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PART 2 OF THE BUMPY RIDE
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Archive for February, 2007

February 7th, 2007

John - yes, Fassbinder would be a good example of an elliptical film maker. Aeschylus as a “single breath” is wonderful. Love also the idea of the Bible as an elliptical landscape in which hallucinatory voices are suddenly heard. Much to mull over.

You write about Hanks, that paragon of suburban decency, and I think you’re correct in your assessment, but also that there are perhaps even better examples of what’s afoot. Ben Stiller, for example, doesn’t even pretend to be an actor. He is more like a walking, talking franchise, a performative entrepreneur. Like many of today’s celebrities, Stiller is a commodifier of himself. There isn’t even the pretense of art, and concepts such as integrity are utterly beside the point. And yet, I strongly suspect that Stiller would view himself as a liberal, a person on the left, whose work is contributing to the general effort to create a better world.

I’ve been wanting to write for a while about Saturday Night Live, a lefty cultural landmark that has actually strenghtened the forces it was designed to undermine. The show exemplifies the ethos of the 1970s, when it emerged the breeding ground for the hip, ironic comedian-actor that Stiller kind of exemplifies. SNL was completely a part of the counterculture. In many ways SNL was the counterculture finally taking its place on television. It provided the kind of hip, entertainment complete with lefty bias that was supposed to shame the post-Watergate right into behaving a little less foolishly.

But the Right got over its shock and recognized that entertainment (as opposed to art) inherently fuels a right-wing agenda in its effects. This is because the intention animating entertainment - to put us to sleep, to provide false comfort - inherently empowers right wing forces. The intention animating art - to wake us up - is, by contrast, inherently corrosive to the Right. For a while the Left had the best of both worlds… you could be an entertainer AND posture as an artist. Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, those two demonic porky pigs dragging us all squealing into the abattoir, brought the axe down on that delusion. At this point, the Right has completely co-opted, or at least neutralized, the standard tropes of the Left circa 1970. “Rock star” is their favorite epithet. “Tony Snow is a rock star,” etc. Among other things this means that we on the left must all dig a little deeper.

We have to recognize what we are up against here. As I’ve written elsewhere, one of the most striking moments of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 is the clip of Bush greeting the audience at a Republican fund raiser as “the haves…and the have-mores.” The laughter that filled the hall speaks volumes about the nature of the class war unfolding in the United States, a war launched pre-emptive by a few thousand people given tremendous influence over human events by vast sums they either inherited, stole (by means legal or illegal), or, perhaps, earned through a combination of good luck, narrow focus and ruthless application. I’m thinking of the self-important CEO’s like Rupert Murdoch who made themselves into celebrities during the roaring 90s. Sometime in the late 1960s and 70s these people decided, collectively or in small think tanks and corporate board rooms, that the postwar boom had raised all our boats a little TOO high (a yacht really isn’t a yacht, perhaps, when everyone can have one.) Strategies were developed to produce the requisite social “correction” not by democratic means, but by the steady application of financial leverage on sensitive cultural pressure points. Alliances were formed with marginalized segments of the middle class whose narrow prejudices could be cultivated, amplified and then controlled. Embarrassing buffoons such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson became suddenly useful, providing a smokescreen of self-exonerating piety over the progressive gutting of the great American middle class. And of course, no right-wing coup would be complete without a demonized Other to blame it all on, preferably dark-skinned. So, finally, we have sadistic preppie George W. Bush proclaiming a third “Great Awakening” in America while he stokes the flames of Muslim fundamentalism abroad in order to justify his shredding of the US Constitution.

It’s easy to get pissed-off about this kind of organized mendacity, and the sheer destructiveness at play. But getting pissed-off can actually render one less effective, which the American left can certainly not afford. What made FDR so effective as an agent of social change is that he recognized that demonizing the upper classes was probably counterproductive and certainly beside the point. As Marx underscored, wealth tends to distort one’s view. Wealth is impersonal in this regard and the distorting effects are difficult to counteract. Wealth simply amplifies tendencies we are all innately saddled with, and the rich are not inherently different than you or me. A case could be made that the cold, murderous anger that animated, for example, the Bolsheviks (not to mention the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, etc) is PART of what has undermined and discredited the left as an agent of change in the latter half of the 20th century. To view the wealthy with compassion makes it more likely you will be able to redistribute a portion of their burden. You may be able to help them resist the destructive impulses that are relatively harmless in most of us, but which their wealth gives an outsized impact. I actually think it’s easier for us in the US of A to resist this anger because class identification is still quite weak here compared to, say Latin America or even Western Europe.

This is a long-ish post already, but I wanted to close by returning to Kafka who you cite as an elliptical writer. I think he is in part, but Kafka seems like very rich terrain. I often have the feeling he’s still ahead of us, waiting for us to catch up or for history to catch up. I’ll just lob that up there for future consideration…

Guy Zimmerman

JOB TO BLOW JOB

February 7th, 2007

Well, so much to talk about. A number of topics floating about. I want to mention that the technical problems regarding the comments section has probably been frustrating to people….a number of friends at least have written to me about it. All I can say is that its being worked on…..though not by me (luddite that I am). Because its apparently spam related….and pornography related….I am again struck with To Catch a Predator. This constitutes the new pornography after all, in one sense. The porno industry seems more and more to focus on humiliation…..for all parties. I think network TV does this too. Its an age of humiliation. What does this mean? Shows like Predator, and most reality based TV, are humiliation predicated. The arms industry is the number one business in the world, and porn (including prostitution) is number two. Mankind is not in a good place.

Alright…..as for the King James Bible. Yes, its an amazing achievment. The story of its making is pretty amazing too. But you raise the question of the elliptical. I’ve thought about this before…..the OED says elliptical, in refrence to writing, would be a sentence lacking a word for completion. You posit this as a space for the reader, or audience, to write the word itself…..or somehow fill in the blank. I think this is true. I’ve thought about this with writing dialogue. If you dont give an actor a space to ‘breathe’ you are destroying the scene. Pinter is certainly elliptical. I think it is possible in film, and I might nominate Fassbinder as the most elliptical of film directors. One might even see Bresson that way, too. But the list you give; the Rulfo, the Ondaatje (second time that work has come up here), the Denis Johnson….these are among my favorite works, so clearly I have some affinity or love for this strategy. It’s linked to the fragmentary to be sure. It’s linked to supressing the desire for completion, too.

Perhaps, however, it is, as you suggest, most connected with giving the audience or reader a means or path to his own inner narrative…..one that runs alongside the artwork. This will get us into a big topic and that is subjective/objective……and I don’t want to go there, yet. This path, though, seems to me to what much Asian writing and artwork is about; consider a Basho for example. Consider haiku in general. The foreground becomes ellipical in a sense. You mention Woyzeck, and this is a perfect example, and one where some of the early scenes are in an unclear order. It doesnt matter. Is Kafka elliptical? I suspect partly. This space is also linked to the question of language. The deep structure of language… or if you’re more of a Lacanian or Deleuzian, to the unconscious-structure of language. It becomes a dialectic, the artwork reflects back and forth with the viewer or reader or audience…and isn’t, as in a certain epic mode, a simple declaration. Im not sure about any of this, however. An Aeschylus for example is a single breath (Sophocles was an inhalation and an exhalation, and Euripides was simple breathing) and wasn’t ellipitcal in the sense we’re talking about. Or was he? Aeschylus was also not epic in the traditional sense. This is why he fascinates me so much.

Ok, I fear I am rambling here this morning. Are certain actors elliptical? Maybe…..McQueen is a good choice….and Bogart, a deceptively complex actor, and certainly Brando. But in acting the elliptical is closely linked to witholding. And this means also witholding emotion, and that makes this entire discussion really complicated. A Tom Hanks never witholds, maybe because there is NOTHING to withold. His sentimentality is pure presentation. This accounts for his popularity. In a film (lousy film) like Road to Perdition, you see him do a facsimile of the elliptical. But it’s fake, it’s all surface. Take Ray Winstone, and you have a deeply elliptical actor, though he operates in a much different fashion from a McQueen, say. This somehow links back to humiliation and an increasing fear in the culture about one’s inner life. Hanks is popular because he pretends to have emotions, pretends to have an inner life, and pretends to show this to us. A Brando, even in the 50s, was showing us too much of what the inner life was really about. Its untidy and dark. Push this further and you end up with Artaud and Kantor and Grotowski. You also end up with Fassbinder and Francis Bacon. Funny how this all seems linked as I think on it. The elliptical is also a means to the inarticulate. Kroetz certainly mined that, and probably Rulfo and Buchner. Brando did, most certainly. I’ve said before that a Paul Scofield seems better and better because of this, while a Branagh seems worse and worse.

A mention here, again, regards the fake. TV cop drama….an NYPD Blue or shit like 24 Hours, these are (besides being fascistic) about a sanitized and contained expression of the inner. First of all, cops don’t have inner lives and thats why they’re cops, but beyond that its a deeply bourgeoise fantasy that manages to keep big forces of life at a distance. Its comforting for the people of the dying Empire.

So, back to the Bible. This is a narrative structure that allows God to suddenly speak…..from whence we know not. ‘They walked for forty days and forty nights and came to a mountain…’ and what mountain is that? Who is “they”? Nothing is explained in that sense. We fill in all of it. What is created is a world that is, at times, pure Id. A dark and menacing place where voices appear from out of nowhere. And yes, the specific demand for compassion and acceptance of your brother and sister is acute. Have you seen Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew ? Interesting approach to some of this.

Alright, well, a last note on what you said regards artists being validated by future artists. This is absolutly true, and something today’s (or any day’s) critics and curators want to keep secret. Those artists who inspire other artists end up being the artists embraced by history. The marketplace tries, over and over, to sell certain people…and somehow it won’t stick. There is much here to return to, but I will leave off for now….and slide the puck across the ice to you.

John Steppling

MYSTERY TRAIN
February 6th, 2007

John - the King James Bible certainly establishes the cultural value of very very good storytelling, no question about it. I love Adorno on fragments and the part being on par with the whole. The example you cite - Lee Marvin’s shoes in Point Blank - is perfect. The history of art is to a large degree determined by such fragments. This is because the history of art is a creation of artists rather than critics or cultural mandarins, and artists are typically obsessed by marvelous fragments and their suggestive power and mystery.

A related point concerns the power of ellipses as an artistic technique. On my list of remarkable fragments and works of ellipses would be Anaxamander (the Pre Socratics in general), Buchner’s Woyzeck, Juan Rulfo’s astonishing Pedro Paramo, Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Miles Davis shows how powerful ellipsis can be in music. Ellipses is obviously a central technique in lyric poetry and short fiction. As a playwright you certainly lay claim to this terrain, along with Franz Xavier Kroetz. It would be interesting to identify actors who somehow embody ellipses in performance. McQueen comes to mind, for example, but I couldn’t swear to it.

The crucial thing about ellipses and the fragment is that the whole has to be created, at least in a virtual sense, before it can be partially withheld. Space is opened in the work of art such that the viewer is forced to engage to complete the whole. The reason it’s such a powerful technique, you could say, is because it makes use of our inherent bias toward form, and that the way we are able to complete the work of art underscores the presence of compassion in us. We instinctively fill in the gaps left by the artist, completing the picture, but we can only do this because of a pre-existing connection to the awareness that underlies the work and that animates the artist. A non-separation. I wonder if technology, mechanical reproduction, gets in the way of this process. I don’t think it does (though right now I can’t think of filmmakers who use ellipses) but perhaps this is part of the “aura” Walter Benjamin was worried about losing when art becomes technology-driven.

The Adorno you quote is also memorable regarding the whole issue of artistic greatness and influence. Artistic influence is determined by the artists of the future - what they find relevant in what has previously been done. Greatness is NOT determined by popular tastes or critics or other “consumers.” The chestnut about Van Gogh never selling a painting during his lifetime comes to mind. Van Gogh’s importance didn’t begin to rise because the the public suddenly discovered a taste for his paintings - it rose because no young painter after him could put brush to canvass without grappling with what he had achieved. Pretty soon Van Gogh was implied, positively or negatively, by all the paintings being made, and this meant his work began to take on ever more weight. Artists lead public taste, not the other way around is the point. Should younger artists suddenly decide Van Gogh is a complete fraud or irrelevant to their concerns his star would begin to slowly fade. This happens all the time to artists, and it’s to be expected. Artistic value is not absolute or written somewhere in stone, but neither, of course, is anything else.

It’s true also what you say about the Bible and how the stories often center around the powerless and the destitute. So many of the values in the Old Testament, and also in the New, are grounded in narrative rather than in direct statements, and this explains the enduring power of those works. That this power has often been exploited for regrettable ends, and the degree to which this power somehow lends itself to manipulation per se, are different topics. What you remind me of is the specificity of the Biblical authors. The Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor talks about this. In Buddhism you tend to have these lofty pronouncements about ending suffering, but in the New Testament it’s about the leper at your feet who must be helped right now. In fairness to the Buddhists, the central practices geared toward the cultivation of compassion are VERY specific in this same way, but on the level of text and of writing the Biblical approach is much more potent. And this points to one of the intuitions we share - that in the West art has, for better or worse, hauled a good deal of the spiritual freight, much more so than in the East. That the power of the Bible, for example, is at root a form of literary power remains an idea full of mystery for me…

Guy Zimmerman

HOMER VS. GOD
February 5th, 2007

Guy…..I think your last paragraph does indeed warrant a larger discussion. I, too, have developed a certain tolerance for melodrama. At least I understand its role in popular culture….as we find it today. But before going further, let me throw out another of Adorno’s chestnuts. Or a couple of chestnuts. He said there was no ranking for artworks. He maintained that consistency was finally impossible. Which is not to throw away the notion of success…..which would land us in some post modern swamp of total relativism. Only to say that success is pretty fluid. For an artwork that is only consistent ends up being an academic exercise or worse. If there is worse.

He also addressed this notion of greatness. “Greatness is the guilt that works bear, but without this guilt they would remain insufficient”. This, in his opinion, is expressed, in a sense, by an appreciation of the exceptional fragment. Adorno is always dialectical. The impulse for consistency must be balanced by a flight from it. And as he often says in different ways, the dreaded circus act or cafe fiddler, must still exist in some shadowy echo-like form in the artwork. It must have a history. It must also have a sense of opposition to the world it lives in. And it must fight, in whatever way, against unity and consistency…..even while struggling for it.

“Artworks register what would otherwise vanish”.

So, the melodrama (Blood Diamond in this case) is, yes, a melodrama. A comment in the Alienated Diamond post complains it is a melodrama and full of clichés. I agree….but I see in the fragmentary, in DeCaprio’s performance for one, something suggestive of a bigger or more significant impulse. Zwick is a hack….who as you put it, got out of the way in this case. Yes…..and I could, if I chose, quibble about the political details ( I mean, a certificate that my diamond is from a conflict free zone is just absurd) but in the overall template, in the form of the narrative itself, we find a history (The Searchers for one) and we find a genuine litany of exceptional detail. Adorno also said the whole exists only for the sake of the parts! Au contraire I hear the academics screaming. Yeah, well, scream away…..because this is a very insightful observation. The lust for completion and product subsumes categories like consistency and unity.

“Whoever lacks an appreciation for beautiful passages — in painting too…is as alien to the artwork as one who is incapable of experiencing its unity”.

A film like Point Blank, a great seventies noir, with Lee Marvin, might be described by a single shot of Marvin walking down a corridor….or even more, by his shoes. Those shoes are so over-determined in that film as to defy analysis. Its only a fragment of a flawed but fascinating bit of genre filmmaking. So, we arrive at our tolerance for melodrama and your observations on epic and tragic.

I think you are basically right. I am reminded of Auerbach’s classic book, Mimesis. The first chapter opposes the old testament to Homer. It’s a cogent comparison. The King James Bible has a narrative structure which means to express what isn’t said or expressed by description. Homer externalizes thought. Homer in leisurely fashion tells us a story. It is, as Auerbach says, almost totally foreground. The world is ONLY what is being told to us. I am simplefying here to be sure. But in the Old Testament, the stories contain great background….in fact that often seems the entire point. It suggests a complex almost hidden world that surrounds us all the time.

One could say that the Old Testament model requires more interpretation. Homer is self-explanatory. Also, in Homer we deal with the elite class, in the Old Testament we often deal with the lowest and most humble of God’s children. I would — maybe — suggest film is more Homeric and theatre more Biblical. Such generalizations will come apart at the seams, no doubt……but still, there is validity here. Tolstoy is Homeric to be sure, and Dostoyevski is Old Testament. Now a Melville is a bit of both, but clearly more wedded to the Old Testament. Same with McCarthy. A Thomas Pynchon is Homeric……in his fashion.

Now, films like The Godfather……the great pure melodrama of the last thirty years I would argue… is, for me anyway, without much exceptional fragment. Perhaps its just me, but I find those films stultifying. I find them somehow reactionary, too. They are part of what was one branch of the Homeric tree. This can get amazingly complicated, so I will try to stay as simple as possible. The Ford film is melodrama, too, but it contains mythic elements that don’t exist in The Godfather. Even Blood Diamond contains a share, albeit modest, of the mythic. Homer, despite Zeus and whoever, tends toward a focus on man and his problems. The Old Testament focuses on man, in relationship to history, to religion, and to nature. Its mysterious and Homer isn’t. The Godfather lacks mystery. Most melodrama lacks mystery. Blood Diamond has a tiny bit…..and its in the Danny Archer character, in his transformation from mercenary. His place in a decisive historical period makes him interesting and draws us in. And DeCaprio’s performance is intuitively mysterious….enough is withheld, is ambivalent, to make Archer something rather special. I don’t want to over-value this film, for its really not a great film at all. But its also about ’something” and not many films are these days.

So, in theatre, we have an endless replay of Job. We have Cain and Able…..and this is what somehow is there before us when the lights come up. In film, we have Odysseus … and that isn’t bad…..WHEN we have him. The problem is that so much film isn’t even vaguely Homeric. Its video game emptiness….or rather, nothingness.

I toss this back to you now…….

John Steppling

A GLASS HALF FULL…
February 4th, 2007

Well, your observations about Blood Diamond are spot on. It really does mirror The Searchers so it should be placed on that film’s ever-growing family tree. I’ve never taken Zwick very seriously as a director, but he got out of the way of this one nicely. Danny Archer’s backstory was very well handled by the script, and De Caprio hit it perfectly with his performance too. We find out about how Archer saw his parents murdered in front of him at precisely the right time, and the description, I recall is very reminiscent of the scene in the Ford film where Ethan finds his family slaughtered. I agree about the sentimental ending, but the intention of the film is important enough that such complaints feel like quibbling. The film is tragic with respect to it’s most interesting character; melodramatic with respect to the Hounsou character (another great performance, by the way). So it’s a classic glass half-empty, glass half-full situation.

I’m not sure I would have felt this tolerant about melodrama a few years ago, but as things have moved toward the extreme right one has to chose one’s battles. The reification effort you describe in Hollywood has become explicitly the project of the famous military-industrial complex. Back in the 1980s, I remember reading, the armed services began to insist on script approval before they would allow Hollywood access to the military locations and equipment that are the life’s blood of many action films. Melodrama isn’t enough for these people, what they want are triumphalist sagas in which an icon of pure ego vanquishes all evil. Michael Bay had to be grown in his test tube…but now people have turned away from Michael Bay, and Brukheimer is working more and more in television where the demands are lower. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the right is very aware of the need for compelling narratives with a rightwing tilt. I think they have their work cut out for them because art is by definition about a kind of liberation. But in this environment, a few nods in the direction of melodrama seem like no big deal.

Interesting you comments on Daoism. What is critiqued, you’re correct, is not the effort to be good or evil…it’s the effort to be (anything) that is the source of the imbalance. You could pull back to a long view and say that the West embraced imbalance, tried to ride it, and this is why the West has been so dynamic. But now the imbalance has gotten out of hand and is out of control and the approach of the East is looking increasingly like a better bet. It’s a dialectic, no doubt, is the truth.

Regarding theater, I know exactly what you mean. I think theater, the way we engage with it at any rate, is inherently tragic. The form of it has a strong tragic dimension, and that cinema has a similar relationship to the form of the epic. I think of George Steiner’s book comparing Dostoyevski - who was an essentially theatrical writer and Shakespeare’s successor - and Tolstoy, who was possibly the greatest writer of epics since Homer. To circle back around, it may be that a certain amount of sentimentality doesn’t curdle an epic the way it does a tragedy, which has to walk a more perilous line. If this is true, it explains why one doesn’t begrudge Ford or Zwick a few yards of chintz if the whole fabric is doing it’s job. No doubt a lot to investigate in this terrain…

Guy Zimmerman

ALIENATION DIAMONDS
February 4th, 2007

I’ve been pondering a couple things of late. If one looks at Blood Diamond, say, in light of The Searchers, one sees a great similarity in narrative structure. I would also toss into the mix, one of my favorite films, Who’ll Stop the Rain. Now the latter is a Robert Stone script….and is a moment of post Viet Nam noir. The Nolte character is quite close to the DeCaprio character in ‘Diamond. The Ford film is post WW2 in a sense….a reaction of sorts at least to Korea. Is Blood Diamond a reaction to Iraq? It’s a reaction to many things related to American foreign policy and colonialism.

If you keep deconstructing these narratives you come up with some interesting comparisons. Jeffrey Hunter has morphed into a former colonial subject in the African fisherman. The diamond is the bag of heroin in ‘Rain. And on and on and on. DeCaprio’s Danny Archer is a former Rhodesian mercenary….not too far away from Ethan Edwards, Indian killer. All very telling I feel.

And this somehow brings me to Adorno yet again. He would say that we have adapted to our alienation (and he said this over a quarter of a century ago). We no longer experience alienation as alienation. The Enlightenment notion of the subject, the individual, is now in the thrall of instrumental reason. The rationale of technology is the rationale of domination (which is from the Culture Industry essay). But, per your notes on emptiness, the subject is of course always a reaction to the object. It reaches out to the object. (Sartre said consciousness is always consciousness of someTHING). And in one sense the object reifies us. Which is maybe a little of what you’re saying about the “other”. If you’re right that the Ford film is about the dawning of compassion, then Blood Diamond is likely the same. I should add that one wishes the political focus had been a bit wider in this film, and that the fairy-tale ending had been avoided, that some of the sentimentalizing cues had been resisted; but all said and done, it’s quite a good film. What I most appreciated was the clear indication that the diamond cartels fueled that war in Sierra Leone. Mining fuels a lot in Africa (google coltan!!). To see children calling themselves Rambo, or Master of Disaster, and holding US made weapons, is an important image and important content.

So, we have our utter alienation and utter loss of autonomy in the totally mediated world of domination. The technological logic of conquest is now spinning into oblivion. Africa really is the canary in the mine shaft. The destruction of that continent is a precursor for what is yet to come. What is dangerous are the various tropes at work in some of the films and plays on this subject. For every ‘Diamond we have a Hotel Rwanda. Its not just the fairy tale re-writing of history, its the mise en scene, the subtle messages of an Imperialist pov. Of course the neo-cons are the extreme and most visible example of deranged Imperialism and self-hatred. Of this logic of domination — which is the loss of all sense of the interdependence of the world. It would be interesting to examine a cross-section of films over the last twenty years (and plays and novels) to see the way domination and conquest are represented. The real sadism and horror of 99% of Hollywood film is to be found in the reification of its protagonists. Fighting outer space aliens or villians de jour (Muslims these days) or “the bad guys”; it’s all the same. And I think you’re correct about Macbeth — except to add that Macbeth, or Ethan Edwards, (and now Danny Archer) have something that seperates them from Hannibal Lecter, or MI’s Tom Cruise character (whose name is Ethan too I believe). A Danny Archer is able to awaken, while the totally dead Cruise character never will. Macbeth never does, but his delusion has a size worthy of an attempt…. and that is where this discussion began….the now totally lost sense of self, of relation, of even an ego. The force of instrumental reason has reached a state where Deleuze and others see only schizoid meltdown. And films like MI or Independence Day or War of the Worlds, or Armageddon, or Rambo, are part of this. Macbeth reflects on his own tragedy, Tom Cruise cannot.

In Daoism, the struggle is not to be “good”, but is exactly not through a struggle within onself (subject) but through a process of seeing the world in its relation to us that we achieve tranquility. We defer. We also do not anticipate… and for the West this is especially difficult. Language, one might say, anticipates. And yet again I find myself arriving at Beckett and Pinter, and Lacan, Heidegger, and Deleuze.

A final thought on theatre again — in relation to film. As I write about these various films I can almost feel the difference from theatre. The two mediums are doing something different. I suspect we should return to this at some point, again.
John Steppling

UNDER THE WESTERN SUNYATA
February 3rd, 2007

John,
Well, since I keep throwing around the term “emptiness” (sunyata) I guess I ought to define it. You’re certainly correct that it must not be confused with “nothingness” or “void” or anything like that. It’s more about the lack of any firm ground or reference point by which to fix definitions or coordinates. The 5th century Indian thinker Nagarjuna is the first to fully unpack the concept from the discourses, or Sutras, of the Buddha. The nuerologist Francisco Varela, in his remarkable book The Embodied Mind (MIT Press 1993) sums up a long discussion like this: “Nagarjuna’s point is not to say that things are nonexistent in an absolute way any more than to say that they are existent. Things are codependently originated; they are completely groundless.” Many others have written extensively about sunyata with more clarity and depth than I’m capable of.

The most important point is that, while most things don’t mind being entirely “codependently originated,” we human beings mind it ALOT. We very much want to be “independently originated” and most of our psychic energy is devoted to interpreting and filtering experience so that we can sell ourselves that bill of goods. We do all sorts of ridiculous and terrible things in order to avoid confronting the implications of what we in fact are. And the process of coming to terms with this truth on an emotional and psychological level is for the most part a very long and drawn out affair, with lots of bumps in the road. The whole thing runs profoundly against our grain.

As for your comments about The Searchers - I mean no offense to Mr. Edwards. If he has a psychotic streak, well, welcome to the US of A. I have this theory that the great literary antecedent of us Americans is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the archetypal regicide. Clearly, when he created Macbeth, Shakespeare was glimpsing Oliver Cromwell looming on the horizon, and Cromwell seems the prototype American on a number of levels. In Macbeth, the murderous impulse is mimetic - his wish is to be king himself, rather than, as with Cromwell, to abolish royalty. But a case can be made that Cromwell was just dressing up a lust for the crown in fancy rhetoric. America, of course, was populated by folks who similarly rejected any limitations on their own autonomy.

You can see where I’m heading with this. If we are all Kings, we are all equally threats to each other, rivals in the quest for power. You can never have enough power, of course. It’s a zero-sum game - if you get more, I get less. And that means killing you out of hand is actually a pretty logical move. Here we arrive at what it is we recognize and perhaps even secretly admire in the serial killers who populate our films and books. The serial killer who murders at random is perhaps the ideal American. Cormac McCarthy certainly has fun with the concept, as do others. And the fun no longer ends with clever writers. Abu Graib was a mirror for the national psyche in this respect, and seeing a psychotic monster looking back at us was quite a jolt. But you get used to such things, and no one’s really that upset about it now.

Guy Zimmerman

THE NO-SELF THAT ISN’T A NO-SELF
February 2nd, 2007

So, I’m reading this piece today over at the Columbia Journalism Review (I think that’s what it’s called) about this show “To Catch A Predator”…Dateline NBC. One of the guys set up….entrapped, ends up putting a bullet in his head. The show’s producer and the creep who is the point man for each episode, both say they sleep well, sad this happened, but hey, such things occur.

What is interesting to me is earlier I was scrolling down the Guardian on-line edition and I see an article about an ex-soldier, back from Iraq, who murders family and turns himself in. I scroll further, and right below, in the same font and format, is a piece on New Zealand vs. England in cricket…don’t miss the pod-cast.

Are these equal news items? Marcuse used to point this out a lot. This is part of that levelling process. Cricket (never mind how weird that game is) is the same as PTSS, as the murder of a family.

I link this to Ethan Edwards in a sense too. Are these signs, a show like ‘Predator”, are they an indication of the utter impotence of our society? Is this the dying empire on display? Is Ethan Edwards somehow a signifier, however fucked up, of a more potent time? I suspect so. His return from the wilderness at least suggests he was in the wilderness (have you read Gary Snyder on ‘the wild’?). Beyond this link, the obvious grotesquerie of modern media has been analysed; but when you can switch channels to see a Victoria’s Secret fashion show with teen models, some 15 or 16, in sexually provacative attire, and then go to your computer and find a chat room set up by the NBC team, luring dumb fuck fireman or auto mechanics, several of whom are only 20 or so themselves, into meeting these *girls*…..all in the service of ratings (the show is a big hit) then what do we have? It’s pitched as a public service of course. But it strikes me as a sign of impotence, of the profound feeling of powelessness in this culture. It’s our version of throwing Christians to the lions.

I return again to anxiety. I think your last post was really excellent, and raises a lot of questions. The debasement of language (it was Confucious who said the first thing he would do if he were master of the world would be to rectify the meaning of words) is reaching fail safe…..reaching silence. And here we have Beckett. Adorno said Beckett was putting “meaning” on trial. Meaning is mediated via language. One can’t escape text. Derrida worked this vein, as did Wittgenstein. Our fragmented selves, our decentralized sense of ourselves, reflects many things……including the decentralizing of power and……meaning. Beckett inched closer and closer to silence by the end. The totally atomized self is no-self. But its the negative no-self. Buddhist ideas of “emptiness” always seem to me to be suggesting that empty is not nothingness. Here I think we’re moving toward nothingness. I am positing a kind of dialectic of emptiness and nothingness.

Those figures in the landscape, those forms on stage when the lights come up, somehow suggest our tragic sense of life. In crappy entertainment-based theatre, that sense is quickly dispelled. In that small corner of work we care about, the tragic is magnified and embraced. It’s this focus that scares people…..as someone said to me, in theatre they know the actors can look back at them. So we have this question of the “other” again. Your description is fascinating because it’s the inverse, in a sense, of the usual formulation….where the “other” is frightening because it ISN’T us. Maybe you’re right….it’s a threat because it might become us. I dont know.

I do know that the hypocricy of a show like ‘Predator’ is an act of collective self-loathing. It also raises questions about shame. Where does that originate in a totally atomized society?

A Girardian critique might be in order here. The man who killed himself after being busted on this show is a sacrifical victim. But the integrating qualities of sacrifice are missing here. The rituals of modern life are now totally cut loose from all meaning, from all tradition, and all history. They are about ratings, about consumerism and sales. Perhaps silence is all that is left.

John Steppling

SACRIFICIAL STOCK…
February 2nd, 2007

John,
It’s chilling to contemplate people losing the ability to speak, but it sounds plausible. If language is the first technology one would expect it perhaps to begin to fall away as culture becomes more and more a function of the mechanical exo-skeleton. I can see how people would begin to communicate via the shorthand codes of text messaging and emails.

Lacan and language as technology are among the topics we took on at the beginning of this dialogue. There’s something in us that resists the view of language as a technology, we noted. In the context of the arts we become sentimental, temporarily forgetting that language is an instrument favored by Josef Goebels as fully as by Dylan Thomas. On the one side, language exists as the instrument by which we pluck some phenomenon out of the flux of experience and fix it once and for all as this rather than that. This process inevitably entails some degree of distortion, some violence to the actual truth of the matter, but it helps us construct a navigatable map by which we can, so to speak, dominate the terrain.

At the other extreme, language is the material of metaphor, the poets realm, in which the divisions separating this from that are loosened, blurred…or suspended entirely. Language here plays a corrective function, pulling us back from the repressive ego that seeks to dominate experience. The metaphoric pole of language restores a balance, allowing us to see our own limitations and vulnerabilities more clearly. Theater, as fundamentally a literary art form, has an important role to play in the process, which is why William Shakespeare, no doubt the greatest creator of metaphor in the history of the world, is still so relevant to our lives today. Here’s what I posted back at the top:

“What I find fascinating in Lacan, along similar lines, is the mistrust of language and a sense that the trap of language will need to be addressed if we are to bring history to heel in some fashion. Are nuclear annihilation and global warming entailed by Anglo-Saxon grammar? Does Shakespeare remain so completely and devastatingly relevant today because he was truly a part of how that grammar developed? Do we revere him because he was fighting “the empire” in the place that really mattered (language) back when English was forming, such that we still, now, today retain a deep connection to metaphor, for example? Metaphor being that aspect of language that undermines the dominance of pure form? I think of Pinter’s wonderful play Ashes to Ashes, which seems to me about the male need to fix meaning once and for all against the woman’s connection to the unconditioned real.”

It’s interesting to reconsider this in light of this current look at The Searchers and Deleuze. I find myself wondering what Deleuze thought about Rene Girard, and Girard’s take on “leveling” and “difference” and their relationship to mimetic violence, doubles, the scapegoat mechanism. Ethan Edwards at the beginning of The Searchers re-enters the world of language, fleeing the realm of unmediated experience, unable to hold his own there, perhaps. What makes metaphor possible is what the Buddhists mean by their endlessly elusive term “emptiness.” And this same quality is what, to me, underpins the violence Girard describes. The Other is so inherently threatening because the Other can become me, can cancel out my individuality. The Other arrives embodying a mortal threat (from the perspective of ego), and must be eliminated, so social difference exists in order to conceal the source of this mortal threat. When social differences are ameliorated, anxiety rises. This is the sacrificial crises, Girard describes. I think of the 1970s, for example, and how relieved Americans were to reinstate the death penalty, which must be considered a domesticated form of sacrifice. The NeoCons understand this phenomenon very well. Manufacturing mortal enemies as an efficient way of generate social cohesion. In hell you know who you are. Ambiguity and its anxieties recede. And the economy improves. Perpetrate atrocities abroad and the stock market soars. I think of Auden’s great line: “…when the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse.” Just what we need - another reminder of the 1930s…

FRAGMENTED
February 2nd, 2007

There is a great comment in the westward ho section…..and it reminds us that Capital must constantly destroy and rebuild, in order to destroy again (think Iraq or Afganistan). The Delueze is, then, a re-configuring of the old Rosa Luxembourg notion of the inside and outside. Keep finding an outside….and if you run out of them, just destroy part of the inside in order to make it an outside again.

Of course this is also about the leveling properties of advanced capital. In this consumer phase of capital (and this is Badiou’s point I think) the homogenizing of experience needs token or illusory forms of opposition (even Marcuse was writing about this, and Adorno). I suppose I shouldnt get into a long discussion of the origins of capitalism, enough has been written on it. But I think your points, expressed through a Buddhist lens, inch very close to where Lacan ends up. At least in terms of this basic split. Once we are not *one*, we are suffering. Lacan, because he gave no weight to the *subjective*, couldnt really be seen to ever address depression. Rather, he saw the modern psyche living in a paranoid and schizoid world. This seems close to Deleuze/Guattari too. Its prefigured, perhaps anyway, in guys like Sullivan and later in R.D. Laing. Modern man is a badly laid mosaic of partial relfections and impressions that are jerry rigged to keep absolute terror at bay. (Cantent’s film Time Out — based on The Adversary — creates a character perfectly expressive of this). The psyche is simply fragmented…and it requires enormous effort to keep the illusion of integrity in place. Its also adaptive…and this is the Time Out character. Ever shifting presentations of *self*. It may also be that its starting to *not* take enormous energy, that the world of marketing and endless distraction has conditioned and facilitated a generation to think in fragments (Mailer said commercials seem to have created an expectation in this generation for interruptions in narrative).

This gets us to Lacan’s notions of language. I see this every semester at school here. Students who seem increasingly resistent to the use of language. They seem petrified when faced with a blank page….or computer screen… and I wonder at this. Each year I reflect on Lacan at this point. Words have become accusatory and an enemy of sorts. And viola, Bush is president. A man who cannot speak. Clinton may have been as a dishonest and venal a man, but somehow didnt suit the trajectory of the zeitgeist. What was needed a further step into what is close to catatonia. If the child is, as Lacan says, born into language, then we seem to be arriving at an historical moment where the child is born into wordless anxiety.

For Lacan, and this is why he works so well when speaking of art, the individual self is expressing tropes and ideas and words that existed prior to that self…..words speaking themselves again…..and to find that more authentic voice, the self must find a way to sift through the debris of modern culture that clutters up his or her thinking. This is what good writers do…..what a Cormac McCarthy does. The Road is masterful and so exhausting a read that I could only do about ten pages a day. Why? I think because the language is so pure and free of decoration. Its pure bedrock granite. It exists at the lowest basement level of our psyche. Now, Beckett does this too, and in his way, Pinter.

Let me add that Bush is indeed a psycho. Though my nomination for the most visible psychos in government would fall to John Negroponte and John Bolton. Both need immediate institutionalization.

Does this bring us any closer to why the great emptiness of the western landscape seems so haunting? Why the lights coming up on an empty stage with two characters suggests something primal? Im not sure. But one role of art today is to reintegrate. But to do that one must do, in a sense, what Lacan was doing in his willfull obscurity. Or thats one way to approach it. McCarthy does something else I think.

Im not sure exactly if Asia hasnt been exercising its own delusions over the centuries. Its all how we choose a vantage point. But your point is right in terms of this Enlightenment notion of progress (which is where I start to have issues with Marx and a lot of leftists). This is dangerous, because one doesnt want, as Ive said a couple times already, to suggest an embrace of backwardness…..whatever that means. But that science seems co-opted to create war machines for outer space indicates something is very wrong.

A final thought on the comment in the westward ho posting. Its pointed out how America had to market itself. This is very true, the formation of the american myths (the west, etc) were sort of rush jobs. The mythopoetic evolutionary process was speeded up…..and in some cases totally pre-packaged. its an important point. And this reminds me of Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid, another example of reconfiguring the mythic.

And lastly, regards Ethan. I dont really think he’s a psycho……though I think he’s borderline. If he were psycho, the film wouldnt be as good. But I am quibbling. However, Lecter IS one, and this is limits the importance of that film franchise. Psychos don’t change. Then again, Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, so maybe the seductive properties of the fallen have always been in place. Thats an intriguing topic.

John Steppling

February 2007
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