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Sadness after postmodernism: mood in contemporary fiction

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Sadness after postmodernism: mood in contemporary fiction

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Content SADNESS AFTER POSTMODERNISM: MOOD IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION by Marija Cetinic A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) August 2010 Copyright 2010 Marija Cetinic ii Epigraph  =Entering the space we have heard about but rarely known : this underground. Here one breathes in an uncanny and unstable aura of resistance, wary hope, and sadness. One sometimes chooses this, sometimes simply gets cast. It seems to be our space and time. We feel so numbered, feel so numb. The web is dark. We are roped to this dark, in which tides of voices rise, swell, are noted, and break over us. It is hard to know why this site is so implacable but it is, clearly it is. —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Draft, unnumbered : Précis,” (2004) iii Acknowledgments  I am deeply grateful to Akira Mizuta Lippit who understood the affective disposition of this project and whose writing and mode of speculative thinking have been a source of inspiration. His generosity and kindness throughout the years were crucial in the completion of this project. Panivong Norindr’s warmth, support, and intellectual insight fostered the writing of this work. Thank you to David Lloyd for his passionate engagement with the ideas in this project. I learned a great deal from Peter Starr and Peggy Kamuf, and my friends and colleagues in the Comparative Literature Department at USC. I want to thank my parents, Biserka and Boris Cetinić, for their love and encouragement. Despite geographical distances, my sisters Andrea and Katarina, and my brother Ante, all provided immeasurable support. I am grateful to my grandparents, all of whom I miss very much. To Slava Škarić, because of whom I understood sadness. To my comrades in Los Angeles, I am thankful for their endless encouragement, their unconditional friendship, their being-in-common: Emma Heaney, Mayumo Inoue, Michelle Har Kim, Marina Peterson, Salvador Plascencia, and Sam Solomon. To my comrades in Northern California, for material conditions and collectivity: Aaron Benanav, Jasper Bernes, Sebastian Chafe, Maya iv Andrea Gonzalez, August Johnson, Kassia Korkus, Laura Martin, and Will O’Connor. For Nathan, this this and so on, concomitance, like writing but it is not a writing, the pieces actually are. v Table of Contents  Epigraph ii Acknowledgments XX List of Figures iv Abbreviations XX Abstract v CHAPTER 1: Sympathetic Conditions: Towards a New Ontology of Trauma 1 CHAPTER 2: Fragile Pages of Grey Ashes: Traumatic Archives in Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress 30 CHAPTER 3: Structures of Sadness: Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String 74 CHAPTER 4: Becoming Everyone: A Can of Sadness in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project 135 Bibliography 181 vi List of Figures  Figure 1 Bruno Corà, curator. “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004. 23 Figure 2 National and University Library in Sarajevo. Bakaršić, Kemal. ‘The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives.’ The New Combat (August 1994). 1 February 2009. http:// newcombat.net/article_thelibraries.html. 35 Figure 3 Bruno Corà, curator. “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004. 37 Figure 4 Bruno Corà, curator. “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004. 40 Figure 5 Bruno Corà, curator. “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004. 42 Figure 6 Bruno Corà, curator. “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004. 44 Figure 7 Bruno Corà, curator. “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004. 45 Figure 8 Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2005), 187. 122 Figure 9 Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 1. 150 Figure 10 Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 52. 165 vii Figure 11 Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 28. 167 Figure 12 Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008). 170 Figure 13 Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 248. 177 viii Abbreviations  FCM Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics BT Being and Time AM Affective Mapping UF Ugly Feelings EP Expressionism in Philosophy ix Abstract  My dissertation project is a comparative study of very recent Anglo-American and post-Yugoslav literary texts that address traumatic experience through experimental forms. What interests me in these texts is the manner in which they treat affect as a form of circulation, rather than as the emotional experience of a particular character. By “affect as a form of circulation,” I mean that the feeling of emotions is detached from individuals and thereby becomes the basis of an impersonal distribution of collective experience. The texts that I am studying—including works by Dubravka Ugrešić, David Markson, Salvador Plascencia, Ben Marcus, and Aleksandar Hemon—are characterized by an ambiguous atmosphere of diffuse and unlocatable “sadness”—a tonal quality that emerges as much from their formal properties as from their content. I argue that the new forms and narrative procedures by which these texts transmit the emotional residue of traumatic experience break down the constitution of individual characters and privilege the circulation of affect as a form of exchange and of community. The dissertation is particularly invested in the politics and the ethics of these experimental literary texts. Trauma theory—as a way of engaging personal and collective experiences of historical catastrophe— has traditionally operated within a psychoanalytic framework that stresses the pathology of the individual subject. Taking up recent work in x political theory, my project aims to transform this framework in order to address the contemporary political conditions of globalization, attempting to account for the new forms of transmission and relationality that transnational capitalism has created. My argument is that an adequate understanding of how historical catastrophe functions in this political climate requires a study of how the affective flows that trauma opens create collectivities that are not predicated upon identity categories, and which resist the hegemony of global capitalism even as they are enabled by it. If the operations of capitalism break down national boundaries in order to facilitate the exchange of commodities, my project explores how this opening of transnationality enables other forms of transaction that are not subsumed by the imperatives of the market. The texts that I study foreground “sadness” as a global condition that circulates as an obstruction underneath or alongside the networks of capital. Sadness is, I argue, the mood of the contemporary fiction I study here. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different mode of such circulation in these texts: archivization, technological connectivity, narration, and the ethics of passivity. The theoretical framework of the study engages extensively with the work of numerous philosophers and theorists, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, Brian Massumi, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Derrida. Overall, “Sadness After Postmodernism” aims to make a significant intervention in the xi manner in which we think about the relation between literature and affect in the context of contemporary politics. 1 CHAPTER 1    Sympathetic Conditions:  Sadness After Postmodernism  Sympathetic Conditions “But if there isn’t a reason, then why does the universe exist at all?” “Because of sympathetic conditions.” —Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close When the University Library in Sarajevo was bombed in August of 1992, it burned for three days, and 1.5 million volumes of books were destroyed. The librarian of Bosnia’s National Museum, Dr. Kemal Bakaršić, observed the scene: “All over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the pages melted to dust in your hand” (x). What sort of conceptual framework—and what methodologies of critical engagement—would be required to think and to practice the relations between trauma, affect, and textuality that such a description evokes? Bakaršić describes a disaster, certainly, but what sort of potential for thinking new modes of relationality does such a description disclose and distribute? This is to ask what this scene exposes. 2 To expose is to put out, to deprive of shelter, to present to view, to put forth; to cast out to chance, to uncover, to unmask and abandon, to dislocate, but also to put into circulation, to open toward, and to risk. To expose is to submit (a sensitized surface) to the action of light (OED). What is exposed by the scene that Bakaršić describes? What is exposed is the contingency of the archive, the materiality of the book, the fragility of the page, the unwritteness of writing, the temporality of temperature, and the singularity of snow in the distribution of ashes. In this scene, reading is itself an exposure—an exposure of incompletion, an exposure to textual elements. The text is a “negative” that dissolves under the conditions of its exposure, ex-posing exposure as such. This dissertation project attempts to engage both trauma and reading as exposure, and to think exposure as partagé, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense of both dividing and sharing-out, a mode of being-with that depends upon dis-position, the spacing of singularities. For Nancy, “a singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed” (Nancy, Inoperative 28). Taking up a range of texts from contemporary literature, film, and conceptual art, I want to investigate the conditions under which trauma operates as a modality of exposure in contemporary political life and cultural discourse. If trauma 3 exposes the subject as a singularity, or if there is no subject prior to the singularity of trauma, how can we think, and construct, the affective conditions under which trauma might constitute a community, and how can we do so while also respecting the singularity of trauma—while respecting its capacity to singularize? How can we think, through trauma, community and singularity together—the partagé of singularity and community? Approaching these questions will involve engaging a problematic in recent trauma theory whereby the category of trauma seems to undergo a certain generalization, a distribution into an affective cloud that hovers over attempts to think or conceptualize possibilities of community (Nancy) or “belonging” (Massumi). One might call these conditions “sympathetic,” one might identify the mood of these conditions as a generalized “sadness,” and one might situate them “after postmodernism,” a terminological constellation to which I’ll return after examining some pivotal developments in recent discourses on trauma. Much of contemporary trauma studies relies on an application of psychoanalytic models to interpret trauma within a text. Shoshana Felman’s essay “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” (1992) and Cathy Caruth’s book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) are two critical texts in the emergence of contemporary trauma studies in the early 1990s. Both critics argue that traumatic 4 narrative (the telling of trauma), must be spoken in a language that permits for temporal disruption, fragmentation, violence, and the breakdown of any mastery or unity: “testimony [of trauma] seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference” (Felman and Laub 5). This kind of referent, one that overwhelms the very notion of event and is associated with trauma, is only experienced in its belatedness, in the inaccessibility of its occurrence. Thus, trauma is more than a pathology: “it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 4). Caruth elucidates the definition of trauma by pointing to the paradox of traumatic experience. “The most direct seeing of a violent event,” she writes, “may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of a belatedness” (92). Theories of trauma, then, ask questions about how to preserve the uniqueness or singularity of the historical event that cannot be simply integrated into or understood through preconceived conceptual terms. 5 Trauma theory enables a rethinking of the referential dimensions of narratives, and the temporality by which they operate. The failure of sequential temporality to account for traumatic events opens up the possibility of more indirect modes of recounting experience. In the fragmentary nature of literary texts that attempt to bear the impact of a trauma, Caruth and Felman contend that a new understanding of retrospective narrativization emerges. It is in the indirectness of this telling that the possibility of a “faithful history” (Caruth 27) lies, and from which an urgent empathy arises: “a new mode of seeing and of listening— a seeing and a listening from the site of trauma—is opened up to us … and offered as the very possibility, in a catastrophic era, of a link between cultures” (56). The insistence on an “address”—of seeing and listening from the scene, and from the scene to us—reduces trauma-related texts to expressions of meaning in an intersubjective frame that doesn’t consider the experience in its own terms, but only through a reductive identification with one’s own experiences. Felman’s position—that listening to testimony allows for the reader to vicariously experience the shock of trauma—engages with texts only insofar as they have a specific message to communicate and reduces them to being “about” trauma. She claims that literature as witness to trauma should “open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative 6 capability of perceiving history—what is happening to others—in one’s own body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate physical involvement” (Felman and Laub 108). This psychoanalytic model positions the reader as both analyst and one who assumes the position of witness, claiming what is supposedly “unclaimed” (to employ Caruth’s term), a sort of metaphoric appropriation of trauma that serves to “reintegrate the crisis in a transformed frame of meaning” (Felman and Laub 54). My project questions such a communicative model of trauma—a model in which an expression of personal experience is addressed to another—and attempts to conceive of the art of trauma as other than an intersubjective exchange. Is it possible to read without taking oneself as the addressee of a text and to instead pursue a conceptual engagement where one is affected without being addressed? How can we conceive of memory as no longer located solely within the experience of a particular individual, but as exceeding the personal, traversing subjects and temporalities? In The Return of the Real (1996), Hal Foster argues that trauma theory is premised upon an account of the subject that, paradoxically, depends upon an evacuation of the subject as the bearer of “personal” experience. The shattered traumatized subject offers a critique of the subject position, while the witness, the testifier, guarantees identity and its authority. In this sense, Foster argues, “trauma discourse magically 7 resolves two contradictory imperatives in culture today: deconstructive analyses and identity politics” (168). If Felman and Caruth foreground the fragmented expression of personal experience, Foster reveals the degree to which precisely what such expressions express is the negation of the category of the personal altogether, a negation that downplays the relevance of intersubjective address and foregrounds the immediacy of affective shock. This is a move away from the representation of subjectivity [“because the real cannot be represented; indeed, it is defined as such, as the negative of the symbolic, a missed encounter, a lost object” (Foster 141)] and a move toward an understanding of trauma as a reduction of the subject to, or an evacuation of the subject into, affect. This is what Foster calls “the return of the real.” Foster posits that the emergence of trauma in the context of contemporary visual art produces an ambition among artists “to inhabit a place of total affect and to be drained of affect altogether, to possess the obscene vitality of the wound and to occupy the radical nihility of the corpse. This oscillation suggests the dynamic of psychic shock . . . Pure affect, no affect: It hurts, I can’t feel anything” (166). The fascination with and circulation around the wound of trauma in contemporary art is further addressed by Mark Seltzer as a cultural phenomenon, what he calls “wound culture”: “The convening of the public around scenes of violence—the rushing to the scene of the accident, the milling around the 8 point of impact—has come to make up a wound culture: the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (3). For both Foster and Seltzer, the wounded body and the wounded mind are a spectacle. Seltzer argues that the “torn and opened body” as public spectacle signals a relay between “private desire and public space,” “a switch point between individual and collective, private and public order of things” (4). And what this amounts to for Seltzer is an understanding of trauma that is “inseparable from the breakdown between the psychic and social registers—the breakdown between inner and outer and ‘subject’ and ‘world’—that defines the pathological public sphere” (11). Within such a zone of indistinction, one becomes uncertain as to “whether this is a matter of (self-)representation or (worldly) reference, psychosis or sociology” (15). The generalization of the category of trauma in the pathological public sphere signals the collapse of the priority of the subject, the failure of the “correct distance of the subject with respect to identification and representation” since the “logic of representation and the logic of ‘the Freudian subject’ are inseparable” (15). In other words, when the correct distance between internal and external, private and public break down, trauma becomes a “generalization,” and for Seltzer, “the generalization of the category of trauma, such that it becomes coterminous with the 9 category of the subject tout court, registers on one level the failure, the incoherence or wearing out, of this model of the subject.” According to Seltzer, the generalization of trauma, in and as trauma “theory,” is itself a symptom of wound culture. “The wearing out of this model of the subject,” he claims, “has become the alamodality of the subject: trauma is nothing if not in fashion today” (15). If the generalization of trauma reduces a concept to a fashion, Dominick LaCapra attempts to prevent it from being a merely fashionable model of subjectivity. It is precisely the generality of the category of trauma that Dominick LaCapra wants to avoid by establishing a precise or “correct distance” between what he calls structural and historical trauma—a distance that maintains clear distinctions and avoids the uncertainties of wound culture. In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), LaCapra posits a rigid separation between these two concepts. While structural trauma is transhistorical and connected to an “absence [that] applies to ultimate foundations in general, notably to metaphysical grounds,” historical trauma concerns an experience of loss that is “situated on a historical level and is the consequence of particular events” (50, 64). LaCapra questions and warns against the tendency “to reduce, or confusingly transfer the qualities of, one dimension of trauma to the other – to generalize structural trauma so that it absorbs or subordinates the significance of historical trauma, thereby rendering all references to the 10 latter merely illustrative, homogeneous, allusive, and perhaps equivocal” (82). Since LaCapra is a key figure in the development of trauma studies as a discipline, he has a vested interest in attempting to ground the concept of trauma against the theoretical and cultural dissemination that Seltzer analyzes. At issue in the different approaches that LaCapra and Seltzer take is the question of whether it is analytically preferable to defend the category of trauma against its dispersal, or rather to acknowledge that dispersal as a cultural fact—to think trauma within its dispersal and to conceptualize new models of affect and relationality that the conditions of that dispersal might enable. In rendering the concept of trauma binary, LaCapra runs the risk of rendering it useless as an analytical tool under the conditions of what Seltzer calls the pathological public sphere, in which all such binary distinctions collapse. But insofar as Seltzer stigmatizes the generalization of trauma as the collapse of a concept into a spectacle, and insofar as he reduces the spectacle of trauma to a cultural symptom, Seltzer forecloses on the possibility that its becoming-general might actually enable a new thinking of trauma that would leave the category of the “wound” behind altogether. It is Nancy’s concept of singularity that enables us to think a mode of traumatic exposure that does not rely upon the logic of the wound. For Nancy, there can be no wound, because there is no subjective interior 11 prior to exposure. Indeed, there is no subject to be opened, there are only singularities exposed in their openness: “there is no laceration of the singular being: there is no open cut in which the inside would get lost in the outside (which would presuppose an initial “inside,” an interiority).” “Neither being nor community is lacerated,” in Nancy’s account, because “the being of community is the exposure of singularities” (Inoperative 30). Trauma, then, is the exposure of this exposure, which is also to say that any occurrence of “historical” trauma exposes the thorough contamination of that category by “structural” trauma, an exposure that displaces the binary distinction to which LaCapra adheres. If Seltzer calls the mode of collectivity predicated upon this exposure “wound culture,” Nancy calls it “the being of community,” analyzing the manner in which it is precisely the exposure of being-with that confounds the logic of the “wound.” Like Seltzer, Nancy analyzes the power of the spectacle to convene a gathering, but Nancy wants to think through the psychology, or the sociology, of this cultural phenomenon toward an ontology and a politics of the “with” that the spectacle exposes, even as it violates a potential for community that it challenges us to think. “If only we made the effort to decipher it in a new way,” Nancy writes, “it might be that the phenomenon of the generalized ‘spectacle,’ along with what we call the ‘tele-global dimension,’ which accompanies and is co-substantial with it, 12 would reveal something else altogether” (Nancy, Being Singular Plural 56). For Brian Massumi, the spectacle of globalization amounts to a usurpation of the very community that it reveals: “What is being usurped here? The very expression of potential. The movement of relationality. Becoming- together. Belonging. Capitalism is the global usurpation of belonging.” “It is the inescapable observation,” Massumi notes, “that belonging per se has emerged as a problem of global proportions” (88). For Nancy, the problem is to think a mode of relationality that might emerge from capital while exceeding its protocols. “The bare exposition of co-appearance,” he argues, “is the exposition of capital. Capital is something like the reverse side of co-appearance and that which reveals co-appearance. Capital’s violent inhumanity displays nothing other than the simultaneity of the singular…and the plural” (Nancy, Being Singular Plural 73). The problem is that “our thinking is not yet adequate to this ambivalence” (64). This is why, for Jill Bennett, any formal analysis of art has to proceed “in conjunction with a reading of global and micropolitics: that is, a sense of our connectedness to global events and the precise nature of our relationship to others” (Bennett 18). In Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Bennett works toward an understanding of trauma as “never unproblematically ‘subjective’; neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’”—as “always lived and negotiated at an intersection.” Bennett addresses trauma as “a presence, a force” that cannot be contained within subjective 13 boundaries because it is not simply “an interior condition but a transformative process” (12). In doing so, Bennett privileges affect as the mode of connection whereby trauma becomes an intersection in process. In the “art of trauma” that Bennett analyzes, affect operates as a relational intensity, insofar as “the work does not turn on its capacity to signify or to represent, or to embody the trace of the individual subject or event. It is rather the sensation arising in space that is the operative element; its capacity to sustain sensation . . . rather than to communicate meaning” (18). Bennett’s project, like my own, aims to engage “transactions” of traumatic experience that operate outside the parameters of intersubjective communication. But while Bennett emphasizes the deconstitution of subject positions, she nonetheless prescribes an “empathic” model of affective relation, and in doing so, she inscribes relation within the logic of “feeling for” rather than “feeling with.” Bennett affirms LaCapra’s concept of “empathic unsettlement” as the “aesthetic experience of simultaneously feeling for another and becoming aware of a distinction between one’s own perceptions and the experience of the other” (Bennett 8). But because the concept of empathy is strongly associated with the projected occupation and experience of the other’s subject position—the OED defines empathy as “the power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of 14 contemplation”—Bennett is forced to construct a tenuous distinction between “crude empathy” and what she calls “empathic vision.” If “crude” empathy is defined as “a feeling for another based on the assimilation of the other’s experience to the self,” Bennett calls for a “conjunction of affect and critical awareness [that] may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible” (10). The target of Bennett’s critique in this formulation is affinity—a mode of relation that is taken here to constitute an erasure of alterity. But while it is precisely the concept of empathy that normally carries the connotative baggage of such an erasure, the etymological root of “affinity”—affine—means, literally, “bordering upon,” and includes fin, denoting an end or border. Affinity, that is, includes and operates within finitude. Affinity is finite—it might be conceptualized as a finite affinity with the finitude of the other. If sympathy denotes “a (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another…or attract or tend toward each other” (OED), then what I am calling “sympathetic conditions” designate a cultural mood and an ontological weather characterized by the tendency of finite beings to be mutually exposed in 15 their finitude. Sympathetic conditions designate the feeling with, rather than the feeling for, of singular beings, where the “with” is prior to and constitutive of the terms it holds both together and apart. As Brian Massumi puts it, the with is “not a middling being but rather the being of the middle—the being of relation” (70). In Jean-Luc Nancy’s radicalization of the Heideggerian concept of Mitsein, “with” is thought “as the exclusive mode of being-present, such that being present and the present of Being does not coincide in itself, or with itself, inasmuch as it coincides or “falls with” [“tombe avec”] the other presence, which itself obeys the same law. Being-many-together is the originary situation; it is even what defines a “situation” in general” (Being Singular Plural 41). The term “sympathetic conditions” is meant to articulate the plurality of this situation, in which obedience to the same law—a law of finite relation— constitutes the being-singular-plural of singularities through their withness, or co-appearance. Trauma is the exposure of this situation, or of these conditions. If trauma cannot be shared in its particularity (if what is exposed is precisely the impossibility of empathic appropriation), what trauma nonetheless forces us to share is the experience of a limit, the limit as shared, or the finite sharing of finitude. For Nancy, such a finite sharing, or partagé, is the only viable modality of community. Affinity is—sympathetic conditions are—a situation in which 16 A like-being resembles me in that I myself “resemble” him: we “resemble” together, if you will. That is to say, there is no original or origin of identity. What holds the place of an “origin” is the sharing of singularities. This means that this “origin”—the origin of community or the originary community—is nothing other than the limit: the origin is the tracing of the borders upon which or along which singular beings are exposed. We are alike because each one of us is exposed to the outside that we are for ourselves. The like is not the same (le semblable n’est pas le pareil). I do not rediscover myself, nor do I recognize myself in the other: I experience the other’s alterity, or I experience alterity in the other together with the alteration that “in me” sets my singularity outside me and infinitely delimits it. (Nancy, Inoperative 33) Trauma exposes the conditions of this delimitation, and the collective mood of these conditions is sadness. Sadness After Postmodernism SADNESS develops in and outside of the house, either just after entering or just after leaving. —Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String How can sadness be thought as an affective mode of finite relationality? Affect has become an important concept in contemporary theoretical discourses on the politics of belonging under the conditions of late capitalism. Working from Deleuze’s Spinozist orientation, Brian Massumi stresses the capacity of affect to exceed its capture (as emotion) 17 by any particular subject or context. While “emotion is a subjective content” (Massumi 28), affect is trans-situational. As processional as it is precessional, affect inhabits the passage. It is pre- and postcontextual, pre- and postpersonal, an excess of continuity invested only in the ongoing: its own. Self-continuity across the gaps. Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world together. In event. The world-glue of affect is an autonomy of event-connection across its own serialized capture in context. (217) It is, paradoxically, the desubjectivization of emotion that is affect that prompted Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis, in the mid 1980s, of a waning of affect characteristic of postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. It has perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged that the condition Jameson diagnoses is less a waning of affect than the emergence of affect as a sort of atmospheric surround. Jameson specifies that in positing a waning of affect, he does not mean “that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling.” Rather, he means that “such feelings—which it may be better and more accurate…to call ‘intensities’—are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (15-16). The waning of affect, in other words, is in fact an intensification of affect that is also a dispersal, or the becoming-global, of emotion. Massumi postulates that “if some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect…is not ownable or recognizable” (28); “if anything,” he notes, “our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it” (27). 18 If affect has not waned, it may be that we are now experiencing the waning of the “peculiar kind of euphoria” that Jameson found dominant in the 1980s—and perhaps this waning of euphoria accompanies the generalization of trauma noted by Foster and Seltzer. Under these conditions, the “whole new type of emotional ground tone” that Jameson analyzed seems to have shifted again. The remainder of a waning euphoria, and the product of a generalized trauma, is a peculiar kind of generalized sadness. In tracking the feeling of that generalized sadness through a range of contemporary literature, film, and conceptual art, this project will explore the possibility that this affective atmosphere might characterize not the “postmodern condition”, but rather the sympathetic conditions that we are left with, after postmodernism. “After,” here, has to be understood as a contradictory preposition. It is meant to denote, simultaneously, a situation subsequent to and distinct from postmodernism, but also a certain affinity of “sympathetic conditions” with “the postmodern condition”—a sympathetic relation of discrepant conditions. Addressing the possible waning of postmodernism in 1993, Marjorie Perloff felt that it was premature to declare its “death,” warning, instead, that “the time has come to avoid pronunciamentos, whether pro or con, about “the postmodern condition” and to try to keep an open mind on the postpost days we are now witnessing, days for which we don’t yet have a name and whose postpeople we can’t quite 19 conceptualize” (33). What Perloff describes here is an approach to the limit of the postmodern, and the exposure of the postmodern as limited. “Sympathetic conditions” might be taken to designate the “atmosphere” of our approach to this limit—the sort of weather in which that approach takes place. “After postmodernism” invokes the delimitation of the postmodern, or an exposure of its limits. “Sympathetic conditions” designates the affective conditions of that exposure, an affect of (and affective) exposure to finitude that seems to be sadness. If the contextual particularity of trauma can never be completely shared, trauma is nonetheless an exposure of finitude that is shared, insofar as finitude is being, shared-out. Sadness is at once the sharing of this finitude and the fact of not being able to share more than this finitude. But this is paradoxical, because insofar as sadness is the feeling of not being able to share more than finitude, sadness is that, more than finitude, which is shared. Such a paradoxical sharing is premised upon a withdrawal from sharing or from circulation: sadness involves a withdrawal from any actual community, and, in that withdrawal, the constitution of a virtual community of the withdrawn. In this sense, as an affect, and therefore as a mode of transversal relation, sadness functions as what Brian Massumi calls an “indeterminate transmission,” or a “virtual transmission,” in which “not meaning, not information, not interpretation, not symbolism is 20 transmitted: only sensation, the germ of that which may eventually unfold as new possibility” (119). The feeling of sadness is the sensation of an unrealized—or counter-actualized—possibility of community: a withdrawn community of finite beings. But the paradox of sadness is that while it exposes a certain circulation of feeling, that feeling saturates, thereby arresting circulation. Sadness, as the OED tells us, is “satiety, fullness; seriousness, steadfastness.” Sadness is the affect of immanence. But of an immanence stripped of "virtuality" or "potentiality." Joy is the immanence of the virtual as "power" or becoming. Sadness is the immanence of the actual (saturated being), an immanence without reserve. Qua feeling, sadness is the fullness of what is, as it is—full insofar as it is felt, serious insofar as it is felt without the reserve of its possible-being-otherwise, steady insofar is it is not predicated upon becoming: the inherence of what is within what it is without being otherwise. Methodologically, my project aims to engage texts—literature, film, and conceptual art installations—as a potential community, and to preserve or defend their potentiality from interpretation. Cesare Casarino calls such a mode of engagement “philopoesis”: a love of literature that maintains texts in their potential not by reading them but by offering them as gifts to one another. It is a premise of my project that such a mode of dealing with texts needs to go beyond a love of literature by engaging 21 texts in a variety of media and exposing their affinity. In the practice of philopoesis that Casarino theorizes, the offering of one text to another is superfluous, because “both are perfect—that is, perfectly finished and perfectly finite.” And yet such a superfluous offering is productive because “both delimit each other’s perfection and materialize the other’s limit as potentiality” (92). For Casarino, such a productive work is also and at once a practice of unworking—a love of “that which remains unmade” in any making (79). This methodology resists the narrative reconstruction, or retrospective narrativization, advocated by Felman and Caruth, and we might call the unworking of construction—the exposure of the unmade in which such a practice of reading participates—traumatic intertextuality. This methodology attempts to respect the trauma of intertextuality, posing the question of how we can “reapproach the traumatic proximity of a text, before or beyond comparison and contextualization?” (Reinhardt 804). Writing on the significance of the “with” for Lacan and Levinas, Kenneth Reinhard advocates a mode of intertextual “neighboring,” in which a responsible reading would be one that attends to the ways in which texts might have neighbored each other in traumatic proximity before the act of comparison that symbolizes their relation, and how they might again neighbor each other, by momentarily de-contextualizing them, separating them from the networks of historical and tropological association. (804) 22 My project attempts to practice a contingency of textual relation, addressing the sympathetic conditions emerging between texts, genres, and media, the conditions of a withness that precedes the constitution of any textual identity or generic category. The condition of this withness in the case of the texts (including films, and installations) that the project will take up is sadness. Sadness, in these texts, is felt and formalized as a mode of potential community. These texts engage in a formalization of sadness, and form, here, operates in the mode of exposure: as both a breakdown of communication and an indeterminate transmission of affect. In these texts, form recapitulates the exposure of trauma, insofar as the brokenness of narrative, image, or space functions at once to convey the impossibility of sharing, and to share that impossibility, as an impossibility. Again, this finite sharing— the impossibility of sharing, along with the necessity of sharing that impossibility—diffuses, perhaps expresses—an affect of sadness that becomes, itself, what is shared. Sadness, then, is the with of these texts: it is the form of being that spaces these texts while holding them together in an affective space—the weather conditions after postmodernism. Chapter 2 will begin with a consideration of Jannis Kounellis’s 2004 installation in the National Library of Sarajevo, which returns us to the site of the disaster that we have already described: the burning of that library in 1992 during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Consisting of assemblages 23 of fragmented materials and stacks of accumulated remains piled in the twelve scorched arches of the library, the installation blocks architecturally determined passageways, closing off channels of bodily transit in order to open a field of affective circulation, between bodies, within that enclosure. Figure 1: Bruno Corà, curator.  “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University  Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004.  24 Kounellis’s interrogation of archival transmission provokes a reading of a Croatian novel that emerges from the dissolution of a communist state, after the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia (1999), with an American novel written in the midst of the consolidation of American power (1988). One is fixated upon the solidity of objects; the other broods on linguistic indeterminacy and the fragility of propositional logic. One is a novel obsessed with history; the other is situated after the “end of history.” In Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender [Muzej Bezuvjetne Predaje] lists, ekphrastic descriptions of photographs and art objects, journal entries, and numbered citations function to both expose and lament the precariousness of a nation, the finitude of any “imagined community.” The radical shatterings produced in the war, the unassimilable pieces of ruins, exceed the attempt of any national narrative to reabsorb and rename such fragmentation. In this sense, Ugrešić’s novel is a critique of the archive, but it is also continually engaged in the process of exposing its own implication in the violence of the archive’s politically “operative” gathering. In David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the museum is the locus of affective inclination, of subjectivity approaching its leavings. This is a novel in which “somebody … woke up one Wednesday or Thursday to discover that there was apparently not one other person left in the world” (230). What remains is a scattering of proper names, facts, indexical traces 25 of habitation, and writing instruments: the elements of an archive. So while museums do survive Markson’s apocalypse, they have been undone through an exposure of the traumatic topology of the museum. The inside and the outside of the archive implicate and unfold each other, rendering history a series of imprecise iterations, a productive unworking and exposure of the geo-historical record that has “made facts sad” (Wallace 226). The second chapter thus asks how texts that might have seemed to share no common contextual ground might be revealed as mutually engaged with discrepant aspects of a larger historico-political context in which they share. If Ugrešić’s text interrogates the emergence of a new nationalism after the break up of Yugoslavia, and if Markson’s “post- historical” text prefigures the leveling force of globalization, we might ask after the manner in which these are mutually constitutive. Both of these texts defamiliarize and interrogate the so-called end of history, addressing themselves to discrepant poles of this problematic. They find themselves in a state of searching through the archive of geographical and aesthetic categories that used to mean something, a state of searching among meanings that are severed from their ties to historical foundations, but also meanings that are exposed in the finitude of their contexts. The contingent belonging of these texts will emerge from a potential, rather 26 than a possible, belonging together, a potential that will be activated by a practice of reading as indeterminate transmission. If chapter two involves an examination of the dissolution into and regathering of fragments, then the third chapter intervenes in the circulation of those fragments. Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String seizes upon affective circulation in an attempt to block its appropriation by the logic of capital, and the logic of joy. Sadness figures as the central affect in Marcus’s text. The Age of Wire and String at once describes the saturating and saturated mood of sadness as the state of our contemporary cultural conditions, but it also seeks to produce such a state through the constructions of literary scenarios and figures of blockage, disagreement, and resistance. In an argument against joy, and its linkage to the digital, the chapter argues for the return of the analog repressed: a key figure of sadness in what Ben Marcus does not call “the digital age,” but rather The Age of Wire and String. Topological thinking—as an exposure of surfaces and an investigation of their possible transformations—is the basis of Brian Massumi’s claim for “the superiority of the analog.” If the digital operates according to the codification of discreet quantities, the analog operates “as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another.” The analog relies upon the relay of indeterminate transmissions, and “sensation, always on 27 arrival the transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought, is the being of the analog” (Massumi 135). The chapter addresses the prevalence of analog figures of connectedness and the connection of those figures to the phenomenology of sadness. The fourth chapter reads Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) as a text that seeks out sympathetic historical conjunctions as a gathering of dispersed losses. Through the inextricable entangement of a historical narrative and a present day obsession with that history that leads the narrator back to Sarajevo, Hemon’s story runs backward preventing the composition of a generic immigrant narrative or the progress of mourning. Sadness in the text emerges as a misreading of a can of sardines as a can of sadness—an affect produced by an error. But it is this attention and fidelity to misreading and error that marks the refusal of a therapeutic relation to the past, one which would involve the pursuit of a coherence in reading that which has been lost. Instead, Hemon’s text reactivates the affective potentiality of an historical event as a practice of relationality marked by the sad debris of misunderstanding and irreparable antagonisms. 28 This Connection of Everyone with Lungs How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs. —Juliana Spahr, thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs As both a withdrawal from community and the constitution of a community of the withdrawn, sadness occupies a zone of enclosed indeterminacy between the privative experience of a mood and the transversal circulation of affect. If the modality of the “with” in Nancy’s radicalization of the ontology of Mitsein is co-appearance, and if joy is an offering of singular being, as appearance, to the other (Inoperative 108), then what becomes of community when the with-drawn sadness of finite sharing threatens that sharing rather than acting as its affective supplement? What becomes of a community of the withdrawn, that is, when finitude is over-exposed, when the withdrawal of sadness approaches the limit of disappearance? Can the co-appearance of the with, at a certain intensity of exposure, disappear? To address these questions would be to investigate the limits of asymmetrical responsibility—addressing the possibility that suicide marks the limit of finite sharing, the over-exposure of finitude. By brooding upon the aesthetics of disappearance and its ethical implications, we might interrogate the appearance of disappearance—the compearance 29 of vanishing—in the any-space-whatever of a withdrawn community: in the ruins of Sarajevo, in the absent narrative space of a non-novel (Markson), in the material sadness of our present-tense (Marcus), in the photographs of The Lazarus Project. Through an engagement with these disparate texts, I take up the consequences of the development in trauma theory that I have tracked, the problem of the generalization of trauma, and the potentially new modes of affective circulation that that generalization might enable for the methodology of comparative literature. The project interrogates the politics of a methodology that moves away from models of address, reconstruction, commemoration, or mourning and toward a circulation of texts that is meant to engage and to produce their relations in an affective rather than hermeneutic manner. This methodology of textual circulation is not euphoric—it is not intended to recuperate a positive practice of reading from a negative affect. But it is meant to expose the sympathetic quality of our conditions, to circulate their sadness, and to feel the way in which that sadness halts circulation as it saturates a scene, as it marks our disagreements. 30 CHAPTER 2    Fragile Pages of Grey Ashes:  Traumatic Archives in Dubravka Ugrešić’s   The Museum of Unconditional Surrender   and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress  25 August 1992, Smoke ‘A city,’ writes Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘does not have to be identified by anything other than a name, which indicates a place, the place of a mêlée, a crossing and a stop, a knot and an exchange, a gathering, a disjunction, a circulation, a radiating’ (Being Singular Plural 145). The proper name of a city – Sarajevo, for example – is a specific, fragile gathering of contingencies, ‘a mixture of syllables stirred on the brink of a semantic identity that is both gently and obstinately deferred’ (146). The arrest of that deferral, a reduction of the city to a ‘target frozen in a telescopic sight’ (145), is, for Nancy, the ‘death of Sarajevo itself’ (146). For a city to be reduced to a target its presence is made measurable ‘by the yardstick of the ‘national’ or the ‘state,’ a body-symbol set up precisely in order to create body and symbol where there had only been place and passage’ (146). In writing what he calls a ‘Eulogy for the Mêlée’ addressed to Sarajevo in 1993, Nancy marks the attempted erasure of relations in a besieged city ‘identified purely and simply as a target,’ (145) while insisting that some sense of the city remains: ‘Sense is . . . not the ‘signified’ 31 or the ‘message’: it is that something like the transmission of a ‘message’ should be possible. It is the relation as such, and nothing else’ (Nancy, The Sense of the World 118). If its potential futures were violently exposed in the destruction of the city, the ruins of Sarajevo still figure. They mark the potential within figuration, however devastated the material conditions of possibility. We return to August 25, 1992, when Serbian nationalist forces fired incendiary grenades from across the Miljacka River that targeted ‘Vijećnica,’ the National and University Library in Sarajevo. The library burned for three days, destroying the almost 1.5 million volumes of the collection, including more than 155,000 rare books and manuscripts; the country’s national archives; deposit copies of newspapers, periodicals, and books published in Bosnia; and the collections of the University of Sarajevo. Dr. Kemal Bakaršić, librarian of Bosnia’s National Museum, described the scene: All over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the pages melted to dust in your hand. (“The New Combat”). The disaster unfolds through a series of abstract distributions wherein the leveling force of violence has subtracted from the burning archive its codified attachments and systems of belonging. The affective force and residual material of that subtraction circulate across the city as weather 32 conditions: an atmospheric, egalitarian scattering of material traces that bears witness to the conflict at hand through the very antagonism between the scorching heat and the floating snow. Bakaršić notes the saturation of the site: the library is dispersed all over the city. The wreckage, that is, is the form of dispersal, of floating, dissipation, melting. The wreckage is configured as transmissibility itself, the transmission not of the meaning of the event, not of the symptoms of the event, not of any content at all, but of a practice of future memory without a subject, of transmissibility as such. It is a mode of distribution singular to that August of 1992 in Sarajevo, one marked in particular by a logic of disappearance. As the page becomes a kind of energy in transit, a heat, Bakaršić tracks its process of dissolution from a contingent, ephemeral legibility to the almost complete illegibility of dust. If the unsettled residual materials of the violent scene of the burning of Sarajevo’s library are constitutively materials dispersed, then what is preserved in that sharing out? We might turn here to Jacques Derrida’s delineation of the potentiality of ‘cinder’ as that substance that tends toward its own disappearance while leaving a remainder: ‘What a difference between cinder and smoke: the latter apparently gets lost, and better still, without perceptible remainder, for it rises, it takes to the air, it is spirited away, sublimated [subtilise et sublime]. The cinder-falls, tires, lets go, more material since it fritters away its word; it is very divisible’ 33 (Derrida, Cinders 73). The dirty black snow, for example, a kind of winter cinder, figures in Bakaršić’s account as an ephemeral crystallization of the atmospheric conditions at hand, a condensation that falls, and in falling that indexes both the brutal reduction to ash of the library and the future potentiality that inheres in that falling. The cinder signals the past in its fragility, while its circulation activates a persistent relation to the future, the movement of memory: ‘A cinder is a very fragile entity that falls to dust, that crumbles and disperses. But cinders also name the resilience and the intractability of what is most delicate and most vulnerable’ (Lukacher 2). As the trace of a burning in and of literature that persists, as the trace of a burning in and of the materials of a building that housed literature, the cinder is nothing except the potential to say afterward, to gather afterward, to write. As Akira Lippit describes in his reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever: ‘What remains in the destruction of the archive always returns to the surface, to the skin, as a skin, a remainder etched onto the skin, a book’ (“The Shadow Archive” 5). How might we approach the potential of this scene – the future of its memory –through a book, through writing? If the scene is a scene of distribution, then how might we re-distribute this floating snow, this melting dust? To remember August 25, 1992 is to attend to a dispersal of memory that is given by the event itself. It is given, yet as Nancy insists, it nonetheless ‘remains for us to think this totality of dispersion’ (Being 34 Singular Plural 156). And to think dispersion in the specificity of the destroyed library would mean to attend also to the consequences for the book, for the literary, for reading. What is particularly compelling in Bakaršić’s description is the way he precisely continues to read the materials of the ruins of the library. And that practice of reading involves itself in devastation; the floating, fragile pages of grey ashes have been violently dis-organized, circulating in new and unforeseen conjunctions provoked by a disaster that has burned the archival systems of organization and rendered texts barely legible. This chapter attends to such potential conjunctions through the reading of two texts whose relations are precarious. The fragility of their encounter is an attempt to remember the sense of that dispersal of books as cinders and to enact the potential of that sharing out in the present. What follows in an experiment, an attempt to render this fragility formally, through a practice of reading responsive to the contingent connections between three texts. Jannis Kounellis’s installation in the destroyed Sarajevo library (2004), Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996), and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) ask what it might mean to register, to narrate, and to archive a crisis when the archive itself is in crisis. If it is books that have burned, then what sort of literary crisis could bear the remains of that burning? 35   Figure 2: National and University Library in Sarajevo.  Bakaršić, Kemal.    ‘The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives.’   The New Combat (August 1994). 1 February 2009.  <http://newcombat.net/article_thelibraries.html.>  36 26 June—26 September 2004, Cinders Books burn. So 12 years later, if we re-enter this burned archive, we are shocked to witness a gathering of remains, a scorched architectural frame blistering with an assemblage of materials that should be burned, that are burned, that have somehow returned. 12 Byzantine arches of the library are swollen with a series of fragmented materials, stacks of accumulated remains. Jannis Kounellis’s site-specific installation project in the National Library of Sarajevo seems driven by the archive fever of an archivist. His work covers over, closes off, envelops the very site of the disaster with heavy, almost impenetrable blockages, blankets upon blankets of forgetting. And in the same gesture, Kounellis’s project addresses the future itself with a radical openness, an opening that “orients the archive towards actualizations and inscriptions to come” (Kujundzic 168). 37 Figure 3: Bruno Corà, curator.  “Kounellis in Sarajevo”   National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004.     The walled-in hollow of layered books is perhaps the most haunting and the most haunted of these blockages. Formally, almost architecturally, the arrangement bears the markings of an archive, of an organized dwelling, a consignation in which the books are coordinated into “a single corpus, a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” (Derrida, Archive Fever 3). But the absolute constraint upon the archive that there “should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate, or partition” (3) is here broken. It is as though Kounellis has zoomed in on 38 the shelf, as a unit of composition, but with so proximate an attention that even the shelves fall away as organizational structures, leaving a dis- organized remainder of the archive, book upon book now held together by a primary gravity, codification in ruins. Yet when the library no longer supports the book, it falls to the book to support the library. Falling upon each other, the words that remain are bound, urgently, in the obligation to with-hold their architectural shelter, a shelter at once pressing in its weight and exposed in its fragility, precarious as any archival construction, any catalogue of traces or order of the book. Most of the bindings are turned away from the spectator, towards the outside, such that we are not privy to titles, or names, or any marker that might permit the formation of a library cataloguing system that imprints books with a number/letter assignation that keeps them under arrest and in place. The books lie horizontally but for the exception of a few upright texts that insert a secret or partition that breaks the formal unity of the assemblage. What is maintained is a devastating closeness, a pressing up against each other of bindings. The tension within each book, its more-than-touching, almost-fused pages, the pressure of the threads of its spine is replicated here between books. Such perverse proximity is an intimacy of fragments that record their own death, that record the very absence of the book. Stacked so closely, in such stillness, we almost hear an injunction against circulation; these books cannot be opened, cannot be 39 read, but can only stand as a record. Paradoxically, though, this melding together of texts is also, in its utterly defensive posture of pure closure, an opening to the future though the command to transmit this posture, to save books. In fact, the closeness of books in a library makes burning difficult because of the deficiency of circulating oxygen. Burned one by one, pages disperse into smoke. But when packed so tightly in their archive and subjected to a force that seeks destruction all at once (a whole library in 3 days) then pages fuse and carbonize. That is, the deficiency of oxygen causes the books to fuse together producing a supplement: a hard mass of ash and partially fused coal that remains. This pressing consolidation of volumes, then, is a future defense against a burning which has already occurred. 40 Figure 4: Bruno Corà, curator.  “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University  Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004.  41 “What remains in the destruction of the archive always returns to the surface, to the skin, as a skin, a remainder etched onto the skin, a book” (Lippit, “The Shadow Archive” 5). This haunting inscription of the disaster manifests itself in Kounellis’s project on the “skin” of architecture itself. The crumbled stones of the exterior of the library bear the markings of the burning and are used to block two other openings in the Sarajevo library installation piece. These concrete fragments are assembled in two discrepant configurations: while one passageway is filled with meticulously re-stacked architectural ruins, another is strewn with rubble, pouring out from the door’s frame. The two sites read each other: ruin as architecture and architecture as ruin. This co-implication of construction and wreckage also establishes a tension between openness and closure, between door and wall, that is activated by two other installation sites that might be read in parallel. The force of this tension itself resists any openness or closure that might be understood as “complete.” Two alternatives are implicated in a mutual exposition. Architectural fragments are stacked to the top of a door, prohibiting any possible passage, but the gaps between fragments perforate the barrier that they form. Or a crumbling pile of stones collapses any opening through which light might pass between them, but the volume of this impossible heap fills only half the vertical area of the space that it occupies. An iron grate extends across the perimeter of a 42 doorframe, but the gaps between its bars open possibilities of contact between “inside” and “outside.” Or a heavy iron door negates any possibility of structural breach, but its dimensions are insufficient to the absolute closure implied by its material integrity, blocking off only 2/3 of its frame. Figure 5: Bruno Corà, curator.  “Kounellis in Sarajevo,” National and University  Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004.  43 This unresolved architectural tension between openness and closure recodes, structurally, the psychological pressure issuing from the overly- proximate books. These do fill the space of the archive's passageways, but their sealed closure infects us with a desire—or activates a drive—to open them. Similarly, Kounellis’s panels of tightly packed rolls of lead and cloth, and of layered hemp food sacs, produce a solid barrier that entirely fills the space of the entrances. It is as if these “essential” articles (of warmth, of sustenance) perform a reduction of the archive (architectural shelter/cultural consumption) to the status of bare life. It is not, in this case, that culture is reduced to nature, but rather that both are exposed in their constitutive materiality, as “elements.” And it is precisely this exposure which, in this case, establishes a tension between the closure of an opening and the drive to re-open that closure. There is an implicit urgency in the use of such "necessities" as structural supports—as if the trauma of the archive were sufficient to override even the most basic laws of utility. Yet with equal urgency, the presence at hand of such articles bears witness to the context in which this archive finds itself traumatized (the violent reduction of populations to the status of bare life) gesturing beyond any bounded interior toward the rations (food sacks) and the bodies (blankets) to which such provisions are so passionately attached. So that one wants to detach the units of these constructions from their structural 44 confinement, at once re-opening the passageways and circulating their contents. Figure 6: Bruno Corà, curator.  “Kounellis in Sarajevo,”   National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004.  45 All of these structural tensions, semiological homologies, and logical double binds are threaded together, on the order of material labor as productive potential, by the shelves of sewing machines that barricade another of the doorframes. And all of these thoroughly problematic impediments—these bones lodged in the throat of the archive—are at once gathered and dispersed by the most absolute and the most indeterminate term in the series: a single, pure white panel, deflecting and absorbing the viewer’s gaze in its numinous, synthetic glow: Figure 7: Bruno Corà, curator.  “Kounellis in Sarajevo,”   National and University Library of Sarajevo, June 26 – September 26, 2004.  46 The indeterminacy of the archive, the à-venir, produces “an opening of the unknown . . . which no archival knowledge prepares us to receive” (Kujundzic 168). If all that is unresolved in the site of this "installation"— if all that circulates here—is caught up in the temporal rift between that before and this after, this now and that to come, that already and this not yet, then the whiteness of this wall opens the archive upon its own question. And that is how the writing of the disaster—the fragment, the cinder, glowing—begs the question of all that goes up in smoke. Traumatic Archives Fires cannot be extinguished; they remain in retreat in cinders. Cinders are like belated ashes, less than ashes: “Cinder remains, cinder there is [il y a là cendre], which we can translate: the cinder is not, is not what is. It remains from what is not, in order to recall at the delicate, charred bottom of itself only non-being or non-presence” (Derrida, Cinders 39). As a trace of a burning in and of literature that persists, as a trace of a burning in and of the materials of a building or the materials of bare necessity, the cinder is nothing except the potential to say afterward, to gather afterward, to remain. “Does language bear within itself the remains of a burning?” “Is language itself what remains of a burning?” (Lukacher 2-3). And what is the status of the archive after the dissolution of fire into cinder, a feverish 47 residue that clings? The archive as collection of cinders is caught in a radical temporal disjunction, “existing in a mode of delayed survival of itself” (Kujundzic 168). It is not then that trauma is archived, but that here it is the archive itself that is traumatic: in its belated citing of a burning which has already occurred, which it has missed, a burning that, in its withdrawal, returns to the surface as a remainder, as “what continues to burn and cannot be consumed” (Lukacher 12). This delay is inherent to trauma, a “slippage or non-synchronicity of experience” which manifests itself as a “belatedness which turns the event into a missed event” (Comay 14). What might it mean then to register, to narrate, and to archive a crisis when the archive itself is in crisis, is too late, is “condemned to incompletion [such] that it blurs every line of demarcation it would impose” (Comay 14)? Kounellis’s installation catalogues this crisis of the archive in architectural and visual terms. But if we pull two books, two cinders, from the traumatic archive that Kounellis constructs, what falls? If it is books that have burned, then what sort of literary crisis could bear the remains of that burning? 48 Dispersal One: Practices of Departure Site Actually, the heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. 1 In Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, a place is only that from where one departs. As a narrative infected with both the necessity of and the desire for departure, it is held in suspension between a country that has broken and a city experienced only as a provisional site that permits a sufficient geographic distance from which to recognize that someplace has been left, that places are what is left. Place is not the broken point a of former-Yugoslavia, nor is it the unstable point b of Berlin. These spaces are bound and ruptured by a wound in time, one that divides 1995 by 1942, folding subjects and cities into the fractional remainder. The indeterminate angle between these temporal-geometric loci marks the inclination of Ugrešić’s text. It leans away from genre, in its fractured use of fractured genres: almost a diary, almost an autobiography, almost a citation, almost a novel. It leans away from characters, placing Nabokov and Brodsky on the same plane as a 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991), 99. 49 “Richard” or a walrus or an angel; characters don’t bear agency “but simply emerge as nodal points, subjectivities irrupt[ing] from the convergence of affective flows” (Bennett 83). In a narrative site that seems to leave itself, that hovers in this interstice, subjectivity too is a kind of affective leaning, or even perhaps, a leaving: “the subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else’, and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject” (Bhabha 150). What practice of departure could unravel webs of leaving into the kind of string that sews up skin, that threads bodies across space? If place is already left from itself, a kind of cartographic displacement, then a site is a citation: “an address without home” (Kamuf 31). Or, in national terms, a nation is only a discursive effect, a writing over of difference, of heterogeneity, of “the conceptual ambivalence of modern society” (Bhabha 146). In the production of nation as coherent national narrative, “the scraps, patches and rags of daily life” (145) must be repeatedly re-absorbed and re-territorialized. War exposes the precariousness of the nation; “the barred Nation It/Self . . . becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference” (148). War is the exposure of the brokenness that precedes place; nation is a 50 collection of these ruins. The radical shatterings produced in war, the unassimilable pieces of ruins, always exceed the attempt of any national narrative to reabsorb and rename such fragmentation. Maps fail; or, in their coverings over of scarred territories, the points and lines of cartography are scarred. Maps produce a topography of woundedness: “Because soon the minefield will be covered in grass, new houses will spring on top of ruins, everything will be grown over, it will disappear and shift once again into dream” (Ugrešić 195). Every topographical elevation is a hill under which “pulsate 26 million cubic metres of rubble from the ruins of Berlin, collected and dragged here after the Second World War” (159-60). Every mapped plane is an absorption: “the map, like good blotting-paper, absorbs a strong sense of loss” (99). Hence the warning: “That is why one has to tread carefully in Berlin streets; without thinking, the walker could step on someone’s roof. The asphalt is only a thin crust covering human bones. Yellow stars, black swastikas, red hammers and sickles crunch like cockroaches under the walker’s feet” (161). The Berlin of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, then, is place as mapped over: 86. ‘Berlin is hard to describe,’ wrote Viktor Shkolvsky long ago. ‘That’s because in Berlin there’s more of what there’s not than what there is,’ says Bojana. ‘That’s because Berlin is a non-place,’ says Richard. 87. Berlin is a museum city. . . ‘All of us here are museum exhibits . . .’ says Zoran. 51 88. Berlin is an archaeological find. Layers of time pile one over the other, the scars heal with difficulty, the seams are visible. It’s as though some invisible, confused archaeologist had been leaving the wrong labels everywhere: it is often hard to say what came first, and what later. That’s because Berlin is a before-and-after place,’ says Richard. (221) Ugrešić rejects mapping as a practice of cancellation or reduction, cutting across the determinacy of the map with the indeterminacy of leaving. Diagrammatical drawings can never erase the traces of their infractions: “the seams are visible.” And it is in these seams of a map, where the wound interrupts the grass hill, where the ruins interrupt the museum, that subjectivity leaves. Remains All artifacts inevitably grow a vast shadow of information; an archival prosthesis of acquisition records, cataloguing information, documentary photographs, condition reports, and supporting evidence. 2 The Museum of Unconditional Surrender begins with an exhibit, a glass case containing all the items found in the stomach of a dead walrus: a pink cigarette lighter, four ice-lolly sticks (wooden), a metal brooch in the form of a poodle, a beer-bottle opener, a woman’s bracelet (probably silver), a hair grip, a wooden pencil, a child’s plastic water pistol, a plastic knife, sunglasses, a little chain, a spring (small), a rubber ring, a parachute (child’s toy), a steel chain about 18 ins in length, four nails (large), a green plastic car, a metal 2 Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, “The Museum to Come,” Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), 86. 52 comb, a plastic badge, a small doll, a beer can (Pilsner, half-pint), a box of matches, a baby’s shoe, a compass, a small car key, four coins, a knife with a wooden handle, a baby’s dummy, a bunch of keys (5), a padlock, a little plastic bag containing needles and thread. (Ugrešić xi) The exposure of the walrus’s interiority leaves the visitor unable to resist the “thought that with time the objects have acquired some subtler, secret connection. Caught up in this thought, the visitor then tries to establish semantic coordinates, to reconstruct the historical context . . . , and so on and so forth” (xi). The impenetrable transparency of glass, of display, both blocks and elicits a desire to retrieve the objects, to re-organize them, to stitch them together with the “little plastic bag containing needles and thread” in conjunction with the “wooden pencil,” and perhaps the “compass.” If the museum solicits precisely those acts of conjunction that its boundaries prohibit, what sort of archive could exhibit the secret connection between the shadow of information and the transparency of glass? 53 Archiving I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am 3 . The glass display solicits an attachment to the object that its casing simultaneously interdicts. Again: “the visitor then tries to establish semantic coordinates, to reconstruct the historical context” (Ugrešić xi). The partition between viewer and object is the mechanism by which the archive imposes its own “semantic coordinates” upon a collection while soliciting our desire to reorder that collection on our own terms. It is the structure of desire itself that is on display. Even if the structural casing of the archival display dissolves, even if “bits and pieces” are apparently “possessed,” not by the museum but by the subject, a partition remains in place—the object retains a strangeness that resists any effort to catalogue its significance: I arrange my bits and pieces, some I have brought with me, without really knowing why, some I found here, all random and meaningless. A little feather I picked up while walking in the park gleams in front of me, a sentence I read somewhere rings in my head, an old yellowing photograph looks at me, the outline of a gesture I saw somewhere accompanies me, and I don’t know what it means or who made it, the ball containing the guardian angel shines before me with its plastic glow. (9) 3 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 59. 54 In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, this gleam, ring, gaze, or glow registers the resistance of the traumatic artifact to any semantic coordinates. In fact, this insubstantial “fringe” secreted by the artifact reveals the artifact as nothing but the failure of semantic coordinates, the excess that both exposes and defamiliarizes the reification of the object as token, as souvenir. Ugrešić’s novel is a critique of the archive, but it is also continually engaged in the process of exposing its own implication in the violence of archiving—of reordering, according to its own imperatives, the memorial material that had been claimed by nations and institutions. The novel opens with a set of instructions for reading: The chapters and fragments which follow should be read in a similar way. If the reader feels that there are no meaningful or firm connections between them, let him be patient: the connections will establish themselves of their own accord. (xi) There is an assumption here on the part of the narrator that time will heal all wounds, whether historical or narrative. But the narrative that follows resists the kind of “accord” upon which these instructions depend. What the instructions don’t recognize, is that the illusion of connection that might emerge to cover over the traumatic isolation of these elements, cannot ever overwrite the excessive glow of a plastic angel: “The collection turns every gain or acquisition into a cipher of loss and dispossession. Striving toward a totality which is blocked by virtue of the interminability of the drive to accumulation, the archive undercuts every order it seeks to 55 found” (Comay 14). It is the very sharing of the unworking of connections that is constitutive of the novel; and it is in that sense that a novel is not really possible, not really finished, without accord. This practice of departure as archiving in Ugrešić’s text wants to resist the pull of return, of re-location. In other words, Ugrešić recognizes the fever of the museum, its returns of all remains to a particular code or ordering. Even a cutting up into little pieces, a severing of the homogeneity of the blue of water on a map, insists on a re-mapping: Sissel buys maps of the world, cuts the seas out of the maps, cuts those seas up into little pieces, then sticks the pieces together again to form one surface. As she does so, Sissel follows her own inner sense of geography. (Ugrešić 98) This internal ordering mechanism ultimately fails as an act of defiance against cartographic totalization because all these “cuts” somehow leave the subject intact. In reterritorializing, on the level of subjective re- collection, the geographic totality she has just taken apart, Ugrešić’s proxy only reconstitutes the archive as autobiography, as an “inner sense” that would hold out against non-sense. The text at once indulges in and exposes the self-indulgence of such an autobiographical re-coordination. Autobiography is critiqued as a memorial operation that only reconstitutes a privative archive, quaint in its faith in the recuperative power of subjective integrity: A photograph is a reduction of the endless and unmanageable world to a little rectangle. A photograph is our measure of the world. A photograph is also a memory. Remembering means 56 reducing the world to little rectangles. Arranging the little rectangles in an album is autobiography. (27) The emergent accord between reader and text, between unorganized fragments and semantic coordinates that Ugrešić gestures to earlier is exposed as a false harmony that negates difference in the name of a generic community: Autobiography is a serious and sad genre. It is as though somewhere deep within us there was an encoded assumption about the genre, and both the author and the reader submit to it: they harmonize the rhythm of their pulse, their heartbeat, slow down their breathing, together lower their blood pressure. (29) If the archival display offers an illusion of transparency that belies the shadow cast by its institutional frame, then the autobiography’s promise of affective communion presupposes organized identities and cloaks the necessary failures of communication implicit in radical loss. Again, it is the structure of desire implicit in such a generic law that the text “exhibits.” The pathos of this critique is that recognizing the insufficiency of replacing the institutional archive with the private record as the locus of memorial value hardly obviates the compulsion to repeat this substitution. The honesty of Ugrešić’s text is that it acknowledges the sadness of that compulsion, continually falling into it and signaling its failure as it falls. 57 Writing Absence of the writer too. For to write is to draw back… To be grounded far from one’s language, to emancipate it or lose one’s hold on it, to let it make its way alone and unarmed. 4 U ostakljenu atelju u dnu našeg parka rumunjski par priprema izložbu. Mlada žena sjekiricom obradjuje komade drveta koje je danima skupljala po parku. Muškarac za to vrijeme na golemi bijeli pano iglicama pribada tanke, gotovo prozirne listiće papira. Na svakom je nježnim, svijetlosivim vodenim bojama iscrtana ptičja glava. Mlada žena ritmično udara sjekiricom o drvo. Papirići isprva miruju, a onda ih lagano pokreće neka nevidljiva struja. Ptičje glave drhte kao da će pasti. 5 (Ugrešić Muzej Bezuvjetne Predaje 10) 4 Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book,” Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 70. 5 In the glass studio at the end of our park, the Romanian couple are preparing an exhibition. The young woman uses an axe to shape pieces of wood she has been collecting around the park for days. Meanwhile, the man pins little pieces of thin, almost transparent, paper to a huge white board. On each one a bird’s head is painted in soft, bright, grey water-colours. The young woman hits the wood rhythmically with her axe. At first the little pieces of paper are still, and then an invisible current slowly stirs them. The birds’ heads quiver as though they were going to fall. (Ugrešić 10) 58 Dispersal Two: Sad Facts Site Actually, the heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. 6 “How I nearly felt, in the midst of all that looking” (Markson 109). In David Markson’s post-apocalyptic non-narrative, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the museum is the locus of affective inclination, of subjectivity approaching its leavings. This is a novel in which “somebody . . . woke up one Wednesday or Thursday to discover that there was apparently not one other person left in the world” (Markson 230). Not one other person, but portraits and proper names, indexical traces of habitation, texts for nothing. In the ruins of what appears to be the end of history, someone wakes up in an archive, sending messages to no one: In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery. Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York. Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages. (7) 6 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991), 99. 59 Here, the museum cannot reabsorb the catastrophe into organized artifacts; here, the unearthing of ruins cannot be covered over with monuments. So that “here” is all wreckage, archive outside in, contents and context unbound. The radical gap between site and citation undoes the museum’s hold over its artifacts. Incommensurable objects that have been held together by coherent historical chronologies, by placement on a particular shelf or under a particular heading, come apart. The museum’s taxonomic mappings are ruptured by an excess of ruins, a disaster that the museum cannot, even in its belated narrative, write over. So though museums do indeed survive Markson’s apocalypse, they have been undone. And it is here where Markson’s narrator, the only person left, the person as left, is housed. The undoing of the archive collapses its boundaries, its distinction as a site of collection from the world it would collect. Traveling, the one who is left remains left among museums, the world as a memory of the museum that had once remembered the world: What I had planned to do next was to take an ordinary rowboat across, and then drive on into Europe through Yugoslavia. Possibly I mean Yugoslavia. In any case on that side of the channel where there are monuments to the soldiers who died there in the first World War. On the side where Troy is, one can find a monument where Achilles was buried, so much longer ago. Well, they say it is where Achilles was buried. Still, I find it extraordinary that young men died there in a war that long ago, and then died in the same place three thousand years after that. (8-9) 60 After maps, at the edge of memory, geography and history are set adrift as rumor, so that “the same place” finds itself divided by a body of water. It is not so much the topography of woundedness that is at stake here, but rather the traumatic topology of the museum. The inside and the outside of the archive implicate and unfold each other, exposing citation to an instability that collapses discrepant sites and renders history a series of imprecise iterations: “Possibly I mean Yugoslavia”; “Still, I find it extraordinary that young men died.” There is a defamiliarization of the archive at work here—a productive unworking and exposure of the geo- historical record—that opens the museum to a sense of its own wonder. It is an unworking that can maintain itself in its own potential, in its tension, only through the registration of its proximity to despair: “Still, how I nearly felt, in the midst of all that looking. Looking in desperation, as I have said” (188). 61 Remains All artifacts inevitably grow a vast shadow of information; an archival prosthesis of acquisition records, cataloguing information, documentary photographs, condition reports, and supporting evidence. 7 Removed from the shadow of information cast by the archive, severed from its institutional prosthesis, the painting suffers an ekphrastic dissolve: There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way. I have now concluded that what I believed to be a person is a shadow. If it is not a shadow, it is perhaps a curtain. As a matter of fact it could actually be nothing more than an attempt to imply depths, within the room. Although in a manner of speaking all that is really in the window is burnt sienna pigment. And some yellow ochre. In fact, there is no window either, in that same manner of speaking, by the way. So that any few speculations I may have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously. . . . In either case it remains a fact that no altered perception of my own, such as this one, changes anything in the painting. (Markson 55) Wittgenstein’s mistress reduces person to pigment, figuration to figure, like so: 7 Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, “The Museum to Come,” Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), 86. 62 person  shadow  curtain  depth  pigment  shape In Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the artifact floats free of the factual descriptions that determine its formal properties and the institutional authorities that might verify those descriptions. After the museum, the discursive effect linking fact and artifact dissolves. What remains? Archiving I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. 8 Not little rectangles. Rather, Markson’s narrator disperses spheres across the remains of architectural landmarks: Once, from the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, for no reason except that I had come upon a Volkswagen van full of them, I let hundreds and hundreds of tennis balls bounce one after the other to the bottom, every which way possible. Watching how they struck tiny irregularities or worn spots in the stone, and changed direction, or guessing how far across the piazza down below each one of them would go. (12-13) Instead of collecting the found object, deciphering its strangeness by hypothesizing the context of the tennis balls’ abandonment, she simply lets them fall. On the order of writing, such dispersal over a textual plane leaves every sentence profoundly isolated. Sentences themselves split into component parts, rupturing their propositional consistency. Facts, in such 8 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 59. 63 an unstable grammatical milieu, are torn from their moorings in logic. In severing the intersubjective ties of “consensus” upon which they depend for verification, Markson has “made facts sad” (Wallace 226): Well, doubtless [Willem de Kooning] would have found it agreeable to have been descended from Vincent Van Gogh as well, even if he was born less than fifteen years after Van Gogh shot himself. I am not quite certain how the second part of that sentence is connected to the beginning part, actually. (Markson 138) There is a slippage of logical subordination here—a rift in the hypotactic interdependence of propositional language—that seems to reveal an ontological fissure, an infection of ontology by linguistic indeterminacy. The indeterminate delay of “less” than fifteen years, its uncertain relation to desire (“he would have found it agreeable”) and to kinship, delays and unsettles the binding of a proper name to a constitutive biography. Delay itself slips out of all relational order, achieving a positivity that undermines any primary clause, any epistemological foundation premised upon the concept of origin. “It is thus the delay which is in the beginning” (Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 203). “After” the end of the world, at the limit of the possibility of the archive, the temporal order upon which historicity itself is founded falls away, eroding the ground of facticity that the belated archivist would attempt to re-establish. In Wittgenstein’s Mistress, facts burn, and we miss them: Now and again, things burn. I do not mean only when I have set fire to them myself, but out of natural happenstance. And so bits 64 and pieces of residue will sometimes be wafted great distances, or to astonishing heights. (29) There are states of disappearance and departure, rituals of disintegration that dissipate the archive into thin air, gradually: Will the house that I am dismantling become the second house on this beach that I have burned to the ground? Granting that I am burning that house board by board, and that it will be quite some time before I have dismantled it fully enough to be able to consider it as having been burned to the ground. (79) Markson’s narrator engages in a practice of unworking, a literal dismantling of anything that might fix memory into a static figure, including the book: One winter, I read almost all of the ancient Greek plays. As a matter of fact I read them out loud. And throughout, finishing the reverse side of each page would tear it from the book and drop it into my fire. Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, I turned into smoke. (Markson 16) To burn the archive is to burn facts, to burn a history to which one cannot lay claim, but what is the future of this burning? The burning of the archive is interminable, because “in the archive, or towards it, language becomes atomic-microscopic, deconstructed, splitting incessantly into near imperceptibility” (Lippit 4). To be en mal d’archive “is to burn with a passion” (Derrida, Archive Fever 91), but the interminability of the archive also leaves one exhausted, all passion spent: “Although even just to see some floating ash again would be agreeable, too. Even if 65 one would hardly go to the trouble to name some floating ash, on the other hand” (Markson 239). “After” the burning of names, one is left to name the remainders of that burning. But to be unable to carry out that injunction—to find oneself tired, sick to death of designation—is, perhaps paradoxically, to endow the trace with a positive potential, to leave it within its potentiality, open upon the indetermination of futurity. Burning indexes the trauma of the archive. And an ash, a cloud of smoke, the trace of the archive’s burning is a signal, but a signal of what, from when, to whom? “One never does solve what it is about watching fires, really” (Markson 130). Writing Absence of the writer too. For to write is to draw back. . . . To be grounded far from one’s language, to emancipate it or lose one’s hold on it, to let it make its way alone and unarmed. 9 Here, when the snows come, the trees write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. The sky itself is often white, and the dunes are hidden, and the beach is white down to the water’s edge, as well. (Markson 37) 9 Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book,” Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 70. 66 Winters, when the snow covers everything, leaving only that strange calligraphy of the spines of the trees, it is a little like closing one’s eyes. (47) Winters, when the snows come and the trees write their strange calligraphy against the whiteness, sometimes the only other demarcation is that of my path to the spring. (77) Or, if there is snow, the flames will write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. (129) Still, on the morning after it fell, the trees were writing a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. (233) Event It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. 10 In a manner of speaking almost everything I am able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso. (Markson 37) Everything that one is able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of plaster and glue. I have said that. (47) So that almost everything I was able to see, then, was like that old lost nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso. (233) 10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 109. 67 99. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender was closed in the summer of 1994, when several tens of thousands of left-over Russian soldiers left Berlin. A little later an exhibition of ‘Russians in Berlin’ was opened at 75 Prenzlauer Allee. In the little basement room an invisible projector showed slides of Berlin buildings before and after the arrival of the Russians. At the entrance to the room hung long accusing strips of paper. The paper strips listed the names of the Berlin streets destroyed by the Russians. What I remembered from the Museum of Unconditional Surrender was a heavy, stale, sweetish smell. The smell here was identical. (Ugrešić 224) Sense emerges from, falls into, sensation. Four white coats of gesso. The smell of the archive. When a canvas is lost, when a museum closes, how can we remember what they were like, without the closure of a “likeness?” The subject does not remember. Memory would have to traverse the subject, exposing and unfolding a forgetting as memorial sensation. “An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound. So I sometimes feel that exile is nothing but a state of searching for and recollecting sound” (Ugrešić 7). Memorial sensation is not a monument. It is not a memorial. It is not an "inner sense," of geography or of history. Not a search, but a state of searching. A nearly feeling for a recollection of a future as a sensory-affective hypersensitivity. Memorial sensation is not subjective, but manifests itself as a field of sensation (a white rectangle, a scent, a sound, awaiting) that activates and evacuates a subject as and into an affective condition. Sensation denotes "the impersonal experience of something new globally registering in a context" (Massumi 295). Memorial 68 sensation reconstitutes what used to be called memory as the occurrence of the new, the à-venir inhabiting the archive as an unfolding of the future within the encounter of a present past. As memorial sensation, Memory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.) makes sheets of past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is always already there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter. (Deleuze, Cinema 2 207) Memorial sensation is the index of the virtual within the actual. A synthetic glow, an identical odor, , the contingency of snow, a sound. Memorial sensation folds discrepant texts and disjointed temporalities into a contingent intersection, an intertextual opening: Where these temporalities touch contingently, their spatial boundaries metonymically overlapping, at that moment their margins are lagged, sutured, by the indeterminate articulation of the ‘disjunctive’ present. (Bhabha 254) What practice of reading could register these indeterminate articulations and retain their disjunctive overlappings? How can contingencies touch? Can we touch, contingently? From two texts in crisis, about crisis, about the crisis of the archive, we have attempted to produce an intertextual crisis. Reading in a traumatic archive, it should come as no surprise that connections between texts are in crisis, that the texts that we read are overly proximate and utterly incommensurable. We would not find these two texts on the same 69 shelf of a library that has not burned. One is “Croatian”; the other is “American.” One emerges from the dissolution of a socialist state; the other in the midst of the consolidation of American power. One is fixated upon the solidity of objects; the other broods on linguistic indeterminacy and the fragility of propositional logic. One is a novel obsessed with history; the other is situated after the end of history. These are texts held apart by the categorical determinacy of the archive, by numbers and letters subjected to disciplinary imperatives. In an archive that has burned, the coordinates of the collection are disarrayed and unmapped. When a library has burned and when books are re-stacked at the site of that burning, the contingency of their dis-placed associations will bear the trace of the archive’s fever. The archive’s associations are dispersed, redistributed, and the tracing of this uncollected redistribution operates as a traumatic intertextuality. Among the contingent conjunctions of an archive in a state of emergency, texts that had seemed geographically dissevered might fall together. Texts that might have seemed to share no common contextual ground might be revealed as mutually engaged with discrepant aspects of a larger historico-political context in which they share. If Ugrešić’s text interrogates the emergence of the new nationalism, and if Markson’s “post-historical” text prefigures the leveling force of globalization, we might ask after the manner in which these are mutually constitutive. 70 While Croatia at once demands and resists integration into the European Union, the “global community” demands the surrender of a war criminal—an expulsion of the country’s representative traumatic kernel, the point de capiton of its nationalist desire. Each demands the unconditional surrender of the other. “Possibly I mean Yugoslavia” (Markson 8): both of these texts defamiliarize and interrogate the so- called end of history, addressing themselves to discrepant poles of this problematic. They find themselves in a “state of searching” through the archive of geographical and aesthetic categories that used to mean something, a state of searching among meanings that are bereft of their ties to historical foundations. To read two books that do not belong to one another, that do not belong on the same shelf, is to produce the space of their mutual longing. Linked by the trauma of the archive at the crux of historical determinacy, both of these texts seem to long for the indeterminacy of the archive—for an opening of the archive onto contingency. If contingency is the site of this mutual longing, how can we construct the space of that longing’s encounter with itself? The contingent is contiguity, metonymy, the touching of spatial boundaries at a tangent, and, at the same time, the contingent is the temporality of the indeterminate and the undecidable. It is the kinetic tension that holds this double determination together and apart within discourse. (Bhabha 186) 71 To produce a site of contingency as a contingent site, one would have to suspend the common place by exposing intertextuality on an indeterminate terrain, a non-site of kinetic tension, of crossings that do not intersect, of parallel lines running at tangent angles. The impossible production of this sort of contingent contact between texts is what Cesare Casarino calls philopoesis: a love of literature that maintains texts in the potential of their irreparable perfection not by reading them, but by offering them as gifts to one another. In the practice of philopoesis, the offering of one text to another is superfluous, because “both are perfect—that is, perfectly finished and perfectly finite” (Casarino 92). And yet such a superfluous offering is productive because “both delimit each other’s perfection and materialize the other’s limit as potentiality.” The contingent contact of texts “surrounds the perfect text with a halo as a superfluous gift of potentiality” (92). But for Casarino, such a productive work of love is also and at once a practice of unworking—it is a “love of words as unspent potentials,” a love of “that which remains unmade” in any making (79). A practice of reading that exposes intertextuality as an unworking which at once constitutes and suspends textuality itself also exposes intertextuality as traumatic—as a limit and a delimitation of nonidentity: What is shared on this extreme and difficult limit is not communion, not the completed identity of all in one, nor any kind of completed identity. What is shared therefore is not the annulment of sharing, but sharing itself, and consequently 72 everyone’s nonidentity, each one’s nonidentity to himself and to others, and the nonidentity of the work to itself, and finally the nonidentity of literature to literature itself. (Nancy, Inoperative Community 66) To practice reading as traumatic intertextuality is to re-circulate the trauma of the text as the gift of its nonidentity—the gift of its incomplete sharing. Such a gift is the gift of contingency as community: the dis- organization of books in an inoperative archive. The inoperative archive, an archive interrupted, is what is given to and transmitted by Kounellis’s installation. The installation is not a demarcation of the scene of a crime or a seizure of the site as re-possessed. It is a tracing of the site’s possession, a haunting that cannot be exorcised or evaded, but is only given. The archive is haunted by the future of the burning it has undergone, as the givenness of the disaster. The installation is not a monument to that burning, but an unworking of the monument, a questioning of the monument’s capacity to transmit: A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event. (Deleuze and Guattari 176) A sensation is not a transmission. A sensation is the glow of white paint, the scent of an encounter, the sound of exile: a field that burns, immanently. The sensation of a burning library. How do we archive the sense of the disaster, the unbearable heat of its violence, without violating the fragility of its passing, without foreclosing on its immediacy? The refraction of light around a cloud of smoke. The glow of a cinder. These 73 are potentials, but they are potentials devastating in the loss of potentiality that they expose. This dis-integration of potentiality is a nearly feeling that circulates, a quietness at the limit of books. As if the burning of the archive were the condition of all questions, of any sensation at all: “Every sensation is a question, even if the only answer is silence” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 196). 74 Chapter 3  Structures of Sadness:  Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String  How many times until I am hollow, the way the bird is when it flies? Yes or no, Father said that the bird has to be hollow so it can eat itself and keep flipping inside out. He said if I looked at it right, I could see it flip over and over and over and hear the wings beating to keep it from falling. That’s what the noise in wind is, and if wind didn’t make noise, it would mean the bird was falling all over us, so that we would be getting pecked at and pecked at. —Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String 112-3 Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (1995) opens with an argument. The argument is at once a polemic against scholars, accused of willful obscurism and the exploitation of secrets in their study of culture, as well as a plea for “accurate vision” in one’s tracking of a society and its matters of concern. Such vision takes the form of “train[ing] the thing to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed” (4), a project of self- revelation and clarification that produces a strange and difficult field of writing. Because “by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire,” because “the outer gaze alters the inner thing” (3), this cultural testimony is an attempt to be without discursive distance. The burden of its disclosures, then, is to remain immersed in the situation at hand, to write 75 from within a present situation, documenting its structures while being structured by them. This kind of internal investigation from within what is given is for Marcus the only concern: “To pretend that there are there other concerns is to pretend” (4). This singular interest of Marcus’s text is to announce a methodology and to remain entirely immersed within its practice. Paradoxically metafictional, the opening, with its announcement that there is only an inside in this book, is perhaps the sole site of something like an outside in The Age of Wire and String. The “Argument” advises us that to catalogue this particular culture, this historical moment, “the living program” (3), necessitates a very particular mode of response. To write about and from within the present moment in the US, as the few geographical markers (Utah, Arkansas, Ohio, Illinois, Denver) in Marcus’s book indicate, is, I will argue, to capture its mood. So the declared immanence of Marcus’s methodology is inseparable from mood insofar as mood is precisely a kind of total embeddedness: the feeling of what is, as it is. That feeling, in an age of wire and string, in an age of the emergence of the World Wide Web and the marked disappearance of the analog, is sadness. My claim is that sadness is the affect of immanence, that to be inside this particular situation, this presentness, is to be sad. In the previous chapter, affect was felt in the present as a scattering, a distribution of disaster and of writing across a scene. Here, that 76 distribution is gathered up into local sites of concentration, blocs of feeling that are subtracted from the very transmission of feeling. Sadness is the feeling of saturation, and sadness saturates, overwhelming and overtaking a situation, arresting or blocking it. Sadness feels, paradoxically, like the obstruction of feeling. Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String describes how this affective response, this mood, is exemplary of our particular historical moment, and this telling happens through a subterranean kind of writing that exposes the underlying structures of the feeling of sadness. “Structures of feeling” is Raymond Williams’s term, in Marxism and Literature, for those meanings and values that are in the process of being lived and felt: an “articulation of presence” (135). The term refers to a thinking and a feeling that are still in formation, that has not yet been reduced to a systematic exchange between determined units. Such unformed, minor, and unfinished formations exert pressures and tensions, are still formed in some sense, but these are more fragile constructions than the built institutions or discourses into which they might be constrained. “Feeling,” for Williams, captures something distinct from “ideology,” something that escapes capture because it is still being practiced, immanently. By “structures of feeling,” Williams means something like the general affective disposition of a local historical moment: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a 77 living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis . . . has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. (132) The affective experience-in-process is both in solution and specifically structured, a kind of becoming structure, a mediation between the personal and the social that is lived as a relation to an emergent formation. “Structures of feeling” registers a tension or unease “between the received interpretation and practical experience” (130); it marks the difference between “practical consciousness,” an embryonic phase, and “official consciousness,” the fully articulated. Williams’s distinction between “practical consciousness” and set ideologies or institutions is reactivated with different terms in Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual. For Massumi, emotion is the category that expresses a fixed social form. Emotion is a feeling that is socially recognizable and classifiable; affect is “in solution,” lived and felt in the present. Massumi writes: An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, the consensual point of insertion into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique. (28) 78 Massumi pushes the definition of affect to mean an absolutely autonomous intensity that cannot be thought or felt in terms of any identifiable, expressible experience. Not in tension with “official consciousness,” but escaping from it: Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture—and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. . . Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect. (Massumi 35) This escaped nature of affect, unattached to any particular body and unstructured by a narrative logic, resembles the unactualized condition of Williams’s “feeling.” But while Massumi’s description employs a language of excess over emotion, a resistance to ownership or capture by any actual connection or particular perspective because affects behave like a surplus over available emotional experiences, Williams draws on a vocabulary of sub-structures. There is a kind of underneathness to structures of feeling, as Williams observes in an earlier section of Marxism and Literature in which he discusses the distinction between the “residual,” and the “emergent,” in relation to the “dominant.” For Williams, feelings remain embedded in an historical field, agitating and unsettling what has already been co-opted by dominant forces. Such a relation seems crucial 79 to any investigation of the affectivity of a situation. “In authentic historical analysis,” writes Williams, “it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance” (121). This would mean to speak of both the residual and the emergent, elements that operate as unformed dispositions, as traces of the past and of the future. Williams defines the residual as effectively formed in the past, but . . . still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation. It is crucial to distinguish this aspect of the residual, which may have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture, from that active manifestation of the residual . . . which has been wholly or largely incorporated into the dominant culture. (122) If residue makes us think of a kind of gritty remainder, some strange murky substance left at the bottom, a material unincorporated, then we can begin to make sense of its relation to those affective elements of consciousness that remain insubstantial in their expression or verification. The residual past that is active and transformative in the present acts as a minor irritant, an affective lingering whose openness suggests a relational logic; the residual is an alliance with the present that allows us to think a thickness of the present that includes its own temporal lag: 80 If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the specificity of present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products. (Williams 128) The “specificity of present being” is precisely its relation to residual pasts not as potentials or as unsubstantiated traces for the future, but as immanent to it, as lived and apprehended presently. Something similar could be said of what Williams calls the emergent, which is necessary to an understanding of structures of feeling. The emergent accounts for “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships [that] are continually being created” (123). The “new” acts as a complication of the “would-be dominant culture” (126), a deformation that is unsettling, minor, superfluous. Williams is careful to qualify that what he means by the emergent is more specifically a pre-emergence, “active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the evident emergence which could be more confidently named” (126). Rather than a superfluity that exceeds the given state of things, this is something smaller, something less than a name. If it cannot be named with any confidence, the pre-emergent, like the residual, retains an uncertainty that manifests as a force of affectivity that is embedded in the present. That is to say, both the pre-emergent and the residual can be sensed affectively, felt, immediately. 81 The feeling of living in or undergoing the present tense, then, is experienced as the tension of that which has not yet solidified into an ideology, or as Massumi might put it, not yet into an emotion. Lauren Berlant writes, in her consideration of these same concepts, that “affect, the body’s active presence to the intensities of the present, embeds the subject in an historical field, and . . . its scholarly pursuit can communicate the conditions of an historical moment’s production as a visceral moment” (“Intuitionists” 1). Apprehending the present moment means recognizing the relations to and investments in the “not yet fully articulated” (Williams 126); or, “feeling out the unfinished situation of the present” as an “ongoing process and project of collective sensory detection” (Berlant, “Thinking About Feeling Historical” 7; “Intuitionists” 2). In Affective Mapping, Jonathan Flatley points out that the unfinished nature of affectivity need not mean that it can be thought only as supplementary to a more resolved ideology, nor as merely a fleeting situation: “structures of feeling can be ephemeral but also just as durable and forceful as ideologies, perhaps even more so. I think that structure of feeling should emerge . . . as a full-fledged parallel to ideology” (26). To think the present as an ongoing condition is then to think it affectively, as a dynamic of relation and transformation that operates within a logic of immanence, a logic that is not reducible to its opposition to forces of domination that have hardened into ideologies. That is, feelings possess 82 an immediacy that have an impact not merely in terms of a teleological becoming; they affirm something in their incompletion that is not just a striving toward or against completion. 11 We might turn to Spinoza here for a more philosophical terminology of affect from his 17 th century work Ethics, particularly as re- read and re-deployed by Deleuze in both Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. For Spinoza, the “intensities of the present” are always in relation to other intensities in a condition of continual variation. The encounter with another intensity might lessen our original feeling; or, we might encounter something that doubles our feeling, such that we move from our original state to a more intense one. A body thus, for Spinoza, is simply a capacity, what it can do, its openness to be both affected and affecting. The body as capacity for relation can encounter bad relations, relations that reduce altogether the body’s capacity for relation, and good relations, ones that maximize the capacity to be affected: I meet a body whose relation cannot be combined with my own. The body does not agree with my nature, is contrary to it, bad or harmful. It produces in me a passive affection which is itself bad or contrary to my nature. The idea of such an affection is a feeling of sadness, a sad passion corresponding to a reduction of my power of action. And we know what is bad only insofar as we perceive something to affect us with sadness. (Deleuze, EP 241) 11 See Anne-Lise Francois’s Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience wherein she considers “never-acted-upon passions and uncounted experiences not as nos disguising incipient, concealed, or denied affirmatives but rather as aimless, innocent, minimal, all but negative, contented affirmations” (32). 83 So sadness here is what inactivity or reduction feels like. Sadness signals the experience of an antagonistic relation; feeling enables or gives us access to knowledge about how an encounter has affected us: A feeling of sadness . . . always comes into any encounter I have with a body that does not agree with my nature, this from the fact that the body always injures me in one of my partial relations. This feeling of sadness is, furthermore, our only way of knowing that the other body does not agree with out nature. (242) The notion of disagreement is crucial here: sadness is the affect of a certain obstruction of composition. Or again, sadness is the affective recognition of an antagonism that is experienced as a blockage within an economy of relation and composition, an economy that privileges the joy of composition and agreement. Sadness decomposes, disagrees. Spinoza offers this definition of affect: “By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained” (III, def. 3). It reads as a theory of the feeling of movement, a theory of being moved. As Deleuze elucidates: from one state to another, from one image or idea to another, there are transitions, passages that are experiences, durations through which we pass to a greater or a lesser perfection. Furthermore, these states, these affections, images or ideas are not separable from the duration that attaches them to the preceding state and makes them tend towards the next state. These continual durations or variation of perfection are called ‘affects,’ or feelings. (Deleuze, Spinoza, 48-9) Affective attachments move us either productively or subtractively. Our dispositions are precisely a shift in position, the time and space of a relation, and the feeling of that relation registers as either being moved 84 more or less. As Deleuze writes: “The passage to a greater perfection, or the increase of the power of acting, is called an affect, or feeling, of joy; the passage to a lesser perfection or the diminution of the power of acting is called sadness.” This chapter is concerned with the latter. Methodologies of Mood A strangely objective, technical language pervades The Age of Wire and String, and its organizational strategies and substructures formalize this impersonal tone. The book is subdivided into eight sections (SLEEP, GOD, FOOD, THE HOUSE, ANIMAL, WEATHER, PERSONS, THE SOCIETY), each of which concludes with a glossary of defined terms that we might have come across in our reading. 12 This lexicon suggests that what is at stake in this re-description of the conditions of the present is not only a new, more “accurate” perspective, but an entirely altered vocabulary. In the first set of TERMS at the end of the “SLEEP” section, 12 The structure of Marcus’s book raises the question of how to characterize the text in terms of genre. The book’s front cover describes it as “stories,” while the back cover cites a reviewer praising it as “an extraordinary first novel.” In an interview with failbetter, Marcus addresses the discrepancy: “The genre categories don’t worry me so much. The confusion around The Age of Wire and String was somewhat accidental. I think the paperback edition calls it both stories and a novel, in different parts of the promotional text. This was probably a typo, and it no doubt fueled the confusion, which was never intended. I never thought of it as either stories or a novel, only because those thoughts didn’t much help me work on it. It was always just a book. But certain publishers do require the label, and it didn’t bother me to call it ‘stories,’ since I saw the distinction as promotional, one I myself wasn’t making. At the time, it seemed to get me off the hook from making a larger sense, and I was glad for the excuse. I suppose, if I had come up with a clever new genre name, I might have tried to force a publisher to use it, but I guess it’s just not interesting to me to do that.” 85 Marcus offers the definition of SADNESS: “The first powder to be abided upon waking. It may reside in tools or garments and can be eradicated with more of itself, in which case the face results as a placid system coursing with water, heaving” (13). Later, when we re-encounter the concept, that definition proves to be of little assistance: “When we kill men, we kill them because we are sad. SADNESS develops in and outside of the house, either just after entering or just after leaving” (55). What would it mean, given these definitions, to call this a sad book? What can we gather from these strange, elusive descriptions? First, sadness is defined as a material substance, a substance that inhabits our surroundings and which bodies encounter. Its materiality is distributed like a kind of weather, an atmospheric powder that permeates structures and fills space. It is at once a primary affective relation, a crisis of the body, and not assignable to any particular body. In this sense, we might say that sadness is the becoming mood of affect. That is to say, what is particular about the feeling of sadness, as both a specific term in Marcus’s book and its overall tone, is that it registers the generalization of affect. Sadness, that is, can circulate within language, or space, or a situation without having emerged from a particular character or plot. If mood, a concept we will return to shortly with Heidegger, is a kind of globalization of structures of feeling such that they “seem to be about nearly everything” (Baier ctd. in Ngai, 179), then the sad structures 86 of feeling in Marcus’s text permeate all its relations, and in a circular way, this permeation—or better, saturation—itself feels sad. What is crucial to note here is that Marcus’s text at once describes this saturating and saturated mood of sadness as the state of our contemporary cultural conditions, but it also seeks to produce such a state through the constructions of literary scenarios and figures of blockage, disagreement, and saturation. These figures are everywhere, disseminated, paradoxically, across the text, but they figure precisely as the blockage of dissemination, as the immobility of narrative, as protection, offered by a certain mood of writing, against an openness to or engagement with the present state of things. So we can trace the logic of sadness as an aesthetic project in The Age of Wire and String: first, the subject’s inscription within the contemporary conditions of late capitalism feels sad, a feeling thematized throughout the book. Sadness is an explicit indication that our relation to the present conditions is a harmful one of disagreement; sadness signals an affective registration of a relation to crisis. Second, the feeling of sadness is immobilizing; it decreases the capacity to act and the capacity to be affected. In other words, sadness materializes as an obstruction or blockage of affective circulation and relation. Finally, this blockage resists a kind of privatization, and is shared collectively as a situation of saturation. 87 Sadness develops as a kind of globalized feeling in the built world of the text, its tone or mood. In Ugly Feelings, an examination of minor, negative affects, Sianne Ngai offers a working definition of “tone” as the “global or organizing affect [of a literary or cultural artifact], its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world” (28). What is strange and innovative about Marcus’s work is that it takes literally the question of tone at the level of construction. “General disposition or orientation,” the inclination of the text toward a certain global affect, is constituted materially in The Age of Wire and String with the repeating figures of cloth and birds and weather. These are the figures whose relations construct a collective atmosphere that is itself affective, and within which affect might be transferred or dispersed. In fact, the book is about nothing other than the systems and techniques by which these base elements, within the world of the text, can form relations and thereby expose the underlying mechanisms of attachment or inclination. The Age of Wire and String is concerned with these affective investments at the level of syntax, of semantics, and of theme as a way to expose how a text can embody a certain disposition, how its attachments are constructed in language. In a section entitled “Air Trance 16,” for instance, from the SLEEP chapter of the book, we are presented with an atmospheric scene about atmosphere: 88 If the motion of wind were to be slowed, as weather is slowed briefly when an animal is born, we would notice a man building and destroying his own house. If we speak to the man through a dense rain, our speech is menaced by the DROWNING METHOD, and we appear to him to be people that are angry and shouting. If my father is the man we are looking at, he will shout back at me, protecting the house with his hand, and his voice will blend with whatever he has decided to create in the sky between us to form a small, hard animal, which, once inside me, will take slow, measured, strategic bites. The animal’s eating project will produce in others the impression that I am kneeling, lying, or fading in an area of total rain, taking shelter behind my upraised hand. (10) The arrest of the weather here reveals a series of emotionally charged situations: the construction and destruction of a house, a misapprehended anger, the body as a defense system, and a return to the concealment of atmosphere through a “fading in an area of total rain.” The scene appears to be a description of how atmospheric pressures, the surroundings in which the text finds itself, press on language and bodies: rain menaces speech; voice blends with sky. Slowing down the wind amounts to a slowing down of language which is exposed as material, “a small, hard animal” that can be consumed, literally, and have violent, physiological effects. The deceleration of the scene reveals the sub-structures at work in the air, that conduit by which information flows and communication transpires. The flows of exchange that inhabit the air—wireless communications signals or radio waves or finance capital—are exposed in a slowed down atmosphere that reveals the concrete materiality of communication that is visible only at a certain speed of exposure. It is as though the barely distinguishable characters here are caught in an 89 atmosphere of feeling that does not emanate from them, that cannot be traced back to a particular agent, but that happens through encounters that are discernible only within a situation of suspension. Suspension, that is, exposes how networks of transmission saturate what appeared to be empty space. The repetition of the conditional (“If the motion of wind were to be slowed,” “If we speak to the man through a dense rain,” “If my father is the man we are looking at”) registers the speculative nature of the scene, how the slowing down of the setting produces a tentative grammar. These hypothetical statements seem to grasp outward toward a futurity that is gathered into the present. There is a hesitation in the grammar, an uncertainty in the “if” that limits the assertion through its formal precarity. The conditional mode thus establishes the contingency between the two parts, separated by a comma, of each of the formulations. Strange new causal relations are established; we notice something only if something else is slowed. And what we notice in Marcus is precisely a diffusion of slowing, how slowing spreads, slows, until that affective capacity to notice itself fades “in an area of total rain,” paradoxically. Paradoxically because at this different speed, language becomes increasingly abstract and defamiliarized, expanding the narrative possibilities. And yet, this expansion proves to be a contraction, because what the reader is opened up to is precisely the experience of closure— 90 “fading in an area of total rain, taking shelter behind my upraised hand”—and of a decreased affective capacity. This is Marcus’s concern: how we can experience in language the feeling of decreased receptivity, of affective withdrawal, of obstructed affective attachments. The “characters” or figures scattered across Marcus’s text are most often arrested in a state of absorption, a state that is doubled in the text as a narrative discontinuity or illegibility. This is most obvious in the listing of “Terms” at the end of each section, where we find an atomized set of concepts interrupting the continuity of the book, both at the level of narrative and of meaning. The concepts themselves index this interruption; their definitions describe strange technologies of enclosure and isolation. For instance, a “SHIRT OF NOISE Garment, fabric, or residue that absorbs and holds sound” (AWS, 14); “HEAVEN Area of final containment. . . Members inside stare outward and sometimes reach” (25); “HOUSE COSTUMES The five shapes for the house that successfully withstand different weather systems” (63); “TUNGSTEN 1. Hardened form of the anger and rage metals. 2. Fossilized behavior, frozen into mountainsides, depicting the seven scenes of escape and the four motifs of breathing while dead” (78); “FRUSC: The air that precedes the issuing of a word from the mouth of a member of person. Frusc is brown and heavy” (94); “GREAT HIDING PERIOD, THE Period of collective underdwelling practiced by the society” (137). This vast collection of unfamiliar 91 terminology describes sites of disengagement. A “house costume,” for example, serves as a screen or shield against the surrounding environment; “Tungsten” protects against the transmission of affect through a concretization of feeling. Verbal communication is preemptively forestalled by a heavy substance, FRUSC, that precedes any spoken word. Much of Marcus’s text operates at this level of abstraction linked with its materialization. What we might consider intangible, like affects, are figured as concrete objects. Subjects we would consider to carry agency and voice are unnamed and depersonalized. Agency and passivity are attached equally to human and non-human figures whose roles are indefinite and inconsistent. No one subject or object seems to possess a narrator’s eye or a character’s eye that is seeing or narrating the situation. Narration occurs, and it is unclear with whom it should be affiliated. We might consider looking to the author himself, as a definition of “Ben Marcus” is offered amid the lexicon in the “ANIMAL” section: BEN MARCUS, THE 1. False map, scroll, caul, or parchment. It is comprised of the first skin. In ancient times, it hung from a pole, where wind and birds inscribed its surface. Every year, it was lowered and the engravings and dents that the wind had introduced were studied. It can be large, although often it is tiny and illegible. Members wring it dry. It is a fitful chart in darkness. When properly decoded (an act in which the rule of opposite perception applies), it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction. […] 2. The garment that is too heavy to allow movement. These cloths are designed as prison structures for bodies, dogs, persons, members. 3. Figure from which the anti-person is derived; or simply, the anti-person. It 92 must refer uselessly and endlessly and always to water, food, birds, or cloth, and is produced of an even ratio of skin and hair, with declension of the latter is proportion to expansion of the former. […] (76-7). The author here is depicted as a blank surface upon which inscriptions occur. These inscriptions take the form of an atmospheric pressing or a bird’s pecking, a violent physical imprint from the surroundings. Writing registers directly as sensation on skin, a kind of wound in the parchment or skin that is the author. This skin cannot be read, except as a rejection of sense or meaning (“it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction”); it can only be worn, inhabited, as an immobilizing garment. So writing then figures as both trace and total embeddedness. If Marcus’s body of writing is something that one must inhabit, or have no access to at all, then we might consider approaching the text as something less like a book and more like an installation art piece: specific to a site, three-dimensional, transformative of the space it inhabits, something one enters. In her analysis of contemporary art, affect, and trauma, Jill Bennett considers how affect, in visual art, operates through formal means rather than as an emotional response to character or narrative: Even where work proceeds from an endeavor to register lived experience, it rarely configures this experience in terms of characters with whom we can readily identify. Nor does a good deal of contemporary art read easily as the expression of the artist’s experience. Thus, the kinds of ‘transcriptions’ of experience one 93 encounters in art do not usually invite us to extrapolate a subject, a persona, from them. Under these conditions, the affective responses engendered by artworks are not born of emotional identification or sympathy; rather, they emerge from a direct engagement with sensation as it is registered in the work. (Empathic Vision 7) “Affects,” she continues, “arise in places rather than human subjects, in a way that allows us to isolate the function of affect, focusing on its motility rather than its origins within a single subject. This, in turn, facilitates an analysis of the affective transaction in terms other than those of the identificatory relationship” (Empathic Vision 10). The isolation of affect as a detached relation often takes the form of an object or a concept (including a proper name) in The Age of Wire and String, though the “affective transaction” figured by the object is also then unfolded into what happens in the book. As Peter Vernon writes in an article on the text: “It is as though Marcus refuses a metaphorical approach and insists on the metonymic—the images, one feels, all have a solid attrition in reality, though that reality is one of terrible pain and loss” (118). If the relation that constitutes an affect (its necessary attachment to an object) withdraws from a subjective paradigm and instead becomes a disconnected intensity, but one with a “solid attrition in reality” rather than merely a free-floating emotion, then in The Age of Wire and String this isolated relation is, paradoxically, a relation of disagreement, a disagreement figured repeatedly throughout the text as the concretization of a particular affect: sadness. 94 These imaginative constructions follow a logic of blockage; they are figures of the obstruction of relations of communication or affective transmission, a kind of occupation or interruption of spaces of flow. And such interruption of affective transmission is itself affective, producing the feeling of failure and disconnection. The unnamed characters scattered across the text are most often depicted as filling their bodies with various substances: “His son may chew cloth and swallow his own garments; he may also self-eat or scheme upon the cloth of another, or he may retch cloth from his mouth and collapse, but no act will dislodge this bird— buried in the father—which will peck out an exit and not use it” (75). There is a sense of total consumption here, as if the only available activity to pursue is to consume; and yet, to be saturated with consumption is to close down the possibility of further ingestion by lodging the commodity in the throat and foreclosing on additional accumulation. Even the potential opening, a wound in the body of the father, is described as useless, not an opening at all. The narrative’s (blocked) circulation around repeated images of enclosure also blocks the reader from any narrative continuity, producing an aesthetic experience of disengagement from the reader. As Christine Hume argues in an essay on The Age of Wire and String: “readerly response is exactly what the work argues against; self- inflicted deafness, silence, and paralysis . . . are what the narrators of Marcus’s stories strive, with elaborate technical and procedural ritual, to 95 attain” (“Reading Ben Marcus”). The obstruction of the aesthetic relation between reader and text is at once localized in particular figures and scenes, and at the same time generalized across the book. A certain kind of aesthetic relationship or openness is rejected, its reproduction is stalled, and that stalling is distributed until it becomes the text’s mood. To think the mood of a literary text, or its “affective comportment” (UF, 43) as Ngai puts it, is to consider its attunement, in Heidegger’s terms. For Heidegger, moods are ontologically primary as they disclose first and foremost our situatedness: “A mood makes manifest ‘how one is, and how one is faring.’ In this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its ‘there’” (BT 173). Our “thereness” is the historical moment in which we are situated, the particular world into which we have been thrown. As Jonathan Flatley elucidates: “We do not know how we got to the ‘there’ in which we find ourselves, nor where we are going; what we can apprehend is the ‘there-ness’ of our ‘there,’ the situation we find ourselves in, in its given-ness, and the unavoidability of always finding ourselves somewhere” (AM 20). Mood, then, always already surrounds us as a permanent and all-encompassing imposition: “A mood assails us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in- the-world, as a way of such Being” (Heidegger, BT 176). Mood is thus fundamental for Heidegger, the “‘how’ according to which one is in such and such a way” (FCM, 67), “the presupposition for [what we intend to do, 96 what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us], the ‘medium within which they first happen” (FCM, 67-8). Mood is the how of these whats; it names how we are in relation to the local situations in which we find ourselves. Heidegger poses a question, rhetorically, to interrupt the most general and simplified characterization of mood or feelings: “Attunements—are they not like the utterly fleeting and ungraspable shadows of clouds flitting across the landscape?” (FCM 64). Are they not, in other words, a kind of ephemeral weather, “merely a radiance and shimmer, or else something gloomy, something hovering over emotional events?” (64). This common understanding of mood as, precisely, moody, as inconstant and unpredictable, is what Heidegger rejects. Unlike the ungraspable shadows of clouds, unlike something hovering, mood in Heidegger’s conception is “not some being that appears in the soul as an experience, but the way of our being there with one another” (FCM 66). The disclosure here of a fundamental relationality is articulated in opposition to a phenomenological “experience” or psychological feeling. Moods disclose that relations are something we are always already in; relations are what it is to be in a specific situation, to be “there.” If “attunement is not something inconstant, fleeting, merely subjective,” then, Heidegger insists, “we must dismiss the psychology of feelings, experiences, and consciousness” (67) when we attempt to conceptualize 97 mood. If mood is necessarily collective, it undermines the prioritization of the subject’s interiority as a site through which to access feeling. Heidegger is clear on this point: “Having a mood is not related to the psychical in the first instance, and is not itself an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical way and puts its mark on Things and persons” (BT 176). Instead, mood “imposes itself on everything” (FCM, 66): it is the gathering of a situation through a shared affect that traverses all its relations, “the way in which we are together” (FCM 66). We might still think mood within a meteorological paradigm, but it would be a different sort of atmosphere, one that permeates completely, one that delineates a world or a collective situation—not an internal weather. As Heidegger emphasizes, “Attunements are not side-effects, but are something which in advance determine our being with one another. It seems as though an attunement is in each case already there, so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which then attunes us through and through” (FCM 67). Mood is a constraint in some sense, as it implies a specific condition within which one is immediately immersed and which governs “our thinking, going, and acting” (FCM 67) because “we are never free of moods” (BT 175). We are always operating within a particular situation, under a specific atmosphere, within an historical context. And because the specificity of mood determines the way of our being, it is what allows things to matter: 98 “nothing like an affect would come about . . . if Being-in-the-world, with its state-of-mind, had not already submitted itself to having entities within the world ‘matter’ to it in a way which its moods have outlined in advance” (BT 177). As Flatley points out, “It is by way of mood that we attribute value to something. And since value for Heidegger . . . is a question of affective attachment, this is another way of saying that it is only possible to be affected when things have been set in advance by a certain mode of attunement” (AM 21). A mood, in this sense, delineates a locale or situation in which affective attachments can occur; this locale can be an aesthetic object, a nation, the present moment, but it is always shared across a collective: “The knowledge we gain by way of Stimmung [mood, attunement] . . . tells us what is collectively possible at that moment; it tells us what our shared situation is and what may be done within this situation” (Flatley, AM 23). Crisis-mood The contemporary world we inhabit presents itself as a space in which geopolitical catastrophes constantly occur, as though everywhere and all the time, such that the psyche cannot hold apart their distinctions. Jean-Luc Nancy calls it an agglomeration: “with its senses of conglomeration, of piling up, with the sense of accumulation that, on the one hand, simply concentrates (in a few neighborhoods, in a few houses, 99 sometimes in a few protected mini-cities) the well-being that used to be urban or civil, while on the other hand, proliferates what bears the quite simple and unmerciful name of misery” (The Creation of the World; or, Globalization, 33). The inescapability of socio-economic injustices, the focalized accumulation of wealth and the swelling proliferation of misery, have so permeated contemporary consciousness that there is “no room” for cognitive functions other than their continual registration. There is a kind of smoothness to this condition, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe in Empire: “In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national color of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow” (xii-xiii). Catherine Malabou’s theory of “the new wounded” (Les Nouveaux Blessés, 2007) offers an analysis of precisely such a situation in which the savage leveling effects of globalization radically undo the delineations of the individual’s interiority, rendering all subjects guilty for and traumatized by everything, everywhere. Reworking Freud’s theory of trauma, Malabou argues that “the erasure of sense” experienced in trauma 100 is no longer particular to an individual, but is in fact generalized: “present everywhere, as the new face of the social which bears witness to an unheard of psychic pathology, identical in all cases and in all contexts, globalized” (258-259). That is to say, what is globalized under the contemporary conditions of globalization is precisely trauma; as Žižek describes: “Today … our socio-political reality itself imposes multiple versions of external intrusions, traumas, which are just that, meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of the subject’s identity” (“Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject”) Crisis is experienced less as a shattering event than as a persistent, interminable everywhereness—an inescapable fact. Such a saturation of consciousness by catastrophe is the permanent condition of the unnamed characters in The Age of Wire and String where mood as crisis, a crisis-mood, a crisis distributed and collective, imposes itself on everything as a shared atmosphere that traverses all relations. Crisis becomes the way of our being there with one another. This generalization of trauma plays out as a leveling force that flattens the topographies of genre and the depths of character. It begins, in the narrative, as a direct transmission: the witnessing of trauma is traumatizing. “They are forced to watch, the family. He lights a fire, this man. . . they are bound such with the wire or rope that they are forced to acquire the status of audience to this act, and then further to the self- 101 created corpse, which singularly occupies their attention until rescue arrives” (Marcus 47). This scene of publicly performed suicide is followed by a description of its mode of circulation, one which follows a logic of contagion: “The spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing. The audience is deceived into a sense of creation for the act it has witnessed. A member of the family seems riotously certain he has murdered through the body, attaining the kill” (48). The transference of violence occurs in what could be described as a scene of reading, where the subject as reader becomes affectively immersed in a way that embeds her directly in the scene at hand. The violence of the situation suffuses everything, revealing crisis as something inescapably shared, a situation of collective exposure. Trauma as puncturing event dissolves into a crisis that attunes us through and through: “It is simple, really. Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and steam, scouring what it stuck and stubborn therein with a lather of golden light, producing an exit of light that is marked by the inception of a shadow. And the shadow takes residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off” (49). Like the logic of Freud’s belated symptom of trauma that repeats, the shadow- scar inhabits the world of the narrative through a relation of belonging to everyone and to no one in particular. The shadow-scar cannot be traced back to some originary event; it is “stuck and stubborn,” resonating with a 102 kind of dulling, leveling rhetorical force. If The Age of Wire and String is a post-apocalyptic text of the turn of the twentieth century, residing entirely in an aftermath of something we did not witness but of which we experience the consequences, its persistent woundedness constitutes a moment of collectivity that is carefully defended throughout the book. If trauma is rendered atmospheric, systematically connected with everything and embedded in everything, then to “protect” such a condition would mean to attend assiduously to all matters equally, without the privileging of any particular site or character or feeling. Spread out, deeply generalized, trauma operates as a permanent condition that is always already in everything: not something that happens to particular subjects, but something that is always already the case. Intimacy, then, becomes an almost impossible situation in Marcus’s text: nothing secret can happen that is not immediately shared out; private pain or crisis materializes through the weather and spreads, like a mood. Not an exposure of something that was once concealed, not that sort of revelation through plot; rather, the openness of wounds in The Age of Wire and String is an openness that is always already the case. Already in the first vignette of The Age of Wire and String, we witness the literal diffusion of a private domestic scene into the external site of its occurrence; the private leaks into the public surroundings, into a general circulation of energy and electricity that streams through enclosed spaces: “Electricity 103 mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor” (7). Mourning the “dead wife,” working through that trauma, involves something like a refusal to privatize the experience, and an acceptance of its seeping into the context that surrounds it. Mourning here means registering a shift in the collective atmosphere, a shift marked not by a free-floating feeling of sadness that is in excess of the private relation to the wife. Instead, this is a shift wherein the embeddedness of a situation unfolds, exposing how interconnection works affectively, and how a particular sad affectivity saturates a situation, both “in and outside of the house.” In other words, the memory of the “resuscitated wife” (7) belongs not only to the psychological sphere, but is always already immanent to an entire landscape of memory, including its technologies of memory and architectures of transmission (electricity, heat, natural currents). Such an outfolding of the personal means a distancing from subjectivity, a distribution of subjectivity across the landscape of a situation. What is a process of self-estrangement is also at once the possibility of new relations, formed from the dissolution and dispersal of 104 the quotidian, between objects, persons, affects, spaces. Another figure of the dispersal of subjectivity in The Age of Wire and String is the “Listening Frame,” a structure that functions as an archive of one’s memories, affects, and relations, and that takes the form of “other members or persons that exist to remind him of his past sayings and doings. They walk always behind the member. Their speech is low” (63). The frame is encyclopedic, like most objects in the book; it swells to saturation: “With no walls or ceilings to specify its search, the frame applies its reverse surmise to the entire history of the society—its trees, its waters, its houses—gorging the member with every previosity until his body begins to whistle from minor holes and eventually collapses, folds, or gives up beneath the faint silver tubing” (63). The traumatic collection of all of history, or previosity, that befalls the subject is, notably, heavy, saturated: the intensities or affects that inhabit the “Listening Frame” are not free floating or ungrounded, but weighed down by the present and its histories. This weight, we might say, is also a delimitation: when a scene is so suffused with a crisis it forms a kind of blockage. Like the materialization of affects into concrete feelings discussed earlier, here the “frame,” or what is most often figured as the house, populates Marcus’s text as a heavy, saturated, differentiated site in which the circulation of unformed, unresolved feelings is arrested. 105 Affective Blockages The house is a kind of crystallization, a bloc, a stoppage. In The Age of Wire and String, the house figures as a built site of affective arrest, where circulation is halted, affective modulation is barred, and where architecture collects and protects vague, emergent feelings. The house, to which an entire section of Marcus’s text is devoted, draws a perimeter around a situation, setting up a contained sub-structure within which affective attachments can be made. Described in a highly stylized rhetoric of an historical document or a philosophical treatise, the characterization of the house reads like something we might find stored in an archive: “In ancient American and earlier, [the house] was considered one of the four basic objects, a substance from which all things were composed. . . The belief that houses are scared is universal in science, and such beliefs have survived in some highly hidden cultures, including those that destroy houses for food and fuel, as well as nomadic cultures whose members derive spontaneous houses from water, cloth, and salt” (58). The house, then, is the basic unit of history in Marcus’s order of things, a primary material, “a substance from which all things were composed” (58). The house is a marker of separation, of containment; a tracing of the volume that one occupies: When we are wise we spend ninety percent of our time in the house. Then we examine the connections and transitions between houses. We check to see if our lives require clarifying or strengthening. Can we substitute a better feeling or a more 106 effective pain? Should a plan of action be moved from the end to the middle or to the beginning of the life? Are the right people in the right places? Is this house preventing something, somehow? (62) The figure of the house is fundamental to Marcus’s constructed world, and it indexes a stillness, a gathering together through subtraction, a protected site that, paradoxically, disengages from the world in order to allow, precisely, an engagement with it. From within this subtracted enclosure, one can pose questions that concern not only the problem of affect (“Can we substitute a better feeling or a more effective pain?”), but also the issue of narrative itself. From an enclosed inside of the narrative, a meta-commentary emerges involving “connections,” “transitions,” “a plan of action,” “the end,” “the middle,” the beginning.” We can read, “Are the right people in the right places?” as, are the right characters in the right place in the narrative? The house is the figure of a negative relation or scission, of an alienation from the processes of the text by burrowing deeply within it. Such separation produces a radically defamiliarized distance that opens to a new questioning of the very being of the text. If “this house [is] preventing something, somehow” it is preventing a certain economy of narrative accumulation and acceleration that is figured by the “wind” in Marcus’s world. The house negates the affirmative logic of process and circulation that the wind connotes, and that is represented as a kind of magical conflict in The Age of Wire and String, a “war between houses and wind” (52). 107 The antagonism between outside and inside, between weather and closed structures, links to the themes of circulation and transmission in The Age of Wire and String, and returns us to the question of sadness. If Marcus’s text is an investigation of our affective atmosphere, a writing of this atmosphere, then the paradox of sadness is that it at once is that atmosphere, and it is the halting of atmosphere, an affect that blocks affectivity. And the house is a figure of that blockage. If we remember that for Spinoza, affect is the body’s capacity to move something and to be moved, the central concern here seems to be how not to be moved. Rather than representing the constant flux of affective circulation or the abstract rapidity of exchange, Marcus is interested in creating images and building objects that smother channels of transmission, fill-in negative spatial volumes, and often situate the reader not as an outside observer participating in meaning-making, but as a body bound within or fully expelled from a saturated space. Feelings, communication, exchange, narrative flow are interrupted by Marcus’s strange constructions; the flow of meaning and the interrelations that begin to develop are arrested: a house arrest, as Derrida describes archives. Houses wear houses in The Age of Wire and String, a layering of defense known as “house costumes,” (63) to protect against various weather conditions, especially sun and wind. Though characters have no narrative continuity within Marcus’s text, they do possess functions. An 108 unnamed female character, for example, “was the first grass guard of American shelters. Augmented by a man, usually, the girl wielded her shade stick so that the sun might never collaborate with the grass in destroying the house” (52). “The taller, skinnier boys,” in another capacity, “could more successfully deflect, block, or stall the wind from the house” (54). Deflection, blockage, stalling: these are privileged actions that are thematized here in a scene that describes the techniques of warding off potentially catastrophic natural disasters. But what is also being described is a certain narrative logic wherein a defense is mounted against the forces of intensification (the sun) and circulation (the wind). Lauren Berlant argues that to think the affective sense of the current moment as an “ongoing historical present,” (“Intuitionists” 2) is to “block the becoming-object of the event” (5). She cites Foucault’s discussion of eventilization wherein “he refers to a need to undo the moment when a happening moves into common sense or a process congeals into an object- event that conceals its immanence, its potentially unfinished or enigmatic activity” (6). Here, though, what is being blocked is precisely the undoing of congealment; the house’s closure is protected by a collective practice of deflection against the contingencies of the atmosphere. We might say then that Marcus’s scenario enacts a shared struggle against precarity, against intensity, against flexibility. If the present neoliberal world is one of “contract intimacies and flexible, fragile networks” (Berlant, 109 “Intuitionists” 14), a world in which “our desiring energy is trapped in the trick of self-enterprise, our libidinal investments are regulated according to economic rules, our attention is captured in the precariousness of virtual networks” (Berardi 24), a world which requires the “breaking down [of] every possible barrier to the profitable deployment of the surplus” (Harvey xxv), then Marcus’s imposition of a pressing density into the structures of relations seems to defend against the openness of relations, against their being pulled into the accelerating momentum of production and circulation. As discussed in the Introduction, for Brian Massumi in Parables of the Virtual, global capitalism operates atmospherically as a seizing upon of any potential collectivity, of the very structures of relation: “What is being usurped here? The very expression of potential. The movement of relationality. Becoming-together. Belonging. Capitalism is the global usurpation of belonging” (Massumi 88). For Massumi, the relation of belonging itself is the site of crisis under the conditions of late capitalism, and it is therefore also the site at which a defence can be mounted: “The idea is that there are ways of acting upon the level of belonging itself, on the moving together and coming together of bodies per se. This would have to involve an evaluation of collective potential . . . It would be a caring for the relating of things as such—a politics of belonging instead of a politics of identity” (Massumi, “Navigating Movements” 223). For 110 Marcus, the experimental writer is serious about this task both at the level of syntactical structures and semantic connections: a caring for belonging. Marcus’s interventions occur at these hinges by interrupting the relations between words and their expected definitions, and by obstructing the syntactical flow of a sentence: “It was them, and then it was less of them, and now it is my Ben Marcus only. It has no stitches, the bird” (116). Marcus recognizes that rhetoric is a site of ideological interpolation and thus a place of violence and usurpation: “RHETORIC The calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of” (78). The persuasiveness of rhetoric is precisely an attempt to induce a relation through the allure of rhetorical structures. But Marcus systematically undermines all three of Aristotle’s technical means of persuasion: the author is discredited as a “false map” (76); the emotional state of the listener is depicted as a destructive force (“by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire” (3)); and finally, logos, the argument itself is exposed as constitutively false when articulated rhetorically because “for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed” (3-4). But the task of “a caring for the relating of things as such” (Massumi, “Navigating Movements,” 223) is not simply a question of meeting affective modulation with affective modulation, as Massumi conceives of 111 intervention. Instead, Marcus’s text is interested in feeling an affectivity that interrupts affective circulation altogether, that refuses to merely tweak the field of preexisting affects, but that pursues a language of a materialized detachment. This kind of collective withdrawal is still a relationality, but one more interested in silence than in communication through an attention to the feeling of subtraction from and disagreement with the affective atmosphere of the present. Such a pocket of resistance to the “air and atmosphere generated from the speech and perspiration of systems and figures within the society” (95) in The Age of Wire and String necessitates the rejection of communicability: “The only feasible solution, outside of large-scale stifling or combustion of physical forms, is to pursue the system of rotational silence proposed by Thompson, a member of ideal physical deportment—his tongue removed, his skin muffled with glues, his eyes shielded under with pictures of the final scenery” (95). The “Thompson,” we are told earlier, “embodies the assembly, the constituency, the audience” (94-5). This figure of the collective is also violently disfigured as a “solution” to the problem of “atmosphere.” The blocking of speech, of touch, of sight are offered as methods for diminishing one’s complicity with the unfolding intensities of the present. If “the proper use of space is to find out the things we have not said, and how our hands might make sure they stay that way” (94), then this act of 112 shielding the unspoken is a labor of disengagement, a shared act of digging out and defending an underground of silence within language. The resistance to “natural” elements in The Age of Wire and String— what we might identify as the narrative conflict—materializes as obstructing surfaces or barriers to the processes of dissolution and circulation. And though we might think to read these enclosures against flow as a kind of privatization, a restriction on the collective experience of affect through the privileging of figures of occupation, Marcus is careful to point precisely to the distinction between subtraction and privatization. For one, the scenes of defense, of “weather kill[ing]” (81) are always collective, performed by a multitude of unnamed figures who take on different tasks in a violent fight against a violent and violating atmosphere: The taller, skinnier boys could more successfully deflect, block, or stall the wind from the house, and they became better known as stanchers, although salaries were meager and they were forces to work in teams, sharing and regurgitating the same meal. During the chalkier street storms, however, the boys went entirely unfed and often starved upon the lawn, creating skin flags, or geysers of bone and cloth, which during more elastic storms could ripple back and snap windows from a house until glass spilled into the air, cutting down the insect streams. . . . Boy piles on grass were richest after storms—this residue was called gersh—and planting was heaviest until this fertilizer was rifled by scavengers—often young girls and their animal sisters, who dragged the soil away in sacks and wagons for burial and sang the lamentations of the house for their brothers, dead on the grass from fighting the wind. (54) This is a scene of collective food, collective eating, collective labor, collective death, burial, and mourning. The atmosphere is violent exactly 113 insofar as it is atmospheric; that is, insofar as the wind is a figure of the appropriation of relations of collectivity, of sharing, of assemblage and belonging, of affective circulation, it must be deflected and blocked. The house itself marks a common dwelling in opposition to what is termed “PRIVATE HOUSE LAW” and defined as the “rule of posture for house inhabitants stating the desired position in relation to the father: Bend forward, bring food, sharpen the pencil” (64). What is obviously a description of a patriarchal system whose imperatives dictate the very movements of the body is in opposition to a collective situation where kinship is not marked by the name of the father, and in which bodies are distributed across space in a being-together that renders even the private unconscious space of dreams into an affiliation of contiguity: They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died. Their houses were boxes, tents, scooped-out dogs, brick towers, and actual houses. Some dug into grass; other camped in shadow; many worked in the house dispersing rice and books and were permitted to sleep on the floor. There was to be no unfolding of blankets or spreading of sheets. Never could a barrier or blind or corner be erected in the house, nor could cloth be clipped or crimped or hung. They sheltered off of one another and slept in heated chains of body. No one could sleep for more than one dream. The dream happened during the day, and the dream was the storm, and the storm was whatever you could name. (81) The proximity of bodies and dreams congeals into a “heated chain,” a barricade of sorts in which contiguity and belonging are protected and in which a kind of collective language is produced: the common name of “storm” is distributed across “whatever you could name.” 114 There is a language of estrangement here; what seems to be a description of the consequences of climate change and global warming is rendered unscientific and closer to something like paranoia about the possibility of defending against the threat of rising temperatures or a superstition about the sun’s powers: “Although shade is mistrusted by many occupants, and has rarely been selected as a primary weapon, it must not be overlooked as a key defense against objects that might burn in to take the house from the air, in secret agency with the wires of the hallowed sun” (53). The aspecificity of the description, occurring outside any marked geographical location or historical moment, opens the issue of environmentalism to a different realm, distant from the positivist language of science and social issues. To write in a register that is so foreign to the issue at hand is itself a safeguard against a simple complicity with a terminology that is already given and which thus already dictates the possible perspectives on the matter of concern. In other words, Marcus here interrogates the way in which epistemology envelops an issue, closing down that “which is still in process” (Williams 132) and congealing its description into a determined thinking. But while Marcus's project disrupts a certain kind of congealment, like that performed by a name or a discipline or a rhetorical strategy, the fragments of such disruption, the affectivity of the scattering of what once held together, are re-distributed and re-gathered. The series of inventories 115 throughout The Age of Wire and String gather terms under an entirely unfamiliar rubric, lacking consistency and coherence. But the form of the inventory remains—terms in isolation followed by definitions; and this structure, its capacity to steady the endlessly unpredictable words and definitions, functions as a re-gathering of what has been rendered impersonal and incoherent. As Christine Hume argues, “Marcus’s use of nomenclature focuses on the process of naming itself in order to question the juggernaut of classification and its raison d’etre, domestication” (“Reading Ben Marcus”). Marcus uses unspecified pronouns to identify characters throughout the text in an undoing of the possessive character of the proper name; proper names, meanwhile, are treated as nouns like any other, terms to be defined prior to their having become personalized or habitually attached to a particular body. “Albert,” for instance, names a certain posture of the body “under various stages of darkness” (13); “Michael%” refers to “any system of patriarchal rendering,” while the percentage symbol indicates the transferability and divisibility of the proper name across multiple bodies: “1. Amount or degree to which any man is Michael Marcus, the father. 2. Name given to any man whom one wishes were the father. 3. The act or technique of converting all names or structures to Michael” (122). The destabilization and expansion of the name’s identifying capacity, according to Hume, “coerces the subjective to reveal its objectivity,” (“Reading Ben Marcus”) blurring the distinction 116 between the private name and a common belonging. What could be readily identified as belonging to a specific subjectivity, the proper name, becomes common. The name never acquires a regulative symbolic function but instead constitutes an immanent field of potential relations. In the case of “Michael,” the name names the distribution of a patriarchal ideology. It names a conversion of “all names or structures” to the same name, to the sharing of patriarchal desire. Here, the common is re- appropriated by the individuating force of domination by gender. The creation of distance between the subject and its name can also open a site of dispossession or unbelonging. That space of the impersonal though, rather than signifying the kind of affective escape that Brian Massumi describes, suggests an epistemological reduction or diminution, a despecification. In a recent interview, Marcus admits that The Age of Wire and String is an attempt to find ways “to know less about something” (Penn Sound). The desire to undo the particularity of qualities or qualifiers that surround any given object or word in Marcus’s text is performed through a minimization of knowledge. The first person narrator in “The Animal Husband,” for instance, engages in a kind of self- critique whenever confronted with the impulse or demand to express knowledge: “No questions, just talk, he told me. I don’t know how to talk” (105). Upon witnessing a filmic projection of images, a response eludes him: “There were so many shows…Father said we were seeing the 117 first things, things that even the first people didn’t see…I never knew what to know about what I was seeing” (107). And even when speaking, there is a willed desire to undo expression: “I try to forget what I am saying” (110). This never knowing what to know, this withdrawal from knowledge, is also a mode of conspiring against the self as a site of accumulation of experience and information. Instead, the narrator’s body is deployed as a cinematic apparatus for the Father’s film projection: “The world was lit up by his moving light blasting through a cup of powder…Father was grinding things down to see how they looked when he pumped the light through. He took bits of me, or myself” (107-8). Filming, or “grinding things down to see how they looked,” seems to require a kind of fragmentation of the body that is also a shedding of self- possession, of the “myself.” The distribution of the subject is directly bound up with the subject’s “never knowing what to know;” the indeterminacy of knowledge here—knowing less—is not encoded in the subject but dispersed across the scene. This is a dysphoric dispersal, one that does not gather positive momentum and that cannot be associated with a joyful indeterminacy or circulation. Atomization seems to be a constitutive condition of all objects in The Age of Wire and String and the breaking down into parts suggests a kind of reduction and minimization, a movement toward less-ness, 118 toward a gathering negativity. The atomized body in Marcus’s text is a precarious, distributed object: The brother is built from food, in the manner of minute particles slowly settling or suspended by slight currents, that exist in varying amounts in all air… Jason Marcus, the original brother, who in 1990 invented a device for counting the air, first correlated food particles and persons. The food that he discovered comprising his person is also chiefly responsible, through its scattering effect upon light (sun stalls), for one type of darkness that is observed when he takes his falls through and above the land, eating and rebuilding parts of himself in a small cyclone of black seeds and grains. (37-8) As discussed earlier, food is a collective substance in The Age of Wire and String and eating is a collective practice. Here, the body’s plurality eats and rebuilds parts of itself, but this process is not merely an endless cycle of repeated dissolution. Instead, there is a “settling,” a “suspension,” “a small cyclone of black seeds and grains.” These images suggest a fragile relationality that produces a “type of darkness,” like small pockets of negativity. A world in which precarity suffuses everything, like an atmosphere, is here literalized in the body’s cyclone of dissolution. Against Joy In their article, “Mood Swings: The Aesthetics of Ambient Emergence” (2007), collected in The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, N. Katherine Hayles and Todd Gannon argue that a new sensibility, a “mood swing,” characterizes recent architecture and literature, a swing away from postmodernism and toward new structures 119 of feeling. Some of the characteristics of this new mood, according to Hayles and Gannon, include an interest in the materiality of surfaces, the intermediation between digital and print media, a pushing of texts and buildings to the limits of legibility, and the distribution of agency across a complex field that contains both human and nonhuman actors. This new aesthetics of “ambient emergence” is thus deeply connected with the emergence of network culture as “part of the world-wide transformations that information technologies and globalization are co-producing” (136). In the case of print novels in particular, Hayles and Gannon note the move away from a traditional mode of discourse where the atmosphere of a text functions merely as a kind of background within which characters develop and plots unfold following a typical Aristotelian arc. Instead, the contemporary novels they find representative of the “mood swing” in literature create “something like an ambient environment that does not so much serve as background for plot development as displace plot altogether” (132). The literature of “ambient emergence” invents enveloping environments in which, according to Hayles and Gannon, characters and plot and agency are all inextricably bound in a complex system of interactions within networks and feedback loops: a shift from “element to ensemble, from close attention to distracted immersion” (131). What exactly this new post-postmodern aesthetics feels like remains unnamed in Hayles’s and Gannon’s characterization, though they 120 offer some adjectives that are surprisingly in line with Jameson’s own classification of the feeling of postmodernism itself. For Jameson, the mood swing that defines postmodernism, its “whole new type of emotional ground tone” (Postmodernism 6), is marked by a “peculiar kind of euphoria” (16), often described in the terms of a joyous intensity. For Hayles and Gannon, the participants of this new ambient aesthetic exude a “forward-looking optimism unthinkable under the skeptical regime of postmodernism” (“Mood Swings” 131). “Though the appellation of this new condition is still up for grabs,” they write, “its effect, products of a renewed attention to materials and to the dynamic intermediations made possible by digital technologies, have insinuated themselves throughout contemporary architecture and literature to usher in a new, optimistic, and distinctly contemporary mood” (131). Though the focus might have shifted in the “mourning after” postmodernism, the mood seems to have remained the same: euphoria, joy, and optimism. As an example of such optimism in innovation, Hayles and Gannon cite Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper, written in 2005, ten years after The Age of Wire and String, in an age admittedly more wire than string. Hayles and Gannon are most interested in the way the text is an example of “how the traditional dynamics of print novels are becoming entwined with digital representations” (“Mood Swings” 112). This intermediation between the print page and the mark of digitality plays 121 itself out in both the layout and the thematics of the text; Hayles and Gannon point to these interactions between language and code, and analogue and digital modalities, as evidence of the novel’s “ambient aesthetics.” Such interactions occur most directly at the site of the central antagonism of the text: in the war between the novel’s characters and its author. The campaign against omniscient narration is directed at Saturn, eventually exposed in a metafictional turn as “Salvador Plascencia,” the narrator who maintains constant and penetrating surveillance over his characters. Federico de la Fe, our protagonist, leads his comrades in a battle against the gaze of the narrator, seeking out and inventing practices and tactics that might defend against the simple legibility of their subjectivities to a controlling narrator. Such practices are manifest through the materiality of the book: in the occlusions of narrative passages under heavy black ink and the fracturing of the authorial voice into competing textual columns: 122 Figure 8: Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper   (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2005),  187.  Another strategy deployed by the characters to shield their visibility is the salvaging of the lead shells of mechanical tortoises that populate the novel, to be used as impenetrable barricades against the intrusive narrative power of Saturn: “Everybody was encased by lead, every thought protected, nothing left to hear or see” (Plascencia 96). Hayles and Gannon deploy the example of the tortoises in The People of 123 Paper to make their key argument regarding the intermediation of the analog and the digital. The “voice” of the mechanical tortoise, like that of the other characters, is constrained by a column on the page. The tortoise’s column consists of a series of 1s and 0s: a digitally coded language: MECHANICAL TORTOISE 000001110001100011100100010111100 100101010101010111100001001001010 (Plascencia 97) Hayles and Gannon read the tortoises’s shells “as a metonymy for the code generating the textual surface;” for them, the digital code of the tortoise disrupts both generic assumptions regarding print novels whereby the putative author has direct agency over the characters, as well as undoes assumptions about the physicality of the page and its limits (113). The tortoises, as “intelligent machines capable of cognition and agency,” represent the reconfiguration of the print page through digital technologies, an exposure of the binary code underlying the words that appear on the screen on which one produces text. While the character of the Tortoise in The People of Paper does embody a split between a mechanical exterior and a digital interior, this 124 conjunction is insufficient to accommodate Hayles’s and Gannon’s argument that the text illustrates a certain becoming digital of the print novel. What is so striking about this strange example in Plascencia’s novel of an animal with a digital subjectivity is the utter uselessness of that subjectivity. That is, the narrative function of the mechanical tortoises is precisely to be emptied of their digital code and reduced entirely to heavy sheets of lead shells, like the analog material residue of digital cyberspace: tangled cables, broken computer casings, dilapidated monitors, and exhausted batteries, that overwhelm landfills in the developing world. It is thus the residue of the digital, its discarded casings, that operates as a disruption of the traditional dynamics of print novels. It is not “digital technologies [that] reconfigure, literally and materially, the print page” (Hayles and Gannon 113); the mechanical tortoise’s force is not the result of an intermediation between the analog and the digital. Only the violent destruction of the digital in The People of Paper seems to push the limits of the print novel, introducing blind spots in the narrative such that the omniscient narrator, Saturn, is reduced to complete ignorance, blocked by the physicality of lead. One singled out Mechanical Tortoise is able to escape from the systematic hunt for tortoise shells, and its movements are depicted as a contraction of global divisions, a pulling together of the global South and North America: “In the field, eight furrows over from where Pelon hooked the plow, the escaped mechanical tortoise brought 125 Tijuana closer, moving scoops of soil from south to north, compacting land with its legs and then lurching through the rises of furrows. Official measures said San Diego was now half a mile closer to Los Angeles than the week before. This is what machines did—the bridged the distance between cities” (Plascencia 156). But even here, where the digital interiority of the turtle seems to offer it the powers of networking, of unification, the narrative refuses to accommodate the globalizing motion of this nonhuman agent: “I took out my crowbar and swung it over my shoulder. I aimed for the head of the mechanical tortoise and then let the iron drop. I hit it right on the back, then again on the crown of the head— two solid blows before it tucked in its legs and head. . . When I was finally done my whole body was sore; my crowbar was bent at its handle and its chisel worn down to a knob” (239). The larger point of this long detour away from Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, and as a way to return to it, is to make an important observation about the predominant conception of our contemporary mood and its aesthetic expressions. Central to the argument of “Mood Swings” is the necessity of always thinking the shift in cultural sensibility and feeling in the context of our techno-scientific situation, which also means our economic situation: “the expanded contexts [of] the aesthetics of ambient emergence, with its emphasis on surface, materiality, intermediation, and nonhuman agency should be understood not as an 126 isolated effect but part of the world-wide transformations that information technologies and globalization are co-producing” (Hayles and Gannon 136). But what is markedly absent from their characterization of the pervasive transformations produced by a globalizing political economy is what is excluded from its “complex dynamics of networks” (136), and how these exclusions are critical to the kinds of hierarchies and hegemonies that form. Though they quickly point to the “dangers of network culture and the inimical effects of globalization,” they just as quickly dismiss these dangers as uninteresting to the artists they discuss who are “generally more interested in building than in critique, more oriented to discovery and innovation that to paranoia and suspicion” (136). If critique is presented as hostile to innovation, and if the affectivity of innovation is necessarily joy or optimism, this is because the shift in feeling Hayles and Gannon describe is applicable only to aesthetic production that operates under the hegemony of the digital. If, as Friedrich Kittler argues in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, discourse networks coalesce around dominant media technologies that determine our situation, The Age of Wire and String unfolds within a scene of residual, retrograde, low, or minor analog technologies, technologies in the margins of the dominant, as a mode of investigation into the affective conditions that are enabled by analog transmissions under the hegemony of the 127 digital. To direct our attention to the persistence of analog and retro technologies as a concurrent feature of our techno-scientific situation, as both what is discarded or superfluous and what interrupts the logic of the digital, is also to be attuned to an entirely different mood, a shift of feeling that is neither joy nor optimism. Sadness, then, describes an affective economy that circulates analogically through minor channels in an emotional and aesthetic disengagement from the major technological context. The New Analog We could say then that The Age of Wire and String represents a return to low or retrograde technologies as a means of imagining new models of relation and of conveying affective tonalities that both respond to and interrupt the discursive hegemony of the world wide web. In a recent review of seven new American poetry books, poet and critic Brian Kim Stefans argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the propensity of recent literature to engage with figures of a technology now antiquated as the expression of a “dissatisfaction with the idea of a singular, technologically determined ‘new’ to which we all must adhere” (“Boston Review”). The rejection of the “new” cannot merely be read as a shift to a complex transaction between the digital and the analog—an “intermediation” as Hayles calls it—but also as a desire for a complete 128 withdrawal from the logic of the digital. Such a withdrawal is an index of what the entanglement of dominant technologies and late capitalism feels like. Not the feeling of innovation, but a mood of sadness that registers a disagreement with and subtraction from the dominating atmosphere of the present. The new analog, then, marks an isolation from the logic of the digital as it exposes the materiality of relations that have been rendered invisible, wireless; the new analog is the exposure of a situation in which “the whole world rewires itself, connections being established where none were believed to exist before” (Evenson). And these connections are necessarily continuous, mechanical, with exposed wires— analogical relations where “the integrity of the units taken to resemble one another must be preserved; otherwise, the correspondence is lost and the relation is broken” (Hayles 201). This fragility and vulnerability of relations is retained through the privileging of the analog as a mode of narrative invention: as a mean of imagining new models of withdrawn communities. The title of Marcus’s text, THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING, is defined within his text as the “period in which English science devised abstract parlance system based on the flutter pattern of string and wire structures placed over the mouth during speech” (Marcus 135). Marcus’s text seems to be structured precisely around the agitations or inscriptions—“flutter patterns”—that are analogically related to the voice 129 emitted from a mouth; language is relayed as an analog signal and its variations and modulations leave material impressions on the world, in the sky, on a body. Voice is always already a writing then, a scratching or trace: “I have a sound inside me that scratches to itself and I am not allowed to listen. . . This is Subject A speaking. Am I speaking if I can’t hear anything but these scratches? No questions, just talk. No talk, just scratching. . . The dirt is soft and I kick the messages into it, or I carve on the backs of the softer dogs” (113-4). Scratching, like that on an analog vinyl record, is a good way to describe the tentative sketchiness of Marcus’s text; if the analog is a continuously variable function, then here all objects, all “characters” are signals in the midst of an alteration, of a becoming something else. But the transitional nature of the objects in The Age of Wire and String does not simply index an open field of flow or circulation between the various entities in the narrative; rather, in materializing the relations between and within its entities, the narrative exposes the irreducible contiguity of relations, a world subsumed by cruel attachments and their reproduction. Topological thinking—as an exposure of surfaces and an investigations of their possible transformations—is the basis of Brian Massumi’s claim for the “superiority of the analog.” If the digital operates according to the codification of discreet quantities, the analog operates as “a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one 130 qualitatively different medium into another” (Parables 135). For Massumi, “Modulation is the very definition of the analog signal” (135). The analog relies upon the relay of indeterminate transmission, and “sensation, always on arrival the transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought, is the being of the analog” (135). In The Age of Wire and String, it is the sensation of disaffection that indicates a slowing down of analog transmissions and that allows for a kind of immanent reconfiguration, an exposure of and intervention in the structures of modulation. In Franco Bifo Berardi’s analysis of the contemporary dynamics of capital, depression signals the way in which the present global crisis can be read as entanglement of processes or flows: “By this word we mean a special kind of mental suffering, but also the general shape of the global crisis that is darkening the historical horizon of our time. This is not simple wordplay, this is not only a metaphor, but the interweaving and interacting of psychological flows and economic processes” (207). Marcus’s concern in his description of the contemporary dynamics of “wire and string” is in flow and process per se, in how the figures of circulation and transmission are co-opted by the dynamics of the market. Berardi calls this depression, but sadness seems to name more precisely the generalized and generalizable affective sense of the “global crisis,” the way it captures us in its pervasive mood. 131 The figure of the bird in The Age of Wire and String can be read as the conjuncture of the analog and its affective counterpart of sadness. The bird emerges as an omnipresent cultural signifier of both solitary ennui and global crisis, the stark silhouette of its quasi-mechanical body marking the potential circulation of global pandemics: an avian flu. In The Age of Wire and String, the bird is as immanent as the air, as everywhere as the sky: “The bird above us is too big to see around, but the white air gets on its skin and helps us see” (104); “The bird that moves or pauses at the speed of the sky is invisible” (75). The configuration of the bird becomes so all encompassing that it seems to resemble a kind of homogeneous surface. But it is precisely the bird’s description in terms of self-variation, as an analog relationality, that in fact exposes what appears to be a single, smooth plane of immanence as noisy and windy and potentially violent: How many times until I am hollow, the way the bird is when it flies? Yes or no, Father said that the bird has to be hollow so it can eat itself and keep flipping inside out. He said if I looked at it right, I could see it flip over and over and over and hear the wings beating to keep it from falling. That’s what the noise in wind is, and if wind didn’t make noise, it would mean the bird was falling all over us, so that we would be getting pecked at and pecked at. (112-3) We have here another scene of deceleration, a slow-motion unfolding of movement. The bird as figure of circulation and transmission maintains its momentum through a flipping “over and over and over” in an effort to avoid “falling all over us.” This is a strange, elusive scene, but it does 132 establish a relation between the atmospheric flow of circulation and its violent materialization should that circulation cease or be halted. To get “pecked at and pecked at” is the delayed wound of circulation. The desire to be “hollow, the way the bird is when it flies” suggests a tendency toward a de-territorialization and pure circulation, an affinity with the singularizing force of global capitalism or the velocity of communication. For Fredric Jameson, an appropriate metaphor for the “free-floating” nature of finance capitalism is a “butterfly stirring within the chrysalis:” “it separates itself off from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight” (“Culture and Finance Capital” 142). Like the bird that “eat[s] itself and keep[s] flipping inside out,” Jameson describes finance capital as that which “can live on its own internal metabolism and circulate without any reference to an older type of content” (161). Free-floating capital is a separation from the concrete context of “spaces of extraction and production” and instead takes on the “form of speculation itself: specters of value, as Derrida might put it, vying against each other in a vast world- wide disembodied phantasmagoria” (142). But in The Age of Wire and String such aspirations for a free-floating disembodiment are repeatedly blocked, and birds are often trapped and grounded, lodged in bodies, “buried in the father” (75). Without the exhaustive global (economic) logic of the bird’s circulation, Marcus’s narrator is left without any sense of self, without any capacity to act: “If 133 the bird leaves, I will live here still, but there will be some things I won’t know, like where to breathe and how to put my hands up when I have no food in them, and when to dig myself up out of the pit if they have left me in it” (109). Without the tools of self-management, the body might appear passive and helpless, but it also “knows less” of its acquired habits and interpellations. Without the bird, a kind of forgetting ensues of the most basic gestures of the body—a forgetting that might open a space for new figurations and new relations, a new grounding. The Age of Wire and String ends with a definition of “the wire.” But this is not the kind of wireless wire we associate with the free-floating of information across a globalized society. If anything, this wire is less like wire and more like string: WIRE, THE The only element that is attached, affixed, or otherwise in contact with every other element, object, item, person, or member of the society. It is gray and often golden and glimmers in the morning. Members polish it simply by moving forward or backward or resting in place. The wire is the shortest distance between two bodies. It may be followed to any area or person one desire. It contains on its surface the shredded residue of hands— from members that pulled too hard, held on too long, got there too fast. (140) This seems to be a scene of labor, of the materiality of relation, and of inequality. If the wire is a figure of our globalized attachments, here those attachments are exposed as inescapably bound to a concealed, rote labor that moves mechanically “forward or backward,” a population that tends to the irreducible physicality of network technologies. If the wire is a 134 figure of the free-floating, disembodied flow of global capital, here it is exposed as marked by the violent residue of bodies that attempt to resist and block its circulation. 135 Chapter 4  Becoming Everyone:   A Can of Sadness in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project   While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery. —Aleksandar Hemon The end of history will be a very sad time. —Francis Fukuyama Seamless Mood If sadness names the becoming mood of affect, a globalization of structures of feeling such that a sad situation is an entirely saturated one that permeates all relations and cuts across subjectivities, then Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project seems to inhabit this sad mood as its own precondition. There is a sense that the collective atmosphere in which the text unfolds somehow precedes it, that the text is thrown into a ubiquitous sadness that is already there. As Heidegger tells us, mood is precisely the disclosure or unveiling of thrownness; it is the disclosure of the fact that we always already find ourselves in the midst of a world, assailed by and 136 consigned to it. Under the constraints of consignment to this shared situatedness, Hemon’s novel attempts to register the feeling of a feeling that does not belong to any particular subject but that seems to structure all the relations of attachment and disattachment in the text. And again, if sadness, as elaborated in the discussion of Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String in the previous chapter, indexes the saturation of a situation by negative relations of dis-attachment, then The Lazarus Project is interested in how error (as a form of dis-attachment) exposes something about our mood. Error, in The Lazarus Project, operates both as an historical phenomenon that characterizes what gets left out of the historical record and returns to haunt it, and as a misreading that exposes a kind of blind spot in our situatedness, allowing us to think new ways of inhabiting this mood of sadness. Negotiating within its own position as a post- communist, Eastern European, “global English” novel by a Bosnian immigrant living in the US, Hemon’s novel makes an aesthetic and affective intervention into the dominant mood of its postnational condition, offering something like a counter-mood to the mood in which it finds itself. Written in 2008, The Lazarus Project still reverberates with echoes of the ruptures of 1989, the year that marks the decline of the GDR and the end of state-socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the eventual war amid the post-Yugoslav nations. The end of actually existing socialism 137 ushered in what Francis Fukuyama infamously declared “the end of history,” the idea that history had reached a terminal point and that that terminal point was, to use Jameson’s terms, “the logic of late capitalism.” The promise of 1989 was the promise of an “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” (Fukuyama). As Robert Kurz elaborates, “The supposed victory of capitalism, according to freedom lovers everywhere, together with the deification of the ‘market-economy’ and the constitution of a singular global economic system on the Western model, is supposed to have rung in a new era of disarmament, peace, and global prosperity.” But what was supposed to have happened did not: “This expectation has proven to be completely naive. . . . Reality has developed into the virtual opposite of such wanton, careerist forecasts. Globalization has produced new zones of mass poverty, aimless civil wars and a postmodern-neo-religious form of terrorism one cannot describe as anything but barbaric. The West, led by the last world power, the USA, has responded with equally directionless ‘wars of world order’ and precarious, planetary crisis management” (Kurz). Barbaric, aimless, and precarious: this is the “capitalist realism” (Fisher) of the twenty-first century. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels offer an account of capital’s leveling force over all systems of relation, producing a world 138 where nothing remains but the “consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics” (Fischer 4): [Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. (Marx and Engels 11) This chapter investigates the mood of that “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” Although Hemon’s novel is far removed from Marx and Engels’s terms, and seems to have little to do with the conditions of contemporary political economy, its situatedness between post- Yugoslavia and the West exposes what it is to write within the situation of global capitalism and the supposed inevitability of its logic. That context allows us to consider The Lazarus Project as participating in a tradition of Eastern European literature, but as a post- communist text. Natasa Kovačević, in Narrating Post/Communism, describes such texts as narratives that “posit displaced identities, this time not communist exiles, but rather refugees from the post-communist civil wars and/or emigrants from the economically devastated locales of Eastern European transitions to capitalism. While Cold War Orientalisms continue to permeate the narrative landscapes, they are accompanied by the more fashionable discourses of globalization, critically evaluated in 139 their many guises as narratives of world peace, human rights, multiculturalism, and consumerism” (Kovačević 7). Engaging with the contemporary conditions of Eastern Europe, that is, amounts to both thinking its “transitions to capitalism” as an inevitable trajectory while grappling with the persistence of an impossible resistance to that trajectory. As Kovačević continues, “If Eastern European narratives measure the failure of real existing communism against its promise, they also measure similar failures of liberal democracy. Especially in post- communist narratives, there is a movement towards salvaging the memory of communist rule in order to work through its trauma, but also to discern and validate the types of social structures or subjectivities that are disappearing through Eastern European initiation into global capitalism” (17). It is as though “capitalist realism” is not only the background or context to any possible narrative, but also a new genre, one in which the affective attachments that could be imagined and the “social structures or subjectivities” that are possible have been predetermined and prefigured. By “capitalist realism,” Fisher is identifying the seamless mood of capital: “It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (16). For Heidegger, the most dominant moods we inhabit, the ones that most 140 powerfully determine how we are in the situation we are in, have exactly this quality of invisibility. For, it is “precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all—those attunements are the most powerful” (FCM 66). Mood exerts a totalizing affect on our world when it is least apparent, or, most immanent. As Jason Smith writes in his Introduction to Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work: “Capitalism is the mobilization of a pathos and the organization of a mood—the saturation of every space of attention and consciousness” (10). The result of this invisible pervasiveness is a world that has become “heavy, thick, opaque” (Smith 10)—wherein language, thought, and especially feeling, are mobilized by and within the logic capital. What would it mean to puncture, to pierce the totalizing heavy haze of this mood? What kind of mood could counter the mood “which attune[s] us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all” (Heidegger, FCM 66)? What kind of minor incidents, untimely encounters, singular errors could denaturalize the naturalized realism of “capitalist realism?” Hemon’s novel seeks such accidents and contingencies in an attempt to open up a space within the present that not only exposes its overwhelming homogeneity, but that also interrupts and 141 obstructs it. The single word, alone on a line, halting the flow of sentences, is one such instance that we will discuss in detail. The word, in isolation, obstructs the form of the novel, its narrative progress, its formal consistency. In that way the word is like a corpse, the central figure around which The Lazarus Project circulates, the “Lazarus” of the title, whose dead body appears and reappears as a photograph puncturing the text, and as a kind of unknown blockage. It is significant that this unknowable object that blocks narrative progression is the body of an anarchist, a worker, a Jewish immigrant. Finally, error itself, as accident and as misreading, introduces a crisis in the text that provokes a redistribution of sense and relation, altering the organization of mood and allowing a new atmosphere to take hold. The Lazarus Project attempts to find singular sites of disengagement from the pervasive atmosphere in which it already takes place. The logic of a counter mood seems to involve retreat and dislocation, an interruption that appears difficult, if not impossible, under conditions that seem dominant and inalterable. As Fisher asks, “If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from” (16)? The project of the West, particularly in relation to an Eastern European region that is in transition after 1989, is to present its principles as the only viable alternative. Fukuyama’s argument holds that the failure of actually 142 existing socialism indeed proves this logic to be the case: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” (Fukuyama). Exhaustion is a fitting description of the feeling of being within a social field saturated by a single logic. Fisher suggests that this single logic in fact presents itself as ontological, a business ontology “in which it simply obvious that everything in society . . . should be run as a business” (17). In Raymond Williams’s terms, what counters the dominant structures of feeling that seem “simply obvious” is the interruptive force of the residual, the unfinished. The unsettling force of the “not yet fully articulated” (Williams, 126), the remainder that hovers at the margins of the dominant culture, exerts a pressure on the prevailing affective disposition of the historical moment. And yet Fisher’s argument suggests that the force of the residual is preemptively anticipated by an economic system that refuses to be haunted: “The old struggle between détournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspiration and hopes by capitalist culture” (9). This preemption seems to negate the potentiality of both residual and emergent structures, those unfinished formations that have not yet been reduced to a received 143 interpretation or an official consciousness, those feelings that agitate and unsettle what has already been co-opted by dominant forces. But Fisher does go on to suggest that there is a possibility of exposing the “simply obvious” totalizing force as not a “natural order:” “emancipatory politics . . . must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable”(17). What we should be suspicious of is precisely that which presents itself as reality, the idea that a certain economic order or political configuration or structure of feeling falls outside the realm of contingency: “The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic…) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non- ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology” (Zupancic ctd. in Fisher, 17-18). We are reminded again here of Heidegger’s description of the particular kind of mood that we least observe but that imparts the most influence, possessing in this way an ideological function. Such an ideological mood reproduces itself through its own sense of inevitability. In the context of Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, one feels the fatalistic consensus that the current model of Western socioeconomic development is the only possible direction, that there is no alternative to the march of 144 history toward its globalization, and that it evokes a single and particular affective valence. Hemon’s novel stages the conflict between a kind of privatized emotion and a more generalized mood; we might say, in fact, that the logic of late capitalism operates through the very attempt to privatize its general affective disposition. While the central figures in The Lazarus Project might be plagued by stress and sadness, their emotional state is not figured in terms of individual psychology; there is a resistance to the paradigm of depression or mental illness as a language of privatization and biopolitics, and instead affective dispositions are thought collectively, considered outside the parameters of the subject. Mood is figured as outside the subject, alienated from and alienating her in its externality. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher addresses the manner in which mental health is treated in the twenty first century and calls for a “politicization” of what are deemed to be common emotional disorders. He writes, “I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? the ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only 145 social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of appearing to work is very high” (19). The resistance to a systemic thinking of stress and depression, a thinking, that is, of mood, is grounded in the need to not think our collective situatedness. Addressing our being-in-the-world, together, thrown in and consigned to its mood, would involve engaging in a thinking of what matters and perhaps the formulation of a counter-mood. Instead, the pathologization of our emotions “forecloses any possibility of politicization” (Fisher 21). The insistence on depression as a medicalized, individualized condition, prevents the construction of affective relations between subjects. In addition, “by privatizing these problems—treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background—any question of social systemic causation is ruled out” (Fisher 21). Franco Berardi, in The Soul at Work, retains the term depression to name the collective mood we are attempting to characterize and designate as the mood of sadness. Depression, for Berardi, means something similar: “By this word we mean a special kind of mental suffering, but also the general shape of the global crisis that is darkening the historical horizon of our time. This is not simple wordplay, this is not only a metaphor, but the interweaving and interacting of psychological flows and economic processes” (207). In other words, Berardi’s depression names our 146 situatedness, our collective being-in-the-world, our mood, by understanding at the same time and in the same context “the events of economic depression and of psychic depression” (208). This interrelatedness unfolds as an impossibility of delimiting a personal mood that does not always already participate in a more general crisis, one that exceeds the boundaries of the subject and her genealogy. Fisher argues that it is precisely in the interests of Capital to prevent such a generalized thinking because of the political potential it holds: The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism. (Fisher 37) Sadness, then, designates a “social and political explanation” of depression insofar as it is not thought as “an inner condition” (Heidegger, BT 176), but rather as the gathering of a situation through its shared affective relations, or as a collective mood. 147 A Can of Sadness The move from depression to sadness as a realization that what one feels is found outside of one, circulating atmospherically and shared across a situation as mood, unfolds in The Lazarus Project as a staging of encounters between a character and the mood that envelops her. We might dwell here, (prior to an actual introduction to the text and its characters), on perhaps the most significant scene in the novel, a minor moment of (mis)recognition through which sadness comes to the textual surface: One morning in Chicago I had tiptoed to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; two coffee cups, waiting. My country’s main exports are stolen cars and sadness. (Hemon 73) The spilling of coffee grounds stands in contrast to the puncturing, capitalized, stillness of “SADNESS” and “SARDINES.” But the holding apart of identifiable objects from a certain affectivity that seems to saturate the situation incites a crisis for the narrator from which he cannot recover. Triggered by the misreading of “sardines” as “sadness,” a strange proximity between the two words is produced, provoking real, material consequences for the narrator’s being in the world. A bolt of physical pain 148 marks this entanglement of things with the feeling that they evoke; it is not that objects feel, but that there is feeling, or to be more precise, mood, and it precedes us: it is in the situation materially. And that mood, here, is sadness: “It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me” (73). As “dark matter,” sadness saturates the universe of these “still objects” without itself being seen, yet it makes the fact of this saturation evident through an act of misreading. The facticity of the situation thus becomes manifest as a mode of comportment, as a way of seeing, a way of reading that produces a meaning at once already there and yet not there at all, irrecoverably necessary (“it was too late”), and yet contingent, a mistake. What must also be observed here is the way in which sadness is not only mistaken for a commodity, but retains that meaning even as the narrator recognizes his error. Not sadness, but sardines. And yet, like the salt and pepper shakers, like the honey jar, like the bag of tomatoes, like the knife, the loaf of bread, the coffee cups, sadness remains the name of a product, a good to be bought and sold, a commodity with an assigned value in the market. That is to say, sadness names both the mood of a world of commodities, the feeling of inhabiting such a world, as well as the commodity itself, the way in which sadness too can be appropriated, individualized (as depression), commodified, thought of as an object within a system of exchange: “My country’s main exports are stolen cars 149 and sadness” (Hemon 73). By “my country,” the narrator is referring to the nations that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, perhaps post- Yugoslavia in general, or a post-Yugoslav Bosnia more specifically. Either reading indicates that the entrance of post-Yugoslavia into the free- market, the stumbling upon “my country’s” sadness/sardines in an apartment in Chicago, transpires through the transmission of mood. In a sense, the mood of sadness is both what is exported and what the process of trade feels like; the narrator’s misreading exposes that feeling. The Haze of History and Pain Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) is a text that seeks out sympathetic historical conjunctions as a gathering of dispersed losses. Through the inextricable entanglement of a historical narrative and a present day obsession with that history which leads the narrator back to Sarajevo, Hemon’s story runs backward, preventing the composition of a generic immigrant narrative or the progress of mourning. The novel begins not with text but with a photograph, an archival image documenting a residence, inscribed in handwriting with the label “The Shippy Residence.” That same house is then described in detail on the following page as the site of an accidental encounter, and, as we will later learn, a death. 150 Figure 9: Aleksandar Hemon,   The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 1.  We know it is March 2, 1908, in Chicago, as “the time and place are the only things I am certain of;” beyond this certainty is only “the haze of history and pain” (Hemon 1). That haze has appeared already in the photograph, particularly at its edges where the image of the house begins to fade into, on the left side, the blankness of overexposure, and on the 151 right, a strange wavy streak of light that makes of a tree a house, and of a house a tree: a double exposure. The fragility of this mechanical reproduction, how it seems to contain the signs of its own inevitable future fading, is what we are presented with as the first scene of the book. At issue already is the archive, the futurity it contains, and its constitutive erasures. And the story that then unfolds seems bound up precisely in its own forgetfulness, in what has remained unknown; the force of this minor account presses upon the present. The Lazarus Project is split between the narrative of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe living in Chicago, who is shot by the Chicago chief of police when he attempts to bring him an important letter; and, a writer in the twenty-first century, Brik, who also lives in Chicago, and has become obsessed with researching Lazarus’s story. In his attempt to write the story of Lazarus Averbuch, Brik and his companion Rora, a photographer, travel across Eastern Europe gathering material on Lazarus as research for a possible novel. The frame is metafictional, and Brik’s character is easily mistaken for the author himself, Aleksandar Hemon. 13 Initially the historical narrative remains entirely separated from Brik’s interest in it, but mid- way through The Lazarus Project, Lazarus Averbuch and his sister, Olga, 13 Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon visited Chicago in 1992 with no intention of staying; but while there, Sarajevo came under siege and he was unable to return home. 152 begin to appear in Brik’s narrative. The photographs too, that appear in advance of each chapter, some the work of Rora from his journey with Brik to Eastern Europe, and others archival images from the Chicago Historical Society, become increasingly entangled, caught in a temporal blur between the past and the present. Lazarus’s death at the hands of Chief of Police George Shippy occurs in the novel on the morning of March 2, 1908, after Lazarus rings the door bell to Shippy’s residence and is invited in. Unsettled immediately by Lazarus’s “foreign cast of features” (7), Shippy’s suspicion of the stranger is further provoked by Lazarus’s handing over of a letter: “They stand right at the living room door, the young man unsure whether to enter deeper. After a long moment of ominous hesitation—Chief Shippy flexing his jowls, a confused sparrow chirping just outside the window, a scraping step upstairs—he thrusts an envelope into Shippy’s hand” (7). This attempted relation through the exchange of a letter is not only refused but is registered as an act of violence. Shippy relays his account to William P. Miller, a journalist for the Tribune: “I did not wait to examine the envelope any further. The thought struck me like a streak of lightning that the man was up to no good. He looked to me like an anarchist. I grabbed his arms and forcing them behind his back, called to my wife: ‘Mother! Mother!’” (7-8). Shippy’s wife, his driver Foley, and his son Henry all converge on the scene and Lazarus is killed: “Without thinking, Chief 153 Shippy shoots at the young man; blood gushes so hard that the burst of redness blinds Foley, who, being well trained and aware of Chief Shippy’s dislike of drafts, is slamming the door shut behind him. Startled by Foley, Chief Shippy shoots at him, too, and then, sensing a body rushing at him, wheels around like an experienced gunfighter and shoots at Henry” (8). Miller, the journalist, concludes his account: “Throughout the struggle . . . the anarchist had not uttered a syllable. He fought on doggedly with that cruel mouth shut tight and the eyes colored with a determination terrible to behold. He died without a curse, supplication, or prayer” (9). Brik’s obsession with the life and death of the desolate, lost Lazarus, “a refugee, a pogrom survivor,” (43) seems most obviously to be an obsession with the question of subjectivity itself, its shared incompleteness. Although he insists that his interest is entirely for the purpose of his writing, there is a kind of excess in it: “I wanted my future book to be about the immigrant who escaped the pogrom in Kishinev and came to Chicago only to be shot by the Chicago chief of police. I wanted to be immersed in the world as it had been in 1908, I wanted to imagine how immigrants lived then” (41). The strange failure of the story, the tragic ending, attracts Brik far more than the generic immigrant narrative which he feels he must inhabit and that others observe in him. At a dinner party with his wife, the other guests seem to recognize in him only one possible narrative, an overdetermined trajectory: “The party 154 inquisitors were often given to gushing over the neatness of my immigrant story; many would recall an ancestor who came to America and followed the same narrative trajectory: displacement, travails, redemption, success” (32). But Brik’s life neither fits this model nor does he have any desire to mold his existence to it, despite his reading of his wife Mary’s wishes: “I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that I had lost my teaching job and that I was pretty much supported by Mary. She liked the narrative trajectory too, for her people also had a history of displacement and replacement, though I was pretty sure that she was disappointed that my success stage seemed to have been suspended” (32). Unable to inhabit the otherness imposed upon him, Brik prefers to become someone unimaginable, someone or something around which “so many things had vanished that it was impossible to know what was missing” (45): “I needed to follow Lazarus all the way back to the pogrom in Kishinev, to the time before America. I needed to reimagine what I could not retrieve; I needed to see what I could not imagine. I needed to step outside my life in Chicago and spend time deep in the wilderness of elsewhere” (46). This re-imagining of the irretrievable unfolds as pressing up of the past against the present. The inassimilable remnants of the death of Lazarus Averbuch are redistributed across the text, across geography, to allow new sympathetic conjunctions to form with these pieces of unfinished story, of the irrational, the unexplained. That is, Brik’s archival 155 fever is less a re-tracing of the past, and more a scattering of the unknown: “Part of the recollection ritual was admitting the defeat, recognizing that I could never remember everything. I had no choice but to remember just miniscule fragments, well aware that in no future would I be able to reconstruct the whole out of them” (Hemon 127). Brik undertakes his “Lazarus Project” with his friend and photographer, Rora; the project soon loses its historiographical imperative as its matter of concern becomes a relation to the present and a recognition of the affective relations possible in that present. Photography as an aesthetic practice seems to lose its significance: existence itself, being-in-the-world, becomes its own kind of aesthetic project: “Now I didn’t care about the future in which I would be looking at Rora’s photos. The pictures would offer no revelations; I would have seen all that mattered already” (228). Brik attests to the immanence of his practice, how being in the present tense produces an affective intensity that he wants to name in the instant that he inhabits it: “I didn’t think that in the future I would know anything that I didn’t know before it. I didn’t care what would happen, what had happened, because I was present as it was happening. Perhaps this was the consequence of our rapid eastward movement: we moved mindlessly from one place to another; we didn’t even know where exactly we might be going. All I could see was just what was right there in front of me, before I moved on to the next thing.” (228). The rejection of the future for 156 the discreteness of the present moment amplifies Brik’s deep sense of disattachment, a feeling that is instantiated in the mood of the world around him. To feel disattached, and to recognize disattachment in one’s surroundings, as one’s context, allows for a pluralizing of the feeling and the construction of a collective mood of disattachment: It was there, the yeshiva, but I had nothing to do with it; it stood the way it had stood for sixty years, and I simply was as I had been the moment before I saw it, unrelated to it and its reality. It was liberating to look at it with such profound indifference—in a moment or two we were going to leave and never come back, and the yeshiva and everything around it would stay exactly the same. I felt as though I had achieved the freedom of being comfortable with the constant vanishing of the world. (228-9) To have “nothing to do with” the ruins amid which Brik finds himself, to feel a “profound indifference,” an unrelation, is precisely the affective disposition that Brik seeks to share with the world in which he find himself. This is what the Lazarus project becomes for him: an aesthetic practice that seeks to create sites in which the feeling of the “vanishing of the world” might be rendered collective. What remains opaque about Lazarus’s death is, therefore, what interests Brik more than what can be uncovered; the incomplete narrative of Lazarus is reproduced as an opacity in the novel that blocks the acquisition of total knowledge and distributes a haunting lifelessness across its narrative. If “so many things had vanished that it was impossible to know what was missing” (45), then no act of retrieval could 157 suffice to produce understanding. This lack of narrative knowledge, a forever looking for what cannot be retrieved, is lodged in the text in the form of a corpse or a word or an error. The novel critically withdraws from the task of locating “what was missing” or rendering visible the vanished; instead, disappearance is pushed to its limits, leaving strange material traces. Melancholic in its internalization of loss, in its unyielding attachment to loss, The Lazarus Project is an aesthetic project of rendering collective this affective attachment to loss or disappearance, distributing it across the world of the text so as to invoke a counter-mood, a new affective atmosphere. Words are Something Else At the moment of Lazarus’s death, the journalistic account claims that “the anarchist had not uttered a syllable” (9). Later in the narrative, his sister Olga, in a state of inconsolable grief, recounts her English language exercises with Lazarus. Here too, his verbalized response remains absent and Olga’s list consists only of the terms that she herself uttered: She used to help him study; she read English words to him and he would respond with the Russian equivalents; just on Tuesday, they were going through the letter L: Look Loom Loose Loot Lop 158 Lopsided Loquacious Lord Lore Lose Lost Lot Loud Louse (Hemon 91) The list reads as an incomplete translation. The Russian equivalents remain unspoken, but the specter of their foreignness is embodied in the strange defamiliarization that emerges when similar words, familiar in and of themselves, are placed in proximity, listed, fragments of their syllables repeated. The “L” prescribes the terms in the list, though the relations between the words are entirely arbitrary, held together only by a sound and an alphabetical ordering system. The reader experiences a kind of fatigue in the encounter with this series of words that clearly does not participate in the construction of a meaning that contributes to the narrative sequence. But as an example of learning and of acquiring knowledge, one that Olga recounts in a moment of sorrow over her brother, it becomes significant as a practice of mourning. Repetition here acts as a dissemination of loss (or “lose” or “lost”) whose distribution produces an indeterminate atmosphere of sound that negates sense by severing words from their connections within a sentence. Mourning, that is, has something to do with a kind of affective and epistemological flatness, a depersonalized practice of the sharing out of a 159 crisis. Olga’s list of vocabulary words might be read as an aesthetic form that undoes memory from its relation to the personal and the interior: What could these mysterious words tell her now? She moans, rocking back and forth as if praying, as if becoming nothing on her way to nothing. Lout Lovable Love Lovely Lover Low Lower Lowland Lowly (Hemon 92) These “mysterious words” provoke Olga’s own subjective dispersal: a “becoming nothing on her way to nothing” (92). The scattering of her sense of self into the gesture of “back and forth,” into the negative affect of becoming nothing, is reproduced in the vocabulary words Olga cites: “Low, Lower, Lowland, Lowly” (92). But in this distributed negativity, there is also “Love” and the “Lovable” and, therefore, the conjunction between low and love. As Olga’s affective disposition is externalized into a shared space of language, her grief and the dissolution of her subjectivity into nothingness remains inextricably entangled with love, with relation. As Jill Bennett writes, “Constructing memory is not simply a question of ‘expressing’ inner subjective feeling, or of retrieving a linear past, but rather of tracing one’s trajectory through a cultural space, a contemporary landscape of memory” (World Memory 8). Olga’s memory of an 160 incomplete language exercise, repeated in its incompletion, solicits the response of a translator or at least someone, anyone, who might engage with and respond to the words. There is a desire for relation, for engagement, for contiguity. The dissolution of the memory of Lazarus across a field of language, like a kind of poem appearing in the middle of the novel, a new aesthetic form interrupting the genre, renders memory and affect a formal material: “The place is hollow without Lazarus, the objects in it stand excluded from her world, uninvolved in her woe: an empty basin, a shawl hanging over a chair, a stolid water pitcher, the sewing machine, its belt occasionally rattling. She cannot bear to touch them; she stares at their shapes, as if waiting for the moment when they will break open and reveal the hard pit of sorrow that is inside every cursed thing. Here it is” (Hemon 90). The paradox at stake in the narrator’s formulation of Olga’s situation is that “the objects in it stand excluded from her world,” yet this exclusion is included in her affective condition. The collective mood of her world involves this exclusion, even though the fact of that exclusion also entails that the objects are “uninvolved in her woe.” Woe separates, distinguishes. The objects are listed one by one, and “she cannot bear to touch them.” But as “she stares at their shapes,” she also recognizes an interior identity traversing those distinctions and separations: “the hard pit of sorrow that is inside every cursed thing.” Inside the distinct 161 exteriors of objects, inside the shapes of every cursed thing, the same interior “hard pit” relates across the differentiation of those exteriors. What characterizes the paradoxical form of this mode of relation, in this case, is “waiting,” or more precisely, “waiting for the moment.” There is a projected instant, anticipated, at which a fracture or rupture will occur, exteriorizing the identical distinction of interiors. In this projected instant, the shapes of objects will “break open,” and the hard pit of sorrow, the mutuality of exclusion, or the uninvolvement of woe will be shared, will be collective. And this is already anticipated by the fact that the excluded objects are included in a mood, that their uninvolvement is itself involved in woe. The mood “woe” is thus that which, through the anticipation of its sharing in the future, is already shared through the very rendering distinct of objects in the present. Put differently, “her world,” Olga’s, from which the objects are excluded, is already involved in an impersonal world of woe, a mood within which both they and she are included by “the hard pit of sorrow” that each contains. And again, it is by way of a list that this logic of mood is unfolded in the text. In her article, “List(en)ing Post,” on the aesthetics of listing and installation art, Rita Raley points to two meanings or registers of the list: “the first is that of collection and archiving, its province that of the personal and the cultural. The second is that of aggregation and complexity, each item not additive but transformative” (“List(en)ing 162 Post”). As we’ve just described above, Olga’s articulation of the word list as a kind of archival collection of the memory of Lazarus allows for a distribution of language and memory in excess of individual mourning. And with the addition of each item to her list, the terms become more and more unfamiliar, blocking and disrupting the circulation of language and of meaning. Words become severed from their reference and seem to transform into just sound, noise, feeling, gesture. A kind of affinity forms between the words, through their lulling repetition, that gathers into a kind of atmospheric bloc that punctures the narrative flow. This formal interruption of the novel alters its organization of mood, and provokes the “resurrection” of Lazarus in Olga’s memory but only insofar as he too is dissolved into a field of language: Lazarus tries to crack his egg, but smashes it against the table instead. Lose Lost Lot Loud . . . She falls on her knees in front of him, lays her palm on his thighs to calm him down. Low Louse, he says, his eyes unsteady like mercury bubbles. Loom Lopsided Lord Lost. Lower Lowland Lowly. (96) We might read this final line as an imperative to practice a deeper negation, to go “lower,” to arrive at a “lowland” of the “lowly.” Becoming low seems to amount to a total deterritorialization, Lazarus as the dispersal of repetition: 163 Tears burst into her eyes, down her cheeks, a sob heaves out of her body. . . All she can see is Lazarus licking the swirling-candy stick, the faint mustache over his lip, and she begins undulating incessantly: Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus . . . as though the word could recall him into existence. (270) Puncture Wounds Like the formal interruption of the narrative that Olga’s vocabulary list provokes, the autopsy report of Lazarus follows a similar formal logic. Wounds are listed in detail, each wound afforded its own line: Puncture wound over the left side of the chin. Puncture wound in the right eye. Puncture wound two inches above the clavicle on the right side. Puncture would two inches to the right of the left nipple. Puncture wound at the lower angle of the left scapula. Puncture wound in the medial line of the back of the head. And beneath skull at this point a bullet was found. (Hemon 87) The fragmentation of Lazarus’s body in the medical report is repeated on the front page of the Tribune where there appears “a photo of Lazarus in profile, his eyes closed, a dark shadow over his eyes and in the hollow of his cheeks. THE ANARCHIST TYPE the heading says; numbers are strewn around his face” (143). Dismembered by numbers and by an explicit anti-Semitism, Lazarus’s facial features are cataloged as follows: 1. low forehead; 2. large mouth; 164 3. receding chin; 4. prominent cheekbones; 5. large simian ears. (143) These lists, like Olga’s vocabulary lesson, puncture the narrative consistency of the text, interrupting it with an obtrusively visual, scientific description of Lazarus’s wounds. The descriptions are almost photographic, and refer us immediately to the archival photograph of a dead Lazarus, whose head is held up by Captain Evans of the Chicago Police Department: 165 Figure 10: Aleksandar Hemon,   The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 52.  166 As though in an act of silent ventriloquism, the Captain positions the head of the corpse such that it directly faces the camera, aligning its blank stare with his own gaze, which intently fixes that of the viewer. The uncanniness of the photograph resides in this complex triangulation. Our gaze shuttles back and forth between a face of authority and another of resistance, the latter supported in its “lifelike” posture by the former, but only after his capacity to resist has been neutralized by the state. The strange combination of care and violence with which the Captain supports the head of the corpse at once enables and suspends a sympathetic identification with Lazarus: we find ourselves drawn in by the silent passivity of an expression that is simultaneously “watched over” by a repressive and vaguely threatening figure, while the very lens through which we look, by proxy, constitutes the scene as an item of criminal evidence. As we look at the photograph, our own affective response displaces the very photographic act by which that response is enabled, enacting a different mode of engagement than the forensic function of the list or the archival image. Insofar as the viewer’s relation to the image puts us under the gaze of the state, we come to occupy a position disturbingly proximate to that of the blank face that cannot return our own stare: we come to be framed and held in a perspectival position by an encounter with the dead body of a figure around whom the narrative circulates. 167 Faced with these faces, one dead and one alive, we are reminded of an earlier photograph in the novel, one we assume to be a portrait of Brik taken by Rora, but which is in fact a photograph of Hemon himself: Figure 11: Aleksandar Hemon,   The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 28.  168 The angle of Hemon/Brik’s gaze falls somewhere in between the direct stare of Captain Evans and the closed eyes of Lazarus Averbuch. His face tilted downwards, but his eyes staring upward, Hemon/Brik’s penetrating gaze, almost dead and almost alive, puts into question the relation between the two figures in the photograph we have just discussed. This might be taken as something like a “dialectical” image, in which the author occupies both the position of authority and that of muted resistance, at once controlling and under the control of the narrative within which he now stands in for his fictional proxy. At the same time, the photograph blurs the distinction between documentary and fiction, photography and narrative, the apparent fixity of the archive and the unfolding of a plot. The image takes on a metafictional function insofar as we are looked at, simultaneously, by the producer of the text and by a character within the narrative, at once included in the fictional world of the story and drawn back outside of it, into the world of the text and its author. The paradoxes at play in these images are similar to those in the case of the objects excluded from Olga’s world by their inclusion within a state of feeling, their “uninvolvement in her woe” operating precisely as the modality of their involvement in that mood. The photographs involve us in the mise-en-scène of the text, but they also situate us outside of the world constituted by their frame. And this seems to have something not 169 only to do with “woe,” or sadness, but also with death. As Rora explains to Brik, “The thing is, everybody who has ever been photographed is either dead or will die. That’s why nobody photographs me. I want to stay on this side of the picture” (189). Rora imagines the hither side of the photograph as a place removed from mortality, as though she might evade the ontological condition of finitude by evading recording. And our own position outside the world in which this desire is recorded, that of fiction, becomes involved with that desire precisely through our position “on this side” of the narrative, both excluded from and included in it through the act of reading. Consider these photographs alongside the lists that punctuate Hemon’s narrative: 170 Figure 12: Aleksandar Hemon  The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 52, 28, 87, 91.  Puncture wound over the left side of the chin. Puncture wound in the right eye. Puncture wound two inches above the clavicle on the right side. Puncture would two inches to the right of the left nipple. Puncture wound at the lower angle of the left scapula. Puncture wound in the medial line of the back of the head. And beneath skull at this point a bullet was found. Lout Lovable Love Lovely Lover Low Lower Lowland Lowly 171 Both the photographs and the lists appear as textual objects, as distinct visual forms that interrupt the flow of the narrative. Separated from and surrounded by prose, these objects obstruct or suspend the narrative by opening a space within it, and at the same time they open into interior spaces. The images of the photographs emerge out of the inky black rectangles by which they are surrounded, and the lists are composed of and articulated by their constitutive elements. Each item in a list, in order to constitute a list, requires a relation to other items. Like the objects excluded from Olga’s world, both the lists and the photographs are distinguished as coherent sets or bounded units by their distinction from the prose (by their “shapes”), but they are unities that also “break open” to reveal something else: interior elements or figures from which they are formed. The text opens, in the midst of itself, into objects that contain other objects, as if to reveal some “hard pit of sorrow” lodged within it: the empty gaze of a dead man’s face, the shadowy hollows of the author’s own eyes, or a word like “love,” placed in proximity to “low.” Both lists and photographs present these interior elements, as if to share some kernel that might be held in common through its punctual exposure within the continuity of narrative. “Here it is,” writes Hemon. “Every cursed thing” contains something like this. And this is how these interruptions can be thought as a form of relation, included within and constituting a mood by the fact of their exclusion. This is how an autopsy 172 report becomes related to “Love,” a photograph to a puncture wound, or Hemon to Brik to Lazarus. Error In the misreading of the can of “sardines” as “sadness,” the blurring proximity of letters, like in Olga’s list of “L” words, provokes a strange defamiliarizing affect; the error in the misreading emerges as a crisis that ruptures the habitual routine of the morning: “A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me” (Hemon 73). The crisis of the error exposes the sadness of the sardines, a mood that is inherent in the world of everyday things, and in this particular canned commodity. Brik’s (mis)reading of the object before him makes manifest the mood of the situation, the mood that is already the case but is now disclosed. In his description of mood, Heidegger stresses that “moods are not side- effects, but are something which in advance determine our being with one another. It seems as though a mood is in each case already there, so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which then attunes us through and through” (FCM 67). And when Brik stumbles upon this disclosure of the atmosphere in which he is immersed, he cannot but see it everywhere, assailing everything: 173 When I stepped out of the post office from which I called Mary, sadness seemed spread wide and thick all over Lviv: a couple of boys were washing a white Lada in the middle of the street; a man wearing an obsolete Red Army hat stood over a blanket stretched on the pavement on which the complete works of Charles Dickens were spread out; a Darth Wader-like Orthodox priest glided along the street, his feet invisible under the long black robe. The buildings with the high Austro-Hungarian windows and reserved ornaments were begrimed with a thick layer of despair. (Hemon 73) The sadness disclosed by the sardines seems to impose itself on everything, “spread wide and thick all over,” hovering like weather over the situation, constituting “the way in which we are together” (Heidegger, FCM 66). Under this “thick layer of despair” (Hemon 73), error persists in Brik’s address to his wife Mary: I would have liked to have seen who Rora was writing to but was too busy with a long e-mail to Mary, at the end of which I wrote: Very much thinking of you. The hotel we are staying at is a whorehouse, apparently. Rora is taking a lot of pictures. How is your dead? (162). Brik’s slip of the hand produces a typographical error that “may have just done serious damage to [his] marriage” (163). Dead instead of dad: though Mary’s father George is in fact dying of prostate cancer, he is not yet “dead.” The morbidity of the error provokes a revelation about the sadness in Brik’s relation to Mary, how his address to her poses the question of finitude, of death. The mistype triggers a crisis of sense, opening the space of address to the question of relation itself. In this new space of thought where his attachment has been re-organized around the 174 question of “your dead,” Brik is able to practice a speculative engagement with Mary through an imagined letter, an act of writing that testifies to and exposes their relation of dis-attachment, the way in which they share a collective distance, a knowing nothing about the other: And when I woke up I continued imagining the future letter, with a mind so slow it seemed somebody else was tabulating all the losses, pains, and grievances, describing all those nights when I had listened to her unsteady breathing, trying to talk myself out of the pain in my head, imagining a different life for myself, the life of a good man, and a better writer. I told her breathlessly about the can of sadness I had found in the kitchen and how afraid I was of having children and how on this trip I realized that I never wanted to go back to America. I told her that I could never find peace in Chicago and that I could not watch George die. I could have written page after demented page of what would have been a testament to our marriage. I will never know you, nothing about you, what has died inside you, what has lived invisibly, I could have written. I am elsewhere now. (287) In Brik’s potential letter, disattachment is externalized into the shared space of speculation and writing, dissolving his subjectivity into an elsewhereness across which affective relations can form, puncturing and countering the givenness of the mood in which he finds himself. Becoming Everyone To render visible the saturated invisibility of a mood is to construct a counter-mood. As Heidegger writes, “when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods” (BT 175). The Lazarus Project figures the potentiality of the aesthetic to puncture the 175 givenness of our situatedness, revealing what is the case and opening a new affective site of relationality. The formal discreteness of the list, the opacity of the photograph, the crisis of the error all interrupt a certain continuity in the narrative; within that suspension, provoked by that disattachment, attachment waits. One name we might give to the shared affective relation compelled by the decompletion of the text is friendship. As Mayumo Inoue writes, “Friendship names such relaying of one’s incomplete witnessing of historical materials to another incomplete being. Or friendship enacts a particular kind of historical materialism that infinitely defers the completion of historiographical writing as it needs to be shared by multiple singularities at once” (Inoue). The pluralization of incompletion is a gathering together as a collective atmosphere. One such collectivity forms in the novel when the two narratives, the historical account of Lazarus and the contemporary description of Brik and Rora, begin to intersect, spilling out of the distinct chapters that held them apart. The past and the present are rendered contiguous; or, more precisely, the different characters emerge as an assemblage of impersonal affects which operates across temporal boundaries and which might be inhabited by different subjects at different times. For instance, Brik’s waiting for a bus in Chisinau, Ukraine is contiguous with Lazarus’s journey on a train from Vienna to Trieste: The birch branches beyond the bus lot slumped down forlorn; against the revving of the engines, birds twittered chokingly; the 176 garbage container was bubbling up with moist plastic bags. How the fuck did I get here, to southwestern Ukraine, to the land of the pissed and passive, so far from everything—anything—I loved? Lazarus, on the train from Vienna to Trieste: third class was full of emigrants, whole families sitting on their valises, imagining an incomprehensible future; men slept on luggage racks. . . Landscapes blurred by; the windows were smudged with the yolk of the setting sun. (175-6) The blurred landscapes are an apt image for the likeness that emerges here. And, indeed, the photograph that opens the section embodies precisely a materialization of the contiguity between Lazarus and Brik, a blurred photograph taken from the window of a bus, or a train: 177 Figure 13: Aleksandar Hemon,   The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 174.  178 The blurred photograph reactivates the affective potentiality of an historical event and puts that residue into relation with the sad debris of the present. The concomitance of narratives is gathered as sadness. To inhabit such a mood is to feel oneself dispersed across a plane of affectivity that might look something like a blurred landscape; and, in the particular case of sadness, such dispersal is marked by a profound passivity and woe— the being-in-common of our aloneness, our elsewhereness. This collective sadness is thus an affinity with the specters of the past, with the incompletion of their death, and that relation ruptures the thickness of the present and makes possible a practice of sympathy or affinity within the present. It is precisely such an affinity that the State rejects (as embodied by the lawyer for the Police, Herr Taube). Taube says to Olga: ““But I cannot be you; we cannot be someone else. We are within our life and we stay there for as long as possible, that’s our home. We need life. There is too much death already, and there is probably more coming our way” (224). And yet, it is at the site of death, at the scene of a grave that might have been Lazarus Averbuch’s, that Brik is able to look over at the woman who has brought him there, Iuliana, and recognize an ontological fissure that cuts across his subjectivity, that dissolves him into a we, into a becoming-someone-else: “That’s me, I thought. That woman is me. Somewhere beyond the roof of tree crowns the sky grumbled, gearing up 179 for a storm. Rora took a picture of her, then of me, then of us” (235). The “us” registers the collective undoing of their identities into the space of relation. As Brik departs the cemetery behind Rora, he continues, And again I thought: That’s me. The thought bounced in my head deliriously, I couldn’t get to the end of it, could not fold it up into meaning. Iuliana walked behind; I heard her gentle panting. She was me, Rora was me, and then we came upon the man on the bench, drooling asleep, his mouth open enough for us to see a graveyard of teeth, his head wedged inside his pants’ waist—and he was me, too. The only one who was not me was myself. (235) There is no more sense of sovereign subjectivity that precedes their being- in-common: “They were me. We lived the same life: we would vanish into the same death” (236). And again: “And everybody was me, and I was everybody, and in the end it didn’t matter if I died” (262). In this graveyard, what transpires is the plurality of mourning, and an asking after the way in which the sadness of the scene might be felt collectively, as a relation. In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy describes how the withness of such affective distribution emerges out of care: “The shared world as the world of concern-for-the-other is a world of the crossing of singular beings by this sharing itself that constitutes them, that makes them be, by addressing them one to the other, which is to say one by the other beyond the one and the other” (Nancy 103). Affect is distributed as a careful address between singular beings, distributing them “beyond the one and the other.” Such dispersal is gathered into a collective atmosphere, the sad mood of everyone and everything: “I 180 imagine my life to be so big, so big that I cannot see the end of it. Big enough for everyone to fit into it. You will be in it, Mother and Father will be in it, people I have met or known will be in it. I can see it. I have a picture of it in my head. It’s a field in bloom so deep you can swim in it. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Cetinic, Marija (author)

Core Title Sadness after postmodernism: mood in contemporary fiction

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 08/02/2012

Defense Date 05/24/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect,contemporary fiction,mood,OAI-PMH Harvest,trauma

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Lloyd, David (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email cetinic@usc.edu,marija.cetinic77@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3227

Unique identifier UC1356976

Identifier etd-Cetinic-3910 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-357683 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3227 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Cetinic-3910.pdf

Dmrecord 357683

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cetinic, Marija

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu