blah-feme

I know you're there (the great white shark speaks)

Occasionally (very rarely, in fact)  I am caught short by the extraordinarily intense mark of intention that makes itself felt in my writing. It is not that I seek this out or look to say, say and say in a way that is of or for 'me', but that, sometimes, very rarely, I am surprised by the strong impression of encountering myself talking back to me from the 'page'.

Quite why one passage should strike me like this and another doesn't is extremely difficult to ascertain. In such moments I am called to question the popular wisdom in enlightened liberal educational institutions that characterises the programme of education as enabling students to find their own voice.

This emphasis on the search for that singular vocality in writing, for that indelible trace that cannot and will not unhinge itself from the acousmêtre of the author, is grounded in a notion hat the best of writing is always the most original, the most unique, the most individuated.

And yet, those moments that seem to 'speak' to me of me, those intensely reflexive turns in the written prose that speak back are precisely those things I dislike in my writing, Only when I am able to write as if  in control of the materials –  only as if unfolding an idea in full and erudite spontaneity, as if in short, I were someone else – only then do I feel that the writing is good, secure. In shot, writing is always for me a kind of effacement.

I want to purge those embarrassing Northern vowels, that mark of suburbia, of the Midlands, of bland, safe lower bourgeois, poorly educated autodidact. I want to write as if I were from a glorious and aristocratic generation of emigré Jews, of dissident Palestinians, of Hungarian violinist, of African rebels, or Cuban guerillas; of Clarissa Furtwangler, Szagylyn Passmaker, Hyacinth Smortlyna, Mahmoud Kobal, Cruella Rozhdestvinsky. Wouldn't it be great to be that, to be other than this white, bland, suburban bore?

When students begin to write critically, intelligently, creatively, perhaps the last thing we should do is encourage to write as themselves. Who on earth wants to do that? Why not encourage them to write as if.

AND YET.... In this tendency to efface ourselves is precisely located the operation of a certain power at its most unmediated, in this feigning of boredom with oneself, with the routinely quotidian white. To play act as if in turmoil with oneself, to march endlessly through the detritus of one's average life in search of something else, something new, something Other, is the act of a class terminally ensnared in luxury, in excess without telos, without suffering. It is the feigning, the colonising , the ruthless appropriation even of the pain this class inflicts as if to say – we cause you harm and yet we maintain the right to own your suffering, to colonise it with our soft and whining pettinesses.

Here then is precisely the burden: to rage against self is to play act as if powerless; and yet to valorise the care of that same self is to enact that brutality of a self-obsession in the face of  the cruelty inflicted on others.

No way out. No way out???

In that encounter with the self, as if speaking back to oneself from the written page, then, one experiences a moment of extraordinary uncanniness when the promise of some kind of way out is glimpsed if only for a moment: the self becomes performative, split, epistemologically impossible, the creepy doppelgänger that promises both a death and a rebirth.

I am you, speaking back to to you. Who do you think you are?

Does the blogosphere have an unconcious?

Is there something in blogging that is inherently redundant? We repeat ourselves, certainly, and go round and round the same topics; but that is not quite what I am asking here. By redundancy, I mean precisely that which cannot be taken up in the flow of argument, cannot be taken up and made part of the exchange, the movement, the shudder. Or, to put it another way, is there something in this practice of writing for a highly dispersed and often anonymous audience something left after all the reading, re-reading and exchanges that can often follow a smart or contentious post? In short, to put this precisely the way I should perhaps have put it to start with, is there an excess or remainder to blog practice that is in some sense surplus to the requirements of that practice?

Theoretical paradigms since Levi Strauss and the so-called structuralist turn make much of the figure of excess, surplus, remainder, kernel, nugget. They are not simple synonyms, of course, and I don't want to reduce them to a simple Zeitgeist, but perhaps there is in these notions something quite useful, however open to he charges of trendiness or opportunism they might at first appear. What strikes me here is the extent to which asking this kind of question brings the critical turn full circle and insists on a certain theory of place, space or territory, insisting perhaps on the primacy (however critically) of scapes, vistas, panoramas to set up the question.

In short, the question might be reworked here to speak that which it really wants to speak – what are the limits, boundaries, horizons of this thing that we do when we log on to post another post?

If we ask this question in terms of excess, the answer inevitably embraces the radically contingency of blogging: to blog, so this answer might go, is to perform the excess hat cannot perform itself elsewhere, cannot open up itself to the demands of other discursive practices. Here is the first answer then, that that which is surplus to blogging is that which blogging does not seek (or need) to find an arena for.

If we ask the question in terms of the kernel or the nugget, then the answer will inevitably seek to articulate that which blogging does not speak or say, but on which it relies, over which it is built, through which it realises itself and under which it labours: to blog, so this answer might go, is to speak in both a concious and an unconscious register.

I have been thinking about this notion for some time now since one of my most erudite and  radical  colleagues asked the question as to how the notion of the unconscious might live outside the psyche: he was talking in particular about Radio 3's Late Junction and was wondering how the hidden, the unspoken of this collectively-authored/-curated radio programme might be read. The notion of an unconscious 'outside', of course, is not altogether new and versions of the notion have existed in some form for 100s of year.

I think what is interesting about asking this question in terms of blogging is that it points up the radical openness and indeterminacy of agency in the blogosphere. Or, at least, it shows how that indeterminacy is played out in the blogosphere in a particularly intense and extreme manner.

The questioning of agency has many authors and its radicalisation in the last 20 years or so has been quite remarkable: gaming theory, theories of fields, institutions, habitus and, even, the sinthome – all these new theorisations have pulled the rug from under the Romantic construction of agency as in some sense always traceable to a small number of sources and addressing an ideal addressee.

The deconstruction (for want of a better word) of such notions is perhaps the place where the left has had most difficulty – a strong theory of political action is difficult under such circumstances, political engagement much more complex and the terms and scope of any kin of offensive action always much more difficult to determine.

What strikes me as potentially useful, though, at least for a short while, might be precisely the blogosphere's disavowal of simple (mono-directional) agency and its broader engagement with citing, pointing, referencing and quoting. One only has to subscribe to a small number of smart blogs like I cite, K punk or larval subjects, to get a sense of the radical potential for this kind of practice.

And, perhaps, the dreadfulness of the right's blogs does not have so much to do with its ideological underpinnings, but, precisely, with the extent to which the blogosphere is, dare I say it, ontologically at odds with modes of thought that seek to reduce, simplify or moralise the social field. At its best, blogging can and continues to hold the promise of refusing that kind of hectoring modality.

Of course blogging encourages a rather full-on and belligerent style of writing sometimes, and often, if one leaves comments completely open, one can be deluged with heaps of mean-spirited or even obscene comments. But this is inevitable if something is to try to maintain a contentious relationship with mainstream journalism and pubic opinion.

Of course, the blogoshpere does not guarantee anything and we must in the end take responsibility for is shape and contest its colonisers and censors; and even then, of course, there is no guarantee that these kinds of engagement will of themselves make the difference we want them to. But agency has a way of biting back, of digging in just when you think its all over, and it often does so when a number of ideas authored over a large time period are drawn together as a uniform resource: the blogoshpere might form a large part of that resource.

So does the blogosphere have an unconscious? And what might that look like? It is undoubtedly structured, undoubtedly disparate and undoubtedly marked by a radical incoherence. An yet, we all know what blogging tends towards: we have all said it many times before – he egoing, the self-analysis, the unbearable drabness of meing that makes up much of the blogosphere is at least testament to its commitment to a certain discursive tone, a to a certain politics of the ego, to a certain figuration of confession as productive. And although this will undoubtedly have to change quite radically if anything like a radical political unconscious is to emerge, its does at least point up the flaws in the arguments that the blogosphere is hopelessly fragmented.

Look at me, no me, no me.... The ubiquity of that confessional tone is what in the end disturbs it – he performative becomes ever more visible in the repeated claims to speak if/as/for self and it is there that he end might be seen...

The political unconscious of the blogosphere might yet show itself to have made something new and something gloriously radical. Hope springs eternal.

Do you mean me?

To be referred to, to be quoted, sorted, circumscribed by the gesture of the upturned commas, single or double: what does this mean? To be linked to, to be pointed at, made part of a discourse, drawn in, made party to it, beholden to it, responsible, culpable? A with-writer, a conspirator, a friend? To reference, be drawn in, made party to..... this is a dizzying thing, a moment of radical alienation (is it me? Really? Am I really part of this – am I here at all in all this?). To reference, to draw in, to conjure up, to evoke.... oh this of all things, this more than anything is to make neurotics of us all.

And, to be as sure as writing lets my me (my me-ing, my being me), this, here, in this instance of scribble, this indeed is where writing breaks with the reader, where the Schreibgesindel fashions its anonymisations and flattenings, disavows the readerly and turns she or he hat reads into a cypher.

You are empty, my dear. You are merely your scribblings, your muted voicings, your clicky surfeit.

What is more (there is always more, it seems, always something that doesn't quite fit, match or hold itself in he serene composure we expect from reading) you are dead. Made still. Held here. In this place. This is what is become of you, you cipher, you figure, you SCRATCH, you CLICK.

Here in this simulated scratching that only references the scribble of the analogue of writing as trope, a tiny little stabbing of cold and disassociated digits, individuations that float in their own isolation tank of voicing. CLICK and again hovering over the mouse, back again, and here we go again around and around – spell check, make right, sort through and make neat, tidy, clean and neat... always neat... neat. This tiny motion of stabbing the marks that disavows the scratch, disavows the paper that we imagine the scratch to break into over, that disavows the materiality of writing as a continued, glissando of noise, the scat of the scratch: this is now gone forever.

The sin of the keyboard.

and so the wheel keeps turning

another beatiful post from ithom and a long and ponderous set of posts from spurious that yet again startle me with their left of field exuberance and their striking deliciousness...

I, on the other hand, am in one of those self-pitying moods AGAIN. God I hate feeling like this. She has left me for good and I am feeling a little blue. I know she feels it too, but for much bigger and complex reasons. I can't help thinking of her as I trot around my pad in shorts, tidying, dusting and generally ensuring I achieve nothing (again) today.

I think what I hate about these moods is that they keep me from doing the kinds of things that are important to me - I find it hard to think when I'm like this. It feels like an indulgance, an over-articulation of ego. If feels, in short, as if I'm placing too much emphasis on the care of the self to the detriment of other matters. Others matter.... that is the core credo of a leftist micropolotics I guess, but it is an extremely exacting and demanding credo to live by, especially since, as I get older, I despair ever more at the cruelty and pettiness of other human beings (a despair I most often rage at myself, I must confess).

At times like this (and I have heard other colleagues make similar statements) I feel like I am trapped inside a circularity with no exit, no place to go. Wackenroder, in 1799, had this feeling pegged right down:

Like a waterfall of thousands of roaring torrents which plunged down from the sky, eternally, eternally poured forth without a momentary pause, without a second's peace, thus is sounded in his ears and all his senses were intently focused solely on this. His labouring anguish became more and more caught up and carried away in the whirlpool of this wild confusion; the monstrous sounds grew more and more ferociously wild.

This sense of being trapped (which, by the way, works for Wackenroder as the marker for the naked saint's prophetic insight) in a circularity had also often been linked to madness in our culture. Someimes, like everyone I guess, I feel like I am going mad - the world becomes strange and frihtening and seems to take on a threatening meanace, its malevolent agency can seem almost palpable sometimes. What I find most difficult about these moments is how difficult it is to make sense of them: are they merely a symptom of a cultural predicament, an ego that has a historicity and an era, that behaves according to learnt rules? Does my putative madness fall just at those moments when that symptom asserts itself?

I hate feeling like this, that is sure, but I also find myself in a wierd and self-reflective turn, analysing my feelings in a way that often provides certain insights. I am paranoid, yes - this is the predicament of a lefty, but I am also an hysteric - the question of my gender asserts iteslf over and over and, of course I'm a neurotic - this last commonplace is nothing remarkable in an academic. But there is more here. I think I have discovered something about myself that is really useful - I really don't enjoy engaging with myself (despite all the above).

By this I mean that the kinds of modalities of analysis we have learnt to draw on seem to me so teinted, so fundamentally ill-suited for understanding self. Psychoanalysis has much to say about self: American ego psychology tries to shore up the ego; Freudian psychoanalysis tries to understand and limit it; Lacanian psychoanalysis exposes it as a sham; Jungian psychoanalysis embeds it in larger frames such as archetypes and the collective unconscious. Whilst they all have soemthing to say (although ego psychoanalysis, it seems to me is the least useful here) they seem to struggle to find a way of dealing with the harm that individualism can do not only to others (and Others) but also to that being who identifies as self.

Lacan comes closest for me to the articulation of something about the harmfulness of ego, but even he, despite all his glorious critical aparatus, misses soemthing quite profound about the nature of the self: it is not just a myth, not just a projection, not just a strategic fantasy, but it is also real. By this I don't mean to say that the self has untramelled agency or that it should be accepted without question as the only model for being. Quite the contrary: the Lacanian turn almost lets us off the hook since to mark self as fantasy is in some sense to allow us to continue to behave as before, safe in the knowledge that what feels like self is just fantasy (so we shouln't worry about it). I know this overstates the Lacanian position (indeed it distorts it beyond recognition), but it does capture somehting of the structural problem in the Lacanian turn from ego.

Perhaps a way to proceed here would be to think of self as in some sense real, but only in the same sense as any symptom of Welanschauung or Vorstellung: what is 'real' here is the palpable effectiveness of the self in perpetrating a view of the world that is fundamentally atomised. The world seems for the self to become meanacing, others take on the hue of danger and silence fills every social interaction as the marker of the hopeless impossibility of real communication. The vale of fantasy falls over everything and the only 'real' left is the real of the self.

This symptom of self-thinking, of being stuck in the wheel is the issue here: to recognise self as real is to require we attend to it, require that we bring it into a ceratin kind of focus and make sense of it. It can never fully die, I suggest since it is already undead, but it can be made to work differently, made to retreat somewhat from the foreground of discouse, made to take its place amongst other symptoms of discourse.

Perhaps the times I feel like this are the only times I can really get this kind of work done.

lethargy or the after-glow of expectation

When expectation has been and gone, and one is left with the aftermath, it is always in some sense with disappointment. Not that there was abything WRONG with the event, or that it didn't fit purpose, but that, rather, we structure the thing ahead of time and it never quite maps onto that fabulous structuring.

Reality always misses. Ok this is not to be so self-obsessed as to deamand your pity or to insist on the overwhelming darkness of it all (this, it strikes me has always seemed luducrous, like Kafka's humour at the worst of all predicaments). My objective in saying the above, really, is that I am always struck by the soundness of the Lacanian distinction often drawn between a number of coordinates:

1. the Real
2. 'reality'
3. the symbolic order.

I won't spend much time dealing with the Real. It is, by its very 'nature', beyond language, beyond symbolisation - that which cannot be accounted for in the symbolic order. The most useful of the three terms, it seems to me here, is 'reality'. For Lacanians, 'reality' is that which articulates, points to, the Real, is its symbolisation. Indeed, 'reality' as such consitutes, as it were, a subsitence level of symbolisation, articulating that point beyond which any less symbolisation would be unbearable, too raw, too unmediated, too REAL. It is a thin flimsy film that keeps the Real out.

Expectation, then, always locates events at a much richer symbolic vein: they are always overfed, fat with it, dripping...

What expectation cannot bear is to be tested against the thinner picking of that reality, that minimum amount of symbolisatioin required for the subject to be able to bear it, stand it, hold out.

Lethergy, disappointment, exhaustion, overwhelming dejection, anger, someimes even violence can ensure from this mismatch. What expectation can feed and make fat, the event of reality can empoverish, thin out, leach.

snatching time

Just before it all kicks off, right now in this eery calm - this is the place to be, I think - where anxiety, excitement and anticipation all role into something not unlike a one, a unity of messy and fluid emotions all tied into a singularity that is unnamable, unknowable, and yet extraordinarily palpable.

I think I have to deal with the fact that I'm the kind of person that feeds off intellectual turmoil; I am engaged by crisis and supercharged by debate. Some of my colleagues seek calm, look for an inner peace and 'happiness' that keeps them from harm. But for me, I think (and I do not mean to suggest this is an 'ought', a state of being for everyone), such an inner calm would feel like a kind of death, a second coming of nature to overwhelm what it is that makes me, leaving me like a stone, a thing, no-thing.

I do not mean this (all in the first person, of course) as some kind fo refutation of the critique of ego. Like Lacan and Buddhists and many left-wing thinkers, I understand the ego as a register of suffering, where failure to recognise the larger 'good' in others (and Others) brings with it a kind of self-forgetting, an unhappiness that is an a priori of the ego's work, its passage towards the liberal atomised capitalist 'individual'.

Nonethless, the turmoil of inner work, the work laid out along the porous barrier between self-as-social and self-as-symptom, is what keeps me from dying.

Here, in this place, in this waiting, this expectation. This is gerat place to be.

[written before the commencement of the first Board of Examiners - yes I know I shoulod get out more]

oh

Well it's happened: the deadline has arrived and I'm not nearly finished

I will have to rush to sew up the messy seams, tidy tidy tidy and hurry around its edges... make it fresh, make it new, make it good, but, most of all, make it safe.

They wrote to say they wanted it all, immediately.

I'm in a panic.

How will I ever polish it, finish it, make it whole?

How can I make it work, at all?

I feel like I have awoken and been told I'm under arrest. The grace Josef K sought, the guilt he felt, the betrayal of his own desire. It's all here.

Shot through it is like a great behemoth of meat... shot through like a great sinewy sibling-thing... nasty little man under a giant ear

it is shot through with mannerism, rhetoric, passion, but nothing sticks, nothing works, nothing is

it is shot through with vocabulary... that's all ... vocabulary

words, words ,words... little symptoms that hiss and spit

froth and howl

like it's not me speaking

vocabulary that isn't from me, not for me, not of me, not by me

it is a contrivance that must be finished

I will go, then and finish

finish

finish

the unbearable drabness of me-ing

The house is empty.

The back door is open and a cool spring breeze plays at my naked feet.

11.50 and still not dressed. The self-disgust is overwhelming. Still not finished, still tinkering with that bloody book. My cat lies on the desk watching with a performative disinterest that belies his underlying fundamental autism.

Quiet.

The stillness is deafening. I cannot stand, I cannot sit... fidget, walk, stand, stop and then walk again and sit

and stand

and sit.

... pottering in the kitchen, coffee ceremony....

nothing.

Tedious.

Reading this week's LRB - thin again.

Sighing occupies three seconds.

Tired.

Ache.

The upstairs neighbours are slowly surfacing and the dog owner next door is shouting at the dog again. And then ...

all is silent again.

Breathing.

The humming of my computer

It used to be Sundays that filled me with dread - the snoring of my parents, the awfulness of tea with my grandmother, the deadening blandness of that food... jelly with a skin, cold custard with bananas, cucumber sandwiches, sliced onion in vinegar. SPONGE CAKE (sorry for shouting)...

But now it is this day, Saturday that I loathe. No one here, no one coming, nothing. Work to finish, to make whole, to make worthy, to make safe, and yet to make new... this work of all works is loathsome.

Rubbing my eyes with the smalls of my hands

makes me dizzy

So tired. Might sleep some more.

Monday ever closer and its starts all over again.

Round and round and round...