Part 2:part 3:There are many astounding components of this brilliant film, this exquisite art work. There are so many reasons I love this image. Look at his hands on the gun—this is not a prop. This is his tool.
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Some use paint brush. Not Burroughs: he uses a shot gun.
But it's not with the affect of a punk; he's not flipping the bird and mooning the art world. No, with an air of absolute refinement, he stands resolute in the gallery, the artist standing before his art, baring his tool: a shotgun.When asked once what he needed to write he responded that he needed his scrap books, a typewriter, and a pair of scissors. A pair of scissors—so matter of fact. The cut up technique is not a negation of the word, of narrative, of character, of literature; it is its liberation.The cut up and shotgun art are not negative functions. They create new grammars, new possibilities of creation.What makes this image so great—so effective, so affective, so powerful—is that Burroughs does not grimace or smile or wink. He could not be more serious just as he could not be more affirmative.
Synopsis: 'O, mio babbino caro' plays as a woman skates gracefully. In contrast, little is graceful and daddy is not dear in Julien's world. His father listens to blues wearing a gas mask; dad prods, lectures, and derides Julien as well as Julien's brother and pregnant sister, while grandma attends to her dog.
His posture, his grip on his gun, says, 'Welcome to my world of creation.' I have no desire to make people experts. I never want to be the teacher that professes mastery over a subject (of course, I am not a master over any subject, so, well, there's that). I don't give a flying fuck if my students are down with every pedantic point of Deleuze's critique of phenomenology.Of course, I don't want to simplify the material for them—and I don't think I do—but I sure as shit don't care whether they grasp every fine point. I am not training 19 year olds to be scholars, to be academics. Undergraduate education is not professional training for the academy—that's what grad school is for.
Fuck citation.No, what interests me, what I try to teach, is a relationship to ideas, to texts, to the world. The focus of my teaching is not as much the material per se as it is how one stands towards the material. I want people—my students, sure, but everyone—to enjoy reading Nietzsche and Borges and Nabokov.
I want them to be generous towards the world, to find the best thing in this or that film, this or that book, this or that work of art.I don't want to create a bunch of nay-sayers, hermeneutic cops who roam libraries in search of ways this or that text fails. I want them only to read texts that set them on fire, that get their hearts pounding, that twist their brains and bodies into new postures, origami-like.I never taught a text I didn't feel was great. Why would I have students read anything I didn't think was astounding, something worth at least one hurrah, a hallelujah, a wooopeeee or three—or at least a wow and perhaps a huh? Why read the shit of the world? Why read the mediocrity of the world? Life's too short—or too long, depending on how you look at it.And so I've always tried to teach a way of going with ideas, with books and film and art. Ideas are not distinct from a life lived.
When I teach, I invoke my life, often. While this may be narcissistic I do it purposefully with a certain pedagogic goal: to show how an idea plays itself out in a life—how ones talk to his wife or child, how he interacts with family, friends, foes.
Ideas are not distinct from life (I learned this from Kierkegaard—thanks, Soren).College is not a job. College is not training for work—even for work in the academy. College is the time to take on different approaches to this life. When I was in college and first read Nietzsche, then Foucault, I was liberated from the contraints of myself—from my banal understanding of politics and power, from my staid assumptions about how the world works.
Reading these texts, life yawned with opportunity, with possibility, with excitement. This is education.A tip from McLuhan: education is exposing, and perhaps destroying, one's environment, the invisible structures that keep us doing the same old shit.For many students, undergraduate life is their one concerted exposure to inellectuals, to the life of the mind. So when I have them in my classroom for 16 weeks, I want to show them a lit up life of the mind—a life that not only is not dry but, on the contrary, is passionate, sensual, practical, personal, that the intellectual life has rewards that exceed getting a fucking A.And, of course, I want to change my students—irrevocably. I want them to see the world, see themselves, see school, see ideas in fundamentally news ways, in ways they never thought possible.
I don't want to let them keep ideas separate from their lives; I don't want to let them segregate their lives between school and life, as if class was something they had to clock in, clock out. I want the ideas I teach to bleed across their classes, across their lives. A Thanksgiving thought:My problem, my issue, with Marcuse is that he thinks of this issue in political terms.
Perhaps we can organize the body politic differently and, voila, we'll have pleasure once again.But the problem is not political or economic or social: the problem is the species. It is incorrect to say that capitalism rids people of their pleasure, as if capitalism were some alien force turning people into zombies and vampires. People—these people, what Burroughs calls the White Man Virus—are zombies and vampires, ergo, capitalism. Capitalism doesn't make zombies and vampires; zombies and vampires are capitalism.And zombies and vampires are, by nature, more voracious, more imperial, more dictatorial.
After all, he would have pleasure is having pleasure, not fucking over the planet, his friends, his family. The weak—those missing souls of their own and who must therefore suck the vitality from others—won, as they will always win. They are the mob and will hence always outnumber the individual, the Johnson, who wants only to be left the fuck alone.Capitalism is not an economic engine. It is the term for the breeding of zombies and vampires. It is the mechanism with which vampires blanch the world of pleasure seeking individuals. Capitalism is the name of this virulent virus, this strain of human being, that is bleeding the world. 'Polymorphous sexuality' was the term I used to indicate that the new direction of progress would depend completely on the opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs: to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.'
-Herbert Marcuse, from Eros and Civilization.OK, OK, so I am only just beginning to understand what Marcuse wrote over 40 years ago. You see, I thought I was immune from things like capitalism, that I could frolic and play, turn the world to my own liking. But one—or, perhaps, I—reached an impasse: the demands of the life I lead ask me to be rid of pleasure and become a foil of capitalism.The work world is transforming the body, ridding it of its desire to enjoy the world. After all, the horny body, the sumptuous body, does not want to sit at a fucking computer all day, every day, banging out Power Point presentations.
The sumptuous body wants to linger over a meal; the sumptuous body wants to make very slow, deliberate love; the sumptuous body wants to eat acid and stake a long stroll.And so capitalism is breeding enjoyment out of us, making us impotent with Prozac and Ambien, with computer screen generated migraines and depression. Of course, capitalism still needs its labor force and so it must give us a way to reproduce; ergo, Viagra. But once cloning is in full swing, there'll be no need for hard ons.Hard ons get in the way of productivity. Why do you think sex is barred from the workplace? We're afraid to express any desire whatsoever for someone who shares our workplace. It seems the struggle to rid the workplace of so-called sexual harassment became another foil of capitalism, an opportunity to flush the work world of all desire.And then they ramp up the work week—40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a fucking week! And, no, you can't touch anyone at work!
You can't even look at anyone with the slightest sexual intention. So where the fuck are we supposed to find our pleasure? We're not supposed to be sexual beings; we're supposed to be productive beings.What's so insidious, of course, about capitalism is that it makes us think we're enjoying life. It co-opts the pleasure principle, turns it to its own use. So you think you're enjoying life when you buy another stupid fucking useless phone or shoes or get a haircut—or even when you buy sex. It fills the airwaves with the hint of sex—but it won't actually allow you the opportunity to have it. And so we feel like we're being pleasured when all we're doing is buying more shit.Because none of this is enjoyment: it's consumption.
Enjoyment is slow, deliberate, considered, decadent. Enjoyment is a body enjoying itself; it is the biological, organic drive for pleasure, the organism finding pleasure in its own experience.Consumption is allopoetic: it is based in contingency. So when I buy the new 42 inch plasma tv or get a lapdance or buy a bottle of Cristal, I'm not enjoying my body's experience of these things: I am enjoying my consumption of them. My pleasure is not in and of my body; my pleasure melds with the object—the lapdance, the shoe, the tv. I therefore come to think that the expression of my pleasure must come from these things—not from my own body.Again, it all seems so obvious— now.
The question is: What the fuck do I do about it? I am always so thoroughly surprised that anyone reads this blog. As is obvious, I rarely post and what I do is usually an essay I've written offline. I am perplexed by the rhetorical complexity of blogging.
This is not a critique of the medium just a statement of fact about the relationship between me and blogging.So: it seems some bile drenched, uh, person has left a comment that is so rich and complex that rather than delete it, I will use it as fodder to explore this medium that so eludes me. This commenter stumbled on a blog written by a fictional character of mine, Henri—the central figure in my novel.Yes, I said it: I am writing a novel. Man, it's fun! How liberating!
I was becoming so fatigued with writing precious, tight, Deleuze-tinged essays. And fiction is so new to me, I am so thoroughly terrible at it, that every sentence I write is an education. First person or third and the complex play of voices in between and amongst; rhythm and flow; texture and tone; description: every piece is a challenge. Things that are obvious to writers are beguiling to me—and I love it.So, yes, my novel and a chance to be free of academese once and for all. The goal of said novel? Well, to shed this voice of academic, philosophic preciousness.
And to learn some things about how language and voice work. And, mostly, to be funny. I want to laugh at the things I write.My Henri—poor Henri—is a terribly depressed, suicidal, sexually, uh, deprived and angry Jewish man. Think: Portnoy's Complaint meets Notes from the Underground.
I started the novel in the first person but I think it was too much—this pissed off man screaming at you became tiring. So I shifted it to 3rd person to better frame him, give him some nuance through another voice.And I tried an experiment: I started a blog written by Henri.
My goals were to test a voice—his voice, not the voice of the book. And to see how people reacted to him as this is an essential part of the novel. What happens when this angry little man starts speaking his mind? He imagines he will be eviscerated—and, in many ways, he is during the course of his short, odd life.The responses of this particular commenter—see the comments in some of my posts below—are so funny and interesting they even surprised Henri: 'I was gonna post that on Ratemyprofessor and report you!,' she writes.What a strange instinct—to report someone, as if this were either 3rd grade or some fascist regime.
And I love that the authority to which I will be reported is Ratemyprofessor.com. It's so odd and hilarious I'm not sure where to begin or even what to say. The best (or worst) part is that she's proved poor Henri's point—we do live in a sort of fascism where the crime of saying the wrong thing is met with anonymous reporting to higher authorities (Ratemyprofessor being a less potent 3rd Reich, but potent nonetheless in its own way, for sure). But she has provided priceless fodder for my book—so thanks!The blog has other goals. One is shameless: to see if I could drudge up some controversy and create buzz for my book. In one fantasy scenario, I'd be fired from UC Berkeley.
That would be too good, too perfect: to be fired by the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley for things I say or, even better, for things written in a blog under a different name. Man, if I were more opportunistic, more committed to my art, I would have tried harder to engineer that and turned it into a press and publishing opportunity. But I'm neither that brave nor that cunning—so I got laid off due to budget cuts. How terribly unglamorous. Foiled again.And the other goal of that blog was to explore the oddity of voice in this blogosphere where, presumably, voice is untethered from identity, from humanity.
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This little hate filled commenter, of course, reveals that this untethering ain't so easy. And that, perhaps, the blog in its immediacy forges a peculiar intimacy between writer and words that somehow makes it seem more true, more honest when, in fact, it should be the exact opposite.What attracts me most about blogging is the potential for a certain kind of freedom, a delirious proliferation of voices, where one man—or woman—can become 20 men or women—or 20 men and women. Doesn't the blogosphere promise the glory of the author's death and the birth of language? Look in the mirror. Stare into your own eyes. What do you see? It's not just your eyes.
You see your eyes seeing you. And, what's stranger, you see your eyes seeing your seeing of you.Eyes, then, are not solely things that see but are things that are seen.
Eyes are at once camera and screen. They are always consuming, taking up the world. But, at the same time, they are always playing the world back.This feedback loop may not be continuous. The eye that sees may be the eye that plays back what it sees. But this play back is always, and necessarily, modulated by the complex algorithm of the body's life—its memories, its associations, its diverse trajectories.
Of course, there may be times that this circuit is more or less immediate: seeing a horrific event may yield horrific eyes.Now turn away from the mirror and look into the eyes of the person next to you. You don't just see his eyes. You see his eyes seeing you. And, what's stranger, you see his eyes seeing you seeing his eyes. This is no doubt what makes eye contact so potent, so powerful, a most provocative gesture, inciting lust, violence, desire, confusion. I see you crying; I'm thinking about a joke a friend once made; my eyes smile; you think I'm callous; and so on.Seeing another inaugurates an infinite circuit: no resolve, no center, no certainty, an endless mutual inflection. The only way out is to turn away or cement one's own gaze, hold it so steady that the circuit is able to find a local anchor.But things are more complicated.
Not only do you see another person seeing your seeing of you. You see his seeing of everything he's ever seen and experienced—birth, his parents, squirrels, films, books. When I see you, I don't just see you seeing me seeing you. I see your seeing of everything that you've seen, including the shared space we're in. And I see your seeing of me seeing all the things around us and all the things I've ever seen. When someone in a long airport line looks at me conspiratorially, as if we see the same indignity, I try to make my eyes say: 'I don't see what you see, I don't see in the same way you see.
Go see for yourself.' To see another person is to see an entire playback—a film in which this other person's face and body are the screen—of a life: it is to see an inflected node within an enormous network, an elaborate economy, of images. To see another person is to see a moving interpretation of this life; to see another person is to see a film, a seeing and playback of the world. This means that I am a film(ing)—a recording screen—interacting with other film(ing)s, both of us recording and playing back each other according to our respective algorithms.Now look at a painting, a portrait.
The portrait looks back at you. You see the person in the picture seeing you but probably not your seeing of her—but this depends on the portrait. It is quite uncanny to look at a face in painting and find it seeing you seeing it.
In any case, you do see a seeing of what you're seeing; that is, you see the seeing of the painter, a seeing that is a touching of paint to canvas, a haptic impression. Each painting, whether figural or abstract, declares, 'This is a way to see the world; this is a seeing; come see how I see.' This is why I will never tire of Van Gogh's 'Starry Sky' or his sunflowers: they are always a seeing that is alien, strange, and thoroughly enjoyable, funny, surprising, intense.When I see a painting I see the painting. And I see what's in the painting. And I see a seeing of what's in the painting. And my seeing becomes something that is seen, that can be seen.
My seeing is enfolded into the fabric of the visual, even if only for the film that I am: it is inscribed on, in, and for me. My seeing of this seeing makes an impression on the general fabric of visual, even if that impression is only stamped on the fabric that is my film. I am, after all, a screen.Seeing, then, is not outside of the film, outside of the playback. The act of seeing the world is part of the film, is seen.
We see seeing. And we are seen seeing seeing. I want to talk to you today about pleasure.Pleasure demands a certain slowness, a lingering, a languoring. You have to savor the complex palate of the tequila, let the emphatic umph of the Uni play across your tongue, lay in bed and nibble your sweetie's nape—slowly, very, very slowly.
You need to take the time when you write to find the proper phrase, rhythm, figure. You have to let your mind and prose meander through and around and with an idea.
You have to watch the great films once, twice, three times, a dozen times to truly appreciate them. You have to chew your food slowly, lay in the daytime sun, and enjoy your evening cocktail. You have to stroll, not run.These are the things that are becoming increasingly difficult to come. The America you inherit is an uncivil beast that moves at an ever more rapid clip, consuming dignity with spite. Take travel, one of the great luxuries of contemporary life. Travel has been stripped of its humanity as lines of people disrobe before disgruntled strangers. And when you question this degradation, this humiliation, you are told it's all for your own good.
And, at times, you may actually believe that.Do you understand what I just said? You actually believe that it is in your own best interest to be humiliated and degraded. This is how far we've come, how degraded we are, how terribly awry we've gone. Our fear has become such that we abandon the very things that make us human, the very things that bring us joy, the very things that make life livable: pleasure, civility, dignity.Now take this thing we call work, this thing that causes you such great anxiety. And it should—but for different reasons. In today's America, a job demands you be at the office at a given place and time, usually quite early, and 5 days a week, regardless of how well you slept.
You go to your inevitably gray cubicle beneath fluorescent lights and situate yourselves in front of a blue screen. This is exactly how I'd describe a prison—a fucking prison! None of this is healthy, physically or mentally. You talk to a variety of people, many of whom are boring, stupid, and incompetent if not cruel, stupid, and resentful.
You spend time in meetings ill run at best, hate filled at worst. You grab some overly salted food for lunch, eat it at your computer, and spend the rest of the day dehydrated and bloated with gas. Perhaps you seek the restroom as a respite, a place to pass gas in peace or at least have some solitude. No such luck. The bathrooms are public and so you piss and shit and fart next to your office mates before you head back to your now stinky cubicle, bloated and thirsty.Work is an elaborate holocaust of dignity.This used to be a 40 hour a week assignment—40 of your best hours spent uncomfortably gaseous, helping make some moron you'll never meet richer than he already is. This 40 hour exercise in humiliation has become 50, 60, 70 hours long. I'm not making this up.
The dot com revolution broke down the line separating work from play—so now you work all day long. You can wear jeans, have your nose pierced, and listen to Black Metal music. Work doesn't care—as long as you work.You've been co-opted, children. The machine of work realized that it doesn't care if your tongue is pierced or tattoos line your flesh. They don't give a shit; they just want your warm body working.
They even give you ping pong and foosball and let you have a beer now and again. And you think you're the one who came out ahead!
You're working 60 hours a week and you think you won! The Google campus is hailed as liberation because they serve you lunch! Even prisoners on death row get fucking lunch.
We are dead men walking, Starbucks infused zombies.This is today's America. There's no room for rebellion as every effort to resist gets folded into the machine. All the avenues of resistance have been co-opted—poetry, fashion, music, even drugs as the pharmaceuticals replace the acid labs as the suppliers of your high. Look what's happened to the green movement: Clorox runs ads claiming to be green. We drive so-called green cars.
That's an oxymoron. You want to be green? Stop driving, you morons!America is an ugly, cruel beast. Dropping bombs on Arabs is not the disease, it's the symptom. It's time to get creative in our revolts.But as big and stupid and mean as America is, it's also big. And this gives us some room to operate.
Maybe not for long as robotic drones fill the skies, leaving nothing unseen. But, for now, there is room. You don't have to walk mindlessly into this mire. There are options. Consider Alexander Supertramp, who burned his money and his i.d. And headed into the wilderness. Or Dorian 'Doc' Paskowitz, a onetime physician who in the 1950s quit his practice, dropped out of the mainstream and raised a family while living a nomadic surfing lifestyle.
All 11 people in the family—the parents and nine children—lived in a trailer, ate organic food, roamed the country, and surfed. The kids were home-schooled; they celebrated the Jewish sabbath every Friday night.That's right, you heard me: these are Jews. And if a nice Jewish boy can do it, you certainly can.Or take Mike Reynolds, an architect before the Feds stripped him of his license. He builds houses off the grid, that generate their own electricity, have their own sewage, and live off of the water that falls from the sky.
He's been harassed and sued and arrested. But he's still going, making it possible to live free of the mayhem.
And it's not just that these houses are actually environmentally sustainable, which they are, it's that they make life—your life—sustainable.You have to get creative in your tactics. You have to demand your pleasure. Because the world you're inheriting is hell bent on disallowing you your life. You have to create the time to savor this life, to deflect the time-soul-life suck of what we call the real world. But it isn't the real world; it's the cruel world.
You can make a more palatable real world, a world worth living in, living for, a world capable of sustaining life.Demand your pleasure. As an adjunct professor with a propensity for saying the wrong thing and who commands no respect whatsoever in the academic— or really any—community, I will most likely never be asked to deliver a commencement speech.
But watching a recent graduation, I couldn't help but think: what an excellent but all too often neglected opportunity. The possible speeches I could give swirled through my mind. Here is one such imagined speech, written with a certain histrionic fervor.-I want you all to think for a moment: Are your parents happy?
Do they consume life with unabashed joy, with voracious abandon? Now think of all your friends' parents: Are any of them happy? Are they lit up—by life? By their respective spouses?I have to tell you: the life prescribed for you—work, marriage, children—is a drain on all that is vital in this world.
Synopsis: 'O, mio babbino caro' plays as a woman skates gracefully. In contrast, little is graceful and daddy is not dear in Julien's world. His father listens to blues wearing a gas mask; dad prods, lectures, and derides Julien as well as Julien's brother and pregnant sister, while grandma attends to her dog. Julien is different, schizophrenic.
He wears gold teeth. He bowls, sings, worships, and chats with a group of young adults with disabilities. His sister's child is probably his own. He talks on the phone, imagining it's his mother, who died in childbirth years before.
He may be a murderer of children. From his point of view (perhaps), the film follows this odd family for a few weeks.
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