The Culture Industry and "Rate-Your-Mate" Reification

I'm going to risk coming across as just another carping dullard and articulate something I have been turning over in my mind for some months now: that the Culture Industry is somehow complicit in the demise of my marriage. It's something on which I have formed no definite hypothesis, but it is something I apprehend intuitively. All typical objections aside--that marriage is a moribund, monopolistic bourgeois institution, and so on--I do believe there is a lingering attraction to the notion of marriage which defies one's self-satisfied critical sapience. I mean, how else can I explain the fact that I, who credits himself with being an informed, sensible fellow (in most respects, at least) and with having read his Foucault, went in for such a folie-á-deux as marriage? Was I delusional or deluded?

It is my sense, deluded though it may be, that, when one exchanges vows with another, he is extending a promise which exceeds those concerns related to reproduction and genitality. Specifically, I think one extends the promise of a certain financial and material stability to the other--that he and she have come together as a way of consolidating and fortifying certain material conditions, which, absent the collectivity implicit in marriage, would just be all the more uncertain, subject to the vicissitudes of fortune, and, as a result of the anxiety this situation brings, perhaps even to exploitation by others.

What I'm driving at is that marriage is, in a sense, a radically anti-consumerist gesture. When one marries with the intention of holding up his end of the bargain, he essentially suggests a sense on his part a perfect, or as nearly perfect as possible, adequation between his desire and the object of his desire. He reveals that he has entered in a relation with another in which obsolescence and disposibility, if not completely inimical to his happiness in this relation, are completely out of the question as far as he's concerned.

Thus the Culture Industry wages war on one's desire for the security only this harmonious adequation can provide through such products as Sex in the City, which I find the most execrable and pernicious of the Culture Industry's offerings, and "Rate-Your-Mate" quizzes in Cosmopolitan. Such products articulate a univocality of engineered perception in their reduction of individuals to objects by situating them in an economy of symbolic equivalence between individuals and items of consumption: buying Bruno Magli shoes will always help one get over a disappointing lover.

Perhaps I'm just trying to console myself by writing these thoughts, but I can't help believing that my ex-wife has fallen prey to this discourse, a misfortune that, if not ultimately forgivable, is certainly understandable, given how ubiquitous this discourse is. She had so thoroughly focused on what I'm not that she'd lost sight of what I am, just as one laments that her Honda Accord lacks some options offered in newer models. Again, I realize that the "blame-the-Culture-Industry" position can be reductive, and may even verge on conspiratorial paranoia. I also acknowledge how difficult it is from this position to deploy tropes to illustrate what I claim that do not themselves reify people.

Perhaps there is no discursive position anymore that allows one to retain his humanity--not even a faithful, devoted husband.

My Fear

I read her blog and am again visited by the fear that she'll come to see me as a bumpkin, a provincial as narrow in his channels as she is wide in hers. I fear she'll come to know the truth: that I was in the ebb-tide of ambition--a lovedumb husband jumping the gun into middle age, consumed with odd yearnings for khakis and boatshoes.

Viva Hermeneutics!

I've long suspected that dialectical materialism, as an incontrovertible condition of existence, is already implicit in Heideggerian phenomenology as Geworfenheit. It is the "thrown-ness" of Dasein (a term which I believe Heidegger coined to preserve some element of the cogito while avoiding the epistemological aporia plaguing Cartesian dualism) that is the sine qua non of her existence. Any understanding that Dasein can have of herself is determined by her being-in-the-world. Since being-in-the-world is therefore always already a condition of Dasein when she attempts self-scrutiny, it does not require a huge leap in logic to claim that Dasein's essence, insofar as it's discoverable, is materially determined. As an inevitable consequence, moreover, any condition of existence that is independent of, or that precedes, dialectical materialism will always remain precognitive. In other words, the gate to the kingdom of noumena is forever shut to Dasein because to gain entry would involve extracting herself from being-in-the-world (to which she is inescapably bound) and, if she were able to do so, she would cease being Dasein, qualitatively speaking.

This is not to say, however, that although Dasein cannot access the realm "behind" her material reality--because it is precognitive--she cannot cognize it at all. But, if we credit Dasein with having an imagination, then it is possible for her to cognize the noumenal realm via this imagination. Dasein can imagine what the noumenal realm might be like. This is where Baudrillard comes in handy. If Dasein can imagine (as opposed to being able to access readily) the noumenal realm, then the contents of her imagination is a simulacrum of said realm. But, instead of having as its referent the noumenal realm qua noumenal realm, it has as its referent the noumenal realm as Dasein imagines it. The simulacrum thus refers only to itself, so, strictly speaking, it is a reference without a referent. Or, better stated, it is a reference that has only itself as a referent.

I nevertheless maintain that imagination is an indispensible tool for understanding existence, especially if one should use a Hegelian approach. Central to Hegel's notion of the process of subjectivation is the subject's encounter with an Other. It is only through the subject's encounter with this Other that the subject is able to reëmerge into herself, i.e., carry back to herself, as it were, fundamental notions of her limits, her isolated and isolable being. In other words, the need for an Other is ineluctable, because it is the necessary standard of comparison by which the subject differentiates herself (both qualitatively and quantitatively) and thus gains therewith a sense of her own subjecthood: she is this, not that; therefore she must be what she takes herself to be. This is the irreducible a priori operation upon which Hegelian hermeneutics triumphs or fails, depending on how much veracity one finds in it.

The subject is moreover able to posit an Other, if no immediate material Other is sensibly present to her, through the power of imagination. That is, the subject is a phenomenal entity because she is Dasein ("There-being--"there" meaning being-in-the-world). The subject qua phenomenal entity, however, also has intimations of a realm beyond, or that precedes, the realm of phenomenon. And what is the repository of these intimations? It is none other than the subject's transcendental imagination. Consequently, the subject's imagination performs the necessary task of generating an Other, so that the subject may reëmerge into herself as a subject. For can a subject truly be a subject if she has no awareness of herself as such?

The salient feature of this process of subjectivation is the subject's imagination, the ability to erect simulacra--an indispensable feature which must be taken into account before assessing existentially what it means to be a subject. I believe Althusser was saying much the same thing when he claimed that ideology interpellates the subject as a subject. Originally born of the imagination, ideology acheives some distance from its origin because it must function as a superstructural or superegoïc Other.

The subject therefore bifurcates precognitive or precognized reality with her imagination into self and Other (or, noumenal and phenomenal) with the intention of reëmerging as a self-cognizant subject. How much does it matter, then, if that Other is real or simulated, if the results are the same? Also, is it really all that scandalous that the truths propounded in any narrative ascribe only to some metanarrative purporting to contain universal truths, and not to absolute truths themselves? Can't we perform the Leibnizian mental gymnastics of claiming that, because we can imagine absolutes, they must exist in some form or another?

To me, the Cartesian revolution in epistemology was a mere coup d'etat, an attempt to supplant Thomist-Catholic convictions with something nominally different but otherwise equally indeterminable.

Made to Love Magic (For C. M. B.)

"I was made to love magic."--Nick Drake

The world makes its own magic, and we are of the world. The magic of which I speak requires no fantastic machinery: no sprites or genies, fairies or familiars. One need rub no lamp, need cast no spell. The magic of which I speak is wholly of this world.

Though worldly, this magic must not be trifled with. It pours on one like a cataract, buoying one up as it dashes him to bits.

I have been deliciously quartered by this magic, my parts sent to the corners of its kingdom that is no kingdom without exile as a warning to those who would deny its power.

It's a fearful magic that reminds one he is a poor magus indeed.

But, more than anything, it's a healing magic, bringing care to the wounded. It turns scars to butterflies, restores grace to blood still flowing for blood spilt.

It's a magic that lilts Baudelaire during hours deep in the bowels of night.

"Beggared one lover, beggared one wife"

Beggared one lover, beggared one wife
By a lurking Lothario who obviously
Feels no compunction from increased misery.
Is not lamentable already this life,
Without adding the absence of solace from strife?
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!
Renew as Thou promised; restore her to me.
Right now I'm a whetstone that but dulls the knife,
A desperate gen'ral who wins not the battle.
Spare me from being a ghost of love past
Who naught but his chains does mournfully rattle,
Whose sad ululations but leave her aghast.
Yet thus hast Thou willed it, so must it be;
Morose Thou'st made me, though I plucked no tree.

Pensées

Do I see in my students' eyes the menacing gleam of the anthropophage?

* * *

In all of Shakespeare's comedies, death is the unacknowledged center whose gravitational pull is slowed only by the centripetal force of locutionary mirth. All of Shakespeare's most enduring comic characters are but one: a desperately playful Dasein.

* * *

The greatest single lesson learned from the collapse of Enron: arithmetic is now as subjective as morality. Thus we've achieved the pleroma of postmodernity.

Avignon

Wistful Memory tugs at my elbow, pointing me to Avignon, to the day we spent in the old walled town. I recall how we crawled the streets, famished from our wandering, in search of a place that promised fare familiar to our xenophobic palates.

We chose, of all places, an Irish pub. I drank stout. You, eau minerale, I think. We dined and talked, as walled in our English colloquy as the city was in stone. Amidst the din of smoke-laced Gallic babble, we relished the blessed evening. The long languid dusk seemed as reluctant to depart as a lingering party-goer who dreads his loverless bed.

The close tall trees screened the thronging revelers' venal pursuits from the Palais du papes' staid, majestic view. The air, once respired by minstrel, lord and serf, felt thick with history: countless Medieval lungs, working as alembics, distilled time into a numinous vapor that lured us modern creatures there.

I thought I knew your thoughts, believing them the same as mine: that after all this Provençal beauty we'd return to Tucson with even more disgust for those graceless stucco horrors blighting the desert like a pox; that we were strangely at home away from home--perfectly comfortable, perfectly unintelligible to others, and, at least for that day, perfectly us.

Prayer

Oh D---
I'd give
my blood
my skin
my mind
(oh wait
long gone
that is)
the rest
of my
days for
one more
night's play
with you

Haiku for a Hangover

Sun through paper shades,
Pushing pain into my eyes--
Shakes and ashen tongue.

Prosodic Wanking

Eros . . . agape,
Pistolero's sarape--
Such Cobainesque rhyme
Needs Tecate and lime.

Shall I write of eld Druids,
Or bodily fluids?
Observations more mordant,
With slant-rhyme discordant?

I'm no poet, you see,
(Many much better than me),
But I live and I suffer.
Perhaps that's enough . . . (er?).

My prosodic wanking
Merits a spanking.
"Quit rhymes feminine;
Watch Benny Hinn!"

The comb-over 'vangelist
From outside Los Angeles?
With accent unplaceable
And assets untraceable?

"Salvation, you see,
Must be purchased, not free;
Certain words in the Bible
May be guilty of libel.

"'Cause the A. C. L. U.,
Folks of faith'll tell you,
Is but a Communist plan
To replace God with Man.

"Plus, must needs a prophet
Remain not-for-profit?"--
Ah, look at this breach
(What the French call rime riche).

Not strictly rime riche,
But as close as the beach
Is to the sea--
Homonyms, you see?

Shit! I did it again!
Time to lay down my pen
Before Poesy
Laments, "Woe is me!"

An English TA's Haiku

One hour past twilight;
Somnolent birds ceased singing--
Time to grade essays.

Sigh-ku

Spring breeze tickles chimes,
And bows grasses to the sun--
All renews, save me.

"Would we were two doves in spring"

Would we were two doves in spring,
Perched on a pow'r line, connubially cooing
With the early morn sun t'illumine our wooing
Of amorous pecks 'neath amorous wing,
But we are what we are ('tis this that I'm rueing):
One changeling heart, one broken--your doing!
Such organs joy and sorrow bring;
They house awhile, then purge one's love
('Tis certain Hell when thrown from Heaven).
Love me, then him, but ne'er Him above,
From Whom came wills both noble and craven,
From Whom came arms to embrace or shove.
Here near the Lethe I now dolefully sing--
Oblivion's river, remove mem'ry's sting!