when the static thickens (iv).

4 | indefinite bleeding, cruel optimism [ repetition ]

 

Fell for Silo. 2010 

“Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.”¹

 

By that line alone, he knows many female complainers. Many male ones too, himself included. No matter how different they are, the complainers’ strangely familiar stories form an “intimate public” of the perennially disappointed yet persistently, insistently hopeful. In the female complaint, the “unfinished business of sentimentality” installs a version of cruel optimism that rebinds disappointed lovers to fantasies of a better tomorrow despite their continued unworkability. Believing that “’tomorrow is another day’ in which fantasies of the good life can be lived,” subjects stick out the bitter present for a sweeter future;² the female complaint tastes of dark chocolate. In the female complaint, love “is a binding relation to time, not a steady state of object desire,” that normatively recalibrates the performances and postures of love in an extension of the problematic present.³ Love and commitment to it is a projection and a project of the long-run—a relation to a person, an image, a fantasy, a cluster of desires, and time.⁴

 

Their break-up process takes nearly a week, strung along an oscillating rhythm of extremes: accusations and apologies, frustration and forgiveness, coldness and cruelty, a sense of tenderness and tragedy. Lots and lots of second-thoughts. They’d gone through this before, but this time they decide ending it all is for the better. But although something like understanding and acceptance floats amidst disbelief and despair, an unshakable deposit of cruel optimism whispers that things might someday turn out well for them after all. Despite knowing better, they sense a smidgeon of hope for brighter days dimly glimmering in their heavy hearts. An entire, shattered world compressed into a speck of a spark so charged with cruel optimism.

 

And yet. Her management of intimacy is a rigid zoning practice that requires the dispelling of any atmosphere of ambiguity. So she is quick to remove any material memory of them—tearing from her wall a quilt of his photographs, boxing up his gifts to her, returning his belongings via priority mail. For relationship-things aren’t a matter of consumption; without being used, now or later, even just having them around may trigger second-guesses and second-chances. When proximity equals presence, even when tucked away in the back of the closet; sheer thereness, but only sort of.⁵

 

He too is aware that things magnetize atmospheres and keep people—here, the heartbroken—in place. But he also knows that detachment from ordinary atmospheres requires something more or something else than the dispensation of things: it isn’t merely a matter of decided posture and attitudinal protocol.⁶ After all, love worlds; it colors encounters with the unexpected, uninvited, and uninvolved long after its official commitments have dissolved. When a walk in an unexplored, charming neighborhood ignites a sensation delivering you to strangely familiar worlds that will no longer ever be…

 

It’s not that the walk that is this particular haecceitic immersion—this cool breeze, these lush trees, this felt stillness, this numb heart, this warm and shady day, this…—or anything like it had been experienced or even imagined beforehand. Nor is it that the heart’s lasting desires are so strong that they steamroll ordinary things into a dead earth unable to world otherwise. Things don’t simply stir lodged feelings; nor do they reduplicate and supplement an unchanged atmosphere of love. Rather, they repeat ordinary atmospheres with a difference, slight though it may seem.⁷ The dark precursor of love needs no preexisting channel of the same to attract relationship-things into a lingering atmosphere that feels familiar despite its difference. Ordinary things can become relationship-things even if they had no role in or resemblance to the relationship when and as it took place, even if they are encountered well after the relationship which they recall has ended. All it takes is a walk filled with ordinary things for the self-fashioned stitches of moving-on to tear. Time and time again.

 

Love is the gift that keeps on taking, even long after its invested relationships are over, because it seeps into foreign territories and is resuscitated by strange, ordinary things. Love bleeds, indefinitely. When things lock you in place rather than nudge you on.

 

You hit an impasse. Or it hits you. Again and again.

—–

notes.

1   Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1. The female complaint is, of course, a much more elaborate notion explicated by Berlant as the adhesive for a women’s intimate public emergent in the US during the 1830s and lasting through the present.

2   Ibid., 2.

3   Ibid., 14.

4   Berlant writes that “love is a formal promise and an aspiration to try and try again to intend to be faithful to an enduring project of projection, mirroring, and repetition” (ibid.). Her frame of reference is Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although I cannot dismiss this framework due to its unfamiliarity, my inclination toward love concerns its affective atmospheres and what binds and rebinds people to it despite the ongoing failures of its fantasies and images. As will be clear, I think that affective atmospheres of love involve more than human subjects and their relations with objects—things energize love and continued commitments to it.

5   The term “sheer thereness” is a provisional one deployed by Bennett to apprehend the “strange attraction” that magnetizes hoard-things (composed of both hoarders and hoarded objects) in a relation that fits the bill of neither utility (consumers) nor aesthetic pleasure (collectors) (“Powers of the Hoard”). Because they aren’t accumulated by a strange attraction that escapes all explanation, relationship-things don’t assert the force of a sheer thereness even if their presence does ignite certain effects. Rather than senselessly hoarded as objects, relationship-things enfold us in a familiar atmosphere of sense, affect, and memory by their presence. Relationship-things are different from objects of consumption and collection partly because they don’t lend themselves so easily to being pigeonholed into a particular categorical objecthood; they are neither used like consumer goods nor sensuously experienced like aesthetic objects, at least not just. The thingliness of relationship-things thus lies apart from the sheer thereness of hoard-things and the objecthood of consumer goods and aesthetic objects; it is less relational, less about the subject-object universe, and more atmospheric.

6   Judith Butler expresses similar sentiments when describing the experience of mourning, to which break-up experiences are akin. Butler speculates that mourning entails resignation to the inevitable transformation entailed by loss. She notes that “one is hit by waves,… one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing. Something takes hold of you” (Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence [London: Verso, 2004], 21; emphasis mine). I emphasize the “something” of which Butler writes because I find her remarks apropos of break-ups and the force of things therein whereby one cannot consummate by simple will the decision to move on. The implication I discern is that things don’t only thwart projects of post-break-up recovery; they also stretch out the time of mourning and break-ups before eventually enabling moving on.

Butler’s notion of that “something”, however, is too informed by the human to be accepted without expansion. Following Freud, Butler suggests that mourning involves confronting an enigmatic something “hiding in the loss” of another that functioned as the adhesive sticking you two together (ibid., 22). I am unsure whether that “something” refers to actual things or if it functions solely as an explanatory placeholder. In any case, things are only about people in this framework of mourning so wrapped around the telling question that is important for Butler: “Who ‘am’ I, without you?” (ibid.). I suggest, rather, that things aren’t the sugar and spice topping the couple-form nor the decorative lining of other intimate aggregates. Instead, they sweep up (any number of) people into atmospheres of intimacy that deposit congealed aggregates: couples, threesomes, families, publics, nation-states, transnational organizations—whatever. In other words, my criticism of Butler’s account of loss and mourning is that it translates things into mere objects that merely supplement intersubjective scenes of humans rather than attending to things as things, as things generating atmospheres of intimacy.

7   Deleuze’s comments on the “apparent paradox of festivals” are apropos of this point on the repetition with a difference of ordinary atmospheres: “[Festivals] repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power” (Difference and Repetition, 1). There are indeed festivals borne of love, ones that are at times quite cruel.

ordinary affects (viii).

returning — drifting into the ordinary all over again. effortless, like a tiny leaf gliding across a calm pond.

strangely familiar.

perhaps a few changes have marked the passage of time. a new collage of artwork adorning a wall. a few new clocks. white frost spray-painted along the storefront windows to reflect the current holiday season. a barista in training. and yet, none of these details distract attention for long, for even the unfamiliar has a friendly way of folding into the familiar. almost unnoticeably. unrecognizable faces compose and color the ordinary just as recognizable faces would. without the unfamiliar, the ordinary would grow stale, boring. and strangely, for the time of the ordinary would be no-time. the rhythms of the ordinary oscillate by microscopic readjustments and retunings leaving little discardable traces. insignificant, dull, not noteworthy. a light hum, white noise.

a moment to gather one’s scattered senses: recalibration of a modulatory body, reliable as it is malleable. perhaps an inflow of memories clustering about the taste and texture of this coffee, this playlist of music, this angle of shadows stretching across the floor by the sunlight of this afternoon. the present’s smooth melting and melding with the past. sometimes too smooth, too warm, without a hot thought to thaw this block of frozen time. the body as a collection of capacities; then, a particular configuration resuscitated and reawakened in an instant dissolving the passage and gap of time between then and now. evental actualization lapsing without a care. corporeal shift shy of an audience. coasting from one composition of comportments into another across seemingly seamless scenes of ordinariness. difference, perhaps noticeable, almost certainly negligible, though it be a leap across a continent and an ocean. the body’s slick slide.

where even memory takes effort, maybe. a labor to restore time where it hides its telling face. for the time of the ordinary is more episodic than evental with a few hiccups and laughs scattered about just to keep things going. a joke that’s lost its freshness but one that never gets old. humming the chorus, singing a few first words. not knowing what’ll happen next but not noting the next either. to unconsciously hit ‘pause’ and ‘play’ for a bathroom break that easily evaporates without disruption: unregistered interruption.

ordinary life: the accumulation of disparate timelines between which one nonconsciously and fluently crosses almost without a care.

ordinary affects (ii).

downpours and drizzles.

boarding the bus to immediately find the familiar face of a driver i’ve known for over a decade. a few persons sit scattered throughout, so i move to the back of the cabin where the back of my head may go unseen.

we stop at the end of the line for a short break. a break – a pause, a relief rife with stillness (as far as the eye can detect, anyway). the quiet of a valley, dim and gray on this overcast day, graced by a light breeze. the bus driver takes a seat two down from an elderly woman and openly ponders whether the yogurt he purchased earlier this morning is still good. he sniffs it. tastes it. then takes larger scoops in between words exchanged with the woman and me. he speaks local and the woman does too with an accent carrying hints of japanese inflections. all this talk summons the pidgin that speaks through me whenever the time is right, when people speak likewise. the formation of an implicit community you enter into a bit unwilled. incipient tendencies of speech lured by some unspoken ‘we’.

we talk about the weather. apparently, the early morning had been ‘nicer’ (some people care not for rain). the bus driver wonders whether it’s raining where his friends are camping on the other side of the mountain range which is the other side of the island. his friends go every kamehameha day weekend. they pile their trucks, impressively large, with all the accoutrements needed to brave the calm wilderness. they even rent a port-a-potty (mainly for the women and their dignity, the drivers informs us). these people know what to do to pass the time, to savor the break.

another woman on the bus, who stands while the drivers drives and furnishes him with much conversation, eats a light pasta in silence.

a passenger stands outside. he wears a faded hoodie once colored by dark hues of purple and gray. the bus driver and elderly woman talk about him. he apparently rides the bus for hours, a looping route that goes nowhere. he’s stopped searching for a job, deflated after his layoff as a custodian and the initial hunt thereafter procured nothing. so he rides.

now, he stands with his back turns to the bus, facing the peaceful movements of the valley before him while letting out a few clouds of cigarette smoke. the bus driver and woman say that the man just isn’t trying hard enough and that jobs are out there. he just has to keep looking. a break recalibrated by the hard terms of hard work. this isn’t funemployment for such is an option available only to those with money and not just smoke to blow. so he rides and rides on a constant loop. he seems relaxed, like exhaling a protracted sigh that no one knows if and when it will end.

but one must breathe to live.

my ipod has been turned off.

the sand on the other side is very fine and soft.

the man outside steps in, sits down, and leans his heads against the window. the driver looks at his watch and returns to his seat. he starts the bus with that jarring rumble of a growling engine roused too early from its slumber. i place my earphones in my ears.

we go.

ordinary affects (i).

a cafe populated by characters without a story to tell them all.

but perhaps they are loosely gathered under some rubric of the ‘studious’. laptops, notebooks, textbooks, books through the roof clutter tabletops more than the coffee cups they’re here to support (but so goes the glazers coffee culture and hospitality of sam). but don’t be fooled! their time here is pregnant with procrastination and pause, little undeserved breaks from yet more breaks; a catatonic stare bleeds into prolonged spacing out, conversation with similarly distracted persons (what’re friends for?), a flurry of websites registering as a thick blur that rarely comes into focus. one could easily catalogue faces of distraction: some serious, some blank, most dejected. there is no such thing as a neutral expression.

some people come for dialogue untethered to text and procrastination. rare cameos, but often enough to keep this place afloat despite the austerity of so many soliloquys of silence. the soundtrack, of course, dispels some of the graveness drowning the studious in an atmosphere of academic despair. but the oft-uplifting tunes, making the walls and mugs beat, pass not through the seal of earphones. neither do those voices always saturated with more cheer than could remain after the black holes of books and computers absorb the vibrancy quivering outside the still room. but just yesterday, three friends sitting around a circular table chatted in that dialogue so rare in these parts: a smooth flow across topics as varied as politics and work, gossip and video games. a stream of spoken anythings circulating life throughout the overcaffeinated body.

the heart of the room rests not in what characterizes it.

rhythm may be the repetition of the ordinary but it is essentially punctuated by the uneventful aberrations counting along with four fingers and a thumb that is neither sore nor sorely sticking out. it’s as simple as a chance encounter with an old acquaintance or the light feeling of familiarity settling as the certainty of a recognized image. it could be catching a glimpse of a look of intrigue or awe, a soft giggle just gracing your ear. or the many subconscious apprehensions and calculations of weight, intent, emotion, and fashion in the audible and felt vibrations of footsteps along a hardwood floor.  it’s the request for disposable cups to house the coffee in a french press because your girlfriend’s illness takes you out the door sooner than anticipated.

these little bumps and thumps, noticed or not, push mood and mind without propulsion; not much punctuates this thick atmosphere of the studious, but nothing needs to either. for forces of all sorts are aswarm, bathing us in light warmth, refreshing us by its spring of grins and giggles, or slowly tugging us as an undertow in an ocean of overwhelming exhaustion. entire worlds open and close, be they as large as love or small as a faint and fading scent. the irregular taps and thuds of objects of all stripes, utterly banal but also singularly significant. sensitivity to these microevents would attune us to a clamor of sounds, but we prefer the comforting buzz of episodes and reruns even if the wear of the ordinary simply and strangely pens intimate characters performing the poorly written script that gets us through the day by getting us nowhere.

tales of cruel optimism (iii).

The Aesthetics of Town-Hall Sovereignty and the Pain of Hope-Fear

(Doug Mills, The New York Times)

From The New York Times:

To Promote Health Care Plan, Obama Talks About His Own Grandmother
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — As President Obama wages his public relations offensive to sell Americans on the need for overhauling health care, he is using a familiar tactic: trying to make the political personal by putting a human face on a complicated and sometimes abstract debate.

At a town-hall-style meeting in a high school gymnasium here on Saturday, Mr. Obama was introduced by Nathan Wilkes, whose family nearly lost their health coverage after costs to care for his 6-year-old son, Thomas, who has severe hemophilia, approached the $1 million lifetime policy cap.

On Friday, in Belgrade, Mont., Mr. Obama was introduced by Katie Gibson, who was dropped by her insurer after she received a cancer diagnosis. On Tuesday, in Portsmouth, N.H., Lori Hitchcock introduced the president; she cannot find insurance, she said, because she has a pre-existing condition.

“If you think that can’t happen to you or your family, think again,” Mr. Obama said here Saturday, adding, “This is part of the larger story, of folks with insurance paying more and more out of pocket.”

Mr. Obama used each of these families to make the case that, if his proposed overhaul goes through, insurers will be barred from imposing lifetime caps, dropping patients and refusing care for pre-existing conditions. On Saturday, he added a personal story of his own, citing the death of his grandmother to push back against unsubstantiated claims that he wants to establish government “death panels” that would deny care to elderly patients.

Actually, the above article’s title is an inappropriate incarnation of the originary version – “To Promote Health Care Plan, Obama Makes It Personal.”  The revisionary rhetoric translates a theoretically acute insight for a simple narrative observation aiming to cleanse an already-dirty debate of any further messy complexities; put simply, simply highlighting Obama’s mentioning of Grandma allows a personal story to upstage the personal.

But the personal seems so integral to the integration of the sovereign-subject with sovereign subjects in this episode of liberalist dramaturgy; it deserves more attention.  Immersed amongst his fellow, if ordinary, Americans, Obama speaks a speech from the crowd, to the crowd, and in so doing, becomes subtly sublimated with that anonymous crowd through revelations of the personal.  The town-hall aesthetic, then, affords a sovereignty alternative to that procured through misrepresentative misreadings of Agamben; against the location of sovereignty within locutions of the “decision,” we view here what William E. Connolly terms the “ethos” of sovereignty.  The clamour of glamourous lauds and applause, the gasps escaping faces gaping from health care horror stories, and so on, along with all their invigorating affective energies, mark the rhythms of a sovereignty channeled through and far beyond the sovereign.  Indeed, it is in deeds, corporeal and sensorial, that sovereignty may be found – here, afloat amongst the shallows of the no-longer-private personal.

Yet this sovereignty rides a personal that is not any less abstract because it has acquired a “human face.”  That human face is one contorted in the sensational sensation of pain, an irreducibly singular experience that is, as Elaine Scarry writes, “language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject” (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, p. 35).  But in light of this evisceration, we often do translate the experience of pain into language, developing a new “source” of the self.  So when one testifies to their pain, we may not understand their pain even as we indisputably recognize it as “pain.”  Davide Panagia gifts a word for this framework of the conventional communicable: “narratocracy.”  Under the town-hall scene’s mandate to narrate one’s painful relation to the health care scare story, the personal, it seems, becomes the impersonal, rendered legible and legitimate by its presumed proximity to sensations of pain and emotions of loss.  This public of strangers is strangely intimate under qualifications qualified by Lauren Berlant: “It flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x” (The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, p. viii).  In short, public intimacy and the sovereignty it properly props up emerge insofar as the purely personal recedes like a sunset beyond the horizon of normative meaning-making.

Yet this impersonal personal of pain seems to have powerful political effects insofar as the political itself evaporates (from view).  “To promote health care plan, Obama makes it personal.”  The personal is not the political (a cliched error), nor is the personal made the political.  Rather, the personal purges the political altogether.  As Obama argues, “In the end, this isn’t about politics.  This is about people’s lives and livelihoods.  This is about people’s businesses.  This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we made the changes we needed, and gave our children a better life.”  Life, living, capitalism, futurity, and the child provocatively provoke the vacuous evacuation of the political under the ideology of the pained person.  Instead of by conflicting conceptual commitments and disjunctive dispositions, divides are drawn, as Obama notes, along hope and fear.  But his rhetoric – that “we are held hostage at any given moment by health insurance companies that deny coverage, or drop coverage, or charge fees that people can’t afford at a time when they desperately need care,” that “what is truly scary – what is truly risky – is if we do nothing” – this rhetoric appears to have the divine effect of liquefying hope and fear in a solvent state of indistinction.  “There but for the grace of God go I” indeed.  Zizek aptly apprehends this affective dimension of “postpolitical” politics: “With the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity” (Violence, p. 40).  Elucidating the fact that all of us are bare, precarious life with respect to health care in the unhealthy status quo, hope-fear becomes the affective rallying point – ethos – for postpolitical (biopolitical) sovereignty.

Perhaps hope-fear, as far as the impersonal personal of pain is concerned, is a crucial tenet of cruel optimism.  For whilst we anticipate a better tomorrow, one in which a happy ending is brought to our health care system woes through the audacious efforts of an ethos of sovereignty affectively charged by the experience of pain, what attritional conditions become solidified today?  Wendy Brown has detailed the dangers of “wounded attachments” and their opening and reopening within the circuits of a Nietzschean ressentiment vitalizing an endless search for a blamable subject upon which the suffering may exact revenge; subjectivity emerges as an “I,” an “I” that has been wronged.  Ontotemporality here is episodic, centering about the publication of traumatic events at the cost of uncovering the seamlessness of “structural subordination” that, as Berlant writes, “is not a surprise to the subjects who experience it… [because] the pain of subordination is ordinary life” (“The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics”).  We become impersonal persons of hope-fear, “subjects of true feeling,” I’s that have been wronged instead of wrong-I’s, subjects suffering a temporally rather than structurally inflected modality of suffering.   Under this mode of biopolitical production attuned to the rhythms of the individual rather than those relays of power through which the individual emerges, it matters little which “I” we are (I-as-I, I-as-worker, I-as-mother) and when because societies of control operate via modal modulations.  The point is a commitment to the “I,” one that, as explored previously, buries those structural striations around which our subjectivity’s roots remain affectively attached and for which the contagion of hope-fear in the town-hall aesthetic of sovereignty infects our intimate public with yet another strain of cruel optimism.

Refrain: “A change of heart, a sensorial shift, intersubjectivity, or transference with a promising object cannot generate on its own the better good life… Shifts in affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world” (Berlant, “Cruel Optimism”).