Laff In: Wife-Swapping Sadism Now Overground!

Music: Nellie McKay: Get Away From Me I have recently discovered last season's "reality television" novelty, a cheeky, family-friendly version of that swinging 70s rage: wife swapping. I suppose I've yet to catch whatever-the-new-thing is this season (I surmise a family-friendly take on bondage or auto-erotic death-tempting). But I'm always a step behind, and I'm simply fascinated by Trading Spouses and it's softer, kinder twin, Wife Swap. When I first tuned in I was ready for lurid bedroom details a la the 1992 film, Consenting Adults, but instead I was treated to moms lording over the children of others and having awkward conversations with their new daddies about whether Suzie could get a temporary tattoo. The moms are always pared dialectically so as to produce the utmost friction: last week a Minnesota housewife with an affinity for the vacuum and fascism redolent of "a certain anal character" was swapped with a laid-back Tennessee country girl with a little yappy dog that shits indiscriminately in the house. This evening one of the swapped mom's called in Ghostbusters because her host family's house was haunted.

Television can occasionally delight; but I must admit I was longing for Lou Reed to pop in with a set of random keys (and the exploding ticket: ". . . and don't forget to bring your wife") this evening. By next week I'll be bored with it.

Speaking of getting bored and spouses, Mirko passed along this linkby an ex-professor who got tenure and up and quit the academy because he was miserable. It goes without saying he was in an English department (after all, MLA is . . . well, let's just say there's a hilarious novel written about it titled Murder At the MLA).

What bothered me about the article was the author's argument at the end about love, that unlike other careers, romance is really strained for the young or "junior" academic. I do worry about that . . . a lot in recent years (a major reason for leaving Baton Rouge, frankly). But then when watching these shows I'm confronted with the horror of a more mainstream life and career . . . if my partner felt the need to vacuum three times a day, or hired psychics to "investigate" my home, or . . . well, all these possible futures. In the immortal words of one frequently swapped during the heyday of swingin' . . . "sock it to me."

The Charybdis of Unprofessionism

Music: TV On the Radio: Desparate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes Two days ago on my answering machine was an odd yet not infrequent kind of message: A woman muttering, apparently to another in a room somewhere someplace, incomprehensible strings of muffled syllables which ended with a discernable, "should I report this?" Then she hung up. Although clearly this was a the voice of someone living, I could not help but to think of White Noise, the recent, failed film on "Electronic Voice Phenomena" . . . what if this was a reproach from beyond, a threat from Marty's mother back in sixth grade . . . .

When I was in sixth grade one of my best friends, Marty, was suddenly not allowed to speak with me on the phone when I called. I would always hit the interference of "mother," who would say he wasn't home, and so on. Then one day she said that I should stop calling, that I know what I did and that she could not believe someone that seemed so polite could do such a thing. What thing? Apparently someone had serially prank-called for a week and said some sick things. Apparently it sounded like me. I swear to this day it wasn't me. In any event, there is the fear of both having a vocal double and of the false accusation.

The figure of Marty's mother, however, has metamorphosed and reappeared in my life--well, today--as an assistant dean. The dean of the Evening School, to be exact. She called today to discuss some "business" related to the Evening School, which is currently in the midst of a budgetary crisis.

It's always about crisis, isn't it?

The budgetary crisis is a result of the university basically deciding to kill-off the ES for sucking too many resources from the regular university budget. This effects me because they do not want to pay me for teaching this summer. So I get a call from the dean, saying that although 75 students enrolled in my course, they can only pay me for quarter of that load. She essentially wanted me to teach three classes for the pay of one, two "gratis," implicitly I suspect to signify my solidarity with the adult education movement. Of course, I refused and insisted that I only teach 25 students; that her budget is cut is her problem, not mine.

In any event, here's the kicker: the dean noted that she called a few times earlier this week and was offended by my outgoing answering machine message. She said it was "unprofessional" and that she was very concerned that if a student called (etc. and so on). I won't go into how many ways this offends me, but then I must remember I am in the Deep South, wherein the LSU Parade Grounds were recently planted with 4,000 small crosses in mourning of all those aborted babies . . . .

And after backing out of a compensation agreement, then trying to get me to teach for free, I'm the one that's unprofessional?

Current Outgoing Answering Machine Message

Ambivalence

Music: Ministry: Houses of the Mole Today I submitted my resignation to my chair, ending my employment at LSU this June. I signed a contract to begin with the University of Texas in the fall. I am sad to leave so many dear friends. I am excited about making new ones in Austin. Aside from grading and having to judge the work of others (and having my own work judged, of course), moving to a new place is the hardest part of being a teacher/scholar sort of person. I don't weather this process terribly well (tummy aches, etc.), but the support of my colleagues here and there helps--and hurts.

Tonight's a lodge night. Looking forward to that, a diversion in fellowship.

What I Just Said to My Cat, Obi

"All my attempts to study, to read, to be scholarly at home are thwarted by your love." Speaking of love, if any of you are reading from Minnesota, there's a Devonshire Rex up for adoption in White Bear Lake. Please take a peek at him.

Mourning Humanism III

More on my review essay on haunting: Speaking of the many attempts to kill off Marx and Marxism (and at least tacitly, Freud and psychoanalysis), in Specters Derrida underscores our general impulse in the West to "chase away a specter, exorcise the possible return of a power held to be baleful in itself and whose demonic threat continues the haunt the century." Richard Kearney's Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, the third of a trilogy of books exploring relgious themes, opens with a thorough examination of this problematic assumption, that the specter is, de facto, a "demonic threat" that must be assimilated, exorcized, or killed-off and mourned. Broadening the pseudo- or non-concept of the specter to alterity as such, Kearney begins with the observation that most "strangers, gods and monsters-along with various ghosts, phantoms, and doubles who bear a family resemblance-are, deep down, tokens of a fracture within the human psyche." Each strange figure is always a double of one sort or another, mirroring a posthumanist subject that is "split between unconscious and conscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other." In other words, at the level of the social, monsters are us. They remind us, argues Kearney

of a choice: (a) to try to understand and accommodate our experience of strangeness, or (b) to repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders. All too often, humans have chosen the latter option, allowing paranoid illusions to serve the purpose of making sense of our confused emotions by externalizing them into black-and-white scenarios . . . .

The first five chapters that comprise Strangers, Gods and Monsters, examine a number of these scenarios, ultimately ending with those launched by the events of September 11, 2001. Insofar as each scenario presents us with a choice to be made in respect to the other, we are again reckoning with haunting as an orientation that avoids the endless spiral of ontology by foreswearing an absolute what (-am I? -are they?) in favor of the "how" of relating to the other.

Chapter one provides a genealogy of the scapegoat, beginning with an examination of the figure of the goat in Leviticus and tracing it to and through various "demons" in religious eschatology. Kearney then examines René Girard's critique of scapegoat myths, which is that since the dawn of humanity the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat has been used build community consensus through "collective projection," but at a horrific cost. For Girard, the death of Christ exposed "the sacrificial lie for once and for all by revealing the innocence of the victim," so the argument goes, the lesson being that the genuine other, "ethical alterity," is God in the end. Kearney takes Girard to task for too readily condemning myth as "somehow inherently monstrous," and he is careful to point out that sometimes the repudiation of strangeness is in fact deification, a claim vividly illustrated by the bloody monstrosity of Christ in Mel Gibson's 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ. Although Kearney does not examine the film, after reading this chapter one can clearly see how controversy surrounding Gibson's pornographic vision of divine sacrifice is in part caused by the film's exposure of the close relation between monstrosity and divinity Kearney describes.

Moving beyond the scapegoating function in mythic and religious discourse, Kearney turns to the figure of the "alien" in popular culture and philosophy in chapters two and three respectively. With an examination of the alien monster in the Alien film series and the Kurtz character in Francis Ford Copolla's Apocalypse Now Redux, Kearney shows how both filmic narratives forward a humane civil pedagogy: our task "is not to kill our monsters but to learn how to live with them," most especially because they represent the "stranger within." In echoes of Derrida's opening remarks in Specters, the task of learning how to live--"finally," Derrida echoes, to live with others, with death--begins by recognizing the demands of justice. In chapter three the problem of the other is most succinctly and clearly framed in reference to the work of Derrida, and his teacher, Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed, insofar as chapter three is the core of Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, a closer account of this chapter alone will help to explicate and organize the rest of the book as Kearney's response.

Kearney begins the third chapter by arguing that "most ideas of identity," specially national identity, "have been constructed in relation to some notion of alterity." He continues that

Contemporary thinkers like Levinas and Derrida have made much of the fact that the Western metaphysical heritage, grounded in Greco-Roman thought, has generally discriminated against the Other in favor of the Same, variously understood as Logos, Being, Substance, Reason or Ego. This prejudice is called the "ontology of Sameness" by Levinas and "logocentrism" by Derrida. But both share the view-one canvassed by a wide variety of continental thinkers-that justice demands a redressing of the balance so as to arrive at a more ethical appreciation of otherness.

Learning to live with ghosts entails the recognition that the other does not have to be the Same. "Openness to the Other beyond the Same is called justice," continues Kearney, and this posture of openness has a name: hospitality.

Kearney then proceeds to examine Derrida's post-Specters work focusing on hospitality.49 He posits the "other" as another "worthy of reverence and hospitality," and the "alien" as another about whom we are suspicious, or who is scapegoated or discriminated against. Kearney suggests that for Derrida (as well as John Caputo, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy), justice refers to something beyond the law (the law understood here as a necessary exclusion of non-conformists in an identitarian regime like the nation state), an "unconditional hospitality to the alien." For the deconstructionists, hospitality is only "truly just . . . when it resists the temptation to discriminate between good and evil others," the "hostile enemy (hostis) and the benign host (hostis). Derrida's extension of this argument concerns the inherent paradox of hospitality: the general conception of hospitality concerns a "host" who opens his or her home to others. Built-into this conception is the idea that the host has the right to discriminate among others who allowed to enter, because it is possible that certain evil others could get in and hold the host hostage. So each visitor is made to announce his or her identity at the door, which entails a certain degree of injustice and thus collapses the other into a binary: the other is either "invader-alien or welcome other." Faced with this pickle, Derrida argues for an "unconditional hospitality" that "marks a break with everyday conventions of hospitality governed by rights, contracts, duties and pacts." Kearney explains that Derrida does not dispense with the law of right altogether, however, for our relation to the other/alien/stranger is still, nevertheless, regulated.

After rehearsing what reads at times like a haunted cocktail party thought-experiment, the point around which the entire book is written emerges: "The problem with this analysis of hospitality is, I fear, that it undervalues our need to differentiate not just legally but ethically between good and evil aliens." Kearney is admiring of the posture of deconstruction, the critique of identity, the embrace of an openness to the stranger-other, and so on, but has trouble with any stance taken against making judgments. After a quick detour through Levinas on radical alterity to establish one end of an extreme (a radical passivity before the other as Absolute Alterity; e.g., God) and Kristeva on the uncanny to establish the other (that the other is the "mirror image: our othered self"), Kearney proposes the third way of a "diacritical hermeneutics of action." The basis for such a hermeneutic is the necessity of self-constancy for ethics, which is achieved only through narrative. "Narrative identity should not therefore be summarily dismissed as an illusion of mastery," as some posthumanist arguments seem to suggest, but rather is required in order to "de-alienate" the other. One is tempted to say that, for Kearney, salvation is rhetoric-more rhetoric recognizing "oneself as another" and "the other as (in part) another self." The reader must wait until many pages later in the next chapter, however, to learn what role the production of discourse has to play in Kearney's program.

So how does one maintain a commitment to the posthumanist subject and an openness to alterity on the one hand, and a need to distinguish between good an evil on the other? First, Kearney proposes to promote "practical understanding," or the capacity to deliberate about "the enigma of evil" with a commitment to act against it once discerned. His elaboration of phronesis-praxis depends entirely on the vehicle of "narrative" and resembles what Dana Cloud has described as a "pragma-rhetorical approach" to evil: "a perspective that emphasizes 'how' evil is produced, deployed, used, and misused in public discourse, bracketing the question of the ontological status of evil itself" with a stress on pragmatic action.53 Such wisdom is supplemented with "working-through," an acknowledgement of suffering and trauma and a commitment to laboring through the pain "as best we can." Such working-through entails a certain commitment to narrative catharsis-writing and speaking about the traumatic, mourning in the more common sense of the term. Finally, Kearney recommends "pardon," the gesture of forgiveness that is, at some level, admittedly irrational.

After the significant discussions of the third and fourth chapters, the rest of Strangers, Gods, and Monsters doubles as both a place to take care of some unfinished, tangentially related business (e.g., quibbles with Caputo, Lyotard, and Zizek) and as an example of the sort of action-based hermeneutics Kearney has in mind. He discusses the U.S. response to the attacks on September 1l, 2001 as a textbook example of wrongly reckoning with the alien outside and within (in personal communication, Kearney noted that he had long started writing the book before those events). He reviews with various alternate attempts to reckon with death and/or the other, such as the adoption of a melancholic imagination in chapter seven, willed silence in terms of the concept of the 'immemorial" in chapter eight, and the celebration of the uncanny concept of the khora in chapter nine. In the second half of the book Kearney is careful to confront various concepts of ineffability-in the language of Lacan, "the Real," or that which is beyond our capacities to represent-in order to stress the necessity of critical judgment and speaking-out. For example, in criticizing Lyotard's notion of the immemorial, Kearney argues that

Rather than reject all notions of "representation" and "reference" out of hand, would it not be wiser to problematize and redefine them? To repudiate absolutely every reality claim amounts surely to a ruinous dichotomy between a modern positivism of fact and a postmodern apophatism of silence.

Kearney responds similarly to Zizek on the sublime, Derrida on the khora, and so on. He is willing to admit of multiple kinds of ineffability in the critiques of ontology, but consistently argues against strategies of silence or inaction; to do so, he claims, subordinates ethics to aesthetics. Ultimately, however, we learn somewhat surprisingly by the concluding chapters that Kearney wants a middle way that is open to Heidegger's thinking about God (unlike Derrida, Kearney ain't no atheist), but supplemented with an ethics of action (this may not be so surprising if one is familiar with Kearney's previous work, however). Although Kearney is on board with the posthumanist critique of the "modern idolatry of the ego," deconstruction needs to be "supplemented by a critique of the postmodern obsession with absolutist ideas of exteriority and otherness" (even Kearney cannot resist the foil of the postmodern, it would seem). For Kearney, learning to live with ghosts does not mean ghost-busting isn't necessary from time to time

Mourning Humanism II

Music: Horizon: Through the Round Window In a previous post I rehearsed Sartre's view of the humanist subject for three reasons. First, I didn't want to discuss my personal life in my blog because I was tired, so I just pasted in a piece of a review essay I've been working on (like I'm doing in this post too).

Second, I think for many folks that Sartre's view represents the last gasp of humanism in continental philosophy. Humanism maintains that human being is the primary and most valuable object of inquiry, and often proceeds in its many variations by describing the many ways in which human beings are, as Protagoras is reported to have said, "the measure of all things, all that are that they are, and all that are not, that they are not." Sartre's existential philosophy of freedom-through-choice is the ultimate secular expression of an ontology built on Protagoras' conviction.

Third, the humanist notion of a radical responsibility through choice was common in the 1960s, and although Sartre's existential subject is rarely mentioned directly, variations were eventually folded into NCA-style rhetorical theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whether we wish to admit it, our last humanist gasp in rhetorical theory is reflected in the many discussions of the ethical responsibilities of rhetorical choice-making, which Kenneth Burke labeled "symbolic action," which Karlyn Kohrs Campbell termed a "symbolic approach" to rhetorical theory, and which Robert L. Scott christened as "epistemic rhetoric." For example, an often overlooked yet central consequence of Scott's epistemic view is the "ethical turn" it recommends: "The point of view that holds that man cannot be certain but must act in the face of uncertainty to create situational truth entails three ethical guidelines: toleration, will, and responsibility." Many of the notable "turns" in rhetorical studies from the late 60s onward, from symbolic action to symbolic convergence, from rhetoric as epistemic to "consensus theory" and the "aesthetic turn," are, however unwittingly, built on the notion of a self-transparent rhetor/artist making rhetorical choices that entail a tremendous responsibility: the rhetor "must recognize the conflicts of the circumstances that he is in," Scott writes, "maximizing the potential good and accepting responsibility for the inevitable harm." Because such an ethical orientation depends on a self-transparent subject of conscious, symbolic intent, a critique of humanism would, therefore, seem to challenge the ethical foundations of our received understanding of the rhetorical subject. The idiom of haunting addresses this challenge directly in a way that preserves--indeed, foregrounds--ethical responsibility, but before I describe how, it is important to provide a basic description of the "death" of the humanist subject.

So what is, then, the critique of humanism? Although there are a number of answers, this critique is often said to begin with a deliberate, conspicuous rejection of Sartre's notions of freedom and choice, and this is primarily because Sartre's expression of humanism provides a clear articulation of the general, underlying assumptions of most versions of humanism. Origin narratives of the critique of humanism typically cite the work of Heidegger as the first step, whose famous "Letter on Humanism" was written in response to Sartre's project. In the letter Heidegger urges an abandonment of "the name [of] humanism" in favor of a different conception that consists in the analysis of "being-in-the-world" over that of subjectivity. For Heidegger, existence per se ("Dasein") topples humanity in its expanse, and the narrow, selfish, narcissistic focus on individual subjectivity prevents us from investigating Being properly. In this respect, posthumanism gets caught in a semantic pickle insofar as the critique concerns human-ism; from the outside it is often read as a disavowal of commonly shared values (e.g., social justice, equality, democracy) or as misguided critique of specieism. Posthumanism is not an anti-humanitarianism, but represents the view that that subject is neither singular, nor self-transparent, nor the center of the universe, and that the self-important "haughtieness" of the subject of certainty, as Nietzsche put it, "deceives him [self] about the value of existence," in retrospect having done more harm to than good.

After Heidegger's letter, the critique of humanism finds its fullest expression in the work the mighty French ménage a trois of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, as well as in that of a number of feminist scholars (notably the so-called "French" feminists, and later, Dona Haraway). The phallogocentrism of the humanist subject, the poststructural critiques of Lacan and Foucault, and the Derridian deconstruction of humanism have been discussed among rhetorical scholars elsewhere, and I refer readers to that work for more thoroughgoing accounts. What has not been discussed in detail is the way in which Derrida's notion of the spectral and haunting assumes the death of the subject, but embraces what most scholars would identify as humanitarian values, most especially those of toleration, (good)will, and responsibility.

In general, Derrida's work comprises a wholesale attack on the concept of unity, which is implicated in notions of origin, truth, reason, presence, and universality. His most famous contribution to the intellectual tradition, deconstruction, seeks to expose the illusions and fantasies of unity often assumed of and by texts. Derrida's critique of humanism is thus initially effected at the level of the reading and writing subject, which is constructed within language, and which he exposes as an unstable play of differences in a manner that is entirely textual (or alternately, everything is unstable text). "[F]rom the inside where 'we are,'" argues Derrida, "one has nothing . . . but the choice between two strategies." Either a "Heideggerian" hermeneutic that continually undermines the suppositions of its own problematic-which "risks sinking into the autism of the closure" by presuming something akin to an end or telos (presumably, the "end of man")--or a Nietzschean deconstruction of the "active forgetting of Being" in the ecstatic production of multiple iterations in multiple languages in an orgasmic textual party. In either case, the centrality of human being is dissolved in favor of an oscillating, de-volving or deconstructing movement that does not ossify into a determinate thing.

When Derrida later moved from critical philosophy to social critique, deconstruction continued to appear as an orientation or posture of indeterminacy that an individual makes or takes in relation to texts, structures, institutions, and so on, which refuses to close-up, settle, conclude, or totalize them in relation to absolutes, unities, and presences. In his later work, beginning most notably with the arrival of the English translation of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (hereafter Specters) in 1994, the posture of indeterminacy is urged in respect to the "other," a term that refers to anyone worthy of consideration in the general pursuit of justice (sometimes the Other is capitalized to denote this status). In Specters the other arrives as a ghost, as a figure that cannot otherwise be fixed or reduced as a being or as a non-being, thereby reframing the self/other relation so central to our fantasy of communication as an ethical relation between a decentered or uncertain self and something that that confounds our sense of place in time, our sense of control: this thing is the ghost the specter, or as Derrida prefers, the revenant, a spirit that always comes back, like the return of the repressed. Derrida opens Specters with the observation that "learning to live" more justly, more open to the other and to death, "remains to be done." We have arrived at the "time of the 'learning to live,'" says Derrida, and the key to such wisdom is "to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts." In Specters the death of the subject is assumed; now the death of the other-the deaths of others, especially the deaths of others under the aegis of Marxism, as well as the ontological status of the other as a harbinger of death-is in question.

Derrida's understanding of hauntology in Specters is advanced as an ethical posture in response to global capitalism and what he terms the "ten plagues" of the new world order that emerged in the 1980s (e.g., homelessness, nuclear proliferation, etc.). Although Specters was intended as a conciliatory project that details the indebtedness of deconstruction to a certain "spirit of Marx," the failures of Derrida's thinking in this respect have been extensively catalogued elsewhere, and a number of article-length book reviews on the project are available. The scholarly consensus about this particular project is that reconciling deconstruction and Marxism is futile (at least from a Marxist vantage). Yet few if any seem to condemn Derrida's ethical undertaking, of learning to live among and with others more justly, more humanely. This is perhaps the reason why Derrida's elaboration of the figures of the specter and revenant have traveled much more widely in the academic imaginary than deconstruction in the spirit of Marx.

From a critical vantage, hauntology participates in a critique of presentism by advancing an empty messianism reminiscent of that which Benjamin described in his "On the Concept of History." Insofar as the specter neither "is" nor "is not," it is a figure that represents past and future temporalities that cannot be "given a date in the chain of presents." Derrida compares Hamlet's/the audience's/our waiting for the king's apparition in the first act of Hamlet to our/the reader's position in the opening of The Manifesto of the Communist Party: "A specter is haunting Europe-the specter of communism." The specter is either from the past (the king) or from the future (communism), or rather, it would seem the specter is always coming from the future even if it is from the past: "The anticipation [for the ghost] is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing ("this thing") will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won't be long. But how long it is taking." Hauntology is thus a politics of "temporal disjuncture," to borrow a phrase from Moishe Postone, that resists what Derrida terms "mourning."

Typically, mourning refers to the process by which an individual is able to detach him or herself from an object of love, usually a loved one. An inability to mourn is melancholia, which is a kind of repetition compulsion driven by an abject inability to detach one's self from the object of love. The process of detaching oneself from the love object-or rather, the idea or ghost of the love object, since the object itself is not present-is not instantaneous, but occurs over time. Mourning is thus a process of temporal "fixing," of "getting over it," and can be plotted along a cultural teleology that many of us learn, for example, in terms of "stages" of grief, "periods" of morning, and so on. Although it is usually characterized as "normal" and "healthy," Derrida characterizes mourning as pathological. Mourning

consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead (all ontologization, all semanticization--philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical--finds itself caught up in the work of mourning but, as such, does not yet think it; we are posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlet's or Marx's, on this near side of such thinking).

Mourning is accomplished by knowledge, by claiming knowledge of the dead, by claiming to know the dead, thereby silencing ghosts in gestures of a certain place and time, a certain present. The consequence of this kind of mourning is an irresponsibility and deafness to the other and the promise of unknown future (that things can always be otherwise, that communism, in a certain spirit, is still coming). The accomplishment of mourning-of ghost-busting, if you will-is reflected in the dogmatisms, absolutisms, apocalypticisms, and other teleological orthodoxies that party-based Marxism shares with, for example, contemporary Evangelical Christian movements (e.g., a vengeful Jesus coming tomorrow to smite the unrepentant, as in the popular Left Behind book series). Later in the book, Derrida counters mournful and strident messianisms with a "desert-like messianism (without content and without identifiable messiah)," as if to redeem the posture of hospitality so central to New Testament Christianity from temporal absolutism--from the certitude of dates. The accomplishment of mourning--of ghost-busting, if you will--is a silencing of the specters of communism and democracy, which represent the possibility of a different and just future. Although Specters is an extraordinarily complex elaboration of hauntology vis-à-vis the Communist Manifesto, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, and the horrors that confronted the world in the 1980s (and today), hauntology is fundamentally a deconstructive approach released from philosophy onto the political and cultural imaginary. As a posture or orientation, hauntology attempts to resist ghost-busting by embracing the figure of the specter or revenant as a haunting reminder that we can never completely reckon with the past--that despite mourning, we remain haunted--nor secure the future. Specters urge us to remain open to both by abjuring the present.

Migrate Already!

Music: Sufjan Stevens: Welcome to the Great State of Michigan

The mood here is plastic, alternately pensive and sentimental, annoyed and appreciative. There is a tremendous flock of birds roosting above my house in The World's Largest Pecan Tree(R), a massive red-wood style monument to history that you can see from the overpass driving through Baton Rouge. In any event, these birds are chirping loudly--there is a sea of chirps, a wave that wafts like the sound of crickets. I was astonished recently to hear the cacophony come to sudden silence--precisely at the moment a song I was listening to by Sufjan Stevens ended. It was one of those perfect moments when meaning and materiality converge--"synchronicity," as my friend Tom would intone, a moment when I am supposed to recognize the radical monism of reality.

And then, I remember: these fucking birds shit like crazy on my car. And insofar as my car is black, it means this shit is really visible and ugly and I have to wash my damn car every other day as result. It's not even an aesthetic annoyance, but a one rooted in resale value: if I don't wash the birdshit from the car, it eats into the goddamn paint!

Spammic Prose

Music: David Bowie: Space Oddity The contents of a random spam email I received from "John" titled "Shipping and Tracking Number." I've edited just a tad:

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing (W. Edwards Demins). Carnivorous. I could go on and on, but I won't. We have many programs the children love. But I would give them ALL up to keep my BORING noun program. I thank THE PARENT daily for her insight. Aleck. We think in generalities, but we live in details (Alfred North Whitehead [1861-1947]). Boloman. THE PARENT arrived back on the scene. She gave me a tape by Dr. Laura Meyers from UCLA. I listened to that tape eight times. I listened over and over and heard the same thing again and again. Ms. Meyers said, "These kids may need to hear a word many times (perhaps 72 times) before they ever say a word. A computer can be patient and say it the same way every time." Now I understood. I was not patient enough. I did not allow the student to hear the words over and over. I was interrupting their learning by interjecting, when they were totally engrossed in what they were doing. I was asking questions they were not ready to answer. They were just learning language. They didn't have the answers yet. Austrasian. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises (Samuel Butler [1612-1688]) Bradydactylia I didn't dislike cooking at home. Celiomyomotomy. About the necessity of compromise. Bushwa. 5 Cabalistic.

Laura Meyers is credited with being one of the first inventors of the "talking word processor" for the Apple IIc. Anyhow, I'm very tempted to run some kabbalistic formulae on this puppy; I think I will write a book called The Spam Code, in which I use gematria and notquarion techniques revealing that SOMEONE WANTS MY MONEY!

Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of Haunting

Music: My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: Kooler Than Jesus Why Derrida? Well, I've been reading Specters of Marx--a tough go, but easier than his early stuff for certain. Why am I reading Specters of Marx? Because I want to talk about a lot of stuff that's influenced by it. So I've been working on a review essay that uses Derrida to leap into a discussion of posthumanism vis-a-vis rhetorical studies. Here's a teaser of a little bit that I have; I'll post more when I get the parts critical of my mother (KK Campbell) and father (RL Scott) written.

__________________

In the work of rhetorical theory in the last decade, the term "postmodernist" is sometimes used as a foil to recommend an alternative. In their popular textbook, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, for example, John Lucaites and Celeste Condit address "postmodernism" as if it were a person:

Postmodernism's critique of modernism [as a misguided positivism] is well-taken; unfortunately, postmodernism does not offer a viable independent alternative to modernism. As a perspective founded primarily on critique and opposition, postmodernism is always parasitic on that which it critiques. In presenting a world where public discourse is nothing but deceit, postmodernism precludes the possibility of any community whatsoever.

Lucaites and Condit recommend, of course, what Edward Schiappa has dubbed "sophisticated modernism," an approach to critical inquiry that attempts to mediate the critiques of modernity and the tried and true methods of structural analysis and criticism. Outside of the academy, postmodernism has been similarly critiqued as lacking a program or productive goal, especially after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 2001: "After the attack," Julia Keller wrote for the Chicago Tribune, "postmodernism loses its glib grip." Reality "became real again," meaning became "meaning fathomable," and "truth extant." After taking a nasty swipe at Susan Sontag for suggesting that U.S. foreign policy is partially to blame for the attacks, Keller recommends, of course, the tried and true posture of self-censorship. Inside and outside of the academy, postmodernism is often characterized as a kind of religion that casts true believers into a perpetual state of doubt, in which every utterance becomes an ironic reversal, and every testament of belief, a rhetorical blind.

As anyone who has been called a "postmodernist" would likely admit, in NCA journals (and especially in the remarks of blind reviewers), the term is most often used as an epithet that means whatever the name-caller thinks it means, frequently without reference to an actually existing literature. To be sure, some rhetoricians would identify their work as "postmodernist," and there are a number of prominent thinkers whose work has become associated with the label, such as Baudrillard, Delezue, Foucault, and Lyotard. Yet outside a general commitment to understanding the dynamics of modernity (whatever we decide that is), as well as the more common and generally welcomed abandonment of rigid or positivistic notions of objectivity in the humanities, very little suggests that the accused sit at the same postmodern table. To wit: what postmodernism means differs according to the context of usage, and to address this or that scholar as a "pomo" says very little about her or his work.

If there is a common denominator among those identified or self-identified with postmodernism, however, it is the de-centering of the autonomous, self-transparent subject, alternately understood in terms of Descartes' rational knower (the "cogito"), Kant's transcendental subject, or closer to home, the vir bonus, dicendi peritus. This common commitment to displacing the masculinist, self-same rational agent as the center of the known universe, also known as "posthumanism," is the hidden premise of the postmodernist enthymeme, and in most instances the accusatory rhetoric of the postmodern (that is, the uses to which postmodern foil is put) is a reaction to the posthumanism that underwrites various, differing understandings of postmodernity. In a disciplinary context, attacking the "postmodern" is a symptom of a theoretical impasse regarding the humanist subject; that which has passed as postmodernism is actually posthumanism.

The humanist subject is dead, of course, but what this means is a complicated matter better examined on the page than refuted by jumping in front of an on-coming train. In this review essay I advance the idiom of haunting as a theoretically informed orientation to criticism that mourns this death in a useful manner. As an orientation toward critical work, the idiom of haunting attempts to preserve the central values informing rhetorical criticism while nevertheless embracing the notion of a subject that is constructed, decentered, fragmented, performed, or spit. Beyond mere metaphor, the idiom of haunting denotes a conceptual repertoire for listening to and speaking about the dead, literally and figuratively, as well as a considered attempt to orient the critic in a position of hospitality, open to the other. Below I review a series of books that provide the mental furniture of the idiom, beginning first by contextualizing the discussion in relation to the critique of humanism begun by Heidegger and furthered by Derrida in respect to "hauntology," an anti- or pseudo-theory of irreducibility that confounds our impulse to essentialize. Derrida's now famous discussion of hauntology (a pun on ontology in French) marks the beginning of what Jeffery Weinstock has termed the "spectral turn" in cultural theory and criticism. Since the English publication of Specters of Marx in 1994, there has been an explosion of academic works that speak in the curious language of ghosts: from John Durham Peter's discussion of spiritualism and the idea of communication, to Jeffrey Sconce's genealogy of the ghosts in our television sets, of from Jean Baudrillard's recent discussion of the "spirit of terrorism," to Slavoj Zizek's frequent discussion of ideology as a "specter," the language of phantoms and ghosts has become ubiquitous in cultural theory and criticism. Although hauntology should not be conflated with the idiom of haunting, it will become clear that all the books reviewed here entail a debt, at least indirectly, to Derrida's thinking about ghosts. Then, after a discussion of Richard Kearney's elaboration of the posthumanist problematic that haunting addresses, I examine a series of books that telescope more narrowly on three, interrelated concepts central to the idiom: trauma, mourning, and the uncanny.

Posthumanism and the Spectral Turn

In the Western intellectual tradition, the critique of humanism is often said to begin with reactions to Jean-Paul Sartre's celebration of freedom in his existential philosophy. In his well known public address titled "Existentialism Is a Humanism," Sartre remarked that the central principle of existentialism was that "existence precedes essence," which he argued demands individual "subjectivity as one's point of departure" in philosophical inquiry. The system he erected to meet this challenge, particularly as it is represented in Existentialism and Humanism (1947), is complex and somewhat contradictory in relation to his later writings,13 but at base it provides a necessary centrality for the Cartesian cogito. "Subjectivity of the individual is indeed our starting point," he says, because there "can be no other truth to start from than this: I think; therefore, I exist." The notion of the singular imagination as a site of purely interior self-creation, which was first extolled in German Romanticism, finds its humanist aspirations pushed to the logical extreme in Sartre, who also isolates the essence of humanity as self-creation or creativity.16 Further, it is on the basis of this creativity that freedom exists as an activity of choosing. Because existence precedes essence in Sartre's view, no meaning is predetermined. Rather, meaning is created by human beings in the act of being. Since there is no predetermined meaning to the world, Sartre argues that humanity is condemned to make meaningful choices. Subjectivity is announced as the effect of the making of choices in the process of making meaning, of acting: "There is no reality except in action. . . . Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life."

Derrida Lampshades and the Men Who Wear Them At Parties

Music: David Bowie: Reality I thought I should blog more as a distraction from ebay. So I’m blogging, but the only thing I want to blog about is work-—that is, stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about as my job requires of me. So, there are these delightfully wicked pink lampshades that I envision hanging in my office.

And then there’s Jacques Derrida.

Yes, Derrida is back in my head, probably because there was some discussion on an e-list that compared Sontag's recent obituary to Derrida's.

Despite interests in similar ideas (the pain of others), Sontag’s prose is "challenging" while that of Derrida is “obscuritanist”; clearly the former is more favorably mourned than the latter. And poor Q.V. Quine’s 2000 passing almost went un-remarked (despite having at least as much influence state-side as Sontag or Derrida, albeit among the analytics—a contentious bunch if there ever was). But let me return to the dueling deaths: why does Derrida’s dying haunt me more than Sontag's? And why are Sontag’s eulogies more graceful and forgiving than Derrida's?

Well, there is Derrida’s father/son issues, I suppose; the ghosts that haunt theory (take Marx or Freud, for example) are obsessed with their progeny—their sons, as was Derrida. In his beautifully moving obituary, James K.A. Smith points readers to this lovely passage on passing:

when I am not dreaming of making love, or being a resistance fighter in the last war blowing up bridges or trains, I want one thing only, and that is to lose myself in the orchestra I would form with my sons, heal, bless and seduce the whole world by playing divinely with my sons, produce with them the world's ecstasy, their creation. I will accept dying if dying is to sink slowly, yes, into the bottom of this beloved music.

It is a lovely passage to me; I would be so moved if my own father said such a thing, such an anti-Oedipal thing. My father is not likely to say such a thing; and what if I were not a son, but a daughter? If I were Anna Freud, what difference would it make?

Derrida’s death haunts me, and the academy, for many reasons. In part his death haunts because his critique of the Western philosophical tradition is so compelling. In part his death haunts because his genius is so daunting. In part his death haunts because stories of his kindness and generosity of spirit—qualities that are not always associated with scholarly genius—are widespread. In part his death haunts because understanding his thought requires the kind of mental labor and patience that fewer and fewer intellectuals are willing to expend.

Indeed, I confess that only recently, now that I have come—in my own way—to the problems that Derrida dedicated his career to, am I truly cognizant that I have been mourning him all along. I have always had trouble reading him directly, though many of his books remain on the shelf. Appropriately, I have only made sense of Derrida’s work in spurts and sudden starts, reading some primary text against some secondary exegesis. He is a scholarly father figure more than many, if not most, and consequently, as a man, I have been mourning in trying to understand. Such a sentiment is classically cliché, but really, for someone like me there are three places to plop: dismiss his insights as so-much hocus pocus; claim to understand his work and condemn the attacks wholesale; or admit to their value but to confess ignorance. I choose the latter, of course, which I think is probably most in keeping with his stance—at least as I can tell biographically.

But there is the woman-thing, which haunts me too.

The public melee between smug journalists denouncing Derrida’s postructuralist prose at the event of his passing, and outraged academics defending his intellectual legacy and humane character, seems to me to reenact the Freudian allegory of primary horde: the exiled sons, desiring equality and resentful of the father’s control over “all” the women (in light of Spurs, this would be knowledge), conspire to band together, kill the father, and eat him. “As soon as they kill and devour the detested father,” explains Lawrence Rickels in his marvelous masturbatory text, The Vampire Lectures, “they double over with indigestion . . . and thus they find that they must also mourn him, that they are already mourning him.” In other words, the occasion of Derrida’s death and the debate over its significance not only underscores the continued importance and power of his work—especially when it is not read or misunderstood, but also the way in which the figure of Derrida haunts the academy—how it haunted it even before the anti-intellectual “feeding frenzy” on the obituary page. Derrida’s ghost forces a continual and impossible reconciliation of the thinker’s ideas and established ways of thinking—even among those contemporary intellectual progeny who refuse to engage it.

So he haunts as a figure as much as a concrete human being. I really enjoyed the documentary, Derrida, which was canned by so many snotty-film heads for being too pretentious. I found the film quite humane. It achieved the job of portraying Derrida as a human being, not so much as a figure—although the latter is, in the end, inevitable. Nevertheless, the film captured mundane origins of complicated thought (“where are my keys?”) . . . in a thoroughly masculine way.

Perhaps someone has written about this extensively—hell, I’m sure of it, but am too lazy to look. But there does seem to be a relation between Derrida-hatred and the patriarchal themes orbiting his work. As someone who does not thoroughly understand this work, I regret I cannot make the case. Even so, this masculinist thing, this association with men haunting men, seems to provide a partial . . . something.

I think I’m spent for today.

Damn Deux

Music: Arcade Fire: Funeral Well, goodness, there's a lot to write about since December 18, but insofar as this blog is public, I must restrain myself. I can say that (1) I received the honor of proficiency in the Master Mason degree a couple of weeks ago; (2) I hung out with the familial peeps for Christmas; (3) I DJ-ed my first wedding yesterday (I'm now officially a wedding DJ, in addition to a general party DJ); and (4) I spent a lot of time on the road and listening to music.

For 2004, my musical picks reduce to two: Arcade Fire's Funeral and The Delays Faded Seaside Glamour. The former is 80s revivalism at its best, with lots of dronish emotionalism. The Delays is Brian Wilson meets the Cocteau Twins . . . with a hot love session with the La's. I've been playing the Delays over and over, which I should stress is a rarity. Both albums are worth my endoresement. I'd even agree to a "blurb" if I were asked. LOL. I wish somedays I were the kind of person who could dole out blurbs . . . if only because it pays insanely . . . but serioulsy, dudes and dudettes, Arcade Fire and the Delays are the shit!

Damn

Music: Television: Marquee Moon Television are/were geniuses. This music is awesome, moving, butt-grooving. Wow. I still think I was born twenty years too late.

Why Can't I Be a Modernist? Or, on Terriers and Blind Terror

Music: Camper Van Beethoven: New Roman Times Part of my job as a scholar is to write essays and publish them in academic journals. These journals are typically read by other academics, less so students, and of course, rarely the general public. I've been asked on a number of occasions to speak about my experience as a writer working on publishing in an academic context. Three years ago, as a graduate student about to become an assistant professor, I wrote an article--with a tongue firmly planted in my cheek--about my experiences publishing in the discipline of communication studies. Although my tone was deliberately bratty and playful, the gist of what I said then remains true today: rarely do reviewers take an essay on its own terms, but filter it through a particular intellectual agenda or political allegiance that is embodied. Owing to years of reading, studying, and writing, reviewers are inevitably disposed--myself included.

At this point in my scholarly career, having an article rejected is routine. Sure, rejection still stings on some level, but I've learned that tenacity, or alternately, adopting the figure of the terrier as a patron doggie-saint, leads to success eventually. I've also learned in the past three years that folks in my discipline are pretty hostile toward psychoanalysis, since apparently it's another dreaded 'p" word. Here's a recent rejection I received on a manuscript that attempts to explain the appeal of Huey Long to Louisianans in terms of neurotic structures:

I am counseling rejection for "Hystericizing Huey: Psychoanalysis, Charismatic Monumentalism, and Southern Demagoguery."

I am not rejecting the essay on propriety grounds: "this isn't a fit with The More Conservative Journal in Rhetorical Studies; try publishing it in a journal more amenable to theory." I am not rejecting it on theoretical grounds: "this ain't Aristotle or KB so it must not be very good." Nor do I counsel rejection based on what strikes me as a very clear desiring of the Other: "the David Foster Wallace meets Slavoj Zizek thing gets a bit old--just like the Rolling Stones." Nor do I reject on the Butt-head principle since you invoke our misfits at the outset: "Turds, wieners and butts--or a little something for everyone, Beavis." Nor even the myriad of sloppy mistakes that pepper each page. No, my counsel to reject is far more mundane.

First, the idea that all of emotion (and thus ethos, too) in a rhetorical encounter is reducible to the body is not defensible nor defended. [Josh: nor is it ever argued or suggested] Sure, I think much charisma has a bodily locus, but to reduce the complexities of emotion to a speaker's body is just a bit overdrawn. Do words simply have no place in the Lacanian scheme of emotional things? If not, perhaps Jacques needs a bit of Aristotelian updating (and surely you'll note that in Book II of On Rhetoric, the lispy Macedonian talks extensively about the body as it relates to pathos; sans mirrors, though). And speaking of mirrors, the Lacanian Moment of Moments appears rooted in the biological. To wit, "Lacan later argued that the imaginary phallus is simply the object-form of GESTALT of the body, something that the pre-symbolic subject can identity with (principally because she senses something is missing from her image of the body)." I'm curious to know how our pre-symbolic gal can figure this one out, since "she" doesn't yet exist in the realm of language. I wonder how her "sense" can be anything but biological. How can she "miss" something she never had, sans the symbolic? If it isn't biology, I wonder if we're into auto-mysticism. Thus is desire innate? Or mystic? Third, and not unrelated to the preceding point, the author is frighteningly clear that theoretical pluralism isn't in the cards. The invocation of "must" just has a whiff of rhetorical Jihadism about it. Finally, the author seems really to be something of a traditionalist at heart: explaining effects and the successes of Huey Long. A thoroughly Wichelns-ian project. To my way of thinking, though, answering this all-important rhetorical question can't be done with theory; it needs to be done with real people in real historical moments--not "unconscious" subjects being diagnosed by rhetorical clinicians, however expert.

As my reviews go, this one is actually pretty funny (I enjoyed the snide humor, even if it was directed at my work). Of course, I didn't say pathotic appeals were reducible to "the body," nor do I disavow a "pluralism" of approaches. Nor do I jettison the work of Wicheln's--indeed, I embrace Herbie (even wrote an article with Laura on why we should admire the Wichelns-ian). Yeah, the essay still needs some work before it's ready to go out again to someone else. Even so, this reviewer does a nice job of illustrating the perceived incongruity of (theoretical) idioms—of a certain kind of embodied disposition.

Apparently I'm a postmodernist who doesn’t realize he’s a modernist. For the bystander, ”postmodernist” is a label some people in my field use to characterize those folks or that work that they do not like.

I'm a modernist, aren't I?

[sigh]

Music: Pinback: Summer In Abandon I’ve been returning to some of my research on collective fantasy/group psychology, in particular, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. Readers might recall a number of television programs devoted to the widespread belief there were murderous Satanists living among us back in the 80s, or perhaps the widespread fear that devil-worshipping rock stars were compelling suburban teens to sacrifice household pets and to commit suicide with backwards messages in their heavy metal music. In the early 90s, the belief that Satan had infiltrated suburbia in the form of cults run by “alters” or human robots was widespread and real. But returning to some of this media material—mostly a number of grainy videotapes of Oprah and Geraldo talk shows—I find myself laughing. The “recovered memories” of these “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA) experts are so ludicrous it is simply astonishing that anyone in their right mind could believe them.

Then again, half the country voted for a presumed knight of Spiritual Warfare. I am wondering if Michael Gerson had anything to do with the SRA movement.

But there is a fine line to walk here between the humorous and the gravely serious. In a more somber tone, this past week I’ve been digging into the case of Fran’s Day Care Center, Austin’s claim to the rumor panic that consumed the popular imagination between 1985 and 1995.

As a result of the coaxed testimony of a very impressionable child (whose mother was just coming to terms with her own, real abuse), Frances and Daniel Keller were charged with child abuse and were sent to prison in 1992 for a 48 year sentence. Their accusers believed that the Keller’s were molesting, torturing, and killing children in Satanic rituals in their Oak Hill home. According to one reporter:

Three children made allegations of abuse that included references to being buried alive with animals, painting pictures with bones dipped in blood, being shot and resurrected, digging up a body in a cemetery and nailing it together, having giant germs implanted in their bodies, and making pornographic movies at gunpoint.

The accusations against the Kellers are almost identical to those levied against the defendants in similar cases nation-wide, such as the well-known McMartin preschool case—a case in which three preschool workers were falsely accused of running a Satanic child-prostitution ring. Notably, in almost every SRA case that resulted in someone’s (false) imprisonment, the “Satanic” rituals were filmed or taped in one fashion or another.

One would think that those trained in child psychology would put “two and two” together: as Rockwell sang so well (to the backing vocals of Michael Jackson, bygods!), “I always feel like somebody’s watchin’ meeeee . . . .” Isn’t it plausible that the gaze is a love object in both therapy and fantasies of SRA? Kids always feel like someone’s watching them, especially in a therapist’s office; of course the “recovered memories” would involve cameras—the desire for the desire of the Other.

The Kellers’ case was part of what was called the “Believe the Children Movement.” This movement is entirely premised on the literalization of the metaphor of memory-as-recording-machine. And abject stupidity, the ideology of de-sexualized children.

From what I have been able to determine, Fran was up for parole in 2003 and was denied; I believe Dan was up this year, and it would seem his parole was also denied.

Returning to this research, I’m reminded of the juridical power of rhetoric. Having returned from a national professional conference, it’s easy to get cynical about my work and the work of others: I watch paper after paper on this or that abstraction, political speech, or “dead white guy.” I write paper after paper on this or that abstraction, political speech, or “dead white guy” (lately Huey P. Long). But taking this project up again, I’m reminded of the sheer force of fantasy: people believe the Devil is literally causing people to eat feces and fetuses. It seems incredible, as there’s no credible evidence anything like the fantasies of 70s horror films ever occurred, but people are still in jail for it!

Heck, the president of our country has waged war on an abstract noun.

My God.

Derrida is more right than I can possibly understand.

On Answering Machines and the A/Object Voice

Music: Peter Murphy: Holy Smoke Thursday’s seminar was strange: defamiliarized by two weeks, the seminar felt like “getting to know you” again. We will repeat this in almost two weeks. Slowly, we’re becoming estranged.

The conference still lingers in my thoughts, and perhaps that is what feels so distant about coming home. NCA is traumatic (apparently at times “repulsive,” according to some first timers), but somehow over the course of a year that initial shock gets repressed. I’m thinking that I am going to start reading about group psychology again, but that’s getting ahead of myself. On Thursday, we’re still stuck in the self-Ich.

Anyhow, I tried out an idea I’ve been working and thinking about since last year that reading Ronell helped to jump-start, and thought I’d share it in this forum as well. I begin by yoking dissimilar things to underscore their structural similarity in the popular imaginary (a kind of mental wallpaper that we are socialized into as members of a screened community); in particular, I begin by tying together dissimilar manifestations of speech as an object in the popular imaginary.

Speech is an object that haunts. Voice is something that lurks. At least until we erase it.

Many days ago one of my dearest friends discovered a series of unpleasant messages on her office answering machine. Apparently while we were at the National Communication Convention in Chicago last week, sometime between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, an anonymous man phoned in to scream, “FUCK YOU JANE DOE, FUCK YOU.” Talking with her on the phone, she revealed that although, intellectually, she knew she should save these messages, it simply felt better to erase them. Acts of repetition, doing unto others, mimetic response.

Erasure is both an responsible and irresponsible act; it is one way to contend with the Other. The decision rule for this is obvious in the everyday, less so in reflection on the everyday (and a platitude is also excusable every now and again; we don’t have to be brilliant all the time, now do we? [or, isn’t that part of the problem at home?] ).

So why do we erase the threatening voice? As Steven Conner shows us, anonymous, disembodied voices need us to fashion them plausible bodies, fleshy origins in which to seat them. Us humans cannot stand to have bodiless voices: as we do with radio announcers and those cinematic voices off the screen, we imaginatively fashion bodies for wandering speech. If speech wanders, it is still a floating head, never absent a face.

Here’s the trouble: the bodies we fashion come from a preexisting cultural repertoire. As Aristotle might say, “you fill in the blank.” I mean that as a command and an explanation since I recognize, at some level, public nomenclature entails the consequence of recognition. For the innocent bystander, though, this will suffice: the trouble with snarling prank callers is that the bodies we imagine for them are monstrous. Or put alternately, given this contextual background, one can begin to understand how a prank answering machine message, a snarling male voice on tape, inhabits a cultural body: the caller’s body is very real and very material although the flesh and blood apparatus that produced it is not necessarily its author.

But these assignments--imagining bodies for the disembodied--are experienced as interior events, even though the assignment is largely determined by the exterior--the wallpaper of experience. There are countless stories of similar vocal violence on the answering machine, but these are relegated to the privacy of one’s bedroom. The bedroom is the locality of both pillow talk and the answering machine (at least it was in my family), but is also the place where most people die. Only in our contemporary imaginary has the bedroom been so exclusively coded as an erotic zone (at least for the generation of MTV, where the show The Real World charts the colonization of the bedroom in multiple senses, but none so curious as the bedroom’s blob-like colonization of the pool hall, dance-floor, and taxi cab). When I was a kid, before the bedroom became the locality of the primal scene, hidden pornography, and cheap vodka carefully replaced with water, the bedroom was the locus of the home state-of-emergency. Therein rested the answering machine (which I was forbidden to touch), and a telephone by the bedside. The answering machine was there to record the voice for later, private scrutiny. The telephone was there for a more curious reason. It was not there for conversation, but rather, the declaration of death at 2:00 a.m.

My point here about the disembodied speech of the bedroom is that the privatization of the disembodied voice holds a privileged status for us in everyday life. Even listening to the voice of the threatening other in the public space of the office is experienced, in some way, as a private event. The telephone and the answering machine harbor the disembodied voice, but the “live” feeling of the former is also felt with the latter. The disembodiedness of it is the rub.

All that rambling above is just that, rambling about a point I don’t know how to make, exactly, without inviting the publicity of something quite intimate (rambling to speak to three audiences at once, even, trying to keep them from becoming promiscuous): To what extent are we, as subjects, answering machines for the Other? Or perhaps, to what extent are we, as subjects, answering machines for the object of voice, the movement of speech. Further, when we snarl, who is snarling? When we cry, who is crying? Certainly there is a sense of ownership for snarling and crying. But what of the wail or glossolalia: who speaks grief? who bleats joy? Who makes the unmistakable call as a cry?

Well, this is all very pretentious I know. “Oh, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” But I also am thinking here with a pretentious metaphor to get at, roundabout (I’m fond of YES), the very real problem of responsibility. The facile and misguided--if not caricatured--way to understand performativity, for example, is to see overdetermined behavior as a “devil made me do it.” But I want to think about metaphors for self with an built in ambivalence with an ethical demand: that I am often moved or influenced by forces beyond my conscious awareness is all the more reason for my responsibility to the Other. This is Derridian territory, I realize; more about that one day soon.

But from my ignorance: everyone knows that we are not trained to listen very well. From our youth we are taught, instead, to make the call: “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret?” Of course, Judy Blume’s blessing is apt here, for as the academic cliché goes, there are no answers to these kinds of questions, only different ways to ask them.

Let me move, then, to Regan’s Answering Machine, if I can constellate a series of doubles. There is Ronald Reagan, the movie (his presidency but a series of quotations from bad B-movies), and there is Regan MacNeil, the troubled and possessed little girl in Friedkin and Blatty’s filmic masterpiece, The Exorcist. If you think the names are merely coincidental, they are, but this is irrelevant to the form of the double--Reagan the President is but a copy of the Hollywood film; the FUCK YOU and it’s many iterations on multiple machines and voicemail boxes across the nation; the Doppleganger, as is assumed of twins, is a seemingly passive copy, a mimetic device, an answering machine or dictaphone that reproduces what it is told even if we’re not the one’s telling it to reproduce. Consider the body of the female Regan, besieged by the African DUNG GOD Pazuzu, in the first dialogic scene between Father Karras and the possessed girl. In this scene (“Holy Water”), the priest dialogues with the demon in accord with The Roman Ritual, which requires that the exorcist thoroughly examine the presumed possessed to make sure he or she is truly possessed by something supernatural and not simply mentally ill. During this conversation he records, on a reel-to-reel tape machine, the conversation. During the end of the dialogue, the priest throws “holy water” on the possessed girl and she writhes and screams strange and unrecognizable speech. What is curious about the scene is the priest’s not-so-secret use of a recording device, which is actually Regan’s double. The homology here is between Regan, as an answering machine for Pazuzu, and the tape recorder, as a hearing device for father Karras. What this scene demonstrates very quickly is a critique of LIVENESS: everything is, as it were, memorex.

Even if everything is always already mediated, always already a recording, however, there is something about the human voice that goes beyond the human voice, something that escapes the illusion of presence or “liveness” that is threatening. This something more, which Lacan would say gives the voice object the status of objet a, is most discernible in moments of trauma or the uncanny. It is certainly there with the obscene message; but it is also there when language means nothing, when we reduce utterance to its phonetic excess: babble, speaking in tongues, the cooing or screaming of a newborn child. Utterance as such communicates. Speech as such causes a response. And our tendency to assign it a body, to place it as a voice, is unavoidable.

Not so incidentally, the first telephone recording device was invented by the Dane Valdemar Poulsen in the late 19th century (he patented it in 1898). Called the Telegraphone, this device was used to record telephone conversations for later scrutiny. The trajectory of later innovations for recording devices, we should underscore, was funded by a desire to study the voice. This is a very different history than that of the Compact Disk--which is traced back to Edison and the reproduction of music on Wax Cylinders. As Jacques-Alain Miller has suggested, music works to make that something more of the human voice less threatening, more comfortable. The telegraphone and its cousin, the answering machine, exists to preserve voice be it threatening or comforting: recorded voices are much more ambivalent.

The Exorcist is a film about the voice object, the voice as something that exceeds what it says. As a film, it is overwhelmingly chatty, full of dialogue that is not typical of Friedkin, who was known for his action films. While the special effects have held up well, Linda Blair looks like a pasty raisin, and the aesthetic of the demonic appears quite dated. The staying power of the film can be traced to Mercedes McCambridge, the raspy, damaged voice of Pazuzu. McCambridge, an actress who died last March at the age of 85, was most known for playing the voice of the demon in The Exorcist, which she described the most difficult acting job she ever had. She won an Oscar for her role in All the Kings Men--which brings her closer to home, you see--but, again, her voice was so unpleasant in The Exorcist that she was never able to upstage it. Her voice, perhaps more than others, reminds us of what Kristeva has termed the abject. This would explain her typecasting and the strange alignment of her voice with her appearance in real life. Consider this rather unflattering paragraph from her obituary in The Daily Telegraph:

Mercedes McCambridge's harsh, rasping voice and severe looks somewhat restricted her repertoire, and she specialized in character roles ranging from neurotic harridans and butch lesbians to homicidal maniacs.” Let us not forget a Dung God.

So I am suggesting that there is something more in McCambridge’s voice than her voice, something that eludes language, something that escapes the symbolic, which troubles us.

Insofar as it is our tendency to find in meaningless speech a voice, an agency, the climatic scene in The Exorcist makes much more sense. In search of this agency, Karras takes his recording of the incomprehensible moans, screams, and snarls of the demon to an audio expert. Once the expert identifies the screams of the demon as “backward English,” the audience is primed to the priest’s conviction that this is a supernatural event. The priest discovers that there are multiple voices responding to his queries in backwards speech (they say, among other nasty things, that Merrin--the elder priest--is coming to exorcize them). This scene is the turning point of the film, in one moment connecting the object of voice, technology, and the supernatural in ways that many media scholars have already brought to our attention. Significantly, we should note that the only time father Karras is startled in the film is here; while he is rewinding and playing and rewinding the tape of the demons, a phone rings and he is, for the first time, visibly unnerved. When confronted with The Demon spewing green vomit he doesn’t flinch, but here, in the presence of McCambridge’s looped and altered voices, he is caught off-guard, frightened, by the call of the Other, reminded as he is of his vow to complete and utter hospitality as a man of the cloth. In a sense, The Exorcist teaches us the ethics of “hospitality.”

In any event, these two scenes mark an extremely important moment in horror cinema, for they deploy a fantasy of the abject voice that helps to cover-over and frame an encounter with the object voice. That is to say, the fantasy of the abject voice--as demonic, as monstrous, as threatening and horrible, even divine and burning-bushy--keeps us from thinking about this something more in voice at the very same time as that something more creates enjoyment.

I’m thinking now of the many ways in which this abject voice has been replicated: in the year following The Exorcist, the “moaner” or “super-tongue” would issue threats to the sorority sisters in Black Christmas. When John Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra caught wind of the backward voice, he would feature it prominently in his 1975 masterpiece, Face the Music (if you check out the album online, click on track one for the strangeness). Indeed, the fear of backwards messages, rooted as it is in the uncanny something more in human speech, would fuel a rumor panic over suicidal prompts in heavy metal albums well into the 80s: white teenage kids, under the influence of marijuana and other mind-altering substances, would become answering machines, slitting their wrists because Judas Priest told them to in backwards speech. Indeed, so compelling is the idea that speech must have a voice or agency that a form of psychotherapy was developed called Reverse Speech Therapy. According to Australian therapist David John Oates, one can get access to the subject of the unconscious by playing recorded therapy sessions backwards.

So, The Exorcist registers the fear of the subject as an answering machine, the uncanny way in which a recorded voice can startle and trouble just as much as an obscene phone call; it registers ways in which we fear being the mere conduits of larger, oppressive ideologies too. But it also registers the fear of responsibility: in answering the call of the Other, we are forced to make a choice, a judgment. So, to bring this back home (since we are speaking of the uncanny), the subject-as-answering machine underscores the ethical act as the only answer. Hospitality is a beholdenness to the Other, an open posture and positioning that is not determined by a selfsame or selfish centering. The obscene answering machine message, like The Exorcist, reminds me that I must make a judgment in a morass of uncertainty. There’s something in that “something more” in voice that voice that forces me to recognize, even if I cannot name it. Perhaps I’m just talking “pot philosophy,” or perhaps I simply cannot find the language for this, but there’s something in the experience of human voice that I can ground an ethical orientation in. I realize Derrida has spent a career arguing against this assumption. The problem is that I agree with him too, but that, in daily life, I respond most ethically to human speech, live, recorded, or simply imagined.

Ah-ha, Om-ha!

Keyed to the soundtrack, I just realized that The West Wing is really Star Trek for the twenty-first century. I'm sure someone has written extensively about it, but I'm too tired to look.

Real Misogyny Made Abstract

Music: Murder By Death: Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left of Them I had to delete this journal entry because it was potentially upsetting to too many people. I'm also confused about the connections between what I do in my work (rhetoric, which we study with the underlying goal of promoting the end to human suffering and ignorance), what I do as a professional in my field, and what I do in my private life. Being an "academic" or "scholar" is in many ways having these three elements confused if not fused.

Silence = Death is an equation that runs both ways.

Fuckedness

Music: Iris: Reconnect

The haunting seminarians had a goodly discussion yesterday regarding the election and the problematics of the Left. I was intrigued by Dana Cloud's clarion call, "don't mourn, organize," a slogan taken from the last words of an executed unionizer. In the language of the course, we'd change the slogan to, "don't get melancholic, organize!" insofar as organizing is the route of mourning. We had just finished discussing Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real and, after praising Slavoj as soothsayer and agreeing that a wider, global frame is the the only vantage from which to behold the Absolute Event, Kelly K. inisted this would not do in the televisual age. The left needs to get religion in that homiletics sort of way, the way Walter Benjamin was calling for back in the 1930s. Cloud's call makes sense in two senses: in the practical/doing sense (which is the tougher job), and from a rhetorical perspective, in a theological (or ontotheological) sense. I've elaborated on this elsewhere before, so I won't belabor the point except to say that rhetoricians have neglected the theological for too damn long. Spirit, the language of spirit, moves, even if it reduces the Other to a god or monster. We need to be studying, explaining, and dissecting the creation and destruction of gods and monsters.

On a lighter note, our patron saint of demagoguery, Michael Moore, offers these words of comfort in a widely circulating email dated November 5, 2004:

Dear Friends,

Ok, it sucks. Really sucks. But before you go and cash it all in, let's, in the words of Monty Python, 'always look on the bright side of life!' There IS some good news from Tuesday's election.

Here are 17 reasons not to slit your wrists:

1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again.

2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

3. The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them.

4. In spite of Bush's win, the majority of Americans still think the country is headed in the wrong direction (56%), think the war wasn't worth fighting (51%), and don't approve of the job George W. Bush is doing (52%). (Note to foreigners: Don't try to igure this one out. It's an American thing, like Pop Tarts.)

5. The Republicans will not have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. If the Democrats do their job, Bush won't be able to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues. Did I say "if the Democrats do their job?" Um, maybe better to scratch this one.

6. Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West Coast! Plus Hawaii. Ok, that's a start. We've got most of the fresh water, all of Broadway, and Mt. St. Helens. We can dehydrate them or bury them in lava. And no more show tunes!

7. Once again we are reminded that the buckeye is a nut, and not just any old nut -- a poisonous nut. A great nation was felled by a poisonous nut. May Ohio State pay dearly this Saturday when it faces Michigan.

8. 88% of Bush's support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn't such a long time! If you're ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age.

9. Gays, thanks to the ballot measures passed on Tuesday, cannot get married in 11 new states. Thank God. Just think of all those wedding gifts we won't have to buy now.

10. Five more African Americans were elected as members of Congress, including the return of Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It's always good to have more blacks in there fighting for us and doing the job our candidates can't.

11. The CEO of Coors was defeated for Senate in Colorado. Drink up!

12. Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don't want them to go away.

13. At the state legislative level, Democrats picked up a net of at least 3 chambers in Tuesday's elections. Of the 98 partisan-controlled state legislative chambers (house/assembly and senate), Democrats went into the 2004 elections in control of 44 chambers, Republicans controlled 53 chambers, and 1 chamber was tied. After Tuesday, Democrats now control 47 chambers, Republicans control 49 chambers, 1 chamber is tied and 1 chamber (Montana House) is still undecided.

14. Bush is now a lame duck president. He will have no greater moment than the one he's having this week. It's all downhill for him from here on out --and, more significantly, he's just not going to want to do all the hard work that will be expected of him. It'll be like everyone's last month in 12th grade -- you've already made it, so it's party time! Perhaps he'll treat the next four years like a permanent Friday, spending even more time at the ranch or in Kennebunkport. And why shouldn't he? He's already proved his point, avenged his father and kicked our ass.

15. Should Bush decide to show up to work and take this country down a very dark road, it is also just as likely that either of the following two scenarios will happen: a) Now that he doesn't ever need to pander to the Christian conservatives again to get elected, someone may whisper in his ear that he should spend these last four years building "a legacy" so that history will render a kinder verdict on him and thus he will not push for too aggressive a right-wing agenda; or b) He will become so cocky and arrogant -- and thus, reckless -- that he will commit a blunder of such major proportions that even his own party will have to remove him from office.

16. There are nearly 300 million Americans -- 200 million of them of voting age. We only lost by three and a half million! That's not a landslide -- it means we're almost there. Imagine losing by 20 million. If you had 58 yards to go before you reached the goal line and then you barreled down 55 of those yards, would you stop on the three yard line, pick up the ball and go home crying -- especially when you get to start the next down on the three yard line? Of course not! Buck up! Have hope! More sports analogies are coming!!!

17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed "The #1 Liberal in the Senate." That's more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore. Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for a trend it should be this -- that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has always been filled with evangelicals -- that is not news. What IS news is that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact, that's BIG news. Which means, don't expect the mainstream media, the ones who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November 2, 2004. In fact, it's better that they don't. We'll need the element of surprise in 2008.

Feeling better? I hope so. As my friend Mort wrote me yesterday, "My Romanian grandfather used to say to me, 'Remember, Morton, this is such a wonderful country -- it doesn't even need a president!'"

But it needs us. Rest up, I'll write you again tomorrow.

Yours,

Michael Moore MMFlint@aol.com www.michaelmoore.com

Anal Aggression and the Twentieth Congress of the American Dream

Music: The American Analog Set: Promise of Love

Love Promises

We knew with our weak messianic powers that it would come to this, despite a profound hope and a conviction that others might see like we do. That is, our prophecy and soothsaying were best left to silence; we are looking back at the wreckage (Bush's toys strewn about, dead people, victims and victims and victims, all but from the push of a button behind a curtain).

It all comes down to the primal scene, the original moment of violence or trauma reenacted in repeat symbolic explosions, like last night, sometime around 2:00 a.m., after I had fallen asleep watching election returns. Someone was subject to anal aggression. I awoke this morning after a bad dream in which George W. Bush was again elected president, turned on the television set, and discovered that George W. Bush was again elected president. Melancholia: someone was subject to anal aggression last night.

“Guns, Gods, and Gays,” said some irritating reporter trying to explain the meaning of “moral conviction” for those “Red State voters.”

It’s the wrong color red, of course.

It all comes down to the primal scene, that original moment of violence or trauma reenacted in repeat symbolic explosions, like when I was about five, if I recall. (In the End, correct recollection does not matter, either in terms of my own development or national reckoning, alas.) I used to get up long before my parents on Saturday mornings. Eventually, an hour or two later, my mother would get up and fix breakfast, and later, my father. One morning, however, mom did not get up even though the sun was. I went to their bedroom door and opened it: there was rustling, furtive movement, and my father yelled, “get out!” and my mother said “what’s a matter baby? I’m getting up soon, go back and watch TV” and something was terribly wrong but “baby” seemed like a temporary fix.

Now I’ve done it.

But I know how to recover from this (kill daddy!). Indeed, as I’ve grown up countless comic books and action films have taught me the recourse of blind thrusting, give unto others as they have given unto you. The pedagogy of the action film is a soul-deep teaching—at least it was for me, having grown up around numerous “G” words—none of which being “geometry.” There is no better example than Collateral Damage (2001, but released 2002), in which Arnold Swarznegger avenges the murder of his wife and child by bomber “terrorists” (first Arabs, then Columbians after Nine-eleven); this mean firefighter smokes them out of their holes in their native land. Or Ang Lee’s film, Hulk, in which a wee-man becomes a giant, throbbing green phallus that really gives it to the men responsible for killing his mother (indeed, the primal scene is a featured flashback throughout the film, except, unlike my discovery at the age of five, Bruce Banner eventually remembers that what he saw behind the bedroom door was his father killing his mother).

“Guns, Gods, and Gays,” they say. Receiving anality is the enemy. The trouble with this ominous copographic foe is that fascism, like the enemy, is always within. Isn't that always the premise of horror/sci-fi films?

The Verso Three

Kerry has lost and, despite his neo-liberal programming, I wanted to see the Anti-Manchurian cyborg win. But this kind of “victory” would not do for a Red America, since it would represent the father who consults instead of spanks: You have two daddies to choose from, I said to one of my classes, the one who gives you a whoopin’ right there on the spot, or the one who consults mom (France for my students) to see what the punishment would be (usually the tiresome sanction of “no telephone, no TV,” and so on). I used a more radical metaphor in preparation for a radio interview on the first of the presidential debates: America is electing its phallus; you can go with the one that gives you a good hard fuck, or the one that makes love to you. I elected not to go with that on the air, of course, but it was amusing to imagine the images as I was addressing a largely conservative audience of talk-radio junkies (and, horror of horrors, many of whom would have probably agreed without a touch of amusement).

In the haunting class we are just completing the third of a series of books dedicated to making meaning of September 11, 2001, an event rooted in three places and in “real” time that, predictably, has been reduced into a simple, screened totem: “Nine-eleven.” Paul Virilio’s Ground Zero is the worst of them, rooting the aestheticization of the so-called terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in a collective will to sublimity catalyzed by the push-button modernity (people become nothing more than paint tubes, exploding red like the unfolding of a flower). Virilio’s tendency to cite anyone that comes to mind, most especially himself, makes Ground Zero little more than an index of theory metaphor-bombs, all of which might be summed up simply as “the arrival of the cinematographic bomb.” Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism fares much better: Us and Them, that is to say, “We,” secretly desired the Absolute event, evidenced in Hollywood dreams: “the terroristic imagination dwells in all of us.” His argument that the real effects of the destruction of the twin towers are purely symbolic is persuasive, while his jettisoning of the psychoanalytic for such a claim is not. Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real is the best of the three, despite his tendency to meander in pursuit of the clever exemplar. Zizek, at least, always has an eye on the pragmatic, political possibilities and the real event of critical inversion: nothing is completely closed-up in advance. Nine-eleven is our most recent prime-number example.

Against Virilio’s retrojected warning against the postmodern cult of the sublime, Zizek argues: “The problem with the twentieth-century ‘passion for the Real’ was not that it was a passion for the Real, but that it was a fake passion whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Real . . . (24). If we were truly passionate for the Real, presumably, we would rediscover a kind of Nietzschean pursuit of aesthetics and beautiful veils because the Real is so sublimely horrible/mind-blowing/impossible. The Real humbles; a passion for it easily slides into what Virilio has termed the Global Suicide State, premised on a false passion.

I find Zizek’s analysis compelling and persuasive, but only to a point: how do I cultivate a passion for the Real that does not succumb to falsehood insofar as fiction is all we got? I suppose the answer is that there are better and worse fictions, and that the pedagogy of the art film is much closer to the desired ethic than the pedagogy of the Western. Hulk is not the answer.

Or rather, we must acknowledge the one-sided truths (hence falsehoods) of the art film and the porno are within the filmic totality. I find Zizek's recourse to dialectic comforting, and his claim that we must adopt both sides (anti-global capital and anti-terrorism) as components of the "total" ethical stance accurate. Zizek is recommended at his most straightforward and clear headed:

We do not yet know what consequences this event will have for the economy, ideology, politics and war . . . . Either America will persisit in . . . the deeply immoral attitude of "Why should this happen to us?" . . . Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long-overdue move [to] "A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhere!" That is the true lesson of the attacks: the only way to ensure that it will not happen here again is to prevent it happening anywhere else. In short, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation--what we are getting instead is the forceful reassertion of the exceptional role of the USA as a global policeman, as if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it. (49)

The Usual Suspects Increasingly Cassandras

When I was about twenty-seven, if I recall correctly (in the end recollection does matter, because we felt our careers were under attack), after a long day of teaching many of the usual suspects packed a small classroom for a teach-in for comfort, perhaps wisdom. We were there to see John Mowitt, one of my favorite professors, give a talk titled “Re(:)thinking the Unthinkable,” which centered on two ideas. First, “as a civilian target the university confronts the unthinkable most immediately in the form of its own censure.” In other words, we witnessed a new battle in the culture wars, often couched in terms of the “end of irony” or the death of postmodernism. His second idea was more extensively developed much later by Jean Baudrillard in the monograph-cum-essay collection, The Spirit of Terrorism.

Well, here we are, our suspicions confirmed. We knew with our weak messianic powers that it would come to this, despite a profound hope and a conviction that others might see like we do. It’s not that I worry about my academic freedom, or that I will not be able to use my specialized jargon in public, or that I will not be able to use anal sex metaphors in my blog. I knew today would happen—at least I dreamt it before it came to pass (regards to Ed Cayce). What troubles me is my own interiority, my own understanding or explanation for how millions can read about the pointless bloodshed “over there” and continue to support blind thrusting: am I, or people of my ilk, simply abjectly naïve to think a general public might see it like I, like “we,” do?

I remember sitting at the sit-in, then, when I was 27, in the wake of primal trauma, thinking that while this threat of censure was real, it was nevertheless slightly—just slightly—over reactive. Overreaction has a important function, and getting hot and bothered about one’s plight does a group of like-minded souls good. Similarly, reading Baudrillard and Virilio and Zizek, I’ve often found myself wrapped up in their often dramatic and sometimes shocking pronouncements but thinking—knowing—somewhere in the back of my mind that much of this is hyperbolic, that to take Baudrillard, literally, at his word all the time is foolish. Having read the Nine-eleven books and forced to think about them, the teach-in back then, and the present victory of “W,” today “reality” takes on the garish hues of horrible cartoon (like that segment in the original Creepshow, when the kid leads an unsuspecting bystander into his imaginary world of Technicolor horror). The usual suspects, once comedic characters, are now tragic ones, increasingly Cassandras. This morning, when I woke up and saw the results, I felt—I think for the first time, I’m unsure—I felt like I was caught in a kind of warped Cassandra complex.

Music: Red Lorry Yellow Lorry: Blow

When Will I Be Blown Up?

The usual suspects never mistake sex for war. That much I can claim. There is no cult of sublimity for us. The sublime may be Real, but confronting it is an openness to radical alterity, not an obliteration of the Other.

Nine-eleven is the primal scene, a reenactment of that initial childhood trauma that further develops the psyche: is daddy hurting mommy? What’s going on? Well, if you buy this tip you must believe that our self-consciousness or “subjectivity” is founded on trauma and haunted by it--the first being birth, the next, the primal scene, and so on--life being but a series of mini-traumas that we define ourselves against or over, as if the self is a series of narrative shields or, well, “screens.” Nine-eleven was a mac-daddy trauma, one of those unsettling events in which our collective identity, in which the American Subject in general, was caused to reckon with its own traumatic past.

When we are made subject to massive, collective trauma we are often subjected by a bigger daddy—we long for subjection. “W” quickly screened a moment of mournful possibility by, of course, characterizing the threat of castration as an exogenous one: You are either “with” US or “against” US (with the terrorists). Always, in national trauma, decisions are made on our behalf that bear consequences for each. Just be an American in Berlin for one day, you’ll see.

Freud associated the primal scene with orifice-ambiguity, and argued that the child, reliving the fantasy of the primary scene, associates the original violence with anal sex, indeed, with his or her own subjection to the Law, to daddy’s “GET OUT!”

Not that anal sex is a bad thing between two loving people.

But anal aggression--"sodomy" in the abstract--is coded in the Western imaginary as the domiance of a blind, masculine thrusting and a “feminized” or “passive” target; hence it's fetishization in heteroporno and demonization in heteronormic "reality." I don't mean, of course, physical intercourse, but rather a mythic that adheres in the American imaginary. In this context, unquestionably, “W’s” hyper-masculinist fantasy characterizes the US as having been violently butt-fucked—its own phalluses castrated by the exogenous suppositories of doom. Consequently, it was time to assert the Law. I realize this is a facile psychoanalytic reading, but at the same time it’s so obvious and “textbook” it is tempting to read the Tragedy in the comic frame. Perhaps characterizing it so is my own push-button modernism, screening the Real of the situation. Regardless, like the muffled boom of the first atomic mushroom, we are once again hearing the dreaded ding-dong of doom.