june

[A service announcement...]

Posting has been a little sporadic here of late. And it is likely to be even more so over the next month, as I am away for most of June.

Thanks to an invitation from Craig, I'll be presenting on (yes) "Pirate Studies" at the so-called "Learneds" in Toronto next week.

Then almost immediately I'll be off to Buenos Aires and Asunción.

And though I hope to write something about Schmitt in that time, and perhaps some reports on the state of things in Argentina and Paraguay, these bulletins may well be brief at best.

Normal service will be resumed around the end of the month.

[Here ends the service announcement.]

Bruce

It turns out (wood s lot tells me) that yesterday was Bruce Cockburn's birthday.

I don't have much to say about Bruce, and don't even listen to his music much if at all any more; at a certain stage, it somewhat lost its appeal. But, back in the day, songs such as "Nicaragua" and "Dust and Diesel" were a large part of the motivation for me to go to Central America in the 1980s, and so to start the process that has led to my teaching Latin American studies for a living.

And one of the highlights of being in Nicaragua in 1988 was to find out that he was in town, cycle to his hotel, grab him and chat for an hour or so. Later, he played a small concert at an Arts Centre in Managua, of which I no doubt have the only bootleg recording in existence.

Meanwhile, he also was one of the first Canadians I had heard much about. And I know that next week, in Toronto, songs such as "The Coldest Night of the Year" will come to mind, as I too try to take in "Yonge Street at a glance."

We saw him play Vancouver three years ago (on my birthday). At some point, while Bruce was tuning up (as he endlessly does between songs), a woman shouted out "Sexy Beast!" It was so un-Canadian, and so unlike Bruce's followers, so unlike Bruce, that it took the whole theatre aback for a moment. Bewildered, he shook his head, thanked her politely, and went on with the next song.

So here's to Bruce (belatedly).

advert

My friend Jeremy, frequent commenter and sometime guest poster on this very blog, is shortly to release to the world his new book, Bourdieu's Politics. (Let us pass over in silence the typo in the subtitle on Routledge's website...) Here's the blurb:

In the last decade of his career, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu became involved in a series of high-profile political interventions, defending the cause of striking students and workers, speaking out in the name of illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the unemployed, challenging the incursion of the market into the field of artistic and intellectual production.

The first sustained analysis of Bourdieu's politics, this study will seek to assess the validity of his claims as to the distinctiveness and superiority of his own field theory as a tool of political analysis.

He has kindly sent me the proofs, and it looks good.

Jezzer has already written the single best book on Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (available in North America via The University of Michigan Press).

He has for some time been promising that he will progress from his love/hate relationship with the man Pierre, and move on to thinking and writing about such things as French intellectuals' passion for jazz. (Cf. the Derrida movie, which we watched last night.) But in the meantime...

Order Bourdieu's Politics now. (For a mere £65!)

reticence

Bob Dylan is 65 today.

I've seen Dylan live a few times: in London, Earl's Court, about fifteen years ago; in Manchester, the MEN Arena, about four years ago; and most recently in Vancouver, the Orpheum, just last year.

Each time there's been something unimpressive about these shows. Dylan refuses the spectacle more than any other musician I've seen. No doubt others refuse it more: The Jesus and Mary Chain, for instance, used to be notorious for playing sets sometimes only ten minutes long with their backs to the audience. At the same time, in both cases, this refusal is part of these performers' mystique: the fact that they refuse to perform is what makes their performances stand out. Put another way, they perform refusal.

In Dylan's Vancouver show, he and his band were arranged in a rough semi-circle around the stage. At the center of this semi-circle, and so front and center of the stage, was a microphone on a stand. One expected and hoped that at any moment Dylan would break formation from his backing singers, and come to the microphone. But though he did enter the semi-circle a couple of times, this was mainly for his harmonica solos, and the stand at the front remained an empty site of non-performance.

No doubt part of the point is also the notion that there is no distinction between Dylan and his band. Indeed, he seems to want us to believe that we are simply eavesdropping onto some kind of jam in which a few friends are laying back and playing some riffs. Not that there's much all that laid back about (what I'll continue to call) the show: everything was up tempo, with scarcely a break between songs, each of which came to sound increasingly similar. It was as though we were witnessing one long medley of Dylan cover versions.

"Witnessing" is probably the best description of the subject position that Dylan appears to want for his audience. Neither spectator nor participant, we seem to be there but strangely not quite there in his mind. Only the most minimal gestures (a slight wave of the harmonica after a solo) are overt signs that he even notices our presence.

There's something attractive, almost seductive about such reticence. But it is of course all in immensely bad faith. There's no doubt that Dylan is the star, however much he may wish to deny it. And we are indeed spectators: spectators of a performance of a very particular type.

It's been some thirty five years since David Bowie articulated Dylan's relationship with his public (the public?) as one of abandonment or betrayal:

Now hear this Robert Zimmerman
Though I don't suppose we'll meet
Ask your good friend Dylan
If he'd gaze a while down the old street
Tell him we've lost his poems
So they're writing on the walls
Give us back our unity
Give us back our family
You're every nation's refugee
Don't leave us with their sanity
("Song for Bob Dylan")

This was after Dylan's famous withdrawal, following his 1966 motorcycle accident. It's no great coincidence that the recent fuss around Dylan (the Scorcese documentary with its accompanying CD and book, "Bob Dylan's American Journey" at Seattle's EMP, even Bob's own Chronicles, however coy) has centered around this pre-1966 period. It's as though we were seeking to reconnect, to bring Dylan back. And so ironically to bring back a presumed "unity" even from the social divisiveness of the 1960s protest movements with which the early Dylan was so associated.

But the real truth of Dylan is in this betrayal, this reticence, a sort of mutiny from above which may even have begun before 1966, but is now ensconced and strangely celebrated in the "never-ending tour".

tears revisited

My friend Susana notes that it would be better to describe The Take as emotional, rather than affective. And it's certainly true that what we see is affect captured: affect given a subject and object. In Brian Massumi's terms, this is emotion.

So these Argentine men define their subjectivity through the emotions that they express: their pain at failing to fulfil their duties as a husband or father in fact underlines the sense that their proper role is as pater familias; their pleasure in labour confirms and justifies their identity as workers.

Likewise, their emotions have very specific objects: sentiment ties them to other people (wives, fathers) and things (machines, commodities).

In short, the emotions that the film projects upon its human subjects define it as melodrama, a hackneyed tale of the desire for work and social integration, rather than the social disintegration that a more (self-)critical approach would demand.

And yet, because emotion is affect captured, we can still read back affect through emotion. There is always something that goes beyond or escapes.

Indeed, the very fact that the film's attention to male affect is so excessive already troubles its attempts at a neat liberal resolution. The film takes too much pleasure in the men's tears on which its cameras linger. There's something improper about its attention, so often willing the men to cry, that we might wonder about the limits of propriety itself.

And so it is perhaps that this somewhat disturbing excess offers a line of flight along which we could imagine other forms of community, other forms of solidarity.

dialectic

An interesting post from Steve Shaviro over at The Pinocchio Theory, on "Pluralism and Antagonism". The nub of his argument is that a Deleuzian anti-dialecticism might re-invigorate Marxist categories.

In this situation, contradiction and negativity have become rather sterile resources for change, I think. Deleuze’s notion of the virtual allows for a wider range of resources. Instead of a dialectic, Deleuze (and Guattari) propose a vision of how capitalism simultaneously unleashes and regulates fluxes of energy and matter, of desires and subjects and objects.

But my question concerns the opening phrase, "in this situation." Shaviro refers to the post-1960s stagnation of the Left and radical theory itself. This is the period that I'd describe in terms of posthegemony.

My question is whether we should assume that the dialectic ever functioned as it claimed to do. For Deleuze, surely not.

Or to put it another way. At Brock, Negri repeatedly insisted that the dialectic of labour and capital was at an end. But a more thorough-going Deleuzianism would insist that there never was such a dialectic.

We have moved, in other words, from a period in which the concept of the dialectic was at best well-rooted only in appearances (and so thoroughly ideological), to a period in which its prior bankruptcy is clearer now than ever.

I'm interested in thinking through the nature of that transition, which is not (cannot be) as far as I can see an transition in the functioning of politics and economics themselves. Rather, what has changed is only a certain regime of visibility or of epistemology. Which is not to say that an epistomological change has no effects. But collapsing one transition into the other too quickly is rather problematic.

Meanwhile, I know I've featured this image before, but even so...

"Girl Refuting Hegel's Dialectic Model of History," by Michael Laster

tears

In Southern California for a conference, I finally got around to seeing Avi Lewis's and Naomi Klein's film The Take (official website here), which champions the Argentine movement to take over and recuperate abandoned factories.

Before the screening, I joked with some friends that the movie would most likely say more about Canada than about Argentina. But so indeed it turned out.

The Take gives us the Canadian dream: young, idealistic do gooders, who tell us they have for years lived with "tear gas by day, theory by night," spreading the word that an alternative is possible. Nothing revolutionary, mind you: merely the small difference of a slightly kinder, slightly more gentle capitalism.

Lewis and KIein are blithely unconcerned by the fact that the justification for the factory takeovers is presented very much in line with neoliberal rationality itself. We are told that worker-run businesses are more "efficient," because their workings are more transparent and because they have been cleansed of the corruption of their former owners. The state is warned not to intervene against the enterprising former workers, who show magnificent entrepreneurship as they lovingly care for and reactivate their sadly abandoned machines.

Obviously, no viewer can resist the banal liberal point that we'd rather see the workers Freddy and Lalo in charge of the plant than the Montgomery Burns style caricature of a former owner. But precisely the irresistability of this point is problematic.

And what's most striking is how much this is a film about affect, motivated by affect. You'd struggle hard to find a movie with more shots of men crying. The camera lingers on the tears rolling down their tough porteño cheeks. The men cry with nostalgia when they tour the ruined factory. They cry with joy when the provincial legislature gives them the legal right to return. They cry with frustration that their sense of self and masculine dignity has been humilliated, now they can no longer provide for their family (the wife's make up, the children's happy meals).

But finally, the film's closing sequence is a long montage of workers smiling, beaming, laughing in their pride and satisfaction as they joyfully invest their labour power into the production of value.

Simone Weil would have been pleased.

For they all worked happily ever after.


Update: tears revisited.

conundrum

The discussion over at the Valve about whether or not literary critics are or should be fans of the authors they study reminds me of what I hereby propose to call "the Allende conundrum."

Anyone who works on Latin American literature will be familiar with the scenario. You're at a party, or bar, or whatever. Someone asks you what you do. Teach. What? Latin American Studies. Oh, what? Y'know, literature, culture, politics. "Oh," comes the reply. "That's great. I so loved that Chilean author. What's her name? The one who wrote House of the Spirits."

Here's the conundrum. Should one encourage such interest in one's field? Or should one reveal that, well, in fact just about every Latin Americanist critic with a shred of self-respect hates Isabel Allende.

And the worst thing about the second option is that readers of Allende think that, by reading her, they are proving themselves not only cultured (Third World literature! Magic realism!) but also politically sound (Women's writing! Exiled niece of overthrown Socialist president!).

In other words, by pouring cold water on their enthusiasm for Allende, one risks undoing what is in fact the great motivation and for many the rationale of the field itself: that seductive blend of aesthetics and political commitment encapsulated in the opening lines of my friend Jean Franco's pathbreaking The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (1967):

An intense social concern has been the characteristic of Latin-American art for the last hundred and fifty years. Literature--and even painting and music--have played a social role, with the artist acting as guide, teacher and conscience of his country. (11)

Readers seek vicarious satisfaction from this heady mix. On the whole, people who read Latin American fiction think that they are better people for so doing. They expect to be rewarded with some kind of new respect for revealing how much they love Isabel Allende (or García Márquez, or Borges, or... well, generally the list stops there).

But the truth is, Allende is rubbish.

And she's not alone, of course. There's plenty of Latin American literature that's mediocre, reactionary, boring, unimaginative... And even the good stuff surely doesn't make you a better person for reading it.

I'll admit that there's more than a dose of elitism in this reaction against Allende. But that's far from the end of the story. In any case, surely we should find ways to work with these rather strange affective investments, rather than simply debunking them. In the meantime, though, I remain reluctant at parties to be drawn into discussions about what I do.

I'm sure that there are other fields in which something like the same conundrum prevails. South Asianists probably hate hearing how much people love Rushdie, or are fascinated by Hinduism. Physicists don't want to answer questions about A Brief History of Time. And so on and so forth. At stake in part is the difference between the popular conception of a field of study, and how that field is sensed or understood by those within it.

But the Allende conundrum in this, its original, form seems to hold an especially concentrated series of contradictions and ambivalences.

towel

Susan's been wanting me to blog about what I'll call "the curious incident of the towel in the morning."

But I told her this was "not that kind of blog." Sorry.

buddies!

After so much enmity in the blogosphere (if sometimes of a semi-affectionate nature), and given that this form seems particularly prone to dispute, occasionally ironized or celebrated as "snark," it's refreshing to see some reflections on friendship.

Angela is perhaps shy to mention it, but she's put up some interesting thoughts on mateship, in the wake of the mining melodrama in Beaconsfield. Glen responds.

I wonder how nationally circumscribed that discussion is, the "mate" as Australian icon of a rather particular type. Indeed, that's partly what's at issue in the disagreement between Angela and Glen.

Meanwhile, over on Charlotte Street, Mark Kaplan continues an ongoing series of meditations on friendship, most recently with reference to Blanchot, Benjamin and Brecht, and Nietzsche.

Now, however much my friends are important, I've mentioned before I'm also keen on the limits to friendship, the indifference of what Alberto Moreiras terms the "non-friend," who can in some ways be equated with the subaltern. At issue here is the challenge of living together beyond like or dislike.

It's the question of community and exclusiveness. And then there's love.

Perhaps all of this will return when we start reading Schmitt.

Cross-posted from Long Sunday.

storytelling

In his autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, Louis Althusser twice provides the same capsule definition of materialism:

"My objective: never to tell myself stories, which is the only 'definition' of materialism I have ever subscribed to" (169)

"'Not to indulge in storytelling' still remains for me the one and only definition of materialism" (221)

["'Ne pas se raconter d'histoire,' cette formule reste pour moi la seule définition du matérialisme."]

I like this definition, for reasons I've hinted at before. The real follows no narrative; stories are always elaborated around, and an inevitable distortion of, the real.

Meanwhile, Susan is getting excited about boredom. (Catchphrase: "boredom, not as boring as you think.") It's in part an elaboration of her suburbs project. (Catchphrase: "suburbs, not as boring as you think.") She's enjoying A Philosophy of Boredom. (The Times: "Lars Svendsen (boring name), a professor of philosophy (boring subject) from Norway (boring country), has written a quite fascinating book.")

And I've mentioned boredom before, both as a kind of degree zero of affect, and in terms of Agamben's discussion of Heidegger.

But if we think of boredom as a result of narrative failure--the point at which stories fail to entertain--could it not be recast as the materialist affect par excellence?

As Deleuze says, in what is one of my favourite lines of his (which I've also cited before): "Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body."

"These are tough times for boredom", claims Michael Crowley. I'm not so sure. The fact that we endlessly seek distraction (Crowley mentions ubiquitous TV and the "wormhole" of the internet) signals less "boredom's demise" than how easily distracted we are, precisely because of our underlying disaffection.

We flip through the channels and click through the pages, listessly, mechanically. We have an ever smaller attention span for the stories we are told. Are we then close to a "materialist way"?

The images in this post are from Martin Parr's "Boring, Oregon" project. Parr is today's high priest of boredom, with Bored Couples and the Boring Postcards trilogy. See Jonathan Bell's review and also a fine collection of Swedish boring postcards.

common

I've been lax with the blog recently. For good reasons and bad. I do have thoughts for future posts lined up, however, so expect more diagram poems, and a critique of indigenism soon. Plus something rather more directly on hegemony and posthegemony. In the meantime...

I was at an interesting conference the other weekend, over on the island, on the Commons. George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici were speaking, among others, including local activists.

At the end there was a long, plenary discussion session. As always in such sessions, the talk rather went in circles, and mostly concerned what had been left out of the conference presentations, rather than the themes that they had in fact introduced. (And I was as guilty of making such points as anyone else.)

Then my friend Fiona suggested that the issue of the commons was a good one to rally around to protest the upcoming Vancouver Winter Olympics.

She pointed to the ways in which preparations for the Olympics involve a series of privatizations, backhanders to local developers, and attempts to "clean up" the city's Downtown Eastside (Canada's poorest postcode) by cracking down on the homeless, banishing them to the suburbs.

(It seems that the Olympics protest site, a parody of the official site, has been forced down, apart from a single page disputing the emblem chosen for Vancouver 2010. But see 2010 Olympic Games Watch, although these seem to be mainly a group of concerned NIMBY taxpayers. More along the lines of Fiona's criticisms is Naomi Klein's article, "The Olympics Land Grab". See also this environmental protest against the highway development to Whistler.)

But as I said at the time, I'd argue that the Olympics, and the hullaballoo surrounding them, manifest a rather more complex inter-relation between common, public, and private than could be summarized in a simple cry that "we are the commons, you the privatizers." I was roundly attacked for saying this at the conference, and I'm no simple-minded Olympics booster, but...

The driving ideology of the Olympic movement, after all, is of a transnational liberal universalism. And however much the Olympic organization fails to live up to their own ideals, that ideology continues to have its effects. It translates into a public service ethos that requires some attention paid to sustainability and even First Nations issues. Moreover, and more pragmatically, the Olympics are an occasion for massive public works projects, particularly improving transport infrastructure, but also housing as well as sports venues, that are on the whole arguably in the public good. Much more so, that is, than the activities of most private capitalist enterprises.

I further noted that in my own experience the various (failed) attempts by Manchester to secure the Olympic Games (though they did eventually end up holding the 2002 Commonwealth Games, as a sort of compromise) were in fact crucial to the renovation of a sense of communal and urban identity. Some of which, yes, led for instance to massive land speculation and milliion-pound flats in the city centre, while deprivation continued round the corner. But much of which was, truly, inspiring and invigorating.

Alongside the 1996 IRA bomb, which opened up parts of the city centre that had not been public space since the middle ages, and alongside the city's cultural creativity (music, sport), Manchester's (leftist) city council's determination to host the games played its part in a post-industrial renovation and sense of civic pride which has mostly facilitated, rather than ennervating, a sense of the common.

Finally, I'd add the following: what makes the Games big business (for whatever profits local developers reap are by comparison peanuts) is that they enable global advertizers to sell global audiences via global television deals to global corporations: McDonalds, VISA, what have you.

And the interest that these global corporations have in the Games is precisely the fact that, in these days of market fragmentation and the decline of public service broadcasting, they are (like the Superbowl and the World Cup, but even more so) among the few things that many millions around the world have, well, in common. It's true that Nike et. al. are trying to convert this common affect into something that can raise a profit, but why deny that brief glimpse of affective commonality?

In other words, why not rescue something of the (perhaps utopian) commonality that still resides in the Olympics, rather than, inaccurately, damning them as simply another set of enclosures?

derealization

It was Marx's 188th birthday yesterday, as s0metim3s, carlos rojas, and Steven Shaviro, among others, note. I hope to write up something apropos before long.

But it is Freud's today. And old Sigismund would be 150 were he still alive, which is quite a milestone by anybody's standards.

Moreover, I have returned to thinking about ruins, one of Freud's many obsessions. Freud took a keen interest in archaeology, and his home in Hampstead was filled with a collection of over 2,000 curios that had been excavated from the Ancient World: no wonder the London Freud Museum should comment that, surrounded by his antiquities, Freud "worked in a museum of his own creation". (See also The Vienna Freud Museum.)

As the museum further indicates, these curios were prized for more than their aesthetic value alone. Freud believed they told something of the truth of pyschoanalysis and its theories of the unconscious:

One example of this is Freud's explanation to a patient that conscious material "wears away" while what is unconscious is relatively unchanging: "I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation."

Freud often compared the unconscious to buried ruins, and the task of the analyst to that of the archaeologist, uncovering ever deeper strata for the prizes hidden in the depths, clues to the ways of life only dimly discerned from mere surface inspection.

But in a late essay, Freud turns this metaphor on its head. In "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," ruins stand for what is clearly in view, in front of the analyst's face. And the issue here is why what is so straightforwardly visible, uncompromisingly material, should be strangely denied or disavowed.

Written in 1936, "A Disturbance of Memory" is in fact a kind of birthday present, dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland "on the occasion of his seventieth birthday." And age, old age, is a constant theme. Freud notes that he himself is "ten years older" than Rolland, and that his "powers of production are at an end" (On Metapsychology 447). There is, therefore, from the outset a melancholy note sounded, a lament for times past and fading strength.

The essay's topic is a recollection from 1904 ("a generation ago" [447]) that has "kept on recurring to [his] mind." It concerns a trip Freud took with his brother, a holiday south to the Mediterranean, first to Trieste, with the intention of continuing on to Corfu. In Trieste, however, the brothers' plans changed. A business acquaintance advises against Corfu and strongly suggests that the two sail for Athens, instead. For some reason, this suggestion provokes in the two travellers "a discontented and irresolute state of mind" (448). Yet, almost unconsciously ("as though it were a matter of course") they book a passage for Athens, and soon enough set out to see the sights.

Freud's reaction to the ancient ruins of which he has heard so much is, he admits, decidedly curious:

When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: "So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!" To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful. [. . .] The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather some expression of delight or admiration. (449)

The ruins are an instance of what is incontrovertible, plainly in front of Freud's face, but whose reality for some reason some part of him chooses to doubt. What should be a source of affirmation ("delight or admiration") becomes instead the occasion for a deep scission within the self. And Freud goes on to describe this as "a 'feeling of derealization' ['Entfremdungsgefühl']" (453).

This derealization is itself, of course, another mode of denial, of repression. And Freud notes that it is the mirror image of the fantasy, or the "hallucinations," more readily associated with psychic disturbance, and indeed with Freudian theory. Where a fantasy conjures up the unreal, the delusion, its counterpart derealization conjures away what is plainly real. And if fantasies are always images of possession, of incorporation, "in the derealizations we are anxious to keep something out of us" (453); "they aim at keeping something away from the ego, at disavowing it" (454).

Interestingly, Freud takes as a prime example of derealization the famous "moor's last sigh," when the last ruler of Muslim Andalucía, Boabdil, reacted to news of the fall of Alhama:

He feels that this loss means the end of his rule. But he will not "let it be true," he determines to treat the news as non arrivé. The verse runs:

"Cartas le fueron venidas
que Alhama era ganada:
las cartas echó en el fuego,
y al mensajero matara"

["Letters had reached him telling that Alhama was taken. He threw the letter in the fire and killed the messenger."] (454-455)

But Freud observes that what is "truly paradoxical" about his own behaviour on the Acropolis is that, far from denying or repressing a trauma or displeasure, his defence mechanism serves to ward off "something which, on the contrary, promises to bring a high degree of pleasure." At last, a dream attained: why deny it, as though it were "too good to be true" (450)?

And Freud's explanation takes recourse in the concept of the super ego. Rather than warding off an external threat, derealization is symptom of an internal frustration, which "commands [the sufferer] to cling to the external one"; and the internal frustration itself is "a residue of the punitive agency of our childhood" (451).

So back further in time Freud goes: beyond the scene of writing as an eighty year old in 1936; beyond his recollections of a trip undertaken at the age of forty-eight, in 1904; back to his childhood, to his schooldays in the 1860s, and back (but of course) to the familial scene, to the figure he refers to, refracted through an anecdote in which he compares himself to Napoleon, in the strangely distanced, formal and foreign, turn of phrase "Monsieur nôtre Père" (456).

It is not, then--and this at last is the "disturbance of memory" signalled in the essay's title--that at school the young Freud had doubted the Acropolis's existence. Rather:

It seemed to me beyond the realms of possibility that I should travel so far--that I should "go such a long way." This was linked up with the limitations and poverty of our conditions of life in my youth.

[. . .]

But here we come upon the solution of the little problem of why it was that already at Trieste we interfered with our enjoyment of the voyage to Athens. It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having gone such a long way; there was something about it that was wrong, that from earliest times had been forbidden. It was something to do with a child's criticism of his father, with the undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier childhood. It seems as though the essence of success was to have got further than one's father, and as though to excel one's father was still something forbidden. (455, 456)

No surprises here, then. In a caricature of pop cult images of pyschoanalysis, the whole incident with the ruins comes to revolve around an Oedipal anxiety: the desire to supersede the father, and the attendant feelings of guilt. The short-cut to interpretation, as always, being to intone in heavily accented English: "Tell me about your father."

Fortunately, and this is the great delight with Freud, he leaves himself open to another interpretation altogether: one that is right in front of his face, if only he'd see it.

For again, the essay ends as it had started, with a lament as to the analyst's own declining powers, a nostalgic sigh from one old man to another, on the occasion of the somewhat younger man's birthday:

And now you will no longer wonder that the recollection of this incident on the Acropolis should have troubled me so often since I myself have grown old and stand in need of forbearance and can travel no longer. (456)

Freud admits that he himself is now needy and dependent. He lacks the mobility of his youth. He can easily be overtaken. Is not the issue then less his own father, than his position as father, literal and metaphorical, of the movement that he started but can no longer keep up with?

Literal in that ("Tell me about your daughter"?) Freud has already referred to his daughter, Anna, precisely at the moment that he introduced the theme of ego defences:

An investigation is at this moment being carried on close at hand which is devoted to the study of these methods of defence: my daughter, the child analyst, is writing a book upon them. (454)

Surely there are some revealing turns of phrase here, though one would have also to examine the original German text.

The "child analyst," in English at least, might suggest both that she analyzes children, and that she is herself still (to Freud) but a child, if only in terms of analysis. But is there not some anxiety in the assurance that Anna remains "close at hand": close because he now needs her close by, to continue his legacy; too close to comfort because it is she who is the future author, catching up on Freud while his own "powers of production are at an end"; perhaps too likely to stray, close now but soon distant, superseding or betraying her father?

And metaphorical in that... Well, can we not read this whole tale, and the birthday essay that has accreted around it, as a metaphor for the fate of psychoanalysis itself? Is not the split subject that gazes at the old, split rocks of the Parthenon the split subject of pyschoanalysis?

Though Freud starts to discuss "the extraordinary condition of 'double conscience'" as a means to understand this condition (453), all too soon he disavows this very concept: "But all of this is so obscure and has been so little mastered scientifically that I must refrain from talking about it any more to you" (454). Freud the little Napoleon chooses silence, repression, because of an anxiety patently about the possibility of losing mastery, about the limits of a method he would like to convince us is in some way scientific.

And yet it is precisely this double consciousness that is most startling, most plainly in view in the entire anecdote! Indeed, the entire story would be impossible were it not for the "second person," whose astonishment at the "first person"'s derealization functions to insist that his denial is indeed in some way pathological. This second person is on the side of reality, of affirmation, of a literal reading of what stares the analyst straight in the face.

And is not this second person, found within the analyst, and enabling his melancholy remembrance, his sad intepretations, the hint of a psychoanalysis that would not be bound to the super ego, to the childhood traumas imposed by a fading father figure? Doesn't this second person, the other side of Freud's double consciousness, hold the keys to a schizoanalysis? A schizoanalysis that begins with the "split personality" (453-454) that so shakes Freud and his illusion of scientific mastery that he has to guard his silence and return (oh, once again) to the old mournful tale of fathers and sons, itself only a cover for a still more pathetic anxiety over fathers and daughters?

It is double consciousness, which includes the wild, unscientific analysis so feared by Freud, that makes the entire procedure productive, that gives the lie to Freud's own self-pitying complaint that production is "at an end." If only it were at an end, thinks Freud; if only he could put a stop to it. It's so evidently in his face. And yet it is this other side to pyschoanalysis that he is most anxious to disavow.

Despite himself, Freud let a genii out of the bottle that still, 150 years after his birth, returns to enliven but also (affirmatively, joyfully, impiously, youthfully playing among the ruins) traduce and betray, supersede and go beyond, the psychoanalytic enterprise that our birthday boy set in motion. Why deny it?

Cross-posted to Long Sunday.

For more, check out the naked gaze's "Obscene Images (1)".

And for other birthday tributes, see Harold Bloom's "Why Freud Matters", Paul Broks's "The Ego Trip", Will Hutton's "A time to celebrate, not denigrate, Freud", or Christina Patterson's "A Freud for all seasons". MotherPie offers some feminist commentary and a whole series of links. And here's Freud's last living patient.

Plus a site dedicated to the anniversary.

word

A meme is doing the rounds, on dissertations' last words. (I first saw this meme via Tabitha.)

So, the last word of my dissertation was... "multitude."

Which is in some ways obvious, but precisely because it is so obvious, it surprised me.

In fact, however, that's the last word of my "postface." And that postface is meant to be in tension with the concluding, chapter, whose last word (as I did already know) is "dead."

Other people's last words have included disruption, discourse, cruel, fade, request, environment, data, harvest, years, and possible. Oh, and knitting, which I find kind of funny for some reason.

I remember that my friend Art had a great final word. Update: I have finally checked it out, and though Art himself swears that his last word was "home," in the copy of his dissertation that I have, it is "floodwaters." As in "a tomato, an ear of corn, floodwaters."