I remember being a freshman in high school, singing with the then-new Bad Religion album (Stranger than Fiction), and thinking, "Fuck yeah! 'Even though you try not to be, we are of the same plague,' indeed!" Well, not the 'indeed' bit, but all the rest. And then a few years later, a decade I guess, really working through--emotionally--the idea of humanity-as-plague, -as-virus. It made sense. It still makes sense, as a possibility.
And then a year or two after that, sitting at my computer while my then-lover slept in our hotel room in San Francisco, typing up a manifesto. I'd come to the conclusion--never mind how I got there; the point is that I believed wholeheartedly I was right--that the most ethical thing I could do would be to commit suicide after doing my absolute best to persuade as many others as possible to do the same. I envisioned (not that I thought I'd have such persuasive power--the point is that the most ethical thing I could see to do would be to try) all of humanity executing a self-chosen, orderly retreat from existence.
Not killing one another or tricking people or anything like that: just carefully and conscientiously cleaning up after ourselves and quietly, undramatically, collectively but singly ending our being as individuals and as species.
Like I said, it doesn't really matter how I came to the conclusion; I believed this would be best and set out to write my manifesto. (Deluded? Sure, why not? But delusion's always only a determination made after the fact, based on what's-agreed-to-have-been.)
I would say that what happened next was that I couldn't go forward. That would be the way of saying it that makes sense for us, that fits one story (i.e., species-survival, coded at the genetic level, opted for my individual survival at that moment). But that's not what happened, or what felt like happened.
I didn't change my mind, decide I had been wrong. And I also didn't feel impotent, unable to act. But I also didn't want to go through with the whole thing, even though I still thought it would be right to. Yes, it still seemed to me best to commit suicide and encourage as many others as I could to do the same. But, in the fact (in der Tat [act], as the Germans say), I didn't want to. I chose, as I experienced it then, being.
Should we exist? I don't know. I disagree entirely however that this is a moot, or an irrelevant question. On the contrary, I think it's one of the most crucial questions we can possibly ask. Not because so much hinges on the answer (though it does on the asking of it, and on the struggling with the answers we elaborate for ourselves), but because we can't not ask the question. It's in our very structure as linguistic beings (on which, more some other time).
We need, on some level, to choose our own being, to choose that which has been laid down for us as the ground for our choices about it. And we need also to consciously experience as *ours* the choice against our own being. I'd like to lay out the whole system that would ground more persuasively what I'm saying, but that will take a book, and I'm not on that one yet. So, for now, just this:
We are the evolving intersection of these two choices, for and against our being, in a million different moments. It is ours to negotiate, to feel, the ways in which they, these choices, will have been who we were.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
An Introductory Fragment
Reading Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric, I was recalled to an evening with friends at the Salle Pleyel by the following line: "The great orator, the one with a hold on his listeners, seems animated by the very mind of his audience" (24). We were seated behind the orchestra, and this made the performance in some way unaccountably beautiful. I had never before this seen a conductor actually conducting, having always previously sat or stood, depending on my finances, in front of the orchestra, a member of what I imagined to be the primary audience. The line I read tonight clarified something for me, and the surplus beauty of that evening in Paris ceased to be unaccountable.
The conductor is a rhetor, her audience the orchestra itself; she persuades this collection of distinct subjectivities, who have been practicing to be persuaded in just this way, to function as--to be--one body, even in silence. It is for this reason that he faces them, and largely ignores their audience, though this is a ruse of sorts, designed to convince the orchestra still more of their unity, of the all-encompassing vibrancy of their unity as one subject, and the relative unimportance of their audience.
She is convincing them, like Kierkegaard's Abraham in Fear and Trembling, to place themselves as the subjective higher than the ethical, which is to say, to find themselves as a unified subject above adherence to the desires of their others, the audience on whose behalf and at whose material behest they exist as a unity.
In this double movement, of course and however, the orchestra executes precisely the will of their absolute--becomes ethical relative to their audience, which desires to witness an improbably unified subjectivity glorying in its submission to wordless transcendence of the ethical, a unity indifferent to the demands or existence of its others.
For those of us who constitute such an audience, this is a satisfying reassurance of the possibility--the reality and even primacy, since it occurs in indifference to our presence--of psychic unity in wordless transcendence, of a return to the extrasymbolic womb (both more symbolic, symbolically hypercharged, and beyond the domain of the symbolic). What matters in this unity is its indifference to the ethical, its absolute permissibility of being. And where better might this be found than in the domain of music, which as Kierkegaard argues (in the Either portion of Either/Or) is the proper location of the erotic?
The tragedy of the orchestra for its audience is that it is a fantasy, that the subject-permissibility it embodies has been a ruse. Music is not, after all, the erotic--the extrasymbolic real of beings-in-relation--but only the sexual, or at worst the pornographic. It is only another language, after all, though spoken ever so fluidly.
The orchestra's real appeal, however, is that it has worked, not only as an illusion of the primary unity of the subject in wordless transcendence but also as its invocation. The masterfully conducted symphony has been a seance with the spirit of absolute permissibility, departed with our accession into the symbolic order that makes unity thinkable and, in being thinkable, impermissible. This, however, is only visible from behind the orchestra, whose spirit has animated the conductor whose audience it is. The seance has been conducted within the conductor.
But this, too, reaches its conclusion, and the men and women in black and white, and the encores of the orchestra's audience, echo together as the cries of a child who cannot help but be human. Which is to say, cannot help but be impermissible.
The conductor is a rhetor, her audience the orchestra itself; she persuades this collection of distinct subjectivities, who have been practicing to be persuaded in just this way, to function as--to be--one body, even in silence. It is for this reason that he faces them, and largely ignores their audience, though this is a ruse of sorts, designed to convince the orchestra still more of their unity, of the all-encompassing vibrancy of their unity as one subject, and the relative unimportance of their audience.
She is convincing them, like Kierkegaard's Abraham in Fear and Trembling
In this double movement, of course and however, the orchestra executes precisely the will of their absolute--becomes ethical relative to their audience, which desires to witness an improbably unified subjectivity glorying in its submission to wordless transcendence of the ethical, a unity indifferent to the demands or existence of its others.
For those of us who constitute such an audience, this is a satisfying reassurance of the possibility--the reality and even primacy, since it occurs in indifference to our presence--of psychic unity in wordless transcendence, of a return to the extrasymbolic womb (both more symbolic, symbolically hypercharged, and beyond the domain of the symbolic). What matters in this unity is its indifference to the ethical, its absolute permissibility of being. And where better might this be found than in the domain of music, which as Kierkegaard argues (in the Either
The tragedy of the orchestra for its audience is that it is a fantasy, that the subject-permissibility it embodies has been a ruse. Music is not, after all, the erotic--the extrasymbolic real of beings-in-relation--but only the sexual, or at worst the pornographic. It is only another language, after all, though spoken ever so fluidly.
The orchestra's real appeal, however, is that it has worked, not only as an illusion of the primary unity of the subject in wordless transcendence but also as its invocation. The masterfully conducted symphony has been a seance with the spirit of absolute permissibility, departed with our accession into the symbolic order that makes unity thinkable and, in being thinkable, impermissible. This, however, is only visible from behind the orchestra, whose spirit has animated the conductor whose audience it is. The seance has been conducted within the conductor.
But this, too, reaches its conclusion, and the men and women in black and white, and the encores of the orchestra's audience, echo together as the cries of a child who cannot help but be human. Which is to say, cannot help but be impermissible.
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