. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

brief reaction, really, but i’m excited to see the bone structure & direction of this new project.

I love your work! Personally, I don’t desire being passive to form so much as I realize the banausic (employable) exigencies of being pliable and obedient in that way. What I desire is to desire it for desiring its sake, not for employment’s sake. I gather that employers and institutions of form indoctrination are already on to this — see “casual Fridays.” Alas, employer-sanctioned freedom still constitutes form. I guess I’m also passive to form, then, because I desire to be considered part of a community. In any case, thanks for getting my synapses all worked up.

I find I cannot think without occasionally surfacing into silence from the ocean of noise I am constantly immersed in. It’s cyclical. Readreadreadreadread. Pause. Writewritewritewrite. Pause. Drinkdrinkdrinkdrink. Pause. (Did I just say that? Perhaps “socialize” would be a less revealing way to put it.) It’s in the pauses that the thinking happens, as all the little bits in my mind sift, arrange, sort themselves into useful patterns, and little connections spark to life.

Might it not be that we hand off our thinking to others because the clamor they make while we’re “interacting” drowns out our capacity for thought? They provide us with the illusion that we’re acting. But as long as they prohibit us from doing that very thing that any true political action requires to occur–a brief moment of forethought–it remains a only a seductive promise.

I was reading the final chapter of David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” when you posted this and was struck by ways you both tell stories of locating non-sovereign being where you suspect it least or where it most resembles its “putative opposite.”

Wallace’s narrator is retelling the story of someone else’s violent encounter with a psychotic (through a ‘soul-connection’ with her perpetrator, the woman transformed her rape into a moment of shared grief and helplessness and avoided murder). Interested in explaining that “literally killing instead of merely running is the killer’s psychotically literal way of resolving the conflict between his need for connection and his terror of being in any way connected,” DFW’s narrator suggests that the psychotic is not “substantively different from a man sizing up an attractive girl and approaching her and artfully deploying just the right rhetoric and pushing the right buttons to induce her to come home with him, never once saying anything or touching her in any way that isn’t completely gentle and pleasurable and seemingly respectful, leading her gently and respectfully to his satin-sheeted bed and in the light of the moon making exquisitely attentive love to her and making her come over and over until she’s quote begging for mercy and is totally under his emotional control and feels that she and he must be deeply and unseverably connected for the evening to have been this perfect and mutually respectful and fulfilling and then lighting her cigarettes and engaging in an hour or two of pseudo-intimate postcoital chitchat in his wrecked bed and seeming very close and content when what he really wants is to be in some absolutely antipodal spot from wherever she id from now on and thinking about how to give her a special disconnected telephone number and never contacting her again. And that an all too obvious part of the reason for his cold and mercenary and maybe somewhat victimizing behavior is that the potential profundity of the very connection he has worked so hard to make her feel terrifies him” (304). For DFW’s narrator, the “either feed or be food” (303) psychic structure is what the psychotic and hyperattentive lover have in common and all that distinguishes them is the varieties of ways they’ll victimize in order to achieve “an absolutely antipodal spot” in relation to the other.

Although both your post and DFW’s narrator draw attention to scenes of desiring passivity where a kind of hyper-activity or extreme relationality is the form that desire for passivity takes, it seems to me that you are, contra DFW, less interested in exposing hyperactivity’s subterranean psychosis than suggesting that what is in fact psychotic is the structure of choosing to inhabit an “either feed or be fed” relation to subjectivity.
You telegraph a realization of the differences between living as “toxic consistency” vs. “loosely quilted leanings” but I wonder whether this conceptualization of one’s psychic options doesn’t risk replicating the terms you seek to undo since (with DFW and then against him) you’re demonstrating that even if hyper-relationality is actually kind of defensive (“antipodal”) there are many positions that can be inhabited/occupied in the space of one’s encounter with self/other and that therefore, even if “hyperfidelity to form” is a version rather than alternative to expressions of non-sovereignty, being hyperactively consistent or diffuse in the face of form are not always or necessarily opposites but rather different ways of negotiating one’s needs, attachments, disappointments. (I am thinking a lot here of the distinction you draw, in your interview on “shame/broken circuit” between the structure of a defense and the ‘experience’ of it).

Lastly, I’m interested in the “impossibility” that figures throughout this post. Not only the writing of it that’s been impossible because of an impossible year but also the description of having been self-organized in order to be “impossible in one way or another.” I think for DFW’s narrator, the psychotic and the lover are distinguished only by the degree to which they inflict others with the burden of their sense of what’s impossible. Your characterization of the ‘impossible’ however seems instead to think about the very foundations of this ‘impossibility’ – rather than trying to establish ways of being better or less ‘impossible,’ I wonder whether you’re describing the theoretical/experiential impossibility of finding something other than the psychotic’s choices?