I'm moving my blog to http://tharmas.wordpress.com mostly because it gives me greater flexibility with the design of the page, and anyone can give me comments.
Introductions and Absolutes I finished a draft of the introduction to my dissertation on Thursday. My thesis in the introduction is that the category of the genius during the Romantic period becomes indistinguishable from that of the celebrity--especially when you start thinking about the fictionalization of the Romantic poet. In both the criticism of the individual author and the fan-fiction emerging out of celebrity gossip, audiences attempt to construct a 'real life' out of the texts they produce. Both assume that there is something in the work of the author or the celebrity that can allow us access into their hidden real life. For the first time in the Romantic period authors become aware of their own literary identity and gained the awareness that they could write for posterity. This means that Romantic poetry is designed to be appreciated by generations living after the late 18th century and early 19th century. So the self-consciousness of the Romantic author coupled with the sense of celebrity emerging with the rise of a literate middle class in the 19th century, creates an environment where thousands of fans want to know the secret obsessions and strange eccentricites of their favorite poet. In this very particular way, I argue, we are still in the Romantic period.
My chapters look at four Romantic authors: William Blake, Mary Shelley, George Gordon Byron, and John Clare and analyze how and why contemporary British authors fictionalize the celebrity author in their work. The ability to fictionally portray a Romantic author depends upon a strange mingling of a desire to understand the real life of the Romantic author, their character, and an ability to import that character into the realm of fiction.
I have already written the first chapter on Alan Moore's portrayal of William Blake, and how the characterization of Blake as a prophet causes Moore to identify with, and perform that very same character in the construction of his iconic celebrity self.
As I wrote the introduction, I came across this quotation from Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe in The Literary Absolute:
"The absolute of literature is not so much poetry [...] as it is poiesy, according to an etymologi-cal appeal that the romantics do not fail to make. Poiesy or, in other words, production. The thought of the "literary genre" is thus less concerned with the production of the literary thing than with production, absolutely speaking. Romantic poetry sets out to penetrate the essence of poiesy, in which the literary thing produces the truth of production in itself, and thus, as will be evident in all that follows, the truth of the production of itself, of autopoiesy."
The quote only obliquely relates to my thesis, but earlier in the text, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe show that production is always production of the new. The absolute of literature is, thus, production of the new. In terms I set out earlier (and noticing that literature--in the sense spoken by these thinkers--is a product of the Romantic period), the celebrity becomes the celebrity precisely to the extent that s/he produces the new absolutely. The literary thing, as a product of the celebrity, makes production happen, it intensifies the economy of meaning by producing. Or, in capitalist terms, to the extent that the celebrity produces a commodity that has claims to transcending economics all together.
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
"One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly, between, even the characteristic faults of our elder poets and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English: in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect, and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of an image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other heart and head to point and drapery."
Captain America is dead, gunned down by agents working for the Red Skull. He had recently lost Marvel's Civil War, fighting against the registration and outing of every hero's secret identity. After surrendering to Iron Man's governmental agents and thinking that he can change the system from the inside, Cap was quickly killed by the editorial board at Marvel and thrown to the wayside.
What does it mean for American comics that Marvel has found its most noble character expendable? What does it mean for America that the "most realistic" ending to the comic series was the overcoming of American values by the pragmatism and war profiteering of someone who should be a hero?
I had a great conversation with Dylan Horrocks this weekend. We ranted against the fact that neither Marvel or DC seem to respect their characters anymore. Marvel has, just recently, turned Iron Man into a snivelling governmental 'yes' man, killed Peter Parker's beloved Aunt May, put Peter's entire family at risk by unveiling his secret identity to the world, and turned the Hulk into an interplanetary gladiator. Now this.
Now, he was never my favorite hero. I hardly bought his book. But there was something noble about Captain America, and I loved his shield.
Baudrillard was one of the most notorious of the so-called "postmodernist" thinkers, going so far as to call the first Iraq War a "dark fantasy." Nevertheless, he is one of the most astute critics of what he calls "hyperreality"--the idea that mass media (and consequently representation in general) are so ubiquitous to our postmodern experience of the world that there is no strict division between simulation of reality and reality itself.
He began his most eloquent work Simulation and Simulacra with a provocative quote from Ecclesiastes (the quotation is, however, apocryphal):
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."
(or, in this case, the citation conceals the fact that there is none, a joke played on many an academic who, even now, ask for the place in Ecclesiastes where they can find this quotation...I mean, really, do you think the Bible would use the word "simulacrum?")
My favorite passage from him, however, comes from his work Americawhere he, like a curious mixture of Alexis de Tocqueville and Jack Kerouac, travels the open road in search for the meaning of America.
"When I see Americans, particularly American intellectuals, casting a nostalgic eye towards Europe, its history, its metaphysics, is cuisine, and its past, I tell myself that this is just a case of unhappy transference. History and Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really cross the ocean, in spite of the many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings. This is just revenge for the fact that we Europeans have never really been able to domesticate modernity, which also refuses to cross the ocean, though in the other direction. There are products which cannot be imported or exported. That is our loss--and theirs. If, for us, society is a carnivorous flower, history for them is an exotic one. Its fragrance is no more convincing than the bouquet of Californian wines (in spite of all the effort being expended to make us believe otherwise)."
I can't tell you how many students have been angered by this passage. Baudrillard is nothing if not a frustrating, oppositional old French codger. Americans can't be Marxist?! Americans can't make wine nor have a history? It is this very oppositonalism that made Baudrillard such a powerful thinker. Where he erred sometimes in precision and specificity, he always more than compensated with vision, eloquence and cantankerous brilliance. His stubbornness will be missed.
Or maybe not. I mean, I never met him. His life is only the hyperlife of his books, his televised interviews, and his death only made available to me through BBC. Perhaps, instead of a death, Baudrillard has given us a hyperdeath, a death that is as much a simulation as his life.
I'll write about the Comics conference a little later. I have to say something about my conversation with Bone creator Jeff Smith about Melville's Moby Dick. But I thought I'd share a little Lady Elizabeth Landon on this Monday morning:
Intimations of Previous Existence
Methinks we must have known some former state More glorious than our present, and the heart Is haunted with dim memories, shadows left By past magnificence; and hence we pint With vain aspirings, hopes taht fill the eyes With bitter tears for their own vanity. Rememberance makes the poet: 'tis the past Lingering within him, with a keener sense Than is upon the thoughts of common men Of what has been, that fills the actual world, With unreal likenesses of lovely shapes. That were and are not; and the fairer they, The more their contrast with existing things; The more his power, the greater is his grief. --Are we then fallen from some noble star, Whose consciousness is an unknown curse, And we feel capable of happiness Only to know it is not of our sphere?
When: Saturday Mar 03, 2007 at the Reitz Union Sunday Mar 04, 2007 at the Alachua County Public Library
This fifth annual conference on comics will focus on the construction of narrative worlds in comics, with particular emphasis on the various temporalities of the medium. We are especially interested in the ways temporality informs the status of comics as a serial medium (both in terms of serial publication as well as the serialization of time within the page) and the ways temporality relates to the representation of history and memory within the narrative. This could be in terms of personal and social history, as in Maus and Persepolis, or in terms of internal narrative histories like superhero retcons and crossovers.
UF's Conference on Comics is one of the nation's leading forums for theoretical comics studies. This year it is being held in connection with the UF Conference on Games and Digital Media. Special guests this year include the distinguished cartoonists Jeff Smith (Bone), Dylan Horrocks (Hicksville) and Tom Hart (New Hat Stories).
"We must [...] abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed an visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but--and this is the important point--a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disperate sexualities. It is said that no society has been more prudish; never have the agencies of power taken such care to feign ignorance of the thing they prohibited, as if they were determined to have nothing to do with it. But it is the opposite that has become apparent, at least after a general review of the facts: never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere."
Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and the new Making Comics, gave a wonderful presentation last night. I had wierd misgivings that were mostly due to my own dysfunctional definition of scholarship--but all in all the presentation was entertaining, jovial, interesting, and...in a strange way, life-affirming. Even though I sometimes disagree with what McCloud says, I appreciate his attitude and his energy in analyzing the function of comic reading.
The last part of McCloud's presentation focused on webcomics, and he showed us some brilliant web-based comic books that employed hypertext in strange and unusual ways. All of these, by the way, are archived on McCloud's homepage. I thought I'd share:
Drew Wing has two interesting experiments with the computer screen, the first one features a dog-character called "Pup" and is entitled "Heat Death" in which a gag similar to a certain scene from a Woody Allen flim I adore is employed in a webcomic: http://www.drewweing.com/pup/13pup.html
"And the seventh angel poured his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, it is done." --Revelation 16:17 (KJV)
I've been through a wilderness of editing and reediting and contacting contributors and worrying about copyright and annoying my webmaster with infinite little miniscule problems with formatting and typography. Last night, around 8:30 Eastern Time, I awoke as if from a daze. I saw that the issue had been completed, that it--a project I worked on for the past three years of my life and my first attempt at true editing--was finally done.
I will give you the URL as soon as the issue is published.
Interesting article on Second Life--the online (gaming) world--from Jenny Diski in the new issue of the London Review of Books.
What is it about the internet that gives us hope for a new world? I was buying a book the other day and thought about Star Trek: Enterprise, which I'm watching on DVD. I thought about how boring the world can be from time to time and that, perhaps even more than Baudelaire in the 19th century and Eliot in the 20th, we are living in a world that is growing more boring with each passing day. Oh, of course there was the horrible Florida tornadoes a few days ago that went just south of Gainesville and the weather that constantly threatens our state, our nation, and perhaps our world with total annihilation. But the real threat is that the world will end, as T.S. says, "not with a bang but a whimper." As I purchased those books and thought of Star Trek and the invention of the warp drive, I prayed for space travel, for a new horizon that could bring an end to the ennui I see slowly asphixiating our culture.
Diski's article laments the fact that Second Life, for all its claims to create a new world, merely replicates the one we live in.
Second Life is a reiteration. It’s a virtual world of buying and selling, profit and consumption, material decoration and political apathy. What you get in this alternative world are houses, home decorations, clothes, jewellery, cars, motorbikes, casinos, strip clubs and shops in which to sell all these things to cartoon characters representing their computer owners, who ‘live’ in the houses on the virtual land they have bought, titivate their interiors, change their clothes, hair and jewellery, drive the cars, gamble in the casinos and stand around gazing at naked pole dancers.
So, essentially, Second Life offers the same, dull world as this one. It is simply packaged online. People can embody their fantasies (Diski notes that most women have large breasts, small waists and most men are muscular and attractive), but the program does little to enlighten and challenge our notions of what is possible between people.
K-punk is in the middle of a series of articles on an electronic band from the early 80s called The Fall. He remembers absolutely loving the band when they first appeared and not knowing what their appearance did to him. He argues that they were nothing short of a musical Event (in the way Alain Badiou understands the term--that is, a complete rupture with the past). The interesting part of this essay, at least for me, is his distinction between fantasy, the uncanny, and what he calls the wierd.
Fantasy (and Tolkien is the exemplar here) presupposes a completed World, a world that, although superficially different to 'ours' (there may be different species, or supernatural forces) is politically all-too familiar (there is usually some nostalgia for the ordered organization of feudal hierarchy). The Uncanny, meanwhile, is set in 'our' world - only that world is no longer 'ours' any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged. The Weird, however, depends upon the difference between two (or more) worlds - with 'world' here having an ontological sense. It is not a question of an empirical difference - the aliens are not from another planet, they are invaders from another reality system. Hence the defining image is that of the threshold, the door from this world into another, and the key figure is the 'Lurker at the Threshold' - what, in Lovecraft's mythos is called Yog Sothoth. The political philosophical implications are clear: there is no World. What we call the world is a local consensus hallucination, a shared dream.
I've always been oddly horrified by Lovecraft's work, and I never knew why. Yog Sothoth frequently takes the form of a giant squid but there was something even more primal, more terrifying about this figure than the fact that he is a giant crustacean. The question, though, is this: what parts of the new do we need to keep from dying of boredom? How much 'new' is just enough to fascinate us (i.e. the fantasy world is fascinating only because people can do stuff there that we can't do here--like cast spells), and how much new would it take to start terrifying us? At what point does the new threaten our world, our sense that we live in something we can call a world?
"Like wine, steak is in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized. It figures in all the surroundings of alimentary life: flat, edged with yellow, like the sole of a shoe, in cheap restaurants; thick and juicy in the bistros which specialize in it; cubic, with the core all moist throughout beneath a light charred crust, in haute cuisine. It is a part of all the rhythms, that of the comfortable bourgeoise meal and that of the bachelor's bohemian snack. It is a food at once expeditious and dense, it effects the best possible ratio between economy and efficacy, between mythology and the mutifarious ways of being consumed.
Moreover, it is a French possession (circumscribed today, it is true, by the invasion of American steaks). As in the case of wine there is no alimentary constraint which does not make the Franchman dream of steak. Hardly abroad, he feels nostalgia for it. Steak is here adorned with a supplementary virtue of elegance, for among the apparent complexity of exotic cooking, it is a food which unites, one feels, succulence and simplicity. Being part of the nation, it follows the index of patriotic values: it helps them to rise in wartime, it is the very flesh of the French solider, the inalienable property which cannot go over to the enemy except by treason. In an old film (Deuxieme Bureau contra Kommandantur), the maid of the patriatic cure gives food to the Boche spy disguised as a French underground fighter: 'Ah, its you Laurent! I'll give you some steak.' And then, when the spy is unmasked: 'And when I gave him some of my steak!'--the supreme breach of trust."
I'm researching for my dissertation this weekend, so I'll probably have alot to share. I am analyzing Romantic authors as celebrities, and their fan communities being contemporary British poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers. I'm stopping short of characterizing these works as fan-fiction, though this might be somewhat appropriate. Roland Barthes's description of Gretta Garbo might prove fundamental to my thesis, as he analyzes her face as an expression of a static, reproduced image. Her makeup is, for Barthes, "not a painted face, but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the colour, not by its lineaments" (56). Garbo's beauty is static, locked in a moment where the filmic recording of the face could still provoke ecstasy by an audience not used to seeing pictures moving in front of their eyes. Barthes calls it a "Platonic Idea of the human creature" which he contrasts with Audrey Hepburn whose face is more dynamic and is "constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions" (57). Hepburns beauty comes alive with expression, its character as a sign constantly changing based upon the minute movements of each muscle as they change to suit a new arrangement of smile, eye, nostril. Heburn is not an idea but a moment.
And yet, in Garbo's face, "something sharper than a mask is looming: a kind of voluntary and therefore human relation between the curve of the nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows; a rare, individual function relating two regions of the face. A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony. Garbo's face represents this fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential form from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of mortal faces, when the clairty of the flesh as essence yields its place to to a lyricism of Woman"
So, Garbo, embodied, recorded, and represented by the cinema, becomes a null space between the face and the mask, at once sum and thematic harmony, at once character and real person. Barthes cannot, at this point, tell them apart, not strictly. Garbo is taken up by the filmic image, reproduced hundreds of thousands of times, and projected in different theaters around the world. She becomes, if she wasn't already, more than her body. Or, rather, the mask, the character, is her body.
From Geoffrey Hill's new poem, published in the December issue of Poetry, and dedicated "In Memoriam: Gillian Rose"
Poetry's its own agon that allows us to recognize devistation as the rift between power and powerlessness. But when I say poetry I mean something impossible to be described, except by adding lines to lines that are sufficient as themselves.
Di-dum endures formally; and the pre-Socratics. Phocion rests in his lost burial place. Devistated is Estuary; devistation remains waste and shock. This ending is not the end, more like the cleared spaces around St. Paul's and the gutted City after the fire raid. I find love's work a bleak ontology to have to contemplate; it may be all we have. ---
So, I'm heading a reading group on psychoanalysis tonight at 6. Our first group of readings is Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" followed by Judith Butler's "Melancholy Gender/ Refused Identification."
Briefly: Freud argues in Mourning and Melancholy, that the Melancholic--after losing a loved one--incorporates that love object in order to preserve some trace of the object in light of its actual erasure from her world. Ultimately, reproaches against the self that follows mourning--the feeling, in other words, that one is horrible--is derived from this incorporation. The loved one is transformed into an ideal object to mask its absense, and any faults that the lover once had with the loved object are incorporated and become self-reproaches. "The self-tormenting," Freud writes, "in melancholia, which is without a doubt enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends in sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject's own self" (260). Instead of detaching onesself from the object of love, the melancholic derives sadistic pleasure in incorporating the object and identifiying with it. The object's faults become the melancholic's own.
Butler expands Freud's argument to include a discussion of gender as--she writes--"formed and consolidated through identifications which are in part composed of disavowed grief" (139). For Freud, in _Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality_, gender is the effect of sexual prohibition. Before the Oedipal stage, sexuality is polymorphously perverse. That is, it has no object, since the world has not been divided into subjects and objects. The production of gender is, for Butler, a process whereby we abandon the ability to sexualy desire the same sex. The melancholia that follows, mourning the lost and ungrievable desire, is incorporated into gender as a repudiated homosexuality. This is why, by the way, some heterosexuals are so threatened by homosexuality--because gender, as such, contains a refusal of homosexuality that gives it definition. Heterosexuality must repudiate homosexuality in order to remain coherent and consistent. I am a man because I am CERTAINLY not gay and definitely not a woman. Like the melancholic who holds onto an ungrievable lost object by torturing herself, the heterosexual must hold on to the repudiation of homosexuality in order to remain gendered.
Butler's analysis of gender and melancholia is certainly interesting, but her conclusion was weak. She argues that homosexuals cannot repudiate heterosexuality, because this would involve them in the same melancholic problem she described above, and that furthermore "perhaps[...]only by risking the incoherence of identity is connection possible" (149). Ultimately, Butler runs into the same problem as Freud did 100 years ago--namely, how is it possible to live without melancholy? I don't necessarily think that gender is the only answer to this problem, but what are the other options? I'm thinking that Butler, and myself, should have more imagination than either of us are demonstrating right now.
from Adam Phillips, a child psychoanalyst from Britain and one of my favorite authors, from _Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape_
"When children play hide-and-seek--or when adults are knowingly or unknowingly elusive with each other, playing at repulsion and enticement--what is being played with is the fear (and the wish) of never being found. When the game goes on too long the child who is hiding always helps the seeker out. No one must disappear for too long, no one must get too far away. And the odd moment of being found is the end of the game. But if playing hide-and-seek is one of our emblematic games--at once testing the appetitie of the seeker and the resolve of the one who hides--it is also a game haunted by the possibility of escape, of being able to escape the intention, the desire of another (chosen) person. Every successful game of hide-and-seek--and one way or another, barring tragedy, it is always successful--reassures the players that no one can escape, that there is nowhere else to escape to. The transgression is to disappear, to find a place where no one keeps an eye on you. The puzzle of hide-and-seek--its absurd drama of conflicting wishes, in which to be found is to lose the ame, and not be found has to be got just right--becomes a blueprint for the delimma of the erotic, of whether we want our sexuality to intensify our self-consciousnss or release us from it. In her game the little girl is convinced that neither of us can escape, that what we are doing is not escaping; that the adult is as confined as she is. What they (we) share is being trapped in something together, which might be called need or sexuality, or the wish for certain kinds of recognition and reassurance."
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