Irony and Ideology in Les Freres' Hell House

For the month of October, a friend of mine will spend his evenings playing a school shooter in Les Freres Courboisier‘s Hell House, – a meticulous recreation of the evangelical’s proptainment take on the traditional neighborhood Haunted House.

Replacing peeled grapes with Gay AIDS victims, and rubber masks with a cheerleader’s aborted fetus – Les Freres’ aim to turn St. Ann’s Warehouse into new kind of Halloween treat – an instance of pitch- perfect ideological voyeurism – complete with entrance literature and Christian Rock after party.

Hell House,, Les Freres’ website informs us, dates back to the 1970’s when Jerry Falwell and his minions set up the first such place illustrating what awaited sinners and secular humanists in general. Apparently staged for the first time in New York City, Les Freres’ asserts that Pastor Keenan Roberts’ text will be performed, (produced, realized) in its entirety, with no winking or nudging to let us know where they stand. In fact, the Pastor himself stopped by the other day for a preview and pronounced it to be, quote, ‘good preachin’;’ throw in an a NYU student protest, and the production becomes one of the most fully realized found-object installations in recent memory.

All of which begins to beg the question of the place of negativity in a performance like Hell House. Turning to Les Freres’ mission statement, we find them identifying as “A theater that is continually conscious of the apparatus, but which simultaneously reaches beyond mere ironic deconstruction… towards a more sophisticated form of positive analysis…” I find the degradation of mere-ness interesting in this context. Certainly there are more didactic and simplistic methodologies than ironic deconstruction – however we wish to approach the terms – many of them present in Hell House itself – before, that is, it was staged in Brooklyn by a gaggle of high-gloss post-pranksters. Indeed, in speaking of the apparatus it is too simple to assert that had the Moral Majority (or some such nasty) produced House, it would be receiving a decidedly different reception. Instead, one must take into account not only Les Freres’ dexterous display of passwords but also the community of Brooklyn itself.

Brooklyn, as everybody knows, has found itself home to a rather virile and consolidated renaissance of the hip. (One could wonder at the justice of this characterization, repeated, as it is, ad nauesem and often in the place of a more sustained analysis or consideration of borough-wide happenings, but no matter) A quick walk down Bedford reveals a constituency not just comfortable with, but profoundly at home in irony. A sense of style, it would seem, is now coterminous with the negative capability to juxtapose historical bits of cultural detritus against one another in a conscious act of subject-construction or place-making. In a kind of mass paranoia, brought on, no doubt, by an over-developed politics of authenticity, we see hipsters going to greater and greater lengths to frustrate any sense of aesthetic expectation or industrial iterability. Nothing new there, except that now we have Hell House, which, in addition to being a wickedly appropriate conclusion to the appearance of the Trucker Hat, seems to have really fooled ideologues on the right (the good pastor) and the left (the adorably ignorant NYUers.) Or has it?

But that is the very delight of this particular House, isn’t it? For if Hell House, works as both irony bath and ideological program than perhaps that is where it exceeds the aforementioned mere-ness of ironic and/or deconstructive intentions and becomes something more positive. For a forced reckoning follows, revealing the uncomfortable truth that there are, at least, two very distinct economies of representation operating at the present moment. And that the contrast between these takes place not on the level of content, on the yay/nay of the Pastor/Pupils, but on the level of form - insofar as it is Hell House, what it itself is, as a performance, and its resulting place within either currency that formally distinguishes the competing registers of its reception. Third, and finally, the coincidence of each strand presents Hell House as a limit case, a boundary question for both the competing dogmas of damnation and tolerance and the overarching ironic-backdrop-cum-zeitgeist from which the hipness gets its thick. Coexistence here is mercifully impossible, leaving Hell House to put the finest of points on an otherwise absent confrontation. Good preaching, indeed.

Expansion, Exhaustion, Evaporation,

Expansion, Exhaustion, Evaporation, (the fate of the political)

xp at long sunday

I would like to begin by quoting Jodi’s post, she writes:

1. “At stake in the emergence of the partisan is the permanent destabilization of the political and of the political as itself another name for the temporal and spatial destabilizations wrought by the technologies producing something like a global.”

2. Jodi’s formulation indicates a nagging question: Is it better to assume applicability in the case of a thinker like Schmitt? Are his categories and ideas applicable, or outdated? What is left of his thought when stretched out over the partisan? Even farther?

3. Thus, and first of all, the question of expansion. At what point does the current situation become prohibitive for the continued expansion of Schmitt’s ideas? When do we abandon his conceptions, his theories, as simply no longer applicable to the world we live in? When is it no longer Schmitt we are talking about, really, but something new? What would it mean to persist in speaking his vocabulary in spite of its obsolescence?

4. When is it, in short, that we give in to the feeling of desperate exhaustion that pervades the entirety Concept of the Political? Leo Strauss in his superb commentary on the essay, writes, “[Schmitt] affirms the political because he sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life. The affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing more than the affirmation of the moral.” Can we imagine the progress of this threat? The disappearance of politics; its mourners tramping around, asserting its continued presence in a disturbing, nostalgic, morality play? What would that look like?

5. Indeed, the first question for the translation of Schmitt to the contemporary political lexicon would be the question of terrorism. We might want the terrorist to be a partisan, but this is a lie. The terrorist does not exist – at least in the way the partisan does. That the partisan insurgents in Iraq are called terrorists only redoubles the point. The terrorist exists only as a pure concept of the enemy, and as such, its purity belies the evaporation of the state. Insofar as the state has created an enemy that exists no place, with no name, and has no coherent ideology, it is only possible to assert that the state itself stands for no name, no place, and no coherent ideology. It has evaporated, leaving behind a conceptual reside as sticky as it is poisonous.
   

6. Does anyone actually know what happened on 9/11? This is not to cast a vote in favor of the conspiracy theorists – rather it is just to reaffirm the concrete undecideability of the event that created what now circulates as terrorism.

7. I would like to draw a parallel between Schmitt’s expansion of the political to include the partisan, and the Government’s expansion of the friend/enemy distinction with the now famous “with us or against us” quote. This comparison takes place insofar as both attempts to stretch the friend/enemy distinction well beyond the point of coherence rebound onto the political itself. The partisan is more telluric mystic than political agent, as his descent into irregularity certainly confounds the ‘high-point of politics’ understood as the collective, public recognition of the enemy. (for more, see Jodi’s post) Similarly, the invocation by the Government of a global, all encompassing friend/enemy distinction, must, by Schmitt’s own terms, herald the end of politics itself.

8. Three final questions then:

1. Are we witnessing the persecution of a worldwide systematic application of violence that can no longer be called political? by Schmitt’s terms? By whose terms can it still be so-called, and, following, what is gained in the way of explanatory power by the continued circulation of the category itself?
2. Can there be no distinction more in need of entrenchment than that between terrorist and partisan? How much longer can we afford to let the undecidabilty of 9/11 haunt us as the idea of a pure enemy?

(Still no such thing as a spectacular bandage, and we had better get over it)

3. In light of all this, has the dialectic ever promised greater hope than it does today? An impossible question to be sure, but, reading Schmitt I became more convinced than ever that if the political was threatened in the thirties, it may now be one worse; exhausted, impoverished to the point of self-parody, and approaching the emptiness of Schmitt’s own valorizing polemic.

Performances of Truth, Patronage, and the Anima as the Other in Language:

“A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating representation collective… A man without a dominating representation collective would be a thoroughly abnormal phenomenon. But such a person exists only in the fantasies of isolated individuals who are deluded about themselves. They are mistaken not only about the existence of religious ideas, but also and more especially about their intensity. The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it. Just as it can be assumed with the greatest probability that every man possesses all the average human functions and qualities, so we may expect the presence of normal religious factors, the archetypes, and this expectation does not prove fallacious. Any one who succeeds in putting off the mantle of faith can do so only because another lies close at hand. No one can escape the prejudice of being human.”

Carl Jung – Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept.

The distance between different theoretical realms or scenes has been renting space in my head for a while now. Some sort of bizarre subletting situation where its unclear at what point the landlord must ask for payment, or really, who is patronizing who. After an especially lively discussion of Jung’s essay last night, I was once again presented with the problem of this negotiation, the problems of distance. What I am talking about?

Taking the passage above for a second, let us say that there is a parallel to be drawn between this idea of the archetype, the persistent kernel of religiosity which is already always human, and any number of hermeneutic ghosts; the other, difference, earth – each being an attempt at signification, at demarcation, incomplete, certainly, but performed nonetheless, an attempt at locating, however briefly and by virtue, no doubt, of several ill-gotten privileges, academic, theoretical, social economic… what is lusted after is the work of highlighting and exposing, putting forth, lifting the skirts of our partiality and allowing the moment of our humiliation and exposure to circulate with something like the consistency of a name. Apparently, this is akin to interrupting ourselves over and over again. Or upstaging ourselves, never reaching the fullness of presence that would be our privilege and our downfall.

So. The parallel, between anima and other, whose existence is simply asserted. The immediate step following assertion is assessment. And this distance too, between assertion and assessment, is the subject of this post. So lets remember to mark these (two) parallel distances, between Jung and Levinas (1), say, and between assertion and assessment, (2) as precisely/perhaps the issue here, as the journey. We are seeking maps, always, to guide us between all these posts. The first map between Anima and Other, Jung and Levinas, is written in language, via a certain ‘vis-à-vis,’ the operative ‘vis-à-vis’ language, linguistically, almost, but not quite, it is not a linguistic map, but the linguistic distance between assertion and assessment, the question of something like the possibility of linguistics that we would map onto the would-be map of assessing the assertion that there is something of the Other in the Anima. What do we make of language? What is its capacity? Is language a good actor? Is that its problem or its virtue? Can language be asked to upstage itself? Or is the performance of its own impotence still a good show?

What am I saying?

The question of whether or not the parallel between anima and other is a good one turns on what one thinks about language, specifically, its capacities. What does language do? What can it be counted on to do? Can we ask of it what Jung does and have it be still, what we know it to be? Can we forgive it its costume? Language’s make-up?

Jung, it was argued, in his language, betrays a certain Aristotelian lust for a discourse of truth – despite, it was argued, clearing the way for an account of truth as clearing, as being an ongoing negotiation with the anima, always, and so partial, not truth at all, in the Aristotelian sense. An Aristotelian rendering of a Platonic truth account and so, as such, contradictory… or something.

But indeed, what if we were too draw the parallel to the other and so, save Jung, somehow, save him from his own performances of discreteness, the betrayal of his content by his choice of form. To throw him a parallel as a kind of life preserver, or have we misheard the operative calling at work in his essay?

Perhaps it is we who have let our paranoia get the best of us? Wittgenstein someplace is laughing, no doubt, at this heightened self-consciousness of language, this thinking of itself thinking itself, the kiss of death on stage, for any actor, as any actor knows. Good acting is first of all a forgetting, a forgetting in order to remember to breathe, we might say, and among other things. Perhaps it is not so odd that our writing here is so bad in this respect, as we are unwilling to get over the customary forgetting that must take place so that we may begin to speak, of anima, of others.

But moving past this for a moment, forgetting it on the way to something else,going ahead and throwing Jung a parallel to pull him from the sea of history where he is, I have been told, been left to slowly drown, pulling him onto this sinking ship of hermeneutics and of ‘Continental,’ philosophy, by way of locating, via a certain faith in language a certain deceit in another, all too faithful language, of psychoanalysis, an Other we recognize, a operative horizon of operative horizons, finding something like the anima in the anima… how much patronage is owed here? Why all this work to save a one such as a Jung? When we collapse the distance of assertion and assessment, in favor of the later, whose side are we on? More to the point, how much assessment is done in the act of asserting?

I think I see, at moments like this, why the analytic performance is so appealing, it is so virile, with so many rules, and allegations of incomprehensibility bandied about like so many nightsticks, but goddamn the trains run on time, even if they exist absolutely nowhere.

I suppose that’s thing about patronizing parallels; at least they get you in the store.

What if language was our archetype? The thing close at hand stepped on and through so that we may call out the heavens to get whats coming their way, and all too soon, no doubt.

But what would be the contents of this faith? And what of the distance between language and rationality?

Whats up (w/Acronyms)

I lost my wallet in my apartment, again, two days ago. So I spent last nite rooting around over Sierra Nevada Pale Ale – (SNPA,) trying to find it. I did not. Probably for the best, as I have no money anyway. I think the whole thing underscores the ridiculousness of trying to lead a life like the one I think I want to when you happen to be a person like the one I wish I wasn’t. So.

What’s on.

In hyperspace:

Another successful symposium over at LS, this one about Spivak, go check it out and then read her essay: Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value, (its kicking around hyperspace someplace.) its fabulous, and, to my mind, a little easier than some of her other stuff.

Also, look for another forum on Freud’s “Group Psychology…” essay over at Woodshed. Taking a page out of LS’s book, and a bit of pressure off our crazy schedules, the ‘shed’s weekly talk has gone hyper, with the estimable Mr. Bergman leading off.

On the Island:

Meg Stuart @ DTW this weekend. Mr. Noonan, of Impasse fame, and myself will be attending this Friday.

Also, the Dancey Dance revolution continues with William Forsythe @ BAM on Tuesday.

My Deah continues to run at the Abingdon Theater Company, hilarious, well acted/crafted version of Medea, written by John Epperson of Lypsinka fame. You probably can’t get tickets, but should try.

NFL draft begins on Saturday, most have my Pats picking a LB or a DB, I, however, and as always this time of year, am holding out for a RB – D’Angelo Williams would be my pick.

Tribeca film festival begins to get interesting on Monday with Chris Marker’s new movie – The Case of the Grinning Cat.

Caught ‘RENT’ with the fam on Saturday, first time I’ve ever seen it on Broadway. G. maintains that its sentimental bourgeois crap, (SBC) and I agree, but its our SBC, anyway.

That's all for now. Blood Wedding begins in earnest. Y'all should come see it.

Circulation, Spivak, and The Skin of Cats,

1. Let’s say there is a European staying in my apartment. Looking up from his work the other day, he asks what I am reading. I do that awkward combination of gestures and words that one does at someone who speaks mostly foreign languages, simultaneously muttering and pointing, Spivak, Scattered Speculations… etc. He replies earnestly and in broken English that it looks interesting, and went back to work. Today, as I sit down to write this, he asks to borrow the essay when I am through. I say yes. I make no mention of its content, its difficulty, its eclecticism, indeed and honestly, how could I? He will simply understand it, or he will not, or, perhaps his encounter will defy reduction to something as simple as all that. It is not for me to speculate on his level of comfort with written English, much less with certain, hyper-syllabic theoretical vocabs. Nor is it for me to apologize in advance for the peculiarity of the offering, he has shared with me his work, and I will share with him this essay. That, on some level, is all.

2. But on another level, it is not. This man is a graffiti artist; he works in images optimized for circulation, created, that is, with circulation in mind. If one were to speak of something like value in connection with his work, one would have to mention its reproducibility, its consistency and its ease and speed of recognition. These traits are paramount for graffiti. Whatever his response to Spivak, it is certainly clear that she is working, in some sense, in an opposite direction. (Two nights ago he was up late into the night, scribbling his trademark ‘Chat’ onto American dollar bills.)

3. Spivak is notorious for her style, which is often called eclectic, irresponsible, and difficult. Indeed, as I have picked up bits and pieces from this community over the past weeks, it has appeared that her style is precisely the issue here, the motivation for this symposium. Spivak’s name itself is inseparable from questions of style; no-one is as difficult as Spivak, no one represents more the indulgences of a certain academic community better than she and perhaps ‘Butler.’ To engage Spivak is to engage not only her style, but style itself. The subaltern and strategic essentialism aside, Spivak’s own question of value is the question, Spivak-style (?).

4. No one is allowed to know my guest’s name. He operates under the pseudonym ‘Monsieur Chat.’ I am told that he is fairly well known in certain circles, and that there would be a great deal of money waiting for him if he ever went public, so to speak. This last bit is due to the fact that everybody knows his work, having recognized it all over the capital cities of Europe. Monsieur Chat as a name is inseparable from the work which is in turn inseparable from its circulation, which it owes to its simple consistency and ease of understanding. The only missing step, it would seem, is widespread knowledge of Monsieur Chat’s legal identity, so that he could be properly feted, fined, jailed, rewarded, or what have you.

5. All of this is to say that, (you’ll pardon the pun,) there is more than one way to skin a cat. And those questions of value, as ‘Spivak’ so brilliantly demonstrates, are bound in chains of circulation, which can perhaps be broken in both directions.

6. Still, and following, I find myself wondering if we are doomed to these divine partialities, and whether this discomfort is my own failing, an inability, perhaps inevitable, to recognize a certain vulgarity in what I am using as the form of the whole, (the whole of the form) which neither Spivak, nor my imaginary guest, are willing to fill. Is it, as it were, that circulation circulates too, and that the concept itself remains unthought? Or is it unthinkable?

For Impasse, From the 'shed and FE, with love, part one.

Process and product. Participant and performer. Production and exchange.

What is owed an audience? What does an audience owe?

Regards our thinking these questions last night, which was not so subtly supplemented by that performance of vulgarity, whose only virtue is, at present, a namelessness, a circumstantial dignity accidentally recovered; indeed, by that virtue, by an operative humility which is not theirs, but exists for us somehow in that we can name them, we can return the favor. So. What shall we call them? Those people who came and read from sheets and offended us and were ridiculous, whose name we, or, at least, I, do not know, and so can take my revenge, an audience enacting its anger through the reduction to a name, the granting of mere-ness, returning them to the simplicity they repeatedly decried but obviously, farcically, could not escape -what shall we call them?

A performance like that demands judgment, cries out for categorization, for reduction, for the violation of its own pretensions if our work is to have anything like meaning at all, we cannot hang fire here, we cannot abstain in good faith or refrain from laying low that which asks attention and pays only malicious adolescent baseness, denying the divine cruelty of what performance can be; that potential which we would have having our continued allegiance. We name, then, in order to preserve this hopeless, delicate fidelity so good at keeping our poverty provincialized within the realm of things and money. What word for those who would profane our fealty – these cartoons detonating inside a space made sacred by a foolish faith in what we call performance?

An odd place to begin, but I think it is what we have to go on, and itwould be ignorant not to recognize the shared experience of being a certain kind of audience around a discussion of audience/performer interaction. So moving, finally, to the substance of this conversation, here are the points I want to make about these to ideas of ‘orientation,’ I am curious to see where it will lead.

(After all, if you will permit another digression, this too, is a sort of performance, of procrastination, both literal and figurative, if nothing else)

lets start like this:

Process oriented

Product oriented

1. Orientation, I think, as a term, is misleading. Orientation, pointing, indication – these operate very differently with regards to the product and the process of performance.

1. First, and most clearly – process and product are only ever oriented towards each other, only ever exist by virtue of one another. Product is of a process, and process is for a product. The terms are meaningless without one another, insofar as they are. So the first point is that it is not either product or process that is either product or process oriented, but, rather, the performance considered as a sum and then some of product and process, (performance not being reducible simply to the combination of process and product) that takes itself as oriented either towards process or towards product.

2. The second question, then; to what extent is it possible for performance to ever be oriented towards either process or product? What is implied by the assertion that performance can be so oriented? In other words, what is gained by this idea of orienting and performance - towards one or the other of its constitutive elements? One answer might be: given that what is circulated as performance consistently denies the value of the process itself - any alternative performance is such via an assertion of the value of process qua process. The process, in this formulation, becomes itself performative, an investment of a certain faith that, as such, has value that is not simply in service of the product, existing here simply to give the process duration, to give it meaning as ‘a process.’ That the product is not performance enough, but arrives as another instance of performance, as a shift outward towards the audience of a performance which was always, in some sense, already going on; and that this shift is what distinguishes between the two instantiations, or types, of performance, that this turns on the presence of the audience and demands the renegotiation of rehearsal and performance under the new names of process and product.

3. Here the question of orientation is only ever a question in light of the presence of an audience. The audience, seeking some sort of work, makes clear the distinction between process and product, and throws the question of orientation into relief. The performance is not process or product oriented, it is always already both - which is to say it is not oriented at all, as such - it is rather the audience whose orientation is at issue, insofar as it is they who produce the distinction between process and product, and it is their presence that would be so oriented towards one or the other. Four things follow.

i. The audience cannot be oriented toward the process, literally, they are not, it is their physical orientation towards the product that makes it, and they, what it is and they are. The process cannot be seen, and no rearranging of chairs can change this fact.

ii. Following, to ask an audience to be process oriented, to orient themselves towards the process, it to ask them to look for a depth in the product, that is, quite literally, not present. It is to ask them to look back through time at what has occurred in preparation for their arrival. It is to ask them to perform their participation in the process via their presence for the product, and to assert said presence retroactively. Thus, the product/process distinction is remapped again onto audience and performers, producing instead performers and participants. In process, the audience performs and the performers participate, in product, performance is returned to the performers for the first time, and the audience participates merely.

iii. To elucidate this last point, some theoretical dexterity is required. Consider that it is the specter of the audience that haunts the process, giving it its process status. That is to say: what distinguishes process as an instance of process-ness is the role performed by the audience as audience, in absentia. Similarly, it is the realization of the presence of the audience, their arrival, which turns the participants into performers, and gives the audience the status of participants.

iv. Performance then is marked at all levels by the interaction of participants and performers, with everybody switching sides in the moment of an audience’s arrival. It is this movement of symmetry that completes performance.

4. We are not yet where it is we want to be, that is, we have merely cleared the requisite lexical ground for approaching what I see to be the true issue at hand. M. asked me what it was I thought of the performance, and it is this question that I think brings us to the third and final binary of this impromptu genealogy, that of production and exchange. (What I would like to make clear is that this is not a denial or a refusal of the question or my answers, but rather, it is first another sort of answer, and, second, a certain denigration of any answer that might be so offered.)

i. What takes place in the asking of this question? First there is the marking of a passage of time, the performance must be completed on the occasion of this asking, it is already past tense, and has become what we will here call a production. This hardening involves two things.

1. The evaporation of the process. Process cannot be thought in this equation due to the asymmetry involved in the experience of those involved. So

2. We are left only with the product, as the only object of experience that can be thought of as crossing the distinctions between performer and participant, and, as a result, the ‘audience’ is fixed now as audience, and the performer as a performer. The being of the performance is denied due to the presence in the past of a shared product, (a product incorrectly thought to be shared in the same way) and thus it becomes a production.

ii. Any production is an object of exchange, and, as such, subject to its laws - chief among these is the category of assessment. It is wondered, was the performance good? Should it have been done differently? But is this category of simplistic qualitative evaluation truly the equal of performance? Or does it not drag its being down to a level where it can be exchanged - making possible an equivalence that any good faith encounter would reveal to be impossible? What I have tried to show is how much we would want to, in pursuit of something like a pure instance of performance, deny this move to production and exchange. To hold onto to performance in the complex movement of its symmetry, and resist the temptation to pass judgment from a position which was only partially ours in the first place, and gone too quickly, thank God, in the last.

So, it is in light of all of this that any thoughts of mine might be taken for what they are; partial flecks circulated in those interminable moments before the lights go down.

Here’s hoping they never come up on that nameless shit again.

Irony, the AIM conversation

AIM IM with scsquibb

3/21/06, 12:45 PM
SCS:
you've seen the onion article i take it...

CR:
which?

SCS:
rage against the machine: where are you now that we need you?

CR:
no
when was that?

SCS:
like two years back, one sec
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33992
also, i would say irony is a performance of indifference, that is also the indication of profound sensitivity
its also masturbatory
but i kind of agree with you about hate

CR:
I don't know about that
I think irony is a response
it's a defense

SCS:
a defense mechanism, which, like others, produces something like equilibrium

CR:
that might be true

SCS:
or the appearance of it

CR:
indifference is a political emotion
it's a conservative motion
irony is a response. The problem is that it is not "active" the way that indifference is

12:50 PM

CR:
indifference resists organization but maintains status quo
irony unifies without meaning or adherence, which indifference easily cuts away

SCS:
a carrying on in spite of

CR:
right
hate, on the other hand, has direction
in a very literal sense. It has movement
(e)motion

SCS:
but it too, cloaks a certain indulgence, a kind of luxuriating manichesim
manicheaism
mani... whatever

CR:
that's because it's a response

SCS:
ah so response qua response is the problem

CR:
but that's all that's left
right, it's not a beginning
but between irony and hate I choose hate
irony is cool, consistent, always right, but does nothing
hate is dangerous, bumbling, often incorrect, but has power, real power. The power of designation
"I have hate and my hate is for X"

SCS:
i would be careful about overgeneralizing hate a purely relational, similarly i would be careful about denying irony power. insofar as clearly is has market power, perhaps the
ultimate market power

12:55 PM

SCS:
also, what about self-hatred
by your logic that would almost seem a contradiction, no?
insofar as clearly the self hating cannot hate the self it hates? or is that the operative
fuzziness that gives hate its power?

CR:
I don't think self-hate is really hating of the subject
hate and irony are responses to a condition of representation
to post/late-capital, to the way the self is represented to the self and others

SCS:
one sec
gotta set traps

CR:
to say "I hate myself and I want to die" (Nirvana) is to say "I hate the way that my
subjectivity is represented to me, but it's the only way I know myself.
and it still has power
Cobain killed himself. That was a powerful gesture
much more so than modest mouse ironically playing a happy song

[Steve had to leave to set mouse traps, but emailed me later. See above

on Irony

From Difference and Repetition, by Gilles Deleuze

page 5:

"If repetition is possible, it is as much opposed to moral law as it is to natural law. There are two known ways to overturn moral law. One is by ascending towards the principles: challenging a law as secondary, derived, borrowed or 'general'; denouncing it as involving a second-hand principle which diverts an original force or usurps an original power. The other way, by contrast, is to overturn the law by descending towards the consequences, to which one submits with a too-perfect attention to detail. By adopting the law, a falsely submissive soul manages to evade it and to taste pleasures it was supposed to forbid. We can see this in demonstration by asbsurdity and working to rule, but also in some forms of masochistic behaviour which mock by submission. The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears as an art of principles, of ascent towards the principles and of overturning principles. The second is humour, which is an art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls. Must we understand that repetition appears in both this suspense and this ascent, as though existence recommenced and 'reiterated' itself once it is no longer constrained by laws? Repetition belongs to humour and irony; it is by nature transgression or exception, always revealing a singularity opposed to the particulars subsumed under laws, a universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws."


Etymology

Irony is believed to have been imported to English from the Latin ironia in 1502, in turn from the Greek eironeia, a conjugation of eiron - to dissemble, such as lying by omission or by concealment of true intent. During the word's Latin use, the lie by omission was dropped from its meaning; ironia is simply lying by concealment of true intent (some group these two actions under the term affected ignorance.) On conversion to english, this definition has been expanded to include not only lies, but some jokes of subtlety.

From a discussion with M. Christie on Long Sunday re: the philosophy of pop -

"There is a difference, it would seem and I would argue, between irony as a structural necessity, as means to an end, and its pursuit of itself on its own terms.

I recall the moment in the Derrida movie when the selfrighteouscollegian challanges D's discussion of unconditional forgiveness before an all white audience in South Africa. Are you trying to be ironic? he asks. Saying, in effect, is that all that is going on here, can we file this discussion under (I)rony and then move on?

D's response is something that I think of often when confronted with, well, this. (I still need to learn that cool linking trick so just click on Matt's links above) He says, (and here comes an awkward paraphrase) yes, to some extent there is a taking place of irony, but only insofar as his work requires the distancing labor that that term invites. The relationship of irony is invoked along the path of his thought, sometimes more than once, but (and this is D's eternal grace) he is never content with THE ironic, with the nihilism and vacuity that the term marks when trotted out on its own.

Irony is here like vanilla extract, added in touches to a larger recipe, but absolutely untenable when tasted on its own. It makes you
want to puke.

However, I do think we have to be honest about the origin of this
over-emphasis, or reduction to irony that I see as operative in the
mini-zeitgeist we would here berate.
And, interestingly, I think this turns somewhat on where we ended up in the pop/Pop discussion we were having earlier,

Matt formulates, with characteristic grace,


"Greif presents a compelling case that the aesthetic ground addressed, that is to say maybe cleared and nurtured in (or in spite of) pop...though significantly neutral, only ever indirectly ethical, always already abstracted, and however easily appropriated by the interests of the beast whose mouth it uses...is still one of...let's call it communist, semi-child-like potential, shall we? And that there is political potential mixed up in this, however the aesthetic priests would no doubt scoff…

I think(Greif's argument) is one for redeeming a certain potentiality in 'pop', in a manner of speaking, that is without merely either sneering nor indulging, which is common enough. This potentiality is not something grasp-able as such, but elusive and desistantly, rhythmically, elsewhere. Homeless and maybe homesick, you might say...

What kind of futurism is at stake in 'pop', what kind of messianicity perhaps salvageable, you know, from messianism proper. If one thing is clear it would seem to be that 'pop' is not merely "anti-" anything. Such formulations may be simplistic, if not quaint."

I see us objecting, in this thread, to the simultaneous gesture of high-hipster Irony, which seem, constitutively, to be the acceptance of Pop delectability, occurring simultaneously with the rejection of its "communist, semi-child-like potential." Thus the important thing is to let everybody now that you're not (the one) being fooled, that you are, that most important of words today, 'authentic.' (Something of a determinate adolescent affectionforrejection, no?)

The (potentially redemptive) homelessness of Pop is ruthlessly located by the approach of the Ironic, fixed as always-already a certain taking place of fascism, (and bigotry, and plebian dirtiness, and fundamentally, poverty) which cannot be denied, but can only be reappropriated by the evacuating gesture of the Ironic. The hipster is the living embodiment of the quaint formulation of Pop as anti-authentic, as anti-everything.

Thus the theoretical scenesterism we would decry is the encroachment on those who would hold onto something, anything, be it in Pop or in irony, that does not dead end in a certain assembled vanity of vintage clothing and ideas. "

Re: Deleuze on Irony

Wow. A lot to deal with before lunch. Let’s start with Deleuze and Guattari.

I think (sadly) the D&G understanding of irony is outdated. If you want to read irony in that way then we have concede that we currently occupy a space of trans-irony. A move from irony as a response or tool to a supersaturation of irony that renders it part of the organizing structures of representation. Remember, you said yourself irony has market value.

Let’s use D&G’s terms, partly because words like “moral” and “resistance” mean different things for them, and partly because I miss talking like this.

For D&G a resistance to law is a move from striated space to smooth space. Smooth space of course being the space of the nomad. In smooth space there is no history, no unit of measure, no value. Most importantly, no law. In striated space everything is divided into quanta. That’s why we have law, value, and history. And since history is the history of the state (one of the key unites of striated differentiation) the nomad and smooth space are forgotten. The problem with the law is that it denies smoothness while all the while oscillation between smooth and striated spaces. Because the two are interchangeable. That’s what 1000 plateaus is all about. Is the space of 1000 joined plateaus smooth or striated? The answer is that it’s always both.

Over time this smooth space, the space of the nomad, becomes colonized and striated. But “events” that exist in the smooth space can bring the smooth space to bear on the striated space. This is resistance.

The space of representation is striated because individual images represent subjects to themselves as whole units operating as centers within a codified system, but at the same time the saturation of images creates a smooth space, one that is always oscillating and disrupting the subject from his or her centrality (in other words the apparatus of representation is at once telling the subject that the world is root-like while itself operating rhizomally and therefore projecting a rhizomal structure on the subject). Interestingly, we might also be able to think about this in terms of Lacan’s symbolic phase. One occupied by subjects who’s “mirror phase” consisted of a million funhouse mirrors, most of them shattered.

Ok, so where is irony in this? For D&G irony is a resistance. In my opinion, irony occupies a smooth space. It has no history or value structure. But it’s relationship to objects is disruptive. It removes the illusion of pure striation, or pure discreetness. Or, at least, it did. Now irony is pervasive. And herein lies it’s smoothness (since all things are both smooth and striated). However, this is not the same smoothness as before. Because the space that irony occupies is now striated. It has become a colonized space (colonized by the market), which makes it belong to the same space as the state, and it therefore participates in structures value and naming. Irony is not purely event anymore. It is a quality of objects and is itself a structure. This is the state of trans-irony.

That said, I don’t see things as that clearly Deleuzian. For me it’s more a matter of reaction—not to be confused with resistance. Reaction is a way for the individual to deal with or respond to the way that the apparatus represents himself to himself. Most people don’t react. They take the representation at face value. Some react with irony. This is a conservative reaction and one of self-preservation. It is an Apollonian move. We mask the representation. We perform it and therefore have some power of identity. In this schema hate would by like a Dionysian gesture (though let’s not think too hard about this, I’m not trying to propose a Nietzscheian framework, just a way of explaining). On the other hand, hate is striated in event—it does this or that. It’s not pervasive, but exists in quanta. But it’s smooth in its lack of history and reliance on event. The fear with hate as a reaction is that it does little to let the subject maintain their discreetness (that’s what I mean by Dionysian). But in so doing it has more power as a moving force. The problem, of course, is that it denies discreet direction. So it has to be tampered. Perhaps with irony. And maybe that’s why we make cocktails out of paint and colorful rags.

Re: Deleuze on Irony via Heidegger

alright. we should probably just put this on the blog. but here goes.

First, as always, the heideggerian in me wants to ask how it is that we can speak of smoothness? what is the nature of its presence for us? is it a thought experiment? something posited out of necessity, ie. there must be something like smoothness to account for this and this and the action of the 'this,' the operation of the one....

thus, and again, how does the nomad appear? it cannot, it would seem, as smoothness can never arrive without the corresponding striation of a linguistic act the-having-been-made-one that any given instance of being requires in order to (be said to) appear... unless the nomad (and smoothness) is an instance of purely formalized language, the arbitrary utterance of something that somehow is without ever being said to be.

all of this is really neither here nor there except insofar as we would want to clarify the tool-iness of irony. What is the sort of thing that picks it up? 'an individual'? is this a rational, thinking subject? is the subject there, next to irony, capable of considering its use? Or is the subject the subject of irony, reformed from mirrored fragments into something like a whole? Does irony return us to ourselves, and thus become the impossible conservation of something that was never here? are all subjects, insofar as they are, ironic?

that said. i like the idea of tempering hate with irony. insofar as i think hate takes off on striation but sleeps with smoothness, 'it has smoothness in its heart,' insofar as the striation it would hold to cannot account nor abide the power of its movement. Hate will smooth. Hate is pure unbuilding, destruction. Irony, one might argue, is smooth by virtue of the dualness of striation. Twice striated so smoothness peaks through cracks where colors cancel each other out.

The sticking point, for me, then, would seem to be my anything but deluezian understanding of delueze, but also, fer serious, the being that is such that irony can be reactive. What would react?

also and further, it is true that I said irony has market value. But we also agreed that advertising is never, ever ironic, properly, insofar as advertising can only ever be an instance of first order intention (representations that can be exhausted, that can be said to be, definitively, these are instances of first order intention, advertising, maps, stop signs, etc. art is categorically second order, unless its in a gallery... i digress) - this is what makes it advertising.

thus what has market value is not irony, but a mimetic performance of what irony can be thought to look like, the colors of irony. irony as the new black.

and i have to go clean a closet. high line tonight?

but i want to go into the subject as the recognizing subject, irony is an instance of second order recognition, in this sense it is reactive and conservative insofar as saturation can never be second order, the recognition of this impossibilty we would call irony...

Re: Deleuze on Irony via Heidegger and back

A lot of different questions in different directions. And I’d prefer to not spend my afternoon defending Deleuze. It’s the century that’s Deleuzain, after all, not me. Plus he had really long finger nails. Eww.

That being said, I’m only using his language because you forced my hand. His understanding of irony is trapped in a very specific system of slippery signs and alliteration (kidding).

Smoothness and striation are not present to us—whatever “us” you’re talking about. It’s a “space” in which things happen (or are structures, in the case of striation). What your pal Heidegger might call an “opening” or “clearing.” So ask him.

That being said, I think of smoothness and striation in relationship to heterogeneity and homogeneity (the obvious/dangerous analogy). Nothing is homogenous up close, nothing is heterogeneous from far away. But certain structures rely on these designations to create the backdrop for our “real.” Most of them are heterogeneous. So an act of homogeny, in this case, would be an act of resistance. But remember, nothing is smooth or striated. They’re both a relationship to the “organization” or maybe the “use-designation” of the space. It’s more of an operation, I think.

“how does the nomad appear? it cannot, it would seem, as smoothness can never arrive without the corresponding striation of a linguistic act the-having-been-made-one that any given instance of being requires…”

Nomads don’t appear. They died out. The state won. Sedentary people are all that’s left. But there are nomadic events. War is a nomadic event (or maybe it used to be). The sedentary city stands in the way while the nomad seeks to move uninhibited though smooth space. In reality, the act of war is nomadic but then sedentary. Conquer the sedentary city, but then stay there. Occupy the space. Make it striated. To ask when the nomad “appears” is against nomadary (if I can say that). Because you’re right, once there’s something that is the nomad we’re operating in the striated space of differentiation. This is why it’s always an oscillation. Then again, remember that smooth and striated only refers to the space, not the occupants.

But like you said, this is neither here nor there. “Here,” of course, being striated space, and “there” being smooth, I think. The question is about the tool-iness of irony. And I like where you’re going, though I want to refrain from getting too ontological. I’m not saying that this is an ontic question, but that we don’t need to get to the beingness of the irony user to discuss irony.

With that in mind, what is the tooliness of irony? Epistemologically the irony user cannot come to know about irony empirically. So what is the relationship between irony and the subject?

I think I understand it the way Gadamer understands authorial intention. Irony is an intentional move. Now, lots of stuff (important stuff) happens that we don’t intend. And, of course, we can never get to the purely intended gesture. However, there is still something that we rely on for understanding whereby one subject recognizes that another subject did something on purpose. Irony is like an intentional mode of experience. My ironic gesture, for example, is to listen to Ashley Simpson’s “La La” while writing this essay. By telling you that this is what’s happening I’m saying that there is an intentional meta-gesture to the act of listening. One that you recognize as the “force” of my listening. By doing so I comment on the popularity of Simpson’s music, or it’s relationship to rational people, or something. What you mean by second-order recognition, right?

But let’s back up a second. That would be true prior to trans-irony. Today this is simply not the case. Before, irony was a critical gesture (literature). Today it’s a reaction. The condition of image supersaturation causes subjects to constantly shift their understanding of their selves. Society of the spectacle system. The spectacle (or apparatus) represents subjects to themselves. The supersaturation of images makes identity so unstable (or stable only in relationship to the apparatus/market) that irony stops criticizing and starts letting people have some conscious relationship to the way the apparatus represents themselves to themselves. It doesn’t change much, of course. Kait still bought Ashley Simpson’s CD. The market survives. But Kait has some sense of control over the mode of consumption—over the way the machine of Ashley Simpson relations to her. But that is not an active force. It doesn’t have direction. Meanwhile, of course, hate is all movement in all directions, so what’s better? I choose movement.

But in the end, trans-irony, for me, is a system in which irony is no longer a critical gesture but a reaction that attempts to save some semblance of internally generated subjectivity. Or maybe not even internally, but in relationship to something other than the apparatus, the spectacle, the market, late capital. Whatever you want to call it. The system that represents the contemporary subject to itself. Of course I only mean that ironically.

Highline sounds good. I’ll pick up some booze on the way home.