My Speech to the Graduates, v.1

As an adjunct professor with a propensity for saying the wrong thing and who commands no respect whatsoever in the academic— or really any—community, I will most likely never be asked to deliver a commencement speech. But watching a recent graduation, I couldn't help but think: what an excellent but all too often neglected opportunity. The possible speeches I could give swirled through my mind. Here is one such imagined speech, written with a certain histrionic fervor.

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I want you all to think for a moment: Are your parents happy? Do they consume life with unabashed joy, with voracious abandon? Now think of all your friends' parents: Are any of them happy? Are they lit up—by life? By ideas? By art? By their respective spouses?

I have to tell you: the life prescribed for you—work, marriage, children—is a drain on all that is vital in this world. Somehow, somewhere, we were all suckered into signing an egregious social contract in which we promised to give up 60 hours a week working in some humiliating job aimed at making someone else rich so that we can barely afford to pay our rents and car payments and utility bills and ensuring that we have no time actually to raise our children so we are left to deal with our children—which itself demands endless negotiating and placating because god forbid a parent should tell a child what to do—which all leaves us so wasted, exhausted, spent at the end of the day that we can barely muster an intelligent conversation with our spouses—not to mention do anything more, uh, satisfying with same said spouse—that all we can do is pour a heavy snifter of Scotch, pop a Valium, and watch ESPN until we fall asleep, only to awake and do it all over again the next day.

And don't imagine that the work you seek is noble and that this makes you exempt from the death trap that surrounds you. Your work may be noble; it may at times even be interesting. But it remains work and the demands it places on your body and soul are inexcusable. No matter how noble your work, it should not demand 60 hours a week—and the best hours at that! No, our society is a meth-infused, speed driven culture of unabashed consumption, hell bent on exploiting all vestige of energy, including the life that pumps through your veins.

This is the anxiety that should be haunting you as you stand at the precipice of the so-called real world. You should be shaking in your boots thinking: How do I avoid this death trap? Where in the world can I find peace, delectation, civility, pleasure, delight, appetite? But instead you entertain the anxiety of how, exactly, you will enter this horrendous, vampiric cycle of soul death. You wonder: How will my degree prepare me for work? When will I be mature enough to be a parent? What if I don't meet Mr or Mrs Right?

These are the wrong questions. These are the questions of a soulless, witless, joyless culture that is plummeting, rapidly, to its own demise. I have to tell you: As graduates of this institution, there is always work to be had. They—that ubiquitous "they"—will always have work for you; you're the ones who make them money. Don't think for a minute that you have to woo them; they are all too ready and eager to suck you dry. The trick is to parry the lunge of their soul siphon—not to head directly into their waiting mouths.

This insane, demented, completely out of control system—you have to work, you have to marry, you have to breed—is unsustainable. It devours the one thing that sustains it, namely, life. Why do you think there are Starfucks—excuse me, Starbucks—on every corner? Because people enjoy drinking half-assed coffee drowned in a quart of hormone-enriched milk? No, because they have no vitality left in their veins so they turn to caffeine—so they can continue working! Capitalism exhausts your personal reserves so it forces you to seek a whiff of vitality from elsewhere–namely, a double Grande Latte.

I ask you to consider, briefly, the cafes of Europe or South America. They are leisurely places where people talk, relax, enjoy each other's company, enjoy the day. Now think of Starbucks. It is not a place of pleasure; it's a place of work! The image of our coffee shops is marred by the ubiquity of laptops. We do not live in a culture of pleasure and delectation, a culture of life affirmed. We live in a culture that seeks to exhaust all of its resources, including its own life.

Now picture lunch in Europe or in South America. Long, leisurely affairs filled with delicious food, conversation, some wine, perhaps a brief siesta. Now picture Americans eating lunch: some grotesque wrap distractedly devoured over a laptop. I have to tell you, this is not a recipe for health, for vitality, for long life. This is an engine hell bent on devouring all remnants of energy. Why? Because it is has no reserves itself. This is a vampiric culture that needs the blood of others to sustain itself.

It's really a very basic question of physics or of economics, depending on how you look at it. The system eats its own source of power until it is drained of all natural resources. It is a system premised on the logic of the vampire: I'll suck your life to make my own; you suck someone else's life; and so on. It is not an infinite deferral; it is an infinite drain, a zero sum game. Take merely a cursory glance around and tell me I'm wrong. We're in free fall, plummeting fast. Can you smell the whiff of impending pavement?

So I say this: Change your question. When your parents ask, "But what will you do with a degree in philosophy or rhetoric or literature?" say: "Wrong question, Mom. Wrong question, Dad. The question is: How will I deflect and defer the hungry teeth of the vampire? How will I maintain my appetite for life, my joy at thinking and tasting and tinkering? How will I avoid the miserable lives that have turned you into Ambien drenched, sexless, joyless zombies?"

You have to jettison the very thought of a career. The question should never be: How will I work for someone the rest of my life so I have none of my own pleasures left? The question should be: How can I get enough money in the door with the least expenditure of my own energy so that I can maximize my own life, my own energy source, myself?

Now, as for children, ask yourself: Must I breed? If so, are you sure the neuroses of the nuclear family is the way to go? The fact is, human children are born way too raw, barely cooked, in fact. They are barely alive. Once they've left the womb, they need every ounce of your energy–and if you're a woman, this is literal—just to make it through a day. Babies are voracious; they need your energy to make it through the first years of life. I'm not saying don't breed; children are excellent. They are excellent precisely because they are insane.

But they do suck you dry with a relentless vigor. And the closed, little world of the bourgeois family is not the proper platform to breed on. Just look around you, at any family. No one looks very good as fatigue, indigestion, and disease punctuate their faces. There's constant bickering, passive aggressive pandering, cruel cut downs. The nuclear family is a failed experiment. The horrible, demented psychoses that swirl and whirl between mommy, daddy, and baby are horrendous, distasteful, and, again, unsustainable. We have to hire nannies because the tribe has gone missing—the extended network that it takes to raise children has disappeared. And we're left with this grotesquerie we call "family" that we mask in maudlin sentimentality.

So breed if you must—and it is a strong, biological drive—but ask yourself: At what cost this child? How can I make this work without losing myself in the process? Where's my tribe?

We live in a time of accelerated, shameless, unabashed consumption. Pleasure, delectation, enjoyment have gone by the wayside—they've been deemed too slow, too unproductive. We eat at our computers; we pound coffee to stay awake and pop Ambien to fall asleep. And by deigning to answer the idiotic questions of your parents and teachers—What job will you pursue?—you join this fraying existence.

The question is everything. The question frames the thinking. So perhaps you ignore everything I say here; perhaps you assume I'm just some jew quack ranting about the system. Perhaps you're right. But I suggest this to you: Just because someone asks you question—such as, What will do you with your degree?—you don't have to answer them. You can change the question.

Question the question, always.

And seek pleasure—slow, considered, thorough pleasure— because it is disappearing quickly.

The Ethics of William Burroughs: Vampires vs. Johnsons

William Burroughs may be the last great ethicist, the man who proffered an ethics of the ages, as timely as it is eternal. It is a simple, this ethics: Don't be a vampire. Don't suck the blood—the vitality and energy—of others. Be a Johnson: mind your own fucking business but don't be a selfish asshole, either.

The cop who gave him a joint when he was in the can; the bellboy that tipped him off that the cops were gonna raid his room: Johnsons, both. They had nothing to gain by helping Burroughs out. But nor did they have anything to lose. They were not self-righteous or sanctimonious. They simply acted as fellow citizens within a world careening.

It is not hard, then, to be a Johnson. It does not entail a relentless self-interrogation or doubting, like the common Judeo-Christian moral code. All it entails is a little look around—letting a driver into your lane, letting someone who briefly left line back in.

Mostly, it means not being a resentful, selfish prick. Which, alas, does seem quite difficult for many people, particularly those with a whiff of power. Oh, how they love to exert whatever tiny force has been granted them. The world, I am discovering, perhaps a bit tardily, is run by vampires, intent on destroying the creativity, vitality, verve of those who dare to live or think large.

Aspire to be a Johnson—that is the Burroughs ethic. It is a humble but mighty aspiration.

Seeing Seeing, or The Generous Image

Let's assume that an image is not an image of. The image is something in and of itself, a piece of the world. As such, the image asks to be reckoned on its own terms. Really, it’s a question of ethics, granting the image the respect it so eloquently requests.

But what happens once we grant such a request, once we make such a generous gesture?

The world explodes, proliferates itself. As real and imitation join ranks, the world becomes a great bounty, an infinitely fecund universe, a plenum of image events. There is not first the world and then images. Now, it’s all images, everywhere, a great baroque symphony.

And we are implicated in our act of viewing. The image looks back. To see becomes an exchange, a dialogue (or multilogue), an event. We no longer view signs of things absent but encounter something here and now.

This exchange between viewer and viewed becomes an exchange between this and that. Each party gives; each party takes. The image gives a seeing, a way of looking at the world. “Here,” the once-image says, “here’s a very nice way to look at things.” And the once-viewer replies, “I see your seeing like this. Thanks very much.”

The image gives over its body to the viewer. And the viewer gives over his or her body to the image. Each says to the other simultaneously, generously, (hence forming an odd, potentially disharmonious, chorus): “See?”

And yet we cannot really say that an image is, in no way, an image of something. Surely, a photograph of a cow or a child is just that: an image of that cow or child. But perhaps an image—such as a photograph—is also an image of.

An image takes up the world. And takes it up in a particular way so that when I see a photo of a cow, I see that cow, sure, but now that cow has been condensed, amplified, saturated, stretched, bent, pleated—that cow has been seen.

Which is to say, when I see a photograph of a cow I don't just see a cow: I see the seeing of that cow. And seeing is not neutral precisely because it is always embodied; this body sees in this way. One always sees, one always takes up the world, with style. The maker of images imprints his seeing—his style—on the image (enacting an odd synesthesia, a haptic vision). In some sense, all image making is a kind of photograph of the seer's seeing.

This stylized seeing is a metabolic engine that makes sense of the world, assembling it just so. This engine not only sees certain things rather than other things—seeing at its most basic level is an algorithm of selection—, it sees how things go, how they relate, their speeds and consistencies. Consider an obvious example: Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Suddenly, the sky is a particulate viscous, oozing and swirling with surprising weight into eddies and undulating planes. Isn't this the delight of that painting—that, for a moment, we see the world in this very odd, beautiful, surprising way? And maybe we even learn something about how things can go, how stars can shine and atmospheres can flow.

An image always proffers a seeing that is a mode of making sense. Everywhere we look, we see sense making.

There Will Be Blood, a Viscous Tale

There Will Be Blood is not really a strange film. In fact, I'm tempted to say that the film is anything but strange in that it is precisely filmic. That is, I might say something like Juno is a truly strange film because it is so literary that it's barely a film at all. Juno enjoys a familiar, linear narrative, literally in synch with the workings of predictable natural law—human gestation, the seasons, human frailty. It is a simple story with some very nice dialogue. But I'm tempted to say that it's not really a film per se but more of an illustrated story. I do not mean this as a pejorative; it's just a comment, as neutral as can be. And, as such, Juno, despite its familiarity, makes for a strange film.

There Will Be Blood, however, is not really much of a story. Is it the rise of Daniel Plainview? Kind of. But is it really interested in his rise as much as it's interested in his going, his mode of becoming? Consider the conspicuous ellipses of plot. Consider the fact that it is impossible to predict Plainview's actions; it is equally hard to explain them. His words, his actions, and his expressions do not conspire to resolve anything, explain anything. He is as multifarious as the images themselves, oozing this way and that, breathtaking and pounding. He is more an image than a man. In fact, I want to say he's not a man at all but a force of life, an inflected will to power.

This is not to say that TWBB is without plot, bereft of story. Rather, the film attempts to forge a different kind of story, a filmic story and not a literary one.

The book wants to be linear, reading from left to right. This has yielded a certain linear narrativity, one premised on cause and effect: first this happens, which makes that happen, and so on. Needless to say, any number of writers have jammed this cause/effect circuit, broken the linearity of the book—all the Oulipo games, Burroughs cut ups, Nabokov's privileging of sensual affect over meaning, over significance. But if the book's linearity asks to be broken, film was never linear to begin with. The image wants to sprawl, to belie explanation, to present the synchronous, the allatonce, the multiple.

But film need not jettison story all together. What PT Anderson gives us in TWBB is a different order of story, a filmic story, one that moves but not according to the logic of cause and affect but to the must more obscure laws of the multifarious. The story slides, thickly, like the oil that stains Plainview's hands, like the oil that stains the celluloid.

Oil, like the film, is not a liquid. It will not fill its container so readily. More insistent on itself, oil moves much more slowly than water. But nor is oil a solid; it is not set in its ways. It sprawls and oozes and occasionally spouts, violently. It does not allow for easy footing; it makes everything in its way slip and slide, turns it black, leaves its mark.

TWBB, like oil, like Daniel Day-Lewis' face, oozes this way and that. You think it's heading in one direction but then it, and you, slide another way altogether. At times, it may seem disjointed. And perhaps it is. So be it. But disjuncture is not a pejorative when it comes to film —and when it comes to filmic stories.

So what kind of story is this? It is not the story of a man. There is not first Daniel Plainview and then the camera. All there is is the filmic image, this filmic image, this forceful, viscous trajectory we call Plainview. His name is Plainview, for God's sake! It's right there in our view, plain as can be. There is no narrative backstory needed to explain his actions; what we see is what we get and what we get is a big, oozing mess of affect.

TWBB is a story that moves according to the logic of flow and force instead of cause and effect. I think it is this, this new kind of story, this filmic narrative, that interests PT Anderson. We see it in the glorious, exquisite Punch-Drunk Love, a love story that's so drunk it wobbles, dissolving into nothing but Scopotones made by someone else all together. PTA is forging a vocabulary of story telling that is properly filmic. This is perhaps his interest in Robert Altman as Altman was a great innovator in story telling, multiplying the narrative, giving us multiple overlapping, intersecting, and parallel trajectories.

But after Magnolia and Boogie Nights, clearly influenced by Altman, PTA seems to be exploring new territory all together. Now, the multiplicity is not in separate narrative paths but condensed into one face, into a plain viscous view.

Affective Films: There Will Be Blood, Band of Outsiders, Pulp Fiction

What do we want from films? How do we assess them?

There Will Be Blood is a great film. Why? Because it is relentlessly surprising, odd, and beautiful; because it never resolves but relishes its ambivalences and multivalences; because it does things with the conspiracy of sound and image that are astounding; because it presents a very odd sort of story, a story that's not really a story, a story that prefers affect to narrative; because it is a deeply affective film without ever being maudlin or sentimental; because Daniel Day Lewis does not play a role but performs a force of life.

Now take Godard's Band of Outsiders. It is a great film for many of the same reasons—the celebration of multivalence, a story that's not a story, a voice-over and soundtrack that put image and sound at impossible angles.

But clearly the two films enjoy quite different affects. PT Anderson rocks our world, puts our whole bodies on edge, tingling and aching with fear and anticipation, the title brooding over us—there will be blood, we've been warned.

Godard rocks our world, too—or at least my world—, through an affect of another sort altogether. There may be blood here but it is not the blood of bodies; it never, ever, sits heavily with the weight of humanity. On the contrary, it does nothing but skirt, tease, play, frolic, dance, wink without ever being unnecessary. Band of Outsiders performs the most elusive of affects: engaged whimsy, delightful cleverness, playful thoughtfulness.

Both films are vital, which is to say, they are each in their respective ways forces of life, not comments on life. Is there way to say one film is greater than the other? Absolutely not, for that would be to quantify qualities. TWBB's menacing tension is not more important or more essential than BoO's playfulness and whimsy.

Now take Pulp Fiction. Its title relishes its own lack of seriousness, of weight. But does this make it less vital, less important? Like Godard, Tarantino engages film with a wicked cleverness and a touch that is at once knowing and playful. I left Pulp Fiction giddy, my heart pounding, lit up by the relentlessness of the film's play, its joy, its frolic at being free of human sentimentality. This is not an easy thing to accomplish—to shun the pantheon of sentiment and still forge a vital being. In fact, I'd say it's a miraculous accomplishment. Pulp Fiction is not frivolous for frolicking.

I taught Pulp Fiction this past semester. Every time the movie was playing, you could feel the collective energy, a certain giddiness, a certain delight, everyone at the edge of their seat, poised to howl with laughter and glee. It's an exhilarating film.

Perhaps I'm simply stating the obvious. But I want to point out that a film that scathes us with blood is not more, or less, vital or great or important than a film that exhilarates us with wit and play.

In Defense of Profanity

I curse. And I curse when I teach. I've been told by a superior of mine, a well-respected and so-called radical, that my cursing "offends the moral and religious beliefs of my students."

That may be the case. But I retort twice:

1. So what? The ideas of my class surely offend their moral and religious beliefs. Is that a bad thing? I was told this by a theorist who certainly proffers beliefs, and a lifestyle, that offends most moral and religious beliefs.

2. And: Why? What is so wrong with profanity?

Every semester, I encounter some student of religious upbringing who tells me that he or she was taught that cursing is for those who lack vocabulary, that it's lazy: I curse because I can't find a better word.

Let's assess this claim. One, it assumes that language is always referential, that its first if not sole task is to mean something, refer to something. But, as I teach, meaning is only one function of words. Words, and communication, are affective; they effect people's emotions. A well placed "fuck," an aptly turned "asshole," can resonate in people's minds, hearts, and bodies and move them, persuade them. Just as ee cummings can move us to tears with nonsense, grammar thrown by the wayside, a well placed "motherfucker" can bring down the house.

In fact, I'd argue that cursing—and cursing well—is pedagogically effective; it wakes the little assholes up—just as you woke up when you read that. Cursing in the classroom affords me the opportunity to seize their attention, if only for a moment.

Now let me address the matter of laziness. First, if laziness is the crime, not cursing, then let us condemn all laziness. Let us condemn the lazy students who don't try to understand what I'm saying; let us condemn the academics who churn out the same, tired, familiar shit article after article, book after book, lecture after lecture. When I teach, I give my fucking heart and soul, all my vitality, to that hour and a half so my students can see, and experience, live thought. What about those lazy professors who deliver the same dry lecture, year after year? If laziness is the accusation, let us please purge the halls of academia of laziness.

And, second, a curse may or may not be lazy but it is by no means sufficient grounds to establish laziness. For cursing well—with the proper timing and the proper placing of syllabic emphasis—is as difficult and demanding as any creative effort. Certainly, there are those who curse lazily just as there are those who pray lazily or preach lazily or live lazily. But let us not condemn cursing just because of a few poor profaners.

United 93: Networked Information, Uncertainty, Action

I accidentally watched United 93 the other night, the film nominally about the 9/11 hijacked plane in which the passengers re-hijacked the plane, crashing it into a field, killing everyone on board but no one else. I feared it would be some banal tale of heroism, the hero in us all emerging in times of distress. What I discovered is an incredibly complex film about information, knowledge, uncertainty, and action in the age of electronic technology.

The film is narratively strange. There are no central characters; we are not privy to any intimate relationships——no lovers for whom we will weep, no reluctant heroes waiting in the wings. Rather, the camera maintains a peculiar distance, an indifference, as it follows the flow of bodies and information.

For the most part, the film does not focus on the action on the plane: it follows the flow of information that demarcates the event. This begins, more or less, at air traffic control in various cities—Cleveland, NY, and central FAA headquarters. One air traffic controller, watching a blip on a screen and speaking into a headset, gets no response from a plane. Soon, that plane—or rather, that blip—is not following its prescribed trajectory. Soon thereafter there is some mysterious sound from the errant plane's cockpit, a foreign accent, muffled words. No one is quite what's happening; tapes of the exchange are played back repeatedly in an attempt to decipher the voices.

This is how information works in a tele-electronic network: a blip on the screen in Cleveland disappears over NY where air traffic controller search their monitors and then grab binoculars to search the sky. Meanwhile, a feedback loop plays, "We have planes." There is no one person to make sense of the information, to declare, "This is what's happening." Instead, there's a series of phone calls, relays, between different individuals at different air traffic control centers, an office in the Pentagon, and rumors of phone calls from passengers on one of the planes. It's one big insane game of telephone, only there's no original message to distort: there's distortion from the get go.

The scene on the plane mimics the scene on the ground. No one passenger knows what's happening; no one passenger rallies the troops. Everyone pipes in to whomever is next to them; rumors spread; a local zone of activity emerges, based on the premise that the terrorists' bomb is not real. BUT NO ONE KNOWS.

What's impressive about the film is that it passes no judgement. There is no implicit condemnation of those who can't figure out what's happening—EVEN AFTER ONE OF THE TOWERS IS ON FIRE. There is no celebration of the passengers, no triumphant music. The camera moves, unsteady, as if it's simply another node within this network, this network without hierarchy, without certainty, this splay and spray of information.

Of course, there are some cultural prejudices at work. Few believe there's actually a hijacking and, if there is, that anything bad will happen. I kept imagining what the same scene would play like at air traffic control in Tel Aviv.

Which actually raises the question of action without certainty: the Israeli's have a certain faith, a moral certitude that allows them to act without total knowledge. In the US, it seems, we have to find a way to act when we just don't know. In United 93, we see some military officer trying to discover the ROE, the rules of engagement. No one knows what's happening and, even if they did, no one knows what to do.

And yet, as I said, the film is not bleak or judgemental. It simply, or not so simply, maps the flow of information within this cyborg vision, this conglomerate of machinic viewing and human understanding.

What a nice surprise, to find a film that takes up 9/11 free of the familiar pathos that surrounds it. That, alas, gives me hope.