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What we talk about when we talk about werewolves: Genre and Genus, Wer- and Wolf

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, The Generic, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 18 April 2014 by Ben

Following is the transcript of my talk for Morrisville State College’s Science, Technology, and Society Symposium on monsters. I was given the topic “Abominations” and, as you will see, chose to speak about werewolves, among other things. I am definitely humming some of the hard parts here, but will leave it at that. You can download a PDF of the talk here.

What we talk about when we talk about werewolves: Genre and Genus, Wer- and Wolf

Benjamin J Robertson

My epigraph is from Angela Carter’s short story, “The company of wolves:

Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops–of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, orgres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is the worst, for he cannot listen to reason.

Introduction: why talk about werewolves?

It’s weird to me to be talking about werewolves, because they terrify me. Or perhaps it’s not so weird. Perhaps I am talking about them because they terrify me. In a short encyclopedia entry on the relationship between horror and science fiction, Leslie Fiedler writes:

[I]f many of us tend to speak apologetically, defensively, self-mockingly about our fondness for horror fantasy, this is primarily because of a cognitive dissonance that lies at the heart of our response, a conflict deep in our psyches between what we, as heirs to the Age of Reason, think we know to be so and what we ambivalently wish or fear to be true. We are convinced that the universe we inhabit is fully explicable in terms of ‘natural’ cause and effect and that once we understand their ‘laws’ we will be the masters of our fate. But we also suspect that we are the playthings of occult forces that we can never understand and that, therefore, will always control our destinies.

Perhaps I am talking about werewolves despite the fact that my father let me watch An American Werewolf in London when I was far too young. Perhaps I am talking about them despite the fact that I still get a tiny bit creeped out by the full moon when I am walking my dog late at night. Perhaps I am talking to you about werewolves today despite the fact that doing so forces me, a grown man in theory, to acknowledge my own fear of something I know for certain not to be real.

Or perhaps I am talking to you about werewolves because of all of these things, because such discussion is productive, because it reveals something important about who we are in 2014, about what we think, about what we are capable of. Perhaps, along with Fiedler, I am talking about werewolves because I believe that if I understand them, if I understand horror, I will become master of my fate. If knowledge of equates with control over, then perhaps I believe, along with humanity, that I can avoid horror altogether by knowing it. I take as one of my core assumptions that humans do precisely this: order the world for themselves so that they might escape or ignore horror, so that they might forever forget that existence is not their understanding of it.

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The Dark Tower and the sense of non-endings

Posted in Here at the End of All Things, The Generic, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , on 29 March 2014 by Ben

A series of epigraphs for the last section of Here at the end of all things, “The Sense of Non-Endings”, which focuses on how fantastika’s failure to ever end is the very stuff of sense. I’m not sure what that means yet.

When the Emperour his justice hath achieved,
His mighty wrath’s abated from its heat,
And Bramimunde has christening received;
Passes the day, the darkness is grown deep,
And now that King in ‘s vaulted chamber sleeps.
Saint Gabriel is come from God, and speaks:
“Summon the hosts, Charles, of thine Empire,
Go thou by force into the land of Bire,
King Vivien thou’lt succour there, at Imphe,
In the city which pagans have besieged.
The Christians there implore thee and beseech.”
Right loth to go, that Emperour was he:
“God!” said the King: “My life is hard indeed!”
Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard.

SO ENDS THE TALE WHICH TUROLD HATH CONCEIVED.

—The Song of Roland

 

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”

–Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

 

“Strike then, Bogle, if thou darest,” shouted out Childe Rowland, and rushed to meet him with his good brand that never yet did fail. They fought, and they fought, and they fought, till Childe Rowland beat the King of Elfland down on to his knees, and caused him to yield and beg for mercy. “I grant thee mercy,” said Childe Rowland, “release my sister from thy spells and raise my brothers to life, and let us all go free, and thou shalt be spared.” “I agree,” said the Elfin King, and rising up he went to a chest from which he took a phial filled with a blood-red liquor. With this he anointed the ears, eyelids, nostrils, lips, and finger-tips, of the two brothers, and they sprang at once into life, and declared that their souls had been away, but had now returned. The Elfin king then said some words to Burd Ellen, and she was disenchanted, and they all four passed out of the hall, through the long passage, and turned their back on the Dark Tower, never to return again. And they reached home, and the good queen, their mother, and Burd Ellen never went round a church widershins again.

–Joseph Jacobs, “Childe Rowland”

 

What do you mean?
To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the door at the top of the Dark Tower.
He saw it at once and understood, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed and time’s curse lifted), but to the moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would immediately succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan? How many times would he travel it?

–Stephen King, The Dark Tower 827

 

There was a peculiar inevitability to everything I did, as if the air around me was gently coercing my movements, from raising the Macallen to climbing the stairs to laboring through “Childe Roland” last night. I couldn’t shake the poem. It was like a maddening soft mental loop: The Dark Tower is the end … The point of getting to the end is to realise you’ve got to the end … The quest has no purpose … The Dark Tower is the end … The end is the fulfillment … My first thought was, he lied in every word …

–Glen Duncan, By Blood We Live 296

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Empires of Disbelief: ICFA 35 proposal

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, The Generic, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 30 October 2013 by Ben

I’m working in this general area right now for Here at the end of all things. I actually used the voice recorder on my phone to take notes on this subject as I walked to school yesterday. First time I have ever done that. I would do it again.

Empires of Disbelief

This paper begins with the remarkable coincidence of several historical events (“historical”, here, in a Foucauldian sense). First, John Clute argues in Pardon this Intrusion that fantastika can be traced to the early nineteenth century; the genres of fantastika “are intimately connected with the becoming visible of the engine of history, round about 1800, when the future began.” Second, we have Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807 and a singular influence on Western notions of history as progressive and significant. Third, Foucault traces the advent of disciplinary power to roughly the same period. As the human being entered History (Hegel) as an individual who is the same as all other individuals (Foucault), it began to narrativize its position within that history through forms that could face the end whether that end was understood to be apocalyptic or Paradisaical. These accounts dovetail, I argue, with the project of Western Empires to at once offer a sort of carrot to individuals in the form of a promise of meaning for their lives (the completion of humanity, the Rapture—what Clute would call Healing or Return) as well as the the constant denial of such an end in order to maintain their existence (humanity is never complete, history never actually ends in its perfection, the Rapture never occurs). Over the course of the past two centuries, individuals in the West (a term I use advisedly not to refer to a given unity but to a construction) have been denied what they have been promised so often that rather than believing in the future, they find themselves in a state of what Bernard Stiegler calls “disbelief.”

With reference to key fantasy texts from the last several decades—such as Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, China Miéville’s The Scar and Iron Council, Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World, Patricia McKillip’s In the Forests of Serre—as well as secondary/theoretical texts from Clute, Foucault, Deleuze, and Stiegler, this paper investigates how the Story that fantasy “wishes to tell” (of Healing, in Clute’s sense of the term) has, despite constant retellings, become impossible. Of course, Healing has always been impossible, but I argue that Empire now no longer even requires it as a carrot. Whereas the West formerly relied on coherent individuals (in Foucault’s sense) who desire insertion into the History (or Story) or Empire as individuals , it now maintains itself despite the fact that people (as what Deleuze calls “dividuals”) no longer believe in such metanrratives of progress and freedom. With seemingly no possible way out of this situation, we can turn to the impossibilities of fantasies such as those listed here (among others) as models for ways of thinking that resist and overcome our disbelief.

Primary sources

Gilman, Felix. The Half-made World. New York: Tor, 2011. Print.

McKillip, Patricia A. In the Forests of Serre. New York: Ace Books, 2003. Print.

Miéville, China. Iron Council: a Novel. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2005. Print.

—. The Scar. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Print.

Morgan, Richard K. The Steel Remains. Del Ray trade pbk. ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Print.

Secondary sources

Clute, John. Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. N. p. Print.

Clute, John, and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge ; and the Discourse on Language. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Print.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1980. Print. Agora Paperback Editions.

Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. Meridian : Crossing Aesthetics.

—. Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals. Trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Print. Disbelief and Discredit 2.

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CFP: Edited collection: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre

Posted in The Generic, The Profession, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on 5 October 2013 by Ben

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I seek proposals for essays that explore the relationship between late capitalist culture/economics and texts which, in one manner or another, are “merely” generic. According to Fredric Jameson and others, late capitalism is characterized by new forms of business and financial organization, developments in media and the relationships amongst media, and planned obsolescence. By “merely generic,” I refer to those texts in any medium that seem less interested in pushing generic boundaries than in maintaining or perhaps hyperbolizing them (such as books by Robert Jordan and David Eddings) and/or belong to an obvious genre, but turn away from that broader genre in order to develop their own environments and/or conventions on massive scales (such as the expanded Stars Wars Universe). These texts may be: swiftly produced, developed in explicit and careful relation to others in their series or world, targeted at an existing audience already familiar with the genre, and crafted for easy consumption and quick obsolescence.

How do such merely generic texts define the cultural landscape of the postmodern/contemporary world? How does this cultural landscape condition them?

Possible topics include:

  • The audience for merely generic texts. Can anyone enjoy them, or are they only consumable by those who have an established, if not hypertrophied, relationship to the broader genre in question?
  • The development of groups of texts that predate the advent of late capitalism, but transform in some way afterwards or otherwise provide antecedents for more contemporary works, such as The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew Mysteries.
  • Proprietary universes—such as the Stars Wars, Star Trek, or Dragonlance universes—and questions of authorship.
  • Fan fiction and other non-canonical or heterodox narratives set within established universes.
  • Problems of continuity in the mega-text.
  • The relationship between such merely generic texts and gaming, whether tabletop RPGs, first-person shooters, MMORGs, or other types of gaming.
  • The economic or cultural conditions that govern the production of merely generic texts, such as the nigh-injunction that, after Tolkien, works of heroic fantasy should be published as trilogies.
  • Mass-produced series of books for children, such as Goosebumps and Animorphs. How do these texts prepare youngsters for subsequent late capitalist consumption?
  • The shift, especially in film, from generic concerns to the logic of the tentpole and/or the franchise.
  • The development of the massive multimedia text in which the same storylines develop in print, in films, on television, etc. simultaneously.
  • The residue of genre in a post-generic world. With increased specializiation and fragmentation in daily life, does genre make any sense as a cultural form? Does genre become, or return to being, one niche product amongst others?

Obviously, numerous other avenues of inquiry exist and many of those mentioned here dovetail with one another. Please inquire at the email address below with suggestions or ideas.

Although I will consider a range of approaches, I am especially interested in essays that situate groups of texts or series in an historical moment or cultural frame. I am less interested in thematic and formal readings of individual texts.

Please send proposals of approximately 500 words as attachments (.doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf, or .odt) to benjamin.j.robertson@colorado.edu by 15 January 2014. Again, also feel free to contact me with questions or other concerns.

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Horror after history: Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, The Generic, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 27 September 2013 by Ben

Text of a talk I gave at the 2013 &NOW Conference. Warning: rough edges.

There is a moment in the life of concepts when they lose their immediate intelligibility and can then, like all empty terms, be overburdened with contradictory meanings.

—Agamben, Homo Sacer

This paper is about horror—both what we feel and the genre known as such—and history. The intersection of these two terms in this paper involves the claim that horror—both the feeling and the genre—has a history and that history in one of its most prevalent senses—that being the sense that history is progressive—horrifies. I will not come to a strong conclusion.

The Last Werewolf is potboiler full of sex and violence (although, truth be told, in both quality and quantity not so much, contra the breathless reviews). Glen Duncan, like so many who have written genre fiction, appears in this context to be, as Melville once said satirically of Hawthorne, a man who means no meanings. Of course to be a man who means no meanings at the end of history, is simply to be a man. Or an animal, as to be a man means to mean meanings and to mean meanings means to be a man. After the end of history, after meaning has ceased, one can no longer be a man properly so-called. Nor can one be beast. Such distinctions are part and parcel of history and the meaning, the technology or the means of meaning which it affords. After history, the genres such distinctions create and maintain—genres which must be created and maintained because they have no inherent reality—disappear. No more human and animal. No more horror, sf, fantasy. No more potboilers and no more literature.

In The Open, Agamben discusses a messianic and a modern account of the reconciliation of the human to the animal, each of which involves the end times or the end of history. In the messianic account, what survives the last judgment is the purely human, the human exclusive of its embodiment, its physicality, its animality. In the modern account, which comes out of Hegel on Kojeve’s reading and very much determines popular and populist notions of history to the present insofar as it’s underpinned by “progres”, the end of history involves the “disappearance of Man properly so-called,” the end of “Action negating the given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object.” At the conclusion of History, “Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or Given being.” In other words, at the end of history the human loses what makes it human; the animalization of the human takes place through the exclusion of humanity.

Later, in Homo Sacer, in a chapter entitled “The Ban and the Wolf,” Agamben returns to his discussion of animality in the context of the political conditions of modernity. He notes that the werewolf, in its origin, is closely related to the figure of homo sacer, or sacred man, who, in contradiction to his title, can be killed but not sacrificed. He notes that Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources define the bandit (who is excluded from the polis and the laws that protect the demos such that anyone may kill him) as a wolf-man. “What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city.” Notably, for all of its etymological inquiries, for all of genealogical tracings of an obscure figure of ancient law, Homo Sacer concerns itself first and foremost with what Agamben calls “the nomos of the modern,” under which the state of exception (which can be traced back first to sacred man and then to the werewolf) becomes permanent.

Agamben notes that, as a term, “homo sacer” makes almost no sense, burdened as it is with so many contradictory meanings. For example, if the man in question is sacred—that is, if he belongs to the gods—why may he be killed by anyone? To come to some understanding of the term, although this definition does not account for its complexity entirely, we might articulate it with a concept of history and say that homo sacer is excluded from all humanity, including that which we call history. Homo sacer, in other words, cannot be made meaningful, cannot be included in the city, in the purview of “Man properly so-called.” In some sense, homo sacer is already removed from such profanity, from human use and is therefore already sacred, but cannot partake in a becoming sacred that meaning requires. If this point seems contradictory, it is. That meaning is human is part and parcel of Hegel’s notion of history, but at the same time this meaning, history itself, requires spirit, something fundamentally non-human, in order to mean.

Glen Duncan’s title refers literally to Jacob Marlowe, the last of his kind. However, I can’t hear it or read it without thinking of Fukuyama’s the last man who comes at the end of history or of Nietzsche’s last man who heralds the arrival of what comes after the human. However, this echo raises the question of whether Marlowe is the last wer and the last wolf, the last human (or at least the last man) as well as the last beast or if he is the last werewolf, the last intersection of the two? That is, with his conclusion does the distinction between human and animal cease or is it completed? Whatever the case, he is both human and beast, an animal in an urban world, a creature whose fleshly (dare I say natural?) appetites—which include well-aged scotch and constant sexual intercourse—can only be satiated by the conveniences of modern culture. He lives always in a human world, but apart from humanity. He is integrated in the system of culture through his investments, but has few friends and a life that has no value whatsoever. he may be captured and tortured without consequence, killed by those who hate and fear him without anyone knowing or caring.

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My Eaton/SFRA 2013 Paper: Media Theory and Genre

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 13 April 2013 by Ben

Here is my paper for the 2013 Eaton/SFRA conference, as part of the panel on “Mediation and Transmedia” with Scott Selisker (“Transmedia Automatism: Cinematic Motion in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl“) and Veronica Hollinger (“The Dis/enchantments of the Mediated Real”).

Media Theory and Genre

This paper is sort of chasing a certain claim, a double inversion of Arthur C. Clarke, although I cannot address it in any depth here: “Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

So, this boringly-titled talk opens a discussion of genre as media and genre’s relation to other media. By “genre,” I mean at the start something fairly non-controversial, I hope: a set of texts, however blurry the boundaries around that set, the conventions of which take on meaning within the set and without historicity. By “media,” I follow McLuhan who more or less understands a medium as a thing, in the broadest possible sense. At times the term “technics,” which here is closely aligned with media but takes on Stiegler’s definition as “organized inorganic matter,” will supplement or replace “media.”

There are a number of strands of thought here that I hope to weave together. First, I am interested in theorizing fantasy as a genre, especially in relation with science fiction and horror, although the latter will not be present here. I am not interested in defining fantasy with regard to dragons or magic or elves and, likewise I am not interested in SF insofar as it involves technology or aliens, nor horror insofar as it involves vampires or transformation. We all “know” fantasy, SF, and horror when we see them, even if we continue to argue about many specific cases and definitive boundaries. Rather than ask “what is fantasy?” I wish to ask “what does, or perhaps better can, it do?” I shall draw shortly on a talk China Mieville gave in 2009 to help articulate this theorization.

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Chapter from my dissertation: The Declaration of Future Democracy

Posted in Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 3 March 2013 by Ben

Another text from the archives, a more complete and wide-ranging version of the MLA paper I posted last week. This was the dissertation chapter form which that paper was culled. This was the third chapter in the diss, following from a long discussion of Octavia Butler’s Kindred in chapter one (published in somewhat different form in Science Fiction Studies) and a discussion of politics and science in the context of Stuart Kauffman’s theory of complexity in chapter two (published in Configurations–my first ever publication! Thanks Jim Bono, Hugh Crawford, and Mark Hansen!). Chapter four dealt with the problem of the monster and offered a conceptualization of wonder.

For the most part, I don’t like my dissertation as a dissertation. It’s all over the place, and this chapter is sort of a microcosm of that all-over-the-placeness (it’s a word). I do like a lot of things I say, and I do like my attempt to draw together theories of democracy and violence from Agamben, Schmitt, Benjamin, Deleuze, Derrida, and others with literature by DeLillo, Coupland, Gibson and others. Also here is Battle of Algiers and Syriana as well as Robert Baer’s See No Evil, upon which Syriana was based. Oh, also: Thoreau and the Declaration of Independence.

I appear to myself, six or seven years later, a much less mature writer. So many block quotes here, which appear to me now as a mask for misunderstanding. I could not discuss or deploy these texts effectively, so I let them speak for themselves far too often and only addressed what I wanted to. In any case, not sure my readings of these texts hold up under scrutiny. Rather, I am pretty sure that my readings of individual texts hold up (simple as they are), but that these texts don’t play as nicely with each other as I might want them to, or believe them to. I am not sure how I feel about that now. I find being RIGHT so uninteresting, and abhor debates about what so-and-so REALLY means a waste of time. As such, if these texts don’t play well together, on some deeper level that only a proper close reading can find and address, then I am not sure I care.

The Declaration of Future Democracy

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government.1

—The Declaration of Independence

 

Revolution.

In “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau reiterates Jefferson’s claim that when the situation warrants, citizens have the right to change their government: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable” (389). However, what Thoreau is able to accomplish in his essay is not simply an affirmation of the right to revolution, but an expansion of Jefferson’s argument. For Thoreau, while political processes must include revolution (or at least its possibility), he also understands that not all decisions involve the dissolution and recreation of government. Thus the right to revolution becomes for him the right to make political decisions, specifically the right to decide upon slavery and the Mexican-American War. The problem, of course, is that while “all men” might recognize the “right to revolution” cum the “right to decide,” they will not all agree upon the proper moment for such decisions or even what decisions should be made and how.

To overcome this problem, democracy asks citizens to express their desires first in deliberation and then through their vote, with the majority awarded the right to make decisions (or the majority’s decision being enforced). However, for Thoreau, the ends reached via this method (what Kaufmann would call consensus) are not satisfactory:

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. (386-87)

The important aspect of Thoreau’s claim is not the notion of “might makes right” (what Jacques Derrida calls “the reason of the strongest”2). Thoreau does not mean here simply that a majority of citizens can forcefully execute their will upon a minority, as in a physical confrontation. What is important in Thoreau’s argument is the implicit claim that decisions cannot be rightfully made on the basis of the deliberation and agreement of the majority, but through an appeal to conscience. In that conscience is for Thoreau only found in the individual and never in groups (unless the groups are comprised of conscientious individuals acting in their capacity as conscientious individuals), the decision making process he advocates is, it would appear, fundamentally undemocratic. It is the purpose of this chapter to explain what Thoreau means as well as to explain the necessary non-democratic aspects of the democratic process.

We should not misinterpret what Thoreau means by “conscience,” or, rather, underestimate such a faculty. While conscience here retains its common meaning of a “moral sense” by which we determine right from wrong, it is not relativistic. The last line of the above passage informs this reading. There Thoreau seems to state that obligations are taken on through a choice, well-informed or otherwise. However, in the previous sentence he contrasts “law” with “right.” If we understand “right” in the context of chapter two, as a power coextensive with its exercise, then we must also understand that such rights are not simply taken on or left aside through a choice, but are obligations in the strongest sense of the term. So to follow conscience, or more appropriately to have a conscience, is to always do what one thinks is right. More specifically, to have a conscience is to use that conscience to the extent that one cannot do anything but what is right.

The difficulty for democracy, according to Thoreau, is that while individuals can and do make use of their consciences, groups of people, taken in total, lose their ability to distinguish between right and wrong, a fact that is demonstrated during voting procedures.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. (392)

That there is an election day once per year does less to afford right action than it does to obfuscate the structuring of action in a specific form. Along with Thoreau, thinkers as historically and politically diverse as Alexis de Toqueville, Carl Schmitt, and Derrida have made clear that voting is not what is important for democracy. What is clear, and here we must extend Thoreau’s discussion of this issue, is that voting, while necessary, is action in a form dictated by the state. It is rationality applied to human action, the naturalization of what Thoreau calls conscience. In that it is the design of a group rather than an individual, it is not guaranteed to be in the right. In that it operates according to juridical structures, it is manipuable in the manner of the history described in chapter one. I do not mean to suggest that elections can be bought or that elections are fraudulent (although both cases are sometimes true). Rather, what I would like to consider is the manner in which the juridical impinges upon the natural, how law (and the representations surrounding it) constrains right.

Most importantly, what I would like to offer is an analysis of the manner in which right must be brought to bear in the name of law, how juridical structures, how democratic institutions, can only ever be effectively democratic by allowing that which is not democratic to influence their behaviors. This statement is no doubt one that will cause concern, and I would like to be able to address it immediately. However, in order to do so effectively I will first turn to a further discussion of right in the context of democracy in order to demonstrate the tenuous legitimacy of democracy itself as well as the problematic legitimation it affords.

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The Illegible and the Interface

Posted in papers, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on 24 February 2013 by Ben

Another conference paper (given two or three times) from the vaults that never went anywhere more productive. I don’t know what happens at the end. So many of these papers just sort of trail off. The session must have been starting and I had to “finish” writing.

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Derrida, in Dissemination: “a readability without a signified (which will be decreed to be an unreadability by the reflexes of fright)” (253)

Bremer - Untitled

Claus Bremer – Untitled

In an early critical evaluation of concrete poetry, RP Draper writes:

In European printed language it is an automatic assumption that letters forming words are separated by space from other letters forming words, that these letters march across the page from left to right, and that the lines so formed are strictly parallel and progress downwards at equal intervals. Concrete poetry plays upon these expectations, but itself takes nothing for granted.

Among his many examples of this “taking nothing for granted, Draper notes that the spacing between words may be erased, as in Ilse and Pierre Garnier’s “cinema”, shown here

Garniers - cinema

Ilse and Pierre Garnier – “cinema”

[Sorry for the quality of the scan]

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A paragraph from my essay on Watchmen, about Dylan, superheroes, and nostalgia

Posted in Writing with tags , , on 20 February 2013 by Ben

Even as it reveals the always already fragmented nature of the ideal nostalgia takes as its object, Watchmen’s preoccupation with Dylan underscores its own, ironic perhaps, nostalgic dimension. The novel makes use of three Dylan lyrics. The first two, from “Desolation Row” and “All Along the Watchtower,” Moore and Gibbons explicitly attribute to their respective sources. (I shall have more to say about “Desolation Row” below.) They serve as epigraphs for two of the novel’s twelve chapters, and therefore operate outside of Watchmen’s fictional world, as if perhaps Dylan himself never existed there (indeed, he is never referenced by name in the story itself). Much as the novel posits an American nostalgia for the simplicity of superhero morality, these references to Dylan to suggest a nostalgia for Dylan himself, for a time when Dylan made sense, or perhaps for a superheroic Dylan who could make sense of the world by simplifying its problems into anthemic songs. The novel seems to long for a world which never existed even as it demonstrates the fact that, had superheroes existed, they could not have created a better future.

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Something is better than nothing: more Watchmen (Page a Day day 7)

Posted in Page a Day, Writing with tags , , , on 8 January 2013 by Ben

The following is part of my Page a Day project and some rough writing from my forthcoming essay on Watchmen, music, and nostalgia.

Another lite day of writing–although I got tons of work done today. I was going to skip this altogether, but I am glad I did something, however litter. This follows directly from what I wrote yesterday.

The contrast between these images of death and the self-assured, good-natured interviewee of the interchapter that immediately follows is jarring. In the interview Veidt discusses his past as a costumed hero, his conflicts with his peers (especially that with the Comedian, a man Veidt refers to earlier in the novel as “practically a Nazi”), and his interest in electronic music. He comes across as a humanitarian and, perhaps above all else, as a sort of “sensible liberal”—a believer in social justice but a hard nosed businessman nonetheless. In short, he appears to be the sort of person who had been, in the historical United States, a hippie in the 1960s before finishing college and then becoming a captain of industry. (He had even been a world traveler upon coming of age and, subsequently, a student of Eastern religions and ancient mythology.) However, we know that in the 1960s Veidt was a costumed hero, following in the footsteps of others, especially Dr. Manhattan. Again, Dr. Manhattan is perhaps the reason that there is no counterculture and therefore no hippies. What’s strange, or perhaps not so strange suggests Watchmen, is that despite not being a hippie in the 1960s, despite having no Bob Dylan to draw inspiration from and then reject, Veidt becomes a businessman and himself begins to draw upon and deploy imagery very close to Nazi propaganda. To be clear: despite the presence of superheroes, and despite the absence of the counterculture, America winds up, in the 1980s, very much as it would in reality.

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