resonance

A long, empassioned post from my friend and colleague Gastón Gordillo over at his blog "Space and Politics" discusses "Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution".

More generally, Gastón is also engaged in an attempt to think what I have previously termed a politics of affective resonance.

There's much to say about and to respond to in Gastón's post, and surely we need to develop further a critical vocabulary of resonance, dissonance, damping, attunement (on which see Massumi), and so on.

In terms of the relationship between space and politics, I think it would be worth investigating the ways in which resonance is discussed in Physics or Engineering. And one would presumably have to distinguish between resonance as it functions in solids, liquids, and gases. (This would be one answer to Gastón's reasonable critique that my tendency is to emphasize spatial solidity.)

But I'd also emphasize that resonance enables an intersection between a concern with space and an interest in time or history. For rhythm or tempo immediately invoke a concern with temporality. A body that resonates moves in space but also in time... literally, "in time" with others.

castell

A particularly fine video (amazingly, it seems it was shot with only one camera) of the Catalan tradition of building castells:



There's much to be said here about bodies, tall buildings, sovereignty, and community. Indeed, in some ways these castles are almost literal embodiments of the famous frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan. A multitude constitutes the temporary illusion of sovereignty.


So what's fascinating is the discipline and coordination invested in the construction of these human towers. But also their inevitable precariousness.

christmas

This happened on my block. Right now there's a scorchmark on the concrete wall, and some flowers and cards that people have left.

and

Carmen Rodríguez’s and a body to remember with is a collection of short stories about tears and loss, but finally also laughter and love. Though clearly autobiographical in many ways, the story it tells of an activist who has to flee Chile for Canada in the wake of Pinochet’s coup is narrated through fragments, glimpses of a life marked by resistance and exile. Hence the protagonist's name (when it is provided) is variously Estela de Ramírez (19), Silvia (112), Yolanda Cárcamo (129), and Laura Arzola (154): there are continuities between these figures, but also displacements and differences. The book's Spanish translation, De cuerpo entero ("With the Whole Body"), suggests fullness and plenitude, but the stories themselves resist such a sense of completion.

To put this another way: there's a tension here between a narrative of lack and a narrative of excess.

Clearly, the coup and the exile that follows are deeply traumatic. In the final story, "a balanced diet," the narrator tells of how she heard that her partner had been killed by the Chilean military. Her reaction is immediately visceral: "The vomit came out of my body in the same instant that I realized that Mario was one of the executed ones. Everything became an immense black stain sprinkled with coloured lights" (156). Years later, she would like to think that she is no longer affected in the same way, but her body betrays her: "What's it like to be dead Mario [. . .] I can talk to you without crying [. . .] oh well yes I still cry and probably I will cry for the rest of my life. . . ." (162).

Perhaps the most somber story is one that features another woman, Gloria. Its narrative progresses like a short film, tracking slowly around the room of a house in Vancouver: the camera eye passes over a desk, a dresser, a bed, posters on the wall, until it finally comes to rest on the body of a young woman and her suicide note.

Elsewhere, however, the book's stress is on the ways in which exile and resistance also make for accretion, even multiplication, and a liveliness that laughs in the face of dictatorship. As Rodríguez puts it in her Foreword, "My heart trespasses over borders and stretches over a whole continent to find its home at the two extremes of the Americas: in Chile and in Canada" (14). Or, to return to the collection's concluding story in which two friends meet up once more after "twenty years of absences, a whole life of absences," the stress is not on what has been lost but on the joy that results from the re-encounter: "obviously the military did not count on this good memory, this love: they did not count on this immense desire to live, this propensity to laughter" (165).

Throughout, then, the movement that Rodríguez describes is from loss to excess. Canada itself is, at first, nothing but a black (or white!) hole, a country that Chilean characters cannot even envisage: they can imagine Argentina, they can imagine England, the USA, even Switzerland, but Canada induces no connotations at all. Gradually, however, this "hole called Canada began to take possession of Estela de Ramírez's stomach, chest, throat, head, ears, and mouth" (21). It becomes embodied, and she becomes embodied in turn. When finally the opportunity arises to return to Chile, she hesitates. She is now attached to Canada, part of Canada, too: both legally (as a newly-minted citizen) and, more importantly, affectively. In the crisis that ensues, in which "she realized that her body was the hole and the whole was her" (35), I think the point is not so much that she has identified with nothingness, and so with absence; rather that what was previously absence has now been given substance.

So, finally, this is a book marked by the conjunction "and" that is precisely the sign of addition: Chile and Canada; loss and discovery; death and life; the past and the present; "a mind and a body to remember with" (159; my emphasis).

unknowable

Still more Roa Bastos...

The Body

"Usted mismo, Señor, dice que los hechos no son narrables" (568)

As much as this is a book about language or power, it is also a book about the limits of both, which it identifies at least in part with the materiality of the body. Indeed, even history, in so far as it is a narrative of or about power, finds its limit in the physicality (and corruptibility) of the matter that constitutes us. In fact, the book's broad narrative could perhaps be summarized in terms of an attempt to use language to stave off the bodily dissolution threatened by the anonymous decree, an attempt ultimately doomed to failure as the Supreme recognizes the futility of the struggle to impose narrative on events.

The main body of the book (and that the book also has a body is not insignificant) ends with a conflagration engulfing the Supreme's papers, and a vision of the dictator's body consumed by worms. We take, I think, this to be the conflagration that has partially destroyed the texts with which the compiler constructs the novel we have before us. That the compiler is continually forced to interpolate comments (more frequent in the final pages than hitherto) indicating the state of these texts (burnt, illegible, missing) reminds us that language has to be incarnated in some physical medium for it to be transmitted. We are constantly reminded that literature has a real (not simply an ideal) presence, that the letter is also material, and so subject to the vicissitudes that may befall all material things. At the same time, the partial survival of the Supreme's papers point to another, contrasting aspect to the letter's materiality: the fact that the dictator is unable fully to destroy his papers demonstrates that once committed to paper his thoughts have a stubborn presence that cannot easily be revoked. In short, the paradox of materiality is that it is both obstinately resistant to change and yet also always mutable, never self-similar.

Likewise, then, the Supreme's predicament might be described as a combination of the fact that his written or spoken dictates are insufficiently powerful to provide him with absolute power over the Paraguayan social body, yet his words will inevitably prove more durable than his own decaying flesh. On the one hand, his power is not powerful enough; on the other, his power far outstrips his own body.

Traditionally, one way in which to conceptualize this second dislocation between the mortality of those who wield power and the presumed eternity of power itself revolves around the concept of the "king's two bodies." As a subject of power, the king's body is incorruptible and immortal, transcending any particular individual (hence the instantaneousness of transition articulated in the declaration "The king is dead, long live the king!"); as a human subject, however, it is recognized that the king's body may suffer illness and decrepitude. The separation between "yo" and "él" that we see in Roa Bastos's novel expresses therefore not only a linguistic complexity, but also a material doubling. Yet even in this neat solution to the question of power's materiality, problems arise in the intricate relation between these two bodies. What happens, for instance, when the king seems to go mad (as with George III)? And, more fundamentally, rather than preserving an ideal, untouchable body is not this doubling itself a form of monstrosity?

As an attempt to resolve these contradictions, the Supreme's discourse therefore attempts a constant dialogue between language itself and materiality. Yet this is always inevitably a failed dialogue, as there can be no dialogue between language and what is not language; by definition a dialogue can only be established within language. The material will always remain forever mute and (at least in part) unknowable.

unita

The Wednesday quotation, Part V: Spinoza on the union of bodies.

When a number of bodies of the same or different size are driven so together that they remain united one with the other, or if they are moved by the same or different rapidity so that they communicate their motions one to the other in a certain ratio, those bodies are called reciprocally united bodies (corpora invicem unita), and we say that they all form one body or individual, which is distinguished from the rest by this union of bodies. (Ethics 50)

wedding

There's so much that could be said about this photograph, winner of the World Press Photo prize for portraiture. The expressions on the couple's faces; the distinct ways in which they hold themselves. And then there's the caption...

"Wounded US Marine returns home from Iraq to marry"via Interbreeding.

[Update: More, from Majikthise, including links to the full gallery of pictures, and the comment "The groom's ambiguous expression is a metaphor for the all the ways that war changes people. [. . .] Maybe the Marine is literally a different person than his finacee agreed to marry."]

tiredness

"The body is never in the present," Gilles Deleuze notes, "it contains the before and after, tiredness and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body" (Cinema 2 189).

Gabriel García Márquez's "No One Writes to the Colonel" is concerned above all with tiredness and waiting--and so also the corresponding attitudes of the body. It provides, therefore, a version of what Deleuze terms the "time-image":

the series of time. The daily attitude is what puts the before and after into the body, the body as the revealer of the deadline. The attitude of the body relates thought to time as to that outside which is infinitely further than the outside world" (189)

The story opens with the colonel of the novella's title making his wife a cup of that ubiquitous stimulant, coffee, banishing tiredness with caffeine. The process is described in all its material determinants: the ground beans, the boiling fluid, and a series of containers that themselves leech into the resulting mixture as he "scrape[s] the inside of the can with a knife until the last scrapings of the ground coffee, mixed with bits of rust, fell into the pot" (109).

At the same time, we also get an early insight into the physical maladies that ail both the colonel and his wife. He finds his gut and stomach affected: "the colonel experienced the feeling that fungus and poisonous lilies were taking root in his gut" (109). She "had suffered an asthma attack" the previous night and "sip[s] her coffee in the pauses of her gravelly breathing. She was scarcely more than a bit of white on an arched, rigid spine" (109, 110).

The pair's deteriorating corporeal condition is a direct result of their long wait for the colonel's overdue pension. "For nearly sixty years--since the end of the last civil war--the colonel had done nothing else but wait" (109). And in the novella's sixty or so pages that follow, there is not much in the way of action except for the small routines that occupy the couple in their quiet, desperate poverty.

In the first few of these pages, the colonel makes coffee, winds the pendulum clock (one of their few remaining possessions, a constant reminder of time's passage), sees to the rooster they are keeping for a forthcoming cockfight, seeks out his suit, shaves, dresses... "He did each thing as if it were a transcendent act" (112). But of course these habits are far from transcendent; they are the endlessly iterated reflexes of a life spent waiting for transcendence, for a response from that department of state bureaucracy charged with allocating money to war veterans.

For of all the colonel's routines, the most symptomatic is his weekly trip down to greet the mail launch, follow the postman to the post office, and watch him sort the mail. "And, as on every Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter" (127).

Still from the film El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
These are, then, bodies that have yet to be scripted into the national narrative. The colonel frequently and somewhat obsessively casts his mind back to his role in the revolution--in which ironically he himself was a type of mailman, whose own arduous journey delivering funds for the war is somewhat belated, arriving only "half an hour before the treaty was signed" (131). But he receives a receipt for his delivery, a proof of his service, and can't believe that it can now have been mislaid in the national archives. "'No official could fail to notice documents like those,' the colonel said" (131).

But indeed, despite the myriad documents and missives that circulate through the story--newspapers, pamphlets, an air-mail letter for the local doctor--the story emphasizes the lives and experiences that never achieve representation. All this writing is characterized by its absences, its lacks. The national papers are subject to censorship, demanding but also frustrating suspicious interpretation: "'What's in the news?' the colonel asked. [. . .] 'No one knows,' [the doctor] said. 'It's hard to read between the lines which the censor lets them print'" (119). While there's little hope that any outsiders will interest themselves in local happenings: "'To the Europeans, South America is a man with a mustache, a guitar, and a gun,' the doctor said, laughing over his newspaper. 'They don't understand the problems'" (127).

And though there are also clandestine missives and messages that attempt to make up for this representational lack, these endlessly say "the same as always," and the colonel doesn't even bother reading them (137).

Waiting, waiting, the colonel and his wife are subject to a "slow death" (165). But almost to the end, they maintain their patience, however much it is tried in their various squabbles as they figure out strategies to keep their bodies at least semi-nourished. Should they sell or keep the clock, and above all the rooster whose fight might lead to a big pay-out? "But suppose he loses," objects the wife (165).

In the end, the couple are reduced to something like what Giorgio Agamben terms "bare life". What are the two then to eat? And yet it is, strangely, this condition, in its loss of hope for transcendence and realization of pure, immanent materiality, that is portrayed as a moment of almost ecstatic ascesis. After all his hesitations, his anxiety, after all the ways in which he is ignored or taken advantage of by the state and local notables alike, somehow the waiting is over:

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years--the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute--to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment that he replied:

"Shit." (166)

(In the meantime, it would seem that García Márquez himself is now tired of writing.)

brain

Via 3 Quarks Daily, an MSNBC report of an experiment on brain activity in response to politically oriented stimuli:

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." [. . .]

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained. [. . .]

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. [. . .]

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

Now, the interpretation put on these results, by MSNBC if not by the Emory team itself, concerns the irrationality of partisan "bias." "Nonpartisanship" is such a strange fetish in US media and political culture.

But of course political habits are about affective fixes; and political responses are affectively conditioned before they are reasoned--or even ideological--judgements. No great surprise or scandal there.

Update: further discussion at Alas.

airports

In another context, Glen Fuller of Fuller's Speed Shop points me to an entry of his about "dead wood", near the end of which he writes briefly about the affect of airports:

there is an announcement broadcast continually over the PA at Sydney Airport that begins with: "Due to increased security measures..." This message has been played over the PA for a long time, I noticed it about 7 months ago. It captures the affective of the 'to-be' journey in pretension with itself. That is, the futurity of the present is in an affective tension with the eventuality of the future. The word 'increased' increases the polarity of the tension across scales of temporality - of coming and going bodies with various anticipations of the future. The anticipating body is in tension.

I'm not entirely sure what he means, but it has got me thinking...

Airports are often portrayed as very neutral, affectless environments. Think of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, for instance, as the semi-subliminal soundtrack for a place that tries to be as characterless, blank, and unremarkable as possible. I guess that this results in part from the fact that the architecture of airports is characteristically modernist--form following function--unlike the ornate neo-gothic ornamentation that characterizes the great railway stations of the late Victorian period. (Is that the problem with Euston? It's a train station masquerading as an airport; or vice versa. In any case, it sticks out like a sore thumb compared with the other London terminals, not least its nearest neighbour, St Pancras.)

Of course, airport architecture is also at times spectacular, and supposed to be visually impressive. But still usually its affective tonality is cool. Concrete and curves, glass and grace. Think of Stansted or Vancouver International, two very fine airports, at least the first of which was built by a notable architect (Norman Foster), and the second of which is full of impressive native art: none the less, both aim at quiet seduction rather than brashly drawing attention to themselves.

Of course, too, airports are increasingly becoming bustling bazaars, with barely a square inch of peace (apart, that is, from the VIP lounges) as more and more of their space is given over to commerce. If you thought malls were nightmares, meet the mall without an exit.

But still, the affective image of the airport remains that of unperturbed modernism, a dampening of affect rather than its exacerbation. This is the affect of the "non-place" of liminal insubstantiality.

Yet at the same time, and perhaps here's the reason, these blank backdrops are the setting for an unending series of affective outbursts. Airports are sanctioned sites for the display of a fairly complex range of emotions, and as such quite different from most other public spaces. Notably, there are the hellos and goodbyes of that membrane separating "airside" from "landside." "Public displays of affection" are permitted, even expected, here: the lingering embrace or frantic snog of boyfriend seeing off girlfriend, the balloons and flowers waiting for visiting relatives, the tears of the bereft, and increasingly the anxiety of those not merely afraid to fly but reminded to be vigilant, suspicious.

Tiredness and waiting (the bodies draped over chairs as their flights have been delayed), sadness and elation, even drunkenness as somehow when you have a early morning flight to the Algarve 8am is never too early for getting in some lagers at the bar. All possible attitudes of the body are to be seen here.