Filed under: Affect Theory, ambivalence, Attachment, Craziness, emotion, Encounters, Love, Mood, optimism, Ordinariness, psychoanalysis, queerness, sexuality, supervalent_thought, Theory of this Blog, writing
You find yourself untethered. Your lover/children have just left and you’re alone. Your pet/partner has died. School is over. You’re on vacation. You’re wandering around streets, a mall, your flat. You are trying to stay awake in a cafe. You are in the limo on the way to the airport in a strange city. The calories you eat are absentminded, yet there’s a faint arousal or hunger.
Under my thumb
Her eyes are just kept to herself
Your head is staging a conversation with someone who has insulted you. You’re saying that you don’t care. In your head your voice is smooth and warm. In the fantasy the insulter is moved that you act as though they still deserve attachment, engagement, and idealizaton, and you do love x about them, so it is not false, but the extra kick you receive in seeming not to let the insult get to you makes the fact of it inflate into something impressive, like courage. Then you listen to the stream of self-policing that accompanies you on your walk, and you imagine confessing, look, I finally have a secret to confess!
My mind flashes to my father as these scenarios collect. I think of my colleague who recites the emails in which she was told that she has no right, no standing to critique what her male colleague loves. I think of another colleague’s monologue about how women who don’t have SHIT can still at least beat men with arguments, and I thank god that I don’t leak out my wishes as facts. But here I am, humbled. Anger induces us all to write in whatever idiom we can pick off.
I am continuing here the discussion of passivity’s promiscuity of form introduced in the last few posts.
Filed under: Affect Theory, Attachment, Detachment theory, Mood, optimism, Ordinariness, psychoanalysis, teaching, Theory of this Blog, writing
Slowly, I aspirate from myself the choking wave of obligations that the 2009-2010 term induced: never have I had a time of such incessant institutional demand, and as I breathe through the final tsunami of papers, my mind volleys, “How did it get to be this way?” and “I still don’t know how to live.” I don’t know how to fix it or even to fake fix it. Then, a few minutes ago, as if on some mysterious cue, an old Jewish New Yorker wearing a Mets cap and jeans that hang loosely off him walks in the cafe door and intones, “Oi am still in juniah high school when I am neah a beautiful woman, Oi am seventy-noine but insoide I am nointeen” over and over, at first loud, then louder. Save me from the inutility of a time when all I have left for contact with the world is a loud voice that even the wind doesn’t want. Apostrophe’s poetic tradition is grand, but to be forced into an apostrophic life is a bitch.
At least blogging is . . . quiet.
I turn to the New York Times article on “eating disorders not otherwise specified,” usually known by its acronym Ednos. Ednos describes eating disorders that invent non-normative forms. They’re far more disordered than the conventional ones that at least imitate a known symptom cluster. When it came out, the Times description of disorganized eating induced me to gather up some thinking I’d been doing around my Ordinariness seminar about the place of passivity in ordinary subjectivity. I’ve been trying to write this post since January, dig?
In the seminar passivity emerged as a register for describing the myriad ways in which the aesthetic represents subjects delegating their agency to a form or norm of being in the world, a delegation that induces the kind of state I’ve been gathering up here under the umbrella of “non-sovereign subjectivity.” Zizek calls this kind of delegation interpassivity. It is a beautiful concept, but it could be much more beautiful. As so compulsively often, he uses it to describe how persons refuse to become genuinely politically rational. Interpassivity describes the relation of disavowal in which one hands off one’s affect to a media form or other persons, thus producing room for disowning and managing one’s own intensities. His point is that much of what passes for interactivity is really interpassivity. (more…)
Filed under: affect, Affect Theory, Attachment, Belonging, emotion, Love, optimism, queerness, sexuality, supervalent_thought, teaching, Theory of this Blog, writing | Tags: affect_theory, Duke_University, Eve_Sedgwick. Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick, Love, mourning, queer_theory, sexuality, shame, teaching, theory, writing
On February 25, 2010, a small symposium gathered at Duke University to honor Eve Sedgwick. There were four formal speakers—me, Tyler Curtain, Maurice Wallace, and Robyn Wiegman—and then many other testifiers and memorialists. We were all listeners. It was a moving and interesting night. As there were no plans by the event sponsors to publish the talks, the participants thought they’d like some record of their part in it to be part of a publicly held history not only of Eve, but of many overlapping affectional and discourse worlds. We decided to publish them here and put out the word. After the jump, After Eve…
Filed under: Affect Theory, Attachment, class, Encounters, Mood, Ordinariness, teaching, Theory of this Blog, writing
1. Uncanny Hollows
Not at home in a discipline, I have my own, daily trading sleep for the hope that some time before the day starts might be spent on some thing besides immediate production. During the school year, though, class prep eats virtually all of that time, as even familiar material feels underprocessed in the scene of ongoing teaching.
This year the precarious time between sleep and performance has become an uncanny hollow. My study is a study in clutter and windows. Usually, I ease into its quiet distributions like a coat thrown onto a chair. But now, the space is fraught. Cries start hurtling through the walls at around 6 and punch the day out randomly but regularly. The sadness hurts my heart–I want to say literally–and starts me hiving off into reveries, just so I can breathe. At first I assumed that the sounds were breakthrough dreaming, a thing I get when I am in sleep arrears. But then I realized that the beats came from an external source–Lorraine, the woman living above me, unraveling from Alzheimer’s.
Isn’t dementia always precocious?
Her guardian tells me that Lorraine is like a baby now, but unteachable: laughing and cooing when she isn’t howling or sleeping, with nothing but an emotional present to live in, no memory, no affect management, just variation between the high notes and the low according to impulse. She hates transitions. As the day is full of them, it’s not good. She’s an exposed nerve registering the minor and ephemeral variations that, for people not in dementia, add up to nothing, or sometimes, a mood. If I’m going to work at home there is no place to turn that is free from the noise of her personality shifting around. I could say the same thing for myself, though. My literal eavesdropping forces me to italicize as though there is no writing but a pushy kind to convey that pressure on my sternum.
This howling has provided the soundtrack for A Teaching all the way through, and its streaming right now makes me lose my focus and confuses me about what I should be listening to, my noise or hers. For example, I can’t access the affect that made me want to write about the two teaching films I have seen in the last month–Daniels’ Precious and Cantet’s Entre les Murs (The Class). My notes tell me that these two neocolonial films seemed worth commenting on v. education as a desirous and antagonistic scene of multiple sovereignty-dissolving encounters. I wanted to think aloud about the breaking and remaking of schooled subjects into subjects who deserve to be precious.
Filed under: affect, Affect Theory, ambivalence, Attachment, Belonging, class, emotion, Encounters, Mood, psychoanalysis, queerness, sexuality, supervalent_thought, teaching, Theory of this Blog, trauma, writing
1. I have been teaching this term two courses that I meant to be identical but at different levels of intensity and abstraction, but my intentions (I typed intensions, which is more correct, since my intentions have stretched) (and I told my students that there are no asides in the classroom) (which is the same thing as saying there is no no in the unconscious) have little to do with what has happened, absolute divergence. As I described in the last post, teaching classes is for me like writing: if, in advance, I overprepare, then become blank and excited before I set out the prospective shape of things, and if, during the time of extension, I find it all absorbing and difficult, and if, afterwards, I can’t exactly remember what happened, not even the affect, and if I have to excavate the encounter as though it involves material from a therapeutic hour, that’s when I know that something has happened.
2. John Forrester claims that the analysand can only lie, as all the story she has is noise that fills the space of what she knows but cannot know yet, or bear to know. That is true about teaching, too. It is impossible to know who one is as a teacher. The relation between what one intended and what one did–even if one’s own sense of things were to govern the evaluation of efficacy–can’t be determined solipsistically, not only because we teach other people as singularities and as groups, not only because teaching them is so very different than reaching them, not only because the feedback loops are so varied and out of synch (when they’re not out of commission altogether), but also because the relation between information transmission and all of the other activities within the scene of teaching is mostly unconscious, seat of the pants, in the normative ether, and atmospheric, rather than eventilized. I cannot imagine myself as a student encountering myself as a teacher.
(more…)
Filed under: affect, ambivalence, Attachment, Belonging, Detachment theory, emotion, Encounters, Love, optimism, supervalent_thought, teaching, Theory of this Blog, writing
1. So many scholars read anxiously, with a hope not to learn, not to be discomposed by learning. They fish in indexes looking for confirmation of not being trumped, they skim the surface hoping that no phrase catches them. The aversion to an event to which one nonetheless comes–like the vague sadism that Adam Phillips describes as a quality of intellectuals who come to the world hoping once again to be disappointed–is a frustrating part of being in this world. I am not invulnerable to this, but when I feel it I force myself to interrupt the desire to not have an encounter that is so often part of encountering’s activity. (See Lingis for a read of how this desire to protect an aversion to a potentially transformative encounter can be part of a rhythm of belonging.)
2. I read for my classes for days, and then make intense notes to provide infrastructures for the session (that become destroyed invariably by an aside or an intervention that creates unexpected folds in thought). But in the last hours of class prep, my teaching notes appear to me to be writing that came from the middle of a dream. Toward the shifted explanation of what was I reaching? The work of reattaching to an elaborate pedagogical intention that I had yesterday turns out to be a lot like reentering a transferential relationship after a break. A friend used to tell me that class prep was rote for him, a skimming over material. Sometimes reading feels like skimming, that Barthesian “abrasion” on the surface of the text. I tell my students that it takes me decades, sometimes, to enable myself to let in a new thought, to let it reorganize fully the way I encounter a problem. In the meanwhile, it’s managing being in the overpresence of a problem and yet at the kind of distance to which Primo Levi refers when he describes someone’s gaze at him as the deadly quiet staring of beings looking at each other through the wall of an aquarium.
Filed under: Affect Theory, ambivalence, Attachment, Craziness, Detachment theory, Encounters, Love, Mood, Ordinariness, psychoanalysis, queerness, supervalent_thought, trauma, writing
I’ve been re-re-re-reading Christopher Bollas’s short essay on moods: it is a complicated thing to take in because of the delicacy with which it calculates what a mood does.
A mood is not a sustained orientation toward the world, but an affective episode: being a curmudgeon is different than being in a curmudgeonly mood. At the same time, Bollas points out, the concept provokes spatial metaphors. Just as one goes to sleep, one gets into moods; and just as one wakes up and can reflect on sleep, one can get some distance on a mood. A mood is thereby an affective impasse, a theatre of self-alteration that comes from “within” but with which one does not have to feel entirely identified. Why am I in such a ______ mood?
Filed under: affect, Attachment, Belonging, Craziness, Detachment theory, Encounters, Mood, optimism, Ordinariness, potentiality, psychoanalysis, queerness, sexuality, supervalent_thought, Theory of this Blog, writing
My posts take forever to write, because they are trying to–my fingers want to type “to survive a genre,” but I meant to say “to invent one,” and that says it all about where I live. But the long duration also comes from the ways that a “post” is a mnemonic genre of its own, a recording of an instance in the pursuit of a problem. What would I need to understand to shift around this thing? Post-making enables me to track a point in my response to x, and how I thought to maintain fidelity to the pressure it incites. I am grateful to my readers for their bibliography and apercus, too: it might not seem that I’m responding sometimes, but it takes awhile to reorganize myself around a new complex thought.
My encounter with problems and the scene of writing provokes sometimes a zone of scarily quiet being in the world. But there is always a soundtrack–at the moment some loud person in a cafe who believes that her addressee is all that exists and to whom the rest of us are apparently failed trompe-l’oeil. (“I’m on a water and ice diet,” she told her friend, who’d dared to put milk in her coffee.) Today also, Pierre Boulez; Fred Anderson; and the new screechy P. J. Harvey collaboration. Also, this phrase cluster: I almost got out, I can’t believe I got out; I’m not sure whether I was trying to get in or get out. Amidst all of this (more…)
Filed under: affect, Affect Theory, Attachment, Belonging, class, Detachment theory, economy, emotion, Encounters, Love, optimism, Ordinariness, Politics, potentiality, psychoanalysis, sexuality, supervalent_thought, Theory of this Blog, trauma, writing
I know that only some of the writing on this blog is accessible and useful. Research is like that, sometimes providing big clarities that open things up memorably, sometimes stacking more material between you and having a minimal handle on a problem. This is the last note for this series, because I have other writing to do, and other problems of approach and address to layer into this detachment project, still very much in its nascence. Explanation does not dissolve what’s incomprehensible about a thing. At least for me, writing makes a vestibular system, a scene around which to move to get the contours of what’s hard about a thing. Maybe a given instance achieves genuinely transformative recontextualization, and the problem looks significantly different after the analysis; usually it just outlines the body.
I’ve been thinking about aspects of this series seriously since last summer, when I heard a story that just blew me away. But a friend told me emphatically that it didn’t belong on this blog, and instead should find a home in an autobiography that I have no plans to write.
Now it is possible to fold it in. Because of intensifications in the crisis ordinary that have happened in the meanwhile, it now appears propped up among many cases, at the same time as I mean for its airing here to transform the taxonomy within which those cases have gained some clarity in the past few posts. (more…)
Filed under: affect, Affect Theory, ambivalence, Attachment, Belonging, class, Craziness, economy, emotion, Mood, optimism, Ordinariness, Politics, potentiality, psychoanalysis, queerness, sexuality, Theory of this Blog, trauma, writing
1. The Campaign Against Living Miserably
Every day digs me deeper into the bumpy surface of this situation. Today, just for fun, I was reading a wonderful Open Democracy post on the women of Greenham Common and then the post turned suddenly from a discussion of women’s emancipated political agency to a discussion of the global suicide epidemic among young men. The interviewee, an activist called Jane Powell, is now working in Manchester UK with a project called–heartbreakingly, really–”the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM).” Sit there with that for a bit.
