"Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return" by Tyrus Miller

Darren Waterston, Untitled (watercolor) on paper, 2008



Right before I received Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites, I had just gotten my hands on Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, edited by Tyrus Miller and published by the Central European University Press in 2008. I had been reading Miller’s essay “Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return.” I immediately wanted to copy this essay for some friends with whom I’d been reading parts of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and his slender but large “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” both astonishing, complex and lush works. It was a thrill to read Miller’s essay in part because he explains who Auguste Blanqui is and Benjamin’s relation to him. Blanqui’s name recurs throughout Arcades and while the editor Rolf Tiedemann provides a “Guide to Names and Terms” that informs us Blanqui was a radical activist committed to permanent revolution, those of us in the reading group found ourselves wanting more.

Miller takes us through Benjamin’s discovery of Blanqui’s L’éternité pas les astres (Eternity According the Stars) as Benjamin explains this discovery and its significance to his Passagenwerk to Max Horkheimer. Miller writes, “Although this [B’s report to Horkheimer] was only two years from the close of Benjamin’s own defeated life, this seemingly minor discovery of a truly marginal text of Blanqui crystallized a whole new set of motives in the Passagenwerk studies and seemed to offer Benjamin a conceptual hinge for the juncture of modernity and myth he intuited in the culture of nineteenth-century Paris” (280).


But Miller’s essay elucidates more than Benjamin’s relation to Blanqui. Miller’s larger argument here is “what seems to be at issue for Benjamin in the emergence of the eternal recurrence is the very narratibility of history and hence also narrative transmission of culture. At the same time, however, this crisis of narrative representation of history may be less the end of history as it turns toward what Hayden White has suggestively called the ‘modernist event’ (282).

You can read all of this for yourself since Tyrus has kindly agreed to share this essay with you here on xpoetics.

I think you’ll find that this essay and Rob’s Disaster Suites are put along side one another productively.

The essay posted here appears in the volume Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, published by the Central European University Press and available from CEUP at:

http://www.ceupress.com/
or Amazon.com here:


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Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return
Tyrus Miller

I
"Men of the nineteenth century, the hour of our apparitions is fixed forever,
and always brings us back to the very same ones."--Blanqui, 1872

On January 6, 1938, Walter Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer from San Remo to report on a remarkable development in his thinking about his Baudelaire studies and about the larger framework of the Passagenwerk, Benjamin's decade-long historical research about 19th-century Paris, a project that he described as an "Urgeschichte der Moderne" (an archaic history of modernity). The occasion of this development was his encounter with a largely forgotten text by the famous insurrectionist Auguste Blanqui, entitled L'éternité par les astres (Eternity According to the Stars). This short book comprised a set of cosmological speculations written in prison by the old revolutionary near the end of his life, and coupled arguments from the popular science of Blanqui's day with a remarkable vision of infinite repetitions of the same in an indefinite series of parallel worlds. Here is Benjamin's report to Horkheimer:

In the last weeks I have made a strange find that will decisively influence the work: I came upon the text, Blanqui's last, which he wrote in his final prison,in the fortress of Taureau. It is a cosmological speculation. . . .and is, as far as I can tell, till now as good as unknown. . . . Admittedly,at first glance the text is tasteless and banal. Whereas what constitutes its main portion are the clumsy meditations of an autodidact, these prepare for a speculation about the universe that could be provided by no one lesser than this revolutionary. If Hell is a theological object, one could call these speculations infernal. The world view that Blanqui sketches here, while taking its data from the mechanistic natural sciences of his day, is in fact infernal--but is at the same time, in the shape of something natural, the complement of the social order that Blanqui must have recognized in the evening of his life to be the victor. What is astonishing is that this sketch is completely without irony. It represents an unconditional surrender,but at the same time the most terrible lament against a society that projects this images of the cosmos against the sky. The piece has as its theme, the eternal recurrence, the most remarkable relation to Nietzsche; and a more hidden and deeper one to Baudelaire, with whom in a few of its magnificent points it resonates almost word-for-word. (Briefe II, 741-742).(1)

Although this was only two years from the close of Benjamin's own defeated life, this seemingly minor discovery of a truly marginal text of Blanqui crystallized a whole new set of motives in the Passagenwerk studies and seemed to offer Benjamin a conceptual hinge for the juncture of modernity and myth he intuited in the culture of 19th-century Paris. In fact, in the final, 1939 version of his exposé of the Passagenwerk he granted the last word--in his text and about the nineteenth century--to the messengers of the eternal recurrence. In his final paragraph, following a quote from Blanqui's L'eternité par les astres, Benjamin concludes:

The century was incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order. That is why the last word was left to the errant negotiators between old and new who are at the heart of these phantasmagorias. The world dominated by its phantasmagorias--this, to make use of Baudelaire's term, is "modernity." Blanqui's vision has the entire universe entering the modernity of which Baudelaire's seven old men are the heralds. In the end, Blanqui views novelty as an attribute of all that is under sentence of damnation. Likewise in Ciel et enfer, a vaudeville piece that slightly predates the book: in this piece the torments
of hell figure as the latest novelty of all time, as "pains eternal and always new." The people of the nineteenth century, whom Blanqui addresses as if they were apparitions, are natives of this region.(2)

Though perhaps not the shattering experience of being "6000 feet above man" that Nietzsche reported when he first envisioned the eternal return, nor perhaps the grim testament of a revolutionary activist doomed to live year-after-year in prison, it might be said that Benjamin's discovery of Blanqui's late text hit him with the force of a revelation. The content of that revelation was that the eternal recurrence--the utmost cancellation of modern historicity--was itself a historically determinate form of experience that had emerged, or punctually reemerged, at the acme of modernity in late 19th century Europe.

In focusing on this motif in Benjamin, I myself will be pursuing three simultaneous paths of argumentation. The first, and narrowest one, will be philological and explicatory. I am using the motif to map out some potential interconnections between fragmentary points in Benjamin's oeuvre, to suggest how such themes as the new, the same, fashion, hell, myth, and phantasmagoria can be read in light of a temporal form of 19th-century metropolitan experience that Benjamin was at pains to disclose in its material context. More generally, I will also use this focus on the cosmological motif of the eternal recurrence to suggest the complex concatenation of time structures in Benjamin's thinking, one that is not reducible to such simple dichotomies as, say, the opposition of a Jewish and Marxist messianic time to a cyclical time of myth.

Second, according to Benjamin's own interpretative and historiographic method, there are particular "horizons of readability" that are time-bound and ephemeral, in which certain aspects of the historical past become discernable, because they are charged with special intensity of a transhistorical configuration of past and present. Clearly, he believed that in his own discerning of a shared experience of the eternal recurrence by the poet Baudelaire, the philosopher Nietzsche, and the revolutionary Blanqui, that he stood in such a momentary horizon. On the other hand, at the moment of his writing, he could not really have the perspicacity to describe his own situation historically. From our later horizon, however, Benjamin's fragmented meditations on eternal recurrence become legible within a cultural context shared with such contemporaries as Georg Simmel, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Karl Löwith, Mircea Eliade, and Pierre Klossowski, all participating in a serious contemplation of the meaning of the thought of eternal recurrence, especially in the work of Nietzsche. Moreover, this concern has not ceased to be important, but rather has persisted up to the present in the work of post-structuralist thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.

Finally, I want to suggest how Benjamin's focus on the modernity of the eternal recurrence highlights its general significance as a topic for metahistorical reflection. Namely, what Benjamin discerns in the 19th-century thought of eternal recurrence --and here he is preceded, even exceeded by the magisterial Nietzsche criticism of Karl Löwith--is the extreme, forced conjunction of an archaizing cosmology with a modern psychology. Yet if, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, narrative offers a way of reconciling the opposition of cosmological time ("the time of the world") and lived time ("the time of the soul"), the maximum polarization of cosmos and experience that the eternal recurrence implies also marks the point at which historical narrativity is stressed to its limit and begins to unravel. In short, I will argue what seems to be at issue for Benjamin in the emergence of the eternal recurrence is the very narratibility of history and hence also the narrative transmission of culture. At the same time, however, this crisis of narrative representation of history may be less the end of history as its turn towards what Hayden White has suggestively called the "modernist event." Historical writing following this turn will need to be more conscious of how temporal concepts such as eternity, succession, causation, and recurrence were tied to concepts of meaning, mimesis, and generic form. Moreover, it will need to be more reflexively constructivist in its conception of the historical, in an awareness that--as David Wood has written--"concepts, theories, and representations 'of' time [form] part of the temporal itself."(3)

II

My discussion will center on a specifically modern formulation of the notion of "eternal recurrence"; however, it is useful to consider more generally this concept, before considering the texts and quotations that Benjamin assembled around it. Mircea Eliade's Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return--begun just after the end of World War II and published originally in 1949--remains a key source for its bold theoretical stance and forceful interpretation of the significance of this concept for religious and historical thought. According to Eliade, eternal return is the characteristic underpinning of mythic thinking and arises in a plethora of variations out of a single fundamental, existential need of human societies: to master the despair and fear that comes from historical change, death, contingency, and transience. Out of this basic anthropological motivation, in Eliade's view, archaic societies, and even, to a large extent, post-archaic and modern societies as well, project an ontology that limits or excludes change by mapping it on to repeating patterns and archetypes. On the one hand, the macro-structure of natural and social reality appears already to be a repetition of a cosmic archetype, and at each level, from the cosmic to the political to the everyday, the cosmogonic act of world-foundation must be repeated and renewed on a periodic basis. The prescribed rituals and profane gestures, in turn, gain their place in a cosmos of social and religious meanings in so far as "they deliberately repeat such and such acts posited ab origine by gods, heroes, or ancestors."(4)

Eliade's conceptualization had the virtue of allowing him to define, with a single clear criterion, an essential difference between mythic thinking and historical thought, between archaic and modern societies, and between the foundations of pagan and non-European civilization in which cyclical cosmologies predominate and the historical orientation of Judaic and Christian civilizations along with their modern European successors. Moreover, it can be said that Eliade's discussion of the mythic thought of the eternal return has a special object that appears in stark relief against the background of this nearly universal myth: the case of Jewish civilization and its incomplete, hybrid confluence into Christian and post-Christian modern Europe. If the eternal return represents the symbolic means through which archaic and pagan societies disavow history, the Jews are singular in having broken with such archetypical, recurring cosmoi in favor of a God who reveals himself in one-time historical moments. With Jewish civilization--and in the Jewish legacy within Christianity--genuinely historical time emerges. For Eliade, then, myth and history, and the phenomenologies of time that underlie them, are pivotal terms in constituting distinct "ethnic ontologies." (5) The status of the Jews, built into the structure of Eliade's interpretation of eternal return, is at once that of privilege and exclusion, privilege from the point of view of historical thought, exclusion from the perspective of mythic thought. The relative valuation of these two interpretative postures is precisely what is at stake in Eliade's short, programmatic study.

It would be an easy extrapolation, and one which I in fact will venture here, to say that Eliade, writing in 1945, could view these civilizational tendencies at war in his own contemporary context. European civilization, at its present extremity of crisis, represented a wavering, unresolved amalgam of mythic and historical components, or to put it in baldly ethnic terms, of pagan and Judaic elements. European anti-Semitism, seen in this light, would mark a return of myth and an anti-modern disavowal of history, but history precisely as ethnically personified by that singularly historical people, the Jews. Insofar as history is the domain of terror and insofar as the Jews are seen from the mythic perspective as the bearers of history as such, they are subject, recurrently, to the violence of the mythic mentality, which seeks to impose a cosmic cancellation of history through recurrence. We might say that Eliade poses himself ambigiously between an historical view of the recent tragedy of the Jews as a singular horror of his time and a mythic view that sees anti-Semitism as the expression of basic anthropological forces that are not going to go away any time soon and are rooted in the very deep-seated existential revulsion against history. The meaning of the war and the Nazi genocide is not simply a matter of deciding between two historical actors, the Nazis and their opponents, but rather also between a historical and an anti-historical, mythic, anthropological framework of interpretation of these events. Or put otherwise, the war, in the most stark and virulent way, sets Europe before a decision--existential, political, even theological--as to whether history or the myth of eternal return gets the final say about who and what is European. Thus Europeans do not just have a particular historical decision to make; rather they have to decide for or against historical being as such, for or against the recurrence of myth. In arriving at this decisionistic conclusion, Eliade thus meets on common ground with Walter Benjamin, who viewed his present as a polarized, extreme confrontation of myth and messianic possibility, an emergency situation that required unequivocal, punctual decision. Benjamin, however, leaned emphatically towards a critique of myth in favor of a messianic, theopolitical Marxism.

Notably, too, as Karl Löwith had suggested in his 1935 book on Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, of which Benjamin read Theodor Adorno's copy in 1938, this issue of decision was already built into Nietzsche's presentation of eternal recurrence in Also sprach Zarathustra. Löwith was, along with Hannah Arendt, a student of Martin Heidegger and a Jewish refugee from Nazism, first in Italy, later in the United States. Löwith notes that the title of Zarathustra was originally to have been "Noon and Eternity," a key image in the text. He notes the temporal ambiguity of Nietzsche's noontide, which is at once the eternal moment in which time stands still and the instant in which the shattering insight that everything recurs can take place. Paradoxically, the crisis point in which one decides, in an instant, to affirm existence as a whole, in all its recurrences, is also the only moment in time in which eternity is manifest. As Löwith writes:

A metamorphosis occurs unexpectedly in Nietzsche's presentation of the noon and of the eternal recurrence: out of what by nature comes again and again,develops something that is supposed to be decisive once and forever. Likewise,the "moment," too, is not eternal because what is forever shows itself in the moment, but because the moment (as a decisive moment) determines in advance what will be in the future.(6)

Löwith's analysis of this paradox in Nietzsche's noon becomes the central point of his critique: for all of its appeal to cyclical recurrence, myth, and the return to pre-Christian and pre-Socratic antiquity, the temporality of crisis, a typically modern time-structure, predominates in Nietzsche's thought. Löwith concludes:

Zarathustra thus teaches two things: as the redeeming man of the future,he proclaims a new way of existence; and as the teacher of the eternal recurrence of the same, he teaches. . . the highest law of the whole life of the world. But as a critical center, the noon is not the always recurring time of something everlasting, but rather the moment of decision at which previous history parts from the history of the future.(7)

III

I now turn to the constellation of materials that Benjamin assembles around the topic of the eternal recurrence, in order to consider how this concept offers a perspective on the associated themes of Benjamin's writing, especially in the Passagenwerk. First, a word about the texts in question. The first notes for the Passagenwerk date between 1927 and 1930, and Benjamin worked periodically on his research throughout the 1930s, but especially intensely following his definitive departure from Germany with the rise to power of the Nazis. Out of the Passagenwerk research notes, he intended to publish a book that would place Baudelaire in his material and intellectual context; the various drafts and reworkings of these Baudelaire writings represent the most achieved part of the research. Thus, the main texts that I will be discussing include a 1935 and a 1939 exposé of his research, at least partly intended to win financial support from the Institut für Sozialforschung directed by Max Horkheimer; his first attempt at a draft of the Baudelaire study, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"; his late truncation and revision of the former draft into a rounded, shorter essay entitled "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"; a group of draft notes assembled under the title "Central Park"; and a few of the topically organized "convolutes," or note-files, of the larger Passagenwerk research, especially Convolute D [Boredom, Eternal Return] and Convolute J [Baudelaire].

The theme of the eternal recurrence emerges in Benjamin's work with the elevation to an allegorical centrality of Blanqui, who had previously appeared strictly as an empirical, historical figure up to Benjamin's discovery of L'éternité par les astres; the emergence of the previously marginal Nietzsche as an important voice and especially as mediated through Karl Löwith's study; and a reinterpretation of several temporal and phenomenological issues in Baudelaire. Moreover, Benjamin's historiographic collage method entailed a kind of hopeful, patient empiricism, in which the historian collects, sifts, and rearranges countless bits of data and discourse, until hidden nodal points begin to take on relief and consistency. The resonance of the poet Baudelaire, the philosopher Nietzsche, and the revolutionary Blanqui around the eternal recurrence convinced Benjamin that he had uncovered a phenomenological key to nineteenth-century experience, a conceptual node that pointed to something more than simply the subjective imagination of these thinkers.

I will begin with Blanqui, whose text is likely to be unfamiliar to many. As already mentioned, Blanqui's text is centered on the view that given a finite number of basic elements in the universe and an infinity of spatial extension and time, then every entity, every event must exist in countless copies dispersed over these spatial and temporal expanses. In this cosmos, we may find consoling that our lost loves are being embraced by our doubles an infinite number of times, yet at the same time, every defeat and instance of suffering in history are also replicated throughout eternity. Contemporary commentators in newspaper notices and reviews of Blanqui's book did not fail to point out the logical inconsistencies in the argument. Two, in particular, stand out, since they anticipate almost word-for-word Georg Simmel's classic refutation of Nietzsche's "proof" of the eternal recurrence and critique of its inconsistencies.(8) First, the commentators note, it is not logically necessary that even a finite number of elements generate recurrences, much less exact sequential recurrences, in the course of infinite time. Second, even if it were the case that the recurrence did take place, so that our doubles led the same life that we did elsewhere in the universe or in another time, "we" would know nothing of it as individuals. Without any perspective outside the recurrences from which to grasp them as a whole, the hypothetical fact of recurrence should be perfectly indifferent to "us," as singular identities here and now. The Blanqui reviewers tend to praise the vivid imagination and vigorous mind of the old revolutionary, while remaining ironical about its content. Analogously, Simmel rejected the "scientific" or ontological claims in Nietzsche's conception, while admitting its force as a moral and psychological ideal, a kind of post-Kantian categorical imperative that values individual authenticity and rectitude over the social generality. Benjamin, however, in keeping with his materialist interests in the structure of experience and the framing of historical time, takes a different tack. On the one hand, unlike previous commentators, he tends to take the idea of eternal return not as a psychological metaphor or regulative moral idea, but rather as a literal experience; accordingly, he seeks to understand what are the social preconditions and phenomenological characteristics of eternal return as an experience of reality. On the other hand, he interprets the eternal return metahistorically and theologically, as a critique of progress, a recurrence to myth within modernity, and a post-Christian secularization of the theo-political topos of hell.

Benjamin cites Blanqui secondhand from a late 19th-century work, Gustave Geffroy's L'Enfermé, and quotes Geffroy's commentary as well. Blanqui wrote, "What I write at this moment in a cell of the Fort du Tareau I have written and shall write throughout all eternity--at a table, with a pen, clothed as I am now, in circumstances like these," and Geffroy comments: "He thus inscribes his fate, at each instant of its duration, across the numberless stars. His prison cell is multiplied to infinity. Throughout the entire universe, he is the same confined man that he is on this earth, with his rebellious strength and his freedom of thought" (9)[D 6, 2]. By the end of his short treatise, Blanqui has risen to a pessimistic hymn to astral necessity and the vanity of human hopes measured against the relentless course of the stars. Following Benjamin's quotation from Blanqui--firsthand this time--I will quote the final three paragraphs of the book. The first reads:

At bottom, this eternity of the human being among the stars is a melancholy thing, and this sequestering of kindred worlds by the inexorable barrier of space is even more sad. So many identical populations pass away without suspecting one another's existence! But no--this has finally been discovered,in the nineteenth century. Yet who is inclined to believe it? [D7; D7a](10)

Benjamin does not follow Löwith's lead at this point in noting the exact corollary of Blanqui with Nietzsche here, but as with Nietzsche's eternity at noon, Blanqui's discovery of "l'eternité par les astres" is an analogous revelation at a particular moment in history, "in the nineteenth century," of a cosmic structure of eternal recurrence. Hence, Blanqui conjoins a temporality of crisis with a temporality of repetition. Though all moments in history are implicitly rendered equal by the fact that each will recur in an infinite number of copies, so that none can be said to be more important than any other, there is one privileged crisis point in the entirety of eternity: the infinitely repeated nineteenth century, as the crisis moment in which this cosmic order becomes conscious to Auguste Blanqui. To state the paradox differently: because every historical moment repeats and the future is in no way a consequent of precedent events, futurity itself is an illusion; yet it is this crisis of the nineteenth century, in which we come to know this cosmic fact, that determines the future for all eternity as illusory.

Blanqui spells out these paradoxical consequences even more clearly in the last two paragraphs that follow. He writes:

Until now, the past has, for us, meant barbarism, whereas the future has signified progress, science, happiness, illusion! This past, on all our counterpart worlds, has seen the most brilliant civilizations disappear without leaving a trace, and they will continue to disappear without leaving a trace. The future will witness yet again, on billions of worlds, the ignorance, folly, and cruelty of our bygone eras! [D7; D7a](11)

"Until now": thus speaks a classic locution in the rhetoric of crisis. But this locution functions as if it were a performative speech act, which, once pronounced by Blanqui at a punctual moment in the nineteenth century, would stamp eternity, backward and forward, with the laws of astral necessity. What follows upon this pronouncement is the rule of cosmic mechanism, which renders subsequent every gesture and act merely a mime-show of inexorable cosmic forces (and note the theatrical metaphors that pervade Blanqui's passage throughout):

At the present time, the entire life of our planet, from birth to death, with all its crimes and miseries, is being lived partly here and partly there, day by day, on myriad kindred planets. What we call 'progress' is confined to each particular world, and vanishes with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial arena, the same drama, the same setting, on the same narrow stage--a noisy humanity infatuated with its own grandeur, believing itself to be the universe and living in its prison as though in some immense realm, only to founder at an early date along with its globe, which has borne with deepest disdain the burden of human arrogance. The same monotony, the same immobility, on other heavenly bodies. The universe repeats itself endlessly and paws the ground in place. In infinity, eternity performs--imperturbably-the same routines. [D7; D7a](12)

Taking off from these passages in Blanqui, Benjamin offers a number of phenomenological remarks on eternal return that interpret it as an index of modern experience. Here, the key issue is the meaning of the element of the "new"--of novelty--in modernity. This problem posed by Baudelaire in his stark conjunction of ephemeral, epiphanic flashes of beauty in the metropolitan environment with the experience of spleen, "I feel that I have lived a thousand years." Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, experienced spleen as the potential for devaluation that exists in any commodity or object of fashion, once its moment of newness had past. What once seemed new, now is just one more inert, material shell, to be accumulated in drawers and on shelves, while its purchaser seeks the new once again. Spleen results from a backward turned glance that perceives and suffers the indifferent weight of obsolete objects, and its experience may even turned forward again and felt at the heart of the new. Already, at the glint of fashionable beauty, the object breathes the staleness that will soon set in around it. Thus, even in the kaleidoscopic procession of new objects, spectacles, fashions, there is the return of the same: the obsolete, the tasteless, the faded. As Benjamin writes in a fragment of the Baudelaire study, "The devaluation of the human environment by the commodity economy penetrates deeply into the poet's historical environment. What results is the 'ever-selfsame.' Spleen is nothing other than the quintessence of historical experience." (13) Against the overwhelming and repeated experience of spleen, Baudelaire seeks to seize the new, a struggle that elevate the artist and poet into the hero of modern life. This heroism. Baudelaire's new, Benjamin emphasizes, is not a formal or objective newness, but an abstract, subjective temporal difference that intensifies the moment to free it from the melancholy sameness of spleen. "Baudelaire's work," Benjamin writes, "is not concerned with the attempt, decisive in all the arts, to engender new forms or to reveal new aspects of things; its interest is in the fundamentally new object, whose power resides solely in the fact that it is new, no matter how repulsive or bleak it may be" (Selected Writings IV, 96-97) (14).

Baudelaire's hero of modern life struggles on the battlefield of abstract time, and thus, Benjamin concludes, is equivalent to those other heroes of time, Nietzsche and Blanqui, in their endurance of the ultimate intensification of nihilism in the thought of the eternal recurrence:

The heroic bearing of Baudelaire is akin to that of Nietzsche. Though Baudelaire likes to appeal to Catholicism, his historical experience is nonetheless that which Nietzsche fixed in the phrase 'God is dead.' In Nietzsche's case, this experience is projected cosmologically in the thesis that nothing new occurs any more. In Nietzsche, the accent lies on eternal recurrence, which the human being has to face with heroic composure. For Baudelaire, it is more a matter of the 'new,' which must be wrested heroically from what is always again the same" [J60, 7]. (15)

Such heroic newness is the distillation of sheer temporal intensity from an object, which at the instant of newness falls away as the mere vehicle of this subjective experience and endures as a knick-knack of spleen. Subjective newness feeds off the new object, but in such a way as, in advance, to doom it to a spleenful afterlife among all the previous objects that were once-new. Thus, Benjamin argues, the Baudelairian new is not really a redemption of or escape from spleen, but rather its inseparable semblable and frere, the complement and perpetual reproduction of spleen in ever-expanded form. He writes: "Baudelaire's project takes on historical significance. . . only when the experience of the ever-same, which provides the standard for assessing that project, is given its historical signature. This happens in Nietzsche and in Blanqui. Here, the idea of the eternal return is the 'new', which breaks the cycle of the eternal return by confirming it" (Selected Writings IV, 97). (16)

Benjamin tried to deepen this analysis by further exploring its phenomenological dimensions. These are encapsulated in a one sentence entry in the Convolute m [Idleness]: "Phantasmagoria is the intentional correlate of immediate experience" [m3a, 4](17). That is to say, what appear to be extreme modes of thought and perception in Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Blanqui are, in fact, rich descriptions of immediate experience. The hallucinatory characteristics of their texts--Baudelaire's negative and positive intensities, the coupling of cosmic pessimism and exaltation in Nietzsche, the inseparability of denunciation and resignation in Blanqui--are not symptoms of unbalanced minds, but rather of an objectively false appearance, a reality that disclosed itself to these thinkers in a systematically distorted way. In a letter to Adorno dated 23 February 1939, Benjamin tried to justify his latest attempts to organize his Baudelaire studies around a critique of the phenomenological pair "newness" and "sameness". He begins by noting that "sameness" is not, in fact, normally experienceable:

Sameness is a category of cognition; strictly speaking, it is not to be found in plain, sober-minded perception. Even in extreme cases, perception that is sober in the in the strictest sense, free of all prejudgement, would at most encounter similarity. The degree of prejudgement which can normally accompany perception without detriment can be harmful in certain special cases. It can reveal the perceiver as one who is not sober-minded. (Selected Writings IV, 208)

Benjamin notes the example of Don Quixote, who recasts whatever he sees as part of his on-going romantic adventure as a knight-errant, and likens Cervantes's comic presentation to that of Daumier's drawings:

Daumier constantly encounters sameness. In the faces of all the politicians, ministers, and lawyers, he perceives the same thing--namely, the meanness and mediocrity of the bourgeois class. But here, one thing is all-important: Daumier, like Cervantes, imparts a comic aspect to the hallucination of sameness. . . . Daumier's laughter, however, is aimed at the bourgeoisie; it sees through the sameness this class prides itself on, revealing it as the fatuous égalité which flaunted itself in Louis Philippe's nickname. (Selected Writings IV, 208)

Benjamin here gives an original spin to the concept of ideology that he inherited from Marx and, more immediately, in terms of sources, from György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness. If ideology, in the classic Marxist view, is false consciousness, then in Benjamin, in contrast, it is false experience: that is, ideology is not just thought, but phenomenologically lived as a kind of intoxication of everyday life. One form in which ideology may be criticized, again in lived form, is through comic presentation and laughter.

This view of ideology and ideology criticism as experiential is fundamental to his interpretation of the eternal return as well, although the critical strategy of comedy seems, in Benjamin's view, to reach its limits here. Baudelaire--and by implication, the associated names of Nietzsche and Blanqui--does not follow Cervantes and Daumier in making fun of sameness, but rather take up occupancy at the heart of sameness, heightening its intensity to the point of critical explosion:

In laughter, both Cervantes and Daumier do away with sameness and thus fix it as a form of historical semblance [Schein]. Sameness has a very different stamp in Poe, to say nothing of Baudelaire. In "The Man of the Crowd," the possibility of comic exorcism may still flash up. In Baudelaire, this is out of the question. Instead, he gave artificial assistance to the historical hallucination of sameness which had taken root with the commodity economy. And the images in his work that relate to hashish are decipherable in this context. (Selected Writings IV, 208)

To put this in other words, the intoxication, exaltation, and hallucination that characterize the perception of the eternal return do not discredit this thought, but rather invest it with its significance as an historical index. The thought of the eternal return redoubles and heightens the very forms in which reality already is experienced as an ideological phantom, and in so doing, it offers purchase on the phantasmatic character of the real.

This understanding is reflected in the plan that Benjamin presents to Adorno for the recasting of his Baudelaire essay: "From the standpoint of the Baudelaire study, the restructured text looks like this: The definition of flânerie as a state of intoxication is fully developed, together with its links to Baudelaire's drug experiences. The concept of the ever-selfsame is already introduced in the second book as ever-selfsame appearance, whereas in its definitive form as ever-selfsame happening it continues to be reserved for the third" (Selected Writings IV, 208-209). Benjamin also explores how this deforming of perception by sameness also breaks down the temporal fabric of experience and memory. If nineteenth-century lived time is increasingly marked by the repeated oscillation between intense punctual newness and the always-already imminent return of spleen, or by the eternal recurrence of the same, then the intervals between one point in time and another are no longer one of a genuine duration. This loss of duration has an individual lived dimension, but also a larger-scale, collective, historical face as well. In a dazzling passage, weaving together these two temporal frameworks, Benjamin writes:

The idea of eternal recurrence transforms the historical event itself into a mass-produced article. But this conception also displays, in another respect--on its obverse side, one could say--a trace of the economic circumstances to which it owes its sudden topicality. This was manifest at the moment the security of the conditions of life was considerably diminished through an accelerated succession of crises. The idea of eternal recurrence derived its luster from the fact that it was no longer possible, in all circumstances, to expect a recurrence of conditions across any interval of time shorter than that provided by eternity. The quotidian constellations very gradually began to be less quotidian. Very gradually their recurrence became a little less frequent, and there could arise, in consequence, the obscure presentiment that henceforth one must rest content with cosmic constellations. Habit, in short, made ready to surrender some of its prerogatives. Nietzsche says, 'I love short-lived habits,' and Baudelaire already, throughout his life, was incapable of developing regular habits. Habits are the armature of long experience (Erfahrung), whereas they are decomposed by individual experiences (Erlebnisse). [J 62a, 2]

Benjamin, in sum, utilizes the emergence of the concept of eternal recurrence as a metahistorical diagnostic of the condition of memory and experience in 19th-century modernity. In the heyday of historicism and visions of historical progress, the thought of the eternal recurrence--in the three very different heads of Baudelaire, Blanqui, and Nietzsche--casts a shadow of repetition and cosmic stasis over the bustle of nineteenth-century urban life, fashion, and commerce. For Benjamin, these two, antipodal modes of interpreting the historicity of experience in this period pointed were, however, covertly interrelated. In their mutually canceling implications, they point towards a new, different form of historical thinking, writing, and acting, a practice of history that could shatter the continuity of historicist succession along with the continuum of mythic repetition. In the end, however, Benjamin's nineteenth-century thinkers only approached the threshold of this new form of historical practice. Its realization would require a new formal and conceptual vocabulary of montage that owed more to Aragon, Eisenstein, and Brecht than to Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Blanqui.

NOTES
(1)Walter Benjamin, Briefe II, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978) 741-742.
(2)Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) 26.
(3)David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1989) 11.
(4)Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Williard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959) 5-6.
(5) I am indebted here to the work of Sorin Antohi for this conception.
(6)Karl Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) 103.
(7) Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy 104.
(8) Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
(9-12) Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Following Benjamin's system of organizing his notes into topical folders, "Convolutes," I cite the "Convolute" and note number parenthetically in the text in this and subsequent reference to the Arcades Project.
(13) Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2003) 96.

Brandon Brown on Disaster Suites

See Brandon's discussion of Rob's book here.

More & Forthcoming on Disaster Suites

You can read Thom Donovan's review of Disaster Suites in The Poetry Project's December 2008/January 2009 Newsletter here:

In it Donovan writes, "Halpern allegorizes lyrical poetry’s complicity
with an entire global network of social disasters which include Katrina, and even become determined by Katrina (Rob’s book was begun immediately after the storm, and completed as the first draft of a manuscript following the death of his close friend and colleague, kari edwards; Disaster Suites’ cover also features drawings, drawn rom memory by the artist, after photographs of homes devastated by Katrina), but also encompass movements between sites, and beyond site itself towards all that is being made invisible, occulted by the fatal abstractions of capital."

Earl Jackson also tells me that he is at work on a long article on Rob's Disaster Suites and his beautiful and challenging earlier book, Rumored Places (Krupskaya). We look forward to it Earl!

Don't Miss Disaster Suites

Disaster Suites is Rob Halpern's latest book published by Palm Press. Colter Jacobsen's Katrina (after Misrach)--Memory Drawing, detail, 2006, graces the cover.


I hope to have more to say about this book when time opens up for me later this summer. Or at least, promises to. But in the mean time, do, read it.




Never has disaster been so stunning.

The scission is exact. An architecture is scaffolded and razed. At once. Desire. Despair. Lyrical undressing of abomination.



Whenever I try to com-
Municate love dis-
Appears said Monica

Viti as Valentine it was
La Notte Antonioni's
Very hot picture so pl-

Ease monitor my hearts
And mind what he
-avenly difference boasts

Of thickness these
Accidents produce me
-mbranes peeling off in-

Ternal selves skins we
Watch all this emerging
Out of the deep too deep

To name inside my rec-
Tum is yrs there
Being no other place

For false members
To go where nothing can
Name these things I

Stink of value ends
Produce yr views

---don't do it for my experience.

The book closes with the lines:

In words with no future we seek portals

Holes and faults hew new relations quicken
Chasing that persistent and ongoing

---no!

A "we," a negative affirmation, abraded words. Here's another one with which to break your heart:

This one wants to be the one to break
The story poems don't break open
Stories someone said as if I couldn't

Hear a word the thing makes here it
Says 'breaks' instead of meaning this
One thing the poem wants to be

Meaning stories making things to
Break the thing our things can't mean
As if all this were really breaking

--what goes unheard sings only of want.

In the essay at the back of the book entitled "Post-Disaster," Halpern writes:

Unlike the death of any one, disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being here for us to share as a site for communion. In one of his late aphorisms on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin suggests that Les Fleurs du mal was the first book of poems not illuminated by starlight. I think the stars are extinguished in Baudelaire because the poems successfully dispatch all sanctioned coordinates of progress and meaning as soon as those coordinates become the pegs upon which capitalist production hangs its own hat. In becoming unmoored, the poems list without a star map, without a guide. They become fateless. And yet this is how the poems resist the death-in-life prescribed by a new world of commodities that have themselves taken the place of the stars in a darkening universe. Baudelaire's poems are without destiny as they resist this disaster by courting their own at once promise and catastrophe, opposites persisting in and thru one another.

There's an echo of chaos theory here. Maybe the lyric "I" of these Disaster Suites is an example of what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call a 'dissipative structure,' that is, a form of provisional and unstable order that emerges as an effect of ever-increasing disorder and dislocation. In the context of our own catastrophe, there are many such structures--NGO's, drug cartels, suicide bombers, al-Queda itself, or even the modest Guatemalan evangelical churches in San Francisco's Mission district--faulty bulwarks against the systematic fallout of the system that produced them. Is it useful to think of the lyric "I" in similar terms? Or would that amount to another bad alibi for lyric disabled agent of entropic drift?

These questions activate the nonsite of these suites.
---Rob Halpern


Here's what some other people have to say about Rob's book:

A paradox sets these disquieting and beautiful Disaster Suites into motion. They produce a music— missing in the count now counts as one — reaching for the disappearance of the very conditions that make it audible: war, so-called natural catastrophe, a public sphere where there is no / Public. As in the songs of William Blake and the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler, these Suites sing against their own beauty and their seemingly perpetual present — which is why they seem so strangely archaic and futuristic at once. In complex patterns of meter and rhyme, Disaster’s lyric “I” summons its own kind of “counting” (prosody) against the physics of finance or exchange. Yet the music which results can only be heard — the drowned and the bombed — in between and against the other tracks that Halpern intricately lays down: the singing of capital, the burble of mass media, the daily noise of bodies who work, shit, fuck, and love. This stunning book has almost single-handedly made me love contemporary lyric poetry again.
—Sianne Ngai



It’s hip to be deaf to the larger sounds of our time because the hip want a party, not THIS WORLD as it is! Fuck THAT! I want THIS poetry where the atonal crisis wails and sputters. Negotiate with yourself, it’s your life, in our world, at the line, and the next line of Halpern’s amazing book. Gross profits and grotesque guilty pleas align with the knife here. The stress of our injuries, you can feel your body ache while reading, now leave us to it Halpern, you’ve done your job better than anyone else could! I’m grateful for these poems.
—CA Conrad, author of Deviant Propulsion

from COMMUNITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL INTELLECT by Mike Amnasan

Photo by Sandra Meadows


Here's an excerpt from Mike Amnasan's dissertation "Community and the Individual Talent." While this section doesn't directly name class as a particular or sole focus, in a recent email about this section Mike wrote, "I am working on a part of my dissertation at the moment which deals with similar class issues to those I wrote about in books like Liar." I find interesting the engagement with how class manifests in comfort and discomfort, an economic and an uneconomic life, and the importance of distraction. Ideology inside the body. Like the way we might think that perspective, an invention of the early modern period, is natural and mimetic of how we see, rather than something that organizes and constitutes how and what we see. If you want to read more about LIAR, click here.

Bio:
Mike Amnasan was a sheet metal worker for over twenty years, working on high rises and othercommercial buildings out of Local 104 in San Francisco (and for two years out of Local 28 in New York). Before that he worked in factories, mostly garment factories in Los Angeles. He met other writers for the first time in Robert Gluck's writing workshop in San Francisco. He went back to school, coming to that decision with the psychotherapeutic help of Liz Naidoff. He presently lives in Brooklyn and is a Ph.D. student in the philosophy department at The New School. He is the author of Liar written in the early '90s and published by Ithuriel's Spear in 2007.

Pre-Reflective Attunement with Others and Intellectual Difference
~~Mike Amnasan

You normally do not look closely at a chair when you take a seat, but, as Martin Heidegger tells us, you may look closely at this chair if, while sitting in it, a leg breaks and you topple to the floor, or if you make a point by calling attention to it. There is also a third possibility that Heidegger does not consider: you may look more closely at the chair, even questioning if it is yours to sit in, if you feel out of place. This involves sensitivity to a situation you have not adjusted to, perhaps one that you will never adjust to sufficiently to put to rest an unusual awareness of your own body, and those aspects of your surroundings that, if you were at ease, would not intrude on your perception.

The following is the Beginning of Dambudzo Marechera’s story “Black Skin What Mask.” It is Marechera’s description of what his black protagonist feels like when he goes among crowds in Oxford England (1) :

My skin sticks out a mile around here. Every time I go out I feel it tensing up, hardening, torturing itself. It only relaxes when I am in shadow, when I am alone, when I wake up early in the morning, when I am doing mechanical actions, and, strangely enough, when I am angry. But it is coy and self-conscious when I draw in my chair and begin to write. (93)

Marechera’s character, probably more or less himself, is overly sensitive to white people’s attention to his skin. Given his title, Marechera was probably influenced by Franz Fanon, who in Black Skin, White Masks writes “I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116). He is overdetermined by the stares of white people, and strives for anonymity. He is forced to reflect upon himself because he cannot forget about himself in the way someone more at ease takes for granted. In “They Diagnosed me a Schizophrenic When I Was Just a Gemini. ‘The Other Side of Madness,’” Colin King describes how his becoming overly conscious of how white people were reacting to him as a black man in England was confused with symptoms of schizophrenia and manic depression.

What Fanon is missing, when he is “over-determined from without,” is the ability to move among people and things without taking much notice, to be pre-reflectively already among people. When Marechera speaks of “doing mechanical actions” during which he no longer feels his skin torturing itself, this involves automatic behavior: more or less unconscious actions.

Josef Parnas, Pierre Bovet, and Dan Zahavi, using a “phenomenologically informed perspective,” propose that schizophrenic autism involves an inability to relate to one’s surroundings and others without close attention to what one is doing. They contrast this to “the ability to see things in the appropriate perspective, an implicit non-conceptual grip of the ‘rules of the game’, a sense of proportion….a non-conceptual and non-reflective indwelling in the intersubjective world” (133).

They defend the explanatory value of this phenomenological approach, but they do not regard it as definitive. While a phenomenologically informed account is compelling, and may offer insight into schizophrenic autism, the loss of “the ability to see things in the appropriate perspective” is not necessarily a symptom of mental illness. Becoming too aware of what most people normally take in stride, can be the result of being treated in a racist manner, or sensitivity to being regarded differently, or simply being different from the people you are among, or feeling something amiss that everyone else seems to overlook. This can involve an aggregate of symptoms that demonstrate a lack of some fundamental requirement of a normal life, the lack of a pre-reflective attunement with others we normally take for granted. But to speak of the lack of the “pre-reflective,” as Parnas, Bovet, and Zahavi occasionally do, can be deceptive. This sense of lack overlooks the competitive nature of mental processing. The pre-reflective may become overruled by mental preparedness to develop some way to get a handle on perceptions that are disturbing, personal, baffling, and uncertain. If you are aroused to the feeling that something is not right, you will pay closer attention to what is going on around you. You are likely to theorize reasons for this feeling, even if these theories are developed from insufficient evidence or a poor interpretation of evidence. You may get it wrong, even if there is something that rightfully aroused your suspicions, and it may be something that you, and anyone else for that matter, would not normally notice. You may become more conscious of the gestures and facial expressions of others (whether you accurately interpret them, or take them as too personally about you, or if you see the shared looks of others as a mutual recognition of their entitlement).

The very definition of the pre-reflective tells you that there is a good deal going on around you that you can safely and practically look past to what has been agreed upon as more important concerns. You will most likely remain unconscious of a prejudice that is immersed in every day practices, as long as you focus on the work you are responsible for performing. Since the pre-reflective involves being attuned with others in regard to “a taste for what is adequate and appropriate,” your body performs the appropriate conduct, by rote, freeing you to pay more attention to issues brought up by you or the people you are with. There is freedom and economy in the pre-reflective. Nevertheless, it is inadequate if a situation arises that calls for unusual attention.

The naturalness of the pre-reflective can be contrived. An actor will find it easier to deliver her lines naturally in front of an audience if she has a secondary focus: an activity to focus her attention on, something to occupy her hands for example. If she concentrates on her lines, her delivery will sound forced. This is why it is important for actors to concentrate on actions rather than speech, even though delivering lines is probably the most important thing they do. In this case it is ordinary behavior--an actor sets a table for example, and while doing so, she has an easier time delivering her lines naturally. This “ordinary” behavior can be consciously intended to help with speaking on a stage more naturally. This is, again, like Marechera’s ability to attain relief through the performance of mechanical actions, relief from feeling himself to be the object of white people’s stares. This relief can be artificially produced, but only where there is some activity you can perform automatically as pre-reflective knowing, like knowing how to set a table without having to give much thought to what you are doing, and as long as you are unquestionably the right person to perform this task, and that it follows from the “rules of the game” so that you do not feel conspicuous by virtue of doing something inappropriate for someone like you, in this place, among these people. Nevertheless, at other times you may be more concerned with asserting independent judgment.

At birth we are already with other people. Consequently we normally become attuned with others long before we perceive ourselves as intellectually different from others. This consciousness of your difference can call your belonging with the others you are among into question. And there may be reasons why you would want this “belonging” called into question. In the following Zahavi describes Husserl’s account of “cultural embeddedness”:

I learn what counts as normal from others, and indeed, initially, and for the most part, from those closest to me, hence from those I grow up with, those who teach me, and those belonging to the most intimate sphere of my life. I thereby participate in a communal tradition, which through a chain of generations stretches back into a dim past. I always already find myself a member of a community. I am born into it; I grow up in it. (Subjectivity 166)

Here’s the problem. You may, as you mature, come to dislike the norms of those you grew up with. This would not be an unusual intellectual awakening to a new judgmental ability. You cannot demonstrate a new capacity for independent judgment by doing what others expect of you. Furthermore, if you grow up in a nuclear family and your parents choose to live in an intellectually bleak community the members of which tend to eagerly defend their limited interests, you may develop a terrible fear of the personal development Zahavi lays out above. This would amount to a fear of responding automatically like those who you are closest to. You may feel as if some of the ways you now do things belong to someone else which, in a sense, is an accurate judgment. You may automatically do some things in ways that do not suit your, more recently developed, self, while looking for other people who ask questions that will suit you better than the interests of those close at hand. If this is the case, you, as an intellectual being, have arrived on the scene too late, long after having acquired automatic ways of interacting with others. You do not want an understanding of “what counts as normal” from others whose taste in such matters you do not trust. But you could not intercept these norms when you acquired them early on before you were capable of judging them independently of the people you acquired them from.

And yet, that you can even make such a judgment, now, in regard to who you are, suggests that your conscious self can be surprisingly immediate, and understood through judgment that emerges from more recent exposure to ways of thinking that you did not grow up with. You may anticipate a more favorable community for you to develop your thoughts within than any you have previous experience of. And yet, due to your lack of appropriate experience, you might not expect to be immediately welcome within any community that approximates what you imagine could be more favorable to you, and this is a problem with the pre-reflective. Fitting in involves automatic attunement with others, behavior that is awkward when too consciously performed. Although you can consciously reject a life-time of personal history, or a key concept for a whole civilization in an instant of insight, adaptation to new situations involves slower changes, and may never be fully successful.

Offspring can be radically different from their parents. Siblings can be, in the biology of their brains, suited to very different lives. This difference will not fully emerge in childhood. A child may be already predisposed to ways of thinking, as the physical make-up of fundamental aspects of her brain that will largely determine who she will later become, ways of thinking that she met with no examples of early on when she acquired norms from those closest to her.

A common finding is that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves. Young children are at the mercy of parents and have to adapt to a world that is not of their choosing. As they get older, however, they can gravitate to the microenvironments that best suit their natures. (Pinker “My Genome” 5)

They “can gravitate to the microenvironments that best suit their natures” if such microenvironments are available to them—and there may be problems with assuming that there are ideal microenvironments. It may incline us toward thinking that takes ideal communities for granted. Miss-matches with communities, and impasses that result in breaks from attunement with others, may be important for developing insights, important to developing an “emerging philosophy” by creating an unusual consciousness of what we normally overlook.

Pierre Bourdieu thinks of norms, learned early on, as personal taste unconsciously embedded in our bodies:

The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will. Orienting practices practically, they embed what some would mistakenly call values in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body—ways of walking or blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking—and engage the most fundamental principles of construction and evaluation of the social world, those which most directly express the division of labour (between the classes, the age groups and the sexes) or the division of the work of domination, in divisions between bodies and between relations to the body…(466)

For Bourdieu, being of a social class is pre-reflective. It concerns a direct and unconscious correspondence to a division of labor. It is not, then, something we can observe in ourselves and change according to a later developing self. This model does not include the capacity to embrace discourse incidentally encountered while turning away from early influences. I agree that a conscious refutation or reevaluation of adopted norms will not simply displace one’s unconscious repetition of “insignificant techniques of the body,” or correct poor adaptation to an unfamiliar, but desirable, microenvironment once and for all. At the same time, it is our ability to change in many respects into people who we could not anticipate that makes it so difficult to assess the potential of individuals. In the following, Bourdieu is in agreement with Husserl’s understanding of how we learn what counts as normal from others early on, but adds a social class bias:

Total, early, imperceptible learning, performed within the family from the earliest days of life and extended by a scholastic learning which presupposes and completes it, differs from belated, methodical learning not so much in the depth and durability of its effect—as the ideology of cultural ‘veneer’ would have it—as in the modality of the relationship to language and culture which it simultaneously tends to inculcate. It confers the self-certainty which accompanies the certainty of possessing cultural legitimacy, and the ease which is the touchstone of excellence; it produces the paradoxical relationship to culture made up of self-confidence amid (relative) ignorance and of casualness amid familiarity, which bourgeois families hand down to their offspring as if it were an heirloom. (66)

In contrast to this description of “casualness amid familiarity,” an arousal to that which is normally pre-reflective could result from entering a room full of people of a social class you have not adjusted to being among. This can result in a “sense of unfamiliarity of the familiar, [a] sense of being overwhelmed or captivated by perceptual details” (Parnas, Bovet, Zahavi 4). You could (assuming this arousal is not symptomatic of continuous pathology) leave this place and return home (if you have a room of your own), where you are no longer overly conscious of yourself and the place where you are. Marechera could enter the shadows, perform mechanical actions, or get angry, the latter perhaps being a refutation of the need for attunement with others.

You may be better pre-disposed toward the work being done by those people you are uncomfortable among than work more typical of someone with your past. Marechera’s great facility with English got him to Oxford, on scholarship, but it did not make for an easy adjustment there. Ideally you will discover the right “microenvironment” at an appropriate age of development to make the adjustment to a new life easily, as a natural transition to new challenges suiting your stage of personal development—and yet this more smooth transition, assuming it is possible, may amount to the loss of whatever advantage a greater sensitivity to where you are could provide.

Pre-reflective attunement with others sets us free from sensitivity to our usual haunts. Privilege is largely maintained through places that the appropriate members of a community will have an unconscious feel for, often corresponding to a sense of entitlement. When confident members of this community are not engaged by problems, even while located where they commonly do so, their brains can relax into a comfortable baseline neural activity (2). This allows them to engage in a richer variety of interactions. They will be relaxed enough to joke with one another, use irony, and other forms of humor, good-naturedly poke fun at one another’s minor errors of judgment, attack others propositions without fear of alienating themselves, and so on. By contrast, the person who does not belong, if he enters this institution, will become too conscious of where he is for comfort. If he is too conscious of his effort to blend in, he is not doing it very well in regard to his own phenomenological experience, and he will feel himself to be lacking in a way that he cannot correct by becoming more conscious, since it is the lack of the ability to relax.

Maybe I should be too conscious for comfort if I enter an institution in order to learn there, and contribute. Maybe I should feel embarrassed if I feel myself relaxing to the extent that I can treat a chair I am about to sit in as so "ready-to-hand" that I pay no more attention to what I am doing than if I were in my own apartment, since I will, then, express through my regard for my surroundings a certain entitlement: all this is naturally mine to be a part of and easily locate my future within. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about what Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence”:

To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it.It’s practical in nature: that
is, its not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. (101)

There is pleasure in the mutual confirmation that we are competent in what we do, the pleasure of “knowing one’s way around,” along with others; if you are in academia, it is like expanding your home, the place where you are comfortable, to include a whole field of study. There is a clear advantage in feeling at ease in various institutions which you can, then, more easily make use of, and more easily contribute within, and this alone may allow you to do more satisfactory work than someone without such an advantage. You can become more involved in ongoing and lively debate, involved in more interactions of various kinds with others who make more practical demands upon you, often involving duties and responsibilities, actions that become mechanical and that allow you to adjust more quickly and easily to new challenges, and so on. And this may give you more ability to have an effect on the lives of others for better or worse.

At the same time, there can be no surprises in “practical intelligence,” beyond how smoothly interactions go, which, on the positive side, can offer the same pleasure an athlete feels when he is reacting to the actions of others quicker than the time it would take to become conscious of what he is doing, an economy of movement that can be breath-taking. And yet, you can’t savor the moment, since, phenomenologically, it goes by so quickly; you do not feel the delay of conscious attention to what you are doing. “Practical intelligence” is know-how according to given rules, and as Bourdieu tells us, these practical practices operate below the level of consciousness. But such practices can be interrupted, producing the confusion of greater consciousness of the situatedness of your interactions, rousing you out of this ease of comportment. This is not the worse thing that could happen; it involves the consciousness that makes uneconomic efforts, to do something different, possible.

In order to develop insights, I should be somewhat distracted by the thought of what other people may be doing elsewhere, things that I am not able to do here and now. I should be somewhat distracted by thoughts that will detract from the economy of what I am doing here and now. I should be somewhat distracted by the thought that my body is located in one place only and that the extent to which I am tied to context is not trivial. This consciousness disrupts the economy and the pleasure of automatic response, but, along with the tension it produces, it can provide the conditions for a rationality that is based on a broader selection of information.

Kant would regard this tension as a kind mental health problem. He devotes a section in Anthropology to the problem of distraction:

DISTRACTION (distractio) is the state of diverting attention (abstraction) from certain ruling ideas by means of shifting to other dissimilar ideas. If the distraction is intentional, it is called dissipation; if it is involuntary it is absentmindedness (absentia)….To be distracted in society is impolite, and often laughable as well. Women are ordinarily not subject to this impulse, unless they devote themselves to learning. A servant who looks distracted while waiting on table is usually thinking something evil, either he is plotting something or he thinks about the possible consequences. (S 47)

While, for a woman, distraction can be a symptom of the folly of devoting herself to learning, for a servant, waiting on table, it is probably evil, which suggests that for a servant to have thoughts devoted to anything other than serving will likely involve plotting against those he serves. Distraction, other than in the case of the plotting servant, is a mental health problem. “The most wholesome means of recovering control is social conversation on various subjects, similar to playing. Such conversation must not change from one subject to another by violating the natural relationship of ideas, for then the state of mental distraction would break up the company because everything is confused and the unity of conversation is entirely lacking” (S 47). If someone makes a habit of distraction he becomes useless to society. He should use reason to reign in his attention, confining it to “the natural relationship of ideas.” Reason, in this respect, is a means of control through reducing attention. Inclination to associate remotely related information can result in an easily distractible mind.

When Kant was considering distraction he was unlikely to have considered the possibility of becoming distracted by ideas that do not fit within the “ruling ideas” of the people he is among while these ideas are nevertheless related to the subject matter being discussed. Different disciplines now often have different “ruling ideas” for dealing with the same essential subject, whether Kantians speaking of intuitions, neuroscientists speaking of sense data and mental processing, or continental philosophers speaking of a phenomenological first person experience as opposed to an empirical approach to perception. The “ruling ideas” of one discipline (as opposed to those of another) may be more useful for considering some aspects of a problem, but not others. This could give an advantage to being able to alternate between the "ruling ideas" of different communities within one’s overall efforts.

Distraction is essential to organizing your life, especially if you have varied interests that bring more information into your mental processing. For example, if you are at one event, say a talk, you may sit near the exit if you have to sneak out before it ends in order to attend another event. Thought of that second event, reminding you to check the time, must repeat occasionally. When it does, you must emotionally reinforce the importance of this other event (remember it as important) so that thought of it will return. If you think of this other event as insignificant you may forget all about it. The importance of somewhere else makes you more aware of where you are than you may like, more aware of sensory perception as opposed to comprehension of what a speaker is saying, more aware that you are in this place, only, and that you can only attend the other event if you leave this event before you may want to. You must remain somewhat intellectually removed from the people you are among. When the time to leave gets near, you must more strongly reinforce thought of the second event, the need to get up from your chair and slip out, so that it will recur more frequently closer to the time when you have to leave. Each time the thought of this other event occurs to you, you lose focus on the people you are presently among. Thoughts of the second event will be distracting, perhaps even impolite. You may feel guilty for not giving your full attention to the speaker. On the other hand you may feel excitement at negotiating a bigger world.

Equivalent choices are stressful because they require either an arbitrary choice or the confusion of alternating attention. And yet we could—this is what I claim--regard the confusion of more kinds of information that is related in regard to subject matter, but that is, nevertheless, unrelated in regard to the “ruling ideas” of the communities involved, as necessary for more advanced thought than would fit within a more economic life.

You can gain more confidence within a narrow-based rationality--at least, confidence of being able to handle clearly pertinent information, and probably even larger amounts of information, more easily recalled in conjunction with other similar memory, since memory is enhanced by association. In an academic setting you may worry about the prospect of becoming embarrassed in comparison to other faculty members who remember more of the information important to your profession.

When sensitive to being only here and now, there is nothing you can do to transcend the pain of your physical limitations, your largely incidental position within a particular, necessarily-limited, time and place. Without transcendence you are left with either a disappointing acceptance of your limitations, or the confusion of alternating attention, but in the latter case you can come to conclusions that you could not have otherwise reached, but to get there may require a consciousness that arouses you out of a pre-reflective attunement with others.
















Endnotes:
(1)Marechera was in England on a scholarship to Oxford. He came from poverty in Zimbabwe, the son of a lorry driver helper, someone who helped load and unload trucks.

(2) In an article concerned with insight, called “The Prepared Mind,” John Kounios and others have concluded that prior to solving problems most areas of the brain show decreased signaling “as neural activity returned to baseline” (886). In preparation to solve problems using insight, there is “increased readiness to monitor for competing responses, and to apply cognitive control mechanisms as needed to (a) suppress extraneous thoughts, (b) initially select prepotent solution spaces or strategies, and, if these prove ineffective, (c) subsequently shift attention to a nonprepotent solution or strategy. Such shifts are characteristic of insight” (887).




Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction; A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers; The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper, 1962.
Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.
King, Colin. "They Diagnosed Me a Schizophrenic When I Was Just a Gemini; The Other Side of Madness." Reconceiving Schizophrenia. Ed. Man Cheung Chung, K.W.M. Fulford, and George Graham. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Kounios, John, et al. The Prepared Mind; Neural Activity Prior to Problem Presentation Predicts Subsequent Solution by Sudden Insight. Psychological Science. 2006. Vol.17. No.6.
Marechera, Dambudzo. "Black Skin What Mask." The House of Hunger. Oxford: Heinemann, 1993.
Parnas, Josef, Pierre Bovet, and Dan Zahavi. Schizophrenic Autism: Clinical Phenomenology and Pathogenic Implications. World Psychiatry. 2002 October; 1 (3): 131-136. [PubMed]
Pinker, Steven. My Genome, My Self. The New York Times. 2009 Jan. 11. Magazine. [nytimes.com]
Zahavi, Dan. Subjectivity and Selfhood; Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge: Bradford, 2008.

Cynthia Sailers' Introduction to Stacy Szymaszek

Julian Brolaski writes of Stacy’s Szymaszek’s Emptied of All Ships (Litmus 2005), Stacy’s work “combines the homo and the piratical to make outlaw speech in a place which has traditionally been outside the law.” Stacy’s “narrative” centers around her protagonist “James” (inspired by Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse “James”), “a robot armed sailor-siren with Protean shoulders, sailing on a bonhomie sea.” Julian continues, “Queers have always been fond of adventures “at sea”—the sea is a notoriously good place for outlaw behaviors—where kitsch, chaos and rum rule and James is inevitably “queer”—an adjective of doubtful origin but possibly in the sense of the German “quer” or “oblique”— oblique, perverse, not going straight to the point; roundabout, indirect.”

Interestingly, Julian’s review was rejected by the poetry publication it was intended for because of its quote “fun, in-the-know approach to the subject,” and because it was too “tied to a specifically queer vocabulary for our magazine, which has a readership that might find some of the references confusing.” (And he was redirected to an explicitly queer publication).

Stacy’s writing as a whole is also inevitably queer in the sense of not going “straight,” through her use of doubles, male doppelgangers, ambisexual “wonders,” masculine signifiers, and dramatis personae. She creates a fantasy, a Gay Male Pantheon out of my favorite literati: Melville, Hart Crane, Pasolini, Whitman, and Genet. Stacy says to her Pasolini: “I think how we are almost brothers Mafioso bandit homo whore.” There seems to be a continuum between male relations from fraternity to criminal to homo to whore which speaks something of her relationship to Pasolini, in this case, but also of a pivotal devolvement in differing subjective positions that splinter and multiply as constitutions of a self. I’m reminded of Roland Barthes question, “Who is the I who writes itself,” or in Stacy’s words “to be both more than I what I am or less than what I am.”

There is much to say about Stacy’s writing (and her love of the long poem!), the close attention to word, line, page, an aesthetically conscious and analytic lyric mode; however, I think one cannot ‘read’ the work without appreciation for the slippage between the invisibility of queerness and queerness as a sign/turn of visibility. Maybe in a sense, it’s one route to asking larger questions about one’s community and who are we writing for? Stacy keeps us tense, does not separate out ‘poetic / perverse’, and is extremely generous in producing frames/ content and at the same time, is able to slip in and out of them.

In Hyperglossia: we’re in the world of the anatomical text, or what I think might be the speaking phallus (over, beyond, tongue, hyperglossia, “excited tongue?). On the opening page, Eustace (“Eustace” a male given name for “steadfast”) appears immediately as the anagram “sea cute” and a subsequent pattern of anagrams appear like code. Having the phallus, being the phallus, speech itself, we also find coded the criminal, the marked one, the writer—and as we think back to her nom de plumes, the multiple and colliding subjectivities—Stacy writes, “All my work is about the itch of desire that can never be scratched,” which is both about the nature of desire and the compulsory, the blocking out, the use of persona, i.e. these longing figures who identify themselves with the criminal (but are still sane, do not hystericize the incident). She is much more straightforward about her loss: “I was once a private person before this” or “how my jaw is never to be disengaged again.”… Desire is desire.

I was looking at Stacy’s photographs this week on flickr and found one of my favorites. It’s a cardboard cutout of Stacy, I think with a woman with her arm around her, and the title is “[Stacy] makes an excellent transference device! I don’t think I could say it any better.

And so I am very excited to have Stacy here and Hyperglossia soon in my (criminal) hands.

Hyperglossia is forthcoming in 2009 from Litmus Press.

Craig Santos Perez & Stacy Szymaszek

Jim Brashear, on hiatus from New York for a week & I (not masked) attended Small Press Traffic's offering of Craig Santos Perez and Stacy Szymaszek reading from their work on Friday the 13th.





Craig Santos Perez was up first and read from new work. He offered us his version of an inauguration day poem. I can't remember if "Senator Kennedy we love you get up" is the title or if this is a line from within the poem itself. But there it is.

Craig offered us villanelles, haiku and other work. His haiku were part of a series or a poem in sections entitled "All with Ocean Views" which explored, in part, the construction of Guam as a tourist destination and site of U.S. military bases. Both Chamoru culture and the resources of the island itself have been devastated from colonization, war and occupation.

In his statement to the U.N. in 2008, copies of which Craig offered us, he writes:

During and immediately after World War II, brown tree snakes invaded Guam as stowaways on U.S. naval cargo ships. By 1968, the snakes colonized the entire island, their population reaching a density of 13,000 per square mile. As a result, Guam's seabirds, 10 of 13 endemic species of forest birds, 2 of 3 native mammals, and 6 of 10 native species of lizards have all gone extinct.

The U.S. plans to introduce--this time intentionally--a more familiar breed of predators to Guam: an estimated 19,000 military personnel and 20,000 of their dependents, along with numerous overseas businesses and 20,000 contract workers to support the military build-up. Add this to the 14,000 military personnel already on Guam, and that's a combined total of 73,000--outnumbering the entire Chamoru population on Guam, which is roughly 62,900.

Perez's poetry explores this history. One of his poems from his second book featured the recurring line "sheet water," and then a Chamorro phrase that I can't reproduce here. I also jotted down, "let there be no
beginning to what this can bear."

It is a pleasure to listen to Craig read. Here is a review by Jake Kennedy of Santos Perez's Unincorporated Territory.

And here's Craig's bio from SPT:

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). His poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared (or are forthcoming) in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others.



Next up was Stacy Szymaszek. I wasn't familiar with Stacy's work, though there is no excuse for that. I was happy to have the opportunity to hear her read and I brought home with me a copy of her chapbook, Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane. It was pricey, 10 bucks, but worth it. Cynthia Sailers provided a smart introduction to Stacy's work, explaining its queer,perverse trajectory. Loved it!

Here's a tiny tidbit of what Stacy read from Orizaba:




"In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy."--HC

My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suite, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-haired woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane's magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change." Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard.

With this piece, Stacy left us in medias res and wanting more.

From one of her poems, I jotted down:

she localizes words
forms fibroblasts
uses a fibroblaster

There is something precise and sleeper wave-like about Szymaszeck's poetry. It rolls up and suddenly knocks you down.

Read a review of Stacy's Some Mariners by Jake Kennedy here.

Check out the work of these writers both.

Here's Stacy's bio, again, from Small Press Traffic:

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus, 2005) as well as many chapbooks, most recently Orizaba: A Voyage With Hart Crane (Faux, 2008), and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Stacy S: Autoportraits which features her self-portraits with texts written in response by Lisa Jarnot, Renee Gladman, Kevin Killian and others was also published in 2008 by OMG!. The complete Hyperglossia will be published by Litmus Press in spring of 2009. She is the editor of Gam and the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.