the demand for love

Music: The Cure: Wish This week I have avoided SXSW festivities to work on ensuring tenure, which means writing: it's been Joshie Writing Camp (JWC)! At JWC we don't shave, rarely bathe, and eat ready-made. A JWC we read and re-read the reviewers suggestions for revision and try to make everyone happy. Making everyone happy is impossible, of course, when I cannot make myself happy.

Regardless, I've re-written a bunch of stuff for my "Hystericizing Huey" essay, focusing especially on the part that distinguished need, demand, and desire from one another. Here's that part, for the curious (I hope to gosh it makes sense; this is hard stuff to write about):

So what, then, is desire? From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire refers to the unconscious wishes of an individual that, by definition, cannot be satisfied. From a Lacanian perspective, "desire" should be sharply distinguished from its more popular understanding, such as that which is found in the OED: "that feeling or emotion which is directed to the attainment or possession of some object from which pleasure or satisfaction is expected." Lacan's understanding of desire refigures the desired object: with apologies to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you can never get what you desire because, if you did, desire would disappear. To better explain this feeling of not getting what you desire, Lacanians often contrast the concept with "need" and "demand." Human need refers to purely biological needs (e.g., for food). Demand refers to a request for something (an object, a deed, a gesture, and so on) from another. As with desire, the distinction between need and demand concerns the status or character of the object, as Joan Copjec elegantly explains:

On the level of need the subject can be satisfied by some thing that is in the possession of the Other. A hungry child will be satisfied by food-but only food. . . . It is on the next level, that of demand, that love is situated. Whether one gives a child whose cry expresses a demand for love a blanket, or food, or even a scolding, matters little. The particularity of the object is here annulled; almost any will satisfy-as long as it comes from the one whom the demand is addressed. Unlike need, which is particular, demand is, in other words, absolute, universalizing. (148)

This "universalizing" or formalizing aspect of demand is important, because it underscores why the objects of demand are, in some sense, interchangeable. Demands reflect an emotional drive or push for "something more," insofar the "Other now appears to give something more than just these objects," a something-more that Lacan terms the object-cause or the objet a (Copjec 148-149). In other words, whereas need is satisfied with the production of a specific object, demand represents a partial awareness that the gesture of the person who produces the object is more important. The demand for this something more is the demand for a special kind of recognition: love.

The demand for love is problematic, however, because it mistakenly assumes this "something more" of the Other can be given away. Love, in this sense, is premised on the lie that the object-cause is attainable. For Lacan, "as a specular mirage, love is essentially deception" (Four Fundamental 268). In light of love's deception, "desire" is therefore the word for what is really happening to a subject when she feels that familiar pull of emotion toward an object or another. Desire is the feeling of lacking the presumed objet a and of pulsating around a substitute as the next best thing. For example, sexual desire can be stirred by a partial or part object, like a breast, or a beautiful face, and so on, but one knows very well what the point of sexual desire is not to "get" the breast or the face, but the yearning for this "something more" beyond the breast or the face (see Krips, 22-24). Copjec explains that with desire, "the Other retains what it does not have"--this something-more--"and does not surrender it to the subject." Consequently an individual's desire does not aim toward an object but is caused or inspired by this elusive "something more," this objet a, which the Other refuses to surrender (Copjec 148-149). Again, it is important to underscore that the reason desire is not aiming for a specific object because if that object were attainable, then desire would disappear. Hence desire is ceaselessly metonymic, moving "from one object to the next. . . . Desire is an end in itself; it seeks only more desire, not fixation on a specific object" (Fink 26).

Incorporating these Lacanian notions of demand and desire into the received understanding of emotional appeals expands its explanatory power, but not without some modification. Traditionally, the emotional appeal has been discussed in terms of a rhetor's ability to produce or promise something that the audience wants (Desire-->Object). So, for example, Aristotle suggests that one can enflame an audience's anger through the symbolic destruction of a person (the object) that has insulted or belittled them (Aristotle 124-130). In regard to the demagogue, Kenneth Burke identified emotional appeal working primarily to scapegoat a common enemy (the object) through the processes of identification and division (Burke, Philosophy 191-220). Roberts-Miller notes that "an important goal of the demagogue is to prevent" division among the ingroup by keeping "identification strictly within the ingroup, and to ensure no sense of consubstantiation with the outgroup: 'Men who can unite on nothing else can unite on the basis of a foe shared by all'" (Roberts-Miller 463). In the traditional scapegoating scenario, the object of desire is the destruction or removal of a common foe.

The psychoanalytic understanding of the emotional appeal is different, insofar as desire has no object, but rather, is caused or stimulated by an object or quality (Cause-->Desire). So with Aristotle's example of anger arousal, the target is really a ruse. Understood as stimulus to anger, the desirous appeal to enflame an audience has more to do with the way in which the rhetor's manner, tone, voice, and physical characteristics stimulate their desiring by becoming a cause of, or at least a catalyst for, their desiring. In other words, a rhetor's ability to turn an audience into an angry mob is not achieved by providing a target for their ire, even though the mob believes that the destruction of this target is the object of their passions. Rather, the rhetor him or herself is the cause and the mob identifies with his or her desire to have, for example, a political opponent defeated. Although the rhetor convinces the audience that they really want a given object (Desire-->Object), in actuality, she is the cause of their desiring and the ostensible object is ultimately exchangeable with another (Cause-->Desire).v The psychoanalytic read of scapegoating therefore changes: although hating a common enemy is the end of scapegoating, the source of its appeal in a given rhetorical situation concerns the audience's desire to please the rhetor; the arousal of anger is produced out of love for the rhetor, not hatred of a common foe. The real cause of their desiring is the objet a, which cannot be given. The emotional appeal is therefore fundamentally deception but, with regards to Nietzsche, "in a non-moral sense."

To say that the emotional appeal turns on love's deception is not to say that individuals do not believe that their desire is about a specific object. The ruse object of the emotional appeal is a result of "fixation." Indeed, we can define the emotional appeal as the masquerade of desire in demand, the causation of a fixation. Maintaining persuasion via emotional appeal requires the parade of a series of surrogates that betokens the objet a--otherwise persuasion would cease. Let us take, for example, a self-aggrandizing joke that Huey Long gave before a crowded room of dignitaries as he was readying himself for a run for the White House. In a newsreel that presumably ran in northern state theatres, an opening shot presents Huey speaking in a variety of venues inside a series of bubbles, four smaller bubbles in each coroner of the screen, and a larger bubble in the middle. In the center bubble, Long appears in a tuxedo, smiling. A voice over begins: "Presenting his Excellency, Huey Pierce Long, the dictator of Louisiana, the enigma who is making many Americans regret that the United States ever purchased Louisiana." The screen cuts to the contents of the center bubble; Huey appears in the center screen with his arms behind his back. With a smile and a lilting, southern drawl he says:

I was elected railroad commissioner in 1918 [a small smile]; and they tried to impeach me in 1920 [Long leans forward, a bigger smile appears, but his arms still behind his back; louder laughter from the audience is heard]. When they failed to impeach me in 1920, they indicted me in 1921 [Long leans forward again with a bigger smile, and louder laugher comes from the audience]. And I, when I wiggled through that I managed to become governor in 1928 . . . and they impeached me in 1929 [a big smile appears on Long's face, and there is even louder laughter].

In this brief example Long advances a subtle pedagogy of desire in the form of a joke, and its success is measurable in the increasing laughter of the audience at each turn (one can liken this appeal to Freud's famous example of the Fort-Da game, which is mildly similar to the peek-a-boo game one plays with infants; see Krips 22-25). From the audience's perspective, Long will not give his enemies what they want, eluding them at every step, thereby creating a homology between the audience's desiring and the desiring of Long's enemies. Mindful of being labeled a demagogue, Long's embrace of insincerity is signaled by his self-characterization as "wiggling" out of impeachments and indictments, as if he is a kind of lovable outlaw. The pull of the emotional appeal here is not reducible to simple identification-you the audience are like me, Huey, and we share a common foe of "they," as this is the ruse of the emotional appeal. Rather, by hinting at the substitute object of desire-an admission of guilt or a refutation of the changes against him-Long inspires this pull for "something more," for love, tacitly promising he has the power to give something that he does not have. In short: the audience laughs at Long's humor because they love him, or rather, they love the "something more" in him. He functions as the cause of their desiring, and they want to similarly be the objects of his desire.

name that gnome

Music: American Idol Today I finally scored me some gnomes for my patio garden. That's right, I got me some gnomes and they were not overpriced. I also picked up a bubbling fountain thing of the Virgin of Guadalupe. And an antique rose bush, which I'll plant tomorrow. In any event, these lovely gnomes are nameless, and I need to name them to ensure they properly guard my treasures (mostly grocery bags of plastic Mardi Gras beads). Here's some close ups (clicking on the image gives you a bigger one):

This little guy is happy. He has an apple. But that's not why he's happy. He's happy cause he just scored a basket of psychedelic shrooms, which will help to make his apple more originally and singularly sinful. Ms. Kay next door says that mushrooms are lucky, and that's why he has them. But I really think that he's headin' home to his sweetheart, and they're going to trip their little gonads off. What shall I name him? Albert? Timothy? Terence?

I knew when I spotted this guy at Howard's Nursery in their statuary section he was coming home with me. Unlike the other gnome, this guy is waaay frustrated. He's trying to tap a beer keg, empty mug in hand. He's not used to such resistance from a beer keg, as his little pot belly shows. Heck, he has a beard and long hair . . . oh, god. It's my avatar gnome. Anyway, I don't want to name him after me (Wendy says that "Josh Junior" is reserved for a more talkative gnome). I thought Dispirited Dude or Dispiradude might work, but then, it doesn’t. Lenny? Bocephus? Bucky?

. . . but jesus wept

Music: Fischerspooner: Odyssey Last night was a late one, which is unusual for me: headphones on and bourbon in hand, I played DJ like there were many tomorrows (for dancing). Lamentably, electroclash is officially dead (signaled by the removal of the genre label from Juno records "new releases" categories), but it has morphed into this thing called "electro house," which is just fine. I mixed electro house last night. My new favorite find: Kissy Sell Out. That shit is hot. And I knew very well what I was doing: holding desperately onto my twenties.

I awoke this morning slightly hung-over to a telephone ring (I have this thing for antique telephones, and they litter the house, and ring very, very loudly): my sweetheart left a message and wished me a happy birthday and mused that Christ died when he was 33. I was thinking that if our personal savior would have just waited four months it'd be a record. Har har.

So what did birthday boy do today? I slept in. Then I re-read Joan Copjec's fantastic chapter in Read My Desire on the "Tephlon President." If any of y'all are scratching your head about GWB's presidency, go back and read Copjec's stuff: I mean, wow, she's so on the right(eous) tip! Then I deposited birthday money in the bank. Then I went to Dan's Burgers and read Chuck Morris' awesome article on silence and passing in The Quarterly Journal of Speech (seriously, it's a nice, beautifully written, new take on "the rhetoric of silence" and its relation of to secrecy, something I've been obsessed with for years). Then I went to the Natural Gardener, a very cool nursery with lots of groovy--but ridiculously overpriced--stuff. I wanted to buy a garden gnome and a rose bush. But I thought they wanted too much money for that stuff --$57 bucks for an unpainted gnome!--so I settled on some pruning shears.

Then I made my way to the bookstore, and picked up a copy of Neil Sperry's Complete Guide to Texas Gardening, since all bets are off on semi-desert-style gardening. I mean, I have no clue what to do in an environment in which nothing ever dies (except my inner-20-year old). This book should help me figure out what replace the previous owners ugly, old lady plants with. Then I went across the street to Waterloo Records, picked out the new Arab Strap, Mogwai, Esther Drang, and Revolting Cocks to buy. I waited in line for what seemed forever. Finally a cashier motioned to me to come hither. He de-magged my CDs, but then decided he needed to change-out the register drawer . . . so I waited, as customer after customer went to other open registers. . but my bladder could not wait, so I had to leave behind my purchase and amble quickly next door to pee.

Bored yet? Heh. It's my birthday so I'm going to write about my navel.

Anyhoo, I came home and then cleaned up the patio, pruned the rose bushes, and had a beer. I'm now drinking a Bombay Sapphire martini. I ordered a pizza. Tonight I have a date with the Ghouls n' Ghosts video game (re-released by Capcom for Xbox!), after Wife Swap, of course. Usually I'd be out to dinner with friends or something, but it's spring break here and it's like a ghost town (few have stayed in town, as we're overrun by the SXSW crowds; the traffic is horrid already!). Thanks to all of you who phoned, emailed, sent inappropriate stripping old men to my computer screen, or phoned in to remind me I'm not a kid anymore. I feel only a little lonely (but I have my screens! My beloved screens!).

Being over thirty is not so bad if you feel loved. I'm so thankful to feel loved.

the joy problem

Music: De/Vision: Fairyland? I've had quite a number of discussions this weekend, starting Friday night at the "graduate recruiting party" and continuing last night over dinner with some friends, about the increasing interest in religion among graduate students. Reportedly, one of my colleagues was "shocked" that over half of his term papers for a rhetorical criticism class concerned the rhetoric of religion, and some of my colleagues were surprised to hear I've been approached by a number of students of offer a graduate course on the topic. "Why religion now?" someone asked on Friday. The answer was so obvious it was hard to respond without the visage of incredulity.

Although I would very much enjoy putting together a seminar on the rhetoric of religion (I imagine I would use it as an excuse to teach myself Derrida's later work; we'd start with Augustine and end with The Gift of Death), I would worry about the (my) ethical scaffolding: would the spirit of hospitality—of a respectful agnosticism--really work with a prospective student whom some overheard saying, "I'm just not sure if God wants me to be at the University of Texas." We have some graduate students now who bob and weave in class and assignments (and who they will and will not "take") so as not to offend their religious habits and beliefs. Indeed, I think I'm seeing more of this relgio-graduate identity-building going on than I've ever noticed: they don't understand because they are godless; this is why they need me as a scholar and teacher. Of course, me against the system (or me against obfuscating jargon, or me against the corporate academy, or whatever) is central to the fundamental occultism of the academy, but the righteousness of the inner light has really never felt so emboldened, at least during my brief decade in higher education.

This morning Mirko forwarded a link to an Op-Ed in the New York Times penned by a favorite of mine, Slavoj Zizek. Titled "Defenders of the Faith." Zizek argues that we should "restore the dignity of atheism" because it's our only chance for peace. Zizek counters the argument that a godless society is nihilistic (e.g., "everything is permissible" without the divine cop) with the evidence of "terrorism": it is precisely because God is everywhere that blowing yourself up in a grade school hallway is permissible. Thus the godlessness of a political atheism that originally underwrote Auschwitz has realized itself in all kinds of fundamentalisms that I'll simply call the joy complex, following Jung's notion of the complex as a linguistic/symbolic knot. [LATER DAY EDIT: oh, I supposed "Joy Division" would do, but that's just a bit too much concentration-camp-brothel-cum-goth-band for my own tastes this evening.]

Joy is the word I've been looking for that best describes what we previously termed the "ecstasy of violence" (a term that has lost its shock appeal, here after the video game explosion). Joy is both the word for unbridled (often tearful) happiness as well as an object that causes such happiness (yup, you guessed it: it's the objet a)—as if to say, "you are my joy" (thank you Snow Patrol). The word derives from Old French, of course, as it is also the root of the much afeared jouissance, Barthes term for the texty orgasmatron and Lacan's designated function for the drives. I recognize this is not news, but I am somewhat joyful at having located a word that works for me (of course the pun is intended, just not when I first wrote the sentence).

That said, the problem with teaching a rhetoric of religion, or about the relation between rhetoric and religion, is "the joy problem." Why? Because joy is always a consequence of using an object to get off in some sort of transgressive (e.g., not law-bound) way. "I'm not sure if God wants me to be at the University of Texas" is another way of saying that this person is not so sure she will find the objects she needs to get off, as if to say, "I'm not so sure your department has enough self-righteous atheists to use for maintaining my own righteousness." You see, I think the department is quite open to religion in all its guises; this is a problem for the conviction of joy.

I guess that the thing which is troublesome to so many about fundamentalist Christians is that they get off thinking that us Godless agnostics and atheists are going to hell. This is to say, the professor is not a subject. The only corrective is a huge heap of depression, and by that I don't mean clinical depression, but rather, the depressive/paranoid position what recoils in the self as doubt and a capacity to constrain joy with guilt. To widen the gyre, this cultural obsession with banishing darkness—with pills, with the violent ministries of joy—is part of what's pushing up these transgressive emails from students. Again, yes, it's certainly an economic logic—but it's also the relentless jubilation of a recently emboldened civil religiosity. I don't know if I agree with Zizek that we need our atheism, but God (,) do we need our depression!

[LATE EDIT: ooh, I see The Sopranos are back; damn! I wish I had cable]

deflation, condensation, and the initial ego

Music: American Idol First, something that I've noticed that has always bothered me—somewhat unnecessarily—is the tendency of some of my friends and mentors to reduce themselves to a series of initials at the end of their missives. What may be intended as a gesture of humility can sometimes seem to me like a claim to self importance: hence, my own recent signature: D(Jx3), which I think is quite funny (it's short for another self-diminutive, DJ Joshie Juice, which combines one of my friend's early nick names for me, "Joshie"--thanks Laura--with a fruit drink name that I loved as a kid, Juicy Juice, with the street-cred address, "DJ," because, as Mirko says, anyone can spin records/mp3s these days). I wonder if, rather than getting the joke, if D(Jx3) reads to some like the very same self-important, tilde accompanied self-initialization that I want us to laugh at?

And my own brand of Joshie algebra brings me to Lacanian algebra, my fear of it, a revise and resubmit summons, and the graph of desire here to the left. In a couple of weeks the psychoanalysis seminar will try to make sense of this graph. Yep. I'm already terrified. But fortunately I did give us three weeks to work through it (and a book long explication of it by Van Haute titled Against Adaptation). I've also got to reckon with jouissance in print, which is something I fear as well.

See, I've been trying to publish this essay on the demagogic rhetoric/discourse/phenomenon of Huey P. Long, "Hystericizing Huey." Finally, after years of rejection, I have a "revise and resubmit." At their behest, I've detailed for some students the process of getting this thing to print, as a sort of window onto the publication process (for example, here's my explanation of how to read the editor and reviewers' letters and what I plan to do to revise). Here's the problem I'm now wrestling with: the theory turf war of the sympathetic. One large challenge for those who wish to do theory-oriented work in rhetorical studies is, of course, getting theory past the "apply or die" sentries, which usually means some gesture to a "text" or an "object" or something that gets "read." I've made my peace with that gesture and, frankly, think it's a good thing. But if one is fortunate enough to get an apply or die rhetoric type to go along for the ride (which is impossible), one also has to contend with the reviewer who claims a better or smarter reading of Your Favorite Theorist. I'm fortunate that, in this round of reviews, the reviewer whom I must please is giving me the opportunity to read Lacan like she does (and she may very well be righter than my preference for Fink's interpretations). In other words, I'm very thankful that I wasn't barred from the process because I didn't get my "desire" and my "jouisannce" right the first time. But this opportunity only happened after what seemed like countless rejections: those that said psychoanalysis is bunk, and those, sympathetic to the "cause," who said I was too stupid to read psychoanalysis correctly. Is it ok to be slow on the uptake? Is there room for us (in/for) theory? Will I ever get the opportunity to sign my emails JGG?

brokeback mountains

Music: The Academy Awards on the Disney Channel As the nominees for the "best supporting actor" flit across my screen, I'm just finishing up the background reading for tomorrow's seminar on the theory of Carl Gustav Jung. At the behest of a visiting scholar in a couple of weeks, for class I assigned some selections from Anthony Storr's edited collection, The Essential Jung, and I have to admit I'm more than disappointed with Storr's "one-sided"--to borrow a term from Jung--treatment. I've been reading The Cambridge Companion to Jung along with Steven F. Walker's Jung and the Jungians On Myth, and it's clear Storr's presentation suffers from a somewhat willful, custodial blindness to the intimate relationship between Jung and Freud, and the ways in which the homoerotic dynamics of that relationship (roughly a seven year, mutually acknowledged "crush" between the men) found their way into their respective theories. For example, the so-called love triangle of Freud, Jung, and Jung's patient Sabina Spielrein is completely neglected (of course, this is one of the topics of Avery Gordan's Ghostly Matters . . . as Juliet Mitchell would note, it makes sense that the Woman is erased by these two . . . in letters), and Jung's horribly botched "experiment" with her goes without mention. Storr is clearly tidying up: this morning I laughed aloud at the assertion that Jung "was no disciple" of Freud. Although it is true that Jung "knew" all along it would end in tears, from his published correspondence with Freud it's obvious he was seeking a father . . . .

Well, per usual, I don't have much insight to offer for the blogosphere. Tomorrow I plan to orbit my lecture around the figure of Spielrein, who represents the "object: woman" problem Juliet Mitchell says inspired Psychoanalysis and Feminism and which, I think, is the invisible center of the Jungian deviation (viz., Jung's repeated insistance on duality and the "other side"). The subjectless status of woman is also central to the interpersonal dynamics that made its way into psychoanalytic work—the sort of thing that only published letters brings out. Consider this excerpt from a letter Freud wrote Jung about Ferenczi:

My traveling companion is a dear fellow, but dreamy in a disturbing kind of way, and his attitude toward me is infantile. He never stops admiring me, which I don't like, and is probably sharply critical of me in his unconscious when I am taking it easy. He has been too passive and receptive, letting everything be done for him like a woman, and I really haven't got enough homosexuality in me to accept him as one. These trips arouse a real longing for a real woman.

. . . a real woman like, oh, Jung—of course! But Jung would eventually refuse Freud's advances, as it required becoming "a woman" in Freud's misguided understanding of subject (or rather, object). In other words, Jung's break can be understood—at least in part—as another "feminist" intervention in psychoanalytic theory when you look at it from an autobiographical vantage (Jung basically accused Freud of being a malicious patriarch). Of course, this argument is . . . likely to meet resistance, as, of course, I identify with Jung somewhat . . . .

I also realized today, as I was reading selections from Jung's autobiography, why I appreciate psychoanalysis: it is explicitly and unabashedly autobiographical. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, like much of Jung's later work, does not suspend the Self from "theory." But it does not dissolve into purile auto-indulgence (as one strain of [auto]ethnography in communication studies tends to do) either. At least in the first half of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis attempted to display its source of invention. Jung's theories (most especially his concept of the shadow) betray an inescapable racism, but one gets the sense from reading him that, unlike Freud, he'd probably fess up to his whiteness were he still alive. I dislike Jung's theory, but Spielrein notwithstanding, he seems much more sincere of a "dude." Unlike his keepers, he acknowledged his love for "daddy" even on the threshold of death; Freud was not so willing.

patio portents

Music: James: Laid Today it topped 87 degrees, but fortunately it has dropped to 73. The weather has been drastic these past few weeks—up and down, up and down. Before I left town, I noticed a bud had developed on the rose bush that changes colors, but I had reckoned the brief freeze early last week killed it. To my surprise, I saw this morning when I returned from my walk that it had opened. This evening, I noticed while I was taking out the trash it had rapidly reddened. This one is turning quickly.

the arrival of the petulant demand

Music: James: Laid Last week Shaun passed along an article from the New York Times regarding in problem email access has created for the professoriate (the article is here for those without a membership). The author avers that "while once professors may have expected silence, their expertise seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers, are buying." I've noticed a similar allegorical trend in higher education reportage, much of which laments the corporatization of the academy (e.g., the strained analogy between the resignation of Harvard's president and automobile companies). Although it is undeniably the case that the university is corporatizing, which can lead to the "me me gimme mime" attitude, I remain suspicious. The NYT article diagnoses the problem thusly: consumerism is the fuel, and technological ease, the mechanism. Something is missing.

I've been reading with much interest Dr. M's ruminations on student emails, many versions of which I've seen in my own in-box (granny died, car trouble, etc.). Owing to my personality, fashion sense, or perhaps outright unprofessional or pedagological stupidity, I sometimes get what I like to refer to as the "rabidly righteous" student email. This email is transgressive in a major way (usually after the course is over), the contents of which used to be reserved--as few as three years ago--for the anonymous teaching evaluation. I thought I might share the most recent e-howler I received regarding last semester as a sort of "mine's bigger" gesture: who can top this?

Beginning on the eve of Christmas Eve, I started getting panicky emails from a student about his grade on a journaling assignment. For an "A," students were to write 27-30 pages of discussion about concepts discussed in class. Because this was a large lecture class, the students were told their journals would be assessed only in terms of relevance and the numbers of pages. This panicky student started emailing with insinuations of my incompetence and what not, and I replied that (a) I trust my and my GTA's grading and would not change his grade; (b) there was nothing I could do about it as I was out of town, and to wait until school begins again; and (c) it's probably better to file a formal complaint with the college. I told him to file a formal complaint because this would protect both me and him (I've been harassed before, so I know it's always better to get it public). Despite repeated pestering over the holiday, I ignored the increasingly demanding emails from this guy. When I got back into Austin after the new year, I found his paper and noticed I docked him for plagiarism. He used an architecture paper he wrote for another class in an assignment for a pop music class, perhaps thinking I wouldn't notice. I phoned him at home to "be nice" and talk to him, since he broke TWO appointments to meet and discuss the situation. On the phone he got incresingly axious and then angry, yelling and ranting into the phone such that I ended up simply having to hang up. Anyway, regardless, just prior to my emailing him to tell him that he received a "C" on the assignment for plagiarizing, he sent this email:

Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:46:26 -0600 From: ---------- @mail.utexas.edu To: Joshua Gunn Subject: Fun with scathing emails

Josh, First let me say that i really regret writing you such a good course review, i fully intend to retract it through the appropriate channels. It is unfortunate that you seem to view this issue as some kind of competition between us where your position trumps mine, as opposed to an entirely understandable problem to be solved. Education is the most fullfilling thing in life and grades are really inconsequential but as a professor you have a duty to your students to treat them fairly and with integrity. In this, Dr. Gunn, I believe you have failed. Since you seem unwilling to carry on a rational phone conversation without dancing around the issues like a politician on Crossfire or hanging up i thought i'd write you this friendly email. I'm absolutely astounded at your willingness to let this be drawn out through official and unecessary channels leading to weeks of headaches and more bad press for your "tenure run" when you know as well as i do that they will rule in my favor. Before our correspondence about my final grade had begun i had commented to several people about you being one of the better professors i've had at UT. Clearly, my impression of you was uninformed. While you're a very interesting lecturer and clearly very informed on the subject matter it appears to me that your inexperience with your authority has comprimised your integrity and your ability to effectively profess. Your obvious depression mingles into your lectures by way of a condecending and generally prickish tone (perhaps, Dr. Gunn, it gets lost in emails but it doesn't in person) and you've allowed your anti-establishment image and behaviour which you've worked so hard to cultivate (and which, in part, makes you a good lecturer) compromise your ability to communicate equitably. Your obviously a very intelligent person, unfortunately you, like so many intelligent people, have made the mistake of assuming that any legitimate afront to your authority is also one to your intelligence. So let me, a very intelligent person myself, give you some advice. Operating rationally and with concession gains one much more credibility in intellectual circles (that is what intelligent people like us are looking for, isn't it, eh?) than the alternative. So before you write me off as some snot-nosed, grade-grubing, student who doesn't really "know" you, you should realize that being privy to another's true view of you is a rare and invaluable tool in regards to advancing your career and (not to mention) enriching your life. So if you feel you need to write back an equally scathing review of me, i'll welcome it as i'm always interested in improving how I project myself and for that matter i'm interested in delightfully scathing emails in general. So that "none of the tone is lost" Dr. Gunn, this email is intended to be read as condecending and arrogant (and oh so therapeutic! thanks, joshie!) in hopes that it's message will resonate and that future students of yours will be treated with a little more due justice. Later, ----.

Ouch! That did hurt to read, although I also know not to "take it to heart" (oh, these Objectivist, Ayn Rand types!) Regardless, there's something in this email that speaks to something other than "student consumerism." The aggression of the manner and tone reflects not only the narcissism individual psychology (surely this guy is having a rough year), but a cultural narcissism of righteousness that has more to do with religious violence than capitalism (although I realize the two are inextricable at some level). Sure, there is a way to read this student's email as a good example of narcissistic identification gone wrong: the student identifies with the teacher ("intelligent people like us") and my failure to recognize him as someone "like me," an "equal"—apparently by dismissing his demand for a grade change—has led to verbal violence. Yet the New York Times article is tracking a trend: students are increasingly transgressive and challenging the presumed "deference" of institutional authority. For this student, I'm not so much an expert as I am an equal who has failed to recognize his status as co-parent. So is it consumerism? Is it merely the "I paid for my grade" syndrome?

Hardly. These students would rarely speak to the boss at work this way. They may speak to a parent this way. I think we need to be thinking more about the cultural function of the professoriate in their capacities as familial authorities. Clearly, teaching used to model itself on the transference of unconscious feelings of the student for a parental figure, such that so-called "good teachers" are typically those who seem to impart a sense of caring for students, such that the students want to "do good for teacher." Not all teachers do or did this, I'm just saying that it seems to be a foundation of the pedagogy I learned (e.g., my advisors are mom and dad, I'm an intellectual child of their union, and so on). Students lashing out at professors in this way could be read as classic "demand," a narcissistic and infantile plea for an impossible satisfaction (e.g., "make me whole!"). Yet in the so-called culture wars taking place in newspapers and Sunday political talk shows, the professoriate, or more to the point, the professoriate of the humanities, are increasingly seen and treated as "bad" parents who are unable to see the real threat of terrorism around every corner. Capitalism may be fueling the fire, but what we are witnessing is a consequence of a general and widespread turn against the classic functions of the university and so-called "liberal values," a shift betokened by the election of the current President and current political climate that supports legal transgressions paralleled only in the 1930s and 1940s. In any dictatorship or fascistic state, there is really no "need" for the university (other than the function Gramsci specified): what I think we are witnessing is the spreading cultural attitude that the professoriate dispensable—not a new story, I realize, but one that recurs—and a collective, largely unconscious release of agressivity. In other words, this trend recounts what Marcuse termed the "silent, 'professional agreement'" that aggression that tends to violent death (as opposed to rigorous sublimation in other domains of life) in repressive society.

In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression. Whether death is feared as a constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender into life from the beginning—surrender and submission. It stifles "utopian" efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat.

The surrender is not necessarily, as if often thunk, to absolute authority, although the uncanny persistence of George W. Bush as the sovereign is good evidence. The surrender is to aggression leading to violence and death, the surrender is to a culture of death and an economy of violence that is no longer repressed, but unleashed. The surrender is to the ecstasy of a culture of fascism—of both enjoying control and meting sadism oneself. It would make sense that the professoriate, after the racial Other, is the next to go.

jedi powers

Music: Depeche Mode: Music for the Masses Last Friday my self-declared "first born," Roger Pippin, defended his thesis. He did a marvelous job and sailed through, producing a masterful monograph that he can be proud of. One of my best buds, Dr. Shaun Treat, who is by all accounts an Ah-tist, drew up this awesome flyer to advertise the post defense celebration at the department hang out, the Chimes (the bar with the best red beans and rice I've yet to have). Shaun has outdone himself with the flyer!

Meanwhile: it's back to the grind today, which is soon to be followed by a weekend of writing and then preparations for many guests before and during spring break: grad student prospects, a colleague from Japan who is breezing through town, a potential visit from my lover and a friend (fingers crossed!), and then another visit from a mentor and colleague who is doing a guest lecture for the psychoanalysis seminar. I'm thinking about using some of my tax return funds to hire a maid service in-between guests . . . I just ain't got the time!

I love Austin, but I must admit I still consider Baton Rouge more "home" . . . I think time will change that. Tenure certainly would. And Lil' Rumpus, I've been having those fantasies too: what could I do instead of this? My therapist says that training to become one of her ilk is a bad idea. Hee.

evangelical grammar: "jesus wants you to throw us beads," says Russian Olympian

Music: This Week with George Stephanopoulos It is the dreaded "day after" the Spanish Town Mardi Gras, made worse (we predicted) because it rained the entire day. Indeed, it DID rain on our parade, however, this did not damper the unstoppable spirit of blasphemy and unbridled joy: beads were flung with abandon (as well as stuffed animals--a new height of Mardi Gras freebie-ism), elected officials were skewered, there was revelry and much drinking and dancing in the rain. It was, by most accounts, an absolute blast, and indeed, the good times rolled like a Chocolate City semi-truck through the skinny, elm-lined streets of Spanish Town. I have never seen so many beads for a parade . . . I mean, there were mounds and mounds of them!

Today, however, is hangover helper day: there is always a price to pay for drinking all day beginning at 9:00 a.m. Today I do not feel too horrible (always stick to sugarless alcohol, I say, on marathon drinking days), but I know a lot of those mimosa slurpin' hotties may feel a little death: the screaming evangelical fundamentalist warned that "the wages of sin is death." And though we all knew he was right, there was something amusing about seeing this guy get pelted with wet beats . . . as Tracy screamed into the PA system: "Jesus wants you to throw us some beeeeeeeeeeaaaaaddddssss!!!!"

So we are recovering, but with lots of fun memories. Of course, I've uploaded a photo gallery, which you can access here. Unfortunately, my memory card filled up too quickly, so the debauchery after the parade was not documented (at least not by me)--including the part when people were jumping off the porch into the "party gravy" down below. Good times.

naked life

Music: CBS Early Show Today shall be spent (a) waiting for the plumber as a consequence of a series of minor plumbing malfunctions (the consequence being no hot water—indeed, no water at all—and the unflushable and unsightly guest turd); (b) grading; (c) writing/reading Agamben. Regarding the parenthetical turd of (a), I am convinced that "naked life" finds a representative anecdote—or perhaps, a token remainder. Isn't it curious in the mad rush to combat naughty dualism and embrace "body" that the dirtier aspects of continental are not written about in our "importation" . . . .

Dr. M, Tremblebot, Lil'rumpus, and Ken: y'all rock! Thanks for chiming in with your takes on zoe and bios. Here's what I wrote last week but was uncharacteristically sheepish about throwing out there:

Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau, or Schmitt, Agamben's understanding of human being is anti-essentialist and anti-identitarian, which leads him, in the end, to argue against the idea of sovereignty on the basis of what some have termed an immanent ontology of potentiality. Space limits discussing this ontology in any detail, however, a brief sketch will prove helpful. In much of his recent work Agamben advances an understanding of human being as an existential potentiality, abandoning the essentialism of "human nature" and the logocentric notion of identity that informs it. Human being is to be understood as "the single ways, acts, and processes of living" that are only possibilities, never determined or given in advance. Agamben argues that

Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, an d socially compulsory, it always retains the character of possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings—as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves—are the only beings for who happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness.

In a strongly qualified sense, one is tempted to characterize Agamben's understanding of human being as being on this (left) side Rousseau in spirit, except that for Agamben the sovereign is always involved in a kind of slight-of-hand that threatens human being in the name of protecting it. "Political power," says Agamben, "founds itself—in the last instance—on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life," thereby cleaving human content and form, as it were, or eroding what we might term "the good life." The content, or "naked life" (zoe), and the form, or "the manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group" (bios) are separated by the sovereign, who establishes his or its power by meting biological and political death. The power to mete life and death can only be established if one has the power to define life, or what constitutes a valuable life. Agamben suggests that such is the function of the modern sovereign: it decides what lives are worth living (e.g., citizenship) and what lives are merely bare or naked lives and therefore dispensable. "A political life, that is, a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form of life," continues Agamben, "is thinkable only starting from the emancipation from such a division, with the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty." The second reason why the assertion of sovereignty is problematic is because its materialization has changed consequent to the emergence of what Foucault termed "bio-power." Blah blah blah . . . .

Ken, I like the formulation that naked life is "life that is the ground of its own worth, which is it say not much worth, actually," which I take to mean without bios, which provides the measure. It's my understanding that Agamben takes the "side" of naked life (or at least forwards it as the underdog to champion) from necessity as a result of the cleave forged by sovereignty. Lil'rumpus was worried about my term "madness," which Tremblebot discerned as my tendency to shunt this through some reference to the Lacanian real. Where I was then going to transition (somehow) is to the homological relation of the homo sacer to the sovereign and a gloss of Agamben's comparative reading of Benjamin and Schmitt. As I gather (I haven't read that chapter in months) Agamben suggests Schmitt and Benjamin were (loosely) in dialogue, and the disagreement involved this locus of anomie: is it containable or circumscribed by the juridical (Schmitt), or is there some powerful, explosive, uncontainable "pure violence" (a sort of disembodied, or multi-bodied rather) that Benjamin said was outside of the juridical but that could be harnessed for political change (revolution). I need to get the language of this disagreement more precise, but as I understand it the argument hinges on a dialectical relation between the law and violence—where the law is understood as an instituting and regulating structure (e.g., the father function in Lacan-o-speak) and "violence" is disruptive, uncontainable, er, energy or life-force or, well, death-drive or aggression. Held in tension the currently "political system" works quite effectively, but when they are caused to collapse Agamben suggestions that "the political system transforms into an apparatus of death." By madness I mean mania in that Greek sense (I've been reading Plato, you see): chaotic ecstasy that can lead to beauty as much as harm—the ecstasy of belonging that can lead to joyful murder. I tend to think of a film like War of the Worlds, a violent and exciting tantrum, and serving up a celebration of the apparatus of death promised my collapse of the norm into the exception.

Ok—I should write all this in the essay instead of in the blog. I hie me to WP.

getting to Agamben

Music: Danzig: Danzing IV I managed to get some "scholarship" accomplished yesterday, and I’m itching to continue with it today, but I regret I have to hang it up and switch gears—from political theory to psychoanalytic squabbles among the culturalists and the essentialists. Anna Freud is not as fun as Giorgio Agamben.

Agamben, however, is not clear, and I'm getting all confused about "bare/naked life" (zoe) and bios or the life qualified by morality and socius. Or rather, I think I get this stuff, I just don't know how to transition from Rousseau's notion of popular sovereignty to Agamben's horrific re-reading of Schmitt. Any of you Agamben fans out there want to give me their slang-style definition of "naked life" in relation to the sovereign? I'll gladly steal it.

And my girl cat is meowing like crazy. It's starting to drive me slowly insane.

Well, here's a bit more from the essay "Staging the State of Exception" as I compose here. Today on tap is the short introduction to sovereignty before I dive headlong into Agamben-speak.

The Rhetoric of Exceptional States

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. --Carl Schmitt The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, inside and outside of the juridical order. --Giorgio Agamben

In the Western intellectual tradition, the concept of sovereignty descends from assumptions concerning how human beings would "naturally" behave in the absence of governance or the "state of nature." Perhaps among the most famous arguments made in favor an absolute sovereign were penned by Thomas Hobbes in 1660, who wrote in The Leviathan that in the state of nature humans would behave as if at war:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes argued that there are five fundamental "forces" of nature exemplified by humans most blatantly in war: egoism, competitiveness, distrust, and glory and power seeking. Only an absolute sovereign willed collectively by the people, he argued, could maintain justice and keep the peace. In the next century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would base his social contract theory on the opposite view of human essence: human beings in the state of nature are noble savages, "born free" and inherently good but perverted by society. Such perversion results from the scarcity of resources that are a consequence of increasing populations, and to escape a progressively degenerate and deadly state of nature people must contract with one another to subsist under the rule of morality or law. For Rousseau, passage "from the state of nature to the civil state" occurs when a people recognizes itself as the "body politic" or capital-S "Sovereign," which he likened to a rather large family. This comparison was obvious to Rousseau, who said the family was "the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children . . . ." For Rousseau, the sovereign is the people, and government fulfills the father function.

Of course, much has been written about the concept of sovereignty since the eighteenth century, and one could easily detail many different types. After the advent of fascism and the horrific holocausts of the twentieth century, however, scholars have been drawn to discuss the inherently paradoxical character of the sovereign as a law-giver or enforcer who has the power to transgress the law. Conceptually, Hobbes resolved this paradox in the absolute collapse of power and the law, the merging of the political and juridical: Whatever the sovereign decides the people should do is justice, as long as it is in the interest of peace (peace for Hobbes is defined negatively as the absence of killing). The issue is more complicated with the popular sovereignty advanced by Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, and others, however, because the sovereign is the result of the "will of the people" contracting under the rule of law. The paradox of sovereignty then concerns relation between its power (or politics) and the rule of law, not in a state of normalcy, but rather when asserting something exceptional, like Marshall law. In his career-long assault on liberalism, the political philosopher and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt attempted to resolve the conceptual problem of the sovereign by embracing the paradox as its core: "it is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is, the whole question of sovereignty."

For Schmitt, sovereignty is established or founded in moments of crisis and anomie. For This is why sovereignty is fundamentally a "borderline concept," which does not mean that it is vague or ambiguous, but rather, that the character of sovereignty cannot be discerned from the mundane or routine, but only at the extremes. The fundamental character of sovereignty is only discernable when events resemble the mythic state of nature, when a polis is unquestionably in some kind of emergency, because its power is fundamentally and decisively transgressive. "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception," writes Schmitt, meaning that the sovereign is the body or individual who paradoxically is legally sanctioned to declare an exceptional right to lawlessness in states of emergency.

As a number of scholars have commented, Schmitt's conception of sovereignty is easily illustrated by contemporary political and legal events. The most recent and familiar assertion of sovereignty in this Schmittian sense has been by the president of the United States, George W. Bush, whose "military order" on November 13, 2001 authorized the indefinite detention of suspected "terrorists" at prison camps in Guantánamo Bay. After the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has repeatedly declared that the country is in a state of emergency (or in a "war on terror") and has asserted that many of the controversial practices of the military and other government bodies (e.g., wire tapping, torture, and so on) are exceptions to the rule of law. The Italian philosopher and Giorgio Agamben argues that these more recent, post-9/11 assertions of sovereignty are problematic--indeed, dire--for two reasons. First, they reflect a more Schmittian view of human nature as fundamentally dangerous or "evil," which contributes to the kind of dehumanization of others that can lead to destroying them. Second, such assertions are symptomatic of a troubling political trend first noted by Walter Benjamin: "the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule," meaning that the norm has collapsed into the exceptional, thereby tempting atrocity and madness. I will discuss each objection in turn.

. . . but not now. I have to write it first. Stay tuned.

postcards from the (pacific) edge

Music: White Rose Movement: Kick With much delight I received this postcard from Lin-Lee and KKC all the way from Japan! They were visiting the Oba Hiroshi Memorial Museum. "This is a self-portrait of [the] cartoonist," says Lin-Lee. "His nose, his hair, and his cat reminded me of you!" said Karlyn. "All you need is a ruff and the hat of a Dutch [illegible]." Ok, this is all well and good, I say. I am quite fond of the Dutch, and especially their open embrace of heroin use and then free methadone when you're finished with that kick. But I have two cats, and clearly, this man is holding a dog. "Yes, I know there's a dog," says Karlyn. "but it's a cat in disguise—in honor of the year of the dog!"

Happy New Year!

And props to Benny Boop for turning me on to WRM. Wow!

invention: prepping publics

Music: Harold Budd: The Room I have actually managed to write this week, and am taking a quick break from writing today. Today my goal is to finish explaining the concept of sovereignty, and to figure out how best to do it, for an essay on War of the Worlds. My pickle is this: I have in mind, first, the audience of Rhetoric and Public Affairs, a largely conservative journal that I've been rejected from four times. I like the editor (who is fiercely ethical and very fair), and respect the readers and editorial board. Now, I'm using just a teensy bit of Agamben's State of Exception, which is quite complicated. To properly contextualize his work, I would have to discuss Foucault, biopolitics, and the critique of the sovereign; Schmitt; Walter Benjamin; and a host of other tendencies (e.g., does he abandon existential dialectics or embrace immanent modes of thinking . . . or both? [I think both are held in tension]). That audience will not go for it. So, I'm thinking, what if I sink a bunch of stuff in the footnotes, explain the sovereign first with Hobbes and then link to Schmitt and Agamben? I mean, my ugrad degree is in philosophy so I'm mildly versed in the basics of social contract philosophy and all that, but I cannot assume this is true of my (imagined) audience, can I? How much "teaching" do I do? Or do I just jump in, assume reader's are familiar with the debates/issues revolving the sovereign, and . . . .

See. I should stop going back and forth, write, and see what comes out, yes? I think I'll take that "let's see what comes out" approach.

As a teaser, here's the introduction to that essay. I've not got much more than this but a few paragraphs. Also, if any of my students are reading this blog, I have uploaded a scan of the original draft, so you can see the editing process (non-students: we're talking about writing for publication in class a bit).

Ok, here goes:

Prepping Publics: Staging the State of Exception in Spielberg's War of the Worlds

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.--Psalms 8:2

After learning that Manhattan has been besieged by large, Tripod-driving invaders from another world, Ray Ferrier, a single divorcee and presumably a rotten father played by Tom Cruise, loads his two visiting children into a stolen mini-van and races toward Boston to escape life-zapping heat rays. As the final draft of the shooting script of Stephen Spielberg's War of the Worlds details, approximately 31 minutes into the film, the not-so-subtle subtext comes out of the mouth of a babe:

. . . the kids begin SCREAMING, but it's hard to hear over the racing engine, the SCREECHING tires. Ray leans forward, trying like hell to see through the windshield, through the smoke that's now blanketing the block. THROUGH THE WINDSHEILD, we see he's reaching the end of the block, which is a T intersection. Directly ahead of him is a bank of row houses. As we [the spectators] look at them-their second floors burst into flames . . . . BACK IN THE CAR, Ray cuts the wheel to the left. Robbie turns and looks out the back window, gets just a glimpse of the top of the Tripod as it rises up over the rooftops behind them. ROBBIE [the teenage son]: WHAT IS IT? RACHEL [the eleven-year-old daughter]: "Is it the terrorists?!"

The decision to explicitly reference the events of September 11, 2001 was Spielberg's. In an interview with one of the two script writers, David Koepp explains that, owing to its theme of invasion, all iterations of the H.G. Well's story have "vast political implications": "In the late 1890s, it was about British imperialism; in the late 1930s, it was about the fear of Fascism; in the early 1950s, it was the Commies are coming to get us . . . ." Because spectators and critics would inevitably yoke the destruction of the film to the destruction of the World Trade Center, implies Koepp, "we just decided not to censor ourselves, because that's not realistic, that's not the world we live in." Says Koepp:

As for specific 9/11 references-like Dakota's [Fanning] character [Rachel] saying, "Is it the terrorists?" or when Tom [Cruise] is covered in ash-those weren't put in because of 9/11; they were put in because we all lived through 9/11. . . . In the first draft Dakota didn't have that line, but Steven said, "Wouldn't she think it's the terrorists?" And I said, "Well, yeah, but do we really want to evoke that, do we want to come out and say it?" And he said, "But she would, she's 11." And it's true, she would. So she did.

Spielberg's insistence that an innocent yet precocious child explicitly establish the relation between that bloodthirsty, exogenous evil from beyond and the staple enemy of our current contemporary, political discourse confounds the often printed sentiment that War of the Worlds is a "piece of perfectly realized, pure entertainment."iii Unquestionably, as the scriptwriters admit, War of the Worlds enacts a politics that extends beyond the screen. As Barbara Biesecker has persuasively argued of Saving Private Ryan, this politics bespeaks a nostalgic reclamation and resignification of World War II in contemporary discourse, a trend continued by the deliberate if awkwardly anachronistic, 1950s aesthetic of War of the Worlds. Biesecker argues that Spielberg's spectacles over the past decade have buttressed a well-worn "American" identity, forwarding a patriarchical, civil pedagogy of complacency as the answer to the anomie and chaos signified by "meticulously chronicled mass slaughter." Insofar as the "civic lesson" intoned by Saving Private Ryan in the wake of bloody spectacle assists in the "reconsolidation and naturalization of traditional logics and matrices of privilege," we should expect a similar, violence-then-lesson progression in War of the Worlds. In Spielberg's films, the event of filmic violence usually heralds a tutorial in civic or familial virtue.

Of course, ideological interpellation is rarely straightforward, and consequently we should be suspicious of the ostensible lesson offered by any popular text-from the bromides that conclude televised situation comedies to the Faustian injunctions of science fiction films. Not surprisingly, many critics were suspicious of the War of the Worlds, which was almost universally criticized for the implausible and unsatisfying moralizing that concludes the film. After a relentless parade of horrific chase scenes, "numbing portrayals of social collapse and chilling references to 9/11," the story is resolved with a paean to passionate parenting: "when it's time to protect his kids, Ray is a great dad." The film ends when Ray and his daughter are joyfully reunited with his son and ex-wife at the Boston home of the former in-laws. In part, this ending was panned because it is emotionally unfair: Spielberg asks audiences to open a would by surfacing the memories of the real trauma that concentrates U.S. political discourse, but fails to close it by rigorously keeping the narrative apolitical. As Stuart Klawans suggests, the rather cloying conclusion in Thanksgiving-style homecoming, particularly after excruciating "eruptions of violence, which in length and intensity surpass all expectation," points to a blind spot in Spielberg's vision. The director's refusal to see himself as the source of ecstatic violence without reason or political import, Klawans argues, "deserves our attention," because "this refusal of self-knowledge" is homologous to other "daily silences-the newscasts that don't reckon up the war dead, for example, or the conversations where people won't call incipient fascism by its name." The critic suggests that it is as if the filmmaker threw a violently spectacular temper tantrum with "vast political implications" that are abruptly abandoned in favor of teaching us that father knows best. This disjuncture or contradiction in both the narrative and the emotional experience of the spectator is a symptom of a deeper ideological labor.

In this essay I argue that the civil pedagogy of War of the Worlds is, in fact, that father knows best, but only insofar as the father is understood as the absent patriarchical sovereign--the strong, seemingly omnipotent political figure that fails to appear within the filmic frame. "If films are to a large extent public dreams," as Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz have argued, then War of the Worlds is a nightmare registering the fears and longings of a public besieged by "terrorists" less than five years ago. Although Spielberg intends an obvious lesson in paternal responsibility, I argue that in trying to answer the question, "what is a father?" via the trauma of 9/11, War of the Worlds ends up encouraging the spectator to yield to the figure of a dictator. Because of its relentless scenes of violence, few films in recent memory are as successful in creating a feeling of prolonged dread, fueling a profound desire for the fictional State to enter the scene and protect its citizenry. Within diegetic space of the film, however, the sovereign never arrives, and responsibility recoils to the family father to provide a sense of safety, however precarious. Within the larger, cultural context of contemporary political events, however, this fictional figure is metonymy for a real world, political sovereign who has the power to ignore the law as well as the power to protect us from an exogenous threat. In short, I argue War of the Worlds, however unwittingly, is a lesson in desiring fascism.

seduction theory, melanie klein style

Music: Turin Brakes: JackInABox

reparation

Music: Arab Strap: The Red Thread I have been reading the work of Melanie Klein, and work about the work of Melanie Klein, all day—in between phone calls and chat sessions, that beloved and bemoaned labor of love (and Klein is appropriate here, as there is some attempt to render and restore my relation to my mother and my girlfriend, in the same day, via the mediation of the gadget). I have only known Klein from the sound bashing she gets from Lacan, and so I was somewhat excited to read this material with "an open mind." I must admit it's fascinating reading, not only because her ideas are plausible (her vision of the traumatic and barren, somewhat Hobbsian state of nature that is infantile fantasy is as captivating as it is abhorrent, and abhorrent because it rings of truth), but because so much ideological work is being done through the vehicle of theory, presumably in the name of pragmatics. Klein, known for pioneering (along with her enemy Anna Freud) psychoanalytic work with children, also marshaled somewhat of a proto- or pre-feminist scholarly front against the boys club that was psychoanalysis in Vienna and Berlin—at the level of ideas, of course, but also at the level of writerly style

I don't know why I'm posting, because I don't have much to say yet—-I have to process this material. But I guess I'm just excited to learn this stuff, and cannot wait until class tomorrow to talk about it. Not that there is any danger in me becoming a Kleinian—I’m much too wed to the ontological dualism of Lacan, and I find Klein's essentialism bothersome. I guess it's just exciting to finally get a chance to read this stuff and get the "whole story," to read the stuff that I never got a chance to read in grad school because of this or that silly ideological prohibition. It's been over a year since I've taught a grad seminar, but this afternoon, as I was reading and writing notes and what not, I re-discovered why I love my job: learning is fun! Sounds cliché, but this is what I signed up for . . . new preps are a lot of work, granted, but if the payoff is a kind of satisfaction that I discovered something; my head now has new pieces of furniture. If I can somehow convey that excitement to the other seminarians, I think this is going to be an awesome and transformative class. I know that sounds all Pollyanna like, but it's the truth (to me).

I'm also thinking now that, by necessity, I'm going to have to teach a new prep every couple of years or I will lose this feeling and excitement about ideas. I can remember taking classes when it was obvious the teacher hadn't revised or revamped the material for many years. New preps are a lot of work, as I said, but they also give me a chance to take a class myself . . . I'm not done with this class and I'm already fantasizing about all the stuff I want to take/teach. I suppose I will have to wait until I get tenure before I teach my seminar on "Shit and the Western Anal Economy."

making good

Music: Judge Judy . . . well, now it's Judge Alex I resolved for the new year that I would visit all of the Blue Lodges in downtown and "move my letter" from my home lodge in Baton Rouge to the one that feels the best. I have visited with Neil Porter Lodge (all of them are cops or ex-cops; I didn't fit in as well there) and with the Austin 12 lodge (there were a lot of 30-somethings, which is good). Last night I visited with University Lodge, presumably so-named because it used to meet on the University of Texas campus. Technically, I can just show up at any stated meeting and get in with my dues card and the password and pass-grips; these days, however, it's such a rare occurrence that someone my age shows up at a Masonic meeting my dues card does the trick.

As a fraternity that is at least 200 years old, one would expect Masonry is not always "up with the times," and so I was not surprised to hear the secretary of the lodge tell me to "bring a lady-friend" for a special, Valentine's dinner. So I had a date last night! I brought my neighbor and friend Kay, who happens to be a lady, and we had a marvelous time. Kay got a rose, and we both scarfed up the free lasagna. We were entertained by magic tricks. Unfortunately, when it was time to go into the lodge meeting proper, I was informed that it was "men only." This was irritating and too old fashioned. In my much beloved and missed home lodge, when "lady-friends" or friends in general were invited to the lodge, the lodge was open to guests. The folks were nice, but I don't think I'll be joining this particular lodge. Regardless, we came home last night full and happy.

Speaking of happy, I picked up the new Cat Power album, The Greatest, on Tuesday, and I am so pleased! I have always liked Chan Marshall's work—but usually when I was drunk. It was such a bummer to listen to sober. The Greatest is "draggy," as my mother would say, but compared to her other albums one could say it is downright cheerful! The song writing is very strong, the lyrics, often biting, but overall the tone is hopeful. It feels at times like a much less Pollyanna Nora Jones, but with more of a funky-middle-class feel. I like the song "After it All" the best so far, punctuated as it is with gentle whistles. Three cheers for therapy and Prozac! If only Zwan sounded as good . . . .

POST-POST EDIT: Ok, so, I am feeling bad about mentioning Cat Power, who is now on an end cap in Target stores across the country, without mentioning the other albums I bought on Tuesday:

THE DEL MCCOURY BAND: the company we keep. This is one of the absolute best bluegrass/rock fusion (thought mostly bluegrass) out in the past year. My rule is: if you download more than three songs and listen to them constantly, then you must buy the album. It's an ethics thing I have about stuff on minor or small labels. The album is freakin' awesome, by the way.

A=HA: Analogue. I think it was David Terry who told me the new a-Ha album was the shit, and as a self-professed BIGGEST FAN EVER of synth-pop, I couldn't resist that endorsement. It's not domestically released, but, the import of Analogue is still rather cheap. This is a great pop album (it reminds me at times of the new Coldplay, and at others, of Indochine's Paradize album). Great, solid pop with catchy harmonies and smart pop lyrics. Why Madonna makes it big and real talent like these dudes do not is beyond me. I guess CRAP is shinier, even in sonata form (not that I don't appreciate crap; it's just a shame the chorus of songs like "Cosy Prisons" or "Analogoue" will never be heard by Americans).

andy rooney

Music: A-ha: Analogue A long day at the office, for vetting applications and writing letters; for teaching the rhetoric of alchemy, H.P. Blavatsky and the Urantia Book; for having lunch with mentors; for going to the library (and for discovering their having lost the Agamben book I wanted ); and for vetting more applications. After the office, I went to psychotherapy (which is usually very cheerful and not very painful, although I suspect one day my parents will have to come into it), then I jet down Congress to Ruta Maya (their coffee is absolutely divine, so I stocked up), and then I took in my healthy, one hour dose of Austin rush hour traffic (45 minutes to go six miles north of I-35).

I hate it when I go to the library for a book that nary a soul has expressed interest in for as many as five years, only to find that it is not on the shelf, nor in the distribution center. Scene: after looking in the shelves for fifteen minutes, then scoping the distribution area for another ten, a librarian approaches: "hmm, let's see." I hand her the print off from the card catalog. "Does it say that it's on the shelf?" The paper is a print off from the card catalog. It says in boldface the book is on the shelf. "Yes," I respond. "Hmm. Did you check the B 100 shelf for it?" she asked in a sincere way. "Yes m'am. I even checked the shelves on either side in case it was misshelved." She looked concerned. I was standing in the relevant section of the distribution shelving. "Well, did you check here?" she motioned to the shelf right next to me. I politely explained I had an appointment at two and had to leave. There's more to this story in respect to my encounter at the circulation desk, but even I bore of my complaining.

American Idol tonight was about the Austin auditions this summer that jammed traffic for a week near campus. The show was hilarious. Apparently it took the producers a while to realize the city motto is "Keep Austin Weird." It took a non-stop parade of creative singers, and then some devoted Austinites dressed as the living dead (with make-up) terrorizing the auditioning guppies wound around the Erwin center (an arena that resembles a nuclear reactor) for the AI peeps to figure out Austin's self-image is warped (I guess they have the learning curve of your typical android).

I am going to try to break the writer's block tomorrow. I wrote a few paragraphs on Tuesday. I will consider a couple of paragraphs tomorrow a success. My topic: Agamben and the state of exception. Today I've been reading Carl Schmitt. You know that you're reading Carl Schmitt when half the book is composed of a forward and introduction explaining (away?) his involvement with the Nazi party. I would not be reading Schmitt again (this time, Political Theology) were it not for the recent presidency. Didn't we see the SOVEREIGN thrust and throb in last night's address? I urge everyone to read Schmitt and Agamben. Unless you have heart trouble, in which case, stick to Walt Disney movies.

Bah humbug. Three of the eggs in my new carton were cracked. Grrr. [sound of farting]

kill 'em all, or, blue-balls for Jesus!

Music: Mansun Kleptomania It was an amazing week for teaching the rhetoric of religion. In class this week we are reading Plato's Phaedrus dialogue, which concerns the madness of love. In the dialogue Socrates flirts with that famous teen hottie Phaedrus, and offers up a thinly veiled allegory of the wings of one's soul as a penis getting erect and "throbbing" at the sight of beauty (eros). The moral of the story Socrates weaves, however, is that erotic love is merely the mimetic inferior of the transcendent love of The Good/God, agape. That's right, Socrates bascially proclaims, "blue-balls for Deity!"

Just as the class was getting to the key allegorical passage of climax on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI releases his first encyclical, Deus Cartias Est, in which he laments that erotic love has eclipsed philia and agape the world over, and recommends a return to the ancient Greek health craze of enkrateia, known in our times as being "Master of One's Domain" thanks to Jerry Seinfeld. The newest papal discourse on "blue-balls for Jesus" makes for an excellent class discussion about the persistence of the human condition and the fantasies that orbit death, and provides a very nice justification (I think) for the relevance of studying ancient philosophy. I would also argue that the Pope's message is potentially a positive one--especially all the stuff he says about charity--were it not the case that the priestly caste he shepherds is incapable of following the example of Socrates, mixing an ancient eros with a contemporary philia that has little to do with loving one's neighbor or community charity.

Speaking of love, yesterday Oprah Winfrey spanked James Frey for lying to her and millions of readers in his largely fictional memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Following a Smokinggun.com expose, Frey appeared on Larry King Live and Oprah phoned in to defend the man and his book, arguing that both were models of "redemption" that helped many people. We could make the same argument about the Catholic Church (sorry Jeezy), of course. Nevertheless, after a fury of bad press and countless letters Oprah decided to change her tune and skewered Frey on her program (it was uncomfortable to watch . . . the man can fabricate a good story but he cannot stand up for himself). Platonic righteousness for "the Truth" was displayed for all, as Oprah followed the "redemption" script, crucifying herself for misleading millions and making Frey into a national Judas. Again, Oprah retreats to the individualism of redemption in lock-step with the therapeutic fantasy that localizes all goods and ills in the bosom of the singular individual: "I feel that you conned us all." I was delighted to see Oprah's embarrassment, and the only thing that keeps me from calling for her demise a second time in the blogosphere is that she stayed mad and did not venture forth at the end with the love of forgiveness. No agape here! Just unbridled eros, the violence of redemption made so starkly plain by Mel Gibson in The Passion of the Christ.

You know, at least when Plato writes about eros and the relation between sexual intercourse and agape (that is, one can achieve a tantric-style agape at the moment of climax, remembering, albeit fleetingly, the face of God), he doesn't try to repress the violence of ecstatic mania (nor does Jane's Addiction, you know, "Sex is Violent!"). Of course, we mean violence here as a metaphor for the death drive, not necessarily killing people. The problem with the Pope's encyclical is that it writes out the violence of love altogether, the hallmark of the Church's two-hundred year retreat from true agape. I mean, c'mon: "God is Love" was oft heard during the heyday of the Inquisitions, was it not? Nevertheless, at the risk of tempting the fallacious "repressive hypothesis," as Foucault has termed it, how else does one explain Oprah's public evisceration of Frey, or child abuse scandals, or Gibson's Jesus porno?

As I type this Mansun's ill-fated song (cause it never got released on the fourth album that never was) "Cancer" is playing and the chorus goes, "I’m emotionally raped by Jesus, I'm emotionally raped by Jesus now/but I'm still here/yes somehow I'm still here . . . ." Mansun was one of the best bands of the last decade; it's a pity no one stateside knows of them, and that the band has dissovled. Gosh, I LOVE this band!

Freud's mourning manual

Music: Athlete: Tourist I regret that with new courses and one new seminar prep I am feeling the crunch for time; blogger energy is getting shunted into new places, and now that all that holiday time has been spent, entries are likely to dwindle. On tap this week, aside from teaching: two more job candidates to question, wine, and dine; editing a thesis (it's on the way Rog!); and new prepping for a manuscript I wanted to finish writing (the stuff on Agamben and War of the Worlds). In lieu of something new, I'll post a rehash, part of my lecture from yesterday that opened "Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric."

Freud said that his The Interpretation of Dreams was his most inspired and important work, comparing its writing to Jacob's tussle with an angel while confiding to a friend, admitting on some level that the angel may in fact have been the heavenly outlier. At the age of 44, Freud had met one professional failure after the next. He longed for recognition. He had delayed The Interpretation for a year so that it would be published in 1900, thinking that the book was going to make an impact--a turn-of-the-century kind of impact.

Although acclaim would eventually come during his lifetime, in the initial years after Freud published the study it went unnoticed. Freud took this seeming failure personally, for as Bateman and Holmes point out, Freud wrote the Interpretation of Dreams as he was mourning his father's dying, his father's death. Hence the landmark document of psychoanalysis is not so much about sex as it is death. The Interpretation is a manual for mourning. And if we will maintain Freud's dream book is a manual for mourning, then we are concerned with memory and forgetting. Insofar as psychoanalysis is dead, or insofar as its death always seems to be coming, and insofar we could argue that that rhetorical studies suffers from a kind of amnesia--a willful forgetting and repression of the Freudian idiom--then it is entirely fitting that we begin the course in mourning.

Let us begin at the ending of Freud's "dream book," and more specifically, with the dream of the burning child. Interestingly, Freud chooses to open his closing chapter with mourning dream (p. 547; Strachey trans.):

Among the dreams that have been reported to me by other people, there is one which has special claims upon our [this would be the "royal" our] attention at this point. It was told to me by a woman patient who herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is unknown to me [here we should interject that Freud is speaking of adolescent omnipotence--to be born without parents; his father is dying]. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to re-dream it, that is, to repeat some of the elements in a dream of her own, so that, by taking it over in this way, she might express her agreement with it on one particular point. The preliminaries to this model dream were as follows. A father had been watching beside his child's sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room which his child's body was laid out, with tall candles standing around it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours' sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm, and whispered to him reproachfully: 'Father, don't you see I'm burning?' He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child's dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.

Freud then moves on to say that such a dream is overdetermined and poses no difficulty of interpretation; it is a model example of how external sensation is incorporated into a reality of the interior. The dream also importantly marks Freud's transition from the "affect-trauma" model of the psyche--ambitiously described in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" essay--to the so-called "primary topography," or Freud's transition from the influence of external reality to the increasing importance of fantasy.

Yet, given the mournful and touching tone of the dream, its placement in Freud's book of dreams should alert us to an obvious paternal dynamic here about one's origins: part of who you are, or who I am, concerns parental origin. "Father, don't you see I'm burning?" is the displaced plea for recognition (pure Kojeve), the very same recognition Freud longed for his dream book and for himself; that the subtextual unconscious here is Freud and his Status as Father and Child is made more obvious that most readers assume the burning child is, in fact, "the burning boy" (the original German is "child"). Most importantly, however, is that the burning child visits the father to reproach him. What the father-dreamer knows is that the child is in fact dead; the teaching of this dream is the source of Freud's own neurosis: the child does not know she is dead; all she knows is that she is burning, that we have a ghostly apparition of adolescent agressivity.

The dead subject who does not know that she is dead is a recurring theme in Freud's work, and perhaps no one has stressed this more than Lacan, who employs the figure to demonstrate the relationship of the subject to the signifier (we'll get to that in about six weeks). Turn with me if you will to another classic, Freud's "Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning," where Freud reverses the role of father and son, stressing now the profound importance of phantasy to waking life (p. 305, number 8):

Suppose, for instance, that one is trying to solve a dream such as this. A man who had once nursed his father through a long and painful mortal illness told me that in the months following his father's death he had repeatedly dreamt that his father was alive once more and that he was talking to him in his usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had really died, only without knowing it.

The dreamer feels guilty for wanting his father to die, muses Freud, as if to disown the death wish. The burning boy has become the burning father; in either case, the dreaming subject teaches us not so much how to mourn the death of love objects, but how to mourn our own deaths. The anxiety Freud's dream book raises is anxiety about death, and more to the point, the horrifying possibility that we are already dead.

Of course, this is a familiar cultural fantasy that is yoked, repeatedly, to fathers, sons, and monstrosity (and what follows will therefore be important to those of you who elect to take the companion seminar in the fall on haunting, which begins on the theme of "women left to themselves"). A good case is M. Night Shyamalan's film The Sixth Sense, which is about a boy, Cole Sear (pun intended, har har), who sees dead people. In the final scene of the film dubbed "Letting Go," Dr. Malcolm Crowe, not coincidentally a child psychologist, gradually begins to realize his own death [show clip].

The realization begins, of course, when he happens upon his wife sleeping. As with the original telling of the burning child dream, the roles only get reversed in the presence of woman, who is the source of truth (this is a metaphor well worn by Nietzsche and something we'll encounter again with Kristeva and Irigaray). In her sleep--that is, in the dream state--she questions the father in a reproachful tone: "Why Malcolm? Why did you leave me?" The ghost is called to account for himself, as if being interpellated by the living, but now we are in his dream. In the film, as with Freud's dream book, the primary identification is with the good doctor, but unlike Freud, this dreamer is revealed to be a ghost--he understand that he is fundamentally a void made meaningful by fantasy. "I see people. They don't know that they're dead," says the boy. When the doctor asks him when he sees dead people, the child responds, "All the time. They're everywhere. They only see what they want to see." So we should ask, in the Zizekian stylistic, "Isn't this Freud's fundamental teaching?" All of us are fundamentally empty, filled up with cultural scripts and narrative and meaning--with all those fantasies of waking life. And isn't the unfolding of the entire film akin to the dream work, the condensation and displacement of the painful and brutal truth that opens the film . . . a scene, incidentally, that the spectator conveniently and perfectly forgets until the end of the film, when the Dr. properly interprets all the pieces of this rebus? Let us not forget that the Dr. Crowes' death was at the hands of suicidal boy returned to punish the father for not seeing that he was burning up on the inside. Mourning always seems to entail a degree of guilt, and death, a punishment.

I have opened the class with a meditation on The Interpretation of Dreams as a manual for mourning, and with The Sixth Sense as an allegory for dream interpretation, in order to underscore a series of common themes that will run throughout the course. They reduce to three:

1. The subject is dead. That is to say, one of the many teachings of psychoanalysis is that there is no real or essential you, or rather, you are only the sum of your stories. Its ethic is consequently and fundamentally a mournful one.

2. Psychoanalysis has a father. This is why it is always being killed off. Freud even had a name for it: the allegory of the primal horde. As a corollary, mother is always the source of truth and the object of barter.

3. Interpretation is suspicious, or, rhetoric is not to be trusted. Although there are no accidents when we speak of the unconscious, nothing ever means what it seems. Rhetorical studies, in this respect, does not know that it is dead, invested as it is in the conscience of the manifest and the wholly conscious.