Tár

Tár is an ambivalent film about the dying of Western cultural institutions that run on abuse. We don’t know much about the victims, and my feelings about the protagonist, who has created a toxic environment, changed with each scene. My feelings are hard to define, much like the theory of music provided within the film: Music gets us to feel the undefinable. Whatever I think about the representation of the abuser is bracketed by the self-reflexive way the film entices me to mourn complex art.

It's yet another representation of abuse that could have just as well taken place in the humanities academy, which is also dying.

Writing in 2023

It's taken me a long time to return. My return first entailed a realization that my addictive social media consumption and time spent in academic work over the past decade have taken me off track. Then came a re-assessment of previous tracks and a new appreciation of my juvenile self, as problematic as she was. 

I write for myself, I decided at some point. I've always felt uncomfortable being read by a particular audience of people who need something in particular from what they are reading. I prefer a random audience. Academic writings are only read carefully by reviewers and other people whose job it is to find a way to subtly misunderstand in order to disagree or to subtly disagree in order to misunderstand. Academic writing is the opposite of what I want to spend my time doing.

Besides all of this, writing is dying. In the next few years, we teachers of writing will convert ourselves into AI platform specialists. Perhaps it is the darkness of mid-January in Northern Germany getting to me, but so many of the practices I have trained for these past few decades seem to be waning. So I might as well do what I want. 

I write for myself, but I'm happy to have random people listening in.

Returning

I began writing blog posts in the dawn of the 2000s. A few years later, we would refer to this block of time as “the Bush years.” The very concept of ‘we’ — as well as the notion that this was a shocking period of time — underwent a major shake-up some time ago. This period is now nearly two decades ago. I find myself looking back, as a thinker and a writer, and I wonder where my thinking and writing have gone. These practices mostly went to academic publications, which very few read. (Rather, we academics all too often skim in order to use, a tendency that precludes understanding and dialogue altogether.) My intellectual energy also disappeared into social media investments, to which I no longer feel particularly committed. The time has come for a return to public writing.

The photos below were taken in one of my favorite spots in the Alps. I went there today to look for one of my favorite trees, pictured here in this picture from several years ago. 

I couldn’t find that tree. I found others, though.

You’re in the forest and suddenly you pop out onto a clearing and it almost always changes your mood. The difference is so striking. A returning.

Resolutions, 2014

Having people in my life who live in the Alps, I'm wonderfully blessed to be able spend a significant amount of time outdoors, especially along the Rhein. I mostly go jogging, one of my pastimes in general. Being out in the fresh air, between the mountains and the river, I often find myself in my clearest states of mind. From the perspective a truly relaxed and contented self, I make plans and resolutions that are becoming of what I feel at the time is my true or real self.

And then I return from my run and become re-enculturated. That is to say, the normal pulls and stresses of life become visible and palpable again, and what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind" returns. My resolutions fade into the background of all of the tasks and worries that are a part of my life when I'm not along the banks of the Rhein. I see my intention fading as I simultaneously become busy with the next thing. It is a terrifying feeling -- like I would imagine someone who is gradually losing his or her memory to feel.

This pattern resembles what we all do every New Year when we make a resolution. The turning over of the calendar is the mental space we all look for in the hustle and bustle of daily life. And then the first day of January comes, and most of us can't keep the monkey mind in check.

One hears the hum of cynicism every year: "Why bother making resolutions? -- Everyone knows they can't be kept." This sort of cynicism is tempting for me. I don't like to fail. I've learned to save face -- it's part of the professionalization process, after all. But this year I resolve to fail in my resolution better than the years before. The moment I start to fail, I want to take the time to ask myself: In what direction am I headed and why? What was it about my resolution that exposes the ideal I have as a fiction rather than something real? Forgiving myself for not living up to my ideal will be the basis for the next big turn.

In obeying the doctrines of my ideal self, I can only learn to fail better. (The notion that I should write on this problem came to me during a run months ago. I got around to it eventually.)

‘National Guarantees’ Redux

Original Post

This post reflects a young and immature mind, one reaching out but one unsure of audience (and one -- forgivably -- not accustomed to the notion of instantaneous publication). At the heart of the crass political observations and the sombre tone, however, is a real concern. This 2004 post exposes something that should be brought to light...

That day in your youth when you realize that happiness is not all it seems. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of it implies that it's an imperative to have the right brain chemicals. It's your duty to fix yourself, to do justice to the national destiny. And if you're not feeling it, it's time to buy the right products, to make the necessary corrections. There are doctors for this, and 24-hour shopping.

The one way to ensure your unhappiness is to believe in being happy at all costs. The only way out is to allow yourself a nice patch of melancholy from time to time. To find a way to enjoy it, to harness its meaningful negativity in preparation for the day when you have the energy to use it properly. To stop believing in the necessity of correction. To be at home in one's failures and imperfections.

My hope is that, here and elsewhere, I can only learn to fail better.

Powers 2

Where does one even begin? Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) is a masterpiece on so many levels. But it eludes the literary critic, the musicologist, and the scientist alike. And that's kind of the point. It is the one-culture text of one-culture texts. Who reads it then? Who translates? (That's kind of the point.)

The literary scholar reads:
"The point of every translation -- the years spent in science, away from art history, wrapped in the library, trapped in this paragraph -- is suddenly one and the same.
     Translation, hunger for porting over, is not about bringing Shakespeare into Bantu. It is about bringing Bantu into Shakespeare. To show what else, other than homegrown sentences, a language might be able to say. The aim is not to extend the source but to widen the target, to embrace more than was possible before. After a successful decoding, after hitting upon the right solution -- however temporary, tentative, replaceable, and local -- the two extended, enhanced languages (Shakespeare changes forever too, analogies adapting to the African plains) form a triangulating sextant pointing back to the height of the ruined tower, steering limited idiom toward a place where knowledge goes without saying" (491).

The musicologist reads:
"Sound, he pronounced, always means more than it says. The parts only start to explain the thing waiting to spring out of them. So it is in every organized hive. Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go. Its contours deliver themselves, bent from the chance of experience. They live for a minute in ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a uniform void that says nothing, carries no knowledge, far less information. The silence they fall back into, the nothing that they contrast with, is what notes make, for a measure, audible. [...]
     But notes passed through a transforming key: nothing is what it is except in where, when, and how it goes about unfolding" (571).

The scientist reads:
"The inert shape of this enzyme has a binding site that fits substance A. The active shape has a site matching B as well as materials C and D that it transforms into product E. If A grabs the molecule first, it locks it into inert shape, eliminating those sites that accept the catalyzable materials. The enzyme is switched off, C and D can't bind, and the manufacture of E stops. But if B first binds to the enzyme in active form, it locks the molecule into shape with C and D's sites intact. The faucet is held open; the enzyme joins C and D into E so long as supplies of C and D exist.
     Ressler's magic of Boolean circuitry begins to emerge. The presence of A inhibits the manufacture of E; B promotes it. None of the compounds reacts with the enzyme itself; the machine remains unchanged except for switching on and off, always capable of switching back if the splint-substances detach. Even wilder: the inhibitors, promoters, and inputs, binding to independent sites, need have nothing to do with one another. A, B, C, D, and E can be anything at all. In theory, any chemical can be made to inhibit or promote the degradation of any other. The effect can even be nonlinear; multiple binding sites on an enzyme could cause the small amounts of compound to have enormous effects on the synthesis of others" (395).

As a literary scholar, I am compelled to start reading a textbook on Molecular Biology. And I've been listening to J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations" all day.

0111011101100101001000000110000101110010011001010010000001101111011011100110010100100000011000110111010101101100011101000111010101110010011001010010000001101111011001100010000001100011011011110110010001101001011011100110011100100000011000010110111001100100001000000110010001100101011000110110111101100100011010010110111001100111

And, it's a love story.

Powers, Richard. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

‘Modernism and Recent Politics’ Redux

Original Post

In my early twenties, it came as a surprise to me that people acted contrarily to their interests. I hadn't read Gramsci and learned about the concept of hegemony. I hadn't considered that my upbringing had taken place in a time of great wealth for America and that what had happened beginning in the early 2000s was the rule and not the exception.

It has been difficult for some of us born in middle-class families in the 70s and 80s. There was an unquestioned notion that hard work amounted to something. That prosperity was available for all. These notions are almost impossible for us to let go of, and this perhaps explains why the modernist nostalgia for the center persists in my writing even today.

But upon reflection, I find that the center continually renews its disappearance into the distant past. In the present perfect: the center hasn't held.

Powers 1

I discovered Richard Powers only recently. The intellectual division of labor required for graduate school had kept me away -- I was a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature; he is a contemporary American novelist. But his various iterations of the Two Cultures* are partially responsible for my most recent project and my thinking in general.

More than anyone, he articulates the places where the boundary between the natural sciences and the humanities dissolves. Here is one version of this from The Gold Bug Variations (1991), which is (among many other things) about a molecular biologist on the brink of decoding the human genome. This is one of many passages I marked:

     "[Ulrich] is under the spell of physics, where the pursuit of fundamentals pares back a mass of data to simple, elegant expressions. It seems safe to assume that cellular mechanisms, carded back to their core, are also driven by symmetry. But it's not safe; safety and life science are incommensurate. That one can derive twenty from sixty-four with pretty, reciprocal twists may be nature's sheer perversity.

     Botkin lowers herself into the line of fire. 'Grammars are not usually so clean.' Her cheeks contract bittersweetly: don't we always mean more than we say? Why not the we within us?" (444).

In several places in this novel, he draws a parallel between fundamental particles and natural human language. Information is simultaneously material and ideal. However, through the focalization of his scientist-characters, one sometimes loses one's grasp of which things are material and which things are ideal -- sometimes his prose reads downright Deleuzean. But he doesn't come from that tradition: his task is always to get into the mind of the scientist on the threshold of understanding. In other words, Powers tries to speak from the position of science even the despite the fact that he is a novelist by trade.

Powers's erudition is breathtaking, but what he does is to take the heaps of "information" he has accumulated and to turn it into "knowledge" (a binary that he himself uses). What is the good of decoding the mysteries of human life if we don't reflect on where we are going and why? Do we, in other words, really believe that "information" by itself carries with it the ethical or pragmatic imperatives necessary for the future? After all, our genome doesn't seem to behave according to this logic. 

*When I capitalize the term 'Two Cultures,' I'm using it to refer explicitly to the science/humanities split.

Powers, Richard. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

'Politics' Redux

Original Post and its Follow-Up

In 2004, I was steeped in French post-structuralism. Like all young people steeped in French post-structuralism, I didn't use it as an attempt to communicate. Rather, it was an attempt to alienate. I wanted to alienate myself from a certain public that I had grown weary of communicating with. I wanted to find a new community.

In fact, I was obsessed with finding a new community at the time. I thought if I got into the right PhD program or found the right friends, the anxiety would go away. At the time, I felt that the world was headed off in the wrong direction. Time was running out -- we needed to figure out what had miscarried. The anxiety came from a feeling that no one took this seriously.

In 2004, this insight was very new to me. I think all young people who read lots of books go through this phase. But often there is a great transformation. The line that progress is inevitable and that democracy and science are its security gets exposed as a fraud. When one matures, the notion of the fraud gets exposed as a fraud. There has been progress for some people. Science and democracy have been its security. The mature mind discovers that the notion of universal or automated progress is the problem. There is still so much work to do.

There are four communicating and mis-communicating cultures here: 1) those who I was trying to alienate myself from, who have lost the ability to distinguish news from entertainment, who have no desire to work on problems, 2) those who haven't gone through this transition yet, 3) those who have gone through the transition but have lost faith in projects, 4) and those who have gone through the transition and still have the energy to write and think, to do the work.

I was writing from the perspective of the second public. Without the transition, one is left in the solipsistic nihilism that (bad readings of) post-structuralism offers. Ironically, what also accompanies this transition is also a more sophisticated reading of what was at stake in the post-structuralist project.

Making Exchange Possible

Those of us who resist Marxian dialectics think that ideal concepts don't physically change the world. How about the concept of the "self"?

Here, Rodolphe Gasché shows how Mauss's description of circular exchange (of the "gift") requires a concept of a self that is able to imagine property alienated from it at the outset.

"The alienation of the self is fictive, since the ego that enters into the exchange believes himself to be outside with respect to the exchange, believes himself to be an irreducible plenitude by virtue of the occultation of the originary alienation, which causes him to be always already caught up in the exchange and which is added to the alienation as a repetition of originary loss. [...] The fiction of the self would be, at this level, the general standard that makes equivalents possible, a standard, however, that would still no have the abstract character of the value form of money but which is still rich in its effigy, in the imprint of the ego."

Reading through C.B. MacPherson's critique of Hobbes lately, I was struck by the way that the former shows how the latter's philosophy depends on a concept of market possessivism before it develops historically. I wonder if the very concept of self entails a market of sorts, insofar as it establishes equivalents through the process of alienation. To think about the development of capitalism, then, we might ask: what is the historical difference between the self and the individual?