blah-feme

fragments and death... towards late bloging

To write in fragments: this is the mode du jour of the late blog style. It is a hysterical, overwrought and supercharged style, symptomatic of the anxiety that attends anything in its late phase. The late style stinks of death, wreaks of an institution in terminal decay, but also holding that end off, keeping it all alive with a supreme effort of will, a willfulness that is written across every prosaic spasm; the late modality, then, is a sysyphian modality.

My friends recently gave a beautiful and challenging talk at my university about the late and posthumous voice. What strikes me in this juxtaposition (late and posthumous) is just how unstable the juxtaposition is, and therefore how intriguing, how gloriously productive. Italian Germanist Massimo Cacciari's  Dallo Steinhof, translated into English as Posthumous People,  opens with Nietzsche’s famous Maxim: ‘It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!’  Nietzsche’s textual self-projection into an abstracted reader-reception after his death touches on a ubiquitous process that had been under way in the Hapsburg lands since the 1850s and which continue right into our own predicament of the late modern – the careful reorganization of education around homogenized standards of reading and an immersion of students into and out of tradition: a kind of gentle dipping motion, like sheep in need of a good barrier against the pests and diseases of the vernacular.  Cacciari’s complex but beautiful account of the intellectual and artistic world of fin-de-siècle Vienna points in essence to the observation, metaphorically cast from the Steinhof (a hill above the metropolis on which stands the church of Sankt Leopold designed by Otto Wagner), that tradition and innovation are here ranged against each other, in productive but deadly conflict:

The symmetrical, repetitive rhythm is accentuated from the outside by a revetment of thin marble blocks. The iron clamps and bolts that keep them in place, rimmed with copper leaf borders, give a sense of motion to these walls, yet without any monumental emphasis and without any concession to ornament. Inside, the building’s perfect measure of basic forms is joined, without contrast, by the multicoloured clarity of light that streams through the stained glass windows. Here is the meeting, never realised so well, of the principles of tradition and quotation on the one hand and the Nervenleben [vitality] of the Secession Movement’s images and colour on the other.

In these two juxtapositions (late and posthumous and tradition and innovation), which refuse absolutely to coincide or resonate with each other, we can detect something of what seems to be at stake in the blogging moment (and it is a moment: this too will pass), a provocative and yet utterly hopeless questioning of the extent to which speaking and writing might have an intimate connection.

I do no want to emblamatize the writing/speaking binarism or link the two poles to a simple presence/absence oscillation. It is better, it seems to me, to think of medialities, the materializations that each allows and forbids: when one dose this, their relation is not binaristic, but differentiated along a line of medial fields (channels, ruts, dikes) and speaking and writing are close, very close, but not structurally summative, not able to grasp the full complexity of the late modern imagination of what it is possible to mean.

The late  and posthumous voices are thus fragments, parcels of symbolic material hat have broken off and  set adrift in a free from reign of  terror, of joy, of agony.

This is the logic of the fragment: to run free in chains, to play in strict discipline, to tarry and to leave, to conjure and to bury.

Late indeed; posthumous, certainly.

the political economy of sickness

I am sick. I have been now for several days and I do mean sick... (abdominal pain, vomitting - you get the picture)

I tell you this not for the usual blog-tick reasons (i.e. as if I wanted to share or unload or tell you all about me, me, me). That's part of it, of course – feeling sorry for oneself can be its own kind of delicious, even when it seems to be too overwhelming to get out of bed in the morning. No, the main purpose of my writing here and now is to try to make sense of something I've hinted at before and something that is beginning to really dig in for me – the cultural work of infirmity, or, perhaps more precisely, the political economy of sickness.

This week was going to be a crunch week – several crucial meetings with university managers about strategic matters, and a crucial meeting with colleagues about other crucial matters and so on. What has amazed me (and I say this not from some kind of unrelenting egotism, but rather from a position of genuine surprise) is that I am not indispensable and that, after all, the world continue to rotate and my not being at those meetings has not bought the universe crashing down around my ears.

Part of me of course is dismayed - what do you mean, you can all continue to function without me? I cherish being needed in ways that are bordering on the pathological. This is bad (very bad), but I can't help it. Perhaps it's about the joy of seeing another alleviated when you can help, or perhaps its really to do with my own ego (in both the informal and Freudian senses if the term).

Another part of me is intrigued by some of the ways in which the relations of production can absorb and  make room for sickness, even integrate it, account for it, make explicit provision for it whilst also nonetheless marking it out as stigma, sign, semiosis in excess.

What is particularly intriguing here, it seems to me is that, if my hypothesis that capitalism incubates a situation in which, for example, fat bodies are becoming increasingly transgressive, then why this extraordinary attempt to absorb sickness, to accommodate to it? Bodies are commodities, producers of labour hours, site of productive force; they situate for of the political economy of health that drives medicine; they are the material foundation of most cultural production. So.... why this accommodation?

I have colleagues and friends who suffer untold indignity and pain at the hands of their life-threatening illnesses. They bring to that suffering not just a simple stoicism (to call it that is to reduce it to the most banal and pointlessly comforting narrative), but a rage against it. They hate being sick; it makes them crazy; it impacts profoundly on their lives and their 'excess' lies far beyond what I am trying to articulate here. What is striking about their story is the extent to which they are not easily assimilable to a single narrative. Their excess, their sickness, is not reducible to mere plurality or ambivalence, but to an impenetrable and inassimilable whole, a unit so in and for itself as to refuse naming, refuse articulation, symbolisation. In that sense, its is an excess that threatens

Has the excess in sickness 'itself' been co-opted to the rhythm of the machine? Has infirmity become a kind of economy to itself?

There is something in Marx's theory of commodity fetish to help us here (but only as a starting point): capitalism fetishes and thereby freezes, paralyses what it cannot fully assimilate: excess, what falls beyond the body and cannot be transformed into surplus, is thus something in late capitalism that must be attended to. The excess (and for our purposes, lack and excess, over-abundance and paucity are structurally equivalent) is something which must in some sense be spiritualised, or, at least, enchanted. In this sense, the political economy of sickness is thus the political economy of one instance of aura, of the magic of the thing.

To be sick is thus in some sense to be hallowed: I have been struck at how many of my colleagues have been kind (they are always kind and they are good and decent people but the tone of that kindness is as in some sense hushed, respectful, conceding a space and place to me that is not there when I am well).

The political economy of sickness is thus Gothic in a very meaningful sense – with sickness comes the externalisation of anxieties about mortality, contagion, and the grim materiality of bodies, and a charging of those bodies with the sacrament of suffering, so central to he Judao-Christian tradition, and at the heart of the capitalist poetics of sickness. In hat poetics, suffering, which is invariably both an impediment to but also caused by capitalist production, must be taken out of the economy, magicked away to a place where the perverse hagiography of suffering can unfold itself without calling the general political economy into question. As in Gothic fiction, the capitalist poetics of sickness are thus a secretion of a simple exchange value, performatively reproduced back to us as if it were in some sense holy.

Blessed are the poor and sick for they shall inherit the world.