Alternatives

«А вождь наконец-то покидал насиженную Россию ... но на смену приходила только серая страшноватость, в которой душа советского типа быстро догнивала и проваливалась внутрь самой себя. Газеты уверяли, что в этой страшноватости давно живет весь мир и оттого в нем так много вещей и денег, а понять это мешает только «советская ментальность».

В. Пелевин, Generation П, с. 32.

All that remains is the серая страшноватость, endlessly refurbished, endlessly traversed by people who are so mutilated that they no longer even want what they desire and instead devote all their energies to affirming the primacy of an unlivable world over what is left of their selves. The utopian impulse is surely an old one, but what I long for is undoubtedly much newer - "N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!" But the ce implies an autre. That isn't quite it. That is still some kind of basically religious impulse. What I long for lies too far ahead of me. All I can do with my desire is prepare the way for it by willing the total negation of that which is. The way in which the present world is constituted makes the good life impossible. What resists it is too far inside us, and the subject is too riven with contradictions to survive outside of the hell which it has created for itself. But everyone already knows that utopia is not for us. That is why they claim that it does not exist. But what could be more pathetic than to think that goodness can only exist for me? We can imagine an empty utopia. This can still animate a basically humanistic political project, one which is constitutionally resistant to self-satisfaction: as long as we are alive, we have failed. But that does not mean that we want to die. We want, rather, to keep falling forward into the infinite possibility offered by an existence free from us, beyond us, not for our children (which we should not have), but for something endlessly ahead of us, unattainable, incomprehensible, the quintessence of hope.

This is what I realized as I walked past the "Cluck-U Chicken" in New Brunswick the other day.

To me, one of the great puzzles of intellectual history, and one which deserves detailed investigation: it is not enough to recognize that intellectual brilliance come in generations. It comes rather in people who meet long before they make their world-historical contributions. University friends: Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin; Eliade, Ionesco, and Cioran; Blanchot and Levinas. What does this mean?

When I first learned of the existence of this thing called postmodernism, I was amazed: how had something so vast as to be practically uncategorizeable - a something encompassing not just aesthetics but a sense of reality - have escaped my attention for so long (I was about twenty years old)? And then I realized the more amazing thing: this something had preceded me, according to the standard periodization, by almost twenty years!

What does this mean for one's position with regard to a cultural development - that is, whether one has seen it come into being, or, on the other hand, been born into it? In one case, the observer realizes the thing as it is happening around him. In the other, one looks around and realizes that one has been blind to one's own reality, not because it has crept up on you, but because you are saturated with it.

How many scholars of postmodernity are younger than it? What is the effect of this lag of the scholars behind the object of their scholarship? What will happen when those born after, say, 1980 will come to dominate academic discourse on the postmodern (if there is any such thing as academic discourse by then)?

Striking as it was for me to notice postmodernism, what I discovered was, in large measure, a corpse.

Imagine a photographic portrait. What is portrayed? Two subjects, looking at each other: the eyes of one through the photographic apparatus, the other's - mediated only by the air. The photograph records two people looking at each other. The photograph preserves the object of one of these and the subject of the other. The complements of these - disappear? Yes, as Barthes wrote, this photographed person is dead and is still going to die. But there is more here. He is looking at me (I am the photographer) - best if both the photographer and the photographed are dead. Then I can be both, looking at myself looking at myself. Three subjects behind one set of eyes, juggling all three, suspending all three in simulated life and simulated death.

Is this the opposite of what I find so terrifying in 'postmodernist' art? That the communicative circuit which is so dilated in the photograph of a dead person (or even one still living) is utterly destroyed here, with no creator and no recipient at all? Just the circulation of texts? The old nightmare: human creations leaving human beings behind. Cavell's idea of the film: seeing a world which does not see us. Is this what the experience of postmodernity is? Why are these images - Kabakov, Prigov, Rubenshtein, Petrushevskaia, Sorokin - so saturated with death? But it is not the death depicted in some of these which is terrifying, but some other death, one which pervades these texts and the experience of them.

The pornographic and the obscene are inalienably linked to the perverse which circumscribes the sphere of the negativity of desire. That is, what the 'I' desires is to be the desire of the 'other,' which is the desire to become an (impossible) object, the cause of desire or objet petit a. Desire, which always hinges on the destruction of the object (Hegel), finds its expression in the mutilation of the desired object or, as Lacan puts it: 'I love you, but, because, inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the objet petit a - I mutilate you.' Sacrifice is the theatre of this drama of the desire of the other. It is in ritual sacrifice that 'we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other,' which Lacan calls 'the dark God' of discourse. Thus the theatre of the pornographic - ontologically connected with Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty' - reaches its climax in sacrifice which represents, in Bataille's cosmology of the sacred, the highest expression of sovereignty, emanating from the negativity of desire.

-Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, "Vladimir Sorokin's Post-Avant-Garde Prose and Kant's Analytic of the Sublime," Poetik der Metadiskursivität: Zum postmodern Prosa-, Film- und Dramenwerk Sorokins, ed. Dagmar Burkhart (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1999), p. 29.

There are no needs, only desires.

Is it possible that human life will finally become livable when - the great dialectic of history completing the movement begun at the dawn of civilization - the economy - realizing its total independence from human existence (absurd appendage!) - shrugs us off, and we are left to feast on the crumbs that fall to us from its the unimaginable fury of its cyclone of exchange?

The students admiring their technological learning-tools do not seem to realize that, for these tools, students are fast becoming a formality. Contrary to the usual apocalyptic fantasies, I dream of the day when the machines become advanced enough to leave us alone.

History and Pain

Anyone who endeavors to study the human sciences must be vigilant lest his standpoint regarding the material being studied (and what a contemptuous term to use when the material is the sum of all the intensities of the researcher's experience, compressed into the abstracted, momentary existence of a human being as datum, multiplied by the innumerable individuals covered by the most casual historical speculation - this 'material' far exceeds the researcher on all accounts) cause him to lose sight of the reality of historical experience. Just as bad as an unproblematic attachment to the material, to personal sympathies and the selection of one side against another is the attitude of superior detachment, bolstered by a few dismissive platitudes about the human condition and a skillful compartmentalization of professional and personal experience. Anyone committed to the human sciences must remain unreconciled with the object of study. He must also resign himself to the impossibility of assuming a proper attitude toward the pain which wells up from every fissure which thought forces in the hardened material of forgotten history.