You sowed a baby and you reaped a bomb.
June 27, 2009, 3:33 pm
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?
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525,600
June 16, 2009, 3:03 pm
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 Continue reading →
Unworlding II
June 8, 2009, 2:34 pm
Filed under:
affect,
Belonging,
Detachment theory,
economy,
Encounters,
Mood,
Ordinariness,
psychoanalysis,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
trauma,
writing The rain was still torrential when I left the library to make my way to the far northwest side of Chicago: through the windscreen the traffic was in a slow chaos, cars shuddering from the beating wind and barely moving forward, the flooding streets outlining once again the urban infrastructure crumbling in real time. Potholes, puddles, and spray pounced out into sight as if the out there were a video game full of menacing threats to survival and not also ordinary life.
In the middle of all that a well-placed Shell station on Hollywood was processing a lot of traffic. In the back right hand corner of the pumping area, though, a man stood just watching the cars. His gray and white cardigan and black cargo pants were becoming just dark with rain. He was tall, no longer young. He seemed to have no relation to a car or the cars or to becoming soaked. He was standing there just looking without watching. It was easier to suss out what wasn’t happening than what was. I wanted to get out of the car and ask him something but couldn’t figure out the mechanics. Or the ethics.
Then things cleared up and moved on and so did the hard day of wondering about those scenarios of the ordinary that are predictable by now and yet feel immoveable too because their accumulation–as data, as exempla, as anecdote–does not lead to clarity, let alone transformation via something made live when the phenomenon turns trope. Continue reading →
. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought 