and Benjamin, but there, it seemed to me worth focussing (with a nod to Nancy) on the ‘we’ that is presupposed in Benjamin’s signature phrase that begins: “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible [...] “

Also, if you haven’t already, you might also like to have a read of Althusser’s Machiavelli and Us, in which there is lots of talk (some of it quoting Machiavelli) of grabbing fortuna by the hair.

by s0metim3s on 30 April 2006 at 5:13 pm. #

Totally off topic: Dave’s comment above about inverts, trauma and masculinity reminds me that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness has been doing the rounds of our house. In which, though, trauma doesn’t result in desubjectification, or not permanently — rather, a sexologically inscribed subjectivation/truth is the ‘answer’, but where trauma, shame and disavowal are the only viable ways to express trans masculinity. The original butch melodrama.

by az on 1 May 2006 at 5:55 am. #

Awesome blog. Peace out until next time TabathaOster

by TabathaOster on 19 May 2006 at 1:30 am. #