2013 in Shit: Taipei

“That is a pity. You should insist. Berma in Phèdre, in the Cid; well, she's only an actress, if you like, but you know that I don't believe very much in the 'hierarchy' of the arts." As he spoke I noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the 'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." But then, if it was so absurd, why did he say the 'hierarchy'? A moment later he went on: "Her acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any masterpiece of art in the world, as--oh, I don't know--" and he began to laugh, "shall we say the Queens of Chartres?" Until then I had supposed that his horror of having to give a serious opinion was something Parisian and refined, in contrast to the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I had imagined also that it was characteristic of the mental attitude towards life of the circle in which Swann moved, where, by a natural reaction from the 'lyrical' enthusiasms of earlier generations, an excessive importance was given to small and precise facts, formerly regarded as vulgar, and anything in the nature of 'phrase-making' was banned. But now I found myself slightly shocked by this attitude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face with generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even having an opinion, and to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy, some precise but unimportant detail. But in so doing he did not take into account that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief (as they say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had an importance of its own.

Is it weird to claim that Taipei put me in mind of Proust? Not in the way of the previous quote; I only stumbled across that, having entirely forgotten it, looking for something else. What called In Search of Lost Time to mind was this:

In the distance, Cleveland’s three tallest buildings, each with a different shape and style of architecture and lighting, were spaced oddly far apart, like siblings in their thirties, in a zany sitcom. After spending their lives “hating” one another, in a small town, they moved to different cities and were happy, but then got coincidentally transferred by their employers to the same medium-size city. They were all named Frank.

Which, of course:

Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in that expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting them by a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, was come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and yet the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight. Then the steeple of Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by the light of the setting sun, which, even at that distance, I could see playing and smiling upon their sloped sides. We had been so long in approaching them that I was thinking of the time that must still elapse before we could reach them when, of a sudden, the carriage, having turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had flung themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop before being dashed against the porch of the church.

We resumed our course; we had left Martinville some little time, and the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already disappeared, when, lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight, its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of farewell, their sun-bathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; then the road changed direction, they veered in the light like three golden pivots, and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of fields. They made me think, too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall; and while we drew away from them at a gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and, after some awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more, now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and resigned, and so vanishing in the night.

Is it safe to say yet that I don’t have much to say about Taipei? It sure isn’t as good as Richard Yates. It does include Tao Lin’s “when i was five i went fishing with my family” which is a really incredible thing, though. So there’s that.

I suspect that I could get a lot of mileage out of pulling a quote and dissecting it; one of the few pages that I dog-eared in my copy was for the following:

At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life--and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate distraction that was currently death--technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.

I suspect, also, that everyone knows exactly where a “critical” reading of a passage like that would go; straight to didacticism. Is there a way to talk about Tao Lin’s writing, critically, without pathologizing or pedagogizing him? Certainly there must be. And since I have little interest in declaring Tao Lin a technological determinist or “correcting” his views on the way in which society is structured. There seems to be little room to engage Lin in a way that Gawker doesn’t already dismiss him, and what a dull game to play.

”What do you mean?” said Paul vaguely.
“I think he died,” said Juan, and they slowed to a kind of loitering, as a policeman, behind them, walked past. They stood in place, then continued walking.
“When did they die?”
“I’m not really sure,” said Juan.
“He died,” said Paul grinning. “How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did he die?”
“I don’t know. I just know he died.”

I could talk, again, about his work, I suppose. About how his apparently monovalent voice is always navigated through a set of differences in his different approaches to forms. How that strict formal approach seems to totalize into the technological determinism of Taipei, maybe. I could talk, too, about how what really reminds me of Proust in Taipei is the structural metonymy, the way that the universal is presented only to be usurped by the particular, and with no clear moment of transition.

I’d rather, though, let someone else figure out for what Tao Lin is holding a brief, as they say.

2013 in Shit: Oblivion

Oblivion kind of completely overwhelmed me. I didn't particularly like it, but I can't imagine that matters all that much. The closest thing I could do to absorbing it was to immediately begin to catalog.

The most egregious reference in the film is to Star Wars; at one point there is literally a shot of two TI-Fighters chasing an X-Wing through a ravine. I mean they are automated security drones, and the X-Wing is Tom Cruise's ship, but that's bullshit. For a brief moment the idyllic postapocalyptic landscape is the ventilation shaft (or what the fuck ever) of the Death Star, and that's fucking weird.

Then there's how the Big Bad is basically Hal as metastasized through the obelisk, which makes Civilization's Last Great Hope Gone Horribly Wrong either a standing critique of SF Capital or the slick aesthetic of an impending already established corporate oligopoly.

Which definitely is in conversation with the Tusken raiders cum Rebel Scum (or wait, they might be the human resistance stationed on Zion? By way of a much sartorially toned down Mad Max?). Right? I feel like I'm missing something there, because the other obvious referent, in terms of structuring the story, is Moon, which bridges the faceless corporate enemy and the human posthuman resistance, the techno tekhne of nonhuman persons in empty landscapes as unwitting contractors to (malevolent) alien intelligences? There are only so many ways to cyberpunk without Harrison Ford in gothic Los Angeles, you know, which is probably a blessing.

But then too there's the lie of idleness, of idyllic reactionary stasis, of the drippy island abode uncomfortably close to Solaris except as a happy (as though the Moonly uncanny could possibly be lost) ending. No helicopter to yank the camera up and away through intermittent blasts of the fog machine this time around. Just a fucked up family.

Of course, the eternal recurrence of visual trauma is just a way of sneaking the Empire State Building into Twelve Monkeys, but you already knew that. Does that even resolve? Was that tourist viewfinder the same thing that was used in Vertigo? I really doubt it (it was probably the opening shot of The Birds, and almost definitely had nothing to do with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage; not that I'd bet on that though).

Don't say Minority Report, you're just being an asshole.

If I've left out the image of the destroyed moon, it's only for two very clear reasons. The first is that it's definitely not 1Q84. The second is that I have no fucking clue what it is. My limits are quickly reached.

Did you know that the whole movie is just propaganda for the Church of Scientology? Yep. Wow. Uh huh. You don't say. Really interesting stuff. Just remember to stay vigilant (just kidding; Alex Jones has given the go-ahead).

If I called it autophagic that's only because it is the SF megatext. You heard it here first. Was there sex in a pool at some point? Holy hell what is going on. I am not my text's keeper.









Alright, look. I didn't say it in my review of Westfahl's book, because it didn't have a place there, but I'm going to here, because this isn't a place for anything. You know why the cyberpunks won? It didn't have shit to do with their vision of futurity, much less their style or their capturing of the zeitgeist. It wasn't Gibson's unique ability to play a crowd, that's for fucking sure. It was their ability to persuasively argue for the sole existence of a canon that produced them as an inevitability. The kids were, more than anything else, brilliant genealogists. They're still winning, you know. Although their lead has been eroded very quickly over the last decade or so.

That's one reason why it matters how Gibson is canonized. Not that there aren't others, more broad and more specific, but that's big. Oblivion is the megatext, but Gibson and Sterling fucking owned that shit for thirty years. There's good and bad there for sure, but you'd be hard pressed to convince me that it wasn't a fact. Cataloging isn't a neutral act; these moments or structures of allusion don't end just because I can't or won't articulate them further. Geek humor persists in its same form, the reference, for a clear reason; referencing is an exertion of power. In particular, it is the exertion of the power to control the fundamental basis of cultural appreciation. There's good and bad there, for sure.

2013 in Shit (Bonus): The People in the Trees

There is -- there has to be -- a better term than the sutures-showing "unreliable editor," though it seems to me not entirely inapt, here. Ronald Kubodera, sometime assistant to the great Norton Perina, discoverer of the Selene Syndrome, is said editor here, collecting Perina's memoirs from prison letters as the Nobel laureate spends a couple years in prison for raping some of his adopted children. That unreliable narrator says more about certain ideological assumptions we bring to fictional narratives than it does about any kind of construction within them seems obvious, but Perina is, pretty clearly, "unreliable." What is less common, though, is a fictionalized editor who outright admits his own willingness to skip the bits that he doesn't like.

I think that's more uncommon, at least; it seems like more of an assumption than a category which requires articulation. Why introduce a fictional editor into novel else? But then, one of The People in the Trees strengths is its ability to fuse the well written with the impulse to overexplain; Perina may be a scientist from the fifties, but the memoir primarily concerns his involvement in an anthropological expedition to the fictional Micronesian island of Ivu'Ivu, and the lush descriptive prose sits well in this context. Anthropology flatters itself on its lack of assumptions and attention to detail, just as science flatters itself on its existential formulation beyond ethics. Both describe the form of the novel, and both are, if not quite indicted, captured in an unflattering light.

The anthropological trip wins Perina a Nobel based on his discovery of a turtle, the "opa'ivu'eke" (the Micronesian conlang here is mercifully scarce, by the way), which the lost island tribe consumes that allows them a sort of compromised immortality; they maintain the physical well being they had the day they ate it, but are slowly taken by a dementia that no one can quite figure out. The memoir, written in the 1990s, suggests that researchers have since suggested there may have been a property of the turtle's meat which inhibits the production of telomerase, but that these are pure conjecture based on the combination of the fact that the turtles were discovered long before genetic theory had sufficiently developed and were subsequently farmed to extinction by corporations. A lot happens in this novel. Or, to be more accurate: a lot is alluded to in this novel that barely makes it in because the nature of the novel (that is, the nature of this novel, given its imposed restriction as a pedophile's prison memoir as told to a close friend and would-be exonerator) is such that the preponderance of the mundane conditions the possibility of the event. And since this is a 300ish page book, events are not particularly present.At least not in the sense of directly dealt with in the novel or resembling action; mostly what the reader is in for is a series of lengthy descriptions of the jungle.

Which, of course, is fantastic, and well worth reading for how beautiful those descriptions are, as constructions of linguistic technique. But to return to the editor.

I'm not entirely sure why I seem to be returning to House of Leaves, especially when Infinite Jest might be a better parallel, but the way Kubodera functions in the opposite mode as Truant is maybe interesting; where Truant's "paratext" absorbs the Navidson Record by way of its aggressively intruding from the outside, primarily in the form of lengthy personal anecdotes, Kubodera's occasional footnote-forays into personal reminiscence are nothing if not supremely circumspect. The most aggressive of them are likely his early tendency to color the relationship between Perina and his brother Owen, who is spoken of highly throughout the text until the very end; Kubodera ominously hints at this falling out from the beginning, coloring the only significant relationship Perina has (with the possible exception of Tallent, the anthropologist) in a way that reads almost as vindictive.

Kubodera, at other points, offers brief anecdotes from his own visits to Ivu'Ivu or time spent in medical school, but these are generally brief and structured like jokes. Kubodera is very much present through the text in his absence; there's the early admission that he is willing to excise portions that don't fit his narrative, and the genesis of the memoir as a series of letters framed to him, but the story itself is his own vanishing act.

And unlike Truant, he doesn't spiral down; the book's epilogue sees Kubodera and Perina reunited, hidden in an unpsecified location, fugitives from Perina's parole. The last chapter of the novel is a postscript, a passage purposefully withheld by Kubodera in which Perina's crimes, until this point held by Kubodera to be ambiguously true, are explicitly detailed. It's a harsh ending to a novel which has to this point masterfully held in tension its interest and its repulsiveness; the main reason I ended up buying it was that the various informal reviewers all seemed shocked by how sympathetic they felt towards Perina. It made me think of Joyland, and how bizarre it seemed to me to be that folks considered Dev sympathetic, much less relatable.

But then, those reviews aren't inaccurate. Yanagihara gives away from the beginning that Perina is personally despicable, a man who feels entitled to everything, who regularly makes racist pronoucements under the guise of "unpopular opinions," and whose guilt is only in question if you tend to believe that scientists are justified in any behavior if they make important contributions. But it's also a book that refuses to moralize about this, allowing Perina the space to detail his racism and acts of sexual abuse on his own terms, framed as they are by his greatest apologist, and in doing so recapitulates history. There is a reason that Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the Nobel prize-winning physician on whom this story is loosely based, isn't really a household name, and it is because of the kinds of recuperations that Yanagihara here represents, and ultimately undermines.

The ending of The People in the Trees is difficult to think about, much less discuss, but I do think it works not just as shock material but to drive home the difficult assumptions that take place in the act of choosing to read a novel. I spent (this might qualify as a slight digression) much of 2013 reading about video games, and one of the arguments (most often via Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, or Brenda Romero's Train) that the critical community there seems to be dealing with is the assumption of moral complicity with the text that is played. I have problems with this framing (most often seen as something like "the only way to win is to stop playing"), but I think it can be accurately seen as a real issue for both the textual and critical imagination of the medium. It's relatively easy to imagine generalizing that stance to include The People in the Trees, and I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. Part of the problem in generalizing it, of course, is the problem of interface; the lack of a controller or dice or whatever on the part of Yanagihara's novel is generally taken to indicate a (relative) lack of complicity on the part of the consumer. Bioshock is (inter)active while Trees is passive, etc etc.

Of course, the victory by abstinence is always in reference to the narrative content of the game, and never the mechanical. As much as game criticism tends to valorize design decisions, it is rarely capable of dealing with the sort of design which is out of the hands of designers. Like, for instance, the establishment of a win condition; at the granular level this is something that is the object of those decisions, but at the structural and discursive levels it is very much out of their hands. And this is to say nothing of the failure to delineate activity and interactivity, much less the (very recent, I suspect, and in direct contradistinction to the practices of literary reception as they have developed in the past few generations) figuring of literature as passive. Historical conjecture aside, though, this seems to be the dominant cultural understanding; even the language of the "sympathetic" or "relatable" protagonist in literature depends on a fundamental distance, while the language of "immersion" depends on the pretense of the (affective?) obliteration of that distance, if not its actual absence.

One thing that the inclusion of the Postscript (the final chapter, noted as excised from an earlier portion) does is to undermine Kubodera's unreliability as an editor; his admission earlier of excisions is here called into question as he restores the most damning piece of evidence against Perina. What, then, if not his innocence, could Kubodera's editorial decisions be protecting? It's hard to say for certain, although one obvious suggestion is that it is another aspect of Perina's character: his alleged brilliance.

To return one last time to MZD; the inclusion of Truant as the editor of the Navidson Record accomplishes two things with regards to that fictional text; it serves as a testament to the text's affective capacity (and in doing so highlights the sort of affective responses that the reader can experience, as well as burying alternative responses that could also be experienced), and it obscures the question of authorship. Unlike Kubodera, there is no real sense that Truant is beholden to Zampanó, and so his realization that the film which the blind scholar is analyzing may be entirely fabricated is little more, for the reader, than a curiousity. There is little or no stake in salvaging Zampanó's reputation, as far as the structure of the text goes; for The People in the Trees, the opposite is the case.

That Perina is a speculative reimagining of Gajdusek, in the register of the SF/F rather than the H of speculative fiction, testifies to this, as much as any other difference between The People in the Trees and House of Leaves does. That the imaginary is primarily visible through the environment rather than the affect is a consequence of the novel's need, if it can function, to be able to strictly control that environment. So Perina can refer, for instance, to the Ivu'Ivuan's ritual of the a'ina'ina, where boys are inducted into manhood through ritual rape by their elders, and then decry the anthropologists he observed this with for systematically refusing to report on it. Without the environmental control of speculative fiction, this would be a clear case of either self-justification on the part of Perina for his own actions or the issue of moral responsibility in the anthropological profession on the part of Tallent and Esme, Perina's colleagues, as determined by a close reading of the text. Because of the speculation, however, it cannot really concretely be either; the language(s) of fantasy and science fiction are so thoroughly established as generic totalities that their inclusion refuses the possibility of independent verification. One can (and should) insist, for instance, that the most pervasive trope in Fantasy literature, the way that races are presented, is racist at the level of culture; to attempt to argue that within the confines of any particular text is just to get lost in the endless self-justifications of its fandom (though this too can often be worth pursuing). To say that Lord of the Rings is racist is to say that its representations function discursively, that they are conditioned by and (most importantly) reinscribe ideological constructions that organize both economic structures and individual actions around pseudoscientific categories which impact lives. It isn't to say that Frodo is a racist, as he goes about slaughtering thinly-veiled representations of dark skinned folks.

In the same way, it is largely useless to argue on the basis of the text whether Perina's claims of the a'ina'ina ritual are evidence for or against him. What the fact of the necessary ambiguity of their position reflects, however, is the structural role of that unreliable editor, Kubodera, in the construction of the fictional morality of the novel, and its clear status as an extended justification of Perina by Kubodera while the text itself refuses that same justification. The Postscript is precisely that limit point, the way that the novel positions itself against itself inside of the reader. Kubodera claims that he shares the excised section because it is evidence of Perina's love, despite the acts; the description itself is unambiguously the description of an abuser, and Kubodera's justification the exact way that abuse is often justified. If it is a way of avoiding the possibility of complicity by hefting it onto the shoulders of the book's fictional editor, rather than the novelist or the reader, then so be it; but it is also the final refusal of the ambiguity that abetted that complicity, and in being so it refuses the passivity of the fiction.

2013 in Shit: William Gibson

Rather than going on about how I found Westfahl's book a problem not just at the level of scholarship, but but based on my perception of the current argument around canonization of speculative fictional texts, I'll simply note two things, following this link to my full review at Strange Horizons.

The first was that the book absolutely lost my charity -- which, I have since learned, was a charity not as willingly extended by others more well versed in Westfahl's work -- because, of all things, of its reading of Falstaff. There's a brief moment in William Gibson where Westfahl, just after (very seriously) attempting a recuperative reading of Case as a literal white knight, on the grounds that the text's characterization of him do not jive with his actual actions, parrots the characterization of Falstaff as an uncomplicated lout. I have no excessive love of Shakespeare, but Falstaff is an incredibly interesting, nuanced character. So fuck that.

The second is that I will have a supplementary review for today, which will go up in the morning. When I established the conditions of this year's marathon I hadn't even begun reading Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees, and expected not to to avoid having to review it. But I somehow found the time, and then also somehow found the time to write about 2,000 words on it. So I hope you'll enjoy.

2013 in Shit: My Education

There are sentences in My Education that are fucking Proustian. There are declamations of love that are so terse and universalized as to be cloying. There are wrapping-ups and contrived circumstances and deliciously small twists on widely reproduced tropes. There are so many fucking characters, characters who are so well drawn even I nearly gave a shit, settings loosely sketched enough to evoke their power structures without them getting in the way, situations so broadly applicable that they become personal. There is exchange and obfuscation and machinations and misunderstanding and hopeless immanence and moving forward and there is so much fucking money.

I haven't read any of Susan Choi's other novels, and almost didn't bother with My Education based almost exclusively on how much I disliked the cover. I'm pretty glad I got over that impulse, honestly; it's one of the best books I read this year (that's a pretty competitive field), even if I can't find all that much to say about it (Dear Author, you should probably think to finish the article before you make statements like this -ed). It's one of those novels that fucking works, I think, that hits just the right note with nearly everything it does, from the sentence structure to the diversion from the general construction of the central narrative trope, that it's hard for me to articulate why it's amazing without falling into Lit 101 platitudes about craft or whatever. Which isn't the fault of this novel so much as it is that I learned quickly which things I actually gave a fuck about and pursued them, rather than developing that particular critical muscle.

The novel is basically the story of a graduate student named Regina at an East Coast school who decides to fall in love with her professor, but ends up falling in love, and having an extended affair, with his wife. The bulk of the novel follows that affair, and then its breakup and the aftermath, with a little coda for many years later when the threads sort of tie up. That part, even, is like, pretty fine, I think. It's in following Regina and Martha through their affair, melodramatics and generational drama and all, where the book is phenomenal.

But instead of that, I am most interested in writing slightly speculatively about the status of money in this book. It's one of those novels, like maybe a lot of Murakamis, where money is this increasingly legible absence in the world of the novel. It's the sort of thing that is simultaneously justified out of mind and constantly underscored by the novels setting; Regina is a graduate student in the early 90s, so, loans? But also, loans?

Nicholas and Martha (the professors), however, make less sense; they both teach at the same school and somehow can afford not only a mansion, but also hired help? Nicholas is painted as a sort of star professor, but even still, and even given that they aren't living in, say, New York City, and it's twenty years ago. It's not quite unbelievable, but neither is it ever addressed; the closest thing is Regina, after dropping out, referring to her poorly paid film review and research assistant gigs, which seem a bizarre way to set the stage for her moving into her own apartment, buying a fish tank, and slowly descending into temporary alcoholism almost exclusively via bars. Again it's likely that the economics could be totally sound, but there's a lingering unaddressed discomfort; one would imagine that a novel, even one set in the recent past, would be more attentive to the current trend of University privatization and the overt class warfare that, while based in the past forty plus years of policy, takes as its current method at least some significant amount of strategy developed in the very time period that this book takes place on precarious laborers like graduate students.

Of course, there’s always the excuse of the story; and for My Education, I’m almost willing to make it myself: these are not the sorts of concerns that a relatively well off college girl would have had, or even likely would have noticed. Especially not one in the throes of a massive, life changing love affair, which leads to her dropping out of school, completely altering all of her other relationships, and being left completely disconsolate a number of times.

But there’s still the fact that the novel as a form is fundamentally about not telling a story, in as many ways as possible, while still appearing to. Which is, generally, where things like political economy come into play. Part of what is great about the novel is that it seems to devote every inch of extra space to aesthetics and nothing else, and manages to fill packed. Granted, even if the sentences can be Proustian, it’s no In Search of Lost Time; it, like more or less everything else, doesn’t approach the breadth and depth of Proust’s investigation of aesthetics. On its own terms, though, it can feel at times as packed as one of Proust’s denser passages, and I certainly think that’s worth a hell of a lot.

Of course, if In Search of Lost Time is about any one thing, it's about figuring out what the fuck this new middle class thing is and how the fuck to operate within it. It's also very avoidant of the question of money. There's a possible suggestion here, a dichotomy borne out through literature to this point; on the one hand, Proust's investigations of aesthetics without money, and on the other, Gogol's (in Dead Souls) investigations of the way in which money changes with this new mode of production. That’s maybe outside my ambit here, though.

There's an image, (and) a thing, in My Education that I suspect carries the weight of this avoidance more than anything else; but even I feel myself stretching here, and so. Regina, after she moves into a new apartment on her own, enlists Dutra, her until-then housemate and former lover and best (as far as we can tell, mostly only) friend, to populate an aquarium.

To reference the amount of space that this aquarium takes up, in the narrative itself, doesn't begin to do justice to how overwhelming this totally unimportant detail of the narrative somehow becomes, for me at least, the defining feature of the novel. So much more than its narrative or its philosophizing proclamations or its anything else, the way that this stupid aquarium becomes a symbol of the refusal of the narrative to acknowledge its own political economy.

I mean by this, of course, not just the way that the budgeting works. That's just what makes the whole thing confusing, at a narrative, existing-world level. What this absence reveals, all the way back to Proust and all the way through Murakami to Choi, is how the realistic modernist novel works, that it is predicated on a naturalized fiction of how it is possible to get by in this awful new world of ours. It is the case that exchange value overdetermines everything; the question is how to represent that.

And, obscure as it may seem, long, tortorous sentences are, in there way, an answer. That is: an obsessive focus on aesthetics is never an opting out of the question of engaging with the mode of production; it can only ever be a means of (detached) engagement. To focus, for instance, on the logistics of which fish would be the best decision to be the first to occupy Regina's new tank, and to decide, based on rational dialogue, as Dutra does, on a member of the class of Pioneer Fish, is never really a disengagement, and to see it as such is to deny the ways in which capitalism's movement between the universal and the particular is totalizing.

Neither is it, though, necessarily an Absolute Statement; that these fish are valorized in terms that relate to the settler-colonialist terms on which the country was founded is not an excuse to obviate the narrative function of naming a real class of fish in the terms on which the logic of the narrative dictates. I am probably only arguing with myself here, but the point remains that My Education is, for all its seeming hermeticism, engaged in ways that go beyond affective descriptions of immiseration, and are primarily accessible at the level of interrogating the form itself. Which, ultimately, is to say that this is a novel deeply concerned with aesthetics.

The way that the novel is concerned, for instance, with not just the inversion of the professor/graduate student affair on the terms of gender and sexuality, but, overwhelmingly, with the subject of domesticity, is as much a way of moving this supposedly-literary drama away from the sorts of valorizations of heterosexuality that even allegedly "hard hitting," bleak depictions like Coetzee's Disgrace crib from the romance novel genre as it is a clear political move. That is, My Education takes the aesthetic concern of how to represent this mode of sexual relationship, which itself could probably be codified into a genre, without relying on aesthetic means developed for representing other modes of being together with entirely different values. The means Choi employs are undeniably political, even as they aren't acknowledged as such within the text, but there remains a sneaking suspicion that the ultimate (or, at least, more foundational) concern is aesthetic. Probably a better critical theorist would have her Benjamin handy, but fuck that.

There's a certain way in which the absence of concern about money becomes a structural principle for discussing class, and not just in the sense of indicating that the characters are rich. Taking capitalism as a totalizing mode of production is not just to say that it spreads everywhere, but that it is the organizing principle of the social. That's the bit that scientistic sociologies like neuroscience or evolutionary psychology gloss over: it is an explanation as to why these, largely able to be reduced to quasi-biological, claims are the ones that are operative within the world we live in, which largely provides for their obsolescence.

For My Education, then, the focus on aesthetics is always necessarily a focus on the way that, as in the example of the question of representation regarding the student-professor affair, also if not only a question of how this organization is achieved not just through previous aesthetic models but through the social itself. And, as it refocuses on the concerns of the domestic and how two very similar people who are barely a decade a part in age can find their modes of living completely incompatible, both with each other and in the context of the world, the aesthetic desire to represent becomes implicated in the social imperative to reproduce. That the text itself spends more anxiety on aphoristic declamations of what Love truly is reflects only the characters' (but most especially Regina's) desire to move outside of this dialectic, and the absolute impossibility of doing so. The absence of money or an exploration of the dynamic development of capital is not an avoidance but an indication of a particular lens, one which, as I am, is often more concerned with the question of reproductive, rather than productive, labor. Also it's a gorgeous book, which helps, except for the cover, which is just awful.

2013 in Shit: The Purge

Had I not seen You're Next this year, I assume that The Purge would have been the subject of my bizarre, endless-sentences affections; unfortunately it hits nearly all the same beats as You're Next without quite as much excitement. I suspect that a lot of the joy I got out of The Purge was conditional on the incredible crowd in the theater in which I saw it, at least to a certain extent, and its preachiness dulled it to some extent, even as I delighted in the incoherence of its message.

The kid who leads the home invasion crew, hired, ostensibly, because he could smile like Ichi the Killer naturally, was a highlight, as was Ethan Hawke's fight choreography in the moments before his death. I assume the kid's robot wasn't really meant to recall the robot from Craven's Deadly Friend (I assume literally no one but myself has much of any interest recalling any aspect of that movie, to be entirely honest, least of all Craven himself), but intertextuality isn't really a feature of authorship no matter what Pynchon scholars or whoever want to build their careers around; so that was, to me, really funny. And, as I mentioned, there were the politics.

Like any other home invasion film, The Purge finds itself trapped in the dialectic of justified violence (in the form most readily accessible as the Stand Your Ground laws, or the castle doctrine) and the abolition (or at least constitutive hostility) of private property. The tension results from the naturalization of the latter's necessary production of the conditions that require the former; what The Purge threatens to do differently is to integrate this dynamic with a vertical analysis of class, against the genre's nearly-exclusive horizontal assumptions (read: intra-class resentment (see: You're Next, Funny Games, Panic Room)). It does this through the sfnal frame, rather than through the casting of the villain, by creating a world in which a human potlatch leads to the murder of the poor by the rich, resulting in one percent unemployment (presumably the world of this film has developed a kind of capitalism in which the progressive immiseration of workers and the attendant requirement of a reserve army of labor is no longer necessary) and the development of a lucrative property-defense industry, on which Our Hero Hawke has made his riches.

It is messy, ineffectual worldbuilding, of course, but the frame is pretty hard to miss. Ultimately, I think, it does little more than exaggerate the intraclass conflict that the movie ultimately recapitulates, and allows for the shift, alongside Hawke's death, of villains onto the other intraclass group, which seems like plenty really. But there are, of course, those dissonances, like the fact that the opening news reports describe the titular night's effectiveness in terms of natural human behavior (which, presumably, is meant less as a statement of truth and more as a statement that a corporate news entity would make given this world's existence) while the whole movie revolves around large groups of people acting very clearly in organized collectives to achieve particular ideological or aspirational goals, or how the boyfriend of the daughter's plan seems to be that his killing Ethan Hawke legally will somehow transmute into a narrative absolution with said daughter, indicating, at least, that the film doesn't quite know whether it is oriented against legal abstractions or narrative ones, which causes problems given the constitutive presence of legal abstraction in the dialectic that motivates the genre.

Which is, I guess, to echo the sentiment that the worldbuilding is kind of bad? Without being nitpicky about it? But also who cares, and bad is such a dull category. And they like, achieved what they set out to achieve, or whatever (also a dull statement), unless of course you assume they were an end in themselves, in which case cool I guess, sorry the movie wasn't more radical, etc.

And of course, what it set out to achieve is a statement so laden with assumptions that it ends up nearly useless. I don't really imagine that at any point there was a board meeting in which Encapsulating and Enhancing the Inherent Dialectical Tension of the Home Invasion Genre was one of the points of order. I mean maybe it was? So I hope you just enjoyed this paragraph of me critiquing my own word choice rather than just editing it out.

Anyway; its a home invasion movie framed by an attempt to vertically integrate class struggle into a genre which deeply resists that. It is also a movie in which the dad dies, which is pretty sweet. And which brings an attempted critique of the defense industry, both in its personal and national forms, to bear in a way that is significantly less awful than Elysium's was, so, like, there's that.

To say that the the film has a problem with identifying the difference between its legal and narrative (by which of course I mean moral) fetishes is just to coyly say, of course, that this is one of many possible centers of its immanence, an incoherent metaphor but a fun one. Its about interpretation, just go with it.

Because vertically integrating class, which is maybe just my cute way of saying acknowledging class struggle without representing it, in the context of the constitutive hostility of private property by way of the justification of violence within it is necessarily an obscurantism by way of ethics of the abstraction of legality, also known as the threat of force. Calling this bullshit a tangled web would be an understatement. Its a good old fashioned clusterfuck. Its the ethical recuperation of structural violence, justified aesthetically in the pleasant vagaries of narrative progression; its the abstraction that abstracts the real abstraction in the form of representational concretion. Lets get it.

Because more than the awkward inclusion of the lumpen (which in this movie is to say a single black body) as, somehow -- and I say this only to pretend, momentarily, that the only correct response isn't structural white supremacy, which it fucking is, clearly -- a categorical moralism, as a quasi-class devoid of its historicity (thanks SF) operating with all the narrative economy of an empty signifier, its the implication of binarism, that violence is justified not by that awkward inclusion but by the suggested inversion, that the story can justify violence while appearing to decipher it. Or perhaps more accurately, how it can totalize morality in its apparent absence, as a rendering of the outside of the class struggle it ostensibly organizes itself by, by way of the projection of the future son-in-law's conflation of the moral with the legal.

What worked about You're Next was how fucking canny it was about its house, but for The Purge canniness isn't really a virtue. Where Next opens with a citation of Scream, Purge opens with that SFnal staple; the infodump, in montage form. This focus on the abstract leaves its material basis, the house, pretty unexplored, which is almost certainly why I dug it less, and is I guess the note I'm choosing to end this review on.

2013 in Shit: You're Next

This is a movie about an estranged and hostile space, as are all home invasion and haunted house movies; it tells us this from the beginning with its Halloween-patented shaky is-it-the-killer's-POV? cam and its tight angles that refuse space, in how it manufactures that Lynchian moment with the lingering camera at the unopened (closet?) door at once situated and antitopological, in how it tightens the world through that once off reference among the myriad of other images to a kind of visual claustrophobia where a meat-tenderizer can function legibly as a deadly weapon at the same (albeit chronologically different) time as the glass of a window can empty itself into the documentarian's brain as a crossbow bolt. It's a movie about an unknowable mansion in this way, with space mappable but only as action taken in its own negations; this is never more clear than in the brief sequences shot outside as characters run away, as the trails & roads vanish into absolute forest. It seems that even the driveway dissolves itself with the light as the cars vanish into an out-of place to be seen only in total isolation.

It's worth noting that there are only three traps -- a fourth if you count the camera in the basement -- and the only two that seem really premeditated are both at the front door, with the third the discarded nail-bat beneath the window. The piano wire strung up by the invaders functions as a kind of final emphasis that the house itself has inverted, or everted, lost its constitutive claim to being the becoming of the private, lost fully the fantastical resonances of the castle only to find itself in its own malevolent intelligence. And then, hours later, the protagonist's failure to recognize this leads to the Home Alone-style axe trap rigged in that same space, as though we were still operating in under the illusion of objectivity amenable to modification and not a bastard constellation of desire and thing, which reminds in its first failure that this malevolence is organized as much by the porousness of space as by its opaqueness. It isn't just the way halls and doors obscure visibility; its the way that portals themselves, the means of communication -- that make the house in common with itself, that provide it a system of signification -- are high abstractions, signifiers that only function as though they are linked to their signifieds under certain forms of very specific, arbitrary authority. Which is why when the cop catches that trap to the chest it's not only the FTP but the formalist in me that yelps & claps loud in a mostly empty theater. Mostly its the FTP though.

If the home invasion genre is better at performing the haunted house than those films whose generic identity is rooted in the trope, like last year's Silent House, then You're Next's invasion at a distance (as metonymized through the crossbow) ramps it up a notch; the house pops inwards with an objective cause that only ever announces itself after the fact, in wound of flesh or property, in accordance with the creation or curation or dissolution of tension as the case may be, but, in its fidelity to the affect, always presenting an unknowable immanence prior to and premiere over the subsequence, the folding back into the linguistic facticity of the crossbow bolt buried in the jock's shoulder. That is, of course, if my claims about haunted houses bear any weight, as well, which build on my thoughts about ghosts against their characterization and for their formal qualities as a sort of linguistics of place, or the becoming of a subjectivity of space. Your mileage may vary or whatever.

How else to know a house but through the legal abstractions that condition it, through the language whose obfuscation is a condition of its precision (as though there was any other way)? Private property is a cop, and even if its only through the mediation of Home Alone in a constructed medium that jiggles the doorhandle that pulls the string that pendulums the axe, at least it can be mediated at all. Anyway, that's (apparently) the purview of tomorrow's on The Purge; for now know only that when the homes grow tongues and history fucking attacks that you won't get very far complaining about the illegibility of their speech. If the hostile home's a camera flashing's strobe light in a basement's lure to a two-by-four bludgeoning, or an unexploded gas pump leaking at a station surrounded by a chorus of cars, or a bleeding wall of awkwardly allegorized trauma, don't look all shocked or try to pretend the people there had a goddamn thing to do about it. It's the fucking social and it doesn't have your best interests at heart.

Threaded through You're Next (have I already gone too far? Can I not return to it at this point? I will, anyway), too, is a strong critique of survivalism, contemporarily a US libertarian aesthetic, in the form of the ass-kicking lady protagonist of the movie who murders her way out of the situation, becoming a Die Hard-style vessel for accumulated gore. Except also for injury. The movie ends, before the cop gets it, with her final murder, for its own sake (I believe the accompanying dialogue is "Why not?") of her greedy rich professor boyfriend, a cutting of the gordian knot of wealth & happiness or wealth & freedom, a refusal to die presented as a refusal of a refusal to die, which is a pretty accurate description of the extent of her characterization (achieved through meat cleaver and mechanized blender to brain matter murders, for the most part) at all points prior. An Aussie-inflected libertarian who refuses the American Dream (being born well off and inheriting riches)? Of course she's going to kill cops, whether she wants to or not. The meritocratic myth has to die in each of us some way, so why not through the hostile thinking house and the gore of elaborately manufactured "state of nature" scenarios? I'm fucking into it.