Sublime Infrastructure

My friend Jim recently posted some thoughts on Infinite Jest.  My entry here is largely a response to that post.  I decided that this might be too long for a comment and that the Black Lodge could benefit from a new post of its own.

In his post, Jim points to a few examples of "postmodern" authors paying particular attention to infrastructure in their novels, noting that "these works are dealing carefully with environments in which space and infrastructure are undergoing radical change. These works seem to want to dig deeper into those changes while also acknowledging that you're never going to get to the bottom."  I wanted to suggest the possibility that we approach this attention to infrastructure through a notion of the sublime.

In Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson suggests that the “postmodern sublime” must be understood with reference to “the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself…that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (38).  For Jameson, the postmodern fascination with technology - particularly the sort of computer and digital technologies that involve a nearly incomprehensible (for most of us) infrastructure - ultimately points toward the global network of late capitalism itself, a network both aw(e)ful and terrifying.  Jameson's sublime has a particular Marxist bent in its focus on "economic and social institutions" that have achieved a new level of complexity and ubiquity in postmodernism.  Regardless of whether you follow Jameson in locating the sublime in a material network (as opposed to, for example, seeing the sublime as a function of language), he opens the possibility of linking the sublime to postmodern technology, which itself involves a certain attention to infrastructure.

To return to Jim's claim about infrastructure in certain "postmodern" novels, we could say that the "desire to dig deeper" balanced against the sense "that you're never going to get to the bottom" suggests a sort of sublime.  Infrastructure here suggests, on the one hand, possibility, freedom, and pleasure (the "desire to dig deeper" corresponds to the freedom to explore as well as to escape and to hide, the sense of space implied by a complicated network).  But this freedom can be terrifying; if there's no bottom, there's nothing on which to anchor yourself except provisionally.  Also, while you may never get to the bottom, there's often a corresponding paranoia that someone sees the system whole, that someone or something stands outside of the infrastructure, in whose service it functions.

Along these lines, to point to some of Jim's examples, in Didion's Play It As It Lays, the rush that Maria gets from driving California highways gets balanced against the terror she feels whenever she thinks about pipes after having an abortion.  The sort of freedom from subjectivity that Tyrone Slothrop experiences in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow by adopting a number of personas as he explores the underground networks of WWII Europe gets balanced against his disappearance as a subject in the novel.  In The Crying of Lot 49, the Trystero could either be the promise of a vast network of the dispossessed linked by the desire to reach out and touch someone or an elaborate hoax pointing to nothing more than the bizarre mental network of Oedipa's former lover.

One limitation of this understanding - suggesting infrastructure as a sort of sublime trope - is that it often leads to a sort of critical impasse:  the ambivalent tendencies embodied in the sublime allow us to contemplate simultaneously the tremendous possibilities of these different incarnations of infrastructure and their terrifying implications, but this leaves no clear path for moving beyond aesthetic contemplation into some form of praxis.  While I wouldn't suggest that these novelists have a political agenda, I do find it interesting to try to chart exactly what these instances of infrastructure perform in these texts.  In other words, while I think that examples of infrastructure in part lend themselves to sublime readings, different texts seem to be shaping our attitudes toward these sublime possibilities in various ways.  In this sense, I tend to think not that the goal of these novelists is to invoke the sublime for aesthetic reasons but rather to represent it as a particular aspect of postmodern experience.

Interview Project

Interview Project (directed by Austin Lynch and Jason S.) began airing this week.  The extent of David Lynch's involvement in this project seems unclear - the site appears under his name and he introduces the interviews and the project generally, but he was not involved in the filming.  Nonetheless, this project overlaps with his films in many ways, primarily in its exploration of the weird, violent, and absurd (and yet sweet, human, and nostalgic) aspects of small-town (dare we say "real"?) America.  In a strange sort of way, Interview Project seems to implicitly make the case that Lynch's other projects have been much more realistic than might have been suspected.  Take the second episode (released today):  as Tommie Holliday describes how he is waiting for his girlfriend to get out of jail in sixteen months after serving time for murdering her ex-boyfriend with a machine gun after he stalked her across the Arizona countryside and finally, when meeting her face to face, came at her with an axe, it is easy to think of Big Ed Hurley shooting out Nadine's eye on their honeymoon or Sailor and Lula's adventures through the South.  

As with Lynch's movies (and perhaps more profoundly in this context given its real-world situation), one of the main achievements here seems to be the laying bare of "real" America for what it is - not that there is a dark underside to the traditional veneer, but that our national identities have always been much more complicated and implicated in violence, perversity, and absurdity.  David Foster Wallace made this point in his definition of Lynchian as a term that "refers to a particular type of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter."  The point isn't to demonstrate the macabre hidden under the mundane but rather to expose their interpenetration and interaction.

At this point, it seems reasonable to ask why David Lynch would go this route and what ultimately we should make of it.  What does Interview Project achieve that the films do not (and vice versa)?  In many ways, Inland Empire suggests a sort of limit of what Lynch could achieve in film.  I don't mean to suggest that he's not capable of doing more with film, but it is hard to imagine him carrying his recent themes - specifically the splintering of identity through various levels and sorts of fantasy - further than in his most recent film.  In Inland Empire, it seems much less plausible to recreate the sort of narratives that can nearly be found in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; which version of Laura Dern really exists?  How many versions are there?  Is she not merely someone else's fantasy?  If Lynch has indeed reached an extreme here - if it would be difficult to show any more poignantly the utter chaos and terror that comes out of our attempts to make sense of desire - what does it say that the next step in the progression is a turn to reality?

Perhaps it is not fair to suggest a sort of progression here.  In some ways, the people we see populating Interview Project seem as if they would be more at home in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks than in Lynch's more recent works.  And yet there is a sort of narcissism pervading the more recent efforts; Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire focus so intently on the fantasy worlds of single characters that their stories suggest a sort of gradual looking inward, seemingly to the point of insanity or death.  In earlier Lynch films, the exploration of a character's desire tended to lead them outward to a community that mirrored this desire or participated in it.  

If we accept this description of Lynch's earlier and later films, where would we locate Interview Project?  We see the interviewees in isolation, but we get a sense for the sort of communities in which they participate.  We get this sense first through their stories, through their thoughts on the people that have shaped and continue to shape their lives.  There is another sort of community at play here as well, an American community consisting not necessarily of a set of shared values but rather shaped by similar forces, American forces.  Perhaps this is not a fair claim (I certainly don't have the expertise to make it), but there does seem to be (Lynch implicitly seems to suggest as much) a particularly American form of the grotesque (which Flannery O'Connor sees as combining elements of violence and comedy) that links the interviewees.  It is simply difficult to imagine that a road trip through any other country would yield these results.  But this is a different question than I want to pursue here.

At this point, it still seems interesting to me to decide what sort of step Interview Project represents in Lynch's work.  I'll suggest a few possibilities, some of which might already have been hinted at.  1) We can think of Interview Project as an attempt to justify and/or validate Lynch's films and some of his most memorable characters.  In other words, Interview Project proves that Lynch isn't simply making this stuff up out of nowhere - these people exist.  2) We can think of Interview Project as an extension of his more recent films.  Having reached the limit of what he could do to represent the fracturing possibilities of desire in film, Lynch now offers a sort of fractured view of American desire writ large, the multiple personalities played by people across the continent.  3) We can think of Interview Project as a return to Lynch's earlier works where the focus was not on characters descending into narcissistic madness but rather looking outward and finding strange sorts of community bound by desire.  Surely other possibilities will present themselves as the series continues.  

On a personal level (and this sentiment seems to be shared by other viewers), it is difficult not to watch these interviews and feel a certain sweetness.  It's possible that this sweetness is purchased all too easily, in the form of some nostalgia that Lynch often hints at but rarely indulges, the nostalgia invoked by telling the stories of small-town Americans, no matter what their stories may be.  And yet there seems to be something good about telling the story of "real" America and having it sound so beautiful and strange.

Outliers

It has been a while since I've posted here, and it is an interesting coincidence that brought me here tonight.  My friend Jim was discussing Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's book explaining how individual success is a product of many factors that have little to do with the individual.  Later in the evening, I found David Brook's column discussing Outliers and another interest of Jim's:  attention.  Jim has been thinking about attention with reference to the impact of speed on rhetoric.  We live in a fast culture; rhetoric historically has privileged deliberation.  As rhetoricians (which Jim and I are), how do we respond?  In the classes we teach, we often encourage students to try to slow down, to notice, to reflect.  But can this approach be applied to our culture generally?  Is there a way to slow down the world around us?  Or do we need to find a way to speed up our own rhetoric?

In his column this evening, Brooks responds to Gladwell by (ree)valu(at)ing individual accomplishment and ability:

Most successful people begin with two beliefs:  the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.  They were often showered by good fortune, but relied in crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

Brooks has been examining the limits of the individual for some time now.  At times he has used his column as an opportunity to reflect upon research and theories from recent years that suggest the importance of our material and social environments in shaping our ways of thinking, our beliefs, our identities/identifications.  When I opened his column this evening, I expected him to celebrate Gladwell's book as another example in this line of thought.  On second thought, Brooks's celebration of the individual fits comfortably alongside his conservatism.  The main aspect of this celebration focused on attention:

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention...Control of attention is the ultimate individual power.  People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.  They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons.  This individual power leads to others.  It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses.

I take note of this for two reasons:  it has interesting implications for Jim's thoughts on attention, speed and rhetoric; also, it helps me think through my own reasons for starting this blog.  One of my main challenges as a grad student has been maintaining focus and attention.  I struggle to "choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons."  Blogging seemed like a way to do this, a way to focus on a series of thoughts and develop them over time.  Unfortunately, I have found so far that this condition of non-attentiveness has informed my blogging habits rather than fading away in the face of such habits.

Regarding the implications of Brooks's argument for the rhetoric of attention, a few possibilities suggest themselves.  If the most successful among us have the ability to slow down and sift through the bombardment of information we experience daily, then rhetorical power (in the deliberative and reflective sense of the term) offers a particular sort of cultural currency.  It seems possible that Brooks has not accounted for the extent of Gladwell's argument.  Although I cannot vouch for this from my own reading experience, part of Gladwell's point seems to be that environmental factors play a large role in who will be able to control their own economy of attention.  Attention is not simply what the individual brings to the table to negotiate with a number of environmental determiners; attention itself can be influenced by such context.  This line of thought suggests that the question of attention helps define the limits of the individual, the line between necessity and choice.  This suggests an ethics of attention as well.  David Foster Wallace has described the pedagogical implications of attention, and perhaps for now the last word should be his.

Holiday Surprise

I made it to New York this weekend for the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise tour. This was something of a watershed moment (as I'm sure it was for many in the audience). I lived in Athens for a year around 2001-02 and have found it easy to continue idealizing this place as the home of the greatest music community on earth. This bit of history was resurrected alongside my first few years of graduate school, brought back to memory by my good friend Anthony (who was both at the show and at grad school with me in Austin). I once had a vision of Anthony's head exploding while he was giving a presentation in our pedagogy class. The vision wasn't so much violent as peaceful (or perhaps some combination of the two - think Joe Christmas in Light In August).  Somehow Anthony's exploding head crystalized a vision of community that I was in need of at the time.

When I was in Athens, the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel were already on indefinite hiatus, of Montreal hadn't started recording on laptops yet, and the Elves were still plugging away under most radars. So it was something of a quiet time in terms of mainstream excitement about the Elephant 6. Jeff Mangum wasn't releasing new music, but you could see him on the streets or catch him playing drums at a Circulatory System show. Andrew Reiger was at about every show and house party in town, and Michael Stipe kept showing up about five minutes after I left any place downtown.

It strikes me as strange that Anthony's exploding head and the Elephant 6 stand in my mind as images of community.  Both of these associations signal solitary experiences for me, images of community seen from a distance.  My mother is a fish, if you know what I mean.  Nonetheless, these were the things structuring my experience this past Saturday.  

Perhaps what has struck me most over the years listening to these bands from Athens is the depth of talent.  Everyone plays with everyone else, and everyone writes their own stuff.  But the bands you aren't as likely to hear are often just as good as the ones you are.  I knew Elf Power and the Olivia Tremor Control would rock in New York, but I was amazed at how well the other projects stood alongside them.  There was no weak link in the Holiday Surprise.  When you throw in a seven-foot tall metronome, a singing TV, and a singing saw, you are pretty much guaranteed of the sublime.

There is no particular making sense of this evening.  It can only be another in a long line of exploding heads.  The whole point of the collective seems to be a continual disruption of time and space - the pop aesthetic always gets balanced against the collage, the noise.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea takes us as far as we can go in the direction of cohesion and then shows it crumbling before us.  Don't hate them when they get up to leave.  So this is how the show has left me:  ruptured, floating in time (many directions at once).  To listen is to constantly be falling apart, and to witness this in person is to ride the ferris wheel on fire.  This is what videos will not remember and why the question of a NMH reunion was beside the point.

Songs played: Major Organ - His Mister's Pet Whistles, Life Forms; Elf Power - An Old Familiar Scene, Spiral Stairs, The Arrow Flies Close, The Spider and the Fly; 63 Crayons - one song; Nana Grizol - 3 songs; Gerbils - about 4 songs; Pipes You See, Pipes You Don't - Karaoke Free, new song; Circulatory System - Yesterday's World; Olivia Tremor Control - Opera House, I Have Been Floated, Sunshine Fix, Love Athena, No Growing, NYC-25 (last two w/ Bill Doss and Julian on the saw); Music Tapes - The Television Tells Us, Schedrevka, Majesty, Manifest Destiny; Neutral Milk Hotel - the Fool

Closer all the time...

What I've Been Listening To...

Parenthetical Girls

It's Not You It's Me

Pattern Is Movement

No Age

The Music Tapes

Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies

My pedagogy class is reading Shari Stenberg's "Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies:  Renewing the Dialogue" this week.  This article offers a nice articulation of a question I've been thinking through recently with reference to my prospectus.  In my project, I am studying what John McClure refers to as the "resacralization" of culture in the postmodern through the lens of Kenneth Burke's thoughts on the quasi-religious turn toward the poetic as a cultural response to the scientific and secular aspects of modernity.  I have been wondering what sort of implications this turn toward the poetic (which, for Burke, emphasizes not only language but cooperation and identification) has in the classroom.  What Stenberg labels "critical pedagogy discourse" tends to emphasize the modernist perspective of "the critical teacher as transformative intellectual" and its focus on rational, critical argument (276).  In other words, in the writing/literature classroom, we tend to focus our efforts on teaching students critical thinking skills, skills which allow students to understand how thoughts and values are culturally situated.  These skills encourage an attitude of detachment, a sort of perpetual deconstruction of the world.

Stenberg responds to this situation by noting the similarities between critical pedagogies and liberation theology.  Each emphasizes social criticism, but the pedagogy that arises from liberation theology also encourages community and solidarity.  In other words, the two pedagogies equally impress upon students the importance of a critical stance toward the world, but the critical model tends to leave the student isolated while the liberatory model promotes community.

I find a similar divergence in my own research between the projects of Kenneth Burke and Fredric Jameson.  Both Burke and Jameson describe (post)modernity as an increasingly secular and secularizing cultural phenomenon that isolates, fragments, and atomizes individuals.  In Postmodernism and elsewhere, Jameson outlines cognitive mapping, a pedagogical response to the condition of postmodernity that emphasizes the individual's ability to establish an incomplete representation of her place in a larger (unrepresentable) cultural field.  This method, however, seems to privilege the sort of critical cognitive thought that led to the conditions of postmodernity in the first place.  Burke's response to these conditions emphasizes the cooperative and communal aspects of communication; his conception of language emphasizes the spiritual and humanistic in addition to (and even beyond) the scientific and the rationalistic.  Jameson, on the other hand, sees all gestures toward the spiritual in the postmodern as nostalgic.

From all of this, I am suggesting a parallel between critical pedagogy and Jameson's cognitive mapping as well as between liberatory pedagogy and Burke's notion of rhetoric (communication and/as cooperation).  The main gap in the second comparison comes from Stenberg's focus on the religious.  Stenberg consistently focuses on the Christian tradition as representative of our students' background.  While this might be true of the United States generally, this focus on the religious (and particularly the Christian) does not seem to do full justice to Stenberg's main argument - that we need to be respectful of our students' cultural origins and the value of these cultural perspectives as possible springboards for critical awareness.  For Stenberg, Christianity can provide the path to "conscientization," and it need not merely be thought of as an obstacle on this path.  But it does not follow that religion should be a privileged term in our pedagogy.  Stenberg's point about the possibility of showing a greater respect for our students' (particularly religious) backgrounds certainly applies to the critical pedagogies she discusses.  Nonetheless, Burke's shift from the "religious" to the "poetic" seems to make Stenberg's argument will widening her perspective.

Hopefully this argument will get fleshed out in my project.  In the meantime, I'll leave it as a question:  how can we responsibly address the limitations of a critical pedagogy?  Is there a place for the religious in the classroom?  Does critical pedagogy discourse reinforce the atomizing tendencies of the culture it presumes to critique?