yrmixedfeelings-blog

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

hold (on to) me

February 5th, 2022

Trying to write this post, I’ve been re-reading an essay by Kevin Killian, Poison, which apart from being about New Narrative and life writing and all that other good stuff, is also about “trying to write this piece, Poison… the ways in which the writer's personality dissolves as it weaves in and out of the sentences he or she so painfully struggles to produce.”

I love so many writers who have seem to have a daily practice, or a clearly discernible critical perspective, where the writing just seems to come – obviously not perfect – but already in frame or in style to represent their whole deal. Or maybe that’s what it seems to me from the outside. Maybe some people are better at obscuring the labor of craft, or maybe I’m just jealous. Either way, thinking about reviving Mixed Feelings, there’s no way for insecurity to not untuck a little from the edges of myself. Back in the tumblr days I preferred the outskirts, lurking in awe of Lazz’s textual acuity, Jeanne’s eloquent panache and not saying a whole lot outside of reblogging actually, if we’re being honest. Not that being more dissolute in the scroll didn’t mean I didn’t perform. I sure did. But maybe it meant I didn’t worry about being consistent and I liked that. In some ways I don’t know how to do this platform not testing versions of myself – unfiltered, drafty or uncooked.

“I'm standing on a flat plain, and then, or so it seems, a little hole appears in the sand ahead of me. The hole grows larger in diameter, this is my sanity, and all the little pieces of my sanity are breaking up and slipping down into the hole,” Kevin writes. “While writing… I notice a host of familiar symptoms. Nobody calls me on the phone. I feel so isolated. I can't hear very well and wonder if I'm going deaf like Beethoven, like Brian Wilson. When people do speak it's with loud, ultra-charged voices, as though they're annoyed with me. I feel like I'm losing my mind and with my mind, the meaning of life I once held onto.”

I wrote the sentence “it’s nice to hear Kevin struggle,” but I didn’t mean it. Because it doesn’t seem like Kevin’s struggling to write about writing so much as it sounds like he’s lonely. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then, that he ensconces himself in the social for the rest of the essay, compiling a bunch of quotes from other poets he admires, culling written representations of himself from writing by friends and lovers. Some texts he sifts through; Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Dodie Bellamy’s description of his flaccid cock in The Letters of Mina Harker, a vitriolic and anonymous note that derides his work, accuses him of being another misogynist homosexual. Sometimes, when Kevin parses these facsimiles of his person and thinks through how he’s received by others (not uh, without a few artfully ruffled feathers), it becomes difficult to tell what’s his slanted poetics, what’s an external account and what Kevin’s unconsciously caricaturizing about himself.

And yet, after all that, still he reaches the end of the essay still not writing, “trying not to write.”

Instead; the hole in front of him widens. The objects and ephemera that compose his life – books, movies, foods –swirl down, cave in. Ineffable gravity as he too, slides towards the void –

“I’m next, perhaps, hold on to me,” Kevin writes.

I get it.

How to write about one’s life, without losing oneself to others?

Maybe I don’t know how. My favorite thing about Kevin is that I’m not sure he ever did either. 

*

Probably it’s like, gauche or something for me to talk about writing or not writing when there’s COVID at hand, but everything is gauche in comparison to COVID and faced with it, sometimes my feeling is that people don’t know what else to talk about. They still ask me what I’m working on though, probably more out of a matter of habit than anything else. I’m always like, what can I write when I don’t even know what to say, I don’t have anything to say.

But then, “I think performance of self is a really important site of knowledge, actually. For me,” I say to Lazz on the phone and then feel like a fucking idiot.

Because okay, the truth is I haven’t been ‘writing’ towards any kind of goal, but I’ve needed to write nonetheless as a matter of figuring out my shit. And apparently what that looks like is like spitting up close to 200k of fanfiction in the past year or so, an activity I haven’t been so fully committed to since high school. For those unfamiliar, idk, look it up. Most days, I grasp for what fandom is, or is to me and come up embarrassed and stuttering. Is it gross porn, yes. Epic romance, sometimes? Collective consciousness? That too. Intertextual experiment or archive? Maybe fan studies chose to legitimize it that way, which fine, I guess. Hive mind. Friendship. Discourse (derogatory). Object-cathexis (affectionate). All of those things at once.

There’s a lot to say about my return to fandom after over a decade obviously, and even if I’m into public processing, it would be kind of a Lot to get into it On Here. But suffice to say, as much as it’s been about comfort, sure, regression, maybe, it’s also been about the bizarre and inherently queer intimacy of getting to know others online based almost entirely on the type of porn they like to read – their specific kinks and sexual preferences – before knowing anything else about their lives. It can feel more honest that way. I mean, how tame a confession is what food someone likes to eat or what books they like to read if I already know they’re into erotic cannibalism. That age-old adage that you learn more about someone from the way they like to fuck or whatever.

My friend Lee often talks about fandom as public sex culture, like the leather bar or the backroom, and to be honest that’s probably the closest analogy we’re going to get. So much in fandom is ambiently promiscuous – all that rubbing between reader and author, text and fantasy, collective consciousnesses and cultural trend, sex and voyeurism, politics and representation, art and genre. Everything misted with the damp, atmospheric air of the slightly horny. But it’s also always necessarily restrained or mediated – by the internet, geographic distance, levels of anonymity and curated timelines, textual performances. If Lazz talks about “the lubricated seventies of the past and the lonely fifties of now,” then I’m not sure what this kind of space is, where there’s sexual content but not sex, displaced personal disclosure but no ascertained fact, deeply vulnerable projection but no self.

I mean, whatever, look, we’ve all read enough theory to know that what’s hot almost definitely ethical, so I’m not positioning fandom as a utopic space by any means. As with any writing, what’s fucked up about the world gets inevitably dragged into that space too. Not to mention fandom’s still operates primarily through digital-social platforms and the internet, the engine upon which it all runs has no shortage of problems, if there’s anything the self-imploded undead tumblr twitterverse substack cluster has taught us. Still, there’s something about fandom that’s buoyed me, an alternate form of intimate contact at a time where everything is shrink wrapped and “the zoom screen delineates the property lines of the liberal self.” (Lazz) No one makes any money from writing fic really. I have not felt the kind of fuck-it no-stakes energy I’ve felt writing it since I was 13 and writing was what I did for no reason other than it allowed me to share an imaginary with friends and that was a lot of fucking fun.

There’s no way to dance with new paramours or friends in these times, not in any kind of real way; with abandon. But with some of the connections and collective libidinal energy I’ve shared in fandom have produced something… proximal to that, maybe not physically but psychically. That can produce that satisfyingly visceral stomach-curl.

What I do know: there’s pleasure there. That’s not anything to sneeze at.

*

Once, in a moment of emotional distress, and on the edge of doing something consequential and foolish, as I am so often compelled to do, Jane texted me sternly “yeah, you can’t melodrama your way out of this.”

Unfortunately, she was right, and it was helpful.

What Jane had been referring to in this context was, of course, less related to melodrama’s generic features – a reliance upon scripts and formulas to evoke high sentiment through a number of cliched permutations – and more my desire to find a quick ending to a complex social problem, however illogical. Just the quickest route between point A and B. My desperate quest for a rushed and unrealistic conclusion, imposed upon the situation arbitrarily by means of extreme happiness or tragedy. That patented false ending.

I have narrativized my life for a long time and LOL, continue to do it. I am an addict in all senses of the term. But in the enduring present of ‘personal’ social media branding and mobilizations of experience through legible identity categories, it’s feeling weirder and grosser to use the partitioned events of what’s happened to me as the tenants of any intellectual argument. I used to say that it was important to live critical theory as a way of understanding it and theorize within the messy geometries of my relationships, but maybe I read too much affect theory at an impressionable age.

Maybe all I’ve been doing is trying to file down the ragged tips of my experience; force it into the forms of theoretical hypotheses and conclusions that feel purposeful in a deeply uncertain time. Definition is very attractive, like muscle. Polemics and declarations are good means of melodrama-ing myself out of whatever should have been left alone to mellow and ripen, and maybe decay. Like, surely I’ve watched enough Sirk and Fassbinder to know that it doesn’t actually work?!

Sometimes, I think fiction writers are so much more brutally honest in how their stories contain aspects of their lives. Life writers need to be much better liars.

Kevin writes, “every time I write it’s to expose to the air of the page a false part of my personality… part of my own need to find myself on centerstage always.” Same, and it’s exhausting it turns out, to inhabit a self that’s slipping away all the time. To constantly draft stylized sketches of me to justify whatever abstract concepts I’m noodling around, or trying to compose some strident “take” or argument about.

*

“I’m good at making people think they know me; very few people actually do,” I say to a new friend and then feel like a fucking idiot.

“I was going to say, that actually sounds very lonely,” another says to me.

*

I’ve been thinking a lot about how fanfiction can take many forms, from pure porn without plot to realist novel-length escapade or screwball romantic comedy. But I tend to write stories where the setup is fraught with interpersonal conflict and the erotics/romance end up serving as stand-in – for an impossible solution to an irresolvable political or theoretical problem. Trying to plug that gap with experiential intensity but ultimately, everything left hanging out.

“haha u found me out that [redacted] is basically jen doyles entire argument in fic form and i am NOT sorry,” I type at Lee one afternoon on Discord, after they’ve completed their first read of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art and clocked similarities between Doyle’s argument and the intellectual thrust of a piece of fanfiction I’ve posted set in the performance art world. In another of my fics, the development of a three-way love affair takes precedence over the minute details of militant leftist infighting. I almost write a remix of a scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria where French kissing in a sound studio would patch over the stunningly off-kilter, awkward articulation of difference the film seems to propose.

Weird not weird, I guess, to realize that writing fanfiction like this does a lot of emotional work for me actually. Like, this way I can articulate the maze of my paranoid thinking about art or theory; the contours of how the world’s real and terrible, yeah, but at least I don’t have to pretend I’m capable of saying anything smart beyond wanting to cry or jerk off about it or both.

Making whoever reads my silly little stories want to do the same.

*

Is that a kind of touching?

My friends and collaborative duo Snack Syndicate write this after Sedgwick, in their incredible book Homework:  

“Touch is not a leveling gesture, even when reciprocated… Touch does not make us undifferentiated from the one we touch, nor does being touched mean we become the one who touches us. If anything, the opposite is true: touching emphasizes difference – otherwise we would not experience it as touch at all. And so, we might desire the kinds of touching and feeling that bring us into social and collective forms; a touching and feeling that seeks not to possess that which is being touched but to hold on and then let go. Perhaps we can be more careful in our touching and more critical of our being touched, more careful with the tendency to equate touching with identifying, identifying with seeing, seeing with knowing, and knowing with possessing.”

Recently I’ve been reading this quote compulsively, because or better or for worse, ‘touch’ these days is weighted with constant negotiation – and rather than it being fraught, I want to believe it’s a site that can feel critical, generative – in our nostalgia for touching, our search for new and different forms of it.

Maybe I’m naïve. I’m clearly prone to romance. But –

“Hold on to me,” I read Kevin beg an invisible spectator outside of the frame – right as he’s about to disappear into the hole and grasping for a hand that will never come. He knows he’s made it this way. I do too. And it strikes me that maybe I no longer want to proffer myself or my life to be seen or read in the ways that I’m used to. Not in email, or on twitter or zoom calls, or on the page, none of those glitchy representations that I used to treasure for being archly performative or slyly fake. Maybe I just want to be touched in a way that makes me feel – not like an entity to be deciphered and slotted into place – but situated in the ongoing process of being known. Not as object but in that nebulous, reciprocal way of being shaped by others.

Someone’s hand on the nape of my neck, or my nails skritching gently through their hair. Contact – brief enough to simmer my insides, but intent enough to let me know where I stand. Where the shared outlines blur but we can still belong to ourselves.

And as for Mixed Feelings – maybe it isn’t that, exactly. So much about what I’ve written here already feels frustratingly familiar. Well-trod, both in form and content. Somatic memory, undead return in the scroll, tired PowerPoint presentation from 2016.

Here I am, like Kevin, still not writing, just recollecting and being collected. Maybe I do identify with him, too much.

I want to believe this can be a space to prod around about it. To hesitate and think and yeah, touch maybe, without obligation. How else are we going to find a different way to be.  

*

[redacted] leans down. Soft kiss, grazing his forehead. “[redacted],” he says, fingers cruel in his hair. When [redacted] comes—wet eyes, arched back—it’s on a pretty half-sob. His volley of masks cracked open, scattering light over the tenderest parts of himself. And later in bed, slack and sinuous, he binds the rest of [redacted]’s wounds. Lets [redacted] lick the rest of it off his hands. Tongue flat against the creases of [redacted]’s palm, past the dents of each knuckle. [redacted]—who savors every drop, the viscous slide of come and blood and medicine down the back of his throat—and burns. With the unfitness of—whatever this is—the push-pull of it, this love. How because of it, they’ve found a way to keep going that’s not about dying, or living; or anyone else’s illusion of what might come.   Just breathing and a pulse. Suspended sunrise. What’s here. What’s now.   “Stay,” [redacted] says. There’s meaning to his tone. A halfway look in [redacted]’s eyes. Anticipation too, can be a posture. Coiled tension before a jump.

*

Hold me. I won’t mind if you let go.  

- trisha 

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

tiny portions

January 31, 2022

· Audio: Tiny Portions

Image: Interior of St. Marks Bath after the closure. 1993. Photo by Ira Tattelman. Via. 

In Motion of Light in Water Sam Delany describes seeing a mass of gay men for the first time. It was in the 1970s on his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse. He walked into a “gym-size room” drenched in blue light, where he made out 16 rows of beds and about 125 men — “an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall-to-wall.” What astonished him was something he labored carefully to describe. 

“Let me see if I can explain,” Delany writes. In the fifties the image of homosexuality was one of “solitary perversion. It isolated you.” But “what this experience said was that there was a population — not of individual homosexuals, some of whom now and then encountered — not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather millions of gay men...” 

Image: St. Marks baths illuminated sign, New York City, c. 1917. Via NY-Historical Society.

He felt a similar fear when the police raided the trucks parked at the docks beside the West Side Highway. The cops might drag a handful into the wagon but what you’d see is what they didn’t catch: hundreds of men fleeing through the cargo and down the street. It was this image of gay masses that produced in Delany a kind of frightened awe, a major difference from the monadic perverts populating the public imaginary.

“Institutions such as subway johns or the trucks, while they accomodated sex, cut it, visibly, into tiny portions. It was like Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. No one ever got to see its whole.” 

The piece he mentions, Eighteen Happenings, is the 1959 Allan Kaprow performance that “engaged the audience” (in 2022 I might as well be reading an Ikea brochure) by giving them postcard cues that told them how to participate. There were 6 sections with 3 “happenings” that occurred simultaneously. Like a silent rave. Is there a better image of neoliberalism, or whatever nominal hellscape we’re living in, than a silent rave? A dance party without common music, where everybody moves to sound that may or may not be what everybody else hears, and music delivered individually rather than carried by vibration, tactility, interference by other bodies? This is what I hate about substack but I digress.

The deconstructed rave reminds me of Matthew Crawford’s description of working out at the YMCA across from Berkeley High. It was 1979, the weight benches were red sparkly vinyl and the room seemed mostly neglected, save the die-hard dudes loading the squat racks every day. The common music came from a cassette player in the corner and people would either vibe to it or complain, but it was linked to somebody. Decades later Crawford stared at a floating speaker in the ceiling at a university gym wondering who the fuck was in charge. When he asked about the music, the student desk clerk said he “didn’t want to impose his choice on others.” We’re all suffering from the absence of a certain kind of imposition. 

When Delany saw these masses of gay men he felt fused with an overarching whole. “Whether male, female, working or middle class, the first direct sense of political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies.” 

I can’t stop thinking about Delany’s careful scene because it’s the closest I can get to a description of the present. Except the lubricated seventies are the past and the austere, lonely fifties are right now. 

Images: Top, St. Marks locker room after closure of the baths. 1993. Photo by Ira Tattleman. Bottom, official court order, 1985. Photo by Rene Perez.

I don’t want to acclimate to the loss we’ve suffered since the onset of covid. In pandemic time a totality has been pared down — to individual nuclear units, to a rotating few people, to the actual interior of your house. Even the zoom screen delineates the property lines of the liberal self; we can only rub outer dimensions of identical geometries. In person, interactions are cut up into tiny portions. One-on-one hangouts because risk is low. Everything has become so dyadic, and for me, this means more risky. I want a dyad to be enhanced by its social lubrication. I wanna see you free associate with your object world, and not in a judgmental way, just for the feeling of lubrication. 

I’ve tried to describe the grief I feel from this degree of social loss. The best I’ve done is to say I miss feeling hot in circulation. Or to recall the demonic feeling of walking into a sea of dykes at Ships in the Night, where everybody’s fine and mean. (I was heartened to hear daemonum x mourning in a similar way here.) The only sea I’m seeing right now is a heterosexual one at the university gym, or traffic, which is just a scaled-up zoom room. US social life was stripped down before Covid, and without this virus it would’ve been right for someone to complain about the meagre collective sense on offer. Liberalism’s isolating effects have only been enhanced. Someone recently asked “How are things in your world?” with an air of utter separation. We live in the same town. But we also live in the world and the world is shared. I want connection without property lines, which is not the same as bad boundaries. 

Some of Jack Halberstam’s recent work (on Alvin Baltrop’s photos of the NY piers) is premised on the idea that we don’t live in the same world, or moment, as Sedgwick and Muñoz were living in when they wrote about “worldmaking.” He studies Baltrop’s photos of queer people and “collapsed architectures.” I think queerness and dereliction have always been intertwined. Fucking in abandoned places. Outerspace and post-apocalyptic vistas. Finding the interstices of capital or whatever’s the opposite of spectacle. As long as we live in this version of a world it’s fine for architectures to be collapsed. But I don’t want my social world to resemble this aesthetics of collapse, settling with the drywall dust or razed for a new Costco. So I’m gonna keep remembering what it was like before, resisting the presentist amnesia that the before was where it was at, and knowing that every encounter has the potential be more rich than the circumstances would have it.

-lazz

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

Mama U Dress Like a Ho

January 21, 2022

My friend Sara Jane came to New York when she was 18. For weeks she couchsurfed at strangers’ apartments and somehow landed at the Rikki Lake show. Someone handed her a ticket to the studio in Chelsea. Before going on air they plucked people from line and designated them "of interest” for an aisle seat, meaning Rikki was more likely to talk to them. Sara Jane is hot, and in 1997 she was the specific strain of attractive that requires you to do nothing: young. I think it’s the lactic acid. Tiny drops oozing from every pore, giving an overall gleam. It’s probably also how America  outsources all sensuality to this age range. Regardless, she was a teenager dressed up and excited to be in New York. The theme that day was “Mama u dress like a ho.” What SJ remembers is grown children complaining about their moms’ “wacky teen clothes” and reckless lifestyles. (From the list of episodes SJ thinks the title might’ve been “Mom You Party, Steal, and Act like a Ho.”) From her aisle seat SJ raised her hand and Rikki came over with the mic. “I don’t know what all of your problem is,” she said, “because these women seem like so much fun.” 

*****

I can’t stop thinking about an episode of Queer Eye. It’s the new season set in Austin, Episode 1. The makeover dossier is 58 yr old Terri White who teaches line dancing at her family’s honky tonk, the Broken Spoke. Terri is almost sixty and dripping sex appeal: she whips her long blonde hair on the dance floor, making visible movements of the body that only long hair can. Her shorts show her thighs, her great legs, but only for a short visual window before the viewer’s eyes hit her suede over-the-knee boots. Cleavage. But her appeal isn’t only visual. It’s the authority and wit, how she moves. A proclivity for taunting, flirting, and dishing back. Through a combination of editing and verbatim quotes, the impetus for her makeover begins to cohere: Terri needs to be on this show because she refuses to accept her age. “She’s wearing Daisy Dukes?” one of the Fab Five is shocked to hear when they’re reading her profile in the car. Tan, in charge of wardrobe, is shocked to see her closet, lamenting the length of her shorts as he holds them up for the film crew. “One of the main personalities that is shining very bright [in her closet] is hoochie,” he says.  

The Fab Five will admit that Terri’s hot, even rave about it. “I think I have a crush on Terri (???)” Antoni says after seeing her hold an audience. But their mission is to align her more with the cultural role of grandmother. At the same time they’re all taken with her, Karamo’s voiceover says something like “if this was my grandma I would be like Granny what are you doin?”

When Tan asks to talk about her closet she explains that she doesn’t wear long dresses because “you can’t dance in em.” Her attire is where labor and sex meet. She needs to move. With him she gives the most lucid exegesis on aging. “Inside you feel like your soul is young. You *feel* young. You have the same taste as you always did. And I gotta dress like Granny?” From the beginning Terri displays resistance to maternal exile and the aesthetics associated with grand/motherly role. She has a desire for autonomy, and simultaneously there is also a compulsory autonomy, and this speaks more to her affective guardedness (“I’m protective of me, because if i don’t shine my buttons no one else will”). They want her to be more vulnerable. The psychotherapeutic industry is irresolvablably paradoxical. It wants to course correct the survival tactics people develop to survive in an uninhabitable world, to make people more raw as if they didn’t live in a radiating, painful reality.  Anyway, Tan’s reply to Terri’s resistance is “But you *are* a grandma.” 

When it’s time for the hair appointment Jonathan asks if it’s wig and she says no. This segment is the most raw, and if there weren’t so many of these moments I’d say it was the punctum of the episode. Terri describes what aging has done to her hair: “I noticed….bad textures….falling out…changing…you’re like what is happening. I know how to camouflage.” Despite the expectation that the makeover artists have full reign and thus full access, she refuses to let them see her without hair — whatever this means, since she’s said it’s not a wig but then Jonathan calls it a wig later in the episode. Is it a wig? Extensions? Whatever, I think it looks great. In the salon she’ll only allow them to style her hair as she already wears it. “I don’t want an exposure” she states.

Importantly though, the person who nominated her is her daughter, a highly together, type-A Catholic, whose son is moving in with Terri after he graduates high school. She’s hesitant about this for many reasons. There’s a lot at play here, the daughter’s early parentification notwithstanding, but also at play is a group dynamic and insistence that Terri play her maternal/lineal role. Terri should be the maternal figure they want her to be, which of course is a relatable need, a selfish need: to feel that one’s mother exists entirely for you.

The idea that mothers are sexual is an open secret; conversely, that mothers aren’t sexual is a cultural mandate.

But in addition to these lessons (“dress your age” and play the correct societal role), the episode is also about accepting yourself. There is a collapse of accepting an aged, asexual visage and of accepting oneself that I ultimately think is bad pedagogy. The question I kept fixating on was why does she have to accept her age? For that matter, why does she have to accept herself? What does it mean to “accept yourself” in a world that doesn’t value an unedited AFAB body (as if such a thing exists, an unedited body) when it isn’t young. This is the same question feminists deliberated over in the second wave. The question remains unanswered and mostly the same. 

The fate of woman is planned obsolescence. Why be “real” when you could be happy? Why be authentic when the game is rigged?

Let her be gonzo and decked out. Let her be all the way fake. If everyone else uses performance enhancers — the apotheosis being money, and the most available being the basic technology of gendered presentation itself — why should older women bear the burden of authenticity? Why can’t each of the Fab five accept themselves as they are — Tan without manipulating silhouettes and first impressions; Jonathan...I don’t know they get more perfect with every shift dress and gesture of compassion; Karamo without star-bright whitened teeth; Antoni without hours of targeted sculpting at the gym. 

I’m interested in artifice and why it can’t be afforded older women.

I guess I just think they squandered an opportunity to pose paradigm-shifting questions about age. Why can’t she conduct herself according to fantasy? According to desire? Why can’t her short shorts and plunging necklines lend an interpretation that she actually accepts herself, and paves a path for older people who still wanna fuck, dance, and circulate without totally emptying themselves out? I don’t often see representations like Terri. There are very few models of an aged woman who retains her libido.

It’s pretty rehearsed: desire in older men shows they’re anywhere from normal to powerful to a pervert and a pedophile. But what happens to desire in older women, it dwindles into resignation? They transform into becoming an empty vessel for the care of others? Or perhaps resentment and judgment of younger women? Triangulated and twisted into malice (i.e., Maleficent). The Cougar and MILF are notable exceptions -- fittingly pornographic categories and they still they have an age limit. (It’s also worth noting that over 25 or any thickness qualifies MILF in a lot of porn). Maybe the only avenue for an aging woman to retain her sexual subjectivity is to embrace the pornographic.

This is also rehearsed: a lot of older women talk about invisibility. Vivian Gornick’s “Even Smart Women Hate Losing Their Looks” (2010) is about how  the women in her CR group are now older and coming to grips with the fact that a youthful look is what afforded them adventure, opportunity, and reception from other people. The supermodel formerly married to the singer of The Cars, Paulina Porizkova, now almost 60, posts IG pics of herself in lingerie and processes in public about what aging means. Like Gornick, when she passed 50 years old she still burned with desire but nowhere to engage it. Gornick this process is either a downer or a source of stimulation. At a certain point for both of them it became “interesting.”

In a draft somewhere I wrote that getting older means not being considered by young ppl, which isn’t the same as not being hot. It’s ultimately an error in reading. This is why queerness is like a fountain of youth. Like, leatherdyke is one name we give to women who won’t relinquish libido, who against compulsory maternalism have cultivated the right to be selfish. Transitioning or being queer at all can be a way out of sexual obsolescence because it’s about signification and knowing how to read.

Sam Delany in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue: “My sexual ideal today tends to be substantially over forty.”

*****

Since this episode I’ve been thinking about what it means to refuse to age and how synonymous that might be with refusing to court death. 

My Mother Laughs, the book Chantal Ackerman wrote as she was caring for her dying mother, is all about how her mother wouldn’t accept age or death. “...I told her you’re not 18 anymore...When I told her you’re not 18 anymore, I could see her world crumble. She refused to eat, she refused to drink....and I understood that she was letting herself go, she had stopped resisting. What good is there in no longer being 18?” 

In another excerpt her mom insists on changing hairdressers. Chantal says her mom had “three hairs on her head” but when she visited him she came back feeling really good. “Yes, she came back coiffed. The hairdresser successfully hid the fact that she has only a few hairs on her head. I ask myself how but the proof is there. So she let one person or another come for a coffee in the afternoon without embarrassment or shame. Well-coiffed.”

I’m grinning. Is life only worth living through fantasy? It’s not easy to tell when fantasy becomes destructive. 

Joan Didion repeatedly wrote that she believed aging wouldn’t happen to her. Age moves differently on people. I’ve never forgotten her standing frail over a white bread cucumber sandwich. Didion seems to have lost her appetite. Terri’s is ravenous.

The makeover they gave Terri included a new fridge — a bigger version of a vintage one she had in her kitchen. She loves it. She also slips in this comment: "He got an old fridge, young.”

- lazz/liz

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

love trumps nothing

Nov 15th, 2016 christopher bollas recently wrapped up a one-week residency at UC Berkeley on the theme “unconscious perception.” it ended the friday before the election. those in the seminar read and discussed his work for a month beforehand and then sat with him for a few hours during each day of his visit. it was clear that the election was an implicit referent and that there was collective reticence to circulating trump’s name, but this fell away pretty early on.

we started by talking about the “group mind,” which bollas approaches through his training in Group Relations (GR). GR employs a method by psychoanalyst wilfred r. bion called the tavistock method, which “concentrates on the individual only insofar as s/he is manifesting something on behalf of the whole group.” in group relations what one person says is not treated as commentary on the individual per se but as a function of the group mind. instead of “sarah thinks this” a facilitator might put forward “the group thinks this” or “what do we do with the part of ourselves that thinks this?” thus the person isn’t isolated, and paranoia is kept to a minimum. i think it also brings to light unconscious material that may be shared but voiced by few. in groups, there’s often the idea that the solution when someone does something we don’t like is to eradicate them (e.g. the war on terror). there is also the idea that we need to find the perfect group, when bollas maintains that “we have a group, but we don’t want to be in it.” his point was that you can’t purge difficult people from the group process, “they are the group process.”

referencing the pre-election polling that had clinton slightly ahead of DT, bollas asserted many people in the US had gone the way of hate as opposed to its more difficult alternative, love. “the group mind of the US is psychotic, we must have a way to reconfigure our group mind and find non-psychotic ways to relate.” the foundation for the seminar was really laid by this early conversation on love and hate. love is very precious, bollas maintained, because it’s not easy to come by and it’s not common. it takes an extraordinary amount of effort and time. but, if you want to hate you will have a companion for life. the child’s first powerful word is no, and with hate comes power; around ages 4, 5, and 6 that new power is intoxicating. hate is highly pleasurable, it’s more reliable, it can be generated individually because it doesn’t require another person like love, and it’s easily transmissible. bollas said that hate is when the self begins to kill love, and as this happens it reduces complexity. paranoia and hate are mechanisms for simplifying and therefore feel pleasurable. love is harder because the price of connection is pain.

in this sense, the phrase “love trumps hate” is a misplaced ontological confidence, to quote @afieryflyingroule. it’s the kind of empty untruth that is partly to blame for the results of this election. the paradox of love is that it doesn’t outpace or surpass anything. it’s constitutionally more delicate and easier to destroy. what is important for group life is that the compulsion to destroy is an investment in staving off pain. bollas argued that the flip side of the right’s paranoia is the left’s sanctimonious rectitude—the righteousness that is paired with having the correct answers and just pointing to or calling out what’s wrong; neither is open to dialogue. 

knowing that racism might be an attempt to stave off pain does not warrant sympathy or forgiveness but rather provides an opening to those who might take it. “what am i trying to protect myself from? is it working? is an alternative more beneficial?” those harboring racism or protecting their right to accumulate capital are invested in separation (and/or destruction) because it is synonymous with ego enrichment. contrarily, many are invested in destruction or separation from the first group because their lives are at stake. as jina b. kim succinctly posted the other day:

I’m also tired of “agreeing to disagree.” Your opinion means the disproportionate death of black, brown, poor, immigrant, disabled, and queer communities. My opinion means your white uncle doesn’t get an extra boat this year. (via)

what many are staving off by “hating” trump and his supporters is deportation, incarceration, misery, impoverishment, and death. the stakes are entirely different. 

i’m still thinking about what to make of the gap between the two. the acts of pointing that get us nowhere. responses to [un/conscious] ego enrichment that might shed light on similarities. and who this burden falls on because others refuse to take responsibility. jill gentile recently wrote a book likening free speech in democracy to free association in psychoanalysis, arguing that in neither case is the importance of free speech really explained. why do we value it? she says that the following passage from freud indicates that he had already detected the democratic process in free association, because he did not just value solipsistic speaking but named a hearer, a partner in the journey of free association:

“Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental change in the person to whom they are addressed.” (Psychical [or Mental] Treatment,” 1890)

gentile argues that what is missing in the first amendment is a commitment to the process of hearing and translating; the polis values speaking but not listening. “we need to restore a good faith relationship” between listeners and speakers.

bollas via group relations would say: we’re in a group and we’re responsible for the group mind, whether we want this one or not. this is what i walked away from the seminar, into the election, and now around inside of its aftermath thinking about, with extra attention toward openness that doesn’t feel pleasurable and might even be dangerous. i don’t have a lot of answers and feel more uncertain than anything else. but how one might do something other than multiply paranoia or feed off hatred is on my mind. “the broader part of love is to encounter hate in ourselves,” bollas said at one point. “to admit that is our ironic statement of love for people around us.”

-liz

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

The Male Sentimental

by Liz Kinnamon

The "sensitive guy” should be understood through the lens of what pop psychologists call emotional manipulation, and his proliferation is the result of two things: the rise of feminism and the rise of immaterial labor. 

At Cannes 2015, a crowd of hundreds competed for entry into a midnight screening of what was called "the most titillating movie of the year": Gaspar Noé's Love. Noé earned a reputation as "world's most dangerous director" and "cinema's L’Enfant terrible" due to graphic depictions of rape, violence, and sex in his previous films (Enter the Void, Irreversible, I Stand Alone). But his newest work reputedly sidelined violence in favor of a more intimate portrayal of sexuality, and specifically between people in love. In the words of the lead character, who Noé says is fashioned after he and his friends, this was to be "a movie that truly depicts sentimental sexuality." 

Since its release, Love has predictably gotten the most attention for its explicit sex, which constitutes about fifty percent of the film's screen time. The opening scene features the central couple engaged in mutual masturbation and culminates in the male partner's ejaculation (multiple reviewers write that they masturbate each other to orgasm when in fact there is no indication that she reaches orgasm during the film: it centers fellatio, intercourse, cunnilingus as foreplay); the couple visits a sex club in Paris and enjoys a threesome with a girl neighbor; and viewers are subjected to a penis ejaculating directly at the camera—all of this in 3D (1). Recalling outraged responses to Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)—whose producer is also Love's—the movie was controversial at Cannes, with some claiming that the 2 hour and 14-minute film never graduates from pornography to art and others walking out. 

The synopsis goes like this: Murphy (Karl Glusman), an aspiring filmmaker from America who now lives in Paris, wakes up to a woman lying beside him and the sound of a baby crying from another room. A voiceover narrates his thoughts upon waking: his life is a nightmare, his house is a cage, he hates this woman he ended up with. Through the fog of a hangover he listens to a voicemail from the mother of an ex-girlfriend he had a falling out with two years before. Electra (Aomi Muyock) is missing, have you been in touch with her? she frantically asks. As his current girlfriend Omi inquires about who called—or rather tries to talk to him at all—he ignores her while the voiceover lashes back, "I wish she'd just shut up," and later when she asks again, "I'm sick of this bitch. Go take care of the baby and leave me alone." 

He then begins to spiral into a sinkhole of nostalgia about his relationship with Electra. After a series of painfully hampered domestic moments, Omi finally departs with the baby and leaves Murphy to his dejection. As he walks from room to room half-alive, he recalls the day Electra handed him some opium and told him to save it for an occasion when something bad happened and she wasn't there. Deciding this was the day, he walks over to a shelf, pulls out a baggy stashed in an empty movie case (which happens to be Noé's I Stand Alone), and swallows the pill. The entirety of the film is based on the present tense setting of that apartment on that day, as Murphy cycles through various flashbacks of their relationship from the beginning to its tempestuous end. The flashbacks are interwoven with scenes of Murphy moping about in the apartment—in bed, on the telephone calling around about Electra, and finally crying in a bathtub doused in red light. 

Murphy is tormented by the memory of Electra and the thought that they might never have another chance. Their relationship dissolved because Murphy secretly continued sleeping with the neighbor they invited over for a threesome. When Electra found out by learning that the neighbor was pregnant, she cut ties with him and turned to drugs, leaving him bereft and desperately seeking reconciliation with a person who was now unavailable. But while many cinematic portrayals of suffering tend to soften characters' unlikable choices, or make the way they hurt others more understandable because they themselves are hurting, Murphy's pain never quite succeeds at inspiring compassion. In fact, the viewer is not gripped by the conviction that Murphy merely made a mistake, neither is one moved to identify with him—a critique leveled by reviewers from the NYT, Indiewire, and Telegraph. The flashbacks picture him in bed showing a different ex the same puppy-like devotion, and this destabilizes the audience’s faith in the singularity of his feeling for Electra. Viewers also learn that Omi was not his only infidelity. One gets the sense that his "love" could land anywhere and that he'd betray whoever fills the position because of that cocktail of easiness and detachment. 

One of the most unsettling parts of the movie is a flashback of a party scene about two-thirds of the way in. Murphy grips a beer bottle by the neck and performs a drunken monologue for a female partygoer while Electra stands by. "Do you know what my biggest dream in life is?" he emphatically asks the girl. "My biggest dream is to make a movie that truly depicts sentimental sexuality."

MURPHY: (Gesturing toward Electra) She doesn't care, she's heard this a million times before. GIRL: Yeah, I like it. MURPHY: You like it? GIRL: Yeah. MURPHY: Why? Why haven't we seen this in cinema? GIRL: Yeah. Right, I agree. MURPHY: I'm sentimental. We should be like babies. ELECTRA: Are you an actress? (Pointing toward the girl) GIRL: Yeah, I agree with you. MURPHY: You're an actress? GIRL: Yeah. MURPHY: What's your name? GIRL: Paula. MURPHY: Lola? PAULA: Yeah, Paula, I'm French but I love to speak English. MURPHY: Yeah well it's very good. What's the best thing in life? PAULA: Love! MURPHY: (hesitation) Love...And then after that? PAULA: Sex! (laughter) MURPHY: Yes, and then you combine the two, and sex while you're in love. That's the best thing. 

Directly after this dialogue, a stranger asks Electra for a cigarette and Paula takes the opportunity to whisper into Murphy's ear. "I need to show you something." He complies and follows Paula, turning to shrug at Electra and leaving her to fend off the stranger's advances. When they get to the bathroom Murphy gestures at his nose to hint at cocaine, but the girl pulls out a condom from her bag. As she approaches he feigns protest and they fuck on the edge of the bathtub to the sound of Electra knocking on the door. He even reaches up to cover Paula's moans for fear they will travel, signaling his awareness of wrongdoing; he then subsequently rewrites that gesture by slipping his fingers into her mouth. 

When Murphy exits the bathroom he approaches Electra and rubs her arm. "Hey," he says warmly. She swats at him, "Don't touch me," because she knows. But even in the face of her knowledge he persists with his clueless performance by asking her in a concerned tone, "Are you okay?"—mystifying the fact of his infidelity and transferring fault onto her accusatory disposition. He continues to lie to her, not even caving when she inserts her own infidelity as retribution. "I cheated on you with Noé," she fires back, referring to her ex (a gallery owner who is not only named after the director but played by him as well). This would have been a perfect opportunity for admission and mutual absolution, but at this, Murphy becomes irate and verbally attacks her on the taxi ride home, calling her a whore, an untalented artist, a venomous cunt, and telling her that she’s incapable of being a mother. 

Because Murphy is difficult to identify with, a schism is formed between the viewer and Murphy’s plight, and the effect of this distance is that the lead character becomes less of a subject and more like an object whose subjectivity is on display. Midway through the screening I attended, many viewers walked out either offended or bored, but when something is boring it is often a signal to pay closer attention. Noé presents the banal of male dominance in an unflattering and rather arduous light, and Love's most prominent aspect is not sentiment but the way patriarchy operates through sentiment itself. Noé and Murphy use the term "sentimental" to refer to sensitivity and feelings generally, but a handful of scholars—from Sarah Vap to Lauren Berlant and Saidiya Hartman—zero in on a definition of sentimentality that is constituted by manipulation (2). For Vap and other writers in A Symposium on Sentiment (2012), something is sentimental when it attempts to provoke feeling that is not merited by what is happening; when it is contrived or unrealistic; and when it is "the enemy of emotional complexity." 

Fittingly, a recurrent critique of the film is that the characters lack depth. The New York Times wrote that the movie might be 3D but "in every other respect, it's exasperatingly one-dimensional." BBC wrote that Murphy is "all bluster and no depth." And Indiewire observed, "Noé's screenplay falls short of offering much dimensionality to Murphy's laments." They level these critiques as if the shallow quality of the characters is a failure on the director's part. While attributing a critical ethic to Noé might be overgenerous, he was not unaware of Murphy's character; in an interview he described Murphy as a "redneck" who is "more obsessed with partying than doing anything else in life," in addition to noting that Murphy "pretends he's sentimental but the guy is not as sentimental as he thinks he is." What none of the critics entertain is that Murphy's emptiness might be precisely what is worth focusing on. His dialogue throughout the film is so bromidic and immature, his wretchedness so self-imposed, and his wallowing so unwarranted—and all of it ironically happens at the same time he continues the disregard that led to his initial problems. Even more interesting is that the director simultaneously identifies with his lead character, admitting to Indiewire, "More than half of my friends are in the film industry, because I hang out with directors or visual effects makers, so I decided that I would do a movie about the kind of people that I am or I know." Noé recognizes himself in Murphy but stops short of any meaningful insight—as if awareness of criticism amounts to exemption from it. 

What Love ultimately brings into focus is not love but a twisted and entirely commonplace masculine subjectivity: what I am calling the Male Sentimental. The Male Sentimental is an overarching genre bracketing a variety of characters that have proliferated over recent years: the fuckboy and the softboy; the manchild and Kay Hymowitz's video-game playing, basement-dwelling, extended adolescent; 2015's explosive hashtag #masculinitysofragile; "the creative type"; male feminists (see porn actor James Deen, who, when confronted by his girlfriend Stoya regarding rape, called her tears "abusive"); Drake; the manarchist and his variations; the New Man (a la Martin Amis); and what Laura Kipnis calls "the victim." It is a genre that describes a general mode of patriarchy wherein “feeling [is used to secure] domination” (Hartman) (3). The Male Sentimental operates through a version of sentimentality that is definitionally manipulative, contrived, and simplistic. He wields sensitivity to escape responsibility, disorients others by dissolving their feelings into a smoky haze, and trades in guilt. Rather than emotional, he exists in a constant state of emotional fugitivity. One way of thinking about the Male Sentimental is as a kind of masculinity one dips into or out of—not so much a fixed identity as a method or a practice. 

Taking a step further, the tactics utilized by the Male Sentimental are nearly identical to those wielded by—in the lexicon of pop psychology—emotional abusers, manipulators, and blackmailers. The reason Murphy's behavior at the party is so instructive is because in this single scene, he engages in prototypical behaviors of emotional manipulation from Susan Forward's 1997 book Emotional Blackmail—from feigned innocence (shrugging as he walks away, retorting "What are you talking about" when Electra calls him out); gaslighting (making her doubt her knowledge by acting confused); the spin (shifting focus from his betrayal to hers and attacking her character and self-worth); and what Forward calls "brandishing anger" (when the sheer intensity of Murphy's rage overwhelms Electra and the conflict at hand). 

Ultimately I am suggesting that a better way of thinking about patriarchy is as emotional manipulation. Characterizing it as misogyny, or "hatred of women," increasingly misses the mark because it fails at descriptive precision (4). Hatred seems vague, outlandish, or unrelatable and this makes the accusation easy to dismiss. With the rise of feminism’s influence, patriarchy has sought different techniques, echoing Foucault's belief that politics use a "sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force." The Male Sentimental can ultimately be seen as the result of a bargain with feminism: one can be a man with feelings, pass the feminist test, and still keep power. Patriarchy operates at the register of emotion where it can’t afford to operate through violence or coercion. In this light it also becomes quickly apparent that the appeal of the sensitive male subject is subtended by his potential for violence. As Eve Sedgwick's therapist once described her father, "someone who could punish but doesn't, or whom you can relate to so that he won't.”  

Those who deal with this kind of character—in media representations, op-eds, and narrative tropes—often respond by expressing surprise at the realization that his softness is coverture for misogyny. Some remain undecided as to which aspect of his personality prevails, because the shady jerk and the thoughtful guy couldn't possibly be the same. But isn’t the Male Sentimental an open secret? Or does he still enjoy success because his very category is one defined by deception? The genre of the Male Sentimental helps us think about the methodology of patriarchy, and in eking out a genre my effort is to constitute “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation” (Berlant). 

While one explanation for this shift in patriarchy is the influence of feminism, another concerns the rise of so-called immaterial labor at the turn of the century. Just two years prior to Forward’s book, Daniel Goleman published the now-famous text Emotional Intelligence — which he quickly adapted for the business world as Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace in 2001. With these publications, Goleman inaugurated an explosion of emotional intelligence in organizational literature that began in the 1990s and constituted a multi-million dollar industry by 2004. Even though many credit him as the concept’s founder, he admittedly drew on a 1990 essay by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, who defined the term as “the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions . . . the ability to regulate and alter the affective reactions of others.” 

Going back even further, one finds that these authors relied on the early intelligence researcher E. L. Thorndike, whose 1920 essay broke up the homogenous category of intelligence into three different types: mechanical, abstract, and social. His definition of social intelligence had “feminine” built right into it, as this type “shows itself abundantly in the nursery”; in fact, what is common to the work of Thorndike, Salovey and Mayer, and Goleman is that emotional intelligence is mostly the domain of women, and that the motivation for their work is to translate it for men. 

[From “Emotional Intelligence,” Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, 1990.]

For Salovey and Mayer, part of emotional intelligence was what Erving Goffman called “The Arts of Impression Management,” or the ability to control the impressions formed by others. “The skilled impression manager knows when not to attend to the behaviors of others,” they wrote, in an uncanny resemblance to the ethos of institutional risk management (RM) today. Of course, RM exploded during the 1990s too, and was shaped by the simultaneous growth of emotional intelligence. The risk manager, in other words, is emotionally intelligent. Like Murphy in the party scene, risk managers are less concerned with preventing original mistakes than they are with managing others' responses to them and ensuring their own strength as individuals or institutions. They are tasked with managing the "secondary effects" of primary risks, like reputation and effects of popular protest—as is evident in the hollow administrative speech in recent incidents of sexual assault, racism, and political protest at US universities. The parallels with emotional manipulation are unmistakable here. Risk management is the logic of the Male Sentimental at an institutional level. If one were to place the bullet points on emotional manipulation from Forward's text alongside those detailing the techniques of risk management, one would be shocked at their resemblance. As patriarchy became more emotionally intelligent, its targets were burdened with wading through emotional manipulation. No wonder The Guardian published an essay in 2016 titled “’Women are just better at this stuff’: is emotional labor feminism’s new frontier?” Neither naturalized female emotional skill nor the existence of emotional labor are new, but perhaps a structure of feeling is giving way to something emergent.

If we take the 1990s as a point of proliferation, we might indulge a slight detour past two examples of the Male Sentimental at the institutional level—moments from both Bush presidencies. The first involves a list TIME published in 1994 of instances when George H. W. Bush cried, titled "Annals of Blubbering." On this list was the occasion that Bush Sr. had invited Paula Coughlin to the Oval Office. Coughlin was the Navy lieutenant who blew the whistle on what is known as the Tailhook Scandal, in which 140 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps officers were accused of sexually assaulting 90 victims at an annual conference. At Coughlin's testimony in federal court in 1994, she explained, "[Bush] said he had just found out what happened to me and he was very, very, very upset. He said he had a 31-year-old also and (then) he started to cry. I really didn't know what to do...I didn't know if I could cry any more." According to the fascinating last sentence of Coughlin's testimony, Bush Sr. effectively stole something from her by adding something else: his tears. His display amounted to something like a primitive accumulation of emotion, as this was no longer about Coughlin's experience but about his ability to feel. He made many promises of repair, including a full investigation, but interestingly, what resulted from this "scandal" was not criminal prosecution of any of the officers involved or any significant overhaul of sexual assault policy in the military. Rather, the outcome was greater access for women into the armed forces. The display of national empathy for survivors in this case enabled the nation to re-up its military capacity by enlisting more women in combat, setting into motion an expansion of the military's roles for women that that finally became complete in 2015. 

In 2008, Bush Jr. presented a Medal of Honor to the parents of a Navy Seal who died in Iraq during the War on Terror. After giving a brief overview of the Seal's heroism, Bush paused, contorted his face, and made a clunky gesture for the parents to come onstage and accept the medal. He was attempting to visualize his grief in that delay and he continued to do so when the parents arrived onstage. As the mother stood next to him in a pastel pink suit and they waited while a female voice announced the award, Bush made a theater of empathizing with her. Within the space of a few seconds, Bush can be seen tapping her on the leg so that she turns to him to make eye contact. Directly after she smiles and then turns away to face the audience, Bush turns back and takes a finger to the corner of his eye in what looks like the wiping away of a tear (1:19). Bush had gotten her attention to flaunt his emotional reaction to the loss of her son. A few moments later someone hands Bush the medal, and when he passes it over to the parents, they look down soberly at the wooden box that now stands in for their son. These two brief anecdotes of U.S. presidential action by a father and a son call attention to the way in which a peculiar legacy of male sentimentality is woven into the fabric of U.S. Empire, colonialism, and war.

***

Speaking of legacies, Love has one of its own. Critics balked at Noé’s self-referentiality, since at least three characters in the film directly reference him: Noé the gallery owner (an older, married man), Murphy (the director's mother's maiden name), and Murphy's unplanned son—unsubtly named Gaspar. When Murphy cries in the bathroom toward the end of the film, his son enters and Murphy brings him into the bathtub while the both of them cry. “Forgive me,” he melodramatically sobs to his toddler. The image conjures something like a family lineage. Gaspar Noé, the director, is the baby and the father who asks for the baby’s forgiveness. (Noé actually confessed in an interview that he expected his father to be moved by that scene in the screening, and instead his father said “you went too far.”) Likewise, because the gallery owner is played by Noé, one is prompted to ask about the director’s identification with the older married man who cheats on his wife just as much as his identification with Murphy, who has been betrayed. Sure, the film is a house of mirrors, but perhaps more important than Noé's particular case of narcissism is what Noé shows us about legacies of masculinity. Each of these characters are ethically bankrupt but their choices, from father to son, are entirely consequential. The Male Sentimental might be a cipher, in the words of the NYT, but his emptiness can destroy the world—whether at the level of generational inheritance or on a global political scale.

Critiques of Noé’s self-referentiality recall charges against “female confessional” writers like Dodie Bellamy and Chris Kraus. The Buddhist and I Love Dick are the kinds of accounts by female writers that are typically considered to be narcissistic, banal, and abject, but because the works interrogate those very accusations, the texts are known for the way they “expose” the machinations of patriarchy at the level of intimate relationships. “Life is not personal,” Kraus wrote. And Bellamy: 

To reveal or not to reveal—this is a core question for many writers. This business of women not suffering in public, of having a gag order when it comes to personal drama, such as a break up, connects back to larger histories of suppression, such as the literature of victimization, women not daring to speak of rape or incest [. . . ] and somewhere buried in there is the history of the wife being owned by her man and therefore she better keep her trap shut, and bourgeois notions of suffering with dignity—or dignity itself, how oppressive a value is that? 

Surely with a little rearranging one could suggest that Love is similar in form; the film is a piece of endurance art that asks its audiences to watch the accumulation of male wrongdoing in messy slow-mo, albeit from the perspective of a male protagonist. But what is different about Love and female confessional lit, aside from the fact that the “confessional” piece in the former is written by the one responsible for exploitation, by the one placed at the helm of power? Can a feminist male confessional lit possibly exist?

I want to suggest two major differences. First, consider an argument by Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. She examines the writings of John Rankin, an abolitionist who argued against slavery by appealing to the white audience’s capacity for empathy. He wrote that he grew indignant at the thought of himself and his family as slaves, urging other whites to imagine themselves in place of the enslaved in order to feel the wrongness of slavery. But Hartman questions whether this process of empathy “ameliorate[s] indifference or only confirm[s] the difficulty of understanding the suffering of the enslaved.” By substituting himself for the black suffering body, what Rankin did was to perpetuate the unfathomability of black sentience. In this case the subject who empathizes merely feels for oneself but fails to “expand the space of the other.” Hartman’s problem with empathy is useful here for the fact that descriptions of suffering are always in relation to the question of empathy, and one could consider whether works of literature that describe male dominance like Kraus and Bellamy’s are attempting to create empathic effects. I would argue, however, that readers would deem the endeavor ineffective if they think these texts attempt to mobilize change through empathy. Alternatively, Kraus and Bellamy are “expanding the space of the other,” they are expanding the space of female subjectivity. The difference between their work and Love's male confessional lit, in this case, is that masculine subjectivity is already everywhere all the time, and Love doesn’t expand it in the sense that it opens up masculinity to better possibilities.

Second, Love differs from female confessional lit because it never imagines another relationship to power. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant coins the term “diva citizenship” to describe the testimonies of Harriet Jacobs and Anita Hill. For Berlant, diva citizenship is when 

a member of a stigmatized population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship. Her witnessing turns into a scene of teaching and an act of heroic pedagogy, in which the subordinated person feels compelled to recognize the privileged ones, to believe in their capacity to change; to trust their desire to not be inhuman; and trust their innocence of the degree to which their obliviousness has supported a system of political subjugation. 

It might be a stretch to extend the possibility of diva citizenship to a white male character like Murphy. After all, he doesn't belong to a stigmatized population. But the leap I want to make is that perhaps both Murphy's character and Love could have been acts of a sort of diva citizenship or at least a variant of parrhesia if they had spun male sentimentality in the light of renouncement. "The real threats,” Elizabeth Gumport writes about Kraus, “are artists who refuse to stop there—who move from confession, which describes a situation, to analysis, which seeks to explain it." Noé and Murphy’s sentimentality could have been problematized in such a way that it hailed the appropriate viewers, “trust[ing] their desire not to be inhuman” and offering something other than intransigence. They could have been draft dodgers or deserters. But instead Love portrays a character who is unwilling to change, both representing and embodying the well-worn masculine mantra “don’t try to change me.” Kraus, Bellamy, Hill, and Jacobs—though very differently from one another—implore society’s dominant actors to change, to learn. They offer information that amasses an archive available to those who are willing. But the lesson and the condition of Love is that power entails a positionality that continues despite consciousness of destroying people and things, of causing suffering. A willed unwillingness. The film lingers on the emptiness at the center of power. 

[The title flashes in quotes at the end of the film, as if to mock its own naming.] 

The purpose of establishing a genre may be to form a compendium of information and resources for those who choose otherwise, for those who want to change. Is knowledge never corrective? What is its purpose? In the words of Virginia Jackson, genres are "modes of recognition—complex forms instantiated in popular discourse, relying on what we could or would recognize collectively, in common—and so subject to historical change and cultural negotiation." Forming a genre offers opportunities of attachment and detachment—the way a climber ascertains the next possibilities when scaling a wall. The Male Sentimental might work through negativity, such that one more easily recognizes it or can arrange oneself in relation to it. It at least lays bare the willingness at the start of change.

Notes

1. Mike D'Angelo of The Dissolve is one reviewer who projected mutuality onto the opening sex scene); Nick Schager from The Daily Beast is another. Schager writes: "[Love] opens with a man and a woman pleasuring each other, to completion, in one long, static, unbroken take." 

2. It has been difficult to find much on patriarchy’s use of sentiment as manipulation. Saidiya Hartman writes about the way sentimentality functions in the reproduction of racism, as well as the role of “feeling” in the context of U.S. chattel slavery. Lauren Berlant writes about sentimentality to elucidate its role in national politics. Sarah Vap et al. write about sentimentality’s multiple valences in the realm of poetry, and Vap offers a variety of meanings in The End of a Sentimental Journey that do touch on its connections to gender, though mostly in an effort to challenge female writing as "sentimental." The co-editors of Sentimental Men (1997) argue that feeling was not always relegated to a feminine realm, but they are interested in breaking down the immediate association of women and feelings. They do not explore the role of sentiment as a technique of manipulation.

3. The mechanism by which white subjects detract from their own racism by retreating into feeling is similar to the Male Sentimental, so the absence of #whitefragility might seem peculiar here. To quote David L. Eng, “liberal white guilt eschews ethical responsibility toward the native other precisely by psychically colonizing its suffering” (2016). But the structures for liberal white guilt and patriarchal sentimentality are not identical. For accounts of the way feeling is mobilized with regard to race, see David L. Eng’s “Colonial Object Relations,” Social Text 126 34 (1), 2016 and Robin D’Angelo’s “White Fragility,” The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3 (3): 54–70, 2011.

4. To the contrary, a common maneuver is to emphasize worship of women: claiming to identify with them, exalting them, or being drawn to strong women in what amounts to a deferral of emotional responsibility and viewing women as sites of respite, what I might shorthand as a womb wish. Beautifully, one reviewer wrote of Love: "as an example of its writer/director’s obsession with rewinding time—back to more blissful early romantic days, if not all the way back to the womb (note its, and Enter the Void’s, views from inside a woman’s birth canal)—Love employs carnal centerpieces for candid self-expression. It’s another step in Noé’s continuing cinematic reversion therapy."

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

Alli Warren is the only person in the mixedfeelings crew that I developed a friendship with in person. I tried to kiss her but we friendzoned each other too fast, we got distracted because it was easier to roll out secrets with her than regular conversation. Over a year or so I’ve learned certain tics she has, as I’m sure she knows mine. The way her voice gets higher if it’s late and there’s wine, how she smiles in a certain way after she’s said something, totally deadpan, if she’s fucking with me.

“yeah, i agree unequivocally that DC can/does allow space for difference. and that physical manifestations (gestures blinking looking bored) often get misinterpreted for truth. there can be/often is a disconnect. but i’m kind of into the prospect of syncing them, to better align my communication with external signs as a service for the other, idk “

I’m fascinated with how much people want to place an emphasis on physical manifestation as a space of authenticity, but I guess it comes out of courtesy, politeness, each in its own way the most ubiquitous form of interference.  But if, like BP is saying, digital communication can in fact be a difference-oriented mode of expression rather than a lesser-than or stripped down translation of face-to-face communication, I’m also interested in how gestures might embody themselves digitally.  Call me a quote unquote poet, but how does the digital space give itself to to these kinds of gestural undercurrents that might function in the say way as the movement of a hand, or the slight roll of an eye. How many hours has it been since someone sent that email?  Why aren’t they replying when they’re usually so quick? Why did they like that post that I didn’t think they would, or how is that reblog really working in the larger context of our online relationship?

The funny thing about online communication is that you can only work in fragments, especially if you’ve never met someone IRL. Which means that often the relationship is predicated already on misinformation, something that never fails to delight me.

Up until a month or so ago I pronounced Jeanne’s name Je-ANNE rather than JEAN until an IRL friend gently corrected me. I see the error as a mark of faith or fangirl-ism, the dislocation of a fact through the digital world still deposited directly back into my mouth.

I can tell the tenor of what Alli Warren wants to tell me on gchat through the length of her pause.

Still have a lot of thoughts about the idea of sisterhood as stalking, the kinds of silent, invisible, unknown intimacies that are drawn throughout a network of tumblr, the kinds of paranoia it can engender because of the lack of location, the fact that everything is founded on misinformation or the possibility of it. I like the tenderness of the conspiracies that we web over and involve each other in.

Recently reading Blindfield’s introduction to Conspiracy Cinema of the Long Seventies – conspiracy as “the degraded attempt… to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system,” – where the fragmented impossibility of a unity is closer to an empirical reality. thinking about internet paranoia as the kinds of gestures that are akin to the lowering of someone’s eyes, our fragmented way of finding a different socialty that is not entirely premised on directness or authenticity.

Lyle’s tumblr is very involved and misquoted in my book, something that happened before I even knew her. Something that still gives me shame and awe - that something so vague could become emotionally sharp once i found the person amidst all the lazy/casual reblogs.

Once, I thought Liz was talking about how I was being over-eager on tumblr without directly naming me. It had appeared after we met each other for the first time IRL, I was worried about my demeanour. I emailed her something frou-frou to hide my discomfort - “am aware of the kind of blunt narcissism and paranoia of this email for which i am sorry!”, “but in any case i hear yr feelings and if i did indeed make u feel in that certain way with my eagerness, i just want to apologise.”

Liz responded - “OMG!!... i like you. like, definitively” Liz might have said to me something like “I like you” before, but I believed it differently now. It wasn’t the IRL interaction though, it was the patterning of our online communication afterwards.

I’m on the plane, watching the new James Bond movie because everything else seems to cost $6 to see. Every James Bond movie has a particular ‘tension’ or contemporary issue that it seems to address in order to make a movie about suits, martinis and womanizing somehow still glamorour or relevant, for the nostalgia to seem sharper or poignant. Whatever, I like it. There’s a moment where the new M is talking to a superior about to shut down the MI6 program in favour of what are essentially drone strikes and a regime of total surveillance.  M says, the thing is, when you send an agent to eliminate a suspect, there is still a moment where he has to look at the living, breathing person right in front of him, and then another split moment where he has to decide to kill him. I’m bored already so I turn to my computer because the directness of this binary is already irking me.

- trisha

What if we decided on a set of rules for digital communication

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Liz Kinnamon and Benjamin Powell on 2/1/16.

Charles Atlas, Tornado Warning

LK: i’ve been thinking today about what if we decided on a set of rules like the declaration of human rights but for the internet. not etiquette exactly, but like,  “it’s okay to be brusque in your emails especially if you’re a woman; it doesn’t mean that you hate anyone or that anyone hates you” because of so much paranoia. like i’ve been thinking about how i sort of don’t even know how to read digital communication. tone

BP: yeah man. seriously. part of the problem is that i think the context shifts so much 

LK: what do you mean? 

BP: like pick up the phone at 4am and i’ll be like________ but at noon I might be like _______. i dunno, digital communication feels, well, like communication, in that it totally depends on a whole host of feelings, moods, moments, in order to interpret and process and understand. 

LK: yeah, but i think the problem is that the context of digital communication is…an abyss it’s an imagined field the context isn’t concrete at all, except perhaps the time of day—and that isn’t even set. it’s 2:30 here and 4:30 there. 

BP: ok. so you’re saying that trying to determine the range of possible contexts from digital communication, or like an object of digital comm is almost impossible because there are so many? an object being like, an email 

LK: yes. and because there’s not a calm body looking back at me in 3D, whose presence alone soothes me and sort of nips potential paranoias from spinning off 

BP: right. 

LK: so determining the context of the object is like a game of squash. the context is a lot in your head. what do you think? do you have a similar experience? 

BP: sure. i think a lot of what you talking about is like talking to someone with an accent. like, i almost never get paranoid or misinterpret things that you send to me over email or text or on tumblr because, i dunno, i recognize and commune with or am down with your communication form. it’s like when I’m around someone from New Orleans or Virginia I immediately recognize and slip into usage. i don’t know if the metaphor works all the way…comfort through recognition, but in digital comm there is no set of rules or common usage that sets up a field of meaning 

LK: yes, totally, but the accent denotes region which means other kinds of shared communication habits no set of rules—except hegemony. 

BP: right right exactly regionality of the internet is real i think 

LK: but how is it determined? how does one belong to one region and not another? 

BP: i mean, it’s probably why i could immediately pick up with you afk when we met in the city for the first time. i mean i think tumblr is an example. like, sites where we congregate, where we develop certain reading and writing styles are very similar to, like, seeing a jack in the box everyday. haha. so you’re saying common usage values in order to stand in for the presence of an other, as a way of grounding context a bit. 

LK: hahaha. i agree only to a certain point; many of the people we both follow have drastically disparate styles 

BP: of course. of course. 

LK: yeah, something like a contract that we could individually refer back to as groundrules for interacting without direct bodily presence 

BP: but it isn’t the quality or content of their blogs, it’s that the habits of reading and writing on tumblr establish an interpersonal dynamic much differently than Twitter or Facebook or the comments section of an Atlantic article. 

BP: right but aren’t you just privileging face to face communication? 

LK: see i’m not sure, i think that might be too romantic 

LK: give me something more specifically illustrative of what you mean and i am privileging face to face, though less face to face (cuz interspecies humanimal contestations) than bodily withness 

BP: hmmmm ok. i’d argue that face to face communication is no more direct or real than digital communication and that our culture tends to put too much weight on non-verbals as truth-telling indicators within human communication. oftentimes my nonverbal listening or reacting has nothing to do with the communication that’s occurring between me and an other person. however it is an immediate form of communication and as such reactions or responses tend to be more instinctual and less reflective when compared to, say, reading an email, thinking up a response and then writing the person back. so, like, within digital communication we have to rely on other things like parlance, shorthand, form, format, to ground our understanding of the other person much the same ways the presence grounds our understanding of an other when communicating to them with the understanding that time in/of digital communication functions much differently than face to face. 

BP: (i’m not suggesting we don’t reflect in face to face, but that we also don’t sit for hours thinking up a response in face to face USUALLY) 

LK: sitting for hours thinking up a response face to face sounds like a great performance art piece. 

BP: hahaha. 

LK: i’ve been reading some studies about different kinds of interpersonal communication and oxytocin. one took a group of young girls from 7-12 and subjected them to some kind of lab stressor, then separated them into four groups— after the stressor, they were allowed 1) direct interaction with a parent 2) no interaction, solitude 3) instant messages with their parent and 4) phone with their parent 

BP: oh wow 

LK: basically, the girls who got to interact with their parent over the phone or in person had higher levels of oxytocin and lower levels of cortisol and the ones who texted or were in solitude the inverse 

LK: i might be inclined to protect digital communication similar to the way you are now, especially because so many people who inspire and interest me, and who i genuinely care for, have been via the internet and we mostly communicate that way 

BP: i think that makes total sense. 

LK: but i think at this point, my response to your thoughts would be to question what is meant by truth-telling via non-verbals. because i think it’s less that face-to-face tells the truth about an event or truth about a communication and more that non-verbals (and i’ll include general sentient presence here) tells the truth about withness that can be intrinsically comforting 

LK: if that makes sense. and now all i want to do is make a performance piece about taking your time to respond. 

BP: totally. i get that. i agree. i meant, generally, that people think nonverbal are somehow more true in that we reveal what we really think nonverbally. like, nonverbal as the manifestation of the unconscious. which isn’t always the case. yeah i mean mostly i’m generally interested in looking at digital comm as an extension of human communication rather than some less than form of communication (which i think it often gets pegged as) as a means of fostering and giving space to difference and difference-oriented modes of expression that happen in digital spaces or digital contexts. 

LK: yeah, i agree unequivocally that DC can/does allow space for difference. and that physical manifestations (gestures blinking looking bored) often get misinterpreted for truth. there can be/often is a disconnect. but i’m kind of into the prospect of syncing them, to better align my communication with external signs as a service for the other, idk 

BP: so like, are you trying to minimize miscommunication? 

LK: yes — maybe that’s what the initial proposal is essentially about! 

BP: yeah. i mean your post is so spot on about jettisoning professionalized internetting. i don’t know. reducing interference in communication is so hard because so often it has nothing to do with things we can control which runs so counter to what we think about communication which is — i think this thing, i make a message to communicate this thing, i communicate this thing. 

BP: Like, that’s not communication because there’s nothing about the other person in that model at all. so much stuff out of our control. i’m running on and on. you got work to do go do it. i always think of these exchanges, as, like, just another piece of our ongoing relationship. 

LK: they are. i love thinking about this together. will think more about reducing interference.

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

What if we decided on a set of rules for digital communication

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Liz Kinnamon and Benjamin Powell on 2/1/16.

Charles Atlas, Tornado Warning

LK: i’ve been thinking today about what if we decided on a set of rules like the declaration of human rights but for the internet. not etiquette exactly, but like,  "it's okay to be brusque in your emails especially if you’re a woman; it doesn't mean that you hate anyone or that anyone hates you" because of so much paranoia. like i've been thinking about how i sort of don't even know how to read digital communication. tone

BP: yeah man. seriously. part of the problem is that i think the context shifts so much 

LK: what do you mean? 

BP: like pick up the phone at 4am and i’ll be like________ but at noon I might be like _______. i dunno, digital communication feels, well, like communication, in that it totally depends on a whole host of feelings, moods, moments, in order to interpret and process and understand. 

LK: yeah, but i think the problem is that the context of digital communication is...an abyss it's an imagined field the context isn't concrete at all, except perhaps the time of day—and that isn't even set. it's 2:30 here and 4:30 there. 

BP: ok. so you’re saying that trying to determine the range of possible contexts from digital communication, or like an object of digital comm is almost impossible because there are so many? an object being like, an email 

LK: yes. and because there's not a calm body looking back at me in 3D, whose presence alone soothes me and sort of nips potential paranoias from spinning off 

BP: right. 

LK: so determining the context of the object is like a game of squash. the context is a lot in your head. what do you think? do you have a similar experience? 

BP: sure. i think a lot of what you talking about is like talking to someone with an accent. like, i almost never get paranoid or misinterpret things that you send to me over email or text or on tumblr because, i dunno, i recognize and commune with or am down with your communication form. it’s like when I’m around someone from New Orleans or Virginia I immediately recognize and slip into usage. i don’t know if the metaphor works all the way...comfort through recognition, but in digital comm there is no set of rules or common usage that sets up a field of meaning 

LK: yes, totally, but the accent denotes region which means other kinds of shared communication habits no set of rules—except hegemony. 

BP: right right exactly regionality of the internet is real i think 

LK: but how is it determined? how does one belong to one region and not another? 

BP: i mean, it’s probably why i could immediately pick up with you afk when we met in the city for the first time. i mean i think tumblr is an example. like, sites where we congregate, where we develop certain reading and writing styles are very similar to, like, seeing a jack in the box everyday. haha. so you’re saying common usage values in order to stand in for the presence of an other, as a way of grounding context a bit. 

LK: hahaha. i agree only to a certain point; many of the people we both follow have drastically disparate styles 

BP: of course. of course. 

LK: yeah, something like a contract that we could individually refer back to as groundrules for interacting without direct bodily presence 

BP: but it isn’t the quality or content of their blogs, it’s that the habits of reading and writing on tumblr establish an interpersonal dynamic much differently than Twitter or Facebook or the comments section of an Atlantic article. 

BP: right but aren’t you just privileging face to face communication? 

LK: see i'm not sure, i think that might be too romantic 

LK: give me something more specifically illustrative of what you mean and i am privileging face to face, though less face to face (cuz interspecies humanimal contestations) than bodily withness 

BP: hmmmm ok. i’d argue that face to face communication is no more direct or real than digital communication and that our culture tends to put too much weight on non-verbals as truth-telling indicators within human communication. oftentimes my nonverbal listening or reacting has nothing to do with the communication that’s occurring between me and an other person. however it is an immediate form of communication and as such reactions or responses tend to be more instinctual and less reflective when compared to, say, reading an email, thinking up a response and then writing the person back. so, like, within digital communication we have to rely on other things like parlance, shorthand, form, format, to ground our understanding of the other person much the same ways the presence grounds our understanding of an other when communicating to them with the understanding that time in/of digital communication functions much differently than face to face. 

BP: (i’m not suggesting we don’t reflect in face to face, but that we also don’t sit for hours thinking up a response in face to face USUALLY) 

LK: sitting for hours thinking up a response face to face sounds like a great performance art piece. 

BP: hahaha. 

LK: i’ve been reading some studies about different kinds of interpersonal communication and oxytocin. one took a group of young girls from 7-12 and subjected them to some kind of lab stressor, then separated them into four groups— after the stressor, they were allowed 1) direct interaction with a parent 2) no interaction, solitude 3) instant messages with their parent and 4) phone with their parent 

BP: oh wow 

LK: basically, the girls who got to interact with their parent over the phone or in person had higher levels of oxytocin and lower levels of cortisol and the ones who texted or were in solitude the inverse 

LK: i might be inclined to protect digital communication similar to the way you are now, especially because so many people who inspire and interest me, and who i genuinely care for, have been via the internet and we mostly communicate that way 

BP: i think that makes total sense. 

LK: but i think at this point, my response to your thoughts would be to question what is meant by truth-telling via non-verbals. because i think it's less that face-to-face tells the truth about an event or truth about a communication and more that non-verbals (and i'll include general sentient presence here) tells the truth about withness that can be intrinsically comforting 

LK: if that makes sense. and now all i want to do is make a performance piece about taking your time to respond. 

BP: totally. i get that. i agree. i meant, generally, that people think nonverbal are somehow more true in that we reveal what we really think nonverbally. like, nonverbal as the manifestation of the unconscious. which isn’t always the case. yeah i mean mostly i’m generally interested in looking at digital comm as an extension of human communication rather than some less than form of communication (which i think it often gets pegged as) as a means of fostering and giving space to difference and difference-oriented modes of expression that happen in digital spaces or digital contexts. 

LK: yeah, i agree unequivocally that DC can/does allow space for difference. and that physical manifestations (gestures blinking looking bored) often get misinterpreted for truth. there can be/often is a disconnect. but i'm kind of into the prospect of syncing them, to better align my communication with external signs as a service for the other, idk 

BP: so like, are you trying to minimize miscommunication? 

LK: yes — maybe that's what the initial proposal is essentially about! 

BP: yeah. i mean your post is so spot on about jettisoning professionalized internetting. i don’t know. reducing interference in communication is so hard because so often it has nothing to do with things we can control which runs so counter to what we think about communication which is — i think this thing, i make a message to communicate this thing, i communicate this thing. 

BP: Like, that’s not communication because there’s nothing about the other person in that model at all. so much stuff out of our control. i’m running on and on. you got work to do go do it. i always think of these exchanges, as, like, just another piece of our ongoing relationship. 

LK: they are. i love thinking about this together. will think more about reducing interference.

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

chantal akerman: notes.

It’s twenty years ago. My conception of what it means to have a home is strangely mediated by the fact that I’ve never known not having one, never had any home but this room, with books lining the walls, my favourite ones placed so high that I’d have to stand on the table to reach them, so they could be kept as far from the world, as possible. I’m still afraid of the dark. There’s a grotesque Minnie Mouse nightlight plugged into the wall, its eyeballs white and worn from running my fingers over it as though it could tell me what the future might bring. I run my fingers over the Minnie Mouse eyeballs once, twice, thrice for luck and I go to bed. I go to bed but I have a nightmare anyway, and I shriek like I’m dying. My dad comes running and he tries to calm me. What’s the worst thing that could happen, he asks, reasonably, stroking my hair. A monster under the bed? I’ll kill it with this magic sword. An evil wizard in the closet? We’ll say a spell to wish him away. The worst thing could happen, well, it’s not really so bad at all. 

It’s twenty years later. I’m supposed to be working, but I’m distracted, my lover is supposed to meet me at home, but they’re a half hour late, messy haired and callous, because they like to make me wait. What’s the worst thing that could happen, I ask myself absently, like my father taught me to, years ago, a method to calm myself. They could be dead. That wouldn’t be so bad, I think to myself, uneasily, but I know that’s not true. I check my phone because my hands feel too idle. Liz has posted on tumblr – Chantal Akerman has died.

What’s the worst that could happen? The truth is that, while I sit here, idle and expectant, someone that I love could leave me.

*

Chantal Akerman’s last film is titled No Home Movie. Home, what even is it. I’m not sure but I know I want it. But maybe that’s just it. Home is a matter of wanting things. It’s about futurity, about forcing desire into a shape in which there has to be a beginning, middle and end. ‘Going home’ necessarily means a journey. It means finding a place to rest after all the time you’ve been roaming. One can have no home, but the implicit suggestion is that everybody wants one, or should. No Home Movie. Say it out loud though, short and curt, and you’ll hear the contempt in it. Home. I don’t want it. No future. No home.

Chantal Akerman’s first film, is titled Saute ma ville, which literally means blow up my town. It was a film that taught me how to breathe. A young woman, played by Chantal, arrives home. She seems to be accomplishing a number of household tasks, she drags flowers by their stems haphazardly through her door, she gets out any number of household items seemingly just to put them to use, methodically, rigorously. She seems to be preparing for something but she doesn’t know what. As she works, she hums, a sharp, unpleasant sound piercing the banality of her movements. It seems absurd, the tension is suspenseful but only because you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be comic. She becomes frenzied, she looks in the mirror and tries to clean it but starts laughing, or crying, joyously, at herself you can’t tell which. There is a pitch that becomes unsustainable but the only person who lacks certainty about what is about to unfold is you. The protagonist, there’s something she knows in the brusqueness of her gestures. No home. She leans over the stove and lights the gas on fire. There’s a bang, then black. No home movie.

*

In her post about Akerman’s death, Liz quotes an article that speculates about the cause for Akerman’s death, and the speculation surrounding her potential suicide makes me queasy, a form too easily imposed on the feminine.

“Friends said that Ms. Akerman had been in a dark emotional state after the death of her mother last year, and that she had had breakdowns. She had recently been hospitalized for depression…

Liz asks a simple question, one impossible to answer --“Can we live?”

There’s a bang, and then black. But, can’t we live?

No, but somehow Saute ma ville remains for me a form for living. The first time I watched it, I sat back in my chair, I laughed, a loose, pealing noise, not from happiness but from relief at its total refusal. The thing is that for Akerman, everything – art, life, death, identity, politics, exists in entwined architectural paradox. But sometimes all of that can be evident in a graceful gesture of -  Saute ma ville. Blow up my town. You will only ever get only what I choose to give.

*

Akerman films are also a form about living, but more than living, they are about living as waiting. They are about how living is nothing but an endless series of motions, they are about the instrinsic nightmarishness of the present tense. It snowed for a very long time.

The sparse apartments, and streets of Akerman are never abstract. Instead, they circle and caress the material conditions of the void, and say This is life but is this living? And the answer is no, mostly; and yes, sometimes. There is value in the painful emptiness of real time, small elations and stupors in the very fabric of it, its grooves and ridges. There’s intent and rebellion in the narrative arcs despite the unintentional drama of how life just happens. And I waited.

I’m waiting for my lover to come home, but they’re not yet here and I’ve moved on to imagining who I’ll call first when I find out that yes, they’ve been in a car accident, shorn apart by metal; yes, they were jumped upon by strangers and beaten to a pulp; yes, that is why they are gone, all, better seeming reasons than quite simply, they don’t want to come to me. I feel loose and unmoored, I can’t find the ground. I try to eat something but I can’t bear it - i can’t. I tear the tip of my fingernail delicately with my teeth.

*

Home? It’s always been the dream. With Akerman, we are always at home but it is never ideal. I watch Chantal in Je tu il elle, waiting in an empty room, sweetened only with the taste of sugar, too-temporary, too-transient. We are in Jeanne Dielman’s apartment, trapped by the stifling domestic, we are in her city, in New York waiting for News from Home, amidst the traffic and the crowds, we are in the stiff and yet languidly generous still life of La Chambre, we are in ancestral East Germany, D’Est. In every Akerman film, home sweet home is a void even if it remains the center of breath, the point from which a heartbeat begins to radiate.

Watching, what I feel strongest always remains what is unseen – some impossible place beyond -- the unspoken claustrophobia of feeling, somehow, always not at home.

*

I’m hungry. I’m a nightmare, I’m crying and railing and collapsing into the weight of anxiety. I can’t find the rigid inside parts of myself that remind me how I’ll be okay. I can’t find a form. My lover finally arrives. They hold me and tell me to settle, as though I’m a cat. But I’m sharp and defensive like a razor, I turn my head. I’m hungry, I say and I leave the room. I eat granola but it’s not what I’m hungry for. Akerman’s women are always hungry. I’m hungry, Anna says, ins Les rendez-vous d’Anna before she finds another friend, another lover, even her mother to fill a void. I’m hungry, the narrator says, in Je tu il elle, when she visits her ex-lover after days locked in her apartment with only a bag of sugar. More, she says, after she eats a piece of bread spread with nutella, in big, consuming bites. In Jai’faim Jai’froid, two teenage friends careen through the city, careless and carefree. Nothing means anything. They smoke and steal innocently. The banal conditions of a teenage schedule, instinctive, immediate, hungry. 

*

The architect, Richard Neutra was influenced by the pop Freudian psychology of the 1950s, fascinated by the way in which objects and layouts in Freud’s office were designed to aid free association. Neutra went on to develop influential architectural design based on psychoanalytic surveys he sent out to clients and sought to develop a relationship with his clients not unlike the transferential relationship of psychoanalysis. In an age where Freud’s psychoanalysis had become but more of like suburban proposition, it seems unsurprising that, like Freud, many of Neutra’s clients were unhappy women, who believe that his approach could create curative environments for them within which they could fill a void, houses to make them feel as though they were enveloped in the embrace of a lover. A Neutra house become an empathetic mirror, something that gave a woman’s life form.

 I’m hungry, but I refuse to believe that the world could give me any form that could cure me.

*

Jai’faim, Jai’froid. Akerman’s women might be hungry but they aren’t searching for a form. They aren’t even looking for a time, they don't cater to the whim of the viewer to find a frame, a narrative, simply because they don’t need one. Instead, what one might call the realism of these films is affective, dynamic, moves beyond.  “Queerness is not yet here,” Jose Munoz cautioned us at the beginning of Cruising Utopia, “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”

Akerman films are not here, they’re like Jose says, always in the there and then, never fully in the present. They’re half memory. What she presents is only a surface upon which to stage the affective landscape of a past. They lose as much as they find. We see always what is ghostly, what is haunting the architecture of the living even as it remains banal. To work in the present tense is also to inherit the stolid impressions of the past. Which is to say, Akerman films build with loss, with how it feels to be famished. When we see the two women make love in Je tu il elle, it isn’t romantic. They’re kneading at each other, fighting, and pressing and slotting into where they can’t and pulling against the sharp melding of their bodies into each other. What they are building aren’t bodies, or an erotic, or even romance. Rather, they shape and reshape with and within each other’s hunger and loss, memory and desire, both individual and with what is older than themselves, an age, ages.

I don't want to find a correct shape. I don’t need a cure, or a form. Because Chantal Akerman taught me that I can build a space that responds to my desire. That cuts, or revenges or breaks, but also that nourishes and weaves and bends. Like Jeanne says, “I want to build an architecture to inhabit with you”. Something not home, but then and there. Not home, but somewhere else. No Home Movie. The nowhere to which we could belong. 

- trisha

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

WHAT

1.

this is could be a polemic but it definitely isn’t. 2. 

right? yea no i mean i also love being mean but we are all on the same page. we don’t really like nobody really likes us except for us. tumblr…right. 

what are your mixed feelings? that’s a good name too but i like drake. 3. 

some of us are idealists, or nihilists, or marxists or anarchists; some of us are queer or housewives or whores or part-time lovers; we’re teen serial killers or poets or fangirls or punks or suicide girls or academics, sometimes militant, sometimes not; some of us own switchblades or hatchets or whips or exacto knives or shovels; some of us own can openers and knitting needles and blankets and earrings; some of us are armed, some of us are but don’t know it, or aren’t and don’t want to be; some of us have bodies or hate them or love or deny them or render them insubstantial or material or tailor them to our needs incrementally but let’s be honest what’s the deal with having to exist as a subject anyway, what’s the deal with we fought for it together, so it must be a container for meaning; we fought for it but also sometimes the fight is all it is: nothing and we just don’t care.

all of us are delinquent, joyous, grieving, salty; sometimes we fight each other, but all of us know it. this cld be a game of jigsaw, or a code—like the split hair between a hairpin and a dagger—all of this might be metaphoric but its sharpness is real. 4. 

i do like aphorisms, i also like contradictory paragraphs, thoughts? like this is not an ‘ice-breaker’ but maybe a good game of daisy chaining or telephone. thinking about sleepovers and land lines. like a loose solidarity or coalition, like the sensibility cld be more like soft gossip. like i’m often one of those who feeds off the ideas of others to really launch me into something…but also not sure i have a platform or position other than just…desire.

i mean, not sure what collective really entails these days.

so i guess to this extent i am kind of “down for whatever” 5. 

ok, can we have a processing moment? maybe it’s that collaboration intensifies the insecurity of bringing one’s distinct self to the table, bluntly coming up against—which is to say abiding—the limitations of your style, or the space you shape between receptivity and defense. i think the trick is to not be afraid to mess things up or be inconsistent. true feelings above form in the shared doc, you know? the salvation in processing is that you’re abject from the start, start there & work yr way up. you need to know that your full range is something that can be withstood. abject from the start might be the basic of true collectivity like u are entering a relationship with everything on the table e.g. “i used to be a cutter, i’m from the midwest, i’m obsessed with learning about how magic tricks work and i’m primarily homo erotic” lol which is something that doesn’t happen much w/r/t actual spaces or groups trying to be collective, the basis of the “too much ego” problem. i think we can all withstand each other’s full range simply bc we want to…

this too: an exorcism of the paranoid nice girl policing tone online. digital communication is all about pre-empting catastrophe until you pass a certain point. it’s become that binary: on the one hand, nicing it up, a kind of chipperness, and on the other, pre-empting catastrophe via the offense, i.e. how can i point out your fucked up-ness before you recognize or unveil mine, how do i make it worse, how do i find it if it is not even there… 6. 

wanting to write a bit about self-domestication and architecture, about ‘staying home’ as a form of genre, about madwomen in the attic but how to channel/funnel libido into work rather than allowing it to completely distract; that’s all there is to do but i haven’t perfected the art, you know, of making a blueprint for subjecting myself to a strict regime of sublimation, also maybe domesticity has historically been just a convenient distraction for every body? but i’ll send you pics from my 80s women and architecture book with freaky quotes about Men and Women because although i love the #dreamers hashtag as much as anyone else maybe what i’m more interested in here is the ‘survival’ portion of it, i.e. what are the ways in which we attempt (and fail) to live dreams or ideologies — the small, weirder, more banal tics, the symptomatic ways rather than that the large generalisations of queer theory or burn the banks revolution or even tumblr feminism like what is the soft underbelly of wanting a hard line of full communism, or aesthetics or lesbian separatism, like where does collective thinking or creating space for collective thinking play into this, thinking about how we can be discussing juliana’s non-revolution piece in lana turner in a gchat, or online, how we be can saying things about ‘the counterfactual economy of tumblr, of collective thinking, prefigurative politics’ because you see i like the phrase ‘prefigurative politics,’ especially how this can be nebulous, unformed, hallucinatory and so manifests in ways other than what is expedient, effective — what could be productive of this mode? but while we’re at it, w/r/t production what are the actual material conditions in terms of writing we want to do or that are the reasons for wanting to create this space because right ‘no peer reviewed journal is going to take this’ or we don’t want to have to make a thesis-statement-argument or be ‘in the field’ or ‘intervene within it’ but also this isn’t poetry or god help us, we don’t need it to be. 

maybe question is; how do we have the war without being soldiers in it. 7. 

i saw a post recently asserting that complicity is a bourgeois bludgeon used to locate blame in quotidian compromises so as to delegitimize any other struggle an individual might be engaged in — a political red herring used to produce guilt that would obstruct meaningful action. [[ but copping to it, and how, is still worth a second look, no?- TL ]] i think yes! but i’m interested in theories of complicity that aren’t merely total, i guess, or like: every question about complicity is a question about agency which is a question about power, which always demands a second look. –LS] {{ +++ agreed xo - TL }} how to survive a world that forces our complicity and then uses it to stop us cold in our lines of flight? it seems like the soft underbelly of a busted militancy is our object and our project: we seek a space for holding contradictions and looking not for a way out, steeped and obsessed as we are in discourse, but a way through. we ran from it but we were still in it: so where did we go, and what was it like there? 8.

i’m interested to hear what we think a tumblr counter-fact might prefigure…

going to participate a lot in 2 weeks. many sad and/or ambivalent feelings to share with you and the internet. 9. 

i still haven't tired of juliana spahr’s non-revolution. it has momentum. the description of the crowd moves like the crowd, and after it’s over the reflection is skittish and circular like reflection. when she talks about occupy it works because like her i remember the feeling of wanting to prolong Non-Revolution, the sensation of being with and fighting to become through fight. the atmosphere now is like it never happened. clamped down. The move from Non-Revolution with its minor insurrections to social center. the oedipal triangle’s second round: after transferring desire from mother to father, must transfer desire from revolution to family. I had once said to Non-Revolution I so want to fuck you and I meant it. revolution failed so the occupiers are knitting, starting start-ups. are a little or a lot more modest. family as revolution in small-scale, local doses and eyes-on-the prize hustle traded for the with’s electric kinetics.

I was feeling both rejected by Non-Revolution who never texted anymore, not even FTP, and then trivial for falling in love with such a minor uprising, for taking a brief hookup so seriously . . . I let all its minorness into me. And now I was something running backwards. but while spahr is writing in a cafe she overhears a woman talking, first about Non-Revolution then about meeting her partner. “when she saw her she tried to kiss her right away and the partner turned her head and said not yet and everyone in the bar laughed at her but she said she knew then, she knew something about being awake and she would be awake with this woman.” suddenly the revolution in small-scale local doses and hustle in capital’s co-opted collective become ways of practicing in the minor, preparing for a major that’s there if we practice it. research for the backwards river.  

10.

“The modality of their fusion is dissonant. And consequently, more resonant. When an idealist learns to destroy, when a militant learns to love more deeply and intimately, there is only awakening. Queerness may never arrive, but the synthesis of their love beckons us to come closer to wherever queerness may be.” —correspondence between Nicholas & baedan, baeden vol. III, a journal of queer time travel

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]