irony & ecstasy

face to face

2010-02-03T13:32:00.010-05:00

"She had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details." Henry James, The Bostonians (1886)

I've been writing about ecstasy and de-composition in James's prefaces, with an effort to lead up to this moment in The Bostonians, where the dis-figuring force of enthusiasm is on display in the exposed face of Miss Birdseye. After multiple efforts, I'm still trying to say something about the pathos of this moment (it strikes me as particularly a "moment," engaged as it is with questions of historicity, monuments, with the analogy of time). It is parodic, no doubt, but from within the parody it registers a double loss: if Miss Birdseye is a monument to mid-century reform fervor gone defunct or dysfunctional in the post-Reconstruction era, the monument itself is compromised, de-composed, eroded. The body that stands in for history is fragile, worn, disfigured, at risk--a move that could signal the conservatism of the novel, its alignment with defunct or dysfunctional ideas of privacy. But that the realist narrative cleaves in such detail to the lack of detail--that it offers a portrait that so strikingingly undoes itself as portrait--makes me think otherwise. Miss Birdseye's exposure (like the various exposures and confessions at work in the prefaces) signals a certain tendency towards dissolution (c.f. James's professed fondness for Miss Birdseye, "the best figure in the book" despite her "essential formlessness"). Another thread here--a thread I need to pick up (this is also a piece about ficelles, thread, fringe, boundaries, textiles)--has to do with the stillness of statuary and the wave-like work of enthusiasm. As Barbara Johnson notes, a monument "is supposed to confer on a memory the immortality that only inanimate things can possess." Miss Birdseye's enthusiasm introduces corruption, but it also undoes the stillness of statuary, of type-casting or molding--character becomes possible via a certain corruptibility (c.f. Pygmalion; Frankenstein; James's tenderness towards his "monstrous" little texts).

I wonder, too, about the loss of detail here; Miss Birdseye remains a detail in the text, notable for her very formlessness but also highly accessory in the novel (and highly accessorized: the glasses that keep sliding down her nose, the hat that keeps falling off--as if the body itself ceased to be a fixture). I wonder about the gendering of the detail, whether gender and form come together in the analogy between the body and the text that James is quite fond of...

and this brings me to skin. The skin that melts, that fails to hang together, the skin that stays a skin in the discourse of the realist novel (and not, for example, a mask or an index--c.f. Anne Cheng's recent work on modernist skin). Realism's investment in the legibility of character (c.f. Leo Bersani's The Freudian Body) demands a move beneath or beyond the surface. Ecstasy manifested at the level of skin does something different, puncturing the surface (as a boundary or a threshold) but refusing to open onto some more instructive interiority (ex-stasis, beside the self, an ethics of tangentiality or facing, of the face to face). Exposing the face in its constant erosion, James makes a very anti-phrenological, anti-symptomatic move; he insists on the wearing away of the surface itself, on the process that marks the "public"-ness of interaction and relation. If James worked to parody "the obliteration of any idea of privacy" in this novel of the feminist movement, he also more radically aligned realism not with a hermetic, gender-specific domesticity but with its exposure and erosion (is it that?), with the threshold or the skin, the compromised and corrupted body.

anticipation

2010-01-28T20:09:00.005-05:00

"These Parerga are not integral parts of the book; they 'do not belong within' 'religion in the limits of pure reason,' they 'border upon' it. I stress this for reasons which are in part theo-topological, even theo-architectonic: these Parerga situate perhaps the fringe where we might be able, today, to inscribe our reflections."

Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge" (1996)

critical gestures

2010-01-14T18:58:00.006-05:00

To Be Liked By You Would Be A Calamity

"Attack is more piquant than concord," but when

You tell me frankly you would like to feel

My flesh beneath your feet,

I'm all abroad; I can put my weapon up, and

Bow you out.

Gesticulation--it is half the language,

Let unsheathed gesticulation be the steel

Your courtesy must meet,

Since in your hearing words are mute, which

To my senses

Are a shout.

Marianne Moore

queer ecstasy

2009-12-07T13:23:00.005-05:00

José Esteban Muñoz on the ecstasy of James Schuyler, via Heidegger, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009):

"In Being and Time Heidegger reflects on the activity of timeliness and its relation to ekstatisch (ecstasy), signaling for Heidegger the ecstatic unity of temporality--Past, Present, and Future. The ecstasy the speaker feels and remembers in [Schuyler's] "A photograph" is not consigned to one moment. It steps out from the past and remarks on the unity of an expansive version of temporality; hence, future generations are invoked. To know ecstasy in the way in which the poem's speaker does is to have a sense of timeliness's motion, to understand a temporal unity that is important to what I attempt to describe as the time of queerness. Queerness's time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time." (25)

In his conclusion, Munoz brilliantly brings together this Heideggerian version of ecstasy with the queer affectivity of the Magnetic Fields's "Take Ecstasy With Me":

"Take ecstasy with me thus becomes a request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional, a time that is not queerness. Queerness's time is the time of ecstasy. Ecstasy is queerness's way. We know time through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality. But let us take ecstasy together, as the Magnetic Fields request. That means going beyond the singular shattering that a version of jouissance suggests or the transport of Christian rapture." (187)

Evoking Bernini's The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, read by Lacan, Kristeva, and others as the shattering of the self (and particularly, of the female self) through jouissance, Muñoz demands an ecstasy beyond individual self-shattering, a collective ecstasy or ecstatic collectivity that might name a queer futurity. C.f. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on being beside, Judith Halberstam on queer time & queer place, Shoshana Felman on madness and the speaking body.

(pre)faces

2009-11-12T20:03:00.010-05:00

Giorgio Agamben in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964)

"The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city."

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (2000)

I've been thinking of James's (pre)faces, what they do and do not expose, the ways in which they save face even as they face what cannot be saved: the work as inviolable, sacred, austere. To preface is to not merely to supplement--to move towards an illusory whole, a flawless artifact--but also to expose the logic (or illogic) of the supplement, and James's prefaces in particular seem to theatricalize this double movement. He gives himself away, exposes himself in order to save face... concedes the ecstasy of method but promises not to lose his head in the process...

I blush when I write, now, alone in my library carrel (which doubles, all cold metal, as a citadel). If I didn't know it before, I am reminded that writing is a circular--a circulatory--system. And not without shame: to write, too, is to be exposed. "Be only your face," Agamben exhorts: "Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them."

See also Brian Dillon's piece on Agamben circa 1964 at Frieze.

negative space

2009-11-11T17:04:00.004-05:00

Kara Walker, "Cut"

"So our writing, as much as our living, becomes extensive, opening out pursuant to filmy trails of the unsayable, not closing down on the secret quivering in fear of imminent exposure. So our writing becomes an exercise in life itself, at one with life and within life as lived in social affairs, not transcendent or even a means to such, but contiguous with action and reaction in the great chain of storytelling telling the one always before the last. Yet how can you be contiguous with the not merely empty, but negative, space?"

Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

The need here to think about the negative space of form, what cuts off and cuts into form as an idea of wholeness (of 'holiness'); defacement and decay and exposure. Taussig's distinction between "empty" and "negative" space, recognition that the negative space is never itself empty but contiguous, formative and trans-formative and pointing always to the de-formed nature of form itself. Here is a theory of writing and living, he says: open secrets, exposed borders, extensions, piece-meal, contiguity.

on the madness of the real

2009-11-10T10:37:00.007-05:00

Excising the Stone of Folly, Pieter Huys, c. 1530-1581

"This, then, is Derrida’s fundamental interpretive gesture: the one of 'separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the HusserlianCogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure' (60).

"Here, when Derrida asserts that '/t/he historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, /…/ in the difference between history and historicity' (60), he is perhaps too short. This tension may appear very 'Lacanian': is it not a version of the tension between the Real – the hyperbolic excess – and its (ultimately always failed) symbolization? The matrix we thus arrive at is the one of the eternal oscillation between the two extremes, the radical expenditure, hyperbole, excess, and its later domestification (like Kristeva, between Semiotic and Symbolic...). Illusionary are both extremes: pure excess as well as pure finite order would disintegrate, cancel themselves... This misses the true point of 'madness,' which is not the pure excess of the Night of the World, but the madness of the passage to the Symbolic itself, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real. (Like Freud, who, in his Schreber analysis, points out how the paranoiac 'system' is not madness, but a desperate attempt to ESCAPE madness – the disintegration of the symbolic universe - through an ersatz, as if, universe of meaning.) If madness is constitutive, then EVERY system of meaning is minimally paranoiac, 'mad.'"

Slavov Zizek, "Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault, and then Lacan"

differential action, or the things we lean on

2009-10-27T18:43:00.006-04:00

What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.

Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture" in Means Without End (2000)

"This photograph is one of a series of what Eakins called "differential-action" studies, which culminated [...] in a lecture entitled 'The Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More than One Joint.' This lantern slide image was probably used as a projected illustration during the talk. In order to demonstrate the tensile strengths of a horse's muscles, the man on the ladder balances his weight on the horse's skinned hind leg."

via the getty

speaking of

2009-10-19T11:26:00.006-04:00

"I have no authority whatsoever to talk to you about religion and experience [...] It is from this very impossibility of speaking to my friends and to my own kin about a religion that matters to me, that I want to start tonight: I want to begin this essay by this hesitation, this weakness, this stuttering, by this speech impairment. Religion, in my tradition, in my corner of the world, has become impossible to enunciate."

Bruno Latour, "Thou Shall Not Freeze Frame"

Note Latour's explicit debt to James's sense of deferral, his self-consciousness about speaking at the beginning of Varieties and in the letters, his invocation of Whitman's "To You"; also c.f. William Connolly, "often, though, the differences between liberalism and secularism are those of inflection"; Stanley Cavell, "in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference."

the disorder of things

2009-10-12T18:59:00.007-04:00

Jacques Rancière, Let Mots de l'histoire (The Names of History):

"The human and social sciences are children of the scientific age: the age of a certain number of decisive revolutions in the fundamental sciences; but also the age of scientific belief, the age that conceives of rationality that has no necessary connection to the revolutions in question. But--we forget this too easily--the age of science is also that of literature, that in which the latter names itself as such and separates the rigor of its own action from the simple enchantments of fiction, as with rules on the division of poetic genres and procedures suited to belles lettres. It is finally--we 'know' this more and more--the age of democracy, the age in which democracy appears, even in the eyes of those who combat or fear it, as the social destiny of modern politics; it is the age of broad masses and great regularities that lend themselves to the calculations of science, but also that of a new disorder and arbitrariness that disturb objective rigors." (8-9)

Eugène Delacroix, "La Liberté guidant le peuple" (1831)

the creative mind

2009-10-05T19:23:00.005-04:00

"According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed of great spiritual currents. If many of us resist others allow themselves to be carried along. And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those are the mystical souls. We know with what sympathy James studied them. When his book Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of vivid descriptions and very penetrating analyses--a psychology, they said, of religious feeling. This was a complete misinterpretation of the author's thought. The truth is that James leaned out upon the mystic soul as, on a spring, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on our cheek, or as, at the sea-side, we watch the coming and going of sail-boats to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and carried away: why could they not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? That is no doubt the origin, the inspiring idea of the 'pragmatism' of William James. For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought."

Henri Bergson, "The Pragmatism of William James," An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)

on metaphor and metamorphosis

2009-10-04T11:58:00.010-04:00

"To put it differently, the word « water » not only represents the encounter of the “Earthwoman” saint with her heaven, but in the state of prayer, Teresa immerses herself above the barrier of word-signs in the psyche-soma. It’s through her fiction ( better and differently than with her epilepsy) that she escapes the “powers” (understanding, memory, imagination). Thus, that which remains « words » is no longer a « signifier-signified » separated from « referent- things », as is customary with « words- signs » in an exterior reality. On the contrary, prayer, which amalgamates the ego and the Other, also amalgamates the word and the thing: the speaking subject undergoes, or nearly undergoes a catastrophic mutism, the self « loses itself », «liquefies », « becomes delirious ». Half way between these two extremes, a thin membrane rather than a bar separates the word from the thing: they contaminate each other and alternately dissociate. The self loses itself and finds itself again, devastated and jubilant, between two waters. Collapse on one side, rapture on the other : the fluidity of the aquatic touch accurately translates this alternation."

Julia Kristeva, "The Passion According to Teresa of Avila"

Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652)

current events

2009-09-29T09:13:00.005-04:00

from Henry James, The Scenic Art; Notes on Acting & the Drama (1872-1901), ed. Allan Wade (New Brunswick, 1948)

"The Théâtre Français has had the good fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. They have been preserved, transmitted, respected, cherished, until at last they form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment. A stranger feels their superior influence the first time he sees the great curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theater that is not as other theaters are. It is not only better, it is different. It has a peculiar perfection--something consecrated, historical, academic. This impression is delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of tranquil ecstasy. [...] He has heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for the first time, he sees something that deserves that name."

"The Théâtre Français" (1876)

"It is enough to be sorely puzzled, and have carried away a considerable store of tough problems, to be solved at leisure. One of those, for instance, will be connected, as we may surmise, with the extraordinary vogue of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, and will concern itself with enquiring into the sources of tender interest excited by this lady. I speak of her 'vogue' for want of a better word; it would require some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt. I spoke just now of topics, and what they were worth in the London system. This remarkable actress has filled this function with a completeness that leaves nothing to be desired [...]."

"The Comédie Française in London" (1879)

c.f. Jennifer Fleissner on the fad; here Bernhardt is the "vogue," filling her function to the end point of desire, using up the movement of curiosity and enthusiasm which is the movement of (cultural) history, the construction of "currency" (the temporality of the "current event," the movement of currency, and the tidal motion of currents all apply here).

corporeality

2009-09-24T14:08:00.005-04:00

"In The Bostonians, the analysis of women and publicity describes a broader dilemma: the more rationalized the analysis of human lives, the more uncertain the question of human agency--but also the more compelling the figure of woman as a representative of modern subjectivity. Among its other critical insights, the distinctly cerebral brand of literary analysis undertaken in realism discovers the power of a corporeal figure--the public woman--that is no longer explicable as merely an unreal spectacle."

Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia, 2009).

Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora in Victorien Sardou's Theodora (1882).

see Jennifer Fleissner on woman as the 'emblematic' subject of naturalism. representations of modern political subjectivity?

on gesture

2009-09-23T14:03:00.004-04:00

Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, 2008):

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions--the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them." (23)

"In other words, gesture is outside the domain of the sign insofar as signs are coded and call for a hermeneutics, an interpretive apparatus separable from, and in place prior to, the act of signification. Rather, the mode of action of gesture is enactive, exterior to anything prior to its own performance: it works through bodily executed events, creating meaning and mathematical significance 'before one knows it.'" (36)

This last bit is of particular relevance for my own (meagre) efforts, my circling around what it might mean to read gesture into literature, and particularly the repetitive tick that seems to mark the body's presence in the very moment of its (literary) translation into a (disembodied) sign. Rotman resists Agamben's assimilation of gesture to silence, to aphasia, to memory loss: a crucial contribution in trying to think the history (the re-membering) of gesture.

Here my critical interest in gesture runs into a deeply personal, unexplained attachment to ASL:

This, too, is on my wish list.

button pressers

2009-09-21T14:30:00.010-04:00

On the relationship between enthusiasm and the fad:

"Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. Those seriously interested in its advancement do not look upon this state of affairs as a misfortune, but as a disguised blessing, inasmuch as photography had been classed as a sport by nearly all of those who deserted its ranks and fled to the present idol, the bicycle. The only persons who seem to look upon this turn of affairs as entirely unwelcome are those engaged in manufacturing and selling photographic goods. It was, undoubtedly, due to the hand camera that photography became so generally popular a few years ago. Every Tom, Dick and Harry could, without trouble, learn how to get something or other on a sensitive plate, and this is what the public wanted-no work and lots of fun. Thanks to the efforts of these persons hand camera and bad work became synonymous. The climax was reached when an enterprising firm flooded the market with a very ingenious hand camera and the announcement, 'You press the button, and we do the rest.' This was the beginning of the 'photographing-by-the-yard' era, and the ranks of enthusiastic Button Pressers were enlarged to enormous dimensions. The hand camera ruled supreme."

Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera--Its Present Importance" (1897)

"The fad is that embodiment of historicity that most pressures the self-determining individual, producing instead a subject that is fully public and fully historical. What I mean is simply this: if we ascribe someone's interests or actions to a fad for that activity, we imply that those actions derive purely from inhabiting a particular moment in time. That moment was 'the time when everyone was doing x'; we might indeed say that any given moment becomes legible as a moment through the category of the fad. This is not to suggest, however, that the fad's relation to the writing of history is a straightforward one. In fact, I claim the opposite, that the fad often operates as the limit of historical knowledge."

Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, 2004).

[note how the commercialization of photography archives the landscape, and particular the female artist/author, as residual forms]

on beginnings

2009-09-21T12:09:00.006-04:00

"But if I hadn't done, on solicitation, this particular thing I shouldn't have begun ever at all; and if I hadn't begun I shouldn't have the set purpose to show, henceforth, what flower of perfection I presume to think I can pick from the dusty brambles--ah meagre vegetation!--of the dramatic form."

To Robert Louis Stevenson. 34 De Vere Gardens W. Oct. 30th, 1891.

The letter begins, "My dear Louis. My silences are hideous, but somehow I feel as if you were inaccessible to sound."

English National Opera production of The Turn of the Screw, December 2007

wish list

2009-09-20T08:39:00.005-04:00

Kurt Tong, Gosling Lake

via 20 x 200

JK Photography, Underwater Silence 7x10

via etsy.com

richard long

2009-09-19T10:59:00.005-04:00

A Line Made by Walking (1967)

"The consolation, the dignity, the joy of life are that discouragements and lapses, depressions and darknesses come to one only as one stands without--I mean without the luminous paradise of art. As soon as I really re-enter it--crossed the loved threshold--stand in the high chamber, and the gardens divine--the whole realm widens out again before me and around me--the air of life fills my lungs--the light of achievement flushes over all the place, and I believe, I see, I do."

The Notebooks of Henry James. October 22nd, 1891, 34 De Vere Gdns.

synapses

2009-09-15T15:31:00.008-04:00

Kiki Smith, Nests and Trees (1997)

Sigmund Freud, "On the spinal ganglia and spinal cord of petromyzon" (c. 1900)

on convergence

2009-09-15T15:18:00.007-04:00

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2005)

p. 16, n. 3:

"Once more my reflection dovetails with the work of William Connolly, who--in Identity/Difference (Ithaca, 1991) and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, 1995)--argues for a 'politics of paradox'. While we put the accent on different aspects, since Connolly is particularly interested in bringing to the fore what he calls the 'paradox of difference' and I am specially concerned with the paradox of liberal democracy, our approaches converge on many important points. We both consider that it is vital for a pluralist democratic politics to expose and acknowledge paradoxes instead of trying to conceal or transcend them through appeals to rationality or community."

c.f. Connolly's anti-rationalist stance in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 2000), and particularly the "visceral register," relevant here to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism.

spectral

2008-08-30T17:12:00.006-04:00

Special thanks to the OED, always.

spectral, a.

Isaac Taylor (attr.), A Natural History of Enthusiasm (1830)

"A spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night."

deleuze and delirium

2008-08-30T17:01:00.009-04:00

Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life," Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).

on the minor (c.f. Melville's Pip, Father Mapple):

"This is the becoming of the writer. Kafka (for central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer." (4)

on delirium (c.f. Durkheim, the delirium of collective representation):

"Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world-historical, a 'displacement of races and continents.' Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant." (4)

on syntax (c.f. William James):

"There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things." (2)

Syntax, experience and revelation; bosh! and "finally, breath-words, the a-syntactical limit toward which all language tends." ..."suspended exclamations as the limit of language, as explosive visions and sonorities." (5)

the action of lightning

2008-06-24T11:17:00.006-04:00

Bataille on the festival:

"The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and this this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.

[...]

The divine world is contagious and its contagion is dangerous. In theory, what is started in the operation of sacrifice is like the action of lightning: in theory there is no limit to the conflagration."

In relation to Durkheim on effervescence and the deification of society:

Deification of society (pursues ends beyond the individual), dominion over consciences: moral authority. Worked out in common, intensity of acceptance in individual mind: echoes reciprocally in all other minds. Psychic properties. Collective force not entirely external, integral to our being (made up in and by individual consciences).

“Invigorating influence” of society, especially at certain moments, e.g. August 4th, 1789: debate over feudal rights, “legal form given to the resolution of a principles made in a moment of collective enthusiasm,” later called night of the Dupes, St. Bartholomew’s night massacre of the estates (August Decree).

Refurbishing of common faith by manifesting it in common, *attitude particular to man addressing the crowd…form of grandiloquence absurd elsewhere, effective in context. “Even his ideas lose all sense of proportion and easily fall into every kind of excess.” “Abnormal plethora of forces,” oratorical inspiration: forces derive from the group, rebounded, amplified feeling, reverberation, the group “incarnate and personified.”

"[...] general effervescence characteristic of revolutionary or creative periods."

Forces: each form in our conscience two circles of mental states, two sorts of reality (sacred, profane things).

Early years of French Revolution, under influence of general enthusiasm, things secular transformed by public opinion (The Motherland, Liberty, Reason) become religion established with dogma, holy days, altars, symbols, etc. Patriotic enthusiasm. Collective action: sensation of the sacred.

on intimacy

2008-06-23T14:16:00.006-04:00

Or, reading to re-center.

"Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky: this is still a negative definition, from which the essential is missing."

Bataille, The Theory of Religion (51)

like a revolution

2008-02-29T16:20:00.006-05:00

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways and is often away from his office for weeks together. That is one reason why we seldom meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.

from the opening pages of Cather's My Antonia. There is an alternate opening chapter (included as an appendix in an edition that also had a foreward by Kathleen Norris, which I have scouted on Google Books Search but haven't yet been able to look at in depth), where the description of Burden's wife is extended:

"She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm."

Perhaps not incidentally, the absence of Burden's wife enables the narrative (her lack of enthusiasm being utterly opposed to the work of narration).

The only other appearance of enthusiasm in My Antonia relates to Mrs. Harling, the domestic revolutionary:

"Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'. Preserving time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was like a revolution."

Next up: Wharton's The House of Mirth

books I'm taking

2007-11-17T10:21:00.006-05:00

to Los Angeles:

George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays.
Henry James, The Bostonians (this is taking me way too long).
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition.
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language.

susan howe

2007-11-13T21:30:00.004-05:00

Poetry you may do the
map of Hell softly one
voice with viol in green
habit or consort twelve

Maniacs and Fantastics
in measured epic dactyl
Far back thinner coranto
one Labadist one Cynic.

Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007)

currently

2007-11-12T16:09:00.004-05:00

Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (University of California Press, 2005).

Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Henry James, The Bostonians (1886).

(more).

2007-11-12T15:44:00.006-05:00

"Velocity, mechanics, heat, thermodynamics, light, chaos of formulae, electromagnetic induction must be called back into the Sublime, found and forgotten. Dickinson was expert in standing in corners, expert in secret listening and silent understanding. Bristling with Yankee energy, chained to an increasingly demanding agoraphobia, she moved through that particular mole of nature in her--she studied Terror. Adopted parataxis and rupture to tell the feverish haste, the loss, to warn of storm approaching--Brute force, mechanism. Cassandra was a woman. All power, including the power of love, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable." (Howe, 116)

"Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun than an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame." (138)

Susan Howe & Joan Richardson on the work of writing as encoding the precedent and the Other, DNA and ventriloquizing, genetic code and inspired vocalization. But: poetry beyond gender?

my susan

2007-11-12T15:33:00.004-05:00

Ammunition from Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007):

"My and me. In this unsettling New England lexical landscape nothing is sure. In a shorter space (woman's quick voice) Dickinson went further than Browning, coding and erasing--deciphering the idea of herself, dissimulation in revelation. Really alone at a real frontier, dwelling in Possibility was what she had brilliantly learned to do." (76)

"Inside the highly formalized rhetoric of Poetry's reason, stalks unreason of perverted sexuality." (90)

"What light smiles in this unsurveyed valley of great memory? Materialistic light from the man-made Gun's forged yellow barrel merely mincing Nature's pure Idea of light as power, as fire mimics the sun? What revelation waiting to be born must be shot violently into leering flame? Now all aspects of the poet's self are homeless. Mistress of suspicion, what is there, who? Simpering smile of layer on layer. Who or what smiler? The Vesuvian face, a mask, veils fire, chaos, original will, vapor. Will that is searing lava and sulfurous power." (100)

(Toward a reading of gender and the volcanic: Alcott/Jo March's linguistic eruptions, the ground trembling under the domicile; Yezierska, immigrant conversion and overflow)

declensions

2007-10-08T11:38:00.003-04:00

“Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Widsom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his god.” (321-322)

"'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again.'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Well, that's funny.'
'And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket." (335)

Melville, Moby-Dick

one day ticket

2007-10-04T20:33:00.003-04:00

summer find: Ottawa Chautauqua, one day ticket, June 21, 1898

simmering

2007-10-04T20:09:00.002-04:00

"The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration--to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible...Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm."
Emerson, "The Over-Soul"

"I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil."
Whitman

"'I sees! O Jesus! I sees!' and still another, without words, like bubbles rising in water."
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Compare all, especially this last, to Durkheim's sense of "collective effervescence," the force of excitation as a social fact.

jules bastien-lepage (1848-1884)

2007-09-25T21:49:00.002-04:00

Joan of Arc, 1879
Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884)
Oil on canvas; 100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm)
Gift of Erwin Davis, 1889 (89.21.1)

foucault's madness part two

2007-09-25T21:48:00.004-04:00

(of many):

"...at a deeper level, we find a rigorous organization dependent on the faultless armature of a discourse. This discourse, in its logic, commands the firmest belief in itself, it advances by judgments and reasonings which connect together; it is a kind of reason in action. In short, under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium. In this second delirium, which is, in a sense, pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel of dementia, is located the paradoxical truth of madness."

Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Connection: to Derrida's sense, in "Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone," of the inevitable proximity (the link) between fundamentalist and hypercritical thought. And with due caution to the distinction between religion and madness, as well as due attention to their shared discursive borders, see also Timothy Clark (on representing enthusiasm): “Ideas that sound a little like accounts of aporias in deconstructive thinking merge in bizarre ways with notions that rest on a religious or magical world view" (from The Theory of Inspiration).

foucault's madness part one

2007-09-25T21:19:00.002-04:00

"Madness has ceased to be--at the limits of the world, of man and death--an eschatalogical figure; the darkness has dispersed on which the eyes of madness were fixed and out of which the forms of the impossible were born. Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital."

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

to do

2007-09-23T21:38:00.003-04:00

To do: the limits of regionalism. outer bounds. politics of the periphery.

To imagine: the work of sound.

irony and ecstasy

2007-09-23T21:22:00.002-04:00

"The anti-rhetoric of Hawthorne, which defends him against sentimentality, also prevents him from rendering sensuality, dissolving all ecstasies in ironies."

Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)

Ecstasy as sediment, reserve, reaction; ecstasy as experience, unmoored.