I cite

Dream differently

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

They should go back to sleep.

Double take

When we say that someone did a double take, we are saying that they looked again, looked back. They saw something and rather than assimilating what they saw into the manifold of impressions, they were pushed, impelled, to look at it again. With a double take, it's not that the person chooses or decides to look again, to look back; rather, they find themselves already looking back.

What makes one look again?

A rupture or a glitch, a disconnection or seam, a fault line in the manifold of impressions that, somehow, is more than that manifold. The plenitude of sensory impressions, the multiplicty in which one persists, at that moment exceeds itself. Some kind of excess in the field calls attention to the field.

The Lacanian term for that excess rupturing the field is the gaze. The gaze, then, isn't what the viewer sees; it's what makes her look and become aware that she is looking. The gaze confronts the viewer in her viewing, disturbing it, denaturalizing it, making what was formerly seamless appear with seams, with cuts, with splices.

In a media setting filled with interruptions, with cuts and splices, segments and seques, the gaze, rather than becoming more apparent, retreats. The field itself seems comprised of bits of footage, multiple layers of impressions impressing themselves into layers. Interrupting this field of interruptions thus becomes a challenge: what makes one interruption different from another, what lets it rupture the field of interruptions, what lets it become an opportunity for an encounter with the Real of the gaze rather than simply another moment in the imaginary?

Perhaps because I've been teaching the Republic, perhaps because my thinking looks back more easily than forward (or even around), I wonder if the interruption of the gaze in a field of interruptions depends on something like what Plato describes as a summons--a sensory impression that extends in opposing directions, that impresses a contradiction on the senses, calling forth some need to understand. On the one hand, we could describe this as a lack, insofar as their is a lack of understanding. On the other, it is just as easy to think of the situation as one of surplus, an abundance which pushes the one who senses in conflicting directions.

And the summons can only summon so long as it remains in conflict, opposed. If there is a resolution, the conflict or opposition becomes only apparent, imaginary, and not Real.

In a field of interruptions the gaze manifests itself as an interruption of the interruptions, perhaps as a bracketing that makes us say, 'but wait! there's more' and that in so doing calls us to look back on our looking. What makes this interruption the work of the drive is that we find ourself already lost in it, already having turned.

Curious Buttons

I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons yesterday. I cried. But I don't know why. My difficulty in reading the movie could be just another case of the way I'm filmically challenged. Or it could be an effect of an insubstantial film held together by curiosity regarding how Brad Pitt will look at his next age. Or maybe something else. At any rate, I felt quite emotional at the end of the film. It's almost as if the film elicited feeling without eliciting a particular kind of feeling, a feeling of this rather than that (like the fast food ad that markets 'flavor' without saying anything about the sort of flavor).

The baby dies. The old man is born. The baby symbolizes not an open future (as part of a reproductive, heteronormative social form) but the end of a life. The old man suggests the new, unpredictable, unexpected, the possibility of a life that does not and cannot conform to narrative conventions. What is old is new again.

The future belongs to the old. The young are dependent, burdens, harbingers of certain death. Is this reversal a hint of the geriatric power of the baby boomers? Or does the reversal just confirm the normativity of what it reverses?

What sort of fantasy has the man as his lover's baby, dying in the arms of his lover-become-mother? What sort of fantasy celebrates the prowess of a male body in its seventies or eighties? And what sort of fantasy views abandonment of one's partner and child as an act of noble sacrifice and responsibility?

It would be wrong for me to say I'm disappointed in the movie, although I continue to wonder about the lack of questioning and reflection manifest in Benjamin as he becomes a young man and those around him age. More striking to me was the absence of connection and responsibility, the singularity with which the character lived with the body of a young man and the memories of an old man (not to mention the difficulty there could be of making such a distinction--what kind of relation could there be between a brain inscribed by experience and the physicality of a child's brain?). The separation suggests a vision of mature masculinity as necessarily isolated and separate, as closed of in itself. Is that lack or loss the stress of feeling the film induces?

Or might it also be the woman's loss of companionship. Her lover returns as her child. She cares for him as he becomes ever more difficult and dependent, with no memories and increasingly limited capacity to communicate.

thumbs up and down

I haven't started doing much work yet, mostly odds and ends as I fight the anxiety of not having my book orders in yet for this fall's courses. Since I'm not working much, I don't have many thoughts. I have consumed media (hours and hours of the Tour de France). Here's my two cents on the movies:

Wanted: not wanted at all. Just say no to exploding rats. Still, some cool images and ideas. Weird how the whole doesn't work.

Walle: wonderful, exquisite, heart-breaking. I want so see the first 30 minutes again and again. I loved the way that the ordinaries of everyday commercial objects, in all their mass productiveness, became enchanting. The difference between garbage and a cherished object of desire is that it is desired. Pixar as Lacan.

The Dark Knight: amazing. I want to see the last 90 minutes again and again. My preference would be to see just all the scenes with Heath Ledger.

Lars and the Real Community

We watched Lars and the Real Girl last night. I completely loved it.

I'm reading In Defense of Lost Causes. The second chapter has some wonderful readings of movies and Kafka letters. The basic idea involves the core Oedipal drama, a narrative that persists underneath all sorts of other stories. One of the strongest and most detailed discussions is of Frankenstein and the French Revolution. It's straightforward, so I won't summarize it here. It interests me, though, because of the way Lars and the Real Girl can't be reduced to an obvious familial drama but instead only works as an account of a supportive community, or more specifically, of the supports that community provides, the community on which people's identities depend.

The familial drama: Lars enters into a delusional psychosis. The triggering factors include the death of his father, the return of his brother after years of being away, Lars' consequent feeling like a stranger in his own home and his moving to the garage, the pregnancy of his sister-in-law (Lars' mother died giving birth to Lars), and the arrival of a new woman at work who stirs up suppressed feelings of desire. Lars orders a sex doll, Bianca, and treats her as his girlfriend. But he doesn't have sex with her. Because both he and Bianca are religious, Bianca sleeps in the room that was his mother's in the house now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law.

The charm of the movie consists in the willingness of the entire town to take Lars' delusion absolutely seriously. He takes Bianca to church, to a party. Bianca gets a job modeling for a local store. She volunteers at the hospital reading to children. She's elected to the school board. She is more than an object for Lars. She is an object for the entire community. So it's not simply that Lars displaces all sorts of feelings and desires onto Bianca. Rather, the community gives her a place. It lets her take a place and in this taking place to enable Lars to see that there is a place for him. More than a domestic drama about guilt and reconciliation, psychosis and recovery, the film is an allegory for the Symbolic as a providing place and meaning.

Of course, Bianca has to die. As Lars gets better, becomes more integrated, acquires a sense of place, learns more about what it is to be man (a lesson which has to do with accepting responsibility and which he demonstrates having learned in a wonderful scene where he performs CPR on a strangled teddy bear), Bianca becomes ill and eventually dies (she might even drown, but this wasn't clear to me). There is a funeral for her and priest remarks, without irony, that she has been loved, that she has contributed, and that she was truly helpful and unique.

Bianca was Real. A Real object for everyone. The gap or space she opened, occupied, and left as an object enacts subject as lack in the structure, the Real of the subject. The drama of the film, then, concerns the Symbolic order of the community providing a place when one of its members feels itself displaced (in one scene, as Lars' brother and sister-in-law go to the church to ask that its members help out and make Bianca feel welcome--the psychologist has advised them to go along with Lars' delusion--as one member voices aversion to treating a sex doll like a person and to socializing with a psychotic, another reminds them that they all are close to people with idiosyncracies and disorders; it's as if she reminds them all that even as deviance and transgression are the underside of the community, they are nonetheless part of the community; perhaps once could say that she is not so naive as to disavow the 'nightly law' but instead recognizes its inseparability from the bonds of sociality; or maybe it's better to say that all nights or all nightly laws are not the same; they can be differentiated, acknowledged, or disavowed in different ways).

Some theory friends (I'm thinking about Jane Bennett here) draw from Latour to extend and develop the agenic properties of objects. At times, that theoretical orientation seems at odds with a Lacanian one. I've wondered, though, if the Lacanian object might suggest more possibilities for convergence or intersection than often seems to be the case. Here, the material object Bianca animated relationships, friendships, opportunities to help, support, be together, speak, and eat that had otherwise seemed less alive. And she did this not simply as an object onto which fantasies or delusions were projected but as a material object and as a Real object. Her materiality incited various physical events (she weighed 125 pounds so dressing and bathing and moving her wasn't easy). And her insistence as a gap/lack and as an excess inscribed or reminded everyone of the prior inscription of a place in the community for Lars.

Sicko

We saw Sicko. It was great. The combination of horror, humor, disbelief, despair, and think that maybe something could change was intense--as it usually is with Moore's films. I left wanting to demolish all the health insurance companies and dissolve the government and create a new one. Best: the emphasis on solidarity.

Moore's proposals:
--universal health care
--abolition of insurance companies
--regulation of pharmaceutical companies as if they were public utilities

Paragraph 175

Watch Paragraph 175. I got it from Netflix. It's a documentary about the persecution of homosexuals during the Third Reich. It features interviews with some of the 10 gay men known to have a survived the camps and a lesbian able to get out and move to England. One man, who was arrested after a hustler dragged him into the woods even as he was saying that he was being followed, spent 8 years in camps. Afterwards, he told no one about it. He weeps as he says that he wishes he could have told his father, who had died. He doesn't tell his mother, out of shame, he says, but also out of a kind of compassion for her inability to handle what he would say. Exactly what he had in mind was unclear.

A lack of clarity, or the inability of some of us properly to read between the lines, opens the film. A man is on the S Bahn in Berlin, telling the camera, and his interviewer, about the intensity and the romance of the time, of the bombings and the stoppings of the S Bahn trains and the need to reach out to people when this happened.

The interviewer stops him, somewhat confused, and asks whether he is saying that he made love on the stopped train.

The man then asks the interviewer if he is slow--of course that's what he did.

Jesus Camp

I watched "Jesus Camp" last night (and, yes, I still read but these days I'm mostly reading a bunch of dissertations for a prize, student papers, and 9/11 truth websites; I've also been reading Lacan and Santner on pyschosis and hope to have something to say soon).

So, Jesus Camp: it's a good documentary, well worth seeing. As a pentecostalist camp director says, there are scenes that will have hard core liberals shaking in their boots (or something like that). The film follows several children from their homeschooled family life, through their experience at a North Dakota camp, to Colorado Springs to Tim Haggard's New Life Church, and on to Washington as they participtate in pro-life political actions.

The preaching at the camp is impressive--lots of use of toys to make points, involvement of the kids in preaching, speaching in tongues, singing (JC's in the house!), praying, weeping, blessing each other. The worship scenes are intense--lots of weeping and blessing one another. Someone brings out a George W. Bush cut out and they all pray for Bush. They smash cups to enact the need to smash the judiciary and sin and abortion and bring about revival in America. Someone hands out palm size plastic fetuses as the children weep and pray for the friends they've never met.

The camp director is convinced (rightly, in my view) that getting to the children, convincing them and organizing them is absolutely crucial. Interestingly, the Christian radio announcer included in the film for balance--he is Christian and worried about the influence of fundamentalist evangelicals in politics--is less persuasive on this point. He gets caught in the conflict between separating church and state wherein religion is a private matter and saying that parents' shouldn't be able to bring up their children the way they choose. He also wants to make religion a matter of free choice, while his opponent rightly points out the pervasiveness of indoctrination overall. I would have gone with a more fundamental argument: homeschooling should be against the law and the state has a compelling interest in raising kids who are questioning, critical, and literate.

A difficult and interesting scene involved the homeschooling of a kid named Levi: he is being taught that creationism is the only thing that makes sense (he has some cool creationist video game) and that global warning is a lie, that the evidence for it is insignificant. He is supremely confident in these truths that he is learning.

For me, the most difficult part of the movie involved an unnamed kid who, in the context of a service where the kids' were to confess their sins, the ways that they fail to live in Christ and go along with the crowd, and are all weeping--although, in a cool move, the preacher washes their hands with some bottled water--this one kid admits to finding it really hard to believe in God and to sometimes not believing the Bible. He is crying and clearly struggling. The camera goes to him, crying and clearly struggling, at various times throughout the movie.

I wondered about the kids who didn't express doubt. Did they repress it with their confidence and conviction? Or did they simply not have it? Were they really moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues and to go up to strangers and ask them about salvation?

I remember saying the pledge to the Bible and to the Christian flag when I went to Vacation Bible School at a Southern Baptist Church in Mississippi. I remember listening to Christian rock. But I also remember the tremendous, unbearable strain as a teenager: the other kids seemed so much more like real Christians, like they really did have a relationship with God. Many would weep at the alter after nearly every service. They would hold out their arms in prayer. I always felt strange and awkward, like, what are they doing? They would leave the room if conversation went in an ungodly direction. My mother, who taught some of them in Sunday School, couldn't stand their piety--this was in the 70s as the Southern Baptist Convention was grappling with fundamentalism. More and more charismatics were attending our church, which had been mainstream Southern Baptist up till that point.

But the struggle, the problem of the world, where sin was everywhere and constant. It seemed impossible--no matter how much one prayed--to be in the world but not of the world. It seemed impossible not to be perpetually drowning in sin. In the film, the preacher lambasts Harry Potter and a parent tells the kids not to tell ghost stories because that's an ungodly focus.

What a relief it must be to direct the difficult, unbearable burden of one's sin, one's struggle with sin, onto a struggle with the world. There is purpose and release; there is a sense that one's struggle matters, that one is a soldier for God bringing America to revival. Having the burden of millions of dead babies on one's soul might make it a little easier to deal with the temptations of Harry Potter and schoolyard gossip. As a soldier for Christ, purity matters--it's one's armor, one's shield. And, the sin is out there--not in me or at least, not so much.

Babel

(I'm a terrible reader of movies, so continue at your own risk; also, spoilers.)

I saw "Babel" last night. The movie made me feel tense and ill the entire time. It was also beautiful--visually and acoustically. I've been trying to figure out what it means, what it's about, how to read it. Then, when writing about the "9/11 Press for Truth" dvd, I realized that these are the wrong questions. There isn't an overview, an over message; there are strands and themes and connections and broken links, and a lack of contact in the midst of all sorts of media.

The film doesn't provide a cheap easy message: globalization is bad, the state is bad, borders are bad, guns are bad, sex is bad, Americans are bad, tourism is bad. It's not so easy. Borders are a pain and create problems. But, lack of state infrastructure is also a problem. The circulation of a gift in a gift economy can lead to tragic results. Accidents happen. Finding real human contact amidst unstoppable media is rare and fragile. Wanting it may even be a sign of damage.

Globalization is challenging on the human level--people don't understand themselves or one another and make all sorts of unreasonable, self-centered demands that they can't grasp why others refuse to acknowledge and respect.

There was one string of associations that seemed important, but which I can't quite find the right concepts for (which unfortunately betrays the superficiality of my understanding of psychoanalysis)--ideas of the mother and of sex. A deaf Japanese girl with a dead mother seeks sexual contact, desperately. But, she is left resorting to visual display (the 'hairy monster'). Is the trauma of her mother's death written somehow on her body? By removing her underwear, is she demanding that others confront her lack? That they see it? Touch it?

A Moroccan boy watches his sister undress. He also masturbates, but is interrupted before he finishes. And he unintentionally shoots an American tourist. His crime of shooting becomes entangled with his crime of watching his sister, as if seeing sex or adopting a sexual gaze is like adopting the gaze of a shooter or terrorist, as if the controlled stance of one is the same as the other--although it isn't since his sister makes herself the object of his gaze while the tourist doesn't know anything about it. Is this what it is to be a tourist, American, contemporary? To be always already the object of a gaze?

The American tourist is a wounded mother, not just by the gunshot, but by her own loss of a child. The other tourists want to abandon her, leave her in the small Moroccan town. They refuse to acknowledge the wounded mother, that she may die and that this death matters. The American children in Mexico are missing their mother--who is wounded in Morocco. But, they are cared for by a Mexican nanny who has been with them since they were born. Her boss demands that she stay with them and not attend her own son's wedding. She tries to do it all, and encounters a crisis at the border there results in her deportation. She can't have it all; she can't mother the children and her own son and attempting to do so results in her losing her home for 16 years.

The symbolic is the name-of-the-father. It's crisis in one of order, meaning, and authority. But what of the crisis of the mother? Is it the accompanying crisis of contact, of connection?

Hell House

I watched Hell House this evening. It's about a halloween presentation written and performed by members (and friends of members) of an Assembly of God church in Texas. Scenes in the hell house show sin leading to death. They also enact struggles between demons and angels over human souls. After going through the hell house, attendees are asked if they know whether they will go to heaven and hell and given an opportunity to accept Christ.

I was completely struck by the participants' commitment and investment. The amount of volunteer hours was incredible; the volunteers were also extremely dedicated. A great deal of emotion accompanied every part of the process, from the initial planning, to the casting, the rehearsals, and the performances. Much of this emotion was expressed in prayer. Since Assemblies of God are pentecostal, the prayer was often in tongues. But, it also involved music, touching, embracing.

Participants also had a sense of mission--they were actively involved in saving souls. In one scene in the church, the pastor told the congregation that they were sent to infect (I think that was the word, it might have been infiltrate, the metaphor matters but I can't recall it and don't feel like goofing around with the DVD, especially since it is in my son's play station and I'm really awkward with the controller) the world or society. His message, overall, was pretty loving.

Another man who was followed during the course of the film also seemed very loving. Both he and his daughter were actors in Hell House. His wife had left him for another man. He was now raising their four kids, including one son with cerebral palsy and epilepsy, alone. Even though he played a demon tour guide, he also went through the house and was very moved, moved to want to continue to pray after the invitation at the end. His daughter plays the 'abortion girl.' She is shown covered in blood because of taking RU-486.

One of the organizers was properly straight-forward and unapologetic about the role of fear. He didn't deny that hell house used fear to win souls. Instead, he said that fear was part (not the whole) of salvation and faith.

One really great touch--having kids in a kind of hole in the floor, illuminated with red lights, filling with smoke or fog, and covered with plexiglass. The kids press their hands and faces up against the plexiglass like souls trapped in hell's eternal torment.

The film ends with a number of people talking about the imminence of the Rapture, their conviction that we are living in the end times.