Zizek and Spiegelman

I am interested in comics—their aesthetic qualities, their tempo, their avowed mediation. Spiegelman is a figure who’s interested me since Maus I and II, and I’ve gone back to look at some of the Raw stuff he’s produced along with François Mouly, his wife. Many great figures got their start in Raw—like Paul Chadwick of Concrete fame—and like Robert Crumb from an earlier historical period, Spiegelman has shifted from comics writer to editor of comics and writer and artist, each discreet from the other. Unlike Crumb, though, Spiegelman stayed stateside (Crumb has been in France for years), so he had an opportunity to comment directly on the events of September 11, to build from the ground up his response. In a series of oversize pages (outsize, he calls them in his intro) depicting his existential angst at his predictable emotions, his reactionary liberalism, and his total emotional evacuation, Spiegelman inhabits a number of classic comics personas, his own mouse headed, chain-smoking figures from Maus, as well as a realist depiction of himself, in an effort to multiply the possible perspectives on what is admittedly a singular work by a sole author. The black-on-black cover (printed in The New Yorker a few days after the event itself) of In the Shadow of No Towers is interrupted by an overlay of a color banner in which an assortment of classic comics characters tumble to the ground, all kicked by the same turban wearing, bearded billy-goat (though, don’t all billy-goats have beards; aren’t all mice sort of cute; can’t cats ever look cute as post-kitties?), and the juxtaposition brings in an element of pastiche and parody that serves to off-set the plunging pathos of the ebon cover. Throughout we are beset with Spiegelman’s ennui regarding the event that took place just a few blocks from his home, but at a moment—later, much later, as the pages came out months apart, and this one is in—in the strip where he’s taken on the Happy [-less] Hooligan persona (the last page, in fact), Spiegelman confronts, and is confronted by in return, the news media: in the guise of a Tom Brokaw interview, he’s taken into a studio and asked goofy questions about my favorite American whatever is—blank; to which he responds with completely removed and polemical tracts like the following. “The greatest thing about America is…uh, that as long as you’re an Arab you’re allowed to think that America’s not always so great!”
Another fav of mine is Slavoj Zizek, whose Welcome to the Desert of the Real presents us with a Marxist-psychoanalytic reading of the event of September 11: that our dreamy fantasy of one-sided liberal democracy that has become our reality has been interrupted by a competing fantasy of obscene adherence to the law of symbolic identification and violence to which the only seeming answer is yet more violence. The real of September 11—the eruption of something inassimilable into our quotidian life—is itself the fantasy of victimhood and one-sided oppression that allows us to simply forget what it is in our own policy and our own global attitude, and capital movements, that could have engendered such animosity. Careful to avoid liberal democratic rightist and leftist arguments of, on the one hand, fear of democratic advance or modernism, and on the other, the empty notion that we deserved it. Opposed to these two poles, Zizek posits a third term: we move to another narrative. On defining courage as having the courage to question one’s own position (or narrative, in the psychoanalytic sense), he says the following: “Instead of imposing our notion of universality (universal human rights, etc.), universality—the shared space of understanding between different cultures—should be conceived of as an infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66). And while he takes on almost every major figure in literary theory today—especially indicting cultural studies, and on the political side, positively skewering Habermaas (who deserves it)—Zizek nails it with regard to the event of September 11. And isn’t this exactly what Spiegelman was trying to do in his interview? Now, despite the fact that this interview with the producer for Tom Brokaw’s show on NBC is a part of In the Shadow of Both Towers, overall, this book is more about demonstrating the poles than positing the third term. But still, at the end, we get that the point of the event is we. Zizek is great in that he takes on so many potentially thorny topics, and in a perspicuous way, details his position while at the same time pointing out the faults in others’ positions. And he always has a program. Spiegelman is great for the opposite reason—his ambivalence.

Paul Virilio and Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

Ground Zero by Paul Virilio and “This Is Information” by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, from 9-11: Artists Respond, Volume One, both attempt to organize arguments about the causes and ramifications of the attack on the World Trade Center perpetrated on September 11, 2001. Virilio’s argument traces the influence of a twin history, that of a dialogue between god and man, and that between the exceptional individual and monotheism. Calling both a history of life and death that advance together, he suggests that the history of man cannot find the sensible and the super-sensible to be mutually excusive, and one of the ways we can see this is in the prohibition of prohibitions evident in both histories: with the prohibition of likenesses of god and angels and devils in religion, and with the seemingly unstoppable destruction of limits in secularism. While it’s easy to condemn Virilio of some Luddite-loving, reactionary, and anti-technological rabidness, his argument has some interesting turns to it. Taking a concept like the doctrine of free will—sacred, pardon the term, to both camps—he shows how its influence has been felt in these various situations. (And as an aside, as I write this, my power is going on and off, nine times and counting, whenever the wind blows—sucks, and means I lose stuff I’ve not yet saved—hard to save on a line to line basis.) For instance, he traces the development of predestination from a life before life (prebirth) to a means of obviating the doctrine of free will, pointing up what imbricates scientific integrism with religion—its Gnostic duality. He is quick to point out the beyond of good and evil that eugenics, racist hereditary theories, and phrenology represented for (and especially the Nazi’s) totalitarian science. Iconoclasm (the prohibition of graven images) in religion is paired under this twin logic of historical progress toward death with the concept of disappearance that is the techno-scientific imagination’s structuring concept, that science strips down the world: god is disappeared that we might not look at it (for fear of knowing too much, about good/evil, and their post-tribal beyond) and the world is disappeared, so that we can look into it. Linking progress to acceleration (“To Progress Would Be to Accelerate” 15), Virilio moves from a utopian model of place and site-specificity to a temporal model of uchronia, a no-time. Forsaking the human body (which cannot exist [and progress] in the dimension of time), Virilio suggests that we’ve no choices left but to seek immortality, either in the technological solipsism of longevity or in the atemporal afterlife of faith’s disappearance. In the succeeding chapters Virilio pursues his thesis of twin histories of progress’s problems. In chapter 2 we see his elaboration of the prohibition of prohibitions that marks both the enlightenment narrative and the religious base (and recent theoretical turn, I’d add) with the introduction of the scientific hero: a conflation of scientist and terrorist, the prohibition of prohibitions seems to establish equivalencies between these usually disaggregate figures. Chapter 3 is about information, and this is where Alan Moore fits.
In “This Is Information” Moore and Gebbie begin with a silent panel (one in which there are no dialogue balloons or narration boxes) except for the title, set before a cloud of dust. Next panel is a pyramid of chards and two boxes: “matter is energy. Energy is information. Everything is information[;]” and “physics says that structures…buildings, societies, ideologies…will seek their point of least energy” (185). Things run down—the third law of thermo-dynamics. Moving through a series of closer and closer shots of rubble, a hand is discernable, but as Moore writes, “the jutting hand holds little information” (185). The next few panels run through the dissemination of the event of 9/11: have you got the telly on? Holy shit, images—symbols. And then we’re back to the pyramid, with its two narration boxes: “people build towers…marriages, careers, empires, fortunes, ideologies…intended to reach god[;]” and “the lightning bolt is information, putting our ideas of god into perspective” (186). Perhaps we’ll learn, Moore suggests. Gebbie’s butch-dykes plotting the attacks as a reaction to the cancellation of Ellen Degeneris’s show on TV feature buzz cuts, bad pants, and mullets, while her Reverend Jerry Falwell is not rendered by her; it is a TV still put into a TV set rendered in the panel—multi-media, remediation, what have you. Moore narrates the ambient of fear in Northampton, as well as an anecdote from his childhood: potty aunt strolling through the blackout with her accordion, uncle Albert, electrified by throwing water on an exposed power line he thought was a power cable. And by way of the musket-ball holes blown in the Northamptonshire Sepulchre Church’s door by Cromwell’s troops in the English Civil War, Moore goes to the Crusades. Pointing up the distance the English take from war, he takes us through the effects of information—the grays of morality, the disfigurations of aim, context; we face a “Mujahedin Moonraker, [who says] choose your next witticism carefully, western democracy. It may be your last” (189). And in the back of the panel—behind Gebbie’s Ossama bin Cufflink, complete with emerald eyed white kitty—there’s the multi-media: six miniature screenshots of cable-and-network newscasts. Moore and Gebbie end it on a humanist note, suggesting the widest context of understanding, in two boxes: “any single human life has more complexity, more energy bound up in it than our tallest towers” and “and any death simplifies that, horribly” (190). Refusing the either/or logic of the law of non-contradiction (x cannot also be non-x), Moore writes, “with all due respect, with all sympathy, with all love, some of us cannot make that [with us or against us] choice” (190). Gebbie’s hand has returned, grey, ashen, jutted, and the narration is in six boxes over three panels: “are we with the terrorists or crusaders? [a pink, living hand enters the panel;]” and “no[;]” and “we’re with you[;]” and “whoever you are [they clasp;]” and “squeeze once if you understand[;]” and “this is information” (190).
Virilio’s Ground Zero, especially chapters 3 and 4, suggest that, firstly, the multiple worlds of the mass-media edge out the factual world of political propaganda, and secondly, that the range of concurrent moves that attend that: from standardization of products to synchronization of opinion (his ludic democracy, which actually sounds cool to me, like play in a post-structural sense, a radicalized democracy—but Virilio’s not havin’ it), from intermittent democracy (representative) to continuous democracy (direct), the move from franchise (citizenship) to forecast—are for Virilio traces of the breakdown of democracy in the breakdown of information systems. In chapter 4 he suggests that the informational shift from WW II’s elevated morality to today’s gulf war concepts of technological superiority is just another station on a track that is always headed to spiritual demolition: both sides of this theater-less (more like the theater of this uchronic war is everywhere) conflict play out a war of images, two equally misleading and self-contradictory systems: ego-mysticism (self and god) and techno-scientific mysticism (exceptional individual and monotheism), both beyond the tribal notion of the good, both using communication as a compensatory function that obviates the painful encounter of self with self (39-40). Both participating in the strategic deployment of images: two hands, touching, one ash, one pink. He talks about the effect of the diasporic and intermittent nature of the battlefields in this war, though writing just after the 9/11, the war’d not yet begun (though Virilio could see its basic dimensions, to his credit). He suggests that the disappearance of any real battle field—the prohibition of its image—obviates any possibility of contact between forces: “in this way, the risks of fraternization between combatants, a well as any true proximity, were eliminated automatically, to the advantage of a global information system freed of any concern for verisimilitude…of anything elementarily human” (43-4).
So, do Moore and Gebbie offer us that contact, that verisimilitude? They give us contact, but it’s between the dead amid the rubble (of our thoughts) and the living of the artists they are, responding in the pink. Virilio goes on to call this cannibalistic mass-media machine Big Optics: multinational powers monopolizing appearances (59). Moore and Gebbie work in a realistic way, sometimes as satire, sometimes as melodrama, but overall—realistic. Is this to suggest, that among his many reactionary pronouncements, Virilio is against the avant-garde, too? He seems to suggest that the development of nuclear weapons was an advent of the avant-garde, the ultimate figure of progress (52). That’s easy, to come to the conclusion that if he’s against progress that he’s against the human. But he has it his way: progress is defined as disappearance of the world, and its effects are to separate humans (as with the disappearing battlefield above). In a way that echoes and deranges Benjamin, Virilio suggests that the age of mechanical reproduction of the image has nothing but deleterious effects—none of the emancipatory potential found in the artwork essay—and that “techno-scientific development has become an art of the false in the service of the art of the lie […] a tissue of absurdities” (67). But I still can’t figure Virilio out. Would he like Moore and Gebbie because of their pathos and communication of the human, or would he condemn them in believing in progress, in an infinite perfectibility? It’s easy to say that Virilio is anti-humanist, and that all ideas of progress are to him the way to ground zero, a path laden with deceit, moral ambiguity, and assaults on nature. He would no doubt rue the hope that “This Is Information” ends with—the repeated image of two hands touching, white, black, Caucasian, African, ashen grey, pink. This is because he’s making a historical argument insisting that iconoclasm is behind every progressive notion, and that what we base hope upon is in fact the same iconoclasm that motivates and subtends terrorists, thus to buy into hope is to buy into terrorist hope. And perhaps he’s right. Not ethically right, but right about the enlightenment narrative. (Ethically, I’d go to Derrida or Levinas, and those are theoretical figures Virilio would likely indict as humanist [but is that better than progress?]) Of course there are options: Adorno and Horkhiemer’s famous assault on the enlightenment narrative has it that it’s both good and evil, and while we progress in our thinking and ethical and moral behavior, we also tend to put reason up as a court against which there is no appeal, thus eliminating any appeal that can be deemed unreasonable. Virilio would only like half that book. Most post-structuralists tend to take some enlightenment narrative on—communism (Derrida’s Specters of Marx), mostly, but sometimes democracy (Laclau’s Emancipations)—but they usually reform it, or recuperate it in some way. Virilio seems to suggest no way out for progressive society, though he does seem to like people, just so long as they stay with their icons—and aren’t comic panels iconistic? This consists in the fact that they communicate by resemblance, re-presentation? Fuzzy little slip, I know, but I like to have it too.

Reverend Charles Adams

Yesterday, Channel 7 (ABC in Detroit) broadcast the funeral services for Rosa Parks, civil rights icon whose protests inaugurated a struggle for equal recognition under the law still on going in our society. What was amazing about it, besides the fact that there were no commercial interruptions for a period of nine hours, was the particular affective response I had to the proceedings. I am religious, and much to the chagrin of some of my materialist comrades, professional acquaintances, and instructors, I also believe in god. Now, I am of a particular kind of religion, sort of Jewish in that I am angry with god and contend against it—as Israel means originally “he who contends with god”—and sort of Christian, in that I believe also in an impossible forgiveness—impossible to fully achieve in this life—that serves as a universal model. So where I was totally unresponsive to folks like Bill Clinton and his tale of sitting in the back of the bus, as if it counts when you’re in the power class, I was blown away by the preaching of Reverend Charles Adams: balling like a little baby, really, just shuddering and inconsolable, except by the thought that I could possibly cry/laugh a little more should Adams stick around.

Adams was thanking god for Rosa, but also for the experience of Rosa, for her affective eruptions in himself, and also thanking god for all of us too, that we got something out of Rosa Park’s life as well. And as Adams went through all the different languages in which someone could be thanked (“If I was Japanese, I’d say, domo arigato; if I was Spanish I’d say, muchos gracias; if I was German I’d say, Danke Shane; if I was Portuguese I’d say, obligato; if I was French I’d say, merce bou coup; if I was Italian I’d say, grazi”) his level of animation rose, and he entered a state known in the vernacular as testifying: the delivery was pitched such, and his gesticulations and tempo matched so perfectly what he had to say, amplifying it but also translating it to a bodily experience, that I was very much imbricated in a contact loop, feeding back from him, but also feeding forward, immersing me in a temporalized and spatialized experience where I was concerned with what Adams was concerned with—despite my intellectual position, my Jewish position, that I should and could be angry with and blaming god for allowing the world to persist in racism and bigotry—and that I was thankful in a way that Adams was. this reached a fever pitch when Adams said, "if I was deaf, I'd say [flaps his arms and does the sign for thank you in American Sign Language]," to which the crowd just exploded, and to which I shuddered and nearly collapsed in joyous tears, both laughing andf crying. "But since I'm here where I am now, and speak the way I do today, I'll simply say, thank you, thank you, thank you."

Now, I resist the notion that I was awash in false consciousness, though that’s a lefty answer hardly anyone buys today, even the lefties; but I also resist the notion that my weeping was some catharsis in which I narrate my psychosis with Adams’s parallel narrative of thankful remembrance in a process of sublimation, or that I was projecting my own sadness—no matter the cause—on to Adams’s narrative for the purpose of avoiding it, that I cried at Adams’s testimony to avoid confronting my own psycho maladies. And this leaves me in an interesting place apropos this class: what is the cause of my intense affective response to Adams’s testimony if not psychoanalytic identification? Following after Leibniz, Brian Massumi suggests that the stakes of recognizing a continuum of affective responses, each with a provisional subjectivity—however fully formed or not—are high, because not only is he suggesting that the subject and the object mutually inform each other, an old idea, but that the subject may not have the attributes we propose it has should we only invest in one of the poles of a continuum between nature and culture. Splitting subjectivity into subject and incipient subject (under construction, or in Massumi’s terms, emergent), the incipient subject is called “self-,” a sort of provisional self where the relationality of subjectivity is put to fore. Relatrionality as in the relation to other positions on the continuum, but also in the sense that time and space form a parallel continuum, on which rest a range of positions from an ontogenetic space-time where positions are impossible to differentiate, to a position where one can tell space from time, or that constructs the possibility of their being disentangled.

This helps to explain my affective response to Adams. For if I were to be reminded of Adams’s struggles, and could relate to them, that’s one thing, but if his appeal were so strong that it awoke in me a memory before the characters that determine that memory, if his appeal ranged over my experience of time, and ranged past it, and took me with it, or dissolved my ability to distinguish between myself and the self of Adams, my time and my associations and struggles and the time of Adams’s struggles and association with Parks, then that’s something different, something where my feedback with Adams has destabilized temporality and subjectivity so much that it can feed forward, allowing the world to relate to itself, even if only (and perhaps only) in an emergent way. so much so that the where Adams was at, and the time that he was in, was also my time and place, and those distinctions disolved into the heterogeneity in which they always were--distinct but entangled. And so I wept, not at god, or with it, not at Adams, nor with him, but in a way that through my weeping, the world could relate to itself, and I was only a stunned witness to it all, barely formed, and quaking.