boston, the limits of language, and the unmaking of the world

"Pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language."

- Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862

“Runners were coming in and saw unspeakable horror."

Boston is a tear in experience. Boston is a breach in narrative. Boston is a rupture in the imagination. To sift testimonials from last week's Boston Marathon Bombing (BMB) is to be assaulted with the unspoken, or, to be more specific, with subjects attempting to communicate an experience of incommunicable horror. (Macabre collections of testimonials are available at NPR, The New York Times, and The Boston Herald.) Boston is a place, a living city and community, located in time. But Boston is also a signifier. There is, mapped unto the real Boston of streets and waterways, schools and homes, an imaginary Boston, a Boston of the mind, now immersed in blood and mediated by violence. The BMB rips the temporal and imaginary fabric of the city and of the nation. Violence ruptures bodies; violence ruptures consciousnesses; violence ruptures syntax. To speak about Boston is to speak around Boston -- the unspeakable horror is a gash through which we cannot immediately speak.

gay is the new black: on the discursive limits of marriage equality

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

- President Obama, "Second Inaugural," 21 January 2013

"The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and 'psychic hermaphroditism' made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of 'perversity'; but it also made possible the formation of a 'reverse' discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified."

- Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality, 1976

To pronounce "gay" as the "new black" is a highly regressive move, especially in light of the assumed progressive impulse the equation implies. The discursive elision of Stonewall and Selma is inherently problematic and, more insidiously, limiting to both the black and queer freedom movements (as well as the incredibly complex feminist movement reified in "Seneca"). Of course, President Obama has always attempted to situate himself rhetorically at an imagined intersection between the state apparatus and the struggle for human rights, and even to locate his own ascension somewhere within this assumed and constructed narrative arc. (Although, in his present position, such rhetorical posturing is untenable.) To weave together the movements assumed to be reified in the totem of Selma and Stonewall is problematic in at least three principal ways. And, more importantly, this equation, and what it suggests about rhetorical and political claims of queer rights advocates, especially when coalesced into the popular, legal, and judicial move for marriage equality rights, advocates a pernicious sublimation of sexuality and identity into a state superstructure. The contemporary focus on legal equality has been at the expense of a comprehensive rhetoric of human rights and true equality of identity, and to reduce the ongoing and urgent struggle for queer rights into a juridical debate about marriage and states' rights ultimately serves to silence the voices of the oppressed and co-opt and absorb potential threats to the bourgeois aegis, by which I mean the ideological and aesthetic construction of the idea and image of the bourgeoisie under late-capital. [I have most directly discussed this conception of the "bourgeois aegis" in my essay, "law and order and bourgeois guilt."] (I should also clarify that I fully support the expansion of marriage rights to all who should seek them -- and am not opposed to a more radical questioning of to whom marriage rights are extended -- but acknowledge that the argument for marriage equality, as it is currently imagined and understood, is a fundamentally conservative argument.)

some say the earth was feverous and did shake: climate change and macbeth

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

the multitudinous seas incarnadine,

making the green one red."

- Macbeth, Macbeth, II.ii.56-60

Macbeth is an anguished portrait of alienation and guilt; Macbeth ultimately dramatizes human betrayal of self, community, and the earth, and exposes the violent will to power at the center of human subjectivities. Macbeth's betrayal of Duncan parallels the human betrayal of the natural world, and Macbeth's tyranny over Scotland further parallels the violent will to reign over and above the earth. Part of Macbeth's trangression is his refusal to acknowledge any limits to his sovereignty, real or imagined, and, as such, Macbeth suffers from the same imagined and solipsistic grandiosity as capitalism itself. The only limit to his ambition, according to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, is his imagination and will. But, as Shakespeare dramatizes here, as in The Tempest and King Lear, any putative human ontology that does not take into account the environment is, by sin of form and epistemology, monstrously limited and unimaginative. The unceasing flow of the blood of the slaughtered and betrayed, the blood of the wretched and the blood of the earth itself, continues to flow through the stained hands of the guilty. Macbeth is consumed by the forest; Macbeth is a tragedy of climate change.

tarantino's gold watch: the postmodern condition, pulp fiction, & messianic time

"This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather during the first world war. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee, made by the first company to ever make wrist watches. Up until then, people just carried pocket watches. It was bought by Private Doughboy Ryan Coolidge the day he set sail for Paris. This was your great-grandfather's war watch, and he wore it every day he was in the war. Then when he had done his duty, he went home to your great-grandmother, took the watch off and put it in an old coffee can. And in that can it stayed 'til your granddad Dane Coolidge was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Germans once again. This time they called it World War Two. Your great-grandfather gave this watch to your granddad for good luck. Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as good as his old man's. Dane was a Marine and he was killed along with all the other Marines at the battle of Wake Island. Your granddad was facing death, and he knew it. None of those boys had any illusions about ever leaving that island alive. So three days before the Japanese took the island, your granddad asked a gunner on an Air Force transport named Winocki, a man he had never met before in his life, to deliver to his infant son, who he had never seen in the flesh, his gold watch. Three days later, your granddad was dead. But Winocki kept his word. After the war was over, he paid a visit to your grandmother, delivering to your infant father, his Dad's gold watch. This watch. This watch was on your Daddy's wrist when he was shot down over Hanoi. He was captured and put in a Vietnamese prison camp. He knew if the gooks ever saw the watch that it'd be confiscated; taken away. The way your Dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes were gonna put their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. And then he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you."

- Captain Koons, Pulp Fiction, 1994 [watch the video here]

"A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal image' of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history."

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History: XVI, 1940

Now does not seem an auspicious time to discuss Tarantino's 1994 opus Pulp Fiction, but the unstable accumulation of historical time and the prodigious palimpsest of his ouvre offer certain retrospective insight into Tarantino's definitive treatment of pre-millennial postmodernism. Tarantino's aesthetic and theoretical interests are dense and varied, and imbue his pieces with a paradoxical combination of cinematic opacity and a multivalent fragmentation. Tarantino presents a distinctive incoherence and tension to the viewer. His films are deeply unsettled, and deeply unsettling. And the subject by which Tarantino is most viscerally unsettled, for all of his pop-cultural bailiwicks, is history. And, in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino's concern for history manifests as a passionate critique of the postmodern as he shatters the simulacrum of American history and culture, exploding the 'empty, homogenous time' of the postmodern present through the critical narrative of messianic time.

eye tiresias

"And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead."

- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

America, designated by Tocqueville as an 'Empire of the Mind,' has metamorphasized into an Empire of the (Evil) Eye. The optics of imperialism, facilitated through the ruthless panoptics of the drone, see and realize death. As the carrion or vulture circles above the site of death, the drone circles above a site of future death premeditated and delivers violence foretold. I wrote in my previous treatment of drones, 'Predator Ontologies,' that a schematic shift wrought by the drone is the abstraction of death, where the digital and simulated mapping of empire takes imaginative precedent over the physical mapping -- the drone flies in a simulated world, but traffics in real death. American imperialism is one partially constructed through optics, through the mechanical eye of the drone. Imperial optics find their dialectical counterpart in blindness; and the American drone program lies behind a veil, behind which it sees, judges, and enacts violence on the world. The drone lies behind a veil inscrutable; the drone and the human occupy different modes of existence, which precedes and determines essence. The drone is a teleological instrument that asserts the supremacy of Empire through the mechanical eye, and the human is blind in comparison. The panoptic bears an inverse relationship with truth. But the dichotomy between seeing and blindness also carries within in the weight of prophecy, and the prophetic voice, the voice of Tiresias, is amplified in the oppressed. The supernatural power of the oppressor is one of panoptics; the blind shall inherit the earth. 

Abdullah Fadiq discovers his two cousins incinerated by an American drone strike in Yemen. Only their eyes remain to haunt the present. "We found eyes, but there were no faces left." In these eyes burns a prophetic power; in these eyes burns the transformative power of judgement foretold. These eyes carry dialectical sight. These are the eyes of Tiresias.

a dream deferred

"Deep in my heart, I do believe
that we shall overcome someday"

The King remembered is too often a King forgotten. And, as we celebrate the second inauguration of America's first black president, on the day consecrated for the living memory of the slain King and in the city and nation that has since cast King in stone, we must reject any facile connection between Martin King and President Obama. Obama's second inauguration on Martin Luther King Day offers a window to discuss the ahistorical reification of King in the Age of Obama. President Obama is symbolic of a flattening of King's dream; his Presidency a bargain -- a pragmatic sublimation of the radical black tradition into the White House. As King argued in 'Beyond Vietnam,' his vitriolic 1967 speech against President Johnson, against Vietnam, against American injustices, and against the corrupted matrix of American hegemony -- 'a time comes when silence is betrayal.' So too must the American left resurrect the memory of the fallen King, the true and dangerous memory of the slain prophet, the living memory of counter-hegemonic imagination and mobilization, and refuse to be satisfied by the insufficient balm of pragmatism and the tainted wells of compromise. As King argued in the same speech, America's soul has been poisoned by the 'giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.' Only through resurrecting the insurrectionist and idealistic impulse of King can the soul of America find redemption.

predator ontologies

"And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed."

- Revelation 13: 11-15

"Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself."

- Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944

Predator's uncanny moment of mimetic laughter at the violent denouement of 1987's military-industrial Predator simultaneously reveals the insidious dialectic between organic and technological agents of terror as well as exposes the dubious contours of humanity, colonized by the machine. Kevin Peter Hall's cyborgian and mechanistic laughter, ironically mimicking Schwarzenegger, mocks the hopelessness of the human enterprise and inversely reflects the human through violent negation. Schwarzenegger, hearing his own laughter in mockery, questions his own determinacy. For Predator, laughter is an aggressive intrusion, mimicking the human through that which distinguishes the human. This messy film, patrolling the undersides of imperialist ideologies, critiques the doomed telos of technology, where the encroachments upon the human by the predatory technological threaten human ontologies. And while Predator most directly offers a critique of United States imperialism through the Monroe Doctrine and Iran-Contra, the film offers itself more subtly to an anticipatory critique of United States imperialism in the age of Predator drone warfare. Predator exposes the uncertain definition of the human in an era of violent machines and cyborgs, and offers a critique against the literal war machines of United States imperialism. Predator is a reification of anxiety and indeterminacy in the Empire and in the individual. Predator reigns, an agent of invisible terror, in the jungle and, to quote Baudrillard, in the 'desert of the real.'