tara's tierra

Seeing the Soul

I am on a bit of a W.E.B. DuBois kick here, in case you haven't noticed, but his writing has a poetic quality that captivates my literary sensibilities and a socio-political radicalness that inspires my will to change the world, or at least try to stir up some kind of authentic dialogue. In my previous post I was talking about The Souls of Black Folk, but tonight I am reflecting on a specific passage from "The Souls of White Folk," a shorter essay that DuBois wrote in 1920 as part of a longer text, Darkwater. He begins:

   

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none that there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.
    Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of the thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, of mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious! (55).

Educated at Harvard and then at the University of Pennsylvania, DuBois was an infiltrator of sorts: a black man among white men, an outsider, and yet intimately knowledgeable of the white soul, as accessed through his proximity to them as well as his education within a European epistemological tradition. I just think he hits the nail on the head when he talks about the discomfort that he causes by "knowing their thoughts." It is not simply that he knows their thoughts, but moreover, that they know he knows.

Only part of the reason that I esteem some of the best work done in Ethnic Studies and in other departments to a lesser extent around critical race, gender, and sexuality is that a large part of the task at hand in some way involves living in a state of double-consciousness not exactly akin to DuBois's articulation of it, but, somewhat similar. The scholars that I read of late not only know their Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud, but are equally conversant in Anzaldua, Fanon, DuBois, and Cesaire. I am not sitting here to pat myself or anyone else involved in this kind of work on the back, but rather to point out the tacking back and forth between "consciousnesses" and "epistemes" that subjects much more marginalized than myself had to do in order to even be seen as humans with souls. That geneaology is a remarkable one, that I have only begun to explore.

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And, on a personal level, lest I lose myself in the tower, if you step inside someone else's soul, to the extent that you know that they know that you know that they know, well, you see what I mean, one of the most difficult activities you will undertake is trying to step out. In fact, I don't know if it can actually be done.

Subjectivity, Double-Consciousness, and the Apathy of Privilege

W.E.B. DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) introduces two central ideas to his thinking: (1) the veil and (2) double consciousness. During discussion sections with students as well as in the larger lecture today (I am a TA in Ethnic Studies this term), we began talking about both the particularities and the generalities that one can take from his argument. In the context of DuBois, he is talking about the color-line, a line he defines not as a black/white line, but rather one between whites and all darker races.  He describes himself as living behind a veil, a veil that prevents others (whites) from seeing him as anything beyond the color of his skin. In this extreme case, DuBois is getting at the fact that to white folks of the period, black folks plain did not have souls, or, I might say, subjectivity. The color of their skin reduces them to a categorization that obscures particularity.  A black man is a black man is a black man. Hey, and what about the women?

Moving on to double-consciousness, DuBois talks about the predicament that characterizes him and so many others. Behind the "veil" DuBois has a soul and a consciousness that is, to the extent that it can be, his own. However, within the racially oppressive climate of early twentieth-century America, this consciousness is "doubled" by the awareness of the way that others see him, from beyond that veil. Because he is constantly aware of others' inability to see him as a human, with a soul -- as a subject -- this externally imposed gaze of inferiority creeps into his consciousness, creating a double-consciousness.

An exploration of the conditions of subjectivity in the Americas has long been the center of my research, even when I did not know it myself. In my work, I am to a great extent exploring an analogue of DuBois's veil, a more modern-day permutation of it, perhaps, that continues to apply to the question of race, but moreover to gender, sexuality and the complex articulations between the three. In Bolivia, I am looking at both racial issues around criollo, mestizo, and indigenous identity as manifested in language but just as importantly around the gender and sexuality questions that are implicitly entangled with race and hierarchical notions of subjectivity. As decolonial thinking continues to evolve, gender and sexuality have moved to the center of neoliberal critiques instead of serving as "and oh yeah, we should also consider. . ." to conversations on race. The ways that we think of creating alliances must breakdown too-narrow constructions of what it is to be an "oppressed subject" and open itself up to the complicated subtleties of being a particular subject in a generalized world.

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I also want to talk about white subjectivity itself, acknowledging that I am white, blonde, and from a relatively affluent community. Outside of the much more important global problems of race, gender, and sexuality, I observe a general apathy in some white, male and female subjects who have never questioned what it is to have a double-consciousness. From an extremely young age, I felt quite frightened by my peers because they often showed a lack of human compassion toward others, and did not strike me as people that did very much self-reflection. It is almost as if they knew from the start, from their parents or maybe from teachers, that their consciousness was the only consciousness. There was no questioning of whether they were wrong or right or if they were affecting other people when they spoke as if their subjective opinion was truth. I often envy such people, for the first stage of double-consciousness is of course, pathology. But then I think of what life would be like that, and I am thankful for my neuroses, insecurities, and sensitivity to others around me. I am happy to occasionally be melancholic because it's better than laughing all the way home to an already pinned-down self.

Those types of people that never could possibly conceive of a veil sadden me to the core. They don't question who they are in relation to others. They don't question why they know what they know and what the limitations of that way of knowing are. They don't look in the mirror and wonder, if in fact, they exist. They simply know and presuppose that they are right. I am sure they go to sleep with out much dread and they probably never feel they have lost sight of themselves, since they have never conceived of another way of being in the world or let others in to their souls. It is not that they are soulless, it is simply that they are contained subjects, closed to figuring out who they are inter-subjectively.

I am still searching for my "self" and its relation to others. I am still figuring out double-consciousness and my many veils, as well as yours. I am really thankful for that.

Dare to Know!

Or so says Kant. After a satisfying am conversation on the history of the Humanities and a foray into the meaning and relevance of the term epistemology I have architectural blueprints and disciplinary structures on the brain. Why is the university spatially organized the way that is and moreover, how does it confine the way we know? Apropos of my thoughts, I wander into a reading room on the 2nd floor of Doe that I used to frequent but have not dwelled in for some time. I am sitting down, working on a dissertation chapter, thinking of disciplines, bodies, and transgression. And then I turn my head to the left and realize, oh my, there are doors opening into spaces in the library that I have never seen before. Not metaphoric doors, my friend, but real concrete, lit up doors. One is in front of me. One is to the left. Light shines in from both. I cannot stay seated any longer. I must explore! I must dare to know what is going on in these enlightened spaces. I did not realize that Bancroft was now attached to the main library! How obvious, how clear, how much more sensical. There are a few beautiful hallways, hallowed hallways in fact, with art and images and an arcade feel. Maybe now that it is connected, more students will feel safe venturing into Bancroft. While this may upset my medievalist friends, it might just be good for broadening the access to knowledge. May César Vallejo's brazos plenarios (plenary arms, Trilce XXXV) beckon us into the new doors, spaces, and vertices of connection.

Dare to explore! Dare to walk into new space!

The Transcendence of Words

I just had an invigorating, living word conversation with one of my favorite Berkeley interlocutors about Emmanuel Levinas's "The Transcendence of Words." The selection was first published in Les Temps Modernes, 44 (1940) and is a response by Levinas to Michel Leiris's work on surrealism, specifically, ideas espoused by Leiris in Biffures (1948). According to the Introduction to the text, "Biffures is in itself a reference to this linguistic construction and deferral: a bifur is a bifurcation, and a biffure an erasure" (page 144 of The Levinas Reader). 

Levinas prefers the idea of bifurcation as starting point(s) as opposed to the notion of a single origin because his entire philosophical view on being is based around the concept of the living, breathing word as privileged over words that are "frozen" or transformed into vestigial documents that represent, in my reading, the self-sufficiency of the one instead of the dialogic relationship between the one and the Other (Autre). For Levinas, "The subject who speaks does not situate the world in relation to himself, nor situate himself purely and simply at the heart of his own spectacle, like an artist. Instead he is situated in relation to the Other (Autre). This privilege of the Other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in-itself (en soi) nor being for-itself (pour soi), but being for the other (pour l'autre); in other words that human existence is a creature" (149). 

This idea -- just think about this for a moment -- is exhilirating! We marveled at the word -- creature. You may not, but we think it's so furry! Existence is a creature.  Being, unlike in Heidegger's notion of dasein, which implies the realization of an authentic self in a totalizing trajectory, is for Levinas a very living, at play, always contested, dialogue between self and Other, between Being and Otherwise than. There is a lot of slippage in Levinas's writing, however, between Other and other, leaving me to wonder how to navigate Levinas in the world of the concrete, lived experience between self and other, whereby other is not a God or an Otherwise, but simply another living, breathing and most importantly, saying person. For Levinas, it is not the thought content of the said that means, but rather, the hearing and listening of and to the word. The utterance, the idea of saying, is the gesture toward the other: "By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays" (149). 

If we do not talk to each other, if we do not do more saying instead of focusing on what the relevance of the said is, we do not learn of selfother but constantly fixate on the realization of the self through the other. Being is not self-sufficient; it is vulnerability, nakedness, and fear before the O/other and saying out loud despite of that fear. 

We are in and of each other we shall remain (I knew this quote in undergrad and had zero idea what it meant), and if that is not apparent, then there is no more saying to be done. 

The Infinity of Dialogue, Emmanuel Levinas

I've had a long relationship with Emmanuel Levinas. In fact, I think it began more or less around the same time as I met you. Maybe that's why I like reading him so much. I have struggled with Levinas, through and through. And in fact, I have only recently begun to maybe -- and that is so fragile -- maybe understand an iota of what his philosophy is about. He believes in the radical alerity of the other in the sense that we cannot know the other fully nor ever necessarily find our self (selfish bitches or bastards that we are) in him or her. However, what we can do, and in fact what it is our ethical responsibility to do, is dialogue with the other in language.

For some reason, when I started reading Levinas, maybe because I started with the incredibly difficult Otherwise than Being, I believed that Levinas was somehow in conflict with language, that somehow I had to go beyond language to come face to face with him, so to speak. However, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas seems to indicate that the only way that I can approach the other is through language. He draws a contrast between totalitarian thinking, which for him accepts vision rather than language as its model, aimed at gaining an "all-inclusive, panoramic view of all things" and infinite thinking, or language, where there is always "room for the diversity of dialogue" (Totality and Infinity, Introduction by John Wild, pp. 12-17).

If I believe in the infinite possibility of dialogue, that creates perforations rather than closes holes, then maybe I can imagine a day like today, gray and miserable, where all I do is lie and talk with my other without ever losing the integrity of myself.

Lacan's 11th Seminar: On the Betrayal of the Real

 I have always had a soft-spot for psychoanalysis so when a friend suggested that we read some of Lacan's 11th seminar, I was game. For anyone who has not read Lacan before, I strongly suggest getting An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis by Dylan Evans because Lacan's terminology evolves over time and so when he is talking about the "real" in say 1952, he may not be conceiving of it as he does, in say, 1956. And given that the "real," at least to my knowledge, is beyond the symbolic -- this is to say, beyond language or representation -- no matter which year we are talking about or what articulation of it we come up with, the "real" plain cannot be explained in words. So, I will defy gravity and try to talk about the unspeakable. In fact, it seems that even for Lacan the real can only be articulated as different from the symbolic and the imaginary and yet simultaneously a plane on which no difference exists. I try to think of the sky. The real is like this space of the "sky" where blue just is blue, where sky just is sky, where Being just bes and there is no difference between blue and red or blue and green or sky and land. There is just blue sky being blue sky (except for it is not even named that, it is not in language because language is unnecessary if there is no difference). The other way I tried to conceive of the approximation to the "real" was through thinking of an orgasm. As my friend said, "you know it happened, you know you experienced it, you know that it was something, but you cannot explain it in words." However, if I think about this orgasmic real, then I get into another tangle of questions, like what is the difference between the "real" and "transcendence", for instance. And can you encounter the "real" with someone else? And if you did, then they would be you and you would be them in the moment of encounter, since there would be no notion of Other. . .and both of you would be all the thems of thems.

The other problem we face with relation to the "real" is that I cannot figure out exactly how to think about the "real" in relation to the unconscious, or to the "pre-conscious," another term that Lacan uses. And then, if I start bouncing around to other philosophers, what is it that  Walter Benjamin's aura has to do with the "real" or Heidegger's dasein? And are these, frankly, questions even worth forming?  Moreover, is the "real," although an impossibility, a positive impossibility to even consider? 

I have had some moments in life that I could liken to being in the realm of the "real" in their multi-dimensional sense of "wholeness," for lack of a better word.  But as soon as they pass, they seem to laugh at me, betraying my belief that something authentic just happened, betraying my trust in gazes and eyes alike, betraying the idea that there even is a "real" behind the iron curtain of language. The "real," as Lacan says, is an impossibility. I guess it is all my fault for trying to touch it.

Enigmatic

The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as it was given to us – unintelligible – and if possible a little more unintelligible. A little more enigmatic. --Jean Baudrillard

It really all goes back to highschool. It goes back to the many nights I spent on the ceiling at parties looking down thinking about the layers of false, empty communication that were going on both physically and verbally. It goes back to saying things that were always misunderstood because they questioned the way we said what we said and the why behind the point of communication. It did not make me many friends then and continues to baffle me -- the tacit acceptance of the surface, the known, the stable, the easy, the predictable. How many nights have I sat up thinking how much easier it would be to join the electric light parade! I would be in abundance -- in the abundance of easy conversation and knowing smiles. I would be swaddled in the warm glow of the thousands of lights shining from the horizon of "meaning" and "beauty." I would be in the abundance of brunches and how's the family and isn't that nice and do you know so and so and what a nice jacket and isn't this lovely and let's go to the movies and buy some Coke.

Baudrillard's cynical suggestion that Disneyland's only function was to conceal the fact that the entire county was a huge theme park is right on. It's a land of cotton candy wishes and ferris wheel meaning, where up is down and down is up, but the reversal does not even matter. If we are to fix it, as critics, then we need to be more enigmatic. We need to get to the unintelligible. We need to do more ciphering.

And still, up on the ceiling, looking down, I wish I could join the healthy parade marching outside my window.

The Crux of the Matter

One of the tasks of the literature graduate student, in my opinion, is to think about literature as its own philosophy and philosophy as its own literature. The problem I frequently encounter is just how much to "delve" into a given philosopher in order to make rich connections between a poem and ethics, or a novel and ontology. I cannot help myself from purusing new philosophers, even when I think I have alredy bitten off more than I can chew. Over the course of the last year or so, Slavoj Zizek's name has been fluttering around in my cage, but I have never actually sat down with one of his texts. Yesterday I finally bought one of his books, For They Know Not What They Do and spent some of my late AM with it. Here is a paragraph of note, from, given that I just bought it, the foreword to the second edition. An excellent reader of Lacan, here Zizek is providing a literary example that demonstrates his point, that the basic interpretive operation of psychoanlysis is not necessarily to go "deeper" than the superficial interpretation, but rather, to be attentive to enigmatic first impressions. This observation is applied to reading, where a "first" reading is sometimes countered with a "second" reading, meant to lessen the blow of the "first." Why don't we pay more attention to the experience of the first reading?

The first impression of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land -- the fragments from common daily occurrences, mixed with the impenetrable texture of references to an inconsistent multitude of artistic and religious phenomena -- is the poem's "message." The direct short circuit between the fragments of "alienated" contemporary daily life and the confusing multitude of metaphyiscal references is in itself, for Eliot, the best diagnosis of where we stand today: lacking a firm religious-metaphysical foundation, our daily lives are reduced to fragments of empty and vulgar social rituals. If we go beyond this threshold and endeavor to discern a consistent spiritual edifice beneath the confusing multitude of references (is Eliot a Buddhist? does he propagate a pagan myth of ressurection?), we are already missing the crucial point [foreword, xv].

How many times do we, in a search for the "meaning" behind the text miss the "crucial point"? the fact that not everything always means? the fact that the experience of the reading itself is laden with meaning, outside of language?

My way of understanding philosphy and literature is connecting it to experience.

I know that the "crucial point" is there. I know that the "meaning" is not always apparent, nor the reason that the narrative has both been ruptured, bent, turned around, and convuleted. Life, to me, is about the moments that are the crucial points, those first reads, those non-rational tingles, those deep sensory experiences that are not analyzable to anyone, let alone myself. The crucial point is what I believe in, not the neat narrative or the annotated notes that explain the choices. The moment I chose is indescribable, unexplainable. It is with me nowhere and everywhere at once. It is invisible, but I cannot stop staring at it.

Thus spoke. . .

"I for a long time 'did' the history of philosophy," Deleuze once explained. "It was Nietzsche, whom I had read late, who pulled me out of all this....He gives you a perverse inclination (which neither Marx nor Freud has ever given anyone. . .): the inclination to say simple things in your own proper name, to speak through affects, intensities, experiences, experiments. To say something in one's own name is very curious: for it is not at all when one takes one's self as an 'I,' a person or a subject, that one speaks in one's name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a real proper name only through the most severe exercise in depersonalization, when he opens himself to the multiplicities that traverse him from head to toe, to the intensities that flow through him" (James Miller, 194-5, citing Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy).

For Deleuze, the self seems to be in contstant flux, and therefore, the proper name really a sum total of the myriad kaleidescopic "I"s that exist inside the proper name. In this sense, after gathering up the Is, one puts oneself outside of oneself to write as the Proper Name. I have yet to write as Tara Daly and I (see!) fear I (inescapable!) never will.

Spectacle

I am thinking about Guy Debord's #30 from The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books 1995; originally published in French in 1967):   

"The spectator's alientation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant       spectacle system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere."    

It is difficult work, reminding oneself to see the spectacle on a daily basis instead of tacitly participating in it. And somedays I think that I won't have the energy when all around me there are glass windows where I turn to see myself because I am narcissistic (so the spectacle continues), but instead see myself and a thousand sweaters and a thousand shoes and a thousand    spectacle     books and a thousand hair barrettes. There is glass window for every single one of my pseudo-needs, like hot chocolate and organic blush. And some days it seems like the difference between just representing my role with certain things that would indicate that I were actually authentically that person and actually living the life that that person lives, is not as significant as I used to think it was. But then I realize, that since most of the world does not even know the difference, it would not even cross their mind to even think that way, to even question who I was. But I will, and that's what alienates me from my      spectacle very self; makes me wonder if I am actually touching my face in that glass or if someone else is making me.  Ruben Darío's "El Rubí" captures it all. Somedays         spectacle when I don't wear my glasses or put in my contact lenses, it's just so I don't have to wonder if you're questioning me, questioning myself. It's so I don't have to try to not participate. It's so I only can see the print of my books and not the shiny mes in the arcade.

spectacle