#the abyss is just lacanian Real

[blood-orange-juice]

Since I'm going all Lacanian on you anyway.

Every time I get asked whether I think that Childe is going to die, I think of this quote:

"I am not pessimistic. Nothing is going to happen. For the simple reason that man is a good-for-nothing, not even capable of destroying himself. "

In other words, I hope that our boy is so pathetic that he'll fail everything. He'll fail his heroic death. He'll fail bringing about the apocalypse.

He'll glitch through a corruption arc especially spectacularly and will continue to live his silly life none the wiser.

[libidinaleconomyberlin]

Participants

Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His research focuses on contemporary Continental theory, cultural politics, literature, and avant-garde and popular culture. His books include Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, The Culture of Death and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. He also edited Communization and its Discontents and has numerous essays on topics such as anti-critique, the aesthetics of financial crisis, drones, time, Ballard, vampies, neurosis and Brexit. 

Hannah Proctor works on revolutionary psychologies, communist neurologies and red therapies. She’s broadly interested in intersections between left-wing politics and psychology, histories and theories of radical psychiatry, and emotional histories of the Left. She’s currently a fellow affiliated with the ICI Berlin. Her forthcoming book, Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria, Soviet Subjectivites and Cultural History, situates the innovative cross-disciplinary clinical research of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria in its politicised historical context. She is also working on a book project for Verso on the psychic aftermath of political struggle. She has an ongoing project on femininity and hardness – with the working title 'Stone Femme.’

Leon Brenner is a post-doc fellow at the University of Potsdam, specializing in the fields of Lacanian psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy and autism research. Brenner has previously worked on the subject of Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivity and love. His doctoral dissertation—conducted at Tel-Aviv University and the Freie Universität, Berlin—concerned the subject of autistic subjectivity in psychoanalytic thought. Today Brenner works on the subject of the anthropological philosophy of autism at the University of Potsdam's institute for philosophy. He is a founder of the Lacanian Affinities Berlin group (laLAB) and teaches courses on the subject of psychoanalysis in Berlin.

Kerstin Stakemeier is a Professor for Art Education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. She has been teaching since the early 2000s in the fields of political, art, cultural and media theory, art history and on topics of artistic and political theory and practice as well as modern, postmodern and contemporary history of exhibition practice. With others she is the initiator of the long-term exhibition, magazine and discussion project Klassensprachen / Class Languages (from 2017). She has published, among others, "Painting-The Implicit Horizon" (2012) with Avigail Moss and "Power of Materials/Politics of Material” and “The Present of the Future“ (2014-16) with Susanne Witzgall. She writes among others for Artforum and Texte zur Kunst. In 2016, she published Reproducing Autonomy with Marina Vishmidt.

Jule Govrin is a philosopher; her research is situated at the interface of political theory, social philosophy, and aesthetics. She holds a PhD from the FU Berlin on the history of the theory of desire and economics. She investigated how the notion of desire is linked to economic theories in the history of philosophy. She currently works at the Philosophical Seminar at the European University of Flensburg and investigates the relationship between authenticity and authority in the political history of ideas of modernity and late modernity. She is the author, in German, of Sex, God and Capital: Houellebecq’s Subjugation between Neoreactionary Rhetoric and Post-secular Politics and, in addition to her academic work, is also active as a journalist, e.g. for »ZEIT Online«.

Luce de Lire is a ship with eight sails and she lays off the quay. A time traveller and collector of mediocre jokes by day, when night falls, she turns into a philosopher, performer and media theorist. She loves visual art, installations, video art etc. She could be seen curating, performing, directing, planning and publishing (on) various events. She is working on and with treason, post secularism, self destruction, fascism and seduction – all in mixed media.

Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is currently research associate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. (Although from next week, he will be a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.) His research areas comprise contemporary European philosophy, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), epistemology, and political philosophy. His publications include The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (2019), The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2015). Plus two edited books, Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives: New Conceptions of Geometry and Space in Freud and Lacan (ed. with Michael Friedman) and Jacques Lacan. Between Psychoanalysis and Politics (ed. with Andreja Zevnik, 2015).

Dominiek Hoens is a philosopher and doctor of psychology, and teaches philosophy of art at two university colleges in Belgium. Recent publications include articles on the logic of the Lacanian ‘not-all’ (in Crisis and Critique) and on Lacan and Pascal, and a chapter on Lacan in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. Currently, he is co-editing with Sigi Jöttkandt a special issue of their journal, S, on Duras and Lacan.

Julie Gaillard was recently appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Illinois. She was previously a fellow at ICI Berlin. She co-edited the volume Traversals of Affect: On Jean-François Lyotard (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current research continues her investigation of Lyotard’s work and its import at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, arts, and politics.

Daniel Tutt is a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University. His academic training is in philosophy and religion with a focus on contemporary continental philosophy, the history of philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics. His interests include Marxism and post-Marxist thought, contemporary social and political movements, political Islam, Islamophobia, Islamic philosophy, historicism and the philosophy of history and post-Lacanian thought. He has published articles on Badiou, Zizek, Islam and contributed to the recent edited volume, Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy.

Adriana Zaharijević combines political philosophy, feminist theory and social history of the 19th century. She is a senior researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, and an assistant professor at the University of Novi Sad. She is the author of more than sixty articles and two books, unfortunately not (yet) available in English – Becoming Woman (2010) and Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of a Citizen (2014). Among other essays in English, she has a forthcoming paper on Robinson Crusoe, invulnerability and bodilessness.

Sami Khatib is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo. Sami's research spans the fields of Aesthetic Theory, Critical Theory, Visual Arts, Media Theory, and Cultural Studies with a special focus on the thought of Walter Benjamin. He is a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). His ongoing research project “Aesthetics of the ‘Sensuous-Supra Sensuous” examines the aesthetic scope and political relevance of Marx’s discovery of the commodity form. His publications include articles on violence, pedagogy, the aesthetics of real abstraction, temporality and Walter Benjamin.

Jason Read is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He specialises in the areas of Social and Political Philosophy, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Spinoza. His two books are The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015) and The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003). He has many articles and book chapters on topics including work, affect, precarity, Balibar, ideology and Althusser.

Vladimir Safatle holds several international appointments. Primarily, Vladimir is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at University of São Paulo. He is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Invited professor at Université de Paris VII (Department of Psychoanalysis), Paris VIII (Department of Music), Toulouse (Department of Philosophy) and Louvain (Department of Philosophy). Fellow of Stellenboch Institute for Advanced Studies (South Africa) and formerly responsible for seminars at Collège International de Philosophie. Vladimir is the author of Grand Hotel Abyss: Desire, Recognition and the Restoration of the Subject (Leuven, 2016) and many further texts in English, as well as Portuguese and French. He is responsible for the new Brazilian edition of Theodor Adorno's complete work and is a coordinator of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. He has published essays on Hegel, Adorno, desire, servitude, democracy and Lacan. He is also an outspoken critic in Brazilian media of Bolsonaro and the turn to far-right politics.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont in the US. He has just published Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). His previous books include Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), Spike Lee (2014), The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2013), Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013), Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (2012, with Paul Eisenstein), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and The Impossible David Lynch (2007).

Yahya M. Madra is an associate professor of economics at Drew University, Madison, NJ. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism since 1998 and served as an associate editor of the journal between 2010-12. He specialises in the History of Economic Thought; International Political Economy; Political Economy and Cultural Formations; Psychoanalysis and Capitalism and Current Heterodox Approaches. He has published and co-authored articles on various issues in political economy and on the history of recent economics in edited book volumes and a number of academic journals in English and Turkish. His first book in English is LATE NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS: RESTORATION OF THEORETICAL HUMANISM IN CONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC THEORY from 2017.

Ceren Özselçuk is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has recently published and co-published in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Rethinking Marxism, and in edited volumes. She is on the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism and also its current managing editor. She and Yahya are working on a book manuscript related to their talk today. She is also developing research on the associations among populism, neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, with a geographical focus in Turkey, and interrogating the relations between populism and contemporary forms of authoritarianism and violence, on the one hand, and the role of populist identifications both in democratic as well as neoliberal transformations, on the other.

Merritt Symes (www.merrittsymes.com) is a video artist who creates audio-visual “resonance machines” from both found and original footage. Her short films are concerned with creaturely lives, uncanny affinities, impersonal intimacies, the unraveling of forms, and the spaces between things. Dominic Pettman (www.dominicpettman.com) is Professor of Culture & Media at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research. His numerous books include Sonic Intimacy, Creaturely Love, and Metagestures (with Carla Nappi).

Margret Grebowicz’s writings on mountaineering have appeared in The Atlantic, The Philosophical Salon, and the minnesota review, and she is currently writing her next book, Mountains and Desire, for Repeater. She is the author of Whale Song (Bloomsbury), Why Internet Porn Matters and The National Park to Come (both Stanford), and co-author of Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (Columbia). She teaches philosophy and environmental humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, in Siberia.

Ania Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland and former Senior Fulbright Fellow at the New School of Social Research in New York, USA where she was working on a research project “Feeling(s) Without Organs. Love in Contemporary Technoculture”. She is a coeditor of (with Karolina Lebek) Materiality and Popular Culture. The Popular Life of Things (Routledge 2017), (with Michael Gratzke) The Materiality of Love. Essays of Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge 2018), and (with Toby Miller) “Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture” (a special issue of Open Cultural Studies, 2017). She has authored many papers and chapters in cultural and media studies regarding love, social norms, codes of feelings and technology.

Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at The University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (2012), and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014). He recently completed his new book, Algorithmic Desire: Towards a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media. He is currently working on a project that examines the aesthetics, rhetorics, and ethics of new materialist, posthumanist, and accelerationist theory.

Ben Gook is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is also an honorary fellow at the School of Social & Political Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne. His books include Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany after 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and the forthcoming Feeling Alienated: How Alienation Returned in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2020).

[splintersfeelings]

Carefully step over the gap of my open heart and show me where I came from / 擔心，小心，開心

Family trees are defined by absences.

--

My father and I were talking as he drove. He wondered aloud if he was like his own father, my Ye Ye. My paternal grandfather passed away when my dad was still a teenager.

"I'm surprised you notice and remember all the stories I tell you," he says to me, when I write about them. I always remember. How could I forget? I'm haunted by the stories. I burn them into my memory in the only way that I can to light up the dark spaces in my consciousness that are haunted by ghosts.

--

My dad doesn't speak much to his family anymore.

His mom, my Maa Maa, tried to control my father's life and groom him to become an eldest son who could serve as the head of the household, where he was needed to fill the vacancy left behind by my grandfather’s death when my father was a teenager. It was a burden that no one that young should have to bear.

My father's younger brother, my Suk Suk, told me about the Wong progenitor 7 generations before me (my father's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather).

This Wong left his Guangdong hometown to come to the United States and make his fortune. He returned home with the fruits of his labor only to be warned of an assassination plot waiting for him. So instead of returning to his home village, he took a detour to Macau to retire with his Gold Mountain windfall. He eventually accumulated 4 wives (including an American wife) and left behind many descendants in the Macau/Hong Kong area. This story was authored by at least 4 or 5 people, stories relayed across generations, until my Suk Suk was able to compile them all and then convey it to me.

Does this make the story less true? Or does it make it more true, the accumulated sweat and tears of generations distilled into a single, elegant fairy tale, an origin story of a man heading east on his Journey to the West?

This was it's own kind of pilgrimage.

--

There's a difference in how Eastern and Western cultures view justice, and it's a complicated question that I'm bound to oversimplify here, but I think the idea is visible in the difference between Buddhism and the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian and Islamic) traditions.

In the Abrahamic, justice is something that happens in the afterlife. Justice is the promise of reward and punishment for mortal sins. Life is allowed to be just, because God will ensure that sinners pay the price and that the good are granted the salvation they deserve.

In Buddhism, there's no punishment and reward in the afterlife. Life itself is the system of punishment and reward for past lives. It has a retroactive temporal orientation towards justice instead of the future orientation of the Abrahamic. In Buddhism, heaven and hell would be confusing, because the goal of religious practice is to escape from life and reincarnation, not to live a post-mortem afterlife.  For the Buddhist, everyone always deserves what they get, what goes around comes around. Somewhere out there is a cosmic Karmic ledger that balances the accounts. Justice is built into the present instead of constantly deferred.

The Abrahamic fears oblivion, fears the unknown, fears the cessation of the senses. Buddhism, by forgoing the afterlife, embracing oblivion and does something different.

I'm neither a Buddhist or a Christian. I don’t self-identify as an atheist or an agnostic. In my own words, I would prefer to say that I think metaphysical statements have no truth values. But this is all neither here nor there.

In Hong Kong there was only one real god.

Its name was money.

--

Getting up at night to use the restroom, I trip over a pile of books I had forgotten. "Pukgaai…" I mutter to myself as I nearly fall, stumbling for my phone. Groping through the darkness with my cold hands, searching for familiar shapes and sensations to remind me who I am.

--

In Cantonese (and in Mandarin), "he," "she," and "it" all correspond to the same spoken word. Gender is only marked in the written form. My sister and I used to make fun of our parents for always slipping up on pronouns, calling he's she's and she's he's. I realize now how special it is to not have gender linguistically and ontologically bound into our consciousness, instantly and immediately assigned to bodies. Of course, Chinese culture still contains uncomfortable Confucian attitudes toward gender, sex, reproduction. But there's something remarkably progressive and profound about not needing to assign gendered pronouns to people. Romance and Germanic languages are so strongly gendered. Who felt like they needed to assign gender to chairs, stars, doors, cups, hats, and boats, anyways? Why should a feminine verb, a neuter verb, and a masculine verb be linguistically differentiated?

--

Trauma is a form of omission.

--

My maternal grandfather, Gung Gung, was a gambling addict. But I wouldn't say he was addicted to chance. He was a surprisingly risk-averse man in other aspects of his life. He turned down a job offer from his family because he didn't want to move away from the racetrack in Happy Valley, where he'd calculate the optimal horse to bet on, studying and researching all the details that might distinguish him from the crowd. He was a man who found comfort in games, the consistency and dependability, the clear and precise conditions of defeat and victory that are absent from the tedium of everyday life. In games there is nothing left but expression of skill. The chess pieces don't care who you are, where you were born, or how much money you make. There is only the elegant simplicity of victory or defeat and whether or not you’re willing to pick yourself up afterwards from the burning wreckage to try your hand again.

Gung Gung was a chain smoker, such an addict that long flights from Hong Kong to the United States were troublesome for him. He passed away watching a game of chess under a bridge on Hong Kong island. But just months before he passed away he visited Seattle to see my sister and I. My sister was less than a year old and I was only a toddler.

I wonder if Gung Gung would have appreciated my childhood chess tournament trophies and my passion for real-time strategy games. I wonder if he would have taught me to flank using chariots, pin down with cannons, connect my elephants.

I was too young to remember him, so I can't say that I really met him. But I'm glad that he got to meet me before he died.

--

The single greatest gift that Cantonese has given me is a slur for white people. If I didn't have it, I would only ever think of myself as a failed national subject. Because of just one word, a word that now comes easily and quickly to my mind, I know otherwise. I was robbed of something, long ago, before I was even born, and every time I say "gweilo" I reclaim just a little bit of that history back.

Peace by piece. Plowshares for swords. An eye for a tongue.

--

Complicity is the price of silence.

--

To this day, the sound of Cantonese music puts me at ease. I barely understand the language. But hearing the rising and falling tones of the prestige Yue dialect, the language of Guangdong, always brings close a warm part of my childhood.

When I young, not yet in grade school, I had a hard time falling asleep by myself. My parents recognized I was a creature of ritual. My dad would sit close and would play Cantopop as I fell asleep.

One day, he turned on some music to listen to during the day, just for himself, and I complained to him that I wasn't ready to sleep yet.

--

Assimilation is death.

--

"Transgenerational trauma," my professor said during our seminar. We were discussing Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the displacement of trauma through unspoken linguistic signs. The idea is that trauma is displaced along generations by overdetermining the language that the parent uses to talk to the child, and the child to grandchild, and so on. And thus, a life time of scars is tucked into the limits of our speech. A child can choose to become like their parents or become unlike their parents. But the shadow of the parent is still there either way.

What an abyss then it must be for a grandparent and a grandchild to not even share a common language. What kind of trauma is belied by the fact that everything goes unspoken?

I grew up reading through my Ye Ye's comic books. Wong Si Ma was a famous cartoonist in Hong Kong when he was alive, and his characters are still remembered fondly. The first time I read them, they gripped my imagination. Over time, I realized that my love for those cartoons was bound into the fact that my father had taught me the same sense of humor as these comics, the same love for puns and physical comedy and light-hearted pranks.

Wong Si Ma had time for everyone in his life, but not enough time for his family before he passed away.

--

Even though I'm not religious, Hong Kong for me is a site of pilgrimage. And that saddens me, because I know that the Hong Kong that I want and need will never exist ever again. Hong Kong’s place in the world changed. Hong Kong has been transferred back to China, and Cantonese language and politics and culture will have to be fought for to be preserved.

I feel regret, as if I have failed in a duty, by not properly learning the language. But now is as good a time as any to start.

--

Whenever I commute around Seattle or Irvine, I think back to riding the MTR in Hong Kong and the sonorous British-inflected English voice warning me: "Careful, please mind the gap." In Cantonese, to be careful is "siusum," literally translated as "small heart." To step with caution. I try my best to step with caution, remembering all the sacrifices people have made to put me here walking these grounds and living this life. I don't think I can be grateful for receiving something I never asked for.

But I keep trying to dream for the two grandfathers I never really met, who persisted as a memory of a memory, ghosts who guide my heavy heart, as I sleep and slowly learn how…

--

…to open my heart and be happy.

[elisaenglish]

“Je bâtis a roches mon langage,” Édouard Glissant writes in L’Intention poétique. I build my language with rocks. “The stumbling blocks of a translation,” Betsy Wing states in her introduction to Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. But nonetheless, their scope or, in Wing’s meditation, “...the hoped-for reward... the task of making these new openings available to new readers.”

Life, too, correlates to modes and methods of interpretation. However, the wisest of our fearless readers are those who embrace “the constant transformation always at work in any living symbolic system” not those who balk at the slightest hint of change. Existence, like language, moves, sometimes shunts its way into being. As Wing writes:

“The most acute need here is... preferably a formula both elegant and concrete but undomesticated, not subject to common linguistic usage, a mental image ready to create a new connection.”

Of course, the task of parsing one man’s syntacatical arrangements into that of another tongue is more a peripheral concern as I contemplate semantics and how they pertain to reality. Although, having said that, creation and dissemination play their own adversarial roles in current climes, many of which position themselves in opposition to any traditional intellectual stance and merge these various discourses “with all the implications of shallowness, dazzle, and hegemony that this implies for us.” Staying true to Glissant’s totalité-monde, Wing writes:

“...activity in the concrete world is important; physical notions of the dazzling, explosive power of this agency cannot be left out. Think: flash in the pan for shallowness, the strobing flash of momentary glamour, the news flash in a sound byte from our sources... Part of controlling the substance of one’s future would lie in controlling its nomenclature.”

Hence, strategies of orality are as central to Glissant’s work as conventions and formal structures; the rocks themselves not fixed but subject, rather, to reconstruction and evolving transformative futures.

To seek is not always to find, but Glissant offers an approach, “one way ashore, a thousand channels.” His concept of the Imaginary is defined as thus:

“...[different] from the common sense English usage of a conception that is a conscious mental image. Furthermore, the now widely accepted Lacanian sense in which the Imaginary, the order of perception and hallucination, is contrasted with the Symbolic (the order of discursive and symbolic action) and the Real (not just “reality” but what is absolutely unrepresentable) does not apply... the imaginary [here] is all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving the world. Hence, every human culture will have its own particular imaginary.”

Glissant possesses a viewpoint, informed by that “first dark shadow” at its socio-historical inception through his earnest plea to “Imagine, if you can...” the horrors of the slave ships. Some lost, others forgotten, his ancestral story unfolds nonetheless and as Glissant points out, “Experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss.” There is a continuum in artistic terms, a generational inheritance “of storms and profound moments of peace in which we may honour our boats.”

A process Glissant characterises as “poetry” – to be stayed, to be cried, to be a surrogate of transcendence.

Language, then, carries with it an historic and a prophetic sense of peoples. For Glissant, his cultural odyssey is that of reconciliation in the aftermath of colonial displacement and its moral ruptures. Knowledge, hitherto not dreamed, emerges from the chasm:

“Not just a specific knowledge, appetite, suffering, and delight of one particular people, not only that, but knowledge of the Whole, greater from having been at the abyss and freeing knowledge of Relation within the Whole.”

The question isn’t what happened? Nor is it denial after the fact. The brave are those who confront the past, the intermediary moments of the now, futures as they may come to be in time. Meanwhile, we synthesise, we learn and, as Glissant writes:

“If the imaginary carries us from thinking about this world to thinking about the universe, we can conceive that aesthetics, by means of which we make our imaginary concrete, with the opposite intention, always brings us back from the infinities of the universe to the definable poetics of our world. This is the world from which all norms are eliminated, and also it is the world that serves our inspiration to approach the reality of our time and place.”

There may be healing, “the open circle of our relayed aesthetics” and more. The always more of a visionary light, as stubborn as it is pervasive in the minds of those who know. “Relation exists in being realised, “ Glissant concludes. So forth we go and “...leave the matrix abyss... the immeasurable abyss for this other one in which we wander without becoming lost.”

So, unlike those long-sunk ships, we may moor ourselves as found.

[chrisengel]

The other is marked by difference, otherwise it would not be genuinely “other,” but this difference is not just external to the subject; it is right there at its unconscious core. There are conditions of insecurity, oppression, and violence, so many of them it seems that they swamp the modern world, under which this internal otherness is not a source of solace and creativity so much as a disturbance, a reminder of the “Real” of the Lacanians, with its grimness and its continual threat of the abyss. When this happens, otherness is attacked. In turn, this diminishes the possibilities for transformation through recognition by and of the other, leading to a more isolated and poisonous “internal” otherness, the weeds of doubt, the wilderness within. This is perhaps the way the lie, to which Rustin (1991) refers, grows.

Stephen Frosh 2002 American Imago: The other

[strangledeggs]

It’s A Short Life: “Nice For What”

In which I fawn embarrassingly over Drake’s best/deeply-flawed/most recent single almost four months after it was released.

With the possible exception of the mythical “dream job” in which one is actually paid to do something they enjoy, it has been my experience that most work is about diminishing and dulling the senses in order to minimize the pain of the task at hand. Thus one becomes something like a machine for accomplishing a specific task, quashing the instinct to point out your boss’s lack of clarity in their emails at an office job, or maybe the instinct to cry out in pain when you cut your hand doing dishes at a fast-food job. This mechanizing force appears to resemble not only the Freudian death drive, but also Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “automatization”, in which a repetitive process happens so frequently as to become repressed, as if it never really happened; the agent begins to carry out the action automatically, without even registering the details of the process. Whole portions of one’s life can be lost in this way, glossed over as “work” without memorable experience to make it worthy of attention.

A brief disclaimer: I don’t like Drake. I find his style bland, drone-y and misogynistic (despite inexplicably being credited as one of the most women-friendly rappers in the modern era - but I could write a whole other essay on that). I also generally dislike pop radio and never listen to it willingly. So it came as a shock when I heard Drake’s most recent single, “Nice For What”, on the radio several months after its release and...it was good? Somehow, the song transcended its repellent context and defamiliarized everything for me, if only for a moment. It felt like I was suddenly hearing Drake as his fans had always described him to me. Needless to say, I decided a bit of investigative analysis was in order.

To begin with what I didn’t know when I first heard it: I’ve come to recognize “Nice For What” as a clever fusion of past and future. The production nods to both Lauryn Hill through a slightly obscure sample that forms the basis of the beat (it’s from the bridge of her song “Ex Factor”) and to Big Freedia through the more raw live sample in the song’s middle section. This turns out to tie in well with the song’s video and lyrical themes, both of which celebrate women living their lives independently; what better way to complement this than to make a musical claim that women are simultaneously hip-hop’s past and future?

About those lyrics: for years I’ve struggled to understand why Drake was seen as somehow less misogynistic than his peers when his M.O. seemed to be centred around emotionally manipulating and guilt-tripping women. Yet here, he seems to have pulled a sudden 180, praising a woman for the very things he guilted his ex about in “Hotline Bling” - while “wearing less and going out more” was a line delivered with a frown on that track, Drake admits here that it’s “all right” to “show off”, whether it be in selfies or at the club. Has he finally learned?

Probably not, or at least not as much as we’d hope. I haven’t listened to his bloated “Scorpion” myself, but reports suggest there’s just as much misogyny scattered throughout it as on his other albums, meaning “Nice For What” is really just something of an act. Truthfully, it’s a bit of a mess, too, though a brilliant one. And so I’m ready to embrace this beautiful mess precisely because it breaks the spell of the “pop genius” in a visceral manner, reminding us that pop music is only ever a temporary act. Not only that, it manages to do so musically as well as lyrically. Consider the bridge with the Big Freedia sample; it’s jarring, isn’t it? It’s not unlike the brief Jay-Z sample in Pusha T’s “Numbers On The Board” that I called a “gasp for air”. Only here, it’s not so much a gasp for air as a moment of breathlessness - the lush harmonies of Lauryn Hill’s voice are snatched from the listener and replaced by a moment of harsh live intensity. The timing, too, is expertly handled, with the tempo threatening to tear free from the song’s rhythmic confines until “Watch the breakdown!” drags it back into the measure in the nick of time.

Much of the production is built on this kind of deliberate deprivation, the removal of pieces the listener expects to be present. In a “When Doves Cry” decision, the production team has opted to amp up the treble on the samples and cut the bass almost entirely, giving the drums a tinny, hollow sound and making the 1998 Hill song sound about 20 years older than it actually is. Even during the hook, a low kick seems to promise a hint of bass tone to give the song some kind of chordal structure, but the listener’s expectations are quickly disrupted as a second bass note fails to follow and the rest of the chorus remains empty.

And then there’s Drake. Misogyny aside, I’ve never found him much of a rapper, as he seemed to have something of a stunted flow and a taste for deathly corny punchlines. Here, however, he not only pulls off a great verse, he manages to tie it in to the song’s disruptive formal structure. The first verse exhibits an admittedly repetitive flow that feels like it lags in relation to the rhythmic momentum of the beat, Drake makes up for it by shifting effortlessly between his brash rapping and his gentler melodic delivery - a strength he’s always had that I’ve probably undervalued. Only here it’s employed better than ever as he uses it to deliver winning lyrics that balance the tension between a kind of carefree-living and the stress of hard work that (supposedly) gives one the right to call themself their own. At the very least, that tension offers an interesting existential take on Nietzschean debt: the woman in this song is positioned as one who doesn’t “owe” anyone anything, as the chorus reminds us. This premise of somehow working yourself up out of your debt to society is so common in hip-hop it’s hardly worth mentioning, except for the fact that it’s so overtly masculine in so much of the genre (as it is with broader western culture in general). For Drake to suggest women might achieve a similar goal shows potential for attempts at understanding other gendered perspectives from his own, even if the understanding is a little shallow [1].

Just when you think he’s about to get stuck in generic-Drake-flow mode, the song’s second verse hits harder with a whole new intensity. The rug is pulled out from under the listener once again as Drake actually varies his phrasing(!) while adding details to the portrait of the woman he sketched in the first verse. The ending of this verse is damn near perfect - just as the brief Lauryn Hill sample contains a tonal loop which seems to never resolve while always implying its next shift, the last line delivers a simile in parallel: “Gotta hit the club like you hit them mothafuckin’ angles”.

All this inevitably leads us back to the hook, which is rousing in its own right. “That’s a real one in the reflection, / Without a follow, without a mention” Drake stresses, urging the woman he’s rapping to not to fall into the trap of trying to evaluate her self-worth through her social media presence. It’s a nice touch, if a little cliched: If you really want to see yourself, stop gazing into the abyss of the “black mirror” and look at the mirror on your wall to appreciate who you really are. Only the threads are showing here, and if you pull on one, the whole thing might just unravel like the patchwork it is. If Drake thinks women shouldn’t be so concerned with their social media “reflection”, why did he plaster his face all over Spotify’s front page on his album’s launch date? What’s more, he’s built this whole hook on a fallacy: as much as the reflection in the mirror might help you better grasp the concept of yourself as “you”, it can never be the “real you” as such a thing is always inaccessible, at least in its totality. Come on, Drake, this is basic Lacanian psychoanalysis! The self is a ramshackle construction, a performance, a facade, one that, much like this song, threatens to collapse if prodded even a little. But such reminders are not always unwelcome, and I’ll take shelter in the ramshackle constructions if they help to defamiliarize a dull life for a few minutes. That’s how life is lived in a non-automatized manner, and if something as shoddily-constructed as this gem of a song can help lengthen it, maybe it doesn’t have to be such a short life after all.

[1] Though one might be tempted to ask: if Drake is willing to expand his view of women to include them as potential equals through their hard work that entitles them to their own lives, why not feature a woman on the song outside the samples? A sample is notably different from a feature, being a sort of static entity with no will of its own, selected by the producer as a sort of “gamepiece” (or even “ornament”) to employ as they see fit. A featured woman would bring her own will into it...perhaps, however, this would be too threatening to Drake’s male ego.