Tag Archives: Louis Althusser

Preach a little gospel, sell a couple bottles of Dr. Good

Posted on by
Reply

i finally fixed the lock on my mailbox last week. Walking over to the locksmith by Five Leaves that is somehow always packed, purchasing the correct lock, making it back home, going upstairs to grab the tiny screwdriver i use when i need to change a battery for one of Jonas’s toys, running downstairs again and figuring out how to screw the pieces in–maybe took me an hour. Maybe. The thing is, it’s been broken since November. My key snapped in half in the lock, and i just left the door open, but my mailman finally stopped delivering the mail because he decided it wasn’t safe. So then i had to fix it, because i evidently can’t not receive my mail. My Dad joked, “You need a man around the house.” i rolled my eyes deeply into the phone. “DAD. i fixed it. MYSELF.” It’s not that i couldn’t do it. This was more of a soft protest. i just. Wouldn’t. Perhaps i do need someone or something around the house, but probably not in the way he meant. i’ve already got way too much trouble getting out of bed.

Some years ago, i worked in a Feminist bookstore. Yes, we were almost exactly like the Portlandia skit, and it actually was a tiny haven of awesomeness. One of our bestselling items was a “Rosie the Riveter” poster. Rosie, that powerfully ambivalent icon of untapped female potential. With a flexed bicep, she proclaims “We can do it!” We can win the war, we can defeat the Japanese (as the little pin with an image of a Japanese woman’s face [she has tiny horns] on her collar suggests), we can do work usually undertaken only by men, we can work with African American women, we can become financially independent. i think the poster (and the mug, and the pins) sold so well because shoppers liked the possibility of rallying behind this image that we would now read as unabashedly butch. “We” is no longer nation; it is now gender, and the specifics of Rosie’s origins are generally lost in translation. For me, Rosie represents the complications of consumer feminism. She has been productively co-opted by Feminism and no longer is really a symbol of patriotism, but a more general sense of a woman’s ability to…do…it. Yes, we can do it–but wait: what the hell is “it” anymore?

Everyone i know from grad school remembers the one text that began her obsession with critical theory. She was a good undergrad, loved her English classes, but then one day she read x and from that point on had a new understanding of politics, words, and, well, she became an academic. Life outside the diamond became a wrench. In a letter, Emily Dickinson asked, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” An ex-boyfriend told me once that he couldn’t sleep for days after the first time he read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and i was in. That he had very long eyelashes and could quote Drugstore Cowboy with an impeccable timing that always made me giggle didn’t hurt, either. For me, that entry in the course pack was Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” ISAs for short. When i worked at Isa, i thought of the acronym every time i walked in the door, even though the restaurant’s name was taken from the Estonian word for “father,” which is not so far off the mark, either.

Instead of saying “sex,” i pretty much always say “doing it.” i generally understand this as one of my many Seventies affectations, but i do like the way it retains some recognition of sex as productive–not necessarily in the way Rosie might have understood production, and not in the way we generally refer to “reproduction,” but in an Althusserian sense: as ideology. In his essay, Althusser discusses the quintessential role of the reproduction of conditions of production for Marx, and “fleshes out” his understanding of ideology, announcing his maxim: “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Yesterday, walking down Wall St with my son and two friends, we simply could not believe the ratio of police to protesters. Here were bodies moving through a space defined negatively by police, and while this is technically an example of what Althusser would call “repressive” state apparatuses, the way in which the arrogant, anticipatory presence of police on the one year mark of Occupy Wall Street “made visible” relationships to power we might usually allow ourselves to dismiss as imaginary was staggering. Yes, we can do it–pretty much however we please, but how do we translate the expansive possibilities for sexuality that have been painstakingly won over the past 50 years into dynamically new lived relations that continue to ask the question of how not to pass on this story?

Things you do, Don’t seem real.

Posted on by
Reply
Kashif Nadim Chaudry's "A Queers Diary"

Kashif Nadim Chaudry’s “A Queers Dowry”

“I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams, when you suddenly find that you can fly, very easily, and wonder why you have never tried it before. I might have discovered other things. For example, I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one. But then the sheriff came.” Housekeeping 204

Does the sheriff always come? Sometimes i read this passage, from Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, and i can see my entire dissertation–everything i want to say and everything i want to ask and everything i hope to understand a little better–falling right into place. When i read this i hear J.L. Austin’s understanding of performative language, Althusser’s interpellative whistleblower, Freud, and queer theory. i am not a supertaster with food and wine, but i can’t not see the shapes of critical theory in literature and film anymore, and what guides me is the promise of subtext, of metaphor, of secrets, of change. i “misread” things, especially literature, all the time. Sometimes my slips are calculated and intentional, other times i just can’t help it because i don’t read for plot or pleasure. The fact that misreadings are even possible challenges the possibility of univocal, universal truth and authorial control, and reinforces the promise of underbellies and flip sides and constellations of meaning.

i am heartened by the resurgence of interest in Donna Haraway’s explorations of scientific discourse, western dualism, and domesticity. When i was vegan, i was amazed by how reactive people could get about what they called “fake” food, which necessarily brought to mind for me Butler’s arguments destabilizing heterosexuality as the “original,” “natural,” model for sexuality and queerness as a copy. Disturbed as i am by the parallels between sexual politics and food politics–and, because i was so deeply convinced by arguments dovetailing the two–learning to rebuild my understanding of food seemed fundamentally representative of other forms of the possible–an individual step i hoped would teach me about collective ones. In some ways, i think the playing field for the consumption of animal products is drastically different now than it was back then, especially where i live, in Brooklyn. Nonetheless, there is an uncomplicated “nature”-worship component to some strands of locavore politics that makes me uncomfortable, and i still think the vegetarian gesture can be creative and hopeful. i like the “vegetable forward” food of chefs like Ignacio Mattos (formerly of Isa), Jose Ramirez-Ruiz (Chez Jose), and Matthew Lightner (Atera)–chefs who like the challenge of not falling back on the easiness of meat as they work to redefine what a meal looks like. i think this is an act of careful reading, and if i were teaching right now i would use their work as object lessons when we read something like the Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi Strauss or Mythologies by Roland Barthes, or even Subculture: the Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige.

i lived in Japan a long time ago, and i feel as nervous as ever saying things about how “in Japan, etc.”; however, in Japan, if i understood things correctly, talking about the weather is a topic for genuine conversation. i enjoyed this so much, because i think even non-poets almost always reveal something about themselves when they react to the heat or the rain or the cold or simply change, and i like listening. Counterintuitively, being really hot makes me feel clean–probably because i grew up in the tropics; perhaps for the same reason, i like being out in the rain. When i lived in Florida, getting cold sent me into a mean rage. These days, i eagerly anticipate the giganticness of deep winter, and the respite from the extreme sociality necessitated by New York summers. Talking about the weather, or the seasons, is a very easy way to allow for the fact that metaphor (and desire) is always right there at the edge of language–of what we seem to be saying. The first line of the Bell Jar, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” makes the weather an actor, and the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss,” gives us “just weather”–what we generally like to pretend almost everything around us is–just predictable, explicable, rational phenomena. Or, as Butler paraphrases Nietzsche, “Only through a kind of forgetfulness of the tropological status of language does something like customary language take hold.” Tropological refers to tropes or figures of speech–metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche. In other words, plain prose cheats. Plain–not purple or poetic or difficult–prose cheats. It cheats because it pretends that language isn’t necessarily indebted to subtext, because it’s boring, and because it seems to exalt “face-value.” There are so many kinds of cheating, and i will never understand why something like sexual infidelity trumps willful lack of engagement with the world, with humor, with desire. Try, because not trying is also a kind of cheating–it’s just too ubiquitous–and too necessary to normative life narratives–to prosecute.