ca. 1927:
ca. 1947:
In complimentary contrast with the inaugural post on this blog, a message from Johns Island, South Carolina:
(via)
ILLUSIONS
Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly’s flight.When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The wild dissipation,And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world, –
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1876
via wikimedia
Cease to exist giving my goodbye
Driving my car into the ocean
You think I’m dead but I sail awayOn a wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave
WaveKissed the mermaids rode the El Niño
Walk in the sand with the crustaceans
I’ve found my way to MarianaOn a wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave
WaveOn a wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave
Wave—The Pixies
I was thinking of these because of a poem I stumbled on recently, which you can read here and which is alright and which struck me as an odd combination of the aesthetic of the oceanic and that of the zombie. It also made me recall the ones above and it made me want to post them again. Again after more than ten years since I first found the Emerson in an assigned cheap paperback collection of American verse, laughed to myself at how similar it seemed to the song, and then decided to throw the two up on a page of juxtaposition on tripod.com. (A page that has long since dissipated itself into some sort of more ethereal realm of disappearance.)
Evan Calder Williams has written extensively about what’s at stake in the zombie film, especially here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Go read these, if you haven’t already. Back? Good. Feel free to keep all of that in mind when thinking about the poems above, because I won’t be getting very far into the zombie element of these particular examples of the oceanic. Instead, I’m going to work at the oceanic side. I’m sure I picked up the term from this post, but since I have read very little Atwood, no Lacan, and have nothing to say about the Symbolic, I’m going to be simply using this as a term to describe an aesthetics of fluidity, motion, mixing, sound and noise, depth vs. surface, and a possibly threatening surround.
So? What’s at stake here? An aesthetic convergence or posing of a certain problem: how to present existent, concrete things as not definite things, but rather mutable and mutating—sliding, dipping, dropping, and rising within some sort of fluid that contains them, shifts them, destroys them, changes them.
And in both, the desire to be inside of this.
Furthermore to know how to know that one is already inside of it.
As an aesthetic fantasy, it is another example of a perspective of coincident self-nihilation and self-infinitization.
In Emerson, it is what I imagine to be the surfer’s fantasy—to ride the edge of a loss of control, to lose it again and again, and to return stronger.
The Pixies present an almost Ballardian fragment of post-fantasy: the car is dead, the beaches and weather are a dull postcard, but a strange ocean of pain remains.
As does the desire to dissipate into it. Though the sense that the oceanic is the cosmic has slipped—hidden by the addition of that -il syllable, that shift from the waves of mutation to the waves of mutilation. If Emerson presents the joy of the breaking crest, the Pixies convey the inexorable pull of the trough.
To me, all this is against Calvino:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974)
Possibly it is a choice of elements—water versus fire—but both the oceanic and the infernal share the sense of a raging turmoil that already exists. No, against this particular vision of the inferno not out of either a rejection of the diagnosis, or by taking Calvino’s first path of some sort of realist acceptance that this particular constellation of infernal suffering is the only possible version of the inferno of life and therefore it must be accepted. (Hardly. No such constellation is static. Which is one of the points of the oceanic aesthetic.) But rather against this because the account of people-who-are-not-inferno is flattery to the reader and not necessarily helpful.
Estrangement and alienation are better as techniques of perception than as lifestyle techniques. Having space to be with others in resistance and endurance is sometimes necessary, but for what? Is it enough to survive and in such survival oppose oneself to this raging world out of pain, anger, refusal, hate, fear? I don’t think it is. And is such self-removal even possible?
The oceanic aesthetic in its cosmic variation posits no points or beings outside the fluid, mutating substance. This is distinct from environment as an aesthetic and from atmospherics. The environmental aesthetic is like a slow-motion version of the oceanic—it proposes unavoidable interlacings, conjunctions, and non-separation of micro and macro scales, but generally through the lens of gradually shifting, temporally finite entities. The environment is the perspectival and physical world of an individual, certainly in its derivations from Uexküll it is this.
Atmospherics is the fascination and dread of the cloud, the gas, the storm.
Nothing that one could choose to plunge into, but rather an inescapable un-form of elements that overwhelm us in earthly yet inhuman ways.
The oceanic is also distinct from what I think the dominant aesthetic of this moment is—the immersive. The immersive is about projecting some self into a new ludic terrain, the oceanic is about losing a sense of surety in this self and gaining a sense of being caught up in a surrounding, moving, mixed environment.
Anyway, Benjamin Noys in discussing Ballard wrote some pretty worthwhile sentences that I feel are worth quoting:
The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)
——Better Living through Psychopathology
Ballard, Calvino—two midcentury men looking at roughly a half-century of Freudianism and modernism and a vision of the twentieth century in part as a problem of the coincidence of drastic, traumatic horror with banal, everyday life. And so social life itself, this protean force, becomes the inferno of suffering, reality is overpopulated with fictions, abstractions, surplus aura, and supposedly there aren’t any values.
Calvino says: retreat, resist, endure. Ballard quotes Conrad and says: swim.
But I want to pretend for a moment. Jump back subjectively to Emerson or to the 1920s—
What if part of the point is to take on this shifting perspective of involution & externalization in order to better swim within the waves that already exist but offer no firm shores. But not just swim. Rather to train oneself to see this reality of seemingly static forms of objects as really real while at the same moment to know these objects as Gestalten of perception and flux. Because there was no time when reality was free of fiction, because reality is always newly made and self-making.
I have tried several times to write what I want to write here.
I cannot do it. So I will write something else.
When I was a child, in my family being Jewish meant making a commitment to history, to this world here and not some nebulous afterlife that may or may not exist, to a sense that the great paradox of the unity of all existence and the particularity of any chain of existence is only really solved through humility—faith in the ineffable, the radical alterity of a non-anthropomorphic Being that could be in and of and outside of all that we know.
No saviors. Just the material, the social, and the ineffable.
I was a kid with a lot of faith—because I was embedded in a community full of love, mutual aid, independence, political debate, friendship, a common practice that we shaped together, and a sense that we didn’t need anyone’s permission to help each other out and make the community that we wanted to have.
I cannot talk about how I lost this community, because it is mostly a story of economic migration, shifting geopolitics, and my life choices, moreover it is a story that continues and deeply involves people that I love.
The drift to the right that has intensified over the past fifteen years throughout the world has left its marks here too.
I miss my heart.
I miss there being a strongly liberal/leftist Jewish community arguing actively and intensely for justice and human rights for all—one that puts tikkun olam at the heart of what we want to do in the world, one that knows that while questions of individual choice are an inescapable aspect of being individual people, nonetheless we are social, communal, and political creatures and we never ever stand alone but always within a social and material matrix that history shows can change and can be changed.
One that isn’t paralyzed by the fear that we could get it wrong, but knows that while our knowledge is limited and contingent and our plans are bound to go astray, nonetheless, we will try to advance the cause of justice, because that too is a demand of ethics.
And one that knows from our own history that as much as the world is something we’ve co-created, so too is our faith and our identity. If it belongs to us, as a result of our history, then it is ours to shape in the history being written today.
We do not shape it alone, we are not so dumb as to think that anti-Semitism is dead or that the actions and opinions of others do nothing to our reputation. But still it is ours. And our actions are still ours. If I claim this identity, it is not because I want credit for what you do or have done but because I don’t feel like I have a choice whether or not this identity applies to me, and I want to have a say in what it means.
My family minhag is relentless criticism tempered by really good parties, and food, community building, and friendship. Right now my world seems pretty far from our minhag.
If history makes me a Jew, and it does, then I want to at least get a community out of it that feels like my own.
200 years ago Israel Jacobson opened a little experimental Temple in Seesen, which worshipped in a new way. And this has been seen as the founding of Reform Judaism. In my heart, I broke with Reform Judaism over ten years ago, because the Pittsburgh Platform of 1999 left me cold. What I’ve never broken with is the idea that this religion of ours belongs to us and that whatever we do with it is it, so we ought to do with it what we want it to do.
Who knows what will happen? We may as well live and while we’re alive we may as well try.
to tide you over while I struggle with some more writer’s block.
free city
This book [Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian] sheds new light on the process of the deconstruction of monotheisms as it is affirmed in the nineteenth century, while exploring one of the modern idealities of the production of the history of religion in the West, that which is constituted around the antinomy Israel/Egypt. This exploration is carried out by a method that is inspired by the Freudian perspective. It is inspired by Freud to the extent that it aims at a history of remembering that calls upon the concept of “repression” rather than on a history of facts. It sheds light at the same time on Freud’s most enigmatic book, Moses and Monotheism, and validates certain hypotheses in it that seemed to Freud’s own eyes very weak. “Freud is the one who restored the suppressed evidence, who was able to retrieve lost memories and to finally complete and rectify the picture of Egypt,” Assmann writes (Assmann, 216). The rediscovery of Akhenaton will have been, in sum, a return of the repressed that allows us to read the case for Moses as an Egyptian. From this point of view, J. Assmann carries out something like a psychoanalytic thinking of historicity: human memory cannot only be understood from the perspective of a history of consciousness and its constructions, especially when it is a question of events that affect our relation to alterity, such as the fall of the gods; human memory is not perfected by a knowledge of the completed past, but depends on a time saturated by a “now-time,” as Benjamin writes in his developments on the concept of history. This saturation by “now-time” is the site of memory for psychoanalysis, the site of a temporal block in which the experience of the past and its writing takes place. Recollection bursts the continuity of history and the linearity of the past, and it is in this sense a leap into the anachronistic, thanks to which the event is appropriated and inscribed.
——Fethi Bensalama, Translations of Monotheisms
I have sometimes posited that history claims objects and texts, while memory claims bodies and selves.
History and counter-history as rhetorical coordinations of evidence that assert narratives and counter-narratives regarding trajectories of lost moments: a procedural praxis that concedes its inherent epistemological shortfalls, while nonetheless believing in its own continual refinement as a procedure. (And similar in its distance from its purported object as other such rhetorical procedures are from theirs—journalism & matters of current importance; law & justice—though perhaps a bit nearer than the gap between money and value.)
Memory as the past embodied and ritualized—consumed, performed, enacted, imbibed, expressed.
Of course, they aren’t actually separate procedures.
Historiography and cultural memory are inextricably intertwined. The writing of history occurs in the “now-time” of cultural memory. History, being the work of historians, reflects their biases—because one cannot write everything, so one writes what one wants to write, what one needs to write, what one is hired to write, what one can support oneself by writing, or can write during moments saved up. (I’m writing this at two in the morning because I can’t sleep.) Biases of historiography arise unavoidably in initial formative stages: in the selection of an event or a process to investigate with an eye to explanation.
But while a historian is often imagined as a solitary individual delving into a stack of books, sheaves of documents, or these days sitting with their laptop in front of an archival box of letters in a reading room, engaged in work that is private, all intellectual, and intended to leave a permanent record, and acts of cultural memory are frequently imagined as communal, ephemeral, and experiential, any firm opposition between the two should be rejected. For one, there are certainly ways to do history that don’t rely on any vision of a single heroic author with intense powers of Sitzfleisch and for another: to engage seriously with objects is an experiential process that occurs in its own ephemeral moment.
The rhetorical bias of a given historical narrative is constructed in reference to an authorial subject’s positions with regards to fictional selves: individual, national, cultural, economical—from which the narrative textual objects of history emerge. These then become the scripts and scores for further enacting, expression, ritual embodiment, and contention.
A particular interconnected set of relations to texts—writing & expression, subjective immersion, performative enacting, contention/appropriation/re-writing—is quite common as set of communal textual practices. It’s also a useful lens through which to consider Jewish historiography & cultural memory—a guide to the movement from the “now-time” of memorial rites to the anachronistic hineindenken of the consideration of the distanced objects of historical study, especially because Jewish religious ritual foregrounds the community as reenacting key moments of history in a kind of eternal-present of continuous remembrance, understood through oral traditions and textual objects and heuristics. Shavout is this explicitly.
The gap between a Jewish historiography and Jewish cultural memory has everything to do with a subjective inability to complete the anachronistic leap into the experiential and actual coordinates of the ephemeral and irretrievable past, coupled with the need to commemorate the traces left in experience.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the problematics of Jewish accounts and understandings of anti-Semitic violence. Timothy Snyder makes this explicit:
The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not.
[...]
Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event.
–Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009
This is not merely a void at the center of the common being of Jewish cultural memory: this is also the paradox of an acknowledgment of the inability to enact an identification as a foundation for a fictive kinship. We cannot imagine Bełżec and thus we are forced to continually attempt to imagine Bełżec.
But who is this we?
Similarly: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisiton. Who is this no one? (And why are they such idiots?)
The joke in the sketch has a certain resonance—it attempts to tame the outburst of violence and State/Church repression by displacing it into a “truly” unexpected context: a British milltown shortly before the First World War, which in its anachronistic accoutrément—the modern dishrack—is visibly neither 15th/16th century Spain nor even “itself.”
As if to say: the terror of the Inquisition was indeed the terror of the outburst, the violence of the unexpected, of that which cannot be expected.
This accords with a certain register of Jewish cultural memory regarding the Inquisition—that it was the lachrymose tragedy of the end of the Golden Age of the Convivencia—a view that conforms not only to a 19th century German-Jewish interest in medieval Spain as a model of inter-religious communal life as Ismar Schorsch detailed in his 1989 article “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” but also one that reflects a historiography via the nostalgia of exile. Expulsion from the garden, from the place of relative comfort, from the dreamed home-in-the-world, an imaginary space within diaspora constructed as an image of wealth and abundance, rather than marginalization, exclusion, humiliation, and violence.
The included audience, the we/nobody of the joke cannot be either the perpetrator, who well knows what punitive discipline he plans, nor any subject for whom such violence would not come as a surprise, or who does not imagine themselves as existing in comfort.
Or so it seems at first glance.
Yet, recall that the slogan is spoken and repeated in sketch after sketch by the buffoonish perpetrators. Their bumbling evinces an assertion that this no one includes the Inquisitors, who are stunningly unprepared at every encounter to take on the role of imposing the fear of God and Church and State.
And of course, by the last iteration, the joke smugly inverts itself—now we are neither imagined victims, nor deluded perpetrators, but the audience—and we’ve all heard this one before, the number of times the sketch is repeated during the episode ensures that. We all expect the Inquisition, just as soon as anyone utters the magic words that summon them: the declaration that they are unexpected.
So the joke pulls you into this conspiracy: we cannot psychologically allow ourselves to expect this violence and repression, it is indeed an irruption, and we can’t even expect it if we are supposed to be the ones inflicting it—it’s obvious that we’d be really bad at that sort of thing anyway—and then, from afar, we smugly and voyeuristically come to know how to expect it all along.
So the joke relies on activating, in shifting perspective, the three parts of a sadomasochistic scenario: the victim, the perpetrator, and the voyeur.
But the joke has some further levels of displacement, beyond Spain/England, victim/perpetrator/audience. The Spanish Inquisition of cultural infamy is often remembered as a key anti-Semitic event. Torquemada is a byword. But the written script for this bit identifies Michael Palin’s character as Ximénez—infamous for his actions against the Muslims of Granada, including forced conversions and the burning of Arabic texts. Too often Jews forget to mention that crypto-Muslims were amongst the persecuted conversos. (That the Inquisition was founded to stamp out Christian heresy is well-known but worth repeating here.) The historical we of the victims of the Inquistion ought always be understood to include Jews, Muslims, conversos, Christian heretics, and anyone (potentially) subversive or radical. Do we enact and recall this event as happening to this all of us?
The other major displacement of the clip above affects not the perception of Jewish history, Islamic history, or Christian history, but labor history.
In this scene, the Spanish Inquisition is displaced to Jarrow, 1912. Jarrow, that in 1939 was called The Town that Was Murdered due to the extreme unemployment there during the Great Depression. And Jarrow in 1912: this was presumably during the “boom” years there. New Year’s Eve 1911/New Year’s 1912 is now almost one hundred years removed from where we stand. It was the time of the Suffragettes, the Sidney Street Gang, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Pancho Villa, Sun Yat-Sen, the founding of the ANC, and the wobbly-led Bread and Roses Strike.
It is difficult to imagine this world, Jarrow 1911/12, without a lot of work, especially doubly-removed from it: in time and from across an ocean. And what right would I have to claim this history as my own, if I could begin to imagine it? The question reveals the problematic: the clip enacts not only identifications—the we/no-one of the Spanish Inquisition, but also represses an identification with the location that the irruption of violence is displaced into. This displacement based on dis-identification, as I indicated above, is what makes the joke funny. Those who might identify with the history of the Spanish Inquisition are not supposed to find any connection to Jarrow. And most of the discussions I’ve read about the sketch make no mention of this place and its history at all. Jarrow, which launched a “Crusade” march against mass unemployment in 1936.
I very much wish that they had not used that word, as there is a world of difference between a march of the unemployed for decent jobs at decent pay and the attempts by the medieval Church to direct religious discontent into violent conquest of territory. On a related note: every time I encounter Michelle Malkin’s nomination of the immigrant rights’ movement as an attempt at reconquista, I get incensed. Her usage of this term would seem to draw on a fearful Anglo guilt about the Mexican-American War, but mostly shows little sense of historical understanding and amounts to anti-Hispanic Catholic-baiting. (As if any more evidence were needed of the lasting chilling effect of the actual reconquista: the conversos of Northern New Mexico seem apt.) Any reasonable understanding of the powers at work, their imbalances, their structures, their ability to call upon force, would see that the immigrant rights movement of 2010 has much more in common with the Jarrow marchers of 1936 than it has with Torquemada, Ximénez, Ferdinand y Isabella, or even Cortés and the rest of the conquistadores.
These terms of history and cultural memory—Inquisition, reconquista, crusade, Jarrow, Ximénez—these semantic, linguistic, historical objects invoke and evoke shared practices and imagined communities; they set up fields of allegiance and exclusion, based on accumulated patterns of polity and audience that they draw on.
[I use the term object here in the sense elaborated by Levi Bryant here and here, though I feel compelled to point out that in the first of these links his comments on hermeneutic disciplines betray a seeming ignorance of the historiography of the book, the history of philology, the practices of paleography, diplomatics, etc.]
The problem with the gap between the cultural memory and the history of events or processes of repressive violence like the Spanish Inquisition is not only that the historical memory of survivors and exiles would tend to overvalue the evidence of those who were able to flee and tend to struggle to imagine those who could not, it’s also that the assumptions built into the perspectives that establish the narratives of cultural subjects tend to be blind to how they exclude or marginalize other perspectives of the same events. The moment of identification can be a moment of erasure. A history of remembering can be simultaneously a history of not-remembering—of not being a remembering subject, of not only repressing what can be recalled again, but of not forming a subject that could recall. Historiography and cultural memory are processes that continually shape, refine, and adjust the forms of subjects. We know who we are in part in reference to rituals of shared memory, contention with shared texts, knowledge of history that binds us together. Our understanding of ourselves is constantly shifting as we acquire new information or find reasons to repeat and affirm long-standing patterns.
Historiography and cultural memory are also processes by which subjects new and old encounter objects and events and attempt to account for these. To take an object of history seriously is to try to project oneself into an immersive imaginary state wherein all facets of the object reveal evidence of thought and action. Furthermore, to look for how these evidences are traces of complex networks of other more distant objects and forces. (The object at the top of this post shows no direct evidence of Pancho Villa, for example, and yet by bringing the questions I had to this object, I found myself led to him and to many other things.)
I tend to think that letting an object “speak for itself” means being open to being changed by the encounter. To come to an object not only with existing fictional selves and their narrative frames but also with the intention to keep pushing at the failings of these perspectives, to try to imagine what the same object might mean to someone else. But here the identifications of polity assert themselves again with force—what right have I to speak of some histories and not others? Can I claim this object for my study? Is my position within the memorial systems of my culture established in such a way as to generally permit me access rights to the telling and interpretation of these narratives?
So: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition in Jarrow in 1912.
But what would it mean if they could have? Perhaps they did expect something similar enough. Did anyone in 1970, when this sketch first aired? Do they still?
Do we?
I am preparing a series of posts about structural practices of silencing and the regulations of affiliation, with particular focus on Jewish tradition, not primarily because it is special in how it regulates speech and affiliation, but because it is what I know enough about to talk about. Also, interwoven, a discussion of how intersectionality relates to Judenhass (aka Anti-Semitism). These might seem like two different topics, but I would like to see what might be brought out by reflecting on how they act together.
Nota bene that while I have not read Derrida’s book on the subject (or any Derrida for that matter, ha!), this essay is also influenced by what I’ve gleaned about its contents. In other words, what I have is a concern for the limitations of politics based on affinity, with the following quote in mind:
When to speak, when to remain silent—these are considerations always of politics, polity, and affiliation.
As such, the rights of speech and the rights to silence are forms of regulation that communal bodies perform upon themselves and on those they have marginalized and excluded from the body politic.
Thus a critical way of investigating how the politics of any community function is by querying who holds these rights.
Who is empowered to speak of this nightmare of history that we share?
And who is allowed to count the omer of my desire for redemption?
I am having some writer’s block with a thing I want to put here. So in the meantime, I’m sharing some of the messages I’ve seen in the world in the past nine months or so.
banking ad during the middle of the save vestas! campaign
future home of café 1919
cb2 = crate & barrel 2: the legend of curly’s gold
