Tag Archives: Bert Stabler

Comiks and Kreative Empowerment (CAKE)

Posted on by

Quoth Slavoj Zizek: “True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism.” The Slovenian philosopher-provocateur may have found much to dismiss at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE), where earnest expressions set off by poignant design choices were on proud display from wall to wall, presented with disarming and/or cloying plainspokenness. “And if 80 tables chocked full of the greatest comics being made today is not enough for you (jeesh, really?),” the press release exclaims, “our Slate of programming presents 14 events that range from conversation to presentation to demonstration to documentation.” Indeed, it was an enormous and well-programmed affair, and this urgently casual tone, while it reminds one of the new “aw, snap!” informality infiltrating internet commerce, is, I feel, forgivable.

Forgivable ultimately because, despite the forced lack of guile, there’s absolutely no misrepresentation. Chicago art-comics virtuosos were on hand, like Lille Carre, Grant Reynolds, Anya Davidson, Anders Nilsen, and Edie Fake, (a primary CAKE organizer), all of whom generate delicately crafted works that invest personal experiences with shimmering magical nostalgia. Local publication The Land Line, and the freeform comics-based collaborative (one might even say improvisational) endeavors Brain Frame and Trubble Club, were all broadcasting their effervescent brand of playful artistic interchange. And their compatriots from around the U.S. (and Canada, the CAKE promo reminds us, “woooooooooo”) echoed the same kind of jubilant communitarian introversion. From table to table, whether it was small publishers, identity-based projects, creative collectives, or individual creators (with plenty of gray areas in between), everyone was thoroughly congenial, sincerely happy to talk about their books, their art, or anything related to small-press comics or indie print culture. I made it to two panels– one on the Chicago comics scene, and one on queer comics anthologies, both of which were lighthearted, enthusiastic, and informative.

Zizek also said that “culture is the name of a belief which is no longer taken seriously.” While he rejects the notion that at any point there were more “authentic” forms of belief, it does seem reasonable to look at the massive production of “culture” today, especially in a grassroots milieu like comics, as the place where devotion can be focused, without the embarrassment of commitment (embarrassment being, for Zizek, the original source of culture). But the unfortunate formal shortcomings of some confessional artwork is compensated for in the collective act of goodwill required for a congregation of gifted reflective aesthetes to create a fun and memorable celebration of pleasant, occasionally provocative fantasies- right here in Chicago, an important center for independent comics and animation.
 
Illustration from Rebecca Mir’s Apostrophe in the Ocean, which debuted at CAKE.
 

Tsushima

Posted on by

Even if rock’s triumphal-film-score concept-album crescendos are generally dedicated to narrating combat of the mythic mock medieval variety, rather than documented events, heroic ballads set against sweeping historical vistas have made a few appearances in rock-opera prog, such as Triumvirat’s Spartacus, and in the occasional power metal suite, like Iced Earth’s The Glorious Burden. But despite not knowing more than a few erratically memorable examples, I doubt that any prog or power “history album” quite compares to Arriver’s long-awaited epic, Tsushima.

Primarily from the viewpoint of the defeated Russian Admiral Rozhestvensky, the album tells the story of the Battle of Tsushima, a landmark 1905 naval encounter in the Russo-Japanese War. Wikipedia describes it as a turning point in modern warfare, as it was the first battle in which wireless electronic communication played a central role and the last in which one fleet surrendered to another. The album opens with “Winter Palace War Council,” a mournful accordion overture interrupted by a vicious staccato assault, in which, although “The Dowager Empress warned us/ Eastern entanglements shall fail,” the vocals growl defiantly states, “We will all die, but we will never surrender!” After balefully adopting the voice of Japan’s victorious Admiral Togo, in the menacing trudge “Togo, Son of a Samurai,” the story resumes in the Russian perspective with “Dogger Bank,” a high-speed stuttering Deicide-esque dirge conjuring the shadow of defeat to the distant conflict in the North Sea. “Our anchorage will be refused in every neutral port of call/ You may turn your backs on us,” the guttural snarl testifies, “but we alone are standing tall!”

In the album’s centerpiece, “Around the Cape,” a fierce, lumbering riff accompanies the background of total collapse, the defeated Russian fleet at Port Arthur and peasant revolts at the Tsar’s palace: “Crocodile hunting and French whores,” shouts the disembodied chorus in the face of their annihilation, “they only serve to slowly weaken our resolve.” A brief, precisely shifting thrash piece, “Dark Clouds Above the Fleet,” evokes mechanized perfection while prophesying the inevitable end: “Misery is all we know/ No solace found in place of sorrow/ Ignore your orders, lashing follows.’ In reverberating harmonic chords, and some actual Russian-language re-enactment, “Singapore” describes Rozhestvensky’s Ahab-like hubris in the face of the looming conflict. A massive swaggering rocker chopped into odd sections by tempo shifts, percussive artillery, bewildering time switches, and ornate finger-picking figures, “Tsushima Trilogy” churns like huge icy waves; in the suite’s last section “The Boiling Sea,” the Admiral exhorts his men to “never lower the flag,” until the battle ends in a whiteout of seasick feedback and the gasping sputter of a dying engine. The devastation is summarized in bleak harmonies over a rumbling funeral march in “Quadrology:” “21 vessels sunk by dawn/ 4000 Russian sailors drowned/ The Tsar’s last armada is lost and with it the war.”

While many loud rock bands deliver arrangements founded on the alternation of chugging riffs and blasts of fury, with Arriver the shifts are more elegant than startling, with dramatic grandeur favored over shock and awe. More classical than fanatical, their chords never simply evoke Satanic massacre or chivalric soundtrack. The uncomfortable relationship between punk and metal is foregrounded with a band such as Arriver– their sophisticated long-form arrangements don’t fail to sound like the French black metal band Deathspell Omega, but without any hint of histrionic horror or the perversion of nature. Or I might think of the melodic arpeggios, whiplash tempo changes, and layered chords of Between the Buried and Me, or the furious mathiness of Converge or Dillinger Escape Plan, but not of those bands’ crisply gated production values, which seem to only make use of death metal tropes in the service of reinventing angsty Gothy industrial music. Arriver’s old-school chops may even occasionally be reminiscent of Vader, but the former’s symphonic nuance is incompatible with the latter’s straight-ahead brutality. Arriver’s warm, tactile sound, both in performance and production, is most comparable with more melancholy exponents of the ‘90s post-hardcore indie-rock spectrum, like Bitch Magnet, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, or Unwound. But, putting the sound aside, the music is convincingly metal.

Merely an agglomeration of tropes, there is no nugget that makes metal metal. But metal fans might concur that, as stridently humorless as metal may be, its lack of irony keeps it blissfully free of sincerity. Metal is not personal but completely internal, not interpersonal but utterly public, magical rather than political, and thus always, in its way, religious. The nature of history as a diverse collectivity of experiences may seem more suited to punk. Still, Tsushima rides the fence admirably, in its unselfconscious apprehension of a totality whose only unifying element is anguish, becoming perhaps less of a “history album” and more of a “war album.”

Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad presents war not as a transcendent individual experience, but an unstoppable gluttonous inertia of force before which conquerors and victims are equally powerless. Weil defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “A man stands disarmed and naked with a spear pointing at him;” she says, “this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.” As in Weil’s description of the Homeric epic, the chief tone of Tsushima is bitterness. “The dissonance introduced in the overture, “The Winter Palace,”introduces a dread that lingers throughout the action of the musical narrative”, grimly relating episodes in the admiral’s reflections upon the battle, before, during, and after, with the delusional yet fatalistic determination of Custer at Little Big Horn. “The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised;” rhapsodizes Weil, “neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated.” On a more modest scale, the same sentiment could be applied to Tsushima.

Glory in struggle, a subtext of all loud white music, is subtly tweaked in the fearful feedback, deformed rhythms, and ominous harmonies that counterpoint Tsushima’s thrashy gallops, surgical barrages, and martial marches, somehow mingling the mournful solemnity of patriotic Russian choral anthems with Fugazi’s insurgent insouciance to create a result that is neither reverent nor skeptical. Almost a straight-faced echo of the miniature Stonehenge proffered by Spinal Tap, the mightiest works and most sublime cataclysms of man are seen in their true ephemeral puniness. Rather than a bestowal of posthumous heroic laurels, the abject defeat of arrogant power seems to be the moral of the story, summed up in the chant that closes the album: “Day by day, like links in a chain, darkness spreads at the edge of the empire.” The torch of triumph and the flame of the fallen warrior must dispel in smoke for any hope to stay kindled.
_____________
Arriver’s website with info about the album is here.

Excess Meaning

Posted on by

Above is a art project Bert Stabler and I worked on together. I wrote the words and he drew the image.

Except, as you’ve probably noticed, there are no words. When it came down to it, Bert decided that the pictures looked better without the text. So he took them out.

In some versions of comicdom, this could be seen as a cardinal sin. As Joe Matt says, “”I’ve gotta draw minimally to serve the storytelling! The writing always comes before the art!” Similarly, Ed Brubaker argues “I’ve always felt that the writing was far more important than the artwork… As long as the art supports the story…” It’s hard to see how Bert could have more thoroughly violated these precepts.Not only does his art not serve the storytelling, but in the name of the art, he actually went ahead and removed the words altogether!

Of course, in our project, the words were always subordinated to the drawing; Bert did the artwork first, then I provided words…and then he decided the words didn’t fit (in some cases literally — too much text for the boxes.) But that merely underlines the point that art here was not subordinated to storytelling.

Bert’s piece takes several steps towards abstract comics. Appropriately enough, Andrei Molotiu has taken on a lot of these issues at his Abstract Comics blog (from which I pinched the Matt and Brubaker quotes). Specifically, Andrei has argued that art in comics should not be, and often is not, subordinated to the demands of text or narrative. Speaking of the art-must-follow-story meme, Andrei says

This is exactly the logic of illustration–which is a form of logocentrism… And here we can expand the discussion beyond abstract comics, which occupy only the extreme position (like “purely harmonic music”) in a wider range of art that exceeds narrative demands.

In another post, Andrei goes on to look at some examples of non-abstract, art-superfluous comics.

For instance, he talks about a Bob Kane story from 1941, in which Kane used a ton of circular panels, as Andrei shows:

Andrei goes on to say:

Now, what does this mean? Probably nothing. (Which is not to say it’s not significant; just that it’s probably not meant to mean.) One can obviously draw the parallel between the circular panels and the moon–but the resulting interpretation (Batman as creature of the night, etc.), would be generally valid for ANY Batman story: so why specifically this one? Similarly, one can find some connection to the closing words of the story, where Bruce Wayne, with a wink, tells Commissioner Gordon: “I guess the life of Bruce Wayne does depend quite a bit on the existence of the Batman!” There is a kind of circularity implied there, I guess, and we can then claim the circularity is echoed formally in the art… And yet, if that’s the great realization, the theme of the story–again, the Bruce Wayne/Batman dichotomy is a constant throughout the strip. Why this story specifically?

I don’t know. Maybe Bob Kane had a brand new compass he had purchased the day he drew this story, and he was just dying to use it. But my point here is: I’m not so much interested in fully motivated signs, portentous (a la Wagner) leitmotifs charged with meaning as you can find in, say, “Watchmen” or “The Dark Knight Returns”–works in which their creators seem fully in control of their formal language, in which every single (or almost) signifier can be seen as adding something to the story’s theme. Rather, I’m interested in what, at this point, may be called automatisms, tics perhaps, that nevertheless affect our experience of the comic.

Andrei is drawing a distinction between formal elements that can be collapsed into the theme and formal elements that are tics, excesses over meaning. As an example formal elements linked to theme, you could perhaps take this Gruenwald painting, where the idiosyncratic formal use of scale illustrates the phrase “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

And as an example of formal tics that do not link to theme, you could take the insistent circular repetitions in the Frank Miller Spider-Man/Daredevil crossover which Andrei analyzes.

In Gruenwald, the formal elements relate directly to the spiritual meaning; in the Frank Miller, the circles are just a way of organizing space; an abstract, musical surplus, which contribute to pleasure or experience without, Andrei says, contributing to narrative or meaning.

The question I have here though, is this: are narrative and meaning synonymous? Obviously they aren’t; Gruenwald’s painting isn’t a narrative, but it’s intended as an illustration of a thought or a metaphysical insight. But what about in Miller?

Perhaps one thing that the circular motif does is to insist on its own integrity. It draws a border; looking at those images, it’s hard to avoid the sense of space. In both of the sequences form Miller above, the words are literally pushed off to the edge, allowing the circles to spread — Daredevil’s senses, his “sight”, reaches out across the page, marginalizing the text. Logocentrism is (again, literally) replaced by iconocentrism. This is the case even in instances where the text is more interspersed with the circles, as below.

The spinning multiple figures against the whiteness demand attention. It draws you down into an excessive, vertiginous whirl of motion that makes the banal text (“Got you fella! Hang tight!”) seem like the superfluous bit.

Thus, the image spilling over the words does not exceed meaning. Rather, its meaning (or one meaning) is the excess itself. When Andrei says illustration is excess, he is not illustrating the way in which illustration does not mean; rather, he’s illustrating that very meaning, which is excess. The circle is a hole in narrative — a vortex that escapes the story’s staid linearity and in its place spins out an ever-expanding circumference of pleasure.

Bert’s excision of text can also be seen as a kind of deliberate overtopping, or annihilation, of narrative content.

In Bert’s drawing, the Peanuts characters flow and morph, losing their coherence as they dissolve into a kind of post-modern iconic glop. They don’t cease to mean; rather, their meaning is unanchored from its original context and sent oozing along the chain of signifiers. So Schroeder turns into a guitar which turns into tombstones haunted by a cute little death and Linus and Lucy fuse into a single terrified/terrifying blob of torment and tormenter. It’s a violent detournement — and the violence is not only in the drawing, but in the (lack of) text. The Peanuts characters are all caught in the boiling cauldron of narrative meltdown, and their blank, stunned, failed efforts at speech only emphasize their tortured transformation. The speech bubbles hang emptily in the design — the last, sad trace of the vanished stability of logos, as around them rages the free-associative chaos of the image.

_____________
In the examples so far, Andrei’s conception of the visual as excess (beyond meaning in his formulation, of meaning in mine) has worked fairly well. I think it is possible to find instances that call it into question though. For example:

This is one of Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji. It’s title of this particular plate is “Fuji as a Mirror Stand.” The point, or meaning, is, then, a kind of visual pun — the image of Fuji in the background with the sun sitting on top of it recalls a mirror sitting on its base.

If that image is what the print is about, though, what to make of all that action in the foreground? The man with his dog crossing over the bridge can be seen as a visual mirror of the mirror, perhaps — but Hokusai makes it very difficult to see the action there as pure formal doubling. Instead, we want to see it as narrative. What (we ask with the dog) does he have in that bucket? Where is he going, and where are those boatmen going under the bridge? Will they speak to each other? Do they see each other? What’s their story?

In this case, we might say that the narrative, or the demand of narrative, acts as an excess; an addition balancing on top of the mountain. Human stories pass over and pull under the image; what you see is disturbed by the demands of what happens. You can look for your reflection in the serene and distant mountain, and you may even see it, but your dog is still beside you, excessively nuzzling, demanding that you move on.

Here’s another view from the same series which works in somewhat similar ways.

The title is “The Appearance of Mt. Fuji in the Fifth Year of Korei.” It is supposed to show the actual date of the appearance of the mountain. Befitting such a momentous occasion, the figures gathered here are intently focused on Fuji. On the left, government officials stare, their attention riveted — so much so that their hands imitate the curve of the mountain’s top. On the right, a group of villagers gaze with similar single-mindedness…for the most part.

There is one exception though. A single villager has been distracted; he points off to the side at…what? A bird? Falling bird poop? Godzilla?

You could easily read this as in line with the last image. The meaning of the drawing — its purpose and point — is the view of the mountain itself as miraculous and devotional presence. But there’s a story in excess of that image; something has happened, and though we don’t know what it is, it draws us away from the image and on to the next panel, even though, in comic-book terms, there isn’t one.

But while you could read this as narrative excess over the meaning of the image, you could also read it as image excess over the meaning of narrative. The scribe next to the pointing man has been recording the story of the mountain on the day of its new creation. But he is distracted by sight — first of the pointing finger, and then, presumably, of whatever it is over there that we can’t see. For us, the hint of a story is a distraction from the view. But for the writer in the image, the hint of a view is a distraction from the story.

Of course, outside the print, there isn’t really a view or a story — just a mystery waiting to be charged with meaning. Narrative and image both leap at the chance, climbing one on the other, each over each, like Mt. Fuji rising through Hokusai’s frame.

Keith Herzik Rocks

Posted on by

The first time I saw work by the Providence upstarts then known only by the name of their communal live/art space, Fort Thunder—guys like Ben Jones and Leif Goldberg, who ended up as founding members of Forcefield. Paper Rad, etc. – it was at a huge rock poster show put on at Chicago’s Butcher Shop in 1999.  Their posters were expressionistic, but exquisitely detailed and highly crafted; they were known for having far more color separations in their silkscreen prints than anyone else in the show. They were more pretty than weird then. The crest of acclaim that buoyed that gang in the ‘oughts followed the arc of many frisky artists brought to heel by MFA degrees and attention from the Whitney Biennial— visionary anarchism whittled down to a few key motifs (diamonds, peace signs, weird dog heads, Gumby) and a trademark style (day-glo colors, seizure-strobe animations).

And I also saw Keith Herzik’s art for the first time in that Butcher Shop show.  Keith’s work, on the other hand, had the mind-blowing audacity of the apparently feeble-minded; the trembling outlines of one little piece featured a toilet sitting on the lap of a large naked person, with a cutaway view to a pack of cigarettes rotting in their stomach.  And yet, other artists treated Keith as the unsung celebrity of an incredibly comprehensive and star-studded survey exhibit.  His posters were, compared to most of the art in that show, not especially offensive, clever, ornate, or vivid.  Rather, like the musical output of Syd Barrett, they were gentle koans of incomparably absurd perfection.

Keith and the Providence dudes have had an ongoing artistic relationship, so the comparison isn’t shocking.  Among other things, he contributed work to their stellar comics periodical Paper Rodeo back in the gay ‘90s.  Since that time, the dudes have made the compromises necessary to become collectible cultural content, somewhat to their detriment, and Keith, well, he just hasn’t.  Drawings that look like something David Crosby would have drawn with a pen in his mouth during a sentimental bout of flashback-induced somnambulism melt and wobble next to hysterically mundane sound bites, the same today as they did a decade ago.  But his production values have advanced tremendously. The ecstatic drawings are scattered and stacked in delicate arrangements of ink separations that don’t belie the spontaneity of the epileptic doodling, but make it leap off the page in a joyful storm.  His posters, once merely loopy, hilarious, and bizarre, have become retina-tingling tableaux of feverish shapes, harmonious chromatic energy, and enigmatic cultural bloopers.  Herzik learned everything there was to learn from alterna-comics oracle Gary Panter, except how to try to age gracefully via obnoxious literary pretentions.

The sense of fragmentation is unavoidable in Herzik’s work, as images drift in and out of discernibility.  In the small fully-screenprinted booklets he’s been making of late, under the aegis of “Alamo Igloo,” the format implies a narrative.  Words appear now and then, there are a few recognizable and repeated images (dogs, astronauts with guns, sexy girls, etc.), but mostly the images dissolve into musical shapes and patterns, recalling the synesthetic synthesis of the arts that was one of Modernism’s nobler aims.  In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky comments that “a first encounter with any new phenomenon exercises immediately an impression on the soul.”  The effect is similarly immediate in Keith’s art, no hesitation in his eternally newborn overflow of sensations.  Working tirelessly, never neglecting his handicraft, Herzik attempts to recreate the assault on the nervous system of a universe too strange to reproduce with detachment.

Keith is not a romantic narcissist—the impression from seeing the work is classically sublime, one of being overwhelmed and absorbed by reality, “to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters,” (quoting Deleuze commentator Daniel W. Smith) “but only forces, densities, intensities; the forces of folding in a mountain, the forces of germination in an apple, the thermal and magnetic forces of a landscape.“  Vitalistic and demented, elegant and incoherent, immersive and marginal, these are pieces at which you stare like blinding headlights, and then stumble away from, forgetting everything but the floating spots briefly burned into your imaginations.

__________

Note by Noah: Bert first wrote the piece above for Paul Nudd’s dvd-r zine “R.U.B. Vol 2:  Keith Herzik – Inside the Alamo Igloo,” which featured a 30-min documentary on Keith Herzik.  This piece is also being used in the catalog for the Keith Herzik retrospective currently at the Hyde Park Arts Center, curated by Paul Nudd. If you are anywhere near Chicago, you need to see it.

Illustrated Wallace Stevens— Flyer’s Fall

Posted on by

 

Flyer’s Fall

This man escaped the dirty fates,
Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,
Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space —

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which
We believe without belief, beyond belief.

 

 

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
Bert Stabler’s Website

 

Vanishing Point

Posted on by

In a footnote in The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson quotes Edmund Husserl on “the constitution of Galilean science as the repression of praxis (italics mine).” Husserl says, “The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities.” And thus, a tangible practice of mapping is rendered abstract when applied to the heavens– unclean knowledge is hermetically purified through contact with the infinite. In something of a Galilean move, Alain Badiou has, following Hegel, insisted that the tangible knowledge of science is not merely expressed though but fundamentally rooted in abstract interaction. He has sought to press this point in meditating on set theory mathematics, arguing against the idea of a “dissemination” that would atomistically reduce everything in a certain “world” to autonomous monads or particles, a common core or a higher singularity, any essential element that would point outside the structured relationships between related objects, relationships that resist being collapsed together in any reconciliation.

In reviewing Badiou’s Number and Numbers, John Kadvany quotes Badiou arguing against transcendent unity: “Dissemination, when it is applied to a natural multiple, delivers only a ‘shard’ of that multiple. Nature, stable and homogenous, can never ‘escape’ its proper constituents through dissemination. Or: in nature there is no non-natural ground.” But, by his own logic, Badiou cannot define his system from within that system. Notes Kavadny, “Set theory relies on first-order logic; it isn’t expressed through its own ontological language or other angelic media.” “You can study the higher infinite all you like for aesthetic or intellectual reasons,” states Kavadny, “but it can’t be justified by an ideology of natural scientific need.” The hubris Badiou attributes to reductionist analysis reappears in his own dream of pure autonomous immanent induction.

The problem of positing a symbolic system with its own symbols resonates with the distrust many feel in regard to Freud’s fixation (if you will) on castration. This literalizing of abstraction informs Lacan’s critique of the Freudian mother-child dyad of the oral stage (discussed by Lacan in terms of the register he calls Imaginary), and, in turn, of the classic three-part Oedipal disharmony and the Symbolic conflict of the genital drive– mother, child, and father. The point being that there is no pure time without the father, and neither is a pure sublimation offered by the irruptive introduction of the father. Lacan offers the phallus, an abstract signifier divorced from the physical penis, as an element haunting the relationship of mother and child, and as an element that does not disappear with the advent of the paternal Law.

But this pair, the “romantic” dyad and the “comic” triad, still leave out a third term. In Freud’s introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, from 1916-1917, he talks of the fact that not only the penis can fill the symbolic function of the phallus, but so can the breast, as can the baby itself, as can feces. Our first creation, abjectly inhuman, an unclean expression of our interiority, feces define our ability to control our own bodies and thus the bodies of others. In a world that we imagine to be completely of and for material use, shit has become not only that which we create, but that which constitutes our value. In Marx, the paradigmatic anti-individualist, we see the apotheosis of voluntarism: a world in which existence is to be understood exclusively as effort. The modern human ideal is the vitalist worker/innovator endlessly shitting out product/algorithim, much like the character in Chester Brown’s comic book Ed the Happy Clown whose infinitely prolific anus is a portal to another dimension.

Analyzing sodomy in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Richard Halpern connects creativity and sublimation to the obsessive anus via Lacan’s alien yet ideal Thing, the lack which is the motivation of unconscious desire, the fetish to which fixation constantly returns.

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
…One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
…And in this change is my invention spent(.) (Sonnet 105)

This singular emptiness is at the center of the Real; the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the inexpressible Real make up the Lacanian triad that matches up respectively with Freud’s genital, oral, and anal stages. What Halpern terms “Shakespearean homosexuality” is “not identical with sodomy but results, rather, from aestheticizing the theological categories that construct sodomy”– i.e., as an impure act based on an unnatural preoccupation. This occurs in much the way that Paul appropriates official imperial Roman language to talk about the Kingdom of God.

And, as with discussions of the religious or aesthetic ineffable, “(s)odomy subsists as the speaking of the unspeakable, as the topos of the inexpressible or unnameable.” Not just in the sense of the closet, or “the love that dare not speak its name” (although those tropes resonate in the Sonnets), but an act of creation and awe, an intrusion of sublime artifice that Halpern associates with idolatry, but dissociates from the genital. Thus the fascination for and suspicion of artistic or divine creation from nothing:

And for a woman wert thou first created
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. (Sonnet 20)

The iconic unspeakable sign is the remainder of purifying alchemical sublimation, the supplement of the phallus or the abjection of feces. Halpern finds an analogous (if arguable) link in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, reading idolatry as a punishment for homosexuality among the Greeks. “But,” Halpern says, “this means that homosexuality, as a failure of natural vision, mimics that transcendence of nature which the Greeks otherwise fail to achieve.”

Reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s abject womb, Halpern returns to passages in Shakespeare that connote decay and perversion. He links the “reeking” breath of the Dark Lady in the later sonnets with the Marquis de Sade’s repulsive misogynist description of Therese, of whose anus “we have proof positive that the shit of her infancy yet clung there.” Halpern goes on to propose a kind of violence and repetition in both the Renaissance and Enlightenment texts that can be linked with an abject negativity that provides new ways of figuring the sphincter-like prison of reality– I would identify in this the collective activity of the drives that Freud termed the “death drive.” In examining this excessive aspect of “doting” nature, we are led to a category of the anal that psychoanalysis has commented upon repeatedly, that of sadism.

The death drive that returns insistently to the tight spot of unbearable pleasure is the scene of the utopian “languages” described by Roland Barthes in Sade Fourier Loyola, a book about authors whose systems, like Badiou’s, prescribe a discipline rather than a summary. In speaking of the lack of clear images in the Spiritual Exercises, Barthes says that St. Ignatius’ techniques “determine less what has to be imagined than what it is not possible not to imagine– or what is impossible not to imagine.” But the goal is not wordless beatitude. The anal-retentive “totalitarian” articulation of every imagined detail resonates with the immanence of structuralism; for Loyola, “language is his definitive horizon and articulation an operation he can never abandon in favor of indistinct– ineffable– states.” The infinite horizon of mathematical repetition in Loyola is captured well in the very first week, when he literally employs a diminishing character size when proscribing proper purging of a sin from the conscience:

Finally, however, the near-impossibility of achieving perfect purity is not an excuse to dismiss the idea of perfection. This perfection is outside of our world, and must be sought through helplessness. It must remain unknowable. This problem is graphically described by Jesus throughout the Gospels, but perhaps never with such clear anal overtones as when he insists in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Money as feces was one of Freud’s least ambiguous metaphors, the thing you certainly cannot take with you when passing through a needle.

The increasingly abstract market of drives, and the increasingly abstract disciplinary father, for all their dispersed ephemerality, cannot pass into perfection while remaining what they are. The attempt to approach truth without “exhausting oneself,” as Barthes puts it, is the arrogance of attempting to create a perfected, purified immanence: a light without shadow, or an image without an observer, as when Galileo and Badiou forsake transcendence in the name of abstraction. Badiou’s attempt to use the fathomless infinity of set theory as a bedrock of Being is a primal fantasy of anal control that attempts to police boundaries and define differences, not by making them concrete, but by making them untouchable. Grasping this seductive (feminine) Real of jouissance is no more possible by repetition than by reduction. Nature cannot be conceived (of) without an unnatural element, a framework of artifice, but that artifice must emerge from a tiny, empty space beyond.

Bert Stabler on Blood and Earth, Lack and Void

Posted on by

Our extended theory and art discussion seems to have wound down, but Bert Stabler got in some retty great last words which I thought I’d highlight. First:

“The advocates of method oppose the nonmethod of chance to that of proceeding by reason. But what they want to prove is given in advance. They suppose that a little animal, bumping into things, explores a world that he isn’t yet able to see and will only be able to discern when they teach him to do so. But the human child is first of all a speaking being. The child who repeats the words he hears and the Flemish student lost in his Telemaque, are not proceeding hit or miss. All their effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to: not as students or learned men, but as people; in the same way that you respond to someone speaking to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality.” Jacques Ranciere, from The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

The left-theory world has its populists, like Ranciere, Bordieu, Zizek, and Gramsci, and its formalists, like Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, and Greenberg. And it’s split up in numerous other ways too. And it’s like that in the art world as well, and in various areas of culture. But hierarchies of excellence are always conservative (even in a university), and totalizing universality is always radical (even when it’s just capitalism).

Barthes might indeed agree that image qua image needs to be recognized in some Platonic trinity of language qua language and math qua math, and freedom is the void that distinguishes and defines incommensurable multiplicities. I realize that that is a properly structuralist outlook.

But if the only true philosophy is epistemology, there immediately becomes no truth to epistemologically discern. Which I recognize as a conservative outlook– which, ironically for the feminists working with idealism, leaves them with nothing but nature and embodiment and the return to ancestral lore, the general revival of “witchcraft.”

And I have a great deal of sympathy for that, for blood and earth and haptic reflexive spasm within egoless harmonious chaos. And yet, there’s nothing about that that stands for an ethics that is itself ontological, rooted in the cosmos. I merely hope, without systematically promising, that image, the simulacrum of death, resurrected through the discursive language of art, can perhaps offer, as Caro says (echoing Hegel?), an ‘intervention that challenges the place to which poststructuralism has cast “primordial writing.”’

And here’s me in response.

In terms of your point about feminism…I think that gets at why Irigary, for example, who so radically resists the notion of biological determinism in some ways, in other ways seems so obsessed with embodiment, to the extent of seeing mathematics as gendered. Gender differences are metaphors, but there is no ontological truth beyond metaphors, so the women are not one because female lips are two, and the metaphor is the only truth there is. Bodies get erased by language and then immediately reconstituted in language. Logic is constantly swallowing bloody hunks of meat and then voiding them in a geyser of fluids, the pure grid eternally defiling itself, like Descartes pausing in his syllogisms to cut open a cow carcass, or Frankenstein birthing a shit baby. Derrida’s close reading is not an academic exercise; it’s a shamanic plunging of his orifice into sopping entrails; a violent and bloody ritual sacrifice to the hungering void.

And Bert again.

Barthes has a book about Sade, Fourier, and Loyola (called Sade Fourier Loyola), in which he describes them all as “logothetes,” inventors of languages; “It makes little difference how their style is judged, good, bad, or indifferent… all that is left in each of them is a scenographer; he who disperses himself across the framework he sets up and arranges ad infinitum. Thus if Sade, Fourier, and Loyola are founders of a language, and only that, it is precisely in order to say nothing, to observe a vacancy… Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the text as an intellectual object… The text is an object of pleasure… It is a matter of bringing into our everyday life the fragments of the unintelligible that emanate from a text we admire(.)”

This to me seems like a possibility in any discourse, to constantly defer Being through the proceas of Becoming, with the techniques of writing and erasing (sacrificing and consuming) functioning to constantly paper over the abyss on which we tread.

But the abyss itself persists only if we emerge ex nihilo, without reference to the gap that exiles us from nature. This lack that is the Real, perceived only in its effects, opposes the void, through trauma that makes necessity necessary and possibility possible. Language’s connection to pleasure is symbolic desire, which means anxiety and frustration for the phallus, but boundless freedom in lack.

Like I said, we may have exhausted this topic for now (though if people want to start off again, that would be cool too.) But in the meanwhile, thanks to Matthias, Caro, Franklin, Bert, and all those who joined in the discussion.