the dream of exhaustion

From a project that never got projected:

Exhaustion can be a paradoxical affect. It is at one and the same time physiological and also conceptual, encompassing fatigue, depression, boredom, mania, confusion.  Marina van Zaylen believes that “exhaustion [….] has a curious way of eradicating more complex signs of weariness, one of which being the indeterminate state we call fatigue.” Perhaps that is so. However the adjective ‘curious’ may indicate a wider gyre for exhaustion as it fights–-by collapsing into a syncope—for larger beginnings rather than only individual physiologies and pathologies, although they can both indicate the beginning of resistances).  Exhaustion is about fatigue as well as elation. Anyone who has ever observed small children at play at the end of day can see the register of exhaustion switch to manic energy before collapse and sudden rehabilitative sleep. Once could perhaps even say that the unconscious is more often summoned by the collapse of exhaustion. Depression, worry, failure, violence, fatigue, mania and all the other affective eddies which exhaustion drags in its wake can lead to either a quiescent amor fati or revolution or revelation.

Nevertheless to even concentrate on exhaustion seems like a grinding propaedeutic, a waylaying and perpetual beginning of legitimate topics—which intensifies the feeling of exhaustion for all who might work in such tenebrous and infrathin margins. Various net searches only begin to draw more gloom, not because of the net’s own darkness (does it have any properly speaking?) but because it has none. Or because it is in the process of enclosure of its darkness by light, the wavering line where information becomes noise and vice versa.

                THE SECRET DREAM OF EXHAUSTION

Exhaustion exists mostly in its macerated by-productions, like when we speak of the exhaust of a car, a generator where the real work is a going forward while the exhaust/ion pushes out behind, falling into more decay, formlessness. But perhaps the ‘curious way’ of van Zaylen’s overarching concept of exhaustion, it’s inclusion of all other sites of breakdown, physical and mental, DOES function as the larger dream of the earth, an un-noticed Bataillean excess, a shapeless geochthonic  mass always escaping—and undermining—our most precious productions and predictions. Whether it be our own body’s waste material, or the negentropic outlier of our machinic culture, an uncountable and largely invisible excess, produced by exhaustion and leading to more exhaustion, piles up behind us, under us, all around us, the true aspect of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History being blown backward into the future (perhaps for the diaphanous sempiternal Realm of Angels, production and its exhaust are all the same in their effects/affects/special effects; inasmuch as they exist as bits of etheric desoeuvrement, workless, community-less forms much like exhaust itself –which we  can never own nor WANT to own, it is always our past and our future but never, not now anyway, our NOW. Much like our Coming Selves in fact, perhaps composed of nothing but exhaust and exhaustion, folded back into earth processes. But then perhaps the dream of exhaustion is not simply an emptying out, creating a husk, a shell, a semblance mimicking life/death, work/not, but a supersaturation, reversing the relations where what is valuable is the precipitate from exhaust, the non/thing which is larger than life, than work, than art, a dark matter/energy which can only be sketched in its absence, in its wish to come. Perhaps the dream of exhaust is to be equilibrated with the exhaustion of its production, stranding us again in the dark zero of the angels.)

68 steps

I have been visiting this house off and on for sixty plus years. It seems like a UFO appearing and vanishing, this internallly illuminated community of Cheathams--and an all-consuming one at that--now abducted to the nether world, just bits of engraved granite down the street scattered, nothing but sepia post cards gathered in gray matter three second vignettes flipping up and disintegrating where life size cards flip up in shooting ranges People say why mix all these modes together the theory with the banal chintz: because these are the zones that cohabit me and maybe because I don't have a lot of cute southern stories to tell no Song of the South anymore it's like I never lived here or born here but somehow being continually pushed here, uncertainty and destabilization yes but comfort no the infinite seeming divide here this disintegrating Now leaving a few pearls in the ashes of being closer to the othered, the back end, the end that falls off also into the blankness of infinity or no not even that maybe less or maybe more maybe nothing but the golden shivers of childhood, the Summer Land, the Fort/da of leave-taking and returns, building forts in the middle of the uncanny chaos we are thrown into. dogs whirling in fields of waist high grasses making their own homecoming "look what we got here, a hermaphrodite kid and his confederate yankee daddy!" uncle W. upon entering the white House on the Hill one summer after moving to the City, the summer of love actually):

from perforations 30

The Fort!

Da?

".... Infancy names the insistence, even the exigency of the

fictive or the figural in conscious life (the exigency that gives

the insistence of the primal scene).

[....] "Infancy has an irreducibly 'fabulous' dimension."

Christopher Fynsk

 

"[The infant or child] enters or is entered into, the places where

speech falters and language chokes in the throat of a political

body, where the questions of fair representation is peremptorily

dismissed or simply not addressed."

Avital Ronell

 

In the case of the hut, the child is indeed father to the man....but what of the

mother? Whenever architects write about the hut, it always begins -- and

ends -- with the primitive, that other to the place that we are always subsided

to in western culture.

 

Everything is always seen to take the path from lowest to highest, a time

scheme which allows for the piling of debris behind (or in front of,

depending on whose viewpoint you take) the angel of history.

But as a child growing up in the wilds of Mississippi, there was no past, and

the future was planned within the confines of numerous 'forts', built and then

abandoned. We were like dogs, twisting in the high grass to flatten it, a

holding place, just enough space to rest and peer over the top of the seeing but unseen. Haven't little boys (and girls? Shouldn't there be a maternal /

 but unseen. Haven't little boys (and girls? Shouldn't there be a maternal /fort

function there [

da

] also?)

always built Forts? But then aren't

Fathers always just returning from the War and just so, aren't little boys

always building forts? Isn't the fairy kingdom of the ancient ones in the

hillock always over the next rise? A fortification of the Eternal against the

depredations of the present, hedge against the closing of the porthole,

childhood is itself the gradually eroding fort-against-time, sempiternal now

hollowed out, rotted from the outside in (or is it the other way round? Those

huddled in the fort of the Red Death are sempiternally the last to know).

A childhood fort is not even yet a hut, that most minimal of adult habitat, but

is vaporous, porous to time, even as it attempts to grasp it and balance

evenly between above and below. The fabulousness of the fort or the child's

dwelling is no more than a sketch, sometimes literally chalk on pavement, a

demarcation of inside and outside. Or no more than a confabulation of

cardboard and quilt. (Indeed, it is often a point de capiton

as Jacques Lacan had it, a quilting point, or sedimentation of meanings gathered together and re-eniforced, a place for the sprouting of the fabulous and the mythic. Later, as

the fort morphs into the hut, the Freudian

fort/

da

function is perhaps more

descriptive with the dispersion of meaning that the 'da' of the other, over

there, brings into play: it is no longer a matter of circling the wagons but of

making a mark to allow entry through other thresholds, not a gathering in a

clearing but an

ecstasis, sinking in, uncannily, and not out, sublimely: the

difference between the juvenile fort and the adult hut.)

 

The fort formed a juridical outline of space and action, perhaps the first

'legal' outline that the child can establish outside the home (no wonder it's

called a fort!), the first outside force or strength (the meaning of 'fort) that

the child can muster.

Deep in the piney woods of Mississippi I built

forts, nestled in clumps of privet hedge in an

otherwise featureless plain of perpetual twilight

pine barrens, carpeted by pine needles; or bits of

lumber nailed together almost haphazardly in low

lying limbs above blackberry bogs; or scooped out

of muscadine vine rambles; cornstalks woven

together in the middle of a dry, feverishly hot corn

field and more. Some lasted a day, some weeks or

even months, a very few perches hanging

bedraggled from tree limbs after years, still.

As Giorgio Agamben notes, play transforms structures into events. (It is left

to adults to reverse that process into memorialization.) The childhood play

of de-marking space into forts, huts, and fairy circles enters into an

acceleration of time to the point of a momentary stoppage of history ... or

rather, the formation of a palimpsest of times in the guise of spaces, with

immediate forgettings.

 

Curved round into the beginning, the ghostly carapace of the fort fades into

the structure of to-come, an extemporization of the boundaries and

thresholds yet to be marked.

---

(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no

more, suppose, suppose this: the child - is he seven years old, or eight

perhaps? - standing by his window, drawing the curtain and, through

the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall

of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child's way, his play space,

he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with

clouds, grey light - pallid daylight without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely

black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had

broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore

been lost therein - so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the

vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all

nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable

feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the

child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an

endless flood of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow;

attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live

henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.

Maurice Blanchot/

The

Writing of the Disaster

---

O touseled head standing on the edge of the 'hundred year ocean' eyeing vast

expanses of twilight night stretching overhead and in front, receding to

infinity, steps on royal road fading to unseen inevitable failure...but now,

NOW! Life stretches out like a train speeding to the horizon in a Kansas

wheatfield, a limitless blinding expansion except every expansion needs an

expansion gap, an exception, a marking to set off remaindered

impossibilities: fortification, to enable impossible happiness, destined to

loop around beginning to end, from fort to coffin, both containers of

im/possibilities, delayed, defrayed, forgotten, alpha and omega of

desoeuvrement

, workless in any possible world.

---

Only Children can create a counting rhyme that opens up to

impossibility and only children can sign of it happily.

M. Blanchot / The Step Not Beyond

-----

Oh Fort! The first/last halo we will have, going from skin, to marking on

world-skin, to the halo of the debris of your worklessness pretending to be

useful, to coffin, to earth, world layered round with the bones of the dead,

ivoried interlock waiting for the last round, pretending to see everywhere

and always.

'Hence the 'halo' always indicated, in some way or

another, a change of the nature of time. It signified

the haloed individual person or place, participated

also in a category of 'time' which was different from

the one determining the natural life on earth as the

medieval mind understood it. The halo, it is true, did

not remove its bearer into the

aeternitus Dei which is

without continuity because in all times, past and

future, are present. Yet the halo removed its bearer

too: removed him, scholastically speaking, from

Tempus to aevum

, from Time to semipiternity"

Kantorowitz

, The King's Two Bodies

Oh! Halo of material circling, circling, circling, endless immemorial summer

of childhood, thin hub of light layered over the frozen waste world of

childhood's end in Spielberg's AI

AI

(all you crankheads out there moaning

about the epistemological errancy of this vision of total intelligence: go tell

your mama!) the child plays on, even as thought slows to a stop, protracted

in time's abysmal fort/da):

'Aion

is a

child

at play, playing draughts'

(

Heraclitus’ fragment B 52

: “The age (eternity /

aion

) is

the kingship of a child, playing dice (knucklebones,

draughts)”)

Night Stand

Night Stand

A student of mine commented to me that I seem to read a lot different types of books. Yeah I guess so. It's a habit started a long time ago, one that's hard to break and one that seems to ramify/expand its parameters over the years. One thing leads to another I suppose and the more 'one thing' s you read the more others there are.

1. When I was a kid my mother made me enroll in the the little Town's local library summer reading program: silver, green, blue, and gold stars depending on how many you went through. I can still remember the tiny library in the court house on the square in small-town Mississippi and the prim librarian. But I only remember three books from that whole period. The first one, oddly, was a red covered copy of Das Capital to the left of the door as you first entered (never tried to read it, hell, I would've been around eight then--guess the bright red cover stood out, dunno); the second book was the Joel Chandler Harris' Tales from Uncle Remus -- couldn't understand the dialect in there at all, was like a foreign language to me—which of course was part of my fascination with it; and third book was The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, which my wife found a copy of recently to give me.

The book was written in 1956 and the photo of the author on the back of the dust cover could be a publicity still from 'Leave It To Beaver'. Even in 1956, the book had gone through nineteen printings and the book is still in print so god knows how many kids -- and now adults -- have read this book. And have perhaps had it lodged somehow, somewhere in the cultural unconscious. In 1985 Director Joe Dante made a sort-of version, unintended homage I'm sure, called Explorers (trashed by many critics, and for many of the reasons Colin Bennett below is often critiqued – but that’s another book/post).

The Cameron book involves two young boys making a space ship under the tutelage of one Tycho Bass, a.. 'person' who seems to be a mushroom being and who (which?) succeeds in getting the boys off the earth to explore and warn the mushroom people of the planet Basidium (orbiting invisibly fifty thousand miles above the surface) about a perhaps impending catastrophe. The book now reads like a weird propaedeutic to all of the alien harvests abductive circularities hidden conspiratorially in plain site. At any rate, reading the book fifty years later, of a sudden the world of the fifties opens and yearns pensively further down the temporal field. One doesn't have to be that much of a postmodernist to think that the remainders we have sloughed off can return as revenants to haunt us (extend that thought all the way down the historical chain and you nave plenty of material to think/be haunted by.)

"Perhaps you'll find it in your dreams, David," said Dr. Tropman, smiling down at him, "not for ten or twenty years yet, or maybe even fifty. Might be something to look forward to though." 

"Perhaps you'll find it in your dreams, David." said his mother hopefully.
"But I don't WANT to find it in my dreams," said David impatiently, "That wouldn't do at all. I don't WANT it to be a dream. I want it to be REAL!"

2. One segment of this real/dream deferral/culmination is constituted by the redoubtable Colin Bennett and his new book, An American Demonology: UFO's over the White House. I love Bennett’s mashups between ufology and postmodernism, both it’s philosophical parts and lit’s more lurid pulp aspects. This book follows the first official investigator of unidentified aerial phenomena, Colonel Ruppelt, which he began at the behest of the then nascent USAF … in 1956! You’ll note the publication date of Ms. Cameron's work above. At any rate, Bennett’s stuff is kinda like shoving Queen, 50-cent, Stockhausen, and Foucault together. I also loved his previous books: Looking for Orthon, on the odd Mr. Adamski; and the Politics of the Imagination, on Charles Fort. I started reading much of this 'outlaw' stuff many years ago (like, after 1956??) – stuff like the Donald Keyhoe book on flying saucers, Morning of the Magicians, and the ton of stuff still coming out – Bennett’s books are really the first to put the material into some perspective for me. (by which of course I mean that it accords to 'conclusions' I had already reached but had not articulated to myself. Warning: those who find they have an epistemological stick up the butt will find it shoved ever more firmly into place. (I’ve also followed Mr. Bennett's post on his web site and he’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners fighter Unfortunately he is now dead. .

From An American Demonology:

"The human mind is not a machine. It was not designed for accuracy, stability, rationality, or mechanical logic of any kind. It was built to manufacture countless transcendental options, whose 'being' and 'reality' varies along a scale from solid to vaporous. We navigate mentally by hoaxing ourselves, by creative hallucinations; we wind these things up like toys and watch them click and wheeze their faltering way to east of the sun and west of the moon. When we look into ourselves, we see that we are made up of impostures numberless, like an Eiffel Tower made of watch and clock parts."

3. Believe it or not, Mr. Bennett's work dovetails fairly neatly with W.J.T. Mitchell’s new book, What Do Pictures Want?, on contemporary art and culture. Mr. Mitchell’ is the editor of the journal Critical Enquiry, and his previous book was The Last Dinosaur, a highly entertaining and fascinating book on the culture history of the dinosaur. His thesis in this new book (chapters consisting of articles published in various places, not a problem here because they all work pretty much together), is that we have created a society of autonomous imagery. (One could perhaps say that both ways: the autonomous images have a ‘society’ of rules and interactive possibilities, as well as the society that creates and maintains them.) As he says early on, the idea that images have a social or psychological power about them is a cliché of contemporary visual culture (the return of the repressed of 'idolotry, fetishism, totemism') and that "There is no difficulty in demonstrating that the idea of the personhood of pictures (or, at a minimum, their animism) is just as alive in the modern world as it was in traditional societies. The difficulty is in knowing what to say next [....] Is is our task as cultural critics to demystify these images, to smash the modern idols, to expose the fetishes that enslave people? Is it to discriminate between true and false, healthy and sick, pur and impure, good and evil images? Are images the terrain on which political struggle should be waged, the site on which a new ethics is to be articulated?"

Well, yes and no, thinks Mitchell, and this next part is very pertinent to the views of Bennett I’ve come to see: "Images are certainly not powerless, but they are a lot weaker than we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what pictures DO to what they WANT, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak. If the power of images is like the power of the weak, that may be why their desire is correspondingly strong, to make up for their actual impotence. We as critics may want pictures to be stronger than they actually are in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them."

(Just as extended note here: I guess I find the Cameron and the Bennett book and the Mitchell book – in their different registers -- interesting because they cover a sort of burgeoning – although not really because it’s heritage is in phenomenology --philosophical movement sort of exemplified most recently by Graham Harman in his first book Tool-Being and unfolding further in his newest one (Guerilla Metaphysics and the Phenomenology of the Carpentry of Things) where he tries to talk about 'objects' and the "reality of entities as genuine forces to reckon with in the world, as real players exerting influence outside themselves even while hiding behind their exposed surfaces."
I realize that this seems hopelessly high-academic esoteric but it seems to be very pertinent to whatever cultural/historical/political/ethical turns that are rapidly approaching us courtesy of our machines and the desiring mechanisms of our images. It is no less about the demise of a certain sort of culture, the old humanist culture that Foucault went on about in that amazing book, The Order of Things, wherein resided the much quoted and just as much debated image at the end of the book of the 'invention of man' and this man(kind) as a figure inscribed on the sand on the edge of the ocean, soon to be washed away. These ideas are just as controversial now as they ever have been, even as we begin to live them.)

At any rate, to finish up an already lengthy—though not nearly long ENOUGH really -- review, a couple of pertinent quotes from Mitchell: "The epithet for our times, then, is not the modernist saying, ‘things fall apart,’ but an even more ominous slogan" ‘things come alive.'"

And a final one:
"We live in a time that is best described as a limbo of continually deferred expectations and anxieties. Everything is about to happen, or perhaps it has already happened without our noticing it."