The Sensual Experience of Thinking

Here's the link.

A bit of rambling (but secretly coherent) about the sensuality, the physicality, the worldliness, and erotics of thinking.

Mentioned here:

• ideas as viruses — at times quite loving — that occupy the body
• the way an idea occupies a body, takes it over, and leads that body into new worlds
• the difference between experiencing thought and experiencing radical haecceity, or thisness, such as the wonder of a the ocean's swell
• Neo (in The Matrix) and Lucy (in Luc Besson's terrible film) who see the fundamental code of the world while I try to see different possible codes of the world — but the visual experience I have is quite similar to theirs
• why I don't like academic thinking

The Relationship Between Theory & Art

Here's the link.

Theory doesn't explain art; theory is art. (And art, theory.)

Blue Velvet is not Oedipal or Freudian; it deploys some Freudian gestures but it does things with the Oedipal Complex other than exemplify it.

Art and theory exist on the same plane and yet occupy different planes that intersect, interact, or don't. But neither is subservient to the other.

Theory goes with art as any art goes with art.

Mentioned here: Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault, Freud, Jasper Johns, Matthew Ritchie, and more!

The Infinitely Rich Inbetween, or The Plenum (a verbal essay)

Here's the link. 

Between things — between you and me; between the couch, the chair, the screen, me; between planets and cars and lives — is an infinitely dense substance. Merleau-Ponty calls this flesh which he sees as an element such as earth, air, wind, and fire.

In any case, I don't see nothing between us. On the contrary, I see the soup of existence — ideology, sun flares, dyspepsia, history, cries and whimpers and moans.

Think of it this way: when you meet someone, your meeting takes place within a dense aura of forces and moods that flow and mix in multiple ways. Your brow is already furrowed; your smile is already forced.

Mentioned here:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Matrix, online dating, the plenum, vacuums, black holes

Elections Shmelections, or Where is the Political?

I find election years frustrating. So many people in my periphery — people I like and respect —  pay attention to the shenanigans as if it all somehow matters, as if reading about and commenting upon who will be the next president of the United States is important. And, strangely, as if who the next president is will change their day to day lives. (There are those who pay attention for interest as, say, I watch baseball or American Idol.)

I come from a different political school. I feel as Burroughs said: elections, and the politics of government, are a matador's red flag attracting the attention of we bulls. We rush towards its enticing wave with such vim only to have it pulled away. There is no there there. And we just end up exhausted, making it easier for the matador to drive his sword through our spines.

What matters who's president? Practically speaking, the president doesn't have a whole lot of power. It's not as if whoever becomes president can, say, fund our schools, house our homeless, cut the military, reduce state sponsored killing — not to mention transform everyday assholes into mensches or my depression into bliss. That's the job of a congress that's owned by corporate interests (and, some of it, a job for me!). So who are we kidding?

Now, I understand that there is a certain symbolic condensation that happens in the figure of the president. Some people feel differently based on who's elected. I remember when Obama was elected and many around me believed their lives, and life in general, would be better.

But the president is symbolic. Ignore the symbol — don't read the paper, ignore the news — and it becomes literally and completely irrelevant. Only when you ascribe to a semiotic economy in which the figure of the president is relevant is there any relevance. It's an affective economy, easily parried by ignoring the pathetic appeals of what is essentially a state sponsored media.

Where is the political, anyway? Is it written in laws and news articles? Or does it exist in the behaviors of yourself and those around you? Does it reside in glances on the subway, in line at the café, on the roads as you drive to work, to the bar, to school? Does it exist in our architecture and roads, in our advertisements and loan structures, in our everyday conversations, in how we talk about relationships, movies, children, politics?

Indeed, there are elaborate structures — historically and culturally and naturally determined — that exceed the everyday that affect people's lives. These are what Foucault calls discursive regimes — the way our exchanges are already shaped, the ways we look at each other, the ways we consider what's possible, the ways we consider who we are and what we can do. 

Why, for instance, do we assume that we're supposed to be in a romantic couple? No one posts and exchanges and lobbies for changing that. (See Michael Cobb's smart book, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled.) No one so ardently resists the idiotic, life draining conditions of contemporary parenting. I never see arguments for shifting the terms of argument. All I see come election time is the same old frame of the debate — a frame which excludes the things that matter.

Laws and elections and such are constitutive, not so much determinative. They are symptom, not disease. It just seems to me that putting the operation of change in an election is, well, stupid when the seat of power is a) concentrated at the site of you and what you do; and b) is disseminated through multiple and wide points of discursive condensation far, far from the White House.

I also realize that laws can have a profound effect on some people's lives. I'm just not sure a) what the President can do about it as she, or he, doesn't pass legislation; b) what paying attention to the shenanigans does; and c) what lobbying at the level of the law does. Shouldn't we cure the disease not just subdue the symptoms? Laws emerge from a combination of entrenched discourse and greed. Change those and you've changed something.

There is something hilarious, and telling, about a Prius driver with a Save the Earth bumper sticker cutting you off in traffic. Is that bumper sticker doing anything at all? One could argue that it's there to remind people about the earth. But I think it participates in a conversation that has already been determined by insidious, egregious, hegemonic forces, namely, newspapers and pundits and people content in a life that's killing them but which they prefer to living a life that's, well, alive. So rather than saving the earth, the mere presence of that bumper sticker perpetuates an idiotic and predetermined conversation — all while side swiping you.

Sometimes, I imagine if all the energy people put into posting about this Trump or this Sanders character were shifted to, say, being surprising in the course of their day — taking the day off, for instance, to go the Pt. Reyes; putting down their phones for an entire afternoon!; being kind to a stranger just for the goof; watching Godard's In Praise of Love — what the day to day would be like, what eye contact on the street would be like, what life would be like.

Pt. Reyes, north of San Francisco.

The political is all around us. It exists in the behavior of us all, how we interact with each other, how and what and when we consider ourselves. I see Marc Kate's lastest album, Despairer, as the most vehement political act I've witnessed this whole election season. Why? Because it demands a different rhythm, speed, and affect than the everyday speeding gloss of technocratic capitalism. His album literally changes the very terms of the conversation. He doesn't rail against as being against is the same as being for (prepositions are everything!). He insinuates himself into the cracks of the beast and expands, breaking the very structures of thinking, of reaction, slowing down our lives, immersing us in an affect we choose not to experience — the despair that permeates. This album absolutely refuses the terms of the consumerist spectacle (elections included).

Listen to Marc Kate's brilliant album, Despairer.
It's the most radical political act I've witnessed this election season.

Elections are a distraction meant to make us feel like change is possible — through a banner, a slogan, a post, a vote. The thing is, change is not only possible, it's inevitable. It's happening all the time, whether you like it or not. But it's not resonant if you continue the same old conversations and support the same old structures. It comes from behaving differently, speaking differently, doing differently.

Is the president totally irrelevant? Probably not. And I'm happy to have someone persuade me of his or her relevance. But it feels misguided, a dangerous distraction, to believe and act as though real change resides there when real change is ready for you always, right now and right here. 

The Tense of the Dead

Back when I was teaching, I instructed my students to always use the literary present in their papers (and to split infinitives, if they so desired) — to say Nietzsche writes, not Nietzsche wrote. The argument I gave is that their papers were not about the historical person of Nietzsche — who lived and died — but about his texts which exist in the present. In this case, the name, "Nietzsche," doesn't designate a person but a set of words and concepts.

These days, I've found that when I write, I no longer use the literary present. I usually say Nietzsche wrote. I didn't decide to do this; I just started doing it because it felt right. And what I realized is that, as I've gotten older and become more and more solitary, I have come to feel as though Nietzsche — and Burroughs, Deleuze, Foucault — are my companions. I want to picture their bodies, their lives; I want their historical person as much as I want their texts. I want to live in their company, not just with their pages.

What, then, of those people we know who have died? What tense do we use to talk about them?

My sister would have been 52 last week. I use the conditional here as she — her body — didn't turn 52; her body ceased to be at 49. And when I remember certain events, the past tense seems right — I remember when she said....

But I found myself conjuring multiple tenses when I thought of her birthday. While she would have been 52, the day is still her birthday. A birthday doesn't cease to be. So her birthday is, not would have been.

The tenses get more complicated when I think, or discuss, her. For instance, do I say: She was so sweet? Or she is so sweet? Did her sweetness end? Her actions of sweetness are no more but doesn't her sweetness persist?

If we use the literary present to discuss texts from writers who are dead, why wouldn't I use the present to discuss the qualities of my sister? Her text may not be written, may not always be visual, but it exists quite palpably. My sister per se didn't cease to exist 2.5 years ago; only her body and her actions did.

And, no, I'm not talking about her soul. At least, I don't think I'm talking about her soul as I don't know what the word soul designates. I am talking about the living text, the living impressions, she made on this world and, more specifically, on me and those who knew her. Or do I say those who know her? Our knowing of her certainly hasn't ceased. I don't think I would ever say I loved her. That sounds and feels all wrong as I love her here and now.

But if I only use the present tense, it has a funny double effect. On the one hand, as when academics use the literary present, it effaces her personhood, her living life by existing only with her trace, her ghost, her memory. On the other hand, it makes her persist above and beyond her physical life and conjures her personhood here and now — who she was and who she very much still is.

And so my sister lives in multiple tenses, as I suppose we all do. She lives here and now with me —  her unshakeable sweetness, her infinite smile, her always honest laugh. I see it; I feel it; I know it. And, at the same time, all these things are past — maddeningly, excruciatingly, deafeningly so.

On Civility in Public Space, or On Ethics & Johnsons

I had an interesting encounter last week. It was Saturday morning and I'd just dropped my boy off at his hip hop dance class (yes, you heard me) and headed to this incredible coffee shop up the block to read while I waited for his class to end. What makes this coffee shop different than others in this ridiculous city by the bay, among other things, is that no one is on a laptop. People of various ages and ethnicities sit, eat pie (it's called Mission Pie), drink coffee and....wait for it...talk to each other. There are even communal tables where I usually find myself putting my book down to talk to a stranger. Egad!

Anyway, I was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street to go to the café when an older man with a walker, standing some distance away, called to me and asked if I could help him cross the street. Of course I would. He moved very, very slowly; there is no possible way he'd ever cross 25th and Mission without getting hit, yelled or honked at. I stood in the road, put up my hands, and held multiple lines of traffic while he crossed.

Now, this is not what's interesting. Hold on.

So he crosses the street and then heads to the very café I'm going to. I hold the door for him. It's rainy and the place is crowded. I ask if he needs help sitting; he does. I position a chair under him, hold his weight as he lowers himself; I then scoot his chair under the table. This is rather intimate. As the line is long, I ask if I can get him what he wants. Yes, he says, a glass of milk and a slice of banana cream pie.

Wait. This is not yet what's interesting.

The line is long but eventually I return to him and our section of the communal table, our goods in tow. There are two pretty women at the end of the table talking to each other. In fact, there are a lot of attractive women there. But this man wants to talk. He's not that old but he's clearly medicated and tells me as much. He repeats himself often. His voice is low and I have to lean in to hear him.

He asks, jokingly, if I'd been a boy scout. Then he asks if I'd like to come over some time (apparently, he lives in some kind of communal home). This is where things get interesting to me. Rather than explain to him the myriad reasons why I have no desire whatsoever to visit him at his home, I give him a phone number — not my number but a number.

The fact is, I always ask people who I think might need some help if they do, indeed, need said help. I ask blind people, old people, people in wheelchairs if they need help getting where they're going. I never sit on the train if others are standing. I never budge on line. But I don't do this because I'm a good person. I'm not. I'm not a bad person, either. It's just that I don't believe in good people and bad people — although I do believe in assholes, douchebags, and Johnsons.

The reason I do all these seemingly good deeds is not because I believe in the good but because I want the social order to run without invading my world. That is, if things collapse, my life becomes much more difficult. The whole damn thing seems so precarious, the social hung together with gossamer that's always on the brink of fraying. And then what'll I do?

No, I want the social to hum along and leave me the fuck alone. And so, yes, I help old and blind people; I respect line etiquette; I hold doors and let drivers into my lane. But that's because I don't want to go to their houses, because I don't want to be part of some bullshit community that, deep down, doesn't want me as a member.

And so I have no desire to help this man with his palpable, heart wrenching loneliness. I only want to help him cross the street and get his banana cream pie. Which is to say, I only want to help him in public. That is the realm of the ethical. Beyond that, we enter a different territory of the good (as distinct from the propitious). I am all for someone having this morality and visiting this old man, hugging him occasionally, maybe even sexually pleasuring him. But that is another realm, another imperative (pace Kant).

For me, I honor the code of the Johnson: mind my own fucking business but don't watch a drowning man drown. I don't want the intimacy of strangers — neither their kindness nor their wrath. I want their general indifference to me while respecting the common space. I don't need smiles or pleasantries, that American facade that masks fear and loathing. I just want everyone to recognize public space for what it is and not be a total douche if an old man needs a chair. Otherwise, I pretty much just want to be left the fuck alone. 

Better Living Through the Critique of Everything (with Reference to Nietzsche)

I'm reading the review of AO Scott's new book, Better Living Through Criticism, in The New Yorker. The title of Scott's book obviously appealed to me; it's been my mantra for years. But his book, as with The New Yorker essay, comes at critique — and indeed the world — from a fundamentally different vantage point than I do.

To them, the arts are special, even essential to human existence. But they're extra. Art, for them, happens afterwards or elsewhere, to the side of things. There is life — social discourse, marriage, medicine, diet, factories, language — and then there is this special other thing they call art.

But what happens when, as Nietzsche argues, everything is constructed? When everything is some kind of artifice? This is the premise of Nietzsche's worldview: art, not truth or survival, comes first. Every word is a poem, a metaphor, an interpretation, a making of the world. You see the moon and think of cycles; the French see the moon and think of light. These are artistic choices.

We are all poets, all artists. Or, rather, we are all would-be artists, would-be poets. Too often, he tells us, we don't create. We imitate. We use metaphors as if they were literal; we deploy interpretation as if it were truth. Indeed, for Nietzsche (and for me!), science is poetry that's forgotten it's poetry. Science, along with the various intertwined edifices of knowledge, suffers from amnesia — and a certain will to power, a will to hierarchy, to the expert, to the one who knows and hence controls the world. Forgetting we're artists is constitutive of a certain will to power, to control, to knowledge (hence, Foucault's project).

Indeed, for Nietzsche, the very creation of humankind — not to mention the self — is a work of art. There were beasts of prey, he tells us, roaming and fighting and hunting. But some wanted a more interesting life and so began to work their own bodies as a sculptor works clay — molding, cutting, whipping their own bodies into a being capable of keeping a promise, that is, a being capable of being continuous over time, a being capable of repetition. For Nietzsche, this took unspeakable strength — a strength that is fundamentally artistic in search of a more interesting life (See On the Genealogy of Morals, if you're interested).

What, then, is the role and purview of criticism? AO Scott and The New Yorker like to believe that the critic is a professional role, assuming its rank and position alongside the other keepers of knowledge — scientists, politicians, and such. But that only serves to reinforce the anti-art structure of knowledge. It is a belief in the expert, in those who know more. The premise is: sure, you all have your silly opinions but it's the real critic, the learned, who knows how to critique.

I want to suggest a fundamentally different operation of critique, one that is radically democratic and hence anti-expert. This operation is available to all who want to live a life that's awake, that's aware, that's creative in the fundamental sense, whether you're making paintings, conversation, love, a meal, or kids.

To critique, I maintain, is to abolish cliché, to brush aside the hegemony of dominant discourse, and usher in a new, fresh, lively way of viewing the world — whether it's a painting, a film, a smile, a child's tears. It is to seek, to will, the interesting. Critic is not the title of the special, the expert, the revered. I want critic to be the title, the mantle, of all those who seek to live life amid the infinite becoming of the universe rather than exist in the closed, predetermined structures of what we call knowledge.

The critic is one who parries everyday nonsense with keen twists and turns armed with both an origami delicacy and a hammer. You assume you need to be in a couple to be happy? You assume a job, a house, a kid is what's called for? You think life and death are opposed? Silly, silly, says the critic who reveals assumptions to be creations, truths to be interpretations, life to be a constant creation rather than a track we're on. 

This is the kind of criticism we should be teaching — not how to master a text but how to open a text, revel in its manifold ways, reveal and steer its assumptions into more interesting possibilities. We shouldn't be limiting our purview to the sanctioned world of art — to books, films, paintings, and performances. Criticism should pervade every moment because every moment is a work of art, even if it's a pile of shit (such as marriage or careers). The critic's job is not to only notice the spectacular. On the contrary, the critic's job is to notice everything.