Notes on Perfectionism
Modeling credit: Fi Black
Or, a Belated Farewell to Summer
The question is the function writing as a unilateral discourse. More specifically, the function of this blog. Still more specifically, the function of this essay itself. But we shall forego an analysis of the recursive for the moment. The point here is to reiterate, both explicitly and performatively, that the point of my writing and publishing here is just that, to develop a practice of writing. This on its own is quite banal, though. One might as well theorize a shopping list. More interesting to me (or to the Continentalist within me) is to examine the Thing-in-Question in light of its internal and surrounding contradictions.
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I think there should be an umbrella adjective covering both circular and spiral. to describe The common centrifugal and centrifugal structures of both begging the question (“circular arguments”) and recursive analysis (thought which “loops” or “spirals” back on itself). Research thus far is inconclusive. Seek funding from the Center for Psychological Geometry.
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A contradiction within the Will to Write, by way of Formal Argument
To write is to write more or less well. Quality is not an incidental secondary property, but rather integral to its ontology. In communication, the degree to which a given meaning is made present for the recipient party is precisely the degree to which communication occurs at all. The being-of-writing, we might say, is a function of the overall fraction of information effectively conveyed. Or,
To write well can be defined positively “Does X communicate Y?” i.e. a value “c” which approaches 1 (one hundred percent), as well as negatively “Does X avoid obstacles to the communication of Y?” (a value which trends away from 0.) Clearly quality writing cannot help but satisfy both questions. Such standards are by no means exclusively, but they shall satisfy us for now.
In the context of academia, where the positive act of writing itself is presumed, there is great emphasis on revising. And because it is easier to correct than to re-create, the greater emphasis within revising on correcting errors, prosecuting fallacies, regulating citations, etc. That is to say, the disposition of the internal critic is (in my experience) chiefly negative, in the structural sense.
Two conclusions:
Insofar as she remains caught up in the desires and demands of academia or a similar external or internal source of a need to write independent of quality (which we see from our definition of writing as quality is somewhat specious), the writer will produce work.
Insofar as the anxiety produced/wielded by the internal critic is a motive force, the writer will not produce poor quality work.
Further extrapolating, if both conditions are met, the writer will produce high quality work, or at least work that avoids being particularly bad.
However, if one of these conclusions is not satisfied—if the writer has become detached from academia or alienated from herself—she will be left with only the internal critic. Therefore, the more she wishes to write (“write well”), the more that drive will be expressed through its negative formation, the anxiety to Not write-poorly, and, apparently paradoxically, the less she will be able to Write.
What an elegant argument!
Let us smash it.
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In the editorial for the second issue of Locust Review, an anti-capitalist, anti-realist journal of art and theory, the authors charge workers to “jump the shark!” What a liberating imperative! Theirs is an embrace of the “odd, [the] brazenly camp, [the] didactically crass” precisely because capitalist realism, the anti-manifesto “to ‘be realistic,’ has put us right here.” They have declared a war of position against the middle ground, against “common sense,” both political and aesthetic (as if you could even have one without the other).
What do we lose in the argument outlined above? If we accept this idea of writing as teleologically grounded, as having being insofar as it fulfills a pre-determined function, do we not run the risk of obscuring functions which might only be discovered in the freedom of the act itself? What of artistic experimentation? What of unscripted (though not necessarily to imply unintentional or even unstructured) self-discovery?
Locust Review insists on a dismantling both the conservative metaphysics of a directly experienced, fully determined reality and the auto-imune tactics of reconciliation to “some sense of normalcy,” which, they argue, “carries with it the implicit belief that those who fight for a better world must make themselves amenable to the current one. Don’t be ‘too weird,’ lest we alienate those who we are told make up the majority.” They rightly point that such blind faithfulness to normalcy as a virtue in its own right cuts directly against both the identity of the Left as a radically transformative project, as well as against the tactical-rhetorical context that, “[e]ven the most demographically “standard” worker is only “normal” when abstracted from their actual biography, psychology, and inner narrative. In other words, they are only ‘normal’ when their actual subjectivity is ignored or repressed.”
Even when we take up (as I readily accept that from time to time we must) a predefined objective of the work, are we to assume that nothing is being obsumed in the unstated/to-be-filled-in criteria of information conveyance (“i · c”) quality? What of this slippery phrase, “effectively conveyed”? Can the content of a text be reduced to a directly calculable quantity? Can the autoexpressive imprint of Form ever be separated from or reduced to Content? Are we to confine our theory of information as so much much passive stuff to be trucked and trafficked? So many smooth (if occasionally interrupted) shipments between the author(itarian)’s quasi-deistic mind and the reader’s passive, unassuming (and quite obviously gendered) port of reception? Do we fail to see by the light of the earlier reference to writing-as-self-discovery that every message, every personality, every feeling ships out from the subject-of-origination only to arrive to the readers—including the author themselves—with Some Assembly Required?
We cannot help but answer every one of these questions in the most profound negative. As the editors as Locust conclude,
Old notions of plausibility and convention – be they aesthetic or political – are dead. We see no need to revive them. In the face of a system that has policed and regulated our affects and emotions, we will dare to be over the top, ridiculous, absurd, silly, grotesque, obscene. Somewhere in the swirl of it all, our worst fears and highest hopes will break from capitalist realism’s constructed cages. And if it is possible for that to happen, in any collective sense, then we think it is also possible that something new and free might be imagined. Perhaps even made real.
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The idea of a belated farewell as such. How it retains more than it concedes. How it concedes more than it is. If I can still say good-bye, even now after all this time, you can’t have gone all that far. A measure of control.
The rite of farewell itself is founded on words of power, an interpolative magic trick. It makes of us, if not the one orchestrating the departure, then at least the high-priest overseeing the sacrament. An infantile gesture? No, the opposite: an act of pure nostalgia. Both more-and-less-than consenting to the separation: avowing the reality and thereby forcing it into something that can be avowed, participated in, by proof positive of the same. The salute of those weighed heavy folds of time, so many precious, dusty NOWs bottled up and fermented-bittersweet, but above all safely sealed away. Are they hailing the end of this summer, or of every summer? The ending intrinsic to summer-as-such? Being-as-such? We have all become drunk on so much time.
A difficult-to-articulate resonance between a belated farewell and the structure of procrastination, of the missed start. And no matter how hard you try to formally inaugurate a project, the more it looms over you like a haughty god, jeering at the impetuousness of anyone who would seek to summon and bind her. Or, a pre-empting of farewell? Refusing to convene a host of words keeps them safely in the realm of uninstantiated perfection.
Thinking especially here of the sublime horror of the—McGuffin? Character?—of The Monolith in Kubrick’s 2001 a Space Oddessy, a painfully smooth break in time and form, the face of a project which, upon initiation, represents a kind of rebirth and, by extension, a kind of death.
Alternatively, an exact reversal of the Ontological Argument—viz. that the idea of God, as the Greatest Conceivable Being, cannot be merely conceptual, as that would be a less-than-Greatest Conceptual Being, but must also be actual. Whereas in our case, the opposite. We dwell in the sacramental mystery of all the essays we could write but will not, lest they ever be degraded by such shortcomings as having been written/writeable.
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This past summer seems a long time ago. Much more distant than seasons years prior. It seems obvious to me that we keep things at a distance to protect ourselves, to feel as if we our protecting ourselves, not only spatially but in Time as well (referring, as usual, to the phenomenal-temporal sense).
Homelessness will do that to a season, I suppose. Ever shifting ground, uncertain where to sleep. Nowhere to hide from the world but the immediate context of your body, meaning the body can never be a place, a residence, but always a vehicle actively alert, preventative, apologetic.
I hesitate to write about having been homeless. It feels like posturing, like poverty tourism. I did not end up homeless purely as a result of financial shortcomings (though having stable income or greater savings would certainly have helped) but a combination of poor planning, unsafe living conditions, a fairly bad mental breakdown, and limitations on material/financial freedom. I was also incredibly privileged; I had a car I was able to sleep in and friends willing to let me couch-surf without judgement once I had quarantined for a week or so in my canvas tent.
Yet. It had been a long time since I reached a nadir as deep as the one I experienced in the last weeks of July. Even after, September and October have been stalked by spaces which wake up in a pallor sweat, once more drifting, or free-falling, or on the run, unable to even feel at home no matter how I fold my limbs or organize my breathing.
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It was bracing to be living with a person who was so laid back about my situation, openly making jokes at my expense. Fi seemed to be doing really well that summer. I remember that afternoons like the one captured here, times when I could bring myself to be around people rather than moping in a random parking lot or junkyard.
That’s probably the reason I really enjoy these warped, warm, CBD-saturated moshgraphs of her sunbathing on the step. They outline the best part of that month, the calmness I was only able to experience vicariously through the people around me. A simulacra closer to the experience than the direct image could ever reproduce.
Because after all, why should we expect information to precede the act of conveying it? When so much of the most important parts of our lives involves producing a feeling in others, or producing in others the production of a feeling in ourselves. Ad sufficienter.
Am I making sense? What is the function of these fourth wall violations in what amounts to a philosophically orientated diary entry?
Perhaps we shall deconstruct as yet-unconstructed walls, walls running parallel away from the stage and bifurcating the authordience in ever smaller slices reminiscent of Fibonacci and Zeno.
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Against the temptation to render everything in ever more profound formulae, these moshgraphs offer a slight-of-hand defence. They function as a kind of security blanket-simulacra. By over-intensifying the representation into a reality in its own right, the photorealistic-nonexistence removes the need for there having been an observer directing the camera’s gaze in the first place. By embracing the randomness of the glitch, we give the negative internal critic a day off, even though the actual production of the piece required just such a critic adjusting dials, timing screenshots, evaluating look-alikes in favor of the best of each specimen.
Is such obfuscation problematic? What does such a question even mean when the problematic itself has been elevated to the level of an ontology?
We cannot deny that much of critical theory is driven by the prosecution of the zero-point observation, the male gaze which so often so successfully passes itself off as nothing but a direct reproduction of reality—or, even more fascisticlly, reality itself. When so much revolves around the reification of perspectival etymology, can we ever avow the escapism of the male gaze?
I would like to excavate something emancipatory, an undercurrent profoundly feminine about the self-forgetting gaze, without discarding—without ever abandoning the critique of its powerful obscuration/conservative function.
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A working definition of dreamcritique: attentiveness to the meanings conveyed in the moments from which we cannot distract ourselves, because they themselves are structured by distraction. Consider that you can’t check your notifications in a dream, since doing so is merely another way for the dream to notify you of something, immerse you in a self-undermining focus over which you acutely do not have control.
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Of what are these moshgraphs dreaming? Nothing more nor less than a respite from the Monolithic gape in space and time, an object over-saturated by heavy tones of creative freedom such that it offers itself as its own distraction.
At the very least, implicit in the obscuring of the gazer, the photographer, the photo editor, the dreamtheorist, the automatic writer and the dissasemblative editor is an acknowledgement of the discomfort of subjugation, of being-made-subject, of needing to escape our selves and orientate around an Outside, around Others. The photos serve as a kind of anti-ghost, a space inversely structured to Lacan’s Temple, or Kubrik’s Monolith. When I look at them, I don’t have to think about the looming disjuncture in space and time and thought which was then haunting me. Saturated colors and watery forms have no need for gazecasting; they negate its negation and so allow the soul to float above its own seared light for a little while, rather than pinning the ghost underneath its own shadow.
