Ghost in the Wire

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The convention for RSA's 2006 conference, which will be held in Memphis near the end of May, is now available online. For those in the academic blogosphere who will be attending, I look forward to seeing you in person rather than in css. For those in the area who find themselves generally bored and looking for entertainment, feel free to drop by and watch us rhetoric geeks get our geek on. One minor programming note: I was going to give a paper about Zizek and politics, one that focused on the issue of Iranian nuclear acquisition and was, shall we say, rather mocking of Zizek's In These Times editorial "Give Iranian Nukes a Chance" and that attempted to link his particularly impoverished understanding of nuclear politics to his rather limited appreciation for rhetorical agency. I'm no longer going to do so. For those who have followed my increasing annoyance with Zizek, you will understand when I say that I have no desire to beat that particularly injured horse in a public academic setting. To do so would be, I fear, Holbo-esque, and I just don't want to play that game. So instead, I'll be doing a piece about the "genetic privilege" of psychoanalysis within rhetorical criticism, one that I think makes a much more substantive contribution (in that it attempts to place a fairly heavy qualification on the critical utility of psychoanalysis within rhetorical study). It is titled "The Thing is that Ill-named Sign."

Hear ye, hear ye! I'm hoping to collect stories of the postmodern, you know the whacky realm of fun wherein critics reflect on, well, how inspirational/horrible/new are our postmodern environments. Inspired by Craig, I have decided to list some of my favorite pomo moments:

• "Look, a potlatch!" This is a perennial favorite among the pomo friendly critic, who sees in some artifact or event a collection of random semi-related elements and declares, as if these sorts of things have never been seen before, that whatever this collection is, it certainly looks a lot like parataxis/and...and...and/potlatch, etc. Doesn't matter if we're talking about David Lynch or Headline News; it's all potlatch to me.
• "Why? Why? Why?" Far from being a series of questions I may soon expect from my daughter (she's currently just over four months, so she's not trying to answer any basic questions about reality or human behavior just yet), these witty and pointed interrogatives are designed to show that even pomo types really believe in something, and are therefore not postmodern. These questions work best when accompanied by a smug "I've got you now!" smile and a handlebar mustache.
• "Postmodernism killed the Left." This one's pretty sweet, and goes a little something like this. Republicans ignore reality and could care less about facts. Not caring about facts and reality is basically postmodernism. Ergo, the right is the real flag-bearers of the postmodern, while real leftists are marginalized by the pomo dismissal of all really real reality. So answer me this, pomo-types: why do you hate America (or other country of choice)?
• "Nuance is so new historicism." This one takes reduction into overdrive, and usually surfaces when folks want to say clever things like "thanks to postmodernism, we know that the myth of a unitary subject was indeed a myth (see Derrida, 1967; Baudrillard, 1977; Foucault, 1980; Deleuze and Guattari, 1983)." Wherein the point is that all pomo types (who of course all recoil at being called postmodernists) all say the very same thing, and do so because they don't want to confuse their readers into thinking complexity is good.

Well, that's just a partial list, to be sure, but I'm sure you fine pomo types out there have a few of your own you want to share. We'll assemble a multiplicity of interweaving accounts that form an intersubjective potlatch of this "concept" called "postmodernism." Maybe then we can work on the same project as Blanchot and Bataille and Baudrillard and Caputo and Critchley and Deleuze and Derrida and Foucault and Lacan and Nancy and Ronell and Zizek and everyone else...

Sparked by a post by Scott Kaufman (which was prompted by a lecture he was about to give on the sexiness of historicism), I have been once more thinking about questions of temporality, specifically the relationship between temporality and representation.

In many ways, the question of temporality is of preeminent concern for a number of thinkers who, nevertheless, get more screen time for their exploration of other topoi. Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida - to name just one group of interlocutors - have all written extensively about the question of time, though surprisingly little attention has been given to this particular theme in light of each thinker's prolific writings on subjects of more obvious and explicit importance. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that there's something here, something to this theme that begs for explanation and expansion, especially if we as critics have any plan on accounting for our own interprative practices.

So let me return to Scott's discussion, in which he proposes three functional moments in the history of the text: its moment of composition, its moment of reception, and its moment of representation. For me the first two moments share a temporal modality, in that the moments of composition and reception involve an agency peripheral to and constituted by the text, an agency that engages in something like an act (of writing or reading). And we can recognize this "agency of the act" without too much definitional wrangling; sure composition might be a hard nut to crack, motivations are notoriously difficult to map, reception is often predicated upon biases that may not be obvious even to the receiver, and so on and so forth. But these variables and ambiguities are not questions of temporality. In other words, these are not questions about the quality of experience of the time at work in composition and reception, but are instead questions about how the "agency of act" occurs within a particular space and time.

But representation strikes me as a different temporal beast entirely.

V for Vendetta is more than simply surprisingly good - it's a brilliantly conceived and executed commentary on the sort of ontological and ethical responses available to individuals who realize they now reside in a fascist state of their own making. The movie does endorse terrorism, but the endorsement is complicated, since the terrorism is carefully crafted for symbolic effect, with only minimal related death dished out along the way, and even these deaths appear to be reserved for evil-doers or a few members of the police force whose "legitimate violence" keeps the fascist extremists in power. I would love to discuss it further, and I might soon, but I want to give it a week or so for folks to see it before I start reviews or comments predicated on plot spoilers, but let me provide a dorky, academic tease: V for Vendetta offers one of the best pop culture demonstrations of the difference between biopolitics and a "form of life" that exceeds biopolitics. There are plenty of brilliant and well-crafted scenes in the movie, but of all of them, no bit of dialogue is as profound as the one that runs through and follows the torture of Evey (Natalie Portman), which touches on the intangible inch, the smallest of undecidables, that ill-named thing that exceeds the desire for and experience of survival.

Here's a slightly modified opening from a paper I'm preparing for submission. As always, I'm open to thoughts or comments about style or substance, though of course, the bulk of the argument is still sitting on my hard drive. Here we go:

Six short months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Big Easy and laid waste to miles and miles of coastal development, one would be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the hurricane had never come, or perhaps that now, thanks to a feverish effort in the intervening months, the damage it wrought had been fixed, lives renewed, and New Orleans restored. One would be wrong, but one could be forgiven for being so misinformed. After vows of journalistic vengeance and a cornucopia of politicians' promises, after a flurry of live, on-the-ground reporting, Katrina and its aftermath have all but vanished from the major airwaves. FEMA funds have gone missing, trailer parks have become makeshift cities, and politicians have geared for silent running. Out of sight, out of mind.

And yet, “Katrina” still means something. Katrina has become a condensation symbol, an ideograph, a signifier of an event that came and went and then was an event no longer. As the television screens overflowed with the suffering of those “left behind,” progressives hoped for – perhaps even believed – that a new age was coming, a rebirth of the Great Society or the New Deal, one that would confront this now-visible abject population, those people who comprise the urban underclass that keeps America's cities running for those more fortunate than themselves. Of course, this dream was a pipe dream, perhaps predictably so. No major movement has materialized, and as of this moment, the possible advent of such a movement seems remarkably unlikely.

And yet, Katrina did initiate a second movement, one that I believe pushed us in a direction at odds with this hope for a responsive and even democratic governance. Instead of a government and a politics that would take unto itself the task of confronting the harsh, intersectional realities of race and class and urbanity, we instead witnessed in Katrina the ease with which the abject can be converted from a progressive spark into fuel for a far more fascist practice of government. It is this conversion that this essay hopes to explore.

I don't usually spend much time highlighting the lists of links that sit on the far right of this page, but as I've recently been updating those lists, I thought that I should say, happily, that it's an impressive collection of particularly good, though of course, decidedly academically dorky, people and places. If some of the links seem unfamiliar to you, I hope you'll take some time to check them out. Alternately, if you have suggestions for further reading or rolling on my part, I'm more than willing to listen.

Jodi Dean asks a pretty hefty question:

What kind of politics are possible in worlds of immediate images? Is language a necessary condition of democracy and if so in what way? ... For me, the matter is one of the conditions of possibility: I can't see in the current conjuncture, in communicative capitalism, conditions that could render democracy viable.

These are big questions, and an equally sweeping, if depressing, initial conclusion. But I think there's reason for hope, or much better, reason to believe that the crisis that we are currently undergoing in terms of publicness, democracy, and the definition of politics offers a space for thinking and for intervening that may come to alter the rest of the terrain. As such, I think two questions above are not necessarily easily conjoined, for a few reasons.