#elizabeth schambelan

[romdocitizen]

Thanks to his hard-won lack of self-awareness, Mishima is oblivious to the conceptual fissures within Sun and Steel, such as the unresolved tension, if not hopeless contradiction, between “seeing without words,” on the one hand, and fetishizing the ultra-erotic beauty of the doomed hero, on the other. The gaze is not a vector of pure libido; it cannot select its targets without language, culture, ideas about what makes something fuckable. You cannot immortalize a hero without representing him, whether in Homeric epic or in a maladroitly Photoshopped poster. Your body cannot disappear into the black hole of ecstatic annihilation and crystallize into an eternal monument at the same time. But Mishima’s peerless power is so totalizing that it apparently neutralizes contradictions by fiat, so that, for example, the most decadent vice of all—the aestheticization and eroticization of deadly violence—can be proposed as a manly virtue, and a philosophy that prizes experience above all else can enfold a vision of sex as the static communion of a calcified body and a desiring gaze. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the promise of a power that simply cuts through the Gordian knots of confusion, ambivalence, cognitive dissonance, all the things that might impel us to consult our self-critical consciences?

If nobody has enough to lose from a revolution to bother plotting its reversal, then it’s not a revolution at all—which means that any year of revolution is necessarily a year of counterrevolution, too. Sun and Steel is a transmission from the dark side of the moon, an artifact of that other 1968, the one Apple never tried to co-opt. That’s what everyone was worried about on the fortieth anniversary of ’68—co-optation, the neoliberal appropriation of the counterculture ethos, the commodification of dissent, the new spirit of capitalism. But all the while, this other beast was slouching along, knowing its time was not yet at hand but would be, in due course, and that a few more years of trickle-up economics would help pave the way. As the historian Timothy Snyder recently observed, with respect to the contemporary recycling of political ideas from the ’20s and ’30s: “Fascism is becoming a story oligarchy tells about itself.” Mishima, like the Italian Futurists before him, reminds us that sometimes, fascism is also a story that the avant-garde tells about itself.

- Elizabeth Schambelan, "In the Fascist Weight Room"

RIP Bookforum, have one of my fav pieces of literary criticism from the past few years in remembrance

[power-chords]

The instructors of West Point understood that the most effective agents of conquest and enforcers of sovereign rule might be people who themselves are not necessarily bound by the rules. In the figure of the “Indian fighter,” the tension between desperado and good soldier was easily resolved in the service of empire, just as it is resolved today in the pop-culture cliché of the bearded, keffiyeh-sporting special operator. These hyperbolic archetypes are the true ideals of reactionary American masculinity, embodying a dynamic equipoise between transgression and authoritarianism. We should take fraternity hazing seriously as a kind of counterinsurgent practice in its own right, a violent resocialization that better equips young men to wield privilege, put down challenges to existing hierarchies, and police the status quo—which is what is happening whenever a bunch of frat guys decides to commit a rape or a hate crime or to express their “revolutionary creed” via some sort of offensive provocation (“Pick my cotton”; “No means yes, yes means anal”). Such acts constitute participation in the irregular warfare by which privilege has always propagated and defended itself. The public record on fraternity initiations has long been robust enough to establish that these rituals are antithetical to the professed values of frats themselves and of the schools that host them. Frat guys understand that hazing is against the rules, but they also understand that the minimal and haphazard enforcement of those rules is a message of permission and facilitation. As Michel Foucault put it in the enduringly relevant Discipline and Punish, torture is “not the expression of a legal system driven to exasperation and, forgetting its principles, losing all restraint. In the ‘excesses’ of torture, a whole economy of power is invested.”

Excerpted from Elizabeth Schambelan's "Special Journey to Our Bottom Line: On hazing and counterinsurgency," which is my harrowing BISR course reading for the week.

[yorkshireword]

"Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a non-rigid, non-complacent orientation towards the world. You're always stepping back and looking at everything afresh, never taking anything for granted, never turning a blind eye to your own complicities and flaws - ideally, anyway. We are committed to criticism not as a way of formulating value judgements, but as a literary-artistic-intellectual practice that has a relationship to irony as definted by Friedrich Schlegel: 'clear consciousness of an eternal agility.'" - Elizabeth Schambelan, Artforum, Sept 2022

[hazardous-waste-containment]

Fascist ideology builds on a concept of the nation as a living organism that can thrive, die, or regenerate, a suprapersonal community with a life history and destiny of its own that predates and survives “mere” individuals and imparts a higher purpose to their lives. [..] As Hitler declared in a moment of lucidity, “To the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul . . . I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued existence in the visible community of the nation.”

“Introduction,” Roger Griffin, in World Fascism

[Fascism] sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.

The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini

The spectacle at the core of fascism’s aestheticized politics—uniformed bodies marching in formation—is atomized in Sun and Steel, the phalanx broken down to its basic unit. The uniform is stripped away to reveal the real uniform underneath, the inhumanly perfect, sculpturesque skin that is the paradigm of all of fascism’s sensuous surfaces [..]. In [..] one of her best-known essays, “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag notes the fascist predilection for “congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing.” [..]

Finally, when Mishima enlists for a brief stint in the Japanese military, he discovers the toxic holism of the fascist “we,” achieving mind meld with his comrades during an exhausting run. “Self-awareness by now was as remote as [a] distant rumor. . . . I belonged to them, they belonged to me; the two formed an unmistakable ‘us.’ To belong—what more intense form of existence could there be?” He adds a telling caveat: “The group must be open to death—which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.”

“In the Fascist Weight Room,” Elizabeth Schambelan

[vermiculated]

Sun and Steel includes virtually no concrete autobiographical details, but can nevertheless be read as an elliptical bildungsroman in which an artsy wimp transforms himself into a jacked-up warrior. Or, depending on your political views, it can be read as an austerely creepy horror story in which an intelligent and thoughtful young man wrestles with the existential temptations of fascism and loses.

Elizabeth Schambelan, In the Fascist Weightroom

[ophelia-thinks]

similar to how the best trick in Trick Mirror was turning me on to the sublime nonfiction horror of elizabeth schambelan the best writing in jenny offill’s Weather is the epigraph: voted, that the earth is the lord’s and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the saints; voted, that we are the saints.

[savagedefectives]

elizabeth schambelan 

[acehotel]

“A woman’s work is revolution, not soup.”

A selection of illustrations drawn by Victoria Lomasko, from her book Other Russias. For over a decade, Lomasko has documented the daily lives of ordinary people who live “on the margins of Russian society” — activists, sex workers, prisoners, teachers and pupils at rural schools, single women in the Russian hinterlands. 

In the post-Soviet culture, the very act of representation is a rebellious one — the practice of art has been delegated to the conceptual, the non-figurative. In an attempt to portray an immediate truth and expose what lies beneath the country’s pervasive censorship, the artist became witness.  In the artist’s own words, 

What I was trying to do, above all, was to break through to a more direct grasp and reflection of the reality around me. 

Pursuing this kind of life drawing was also my way of protesting the insular Russian art scene, and the complete social alienation of artists from viewers — and vice versa...To present a true picture of Russian society, I found I had to become an independent researcher, journalist and activist. I made working at the crossroads of journalism and human rights activism my creative method.

"When I was young, I had a date lined up on every corner.”

“Put Pussy Riot in the trash.”

Other Russias is published by n+1, who is launching Issue 28 of their journal tonight at Ace Hotel New York, with readings by Dayna Tortorici, A. S. Hamrah, Tim Barker, Alyssa Battiston, Richard Beck, Mark Krotov, Nausicaa Renner, Sophie Robinson, David Samuels, Nikil Saval, Elizabeth Schambelan and Jenny Zhang. You can purchase Other Russias on their shop. 

[transjuvenilia]

What that rate is — the percentage of all men who are rapists — is highly contested; a few years ago I frequently saw the figure 6 percent, but there is a school of thought that this is way too high. Six percent is certainly a staggeringly high number; it would mean, for instance, that should you find yourself in a New York City subway car that is crowded to capacity, you may estimate that there are two rapists with you in that car. Happily, if the 6 percent figure is wildly inflated to twice the real number, that would mean an average of only one rapist per car.

Elizabeth Schambelan, Footnote 1 in “Everybody Knows”

[pruzzels]

"It is a rallying cry for our enemies."

“It is a rallying cry for our enemies.”

Wikipedia Poem, No. 876

personnel the paper foundationist movements media cultural ideas or past artist pain their extractor called security behind these facts with their exceptable context neue sachlichkeit: meaning iran // reveals simply view of those meaning iran trump’s war — trump’s official faction of predisposition and foreign-made eventual owners michael…

[vacantgarde]

'cognitive laborer' rather than 'artist': Elizabeth Schambelan talks w/ Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev about Documenta 13 (from Artforum)

Schambelan: You don't list 'artists' on the website—you list 'participants,' and artist is just one type of participant among several dozen, from activist to zoologist.

Christov-Bakargiev: I think that right now there is an urgent need for what I call a worldly alliance among so-called cognitive laborers of every sort, artists and scientists and fiction writers and so on. It is very urgent to speak together and to work together and to be in a state of the propositional together. The notion of 'the artist' is very limited historically. The ancient Greeks didn't have a word for 'art.' They had the word techne, which did not at all mean 'art' as we understand it today but instead something like 'craftsmanship' or 'craft.' So whether or not art will even continue to be defined as a discrete field for much longer is an open question. It is not guaranteed that in a hundred years the Tate Modern's collection or MOMA's or any museum's will be defined as a collection of artifacts made by those who are today called contemporary artists. It might be that there are other aggregations of objects we decide to constitute in spaces of knowledge and of experience. So while I wouldn't define it as interdisciplinary, because that implies a space that is neither one thing nor another, the exhibition points toward an alliance of sensibilities, intelligences, different forms of knowledge, and different ways of acting.

[hazardous-waste-containment]

good reading/listening that i've come across and would recommend:

"Staging the Nation's Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies," Roger Griffin

"Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea," Andrea Dworkin

"In the Fascist Weight Room," Elizabeth Schambelan

"Nation-building and Nationalism under Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram"

"The Doctrine of Fascism," Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile

"The Futurist Manifesto," Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

"Last Statement by Franco," Francisco Franco

Fascism and Big Business, Daniel Guérin

"It Could Happen Here," Robert Evans

[hazardous-waste-containment]

The spectacle at the core of fascism’s aestheticized politics—uniformed bodies marching in formation—is atomized in Sun and Steel, the phalanx broken down to its basic unit. The uniform is stripped away to reveal the real uniform underneath, the inhumanly perfect, sculpturesque skin that is the paradigm of all of fascism’s sensuous surfaces, from the lacquered sheen of Nazi Moderne to the precisely machined weaponry that will roll down Pennsylvania Avenue if Donald Trump gets his military parade. In another one of her best-known essays, “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag notes the fascist predilection for “congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing.” Mishima’s own prose, at times incantatory, fluid, and brilliant, keeps congealing into these campy images of classical, implicitly nude virility. “How, though, could something personal ever become a monument?” he demands. The hero’s body is not personal; it is already monumental. [...]

Finally, when Mishima enlists for a brief stint in the Japanese military, he discovers the toxic holism of the fascist “we,” achieving mind meld with his comrades during an exhausting run. “Self-awareness by now was as remote as [a] distant rumor. . . . I belonged to them, they belonged to me; the two formed an unmistakable ‘us.’ To belong—what more intense form of existence could there be?” He adds a telling caveat: “The group must be open to death—which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.”

Elizabeth Schambelan, In the Fascist Weight Room

[vermiculated]

His newfound “transparent, peerless power . . . required no object at all.” No need of others, no object at all: This is what you might call a highly subject-oriented ontology. But unlike the Kantian subject—the individualist “I”—the fascist subject is plural, as Mishima will eventually discover.

Meanwhile, he is pursuing an impossible holy grail: a sensorium without a brain. “Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!” Perception without thought is the necessary precursor to the “ultimate sensation,” “the essence of something extremely concrete, the essence, even, of reality.” Representation in any form, including language, is a “dubious” diversion from sensory experience. As for expression—the representation of emotions, individual consciousness, interiority—it’s “a crime of the imagination.”

Elizabeth Schambelan, In the Fascist Weightroom