The Seattle Research Institute is trying to bridge the gap between academic and journalistic discourse, and to open a new space for a new generation, and a new sort, of “public intellectual.” Over the past few years, they’ve been a vital presence here in Seattle, sponsoring lectures, readings, and performances, as well as publishing two volumes of essays, with more to come. I finally got around to reading their first book, Politics Without the State, by Nic Veroli and others, and edited by Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede. (It was originally published in 2002, and has just been reprinted).
Politics Without the State is a brilliant polemic, one of the few I’ve read recently that is actually worth arguing with, rather than just dismissing. Veroli et al. argue for a politics of joy and imaginative expansion, in contrast to the politics of terror and restriction purveyed by the IMF and the US government, no less than by Al Qaeda.They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against “the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus”, they advocate “a universal communication” of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is “gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted.” This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable.
The theoretical inspiration for all this comes from Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt, and to a certain extent Zizek; and before them, from such nomadic thinkers (as Deleuze calls them) as Spinoza (for his theory of affect) and Gabriel Tarde (for his theory of sociality). (They also cite C. L. R. James, as well as some German thinkers I am alas only vaguely familiar with, like Negt and Kluge, and Enzsenzberger).
But there is also a pragmatic inspiration, or one deriving from practice, which has a lot to do with why and how Politics Without the State is more than just an academic exercise. Veroli et al are inspired by the successful Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999 and by the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as by the ongoing (and not quite as successful) efforts in the alternative media to develop a counter-narrative to the official “manufacturing of consent” to imperial adventurism in the wake of 9/11.
So what is it that I want to argue with in Veroli et al’s account? I suppose I could put it down to my own neurotic doom and gloom that I find them (as I do Hardt and Negri) way too optimistic. However attractive it is to call for a revolutionary politics of gratified desire, in opposition to the old-fashioned (Leninist) ethos of sacrifice and discipline, I am not really convinced by such a vision. It’s the old problem that Wilhelm Reich ran into: if the masses (or, to use the more up-to-date Negrian term, the multitude) are orgasmically sated and satisfied, they aren’t going to rebel for anything more than their orgasms. While I’m all for “irruptions of idleness, perverse delights, useless pursuits” (Veroli and George), I don’t believe that such “practices of desertion” are radical acts, or threats to the consumerist world order. And although I’m as much in credit card hell as anyone, I also don’t believe that “our mounting debts, even as they topple us, will bring the system in upon itself, effectively sucking the money away from globalization’s larger agenda,” as Robert Corbett playfully (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) proposes. (For one thing, because the problem for world capitalism is not overconsumption, but precisely the reverse: overproduction).
In addition, I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is. Bush’s police state tactics are in the service of Halliburton, and not the reverse. Deleuze and Guattari write somewhere of the “minimal State,” pioneered by Pinochet and Thatcher, and reaching fruition today under Bush. This is when the State abdicates all forms of authority except for its policing and military functions (and even those are being privatized to a good extent), in order to give capital a freer hand at ever-more horrific forms of exploitation. That, rather than State power, is the main danger, the real source of terror, today. Bush is truly a “crowned anarchist,” destroying the State far more radically than any left anarchists have dreamed.
Similarly, it’s the IMF and the World Bank and free-trade agreements like NAFTA that are the greatest antagonists of the State today, since they are precisely negating any form of independence or local sovereignty, in order to allow for the unimpeded expansion of flows of capital, and in order to further privatize all forms of social life.
So when Veroli dismisses the importance of public services like those of the New Deal, on the grounds that such services were only extracted from the State by the threat of “large mass movements” (which is not untrue in itself), he’s speaking from a position of luxury that fails to acknowledge what a big difference such services have made in many people’s lives however inadequate such services are. And when he says that “it is unlikely that today’s mass movements will be satisfied by a New Deal, even a global one,” I can only throw up my hands in exasperation: it’s like saying that starving people will not be satisfied with access to middle-class American meals, because anything less than the banquets of ancient Rome is oppressive and unfair.
In short, I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must strive to reinvent the State, not bypass it or destroy it. “Politics without the State” is a chimera.
The Seattle Research Institute is trying to bridge the gap between academic and journalistic discourse, and to open a new space for a new generation, and a new sort, of “public intellectual.” Over the past few years, they’ve been a vital presence here in Seattle, sponsoring lectures, readings, and performances, as well as publishing two volumes of essays, with more to come. I finally got around to reading their first book, Politics Without the State, by Nic Veroli and others, and edited by Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede. (It was originally published in 2002, and has just been reprinted).
Politics Without the State is a brilliant polemic, one of the few I’ve read recently that is actually worth arguing with, rather than just dismissing. Veroli et al. argue for a politics of joy and imaginative expansion, in contrast to the politics of terror and restriction purveyed by the IMF and the US government, no less than by Al Qaeda.They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against “the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus”, they advocate “a universal communication” of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is “gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted.” This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable.
The theoretical inspiration for all this comes from Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt, and to a certain extent Zizek; and before them, from such nomadic thinkers (as Deleuze calls them) as Spinoza (for his theory of affect) and Gabriel Tarde (for his theory of sociality). (They also cite C. L. R. James, as well as some German thinkers I am alas only vaguely familiar with, like Negt and Kluge, and Enzsenzberger).
But there is also a pragmatic inspiration, or one deriving from practice, which has a lot to do with why and how Politics Without the State is more than just an academic exercise. Veroli et al are inspired by the successful Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999 and by the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as by the ongoing (and not quite as successful) efforts in the alternative media to develop a counter-narrative to the official “manufacturing of consent” to imperial adventurism in the wake of 9/11.
So what is it that I want to argue with in Veroli et al’s account? I suppose I could put it down to my own neurotic doom and gloom that I find them (as I do Hardt and Negri) way too optimistic. However attractive it is to call for a revolutionary politics of gratified desire, in opposition to the old-fashioned (Leninist) ethos of sacrifice and discipline, I am not really convinced by such a vision. It’s the old problem that Wilhelm Reich ran into: if the masses (or, to use the more up-to-date Negrian term, the multitude) are orgasmically sated and satisfied, they aren’t going to rebel for anything more than their orgasms. While I’m all for “irruptions of idleness, perverse delights, useless pursuits” (Veroli and George), I don’t believe that such “practices of desertion” are radical acts, or threats to the consumerist world order. And although I’m as much in credit card hell as anyone, I also don’t believe that “our mounting debts, even as they topple us, will bring the system in upon itself, effectively sucking the money away from globalization’s larger agenda,” as Robert Corbett playfully (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) proposes. (For one thing, because the problem for world capitalism is not overconsumption, but precisely the reverse: overproduction).
In addition, I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is. Bush’s police state tactics are in the service of Halliburton, and not the reverse. Deleuze and Guattari write somewhere of the “minimal State,” pioneered by Pinochet and Thatcher, and reaching fruition today under Bush. This is when the State abdicates all forms of authority except for its policing and military functions (and even those are being privatized to a good extent), in order to give capital a freer hand at ever-more horrific forms of exploitation. That, rather than State power, is the main danger, the real source of terror, today. Bush is truly a “crowned anarchist,” destroying the State far more radically than any left anarchists have dreamed.
Similarly, it’s the IMF and the World Bank and free-trade agreements like NAFTA that are the greatest antagonists of the State today, since they are precisely negating any form of independence or local sovereignty, in order to allow for the unimpeded expansion of flows of capital, and in order to further privatize all forms of social life.
So when Veroli dismisses the importance of public services like those of the New Deal, on the grounds that such services were only extracted from the State by the threat of “large mass movements” (which is not untrue in itself), he’s speaking from a position of luxury that fails to acknowledge what a big difference such services have made in many people’s lives however inadequate such services are. And when he says that “it is unlikely that today’s mass movements will be satisfied by a New Deal, even a global one,” I can only throw up my hands in exasperation: it’s like saying that starving people will not be satisfied with access to middle-class American meals, because anything less than the banquets of ancient Rome is oppressive and unfair.
In short, I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must strive to reinvent the State, not bypass it or destroy it. “Politics without the State” is a chimera.
An exhibit of works by Ellen Gallagher just opened at the Henry Art Gallery. The artist was present to give a talk about her work. I’ll have to go back for a more extended look, but what I saw (and heard) was quite interesting. Gallagher’s work is fascinatingly oblique, giving a kind of formalist take on the history and position of black people in America. Gallagher took advertisements for wigs from old copies of Ebony and other African American magazines (her archive extends from 1939 to the late 1970s). She obsessively reworked these images in various ways, replacing the depicted wigs with plasticine blobs, effacing the faces of the models, organizing the resulting tiny images in huge grid patterns.
Gallagher is tracing a careful path between the Scylla of identity politics, and the Charybdis of universalizing abstraction. She is not representing “black identity” or even black history in any straightforward way; but neither are her abstract patterns – which is what you first notice of her work from a distance – abstracted from history, or from the history of that (contingent, non-essential, but also perfectly concrete and real) “identity.”
Wigs are a prosthetic amplification of the body, even when (or especially when) it is claimed (as is the case in many of the ads Gallagher appropriates) that they are “natural.” (They are also part of the larger history of the cultural meanings of hair – remember Madame C. J. Walker). As dubious fashion accessories. wigs themselves have a history in the years of Gallagher’s archive (witness the differences between the straight ones of the 1940s and the Afros of the late 60s and 70s).
But Gallagher is not just memorializing a history. Neither is she making a critique (as might well be done, for instance, from the point of view of looking at the various ways that African Americans have often sought to make their hair straigher, more like white people’s hair). Rather, she is exploring a tricky middle ground, where identity, an artifice to begin with, becomes blurred by memory, time, and loss, but is never entirely obliterated. Her images of prosthetics of the body are themselves prosthetic images: images which replace, or extend, previous images. This suggests an endless progression of simulacra, perhaps; but it does NOT suggest any sort of Baudrillardian thesis that the “real” has been obliterated. This is because, far from being “hyperreal,” Gallagher’s images are troublingly concrete: indexical presences rather than achieved absences, residues rather than effacements of their dubious “originals.”
In her talk, Gallagher linked these residual presences, uneffaced despite the violence with which she works over her appropriated images, to the themes of Afrofuturist science fiction. That is to say, she sees the Middle Passage as the true and ultimate form of alien abduction: people taken away from their homes and families, brutally dragged by strangers through an unfamiliar, blank space, and enslaved in an utterly alien environment. She suggested that the Middle Passage itself, rather than any fantasy of Mother Africa, is the one “origin” back to which black Americans can refer. And she cited the conceptualizations of Samuel Delany, and the SF mythologizings of George Clinton and especially Drexciya, with their wonderful vision of an underwater Atlantean realm, inhabited by the women and children who perished during the Middle Passage. Gallagher said that she felt close to Drexciya both in terms of this mythology, and in terms of the oblique, abstract way that they present it, in enigmatic techno music without vocals.
Gallagher is a brilliant artist of the in-between, in many different senses.
An exhibit of works by Ellen Gallagher just opened at the Henry Art Gallery. The artist was present to give a talk about her work. I’ll have to go back for a more extended look, but what I saw (and heard) was quite interesting. Gallagher’s work is fascinatingly oblique, giving a kind of formalist take on the history and position of black people in America. Gallagher took advertisements for wigs from old copies of Ebony and other African American magazines (her archive extends from 1939 to the late 1970s). She obsessively reworked these images in various ways, replacing the depicted wigs with plasticine blobs, effacing the faces of the models, organizing the resulting tiny images in huge grid patterns.
Gallagher is tracing a careful path between the Scylla of identity politics, and the Charybdis of universalizing abstraction. She is not representing “black identity” or even black history in any straightforward way; but neither are her abstract patterns – which is what you first notice of her work from a distance – abstracted from history, or from the history of that (contingent, non-essential, but also perfectly concrete and real) “identity.”
Wigs are a prosthetic amplification of the body, even when (or especially when) it is claimed (as is the case in many of the ads Gallagher appropriates) that they are “natural.” (They are also part of the larger history of the cultural meanings of hair – remember Madame C. J. Walker). As dubious fashion accessories. wigs themselves have a history in the years of Gallagher’s archive (witness the differences between the straight ones of the 1940s and the Afros of the late 60s and 70s).
But Gallagher is not just memorializing a history. Neither is she making a critique (as might well be done, for instance, from the point of view of looking at the various ways that African Americans have often sought to make their hair straigher, more like white people’s hair). Rather, she is exploring a tricky middle ground, where identity, an artifice to begin with, becomes blurred by memory, time, and loss, but is never entirely obliterated. Her images of prosthetics of the body are themselves prosthetic images: images which replace, or extend, previous images. This suggests an endless progression of simulacra, perhaps; but it does NOT suggest any sort of Baudrillardian thesis that the “real” has been obliterated. This is because, far from being “hyperreal,” Gallagher’s images are troublingly concrete: indexical presences rather than achieved absences, residues rather than effacements of their dubious “originals.”
In her talk, Gallagher linked these residual presences, uneffaced despite the violence with which she works over her appropriated images, to the themes of Afrofuturist science fiction. That is to say, she sees the Middle Passage as the true and ultimate form of alien abduction: people taken away from their homes and families, brutally dragged by strangers through an unfamiliar, blank space, and enslaved in an utterly alien environment. She suggested that the Middle Passage itself, rather than any fantasy of Mother Africa, is the one “origin” back to which black Americans can refer. And she cited the conceptualizations of Samuel Delany, and the SF mythologizings of George Clinton and especially Drexciya, with their wonderful vision of an underwater Atlantean realm, inhabited by the women and children who perished during the Middle Passage. Gallagher said that she felt close to Drexciya both in terms of this mythology, and in terms of the oblique, abstract way that they present it, in enigmatic techno music without vocals.
Gallagher is a brilliant artist of the in-between, in many different senses.
I don’t usually put links without my own extended commentary into this blog, but this time I couldn’t resist. Warren Ellis has a wonderful rant about fanatic protesters against genetically modified food.
I don’t usually put links without my own extended commentary into this blog, but this time I couldn’t resist. Warren Ellis has a wonderful rant about fanatic protesters against genetically modified food.
My office. This is a test of MFOP2, which allows me to post photos directly from my new Nokia futurephone. Yes, I have a new phone, with a camera and email, so that now I can post images directly to this blog, to my regular photoblog Macular Hole, or to the new, occasional moblog I have created, Missed Encounters. These multiple blogs should keep me busy…
My office. This is a test of MFOP2, which allows me to post photos directly from my new Nokia futurephone. Yes, I have a new phone, with a camera and email, so that now I can post images directly to this blog, to my regular photoblog Macular Hole, or to the new, occasional moblog I have created, Missed Encounters. These multiple blogs should keep me busy…
Seattle’s Grand Illusion Theater is one of only four theaters in the country showing a complete Aki Kaurismaki retrospective. I’ve written about Kaurismaki before; I’ll just add that tonight’s entry, Match Factory Girl from 1989, is a well-nigh perfect film. Minimal, deadpan, it’s about a young woman (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who’s abused by her parents and lover, and takes appropriate revenge. Every shot is perfectly framed, and every shot is a surprise. The icy lighting is a wonder to behold. And the film somehow combines world-weary fatalism with (dare I call it?) a sense of justice, and Fassbinderian melodrama with Bressonian intensity. All this, and the film is modest and unpretentious as well. I’d seen Match Factory Girl before, but seeing it again reminded me of why I love Aki Kaurismaki. (And it’s purely as a compliment that I named my dog after him).
Seattle’s Grand Illusion Theater is one of only four theaters in the country showing a complete Aki Kaurismaki retrospective. I’ve written about Kaurismaki before; I’ll just add that tonight’s entry, Match Factory Girl from 1989, is a well-nigh perfect film. Minimal, deadpan, it’s about a young woman (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who’s abused by her parents and lover, and takes appropriate revenge. Every shot is perfectly framed, and every shot is a surprise. The icy lighting is a wonder to behold. And the film somehow combines world-weary fatalism with (dare I call it?) a sense of justice, and Fassbinderian melodrama with Bressonian intensity. All this, and the film is modest and unpretentious as well. I’d seen Match Factory Girl before, but seeing it again reminded me of why I love Aki Kaurismaki. (And it’s purely as a compliment that I named my dog after him).
I watched the first episode tonight of The Apprentice, Mark Burnett’s new reality show. It really is Survivor in the corporate boardroom, with Manhattan as the island that the losers are booted off of. The show is insufferable, and some sort of masterpiece, for the way it epitomizes everything that is most sick about American society, from the idealization of “teamwork” among people who are just waiting to stab one another in the back, to the inane business-speak that permeates any understanding of activity and character, to the way the 16 contestants grovel before Donald Trump as they seek to curry his favor, to the way Trump himself eats it up and takes it as simply being his due, to the nouveau riche vulgarity of Trump’s apartment (I can just imagine the scorn with which the old rich would regard its collection of fake Italian Renaissance artifacts), about which Trump expansively explains that “this is what it’s all about”, to the gender stereotypes running rampant throughout the show (the initial contestants are 8 men and 8 women, they are divided into teams by gender, and the women seem to be showing their business acumen by competing as to who can wear the shortest skirts and the highest heels), to the conclusion in which the evidently Jewish man is the one whom Trump decides to (as it were) banish from the island first (I don’t think this is a coincidence)
I watched the first episode tonight of The Apprentice, Mark Burnett’s new reality show. It really is Survivor in the corporate boardroom, with Manhattan as the island that the losers are booted off of. The show is insufferable, and some sort of masterpiece, for the way it epitomizes everything that is most sick about American society, from the idealization of “teamwork” among people who are just waiting to stab one another in the back, to the inane business-speak that permeates any understanding of activity and character, to the way the 16 contestants grovel before Donald Trump as they seek to curry his favor, to the way Trump himself eats it up and takes it as simply being his due, to the nouveau riche vulgarity of Trump’s apartment (I can just imagine the scorn with which the old rich would regard its collection of fake Italian Renaissance artifacts), about which Trump expansively explains that “this is what it’s all about”, to the gender stereotypes running rampant throughout the show (the initial contestants are 8 men and 8 women, they are divided into teams by gender, and the women seem to be showing their business acumen by competing as to who can wear the shortest skirts and the highest heels), to the conclusion in which the evidently Jewish man is the one whom Trump decides to (as it were) banish from the island first (I don’t think this is a coincidence)
Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).
Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
Yes, I know. Me and My Brother, by the Ying Yang Twins, is nothing but stupid (stoopid?) party music, heavily misogynistic and relentless in its praise of getting fucked up, wearing its ghetto “authenticity” on its sleeve (not the least through endless repetitions of the n-word), but probably appealing mostly to frat boys. Still, I can’t help myself: I basically ignore the words, but I find the beats infectious. The Twins’ production is at the opposite extreme from Timbaland’s: maximalist instead of minimalist, hitting you over the head instead of subtly insinuating, putting the listener (well, me, at least) in a hysterical state of sensori-motor overload. (And I really do mean that “motor” part: listening to this album on headphones, from my iPod, while sitting on the bus, I can’t exactly dance, but I feel that twitching all through my nervous system, from my ears down to my toes).
Yes, I know. Me and My Brother, by the Ying Yang Twins, is nothing but stupid (stoopid?) party music, heavily misogynistic and relentless in its praise of getting fucked up, wearing its ghetto “authenticity” on its sleeve (not the least through endless repetitions of the n-word), but probably appealing mostly to frat boys. Still, I can’t help myself: I basically ignore the words, but I find the beats infectious. The Twins’ production is at the opposite extreme from Timbaland’s: maximalist instead of minimalist, hitting you over the head instead of subtly insinuating, putting the listener (well, me, at least) in a hysterical state of sensori-motor overload. (And I really do mean that “motor” part: listening to this album on headphones, from my iPod, while sitting on the bus, I can’t exactly dance, but I feel that twitching all through my nervous system, from my ears down to my toes).
My new book on display at the MLA convention. (U of Minnesota Press booth in the book exhibit).
My new book on display at the MLA convention. (U of Minnesota Press booth in the book exhibit).