Introducing "Aphorrhœa"

Your humble Abjectus has begun a new weblog, Aphorrhœa, which, as the title suggests, is devoted to reviving the art of aphoristic thought and writing. I hope it brings you joy.

Disclaimer: all aphorisms found on Aphorrhœa are the creations of Abjectus or his partner; any aphorisms therein bearing any similarity to any extant aphorisms (or maxims, epigrams, morals, old saws, bromides or other sorts of pithy observations) is unintentional and therefore coincidental.

Fall into the Gap

(This review also appears on amazon.com.)

The Parallax View, which the ever-prolific Slavoj Zizek has declared the "magnum opus" of his substantial oeuvre, is a generally rewarding if uneven work.

I took from it this: every posited antinomy, opposition or other binarism conceals in itself a more pluriform nature, the terms themselves irreducible to themselves (a challenge to Western thoughts principle of identity: an entity is identical to itself[?]), leaving an irreducible bare difference(the old Derridean stand-by) that remains largely unaccountable but ontologically substantial nonetheless -- a locus of "the Real." Ultimately uncognizable, this difference, which for Zizek is the Lacanian "objet petit a," opens a parallax gap wherein this difference, though uncognizable, nevertheless serves as a common referent among the actors of any ideological disagreement.

I found this a compelling thesis, and Zizek, though often given to an over-reliance on rhetorical questions, ellipses, and anacoluthon (this latter tendency perhaps inspired by St. Paul, himself an inveterate employer of anacoluthon, whom Z. frequently discusses in the early portions of TPV), is in the main persuasive. (I have to balk, however, at Z.'s frequent recourse to pop-cultural examples. Are overwrought, pandering summer blockbusters like The Matrix and The Revenge of the Sith really so fraught with important theoretical implications?) The real shortcoming of TPV, as I see it, comes in the final pages, wherein Z., having explicated his theory, waxes prescriptive, encouraging his readers to embody the "Bartleby-parallax" in order to avoid being caught up in the Hegelian pseudo-negations of counterhegemonic practices. We must be as resistant to the latter in our "preferring-not-to's" as to the hegemonic ills the latter are intended to redress -- I prefer not to eat factory-farmed, adulterated, GM food; I prefer not to purchase food from an organic farming co-op. Because not to do so and to remain, rather, in the old dialectic of resorting to alternatives to dismaying hegemony, is to remain ensnared in the Foucauldian circuits of power that result in the eternal recursion and reinscription of extant relations. The parallactic Bartleby disrupts the workings of ideological apparatuses by cultivating an inner disposition of refusal until, according to Z., there opens up possibilities that are not determined by the dialectic.

This is precisely where Z. lost me. I recall Bartleby's fate: blind, starving, homeless, jailed ... eventually dead. And, for all of Z.'s hostility to what he calls "postmodern techno-gnosticism," Bartleby seem an odd exemplar, given the fact that Herman Melville, Bartleby's creator, often mused upon the tenets of Gnosticism (He composed a poem on gnosticism, and The Confidence Man, his last published novel, arguably lends itself to a gnostic reading). Z.'s recommendation here seems too close to Baudrillard's injunction to "be silent" in the face of popular media -- essentially to choose a mode of resistance likely futile, all while consoling oneself that futility is inevitable, until from the inchoate parallax gap of the Real messianically springs, like Athena from the head of Zeus, the possibility of truly efficacious revolution.

C. at Sea

Swim.
And she will swim
Far past the dolphins who sport, spout to fluke,
Far past wave-slapped hulks,
Their sound the sound of a thousand mouths
Puckered 'round a thousand stones.

Stones.
And stones
Black with wet,
Black as sharks' eyes,
Barnacled Arguslike,
Bear her down.

Down.
Down past wrecks whose flecks of rust she will inspect,
The dream of which
No longer a wish
But an act.

Ache.
And she will ache
As we all ache;
God's tears, we,
A diluvian rain, we

Drown.

Shit Floats

Three thousand miles from here, in that human Porto-Pottie, Tucson, many thousand fledging fleshpots and thugs will begin classes at The University of Arizona. For the first time in nearly seven years, I will not be there, though I have not escaped entirely; I begin teaching at The University of Rhode Island on 6 September.

Nevertheless, my distance from the former institution (you may take my use of this word in more than one way) grants me a certain freedom of reflection no longer stifled by outlandish professional pieties, imposed from above in the UA Writing Program, which, in their simpering delusiveness, often clash with perception. We graduate students in the program's employ were, for example, encouraged to regard all of our charges as incipient geniuses who brought "different skill sets" (read: "ADHD and near-illiteracy") to the classroom, presenting us with "unique pedagogical challenges" (read: "discourtesy and fecklessness verging on sociopathy"), and that any one of these bright young things would flourish, given the proper instruction (I. e., reinforcing in their minds that critical writing is tantamount to assembling a bookcase from IKEA; in other words, that it is not an exercise in intellection, and certainly not an art; and that the university composition classroom is a place, or "space," to use the Writing Program's milksop nomenclature, in which all opinions, or "feelings," about a text are equally valid and meaningful, the instructor's being just one more opinion. The larger implication here is that the letters after the instructor's name are irrelevant. Who can grade another's feelings, after all?). These "unique pedagogical challenges" one invariably attempted to overcome by instituting embarrassing disclipinary measures in order to prevent his class from falling into utter disorder.

The upshot? I am sorry to impart this to you, mon cher lecteur, but the overwhelming majority of undergraduates at The University of Arizona are animals. Their "unique skill sets," stemming from a lifelong immersion in popular media, the repository of all things brutish and vulgar, and exacerbated by the total collapse of American public education, renders them impervious to instruction. The males are slovenly. (UA recently filmed in-house a video, shown to all incoming students, which illustrates for them "inappropriate behavior"; one such behavior is students who allow their personal hygiene to fall in arrears to a significant degree [no pun intended].) They are impassive and disaffected, and write like they speak -- typically, the textual equivalent of simian grunts and hoots. The females are whorish and as stupid in their way as the males. And, as a body, they are an impossible, treacherous, often mutinous bunch. I liken the first day of the semester to being locked in a room with twenty-five angry badgers.

The ivory tower is being deluged ... and shit floats.

!!!!

Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. Schopenhauer

My neighborhood: Sometimes there is silence, sometimes there is noise. Noise predominates. The most prevalent noise is the constant chatter, usually of voices heavily accented, which sometimes flares into yells and imprecations, fusillades attending some who-knows-the-reason histrionics. (Strangely, my street, Ives, experiences quite it share of lovers' spats; Rhodies seem to know little about restraint and even less about decorum.)

There is also a presence most terrible, most brutish, and, unfortunately, most loud -- a fat, stunted, sloping-browed miscarriage of humanity who rides endless circuits around the neighborhood on chopper reminiscent of the one belonging to the anthropomorphized cheetah who sells ersatz-cheese snacks (Here he is now! Speak of the devil and he is bound to show up.) -- a chopper so constructed as to maximize the combustive noise of the engine. The noise it produces is window-rattling, nerve-fraying and can only be described as farts of the gods. What this mongoloid's object is one can only speculate. I am of the opinion that it involves mating, and this noise-making is part of some ritual, remarkable in both its crude ostentation and apparent inefficacy and perhaps peculiar to northeastern pipe-welding illiterates, devoted to that end. I imagine he believes this infernal bike of his so compellingly announces both his potency and availability that the females of the neighborhood cannot but swoon at his approach and fling themselves into recumbency on the street to receive his seed. C. is of the opinion that, being so apparently stupid and unlettered, he can only get his own back this way, with his noisy bike, against the society which has so thoroughly thwarted his jouissance and neutered his will with its oppressive expectations of civility and the productive disposal of one's time.

In addition to this motorcycle idiot are those whom I call "the people of the stoop": squatters upon entryway steps for hours on end, carrying on with the sort of pointless, high-decibel blather only indolent welfare cheats can ken. They appear in the process of being squeezed from the neighborhood by the property-value-minded Portuguese, and are under constant surveillance by the Providence police. Truly, then, one can say that these stoopsquatters' bark is worse than their bite.

Despite these clamorous elements, however, Providence -- at least the east side, where I live -- seems an orderly city. I have found it even more retiring than Tucson; many more businesses here keep bankers' hours. Not to be outdone, my bank does not even keep bankers' hours, closing its door to commerce at 4 PM daily (noon on Saturday).

Alum & D

I would have deserted you years before
if I knew what you would do
and what our life would come to;

no one pays a premium
for what he can get discounted.
Your man now should have taught you that.

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Rage, like rust, never sleeps. What is rage but love pilloried and mocked? And who are this love's accusers but those for whom love merely bites its own coin, whose luster is its very falseness?

My rage places me beyond all hope -- but also beyond all fear. There is something quite soothing about not being able to feel as one used to. It will serve me when I stand before the grainy tide of mindless time and, unlike my recreant oppressors, who will quiver before the inevitability of their own annihilation, which could never have come too soon, will nod my assent: truly fitting, this moment where rage and rust converge in the eager maw of oblivion. Nothing to record the anguish, the constant bleed of sorrow. No traces, no stains. Just mist in summer's morning light.

Rust is the sleep that isn't; death is the sleep that is.

Geworfen

She said her fondest dream of me is of me by the pool reading Heidegger.

Me at twenty-four, rail-thin and poor, a slight pungency about me from the slop encountered at my job as a hospital janitor, squinting at the German verbiage as tight and springy as racquet strings, mouthing it soundlessly in the vain hope of finding its meaning; me in the springtime of my intellect; me before the days in which names found bodies, names joyful to speak, bodies delightful to embrace -- pregnant, however, with misery to come.

And come it did. Though not that day, that day of mind-spraining discourse, of wrathful sunshine which made the pool's water seem oily and slack, not at all inviting. No, then it was only me and my ambition, my frustration, my loneliness. . .

This is also one of my fondest dreams of me -- as much a dream to me now as it is to her.

Nihil U.

Many practitioners of prevailing critical theory -- I have in mind specifically Michel Foucault and his disciples -- have, for several decades now, besieged the sovereignty of the individual to the point of its nearly disappearing altogether. Central to their contentions is the preeminence of discourse, the fiber and sinews of the episteme, over the agentive subject. The subject believes herself to be a nodal point of ingenuity, creativity, artfulness; but really she is animated both from within and without by the power discourse is. Here, however, it becomes a bit murky; Foucault never develops a physics per se of the power discourse exerts on the subject. Rather, Foucault leaves one with the blanket assertion that power is dynamic, never originating in the subject, nor entirely outside of her, and instead suffusing the entire milieu in which the subject moves and with which she is co-extensive.

I, for instance, believe as I write this that I am cleverly crafting this recondite weblog entry, when in fact I am nothing short of some automaton, my mind and fingers quickened by the discursive episteme (or should it read, "epistemic discourses?" I am never quite sure.) of which these words and phrases -- these syntagmata -- are but rearranged and reconfigured fragments. Nothing I write here, as any graduate student in humanities will tell you, is new. If, moreover, you were to parse my words with the aid of other texts bound up in the same episteme, as disciples of Foucault do, you would quickly see that any inventiveness you might find here would quickly disappear, taking with it any notions of me as an "author" as traditionally understood. To write this entry is to write my epitaph as some force above, beyond or behind these words. There is only lifeless text.

Essentially, the thought of Foucault and others derives from Nietzsche, who has enjoyed the posthumous glory he predicted for himself. And I should add that this mode of theoretical inquiry can be quite convincing, quite seductive -- even gripping -- as far as it goes. But who can live with this knowledge of himself? Can I? Can you? If we are all essentially ciphers, and what is worse, ciphers of ourselves, then have we not reached the end of history, the Hegelian World Spirit having sublated itself into itself in some strange convergence resulting in a singularity of always already elsewhere eidetic qualities? If Foucault and his ilk are correct, then all of human art and speculative thought has been nothing more than the futility of one attempting to see the back of his head.

I write all of this because I do not see anything supplanting postmodern theory, whose greatest single accomplishment may be that it has proven, perhaps unwittingly, its virtue as a bedfellow to the corporatization of the university, which to all outward appearances has consolidated it domain over institutions across the nation. To the victors go the spoils and devil take the hindmost, the devil in this instance being humanity itself.

Hot in the Colonies

And how! Sweatstains mark my shirt and pantlegs -- moaning mouths of ghosts. It is too hot to move, to think, to write. Yet one writes. The heat of the laptop, and already-hot palms recoil.

Torrid. I told C. that I was going to fly to Arizona to cool off; at least one can find air-conditioning there. Here, in the apartment, inside is as outside, and one feels himself a character from a Conrad novel, one fanned by a coolie as he watches the water lap the shore and knows that in its bloodwarm flow, no relief.

In this swelter one feels as if he is being tried, his blubber rendered into lamp oil too adulterated by water to ignite.

Come, Autumn. Come quickly.

A sidenote: Your Abjectus has found work at The University of Rhode Island. He will be teaching literature.