Sunday 27 July 2008

Toxique


Ah yes, I have been hiding again.

The preparation for my article has been a pure mental fight. Olga was kind enough to offer me her reading of the film, but it took me all this time to nail down my thesis, and be able to tailor my structure accordingly. When I was doing my A-levels and when I was an undergraduate, writing an essay was a relatively easy task. I never had trouble finding a thesis, and I always poured my heart into whatever topic I chose to discuss, rather than picking topics about which I was passionate beforehand. Perhaps now, writing an article is a professional task, something that I need to be careful with every gambit I take. I do find it hard to complete anything without going through multiple drafts and failures.

The good news is that Dance, Dance, Dance now only needs a coda. How? I don't know. In a way, every night, I look forward to opening my Finale and composing, for that is probably the only soothing activity with creative surprises and excitement (writing the article is creative, but it invites frustration more often than excitement).

Françoise Sagan's Toxique arrived this afternoon--a surprise, since I didn't expect it to be in my mailbox so early. It is probably the most beautiful book I have ever purchased. It looks like a notebook hand-drawn by Sagan, with typewritten text and amazing artwork in ink. Sagan had a car accident in 1957, and according to the introduction of the book, in order to alleviate her pain, she was injected morphine three times a day. By the end of the treatment, she was completely addicted to the drug and required detoxication.

In a way, Toxique testifies that confessional writing is one way to rationalise the body's pain and suffering during the course of drug-deprivation. The book completely echoes Jean Cocteau's Opium. However, in this case, instead of an obsessive-compulsive cling onto the human penis as multiple protrusions from the body of the user, Sagan caresses her body, especially her vagina with the deep strokes of her charcoal. In one of the pages, Sagan's naked body lies across the page, with her nipples erect and her vagina wet and exposed. She wrote, 'Lundi, j'ai passé Hier 13 Heures sans Ampoule.' In another one, across two pages, we see her lower body only, with the edge of the left page framing her vagina. She wrote:
If it weren't for this even more terrible threat to my legs, I'd be at the end of my rope. 'Just one more short one.' Goya will be disgusted to see me drinking mineral water. It's for my own good, I know, to take this cure whose purpose is to disgust me with alcohol. But iced white wine when the weather is hot and red wine when it's cold …?
Later on, Sagan, shows her torso and her lower body; but this time, her posture conceals her private. She wrote, 'Je crois que je ne suis plus Amoureuse de Personne.' For Cocteau, opium makes a woman amoureuse; it 'masculinises' women by turning them into sexual agents (of course, it is a male assumption that women are not supposed to be sexual agents). But then, the loss of sexual impetus does signify the beginning of withdrawal, a female body's declaration of her own independence from the mode of sexual crave induced by the drug. In fact, Sagan's body deteriorates, flattens, and eventually turns itself into a skull by the end of the book. The further she departs from morphine, the harder it is for her to enter love.

To a certain extent, opiate forever changes the sexual structure of a human being, and there is no turning-around from that. Weening oneself from the drug is to force the body to re-invent itself, to give birth again to a body that relies on deliberate oblivion to opium. Nevertheless, oblivion presumes the very existence of the drug and the physical memory of it. The consciousness the being arrests under its spell, has eternally entered the DNA of this body.

After all, is Bonjour tristesse a story about a girl weening herself from the intoxication of her youth, and her premature matricide is a perhaps way to perform the killing of the father that her body is too exhausted to carry out (the father, in turn, is part of the drug). And in this sense, does À bout de souffle operate in the exact same way; only this time, Belmondo, who has been intoxicated by all things made in USA, is part of the opiate-induced dream?

Tuesday 22 July 2008

On the Street


I was waiting for Brian in front of the restaurant Republic while a red school-bag landed on the curb of the pavement. A pile of notes and a calculator fell out, and were scattered around it. A rather nerdy African-American boy screamed at a tall broad-shouldered street-smart Asian kid. Standing in front of the restaurant, I could hardly hear what they said to each other. A twenty-something African-American man pointed at the school-bag and asked the 'nerd' to pick it up. The 'nerd' picked it up, only to throw it again onto the pavement in utter anger.

These boys were all skateboarders. They hung out in the part of Union Square in front of Heartland and Republic probably everyday. I remember when I was at the 'nerd's' age, the kind of satisfaction I would get from drawing the attention from all the people on the street by picking up something that belonged to me, only for the purpose of throwing it away--a renunciation of property (how socialist!), and most important, the part of the self that makes an intellectual intellectual. The ultimate desire he had was in fact the unconditional camaraderie from the tall kid, who probably skated better than the 'nerd' did, and occupied a more essential position in the clique to which he yet belonged.

Sure enough, the 'nerd' stole the bag of the tall boy and threatened to throw it onto the curb, like the way his bag was treated. In return, the tall boy picked up his skateboard and threatened to throw it into the trash bin, and in the end, he did. The boys then laughed at each other--no psychoanalysis was needed.

Amid the crowd, a 20-year-old version of Thomas crossed the street and marched towards the subway station. A 20-year-old version of Thomas? When have I begun to think of my friend's image when I first met him as a shadow of my past dreams?

Saturday 19 July 2008

Versagung




After receiving the news about the acceptance of my article in the journal, I sabotaged its pleasure by a week's worth of recoiling from the public. Why did I sabotage it? In 1916, Freud wrote about a clinical 'surprise' he called Versagung (frustration). For Freud, the general principle of psychoanalysis as a curing procedure is to ask patients to give up some of the pleasures, i.e. pleasures that are symptomatic of the traumatic memory (for him, the traumatic memory necessarily goes back to the primal scene). By surrendering these pleasures, the patients would be able to rationalise their traumas, which would generate a higher form of pleasure than those the mind invented in order to cover up their traumatic memories. It surprised Freud that there were patients who refused to surrender (in Žižk's words, they surrendered the surrender), and considered the psychoanalytical process of uncovering their traumatic memories too traumatic to bear. These patients often imagined protectors (for Lacan, the Other of the Other) to protect them from being exposed to these traumatic memories.

One type of such patients sabotaged their successes by escaping into guilt. Freud observed that in such cases, pleasure is completely censored by a one-sided 'ethical' debate proposed by the ego. The 'ethical' stance that the ego takes, for Freud, is the parricidal and incestuous ban he propounded in Totem and Taboo. If I follow Freud wholeheartedly, my own sabotaging of my pleasure did stem from my parricidal fear for 'taking over' the idea and teaching of my professor on the one hand, and perhaps in its mise en abîme, my own parricidal fear that initiated this blog a couple of weeks ago on the other.

Žižek obviously wouldn't allow me to stop there. The ego is the Law of the Father, which is instantiated by the father who is already dead, articulated in the symbolic order as the phallic father. Versagung is therefore, first and foremost, a result of the objet petit a blocking the enjoyment of the subject, a piece of the real (the truth that the father is already been murdered by the son), the symptom of the patricide itself. For Žižek, therefore, by surrendering the surrender, the subject completely enjoys the symptom, and externalises her/himself as the real. As a result, the subject fully realises that the father is already dead, only that he shouldn't let the father himself knows. The real, being 'outside' subjectivity (but it is precisely from this 'being-outside' that subjectivity is formed and split), is lawless. In this sense, Versagung represents to Žižek a mode of resistance, by which the Law of the Father is suspended not for the constitution of subjectivity, but an eternal escape into this state of lawlessness as an end itself.

Now, I'm back again facing the public, and I have spent an afternoon re-arranging all my furniture for therapeutic purpose. Perhaps all of these effort to 'cure' myself from Versagung is symptomatic of my inability to surrender the surrender, a fear for the spoiled spot on the screen that is the return of the repressed.

Monday 7 July 2008

To Sleep So As to Dream: On Louise Bourgeois


In one of her Cells, Louise Bourgeois sets up a 19th century, or early 20th century 'room' demarcated by a wall of used and broken doors. In this 'room', we see a bed, on which there lie some sheets and blankets with red words embroidered on them. I can't remember exactly what these words are, but they roughly say something like 'let me sleep so I can make my dreams.' Beneath the bed, there are more blankets like this. Next to the bed, there is a side table, on which there are pieces of glassware that remind me, perhaps because of my current research on drugs, opium paraphernalia.

The room perhaps has nothing to do with opium or drug use, but the installation strikes me as a plea for the right to sleep and to dream from someone who is suffering from an intense physical or emotional turmoil.

But do we have a right to sleep? As animal lives, we need to sleep, and it is not so much a question of right that our biological bodies would inevitably fall asleep. Nevertheless, as political lives, this need to sleep is peculiarly translated into a 'right', something that as individuals, we would need to negotiate with the rest of the community. In fact, sleep deprivation is often regarded as a disciplinary tool at school, in torture, in fraternity rushes, as though the surrendering of sleep as a right were a test of loyalty, a contract one makes with the political community by sacrificing the biological functions of one's animal life.

As a means to suppress pain, either emotional or physical, opiate use in the 19th century and early 20th century challenged a political community, whose 'consciousness' of its political life was made ever more palpable by the formation of the medical profession and the power it vested in itself, precisely because it asserted this individual right to sleep, and the transgression of humanity by an animal need over which the polity has essentially no power to intervene unless it translates it into a 'right'. In this sense, opiate use is much more intimately related to one's right to 'die', and the increasingly ambiguous definition of medical death based on what the community sees fits regarding to its control over animal lives.

In this sense, art, by asserting the animalistic poesis, the constant resistance against the translation of the artist's 'will' into a communal 'right', is fundamentally anti-social. The moment art enters the public space, its poesis disintegrates into aesthetics. By 'fencing' a patch of this shared world with a wall of doors, Bourgeois has perhaps attempted to protect this poetic space from the contamination of aesthetics. However, a wall of doors always has the potential to be dismantled, and between doors, there are always gaps through which one can escape into the artist's private space. This 'right' to sleep and to dream can be disintegrated and returned to the animal 'self' if we cease to be spectators, and when we are willing to climb onto her bed in order to dream our dreams.

Saturday 5 July 2008

A Moment of New York


I'm beginning to sober up from my overdose of white wine and margarita. I ended up not going to the party hosted by Dominic--John and I were too drunk to do that.

We saw the fireworks on the rooftop of John's building. We couldn't see much, as the building is closer to the Hudson than to the East River. Nevertheless, it was quite beautiful to see the citiscape that featured the New Yorker sign, watch trains from New Jersey entering the Penn station, and couples appreciating the fireworks that show their heads behind the golden top of the New York Life building. Sometimes, a hidden explosion happened secretly behind the skyscrapers, and its flare spilled out a sheet of red or silver across the sky. You have to love New York at a moment like this.

Now, I'm hearing the wailing from the trains entering the Penn station in the middle of the night, and the sounds of vehicles sliding across the wet 'pavement.' I'm here, in this world, pacifying myself from the dolorous interludes of life.

Friday 4 July 2008

What 'America' Can Truly Stand For


The telltale sign of a cat is her/his hair, something that I have recently discovered every morning in the washbasin of my bathroom.

I basked in joy as I went to New Haven with John today. There was something beautiful and satisfying about riding the train with him, reading my book while he dozed off, introducing him to my hairdresser Holly (one of the coolest human beings I've ever met), and appearing with him together in front of my colleagues. Perhaps it's a sign of age, that I too fancy the pride and bliss of the togetherness and sharing of two beings in the world, the caring and ever-renewal of life that his presence in my little private temporality, a certain comfort in existence out of a certain suspension of what the existentialists would conceive as a state of solitude--a 'taking-care' of the time-outside. I loved every moment of it, as we walked through the reading rooms of the SML and discovered the little squirrel staring at us with its curious eyes--life becomes a transgression of time.

There is indeed a sense of peacefulness in me on this year's Independence Day. The first time I celebrated it with my friends was the summer I spent in NYU. The year after 9/11, Debbie invited me to the rooftop of a hotel around Gramercy Park (or was it the Gramercy Park Hotel itself?) to watch the fireworks. When the homilou sang the 'Star Spangled Banner,' I felt absolutely painful. It has always been painful for a person who was abandoned by Britain by birth, then by China by law, and reinstated as a British citizen only as an act of pity the moment I left that country; but the 4th July of that year reminded me how a nation (any nation) is inevitably built upon the violence that human beings have always inflicted upon each other. In a way, the celebration that year, and for many years to come, was built upon the victims of 9/11, the numerous violated bodies and souls in the War Against Terrorism, and the exclusion of an increasing number of people outside the 'American' law (its constitutional law, and its social ethical values) as animal lives. The immediate reaction of many Americans and those who love this country (and in a way, including myself) that year, was fundamentally at odds with what has always been classically defined as 'American' values. That night, the national anthem instantiated the aporia of what 'America' stands for, an aporia that many 'Americans' have spent centuries to 'make sense of,' to reconcile, and to re-configure in the hope that democracy and freedom would cease to be merely exchange values in the execution of life in a polity, but a state of exception worthy of standing outside the world as the world-to-be not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

What 'America' can be proud of are not freedom and democracy, values that every regime in the world, from the classical period until today, has offered numerous models and versions for their citizens as an imaginary system of biopolitical control. What the Independence Day stands for is the implicit and explicit acknowledgment, for the first time in modern history, that the constitution of a community is, and should be based on, the formation of such ethical values as freedom and democracy under negotiations that are meaningful to the beings who share their world as they imagine. It is the 'inventiveness' of this process of negotiation that offers the possibilities (not always actualities) for people in this political community to constantly rewrite and redefine these ethical values. Stalin and Mao had precisely missed the very point that Marx, Engel and Lenin proposed: if one were to invent an alternative sense of 'history,' one needs to rethink what it means to dismantle the conceptual percept of a system, or a 'principle' of being. By establishing a 'system' or by identifying a 'principle,' a political community begins to sanction a law, a way of being, that excludes other possibilities, i.e. negotiative processes that make up the very material relations that define 'history.'

The fundamental assumption in Bush's War Against Terrorism is the elimination of alternative 'American values.' This terror is precisely the fear that democracy itself would rewrite what his administration has identified as the 'real.' This 'War' is not one between 'America' and the Arabic world the Bush administration has adamantly defined and imaged as a world 'outside', but a frenzied demarcation of the interiority/exteriority of the American polis, a way to close up the juridico-political 'openness' 'America' has always prided itself, a conscious erasure of what 'America' represents, and how its 'founding fathers' have constituted it as a political community that has supposed to question the 'inside/outside' model of how the law is constituted. It has precisely engaged the 'American' people into the very ideological foundation that underlined the inexcusable violence that was imposed upon the victims of 9/11: the animalisation of the human world. To fight against some human beings who have turned themselves into animals in order to execute lives as animals by turning the entire nation into animals has simply perpetuated the human impasse that the law is always founded upon a state of animalisation, and the true spirit of the American Revolution is that such state of animalisation might seem inevitable, but it doesn't need to be, as long as a meaningful sociopolitical negotiation continues to exist. The task after 9/11 is not to perpetuate the fight for a new nomos; rather, it is time for us to rethink what the conceptual percept of the nomos has done to us, its purposesiveness in our sense of history, and how a new material condition (including the distribution of natural resources) can come to terms with our consciousness with the actual violence we face by engaging all beings in the world in the process of negotiation. It is not a reiteration of the centuries-old demarcation between the inside-ousidenesses of the Euro-West versus the 'Orient', but the disintegration of the purposiveness of animalisation in the constitution of this inside-outside relationship, the deep-structured demon that is the core of our terror, a 'pure' globalisation which is not merely a reconstruction of competing empires.

Thursday 3 July 2008

Opium and the Law


My vampiric existence continued last night, though I forced myself to wake up early this morning in the hope that I can start adjusting my sleeping pattern. I forged ahead with my composition. I wasn't terribly inspired, though the passages I wrote sounded 'right.'

I finished reading Opium and the People (Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards). The project is essentially Foucaultian, though the writers never quoted him, because in a way, as social historians (at least as far as this project is concerned), Berridge and Edwards try to resist accepting any figurative model. For them, their book suggests a way to investigate the issue of opiate use and public policies with the epistemological space of Foucault in mind (again, suggested, but not named), but the reader's consciousness of the actual physical and material conditions of the biopolitical structure in British drug politics and policy-making (and in relation to it, the formative elements of the British polity at large upon the basis of the biological lives of the 'people') in today's society (in terms of the book, post-1968 society) is one that cannot be easily negotiated simply through an ontological question.

Policy-making in the twentieth century (and arguably, since antiquity) presupposes an ontological turn that transforms animal lives into humans, and vice versa, and the underlying presupposition of public policy is in fact the management and execution of human lives as animals. As long as the book stays within the concern of policy-making as a symptom of this ontological question at large, the reader is left with two choices: either one must abandon tentatively, for 'pragmatic' reasons, the ontological impasse that the Foucaultian thesis has propounded (and later on, developed by Agamben), and continue to make policies based on the assumption that our democracy is founded upon the execution, exclusion, and management of animal lives in the name of the law, or one must seriously rethink the question how a new way to approach the negotiations of drugs, and our epistemological space that gives forms to their beings (and hence, our understanding of them, their effects, the social, political and monetary values), that would forever suspend the violence of the law and the community that sustain themselves upon the exclusion of lives without any percepts of beginning or an end.

Tuesday 1 July 2008

Eclipse


For a cat, the joy of life can be derived from such subtle things as a touch of the human finger on the fine hair of her scalp, the gentle rubbing of her paws, or simply falling asleep while looking into the depth of the human eyes--the kind of intimacy a child shares with her mother, an absolutely pre-linguistic and unconditional jouissance. Unlike me, my cats never worry about my being on Californian schedule all month, something that has been making me rather uncomfortable these days: going to bed at 4 am, waking up at 10 or 11 am. In truth, the schedule doesn't bother me as long as I don't find excuses not to go to the gym or finish a certain task because it has passed a certain hour; but having said that, I do miss the morning. There is something 'hopeful' about the angle of the sun and the scent of the air, about smelling the first cup of coffee at an appropriate hour, or perhaps even being at the gym without worrying that the sun is going to set by the time I get out of there. Alas, perhaps I am temporally conservative.

In fact, today, things have been feeling like an eclipse. Since I always fell asleep around 10 pm on my couch (and then ended up reading until 4 am after I woke up), I decided to put my blanket next to me and read on my couch at 1 am, in the hope that I would somehow drift off of my own accord. No, life doesn't work that way. My eyes adjusted themselves to the dim reading light and I felt absolutely awake around 4 am. I surrendered to my physiological impossibility (whatever it means), and again, I woke up around noon. I got a peculiar email from Olga (I hope that she wasn't offended by my asking her about the new translation of Shklovsky, or my being too boring), made my music, and didn't bother to use the gym afterwards. Alex came over for dinner, and I made my English curry to entertain him with half a bar of butter (not recommended for myself, or anyone above the age of 30).

The only productive thing today was my music. Yes, Dance, Dance, Dance is finally working as an ad lib. piece for a solo zhongruan and a chamber orchestra (ad lib. aurally, but mathematically calculated). Please let me finish this piece.

Let me see if I could manage ending my vampiric life today.

La Fée verte


I have rather translucent curtains on my windows, so does my neighbour across the street. Judging from the way he is dressed, he has an office job somewhere during the day, and he stays up until pretty late at night. He has a piano room, and a mosaic lampshade. I never thought twice about him until I saw him peeking through his window, with his face mostly covered by his curtain. Perhaps he finds what I do in my apartment objectionable, or perhaps he eagerly waits for me to masturbate in my apartment with utmost excitement. Either way is fine. We all need amusements in our humdrum lives.

Imagining stories behind our neighbours' windows from the titbits of actions passing in front of our eyes is the foundation of urban modernity, of photography, and of cinema. However, in order to truly appreciate the beauty of such fleeting instants captured in the image consciousness, one ought to be able to afford to be free from any human praxis, and the fetishising effort of our social attachment of ethical and monetary values to any human production, or for him, the lack of it. His job is to be frozen in time, in an
ex-stasis that defies chronometric time, and it is in the disclosure of such 'temporality-outside' that he can arrest an escaping instant as a consciousness, savour it, live in it, and partake of its 'caring of'' the world he shares, but stands outside this world of excitement. The flâneur is, in this way, not an aesthetician; for what captures his interest is not the form of artistic production, but the rhythm of life beyond the chronometric sense of time--the death of life that defies the definition of an instant.

It occurred to me today that my creative impasse with
Dance, Dance, Dance is not formal, it is one of poesis. When I thought of a rewrite, I was thinking about an 'improvement' based on the structural framework of what I wrote in 1993; but no matter how hard I try, I cannot create a 'better' piece than what I wrote in 1993, unless I leave that piece untouched. I worked on the third section first, and then broke up the three sections into three movements. I then took away those contrapuntally chaotic moments that really bothered me in the first section. After an hour of work, I gave up. In reality, the only section I feel passionate about is the first section, and that section drives me to ecstasy because it is the soundscape that I admire so much in the music of Takemitsu or Salonen, something that has always been in my head since the first measure I wrote fifteen years ago, but have constantly violated by regulating it with all the rules and rudiments I learned from my academic training. I need to give up the metric system that I have observed so diligently in the first draft, and carry on the soundscape that has the violation and suspension of time as its very foundation.

I have started working on the opium section of the dissertation, and am quite absorbed by all the stories about child doping, opium suicide and all the wonderful elixir of life that late Victorians had enjoyed but denied us by paving the way of modern drug control--a little break from football.

As for now, a little drop of absinthe wouldn't hurt; but a writer dreaming about absinthe at 2 am, instead of flirting with
la fée verte herself, i.e. my poor little soul, is, in my opinion, by definition, ontologically contemptible.