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.

Peace Amidst the Teem with Reference to Kierkegaard

I like to go to the ocean. Not in the ocean, mind you. Its tumult terrifies me. Plus, I can't swim. So there's that. Being at the ocean's edge, however, is at once calming and exhilarating. (I want to say that being at the ocean's edge is what Kant would call beautiful; being in the ocean is what he'd call sublime. One enjoys free-form proportion; the other, absolute excess.)

It's not just the ocean and its sense — its whiff, its warp and woof — but solitude in general that gives me peace. The farther I am from the mayhem of the social, its noise and needs, the calmer I become. But it's not just calm I experience. It''s joy, an inundation with the thisness of the universe, its infinite becoming. It gets me high.

But then I have to return to the demands of the social — to jobs and women and rent and asshole cable companies and shitty drivers and phones that refuse to work— and my peace and exhilaration vanish in an impossibly swift woosh.

It's easy to say the fault is with people and our world. And there is no doubt we live in an unsustainable culture that demands nothing less than the evacuation of our souls, our vitality, our health, our very being.

Still, my lack of peace is not the culture's fault. It's not Comcast's fault or a woman's fault or the fault of the relentless San Francisco construction and traffic and tech buses and sky rocketing rent and greedy landlords. No, it's my fault. I have trouble holding my peace amid the torrent.

Kierkegaard proffers four stages on life's way. There's the aesthetic which lives in the immediate now of desire and whim (a version of the id, I suppose). There's the ethical in which life is mediated by the civic and its demands for propriety (the super ego of a sort). And then there's the religious which has two phases. The religious in general is the embracing of the infinite. Kierkegaard calls the first phase infinite resignation, those who commit their lives completely to the infinite. Picture monks who live in a remote monastery eating gruel and speaking little.

And then there's the final phase of the religious: the knight of faith. This person lives simultaneously in the finite and the infinite. He — or, yes, she — enjoys the peace and joy of infinite resignation but while living in the social — being married, having a job, negotiating assholes and traffic.

I can imagine my life of infinite resignation. I'd go to the ocean's edge and never return home, never take another client call, never fight with a girlfriend again, never whine and wail when my internet is down. I'd be at peace, exhilarated, all the freakin' time. I do have this persistent dream of awaying myself to the desert and living out my days in an Airstream, far from the madding crowd, until I succumb to death's gentle embrace.

It's seductive, this infinite resignation. It calls to me, beckons, whispers and winks with its come-hither. But I have a kid and I love him infinitely and I'm not leaving him as I absquatulate with my soul and, alas, money.

Plus, something feels insufficient about it. Weak. Like a fleeing rather than a reckoning. Which may be idiotic, my false consciousness based on a weird machismo: I must be wise and strong! Perhaps infinite resignation is the easy way out, relatively speaking. But I wouldn't mind an easy way out. Who wouldn't, right?

In any case, like it or not, here I am and here I remain, in 2016 San Francisco, a shit storm of civilization (he says from a position of white middle class privilege). But kvetching, while no doubt affording a certain pleasure, doesn't suffice. Wailing and whining is only destructive to me and those very few around me.

The trick, then, is to take that peace I find at the ocean and carry it with me always — in traffic, on hold with Comcast, negotiating the inane demands of this life. Life may be suffering but that's no reason to suffer. I just need to fortify my fortitude. Or perhaps rather than working on building my strength, I need to let go of all nonsense, surrender infinitely all day every day, the wu wei.

Or I can just wait until my kid graduates high school and then flee to the high lands or hinter lands or whatever lands will have me and resign myself, infinitely.

Diet and Knowing in Time (verbal essay)

Here's the link 

(I really need to ditch Podomatic as it's so clunky and refuses to embed; suggestions appreciated)

To be on a diet, we believe, is to submit one's body to an external regime. Which is telling in that diet is in fact neutral and based in practice: diet is what you eat. Which is to say, diet is not something that is external but is empirical and, alas, judgement free.

And yet we will to a diet that comes from outside, like a moral code on high. Our contemporary conception of diet is, indeed, based in morality when eating is not moral at all (excuse me, for now, vegans): eating is ethical. Which is to say, it marks a juncture of my body and these foods and how I go in the world.

This is tricky as this juncture is always moving. After all, we live in time. Our bodies are always changing. And we don't just eat for the now; we eat for the later based on what we've eaten in the past. Diet, then, is a temporal juncture that looks back, looks forward, all while negotiating the now. 

It seems to me basing a diet on knowledge learned in a lab is, well, insane. There is such little correlation between the extreme abstraction of elements isolated and experimented with in a lab and the living reality of my body in the world. Anecdote is a much more powerful and useful mode of knowledge when it comes to diet. Science is ill suited for such things. When it comes to diet, your body is the lab and your experience, your health, is the knowledge.


 Listen and you'll hear more!

Writing and Speaking as Performance

For the last 25 years, writing has been a kind of meditation for me, if you will. It's how I slip into the ether, letting go of ego as ideas and words play through me. Writing never feels like mastery. It feels like participation, the grammars of the social, conceptual, and linguistic carrying me along a series of possible trajectories and necessarily landing me on this one, here and now. Writing is beautiful like that, at once so generous and despotic. It gives you x number of options and then demands you choose one.

I always loved writing as a practice rather than as a mode of communication. It's the writing itself that turns me on and riles me up — to be carried along by the mechanics of ideas meeting language meeting what's coherent (more or less).  It takes me out of myself, out of the insistent and insane demands of the everyday ego.

No doubt, we tend to see the writer as an egomaniac, forging the world in his likeness. But that's to forget and ignore all the constraints of language, of words, of people. Burroughs and Beckett and others pushed up against this — these logics, these possibilities, these necessary limits.  Writing is a kind of surrender that doesn't abandon self but becomes self:

The old writer lived in a boxcar by the river. … Often in the morning he would lie in bed and watch grids of typewritten words in front of his eyes that moved and shifted as he tried to read the words, but he never could. He thought if he could just copy these words down, which were not his own words, he might be able to put together another book and then…yes, and then what (Burroughs, The Western Lands, his greatest book).

I loved writing my dissertation. I know grad students complain about this part which, frankly, is insane to me. Why else go to grad school? Writing my dissertation was writing a book, a sustained argument for around 200 pages. It was like building a house from the inside out, deciding what needed to be built next based on whim and necessity. Ah, a veranda here! A hall and stairway here leading back down there! A turret here! Perfect! Only, the only person living in the edifice was me. Which is awesome!

We think about writing as a mode of expression. It's way to communicate what's inside me to you who's outside me. But that's not all that writing is. Writing is itself — and first and foremost — a practice of engineering, aligning, assembling ideas, words, and one's self. It's a kind of surfing, ocean and crowd, leaping into the undulation and riding it out.

And so, after the pleasure of writing my dissertation, I continued writing books — sustained arguments over 100 or so pages. I never did anything with them. Publication always seemed foreign to my writing practice. I wasn't writing to tell anybody anything; and I sure as shit wasn't writing to make money. I was writing as I loved to get lost, and found, in the performance itself. (Alas, I do have a book coming out later this year, published by Zero Books. Publishing speaks to a different component of writing, an ethical component. But more on that another time.)

Oh, that's an awesome moment! To be carried along the waves of an idea, veering this way and that along the grammars of language! This is bliss. This is what I assume the surfers are talking about, feeling the ocean's tumult and power, letting them be your guide as you steer into the wave's vortex. This is writing: steering into the crest of an idea hitting words hitting the world and it's fucking beautiful.

A few months ago, writing began to feel like a chore. It wasn't something that carried me along; it was something that I carried along. But I craved that abandon and remembered that that was what I experienced when I was teaching: performance as the subsuming of ego. I loved prancing and rambling to students. I was always less interested in their comprehension of the material than in the rhetorical postures we created as a classroom (eeesh! That sounds vague and odd!).

So I began speaking into a mic rather than writing — which explains the past few weeks of podcasting rather than bloggng. When I turn on my mic, I have an idea but that's all. I'm not sure where it's going to take me either in words, ideas, or inflection. And that's the pleasure! Getting lost in the performance of articulation!

I'm not that interested in explicating this or that idea. For me, that's just so much fodder. I love the performance of writing and speaking — not in terms of performing for an audience but in terms of performing as doing.

After all, life happens. That is, life isn't per se. Life is always an activity; we're always doing something. Writing and speaking are not a matter of this ego using language as a tool to convey to you, another ego over there, what I want or need. Writing and speaking are actions, ways and modes of taking on the world, of taking on ideas and words, and at once abandoning and superseding the ego. Writing and speaking are not means. They are actions, practices. And should afford the speaker and writer the pleasure of living.

The Graduate, Age, Time, and Irony (a verbal essay)

Here's the podcast link.

After talking with an old friend and re-watching The Graduate, I was struck by the hilarity of youth's claim to certainty, to vision, to sanctimony when we all know, all experience, the relentless flux of perspectives.

There is something different about the gap that separates the young from the old. When it comes to race, gender, sexual orientation (is that the right word?), there is at once an infinite gap and a certain affinity or fluidity as we all occupy the same space. We endure together and so our respective ways of going intersect, bleed.

The divide between the young and old is not spatial; it's temporal. In fact, the young and old share certain spatial continuity — my 12 year old body and my 46 year old body spatially share the same body even if that body is qualitatively different. But we are temporally divided, necessarily.

This is odd. My 46 year old self supersedes my 12 year old self: I know what it is to be 12 and to be 46. But my 12 year old can't possibly know what it is to be 46. All the 12 year old knows is that he doesn't know; he can intimate but not know. After all, he was different at 10, 7, 4 so, for all he knows, he'll be different at 46. We all know what it is to change.

Which is what makes the adamance of youth so cosmically hilarious. You're sitting there speaking and acting like this is the way things are while the rest of us see and feel the waves of change about to pound down upon your very and every being.

This is why I can't understand sanctimony and only understand irony. How can we not know that what we feel and believe here and now is going to change? I mean: Duh!

Notes on the Plenum

Going through old files of my writing, I found this. I have no idea what prompted it. The tone is a bit preachy know-it-all as this was before the fall, as it were. I've edited it a bit for good measure....

Let’s begin, then, from here: everything is multiple. A person, a body, a family, an animal, politics, feelings, moods, ideas, cocktails, love, technology, business, desire, appetite, meaning: everything is a multiplicity.

A thing is one thing that is many things. I am father, lover, pervert, sweet, nasty, brand consultant, critic, writer, blogger of philosophy, would-be adult, man, adolescent, frustrated driver — often all at once, sometimes one more than another.

We are run through with ways of going that exceed us, crisscrossed with flows of culture, blood, history, image, desire, disease, ideas, fears, anxieties, needs, dreams, and drugs.

The weather in San Francisco changes frequently. And with it, the moods of its citizens. Which is to say, our very private selves are environmental selves — the world, the universe, the cosmos runs through us, in us, with us at all times.

So-called Western medicine tries to isolate an ailment from its environs — treat the stomach, treat the toe, treat the mood. It then finds itself following a trail of effects — the stomach treatment changed the mood; the new mood treatment changed the kidneys; so treat the kidneys….and on it goes.

We are body but we are also mood; we are flesh and we are idea; we are blood and we are notion. The visible and invisible parts of us are marbled and cannot be separated once and for all. Things and ideas go together. This is important to understand.

We are ever changing networks (without an outside), internally and externally. These networks break down the perceived rigid lines that would separate me from the weather, me from the traffic, me from you.

The self is fundamentally ecological: it is part of an infinite system of relations, contingencies, connections, a Rube Goldberg machine of cosmic proportions.

We are multiple from the get go. This is not something to be avoided, shunned, or reduced. It is something to be celebrated and negotiated. Multiplicity is the state of things. And this is good, even if at times overwhelming and difficult. Making sense of life in all its teeming complexity should not always be easy.

It’s not that I am sometimes this and sometimes that. It’s that I am always this, that, that, and that in ever varying degrees of intensity. This variation never stops, not for one moment, even if at times it moves very, very slowly.

But this is not to say that we are a chaos. No, each of us is a singular node of networks, a singular amalgamating of elements, ideas, bodies, gestures, moods. Each of us is a way of going, a process, infinitely becoming — a differential equation.

I want to say that each of us is a different way of assembling these things. This way is what we might call a style: each of us has his own style of putting himself together. This style emerges rather than determines. Style changes.

We are productive nodes. Each of us takes up different things in different ways at different speeds with different intensity and makes different things of them. What I do with tequila is talk; what you do with tequila is dance; what he does with tequila is vomit.

You are an assemblage point. Things and ideas and people and moods and events gather around you, gather with you. You are a local torrent of activity, a magnet for certain kinds of things — some you attract strongly, some less so, some not at all. Others, you repel. So it is with bodies: they push, pull, and ignore each other. This is the cosmos, galaxies, solar systems, marriages, friendships, diets, addictions.

You are a manner of going. You are not first yourself and then you act. You are always acting, putting yourself and your world together. Which is to say, you are fundamentally temporal.

You are not. You become. You don’t become something. You just become — always moving, always shifting, but within limits.

You are bound and you are infinite. You are forever becoming along a particular trajectory — that is determined by that trajectory (rails are rare in the universe).

The world flows through us, in and around us, always. Before we are born, we are already figured in a network of becoming — race, class, gender, sexuality, religion. And throughout our lives, every day in many ways, the power of the world streams through us, carries us along and we inflect it just so. We are not determined; nor do we determine. We all go together, more or less. Just because I'm a so-called man doesn't mean I have to do manly things. I make — inflect — "man" just as "man" makes — inflects — me.

The world — what we might call our environment as long as we understand our environment to include buildings, roads, people, trees, air, clouds, stars, planets, oceans — the world is not an empty stage. It’s not a blank canvas, a neutral space, a background, a backdrop. The world has its moods, its needs, its complex desires: the roots of trees will sprawl, crab grass will find a way, the moon will tug at the ocean, billions upon billions of microbes will adapt and morph.

The air itself is curved. Just look at the clouds. 

We, as human beings, do not dictate this vast ecology of forces. But neither are we outside of them. We are part of them. Just as the wind blows the leaves that, in turn, shape that wind, we are part of everything happening. We are inflection points, changing things and being changed by things — always. This is the way of the world, of the universe happening. It exceeds us and includes us, envelops us. There is no outside and it's always happening. 

On Sense (a verbal essay)

Here's the link. 

Sense is the way bodies cohere, or don't, in a perceptive field.

Sense is not the meaning of an experience; sense is the meaning + the immediate affect  + temperature + speed + intensity + color + shape and the diverse terms in which different bodies interact and cohere, more or less, with other bodies (visible, invisible, organic, machine, vegetal (yes, that's redundant)).

Sense happens at the cusp of events, in the seams of bodies assembling and disassembling.

Sense is always at the point of its own dissolution, fragmenting infinitely into chaos or cohering too rigidly into cliché or meaning.

William Burroughs, in his cut-up method, plays at the borders of sense and chaos. It's often a subtle, tenuous, and moving line that separates one from the other. Artists reckon this moment at every moment.