Transcendental nomadism remains embryonic and still grapples with elementary pedagogy. Due to the novelty of this lifestyle, tradition provides only vague guidance for its development. Improvisation is never a preference, but rather a necessity for such an orphan culture. Of course, nomadism is not completely unprecedented. Anthropologists study the pastoralists of the steppes who continue their itinerancy to this day. But transcendental nomadism is not an outward lifestyle, and it’s rather an ontological disposition for which the precedents are obscure. The nascency of this culture only appears at singular junctures when it manifests in the cracks between the great civilizations. A contemporary passage beyond sedentary life is responding to a Christendom which has become mercantile to the point of financial oligarchy. Christianity has always tended towards the hypocrisy of an anti-Christ, where populations are subjected to the perverse law of sinful flesh. Under these conditions, a transcendental nomadism harks back to the antinomic Pauline teachings on the Inner Kingdom. Though there is nothing Christian about this development, which just adapts ideas that work.
A static or inwardly nomadic life is distinguished from anything defined in anthropological terms. What enters migration are the “affect tips”, which are the limit-sensations where the organic drives contact with others. It’s in that threshold that transcendental nomadism could come into existence, where those drive-tips slide into abstraction and begin an ontological migration. The last generations of artists and poets, the romantics and the modernists, were still sedentary relative to what is required today. Joyce wrote Dublin, and Olsen wrote Gloucester. Nomadism is defined in contrast to the terrestrial orientation of that romantic legacy. If contemporary aesthetics hasn’t attained respectable achievements, that is because art remains inadequate to today’s dynamic environment. We haven’t enough experience with this frantic world to develop an aesthetic ethos.
The transition in question here is a sort of technological adaptation which systems theory would define as “functional differentiation”. The organic drives are undergoing a series of differentiations where the interface through technology is adjusted. Psychoanalytic notions of ‘symbolic castration’ are suited to understanding this evolutionary juncture, though that is a crude and arcane term which is open to a variety of connotations. The drives are getting unanchored from local environments so they can migrate through aesthetic abstractions. Several concepts are available which define various aspects of this localization which must be dissolved. The points where the drive obstinately relies on the reality of the other correspond with what Husserl called ‘perceptual belief’ and what Lukacs called ‘reification’. And this is ‘the gaze’ which Lacan defined as the point of affective anchoring in the optical field. Combining these concepts allows us to define the affective “tips” where the organic drive crosses into the sensation of contact with the other. It is these tips which must be ‘castrated’, which means that they must be set into migration, so that this libido attains higher mobility or abstraction. Castration in this sense converts aesthetic customs oriented in local environments so they become migratory. This can imply setting the environmental relation into migration.
The question arises as to why these local anchors should be cut. There is little to be gained from politicizing this gesture, especially if that means some zealous appeal to justice, or universal solidarity with the precarious populations of the planet. Rather the basic rational for this gesture should be defined modestly as a response to tight constraints. This is a way to escape from legalistic capture within a regime of social technology. A nomadic lifestyle is not proposed as an ideal, and it is superior neither ethically nor aesthetically, but is merely a desperate recourse for liberty which might be a destiny for some. A relevant scriptural reference here is “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” That arcane term ‘castration’ helps to acknowledge the suffering which is implicit in this process. This isn’t the suffering of an exchange, where a pound of flesh is ceded to meet the letter of the law, but rather an organic transformation. Nomadism is a difficult path as the consequences can be drastic and unpredictable, and the transition is especially uncomfortable for pioneers. The only available course is to experiment with bodily modification, and some unfortunate results inevitably ensue.
This umbilical severance involves inevitable ennui, though this torment can be ameliorated through figural or cosmetic adjustments. If the sedentary environment is figured as the domus of an egg, then the horrible figure of castration can be replaced with the perhaps less painful model of hatching. Much aesthetic work is required on the figuration of tribulation, to lessen the trauma without disavowing the essentially traumatic experience. This work has been underway since the middle ages, and the tribulation recurs through romantic and modernist literature, though those works remain relatively sedentary. Today the traumatic breaks are more intimate, so they run more directly through the subject or the ego, so that we undergo the experience of the ‘cracked-I’. This returns today’s problem closer to some concerns of the reformation and the middle ages. let’s consider some lines of modernist poetry from Charle’s Olsen’s long free verse work, ‘I Maximus’:
o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)
in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak
in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form
that which you make, what holds, which is
the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what
the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect
the mast, the mast, the tender
mast!
The “law of object” cuts internally, so the objective passes through the heart of the subject. The nest figures this object that is more subjective than any subject. And then it becomes the phallic ship mast. The question here concerns where this topology of the organism, which isn’t so much inscribed, but becomes a matter of hermeneutics. Olsen’s Magnum Opus presents itself as a literary fortification of his fishing village against commercial development.
oh tansy city, root city
let them not make you
as the nation is
What interests us here is the ontological question of whether this poetry refers to an actual village with a fixed location in space and time, or whether this is generating a simulacra with the potential for nomadic migration as a kind of abstract anyvillage. This difficult question can send us deep into Olsen’s aesthetics, and its in this problem that we can situate the painful tribulation of the transition to nomadism. This issue of identity through time and space has been discussed around the poetry of Wallace Stevens, such as “the snowman” or “an ordinary evening in new haven”. And this ontological approach to modernist poetry has been adopted at specific points by deconstruction, especially where it has considered fetishes and signatures, as well the theme of “inevitably failed mourning”. These lines of Olsen demonstrate a signature doubling,
for those of us who do live our life quite properly in print
as properly, say, as Gloucester people live in Gloucester
Throughout the opening pages of this work, there is invoked a community identified with the ‘polis’. Perhaps his use of this archaic term was influenced by the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition in 1957. That book was a rational, modernist defense of a certain Aristotelian classicism. It analyzes the value of work, and how a polis depends on the toil of the lower classes. It would seem that this sort of classicism may have had some currency among the literary modernists of the English speaking world. Joyce and Pound both professed an Aristotelianism which had territorial and identarian implications. Against this tendency, a transition to nomadism would imply more Platonic sentiments. This would be a shift towards a more cosmic and less terrestrial ontology, such that the pure idea takes on a power that supercedes local contingencies.
There is a conflict between nomadism and modernism which reaches a decisive juncture in the dialectics where aesthetic singularity is absorbed into a monetary economy. The modernists sought to fortify their communities in particular localities of terrestrial life, which were considered resistant to the danger of being reduced to commercial clichés. The important question here concerns how this strategy has aged, and in what sense it should be deemed obsolete. Nomadism is admittedly eager to chart some relation with these prominent predecessors, though this is an especially fraught line of inheritance. We shall proceed by raising a question of a community in a very particular way, where there are conflicting models of relations. The substance of literary modernism was a community that was avowedly linguistic and fraternal, such that these qualities were prominently exhibited throughout its literature. Various other relational models have conflicted with this controversial tradition, but in what follows let us consider the apophatic community of the Acephale group in Paris during the 1930’s. The conflict between these two models of community would seem to be decisive for the transition to nomadism. This is because nomadism emerged among this group of Parisian Platonists, but the Aristotelian aesthetics of Poundian literary humanism has dominated the English language in which these words are written. A rivalry between these models of community has been underway for several decades. It was once called the postmodernist controversy, and it has returned in several variations. This conflict is difficult to understand because the French side rejects communitarian identity and vanishes into the enigmas of Jewish mysticism.
just because weather
is very precise to
the quarter it comes from (as writing is
Olsen was famously concerned with the particularity of his writing, which was like his poetic principle. His style is recognizable in distinct signatures. His verses are nearly prose, but the breaking of sentence expresses a chaos of singular orality. This is poetry at the threshold where grammar and logic are sacrificed for particularity. The question we need to raises here concerns what we might call the politics of particularity. And by this I do not mean to question the justice of Olsen’s or Pound’s writing, but rather the political efficacy. When the composition of particularity is anchored in proper names and places, those are rendered susceptible to appropriation and merchandising. The modernist aesthetics was expressed through a voice that was immediately recognizable, and which was shared through a network of associates. It never effectively resisted capitalism because it substantialized itself as celebrity branding at the limits of ladhood. This was an aesthetic that ceded everything it had to the market up front. It’s resistance to capitalism was perhaps sincere, but this brings us to a criticism of Pound’s social credit politics and how that was rooted in anti-semitic ethnic identity. (On a side note, let us just mention that today social credit is a prominent fad in Chinese technocracy.) The issue here is the legacy of Aristotelian chrematistics and the associated ideologies of work.
Eyes,
& polis,
fishermen,
& poets
This organic solidarity of the maritime community is reminiscent of socialist class alliances, and perhaps not totally unrelated to the Fordist division of labor. Industrial development was disrupting subjective ideology, and poetry was searching for allies that could anchor it in the material. The organic is a trope that gives materiality to the divisions of the worker-army that is being enlisted.
so few
have the polis in their eye
The brilliant Portuguese owners,
they do. They pour the money back
into engines, into their ships,
whole families do, put it back
in. They are but extensions of their own careers
as mastheadsmen
This brings us to entrepreneurialism and the market spirit. The ship has always been a common trope for the firm, where to engage in business is setting sail on a risky venture. There is a nautical aesthetic that features throughout modernist poetry, going back to Pound’s first published work which was a translation of an old English poem called the Seafarer. As his poetry enlists itself for the work of constructing an aesthetic polis, it is no surprise that Olsen invokes Hyperion, that Quixotic champion of the Greeks against the Ottomans.
The polis requires a differentiation of labor, and Arendt’s book provided an economic analysis of different kinds of work, such as the writing of literature, and the cleaning of toilets, which a good city requires. Her philosophical classicism tends to overlook some of the more feminine aspects of labor which get evoked in Olsen’s aesthetic survey,
the attention, and
the care
however much each of us
chooses our own
kin and
concentration
The transition to nomadism concerns the ontological modality of what I call “affective possession”. And I want to suggest that this problem should be troubling and depressing. There is no question that the sedentary aesthetic of modernism is exquisite and comfortable, though its limited political efficacy is now exhausted. Sedentary aesthetics is susceptible to capture within simulation, which is a concrete anchoring of subjectivity within stereotyped conditions which are mistaken for originality. This affective anchoring is hypnotically positioned within sociotechnical regimes. This is an automatism which can appear well-adjusted and vigorous, and the fact that its an automatism can be well concealed. The decisive issue here is how it reifies the reality of the other: its affective tips have anchored it into an identity position. Its symbolic constitution is dependent on the reality of others. But when those perceptual beliefs are castrated, then there is transpires the ontological originality of the nomadic affects. Then there is lucidity regarding the originality of time.
Affective tips are the proprioceptions where the organic drives enter the threshold of contact. These are trigger-points of disinhibition where organisms are anchored in the perceptual field. Orgasmic tips. Nomadism is where these tips enter a transient relation with the perceptual field or actuality. More specifically, we are interested in another threshold where the tip-perception relation switches from fixed to transient. The configuration of this threshold borrows from what Freud called a ‘sublimation’, as a point of abstraction where symbolic relations become possible. Sedentary life in this sense is a concrete literalism.
The epistles of St. Paul provide a scriptural background for discussing the break with commercial simulation. The way subjectivity is captured in the simulation is insidious like the collusion of law and sin described by Paul, where these are indistinguishable in some economy of the damned flesh. He proposed a paradoxical liberation where one breaks free from the law while remaining within it, because simply fleeing would only tighten its binds. The law loses its grip on affect as it is converted into an aesthetic simulation which is registered lucidly. This paradoxical conversion corresponds with the gestures of conceptualism and minimalism. Bringing a commercial product into a gallery does not change anything about the object, but just how its situated with institutional coordinates. This is what has to be done with the entirety of the law, which has to be replaced with a simulation, or we could say counter-actualized as an aesthetic object.
JL Nancy conceives contact as the essence of the world, so that the world is the limit where people and things touch. Derrida developed ideas about how other-touching alternates with self-touching through a dialectic of mutual exposure. When Nancy deconstructs the concept of compassion, he defamiliarizes the sense of this word. This disrupts a reified psychological and political valorization of this concept where it bestows dignity on the humanism championed by progressive liberals. Political communities are formed through the recognition of compassion, as communities of the compassionate which shun the apathy and coldness of the outsiders who must be held beyond the borders. Compassion is a trait that identifies members, whether a limited compassion between members of a community, or an unlimited cosmopolitan hospitality towards strangers.
In American politics, the distinction between liberal and conservative should never be equated with a simply between the compassionate the uncompassionate, although some zealous liberals might like to portray it that way. Rather it concerns qualitatively different models of compassion which are alternate topologies of affect. Liberalism can be identified with the promiscuity of affect, and conservatism with the discrimination of affect, though these are often superficial masks concealing their opposites. And these parties might prefer more ‘flattering’ terms like generosity and patriotism, though it is precisely this sort of preference which is the most insidious aspect of sedentary aesthetics. As we shall see below, it’s the narcissistic insistence on how affects are named and conceptualized which makes them exchangeable, and which brings them under the seductive power of the law. And its this reliance on legalistic conceptualism that damns any economics of the polis.
JL Nancy’s touch-world deconceptualizes compassion and deprives the term of any positive ideological connotation. This approaches the way affects are treated in Buddhist meditation. Compassion in this sense is simply the fact that people affect each other, whether by their presence or their absence, or by how these aren’t even distinguished. Someone might be affected by a ghostly pseudo-presence or a lingering odor, such that the neighbor simply affects us in a way that is left without any further conceptual determination. This leaves the affect uninterpreted and gives it hermeneutic space so that concepts can be played with. This creates uncertainty about passivity and activity – was it they who affected me, or did I affect myself? – so the affect is expressed in the neutral voice, where the distribution of responsibility is postponed. This affect has refused any names, whether offense, gift, honor, shame, humor… judgment is suspended, so there is no value of good or bad, and yet it remains registered as a fact.
Where the affect is suspended on this fence between self and other, then it is in danger of falling into a gift/debt cycle. The suspension of the accounting machine can make it more dangerous. To further neutralize the legal sense of affects, they should be hermeneutically repositioned as effects of customary media which is sociotechnical and physiology. Affects are then a product of arbitrary and opaque customs. This interpretation further neutralizes the legal conceptuality so that affects cannot be attributed subjectively, or “taken personally”. The affects produced by say, someone making racial slurs, can be defamiliarized, or alienated, or depersonalized, as they are attributed to customary media.
Nancy understands com-passion etymologically as passions felt together. This can begin to deconstruct an archive of passion-concepts: hatred, envy, lust, love, honor, fear, respect… these are all terms of legalistic accounting in that they represent affects within cycles of debt/gift. In other words, its these concepts which anchor affects within the domain of law as described by St. Paul, or what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘mythical violence’. Hatred is reduced to a narrowly legalistic interpretation of some otherwise nameless affect. The net of the law then is woven from these concepts, and populations are under its spell insofar as their affects are coded legally.
Following St. Paul, the problem is not to dissolve this legalistic net of concepts, but rather to avoid identifying with it. The problem is not about inscription – it’s not that the law could be written out of existence – but rather a problem of hermeneutics or interpolation. The concepts require deconstruction to break the spell of affect-possession, and this is something like an exorcism. Then the affects don’t belong to anyone personally, rather they belong to the roles in which people have been cast in the simulation. Or more interesting, perhaps they belong to roles which haven’t yet been fashioned. Then the affect becomes like an enigmatic stage direction, suggesting the sort of roles that populations might be moving into.
At this point transcendental nomadism may enter a visionary phase. Society can be figured as a swarming of migratory tips that massage populations from all directions. Society is not the sum of the people, but the sum of the tips where they are affected. This vision is an extreme limit of commercial-aesthetic development, where society is completely transformed into a market simulation, and where that simulation can be experienced lucidly.
Where modernists inherited the Aristotelian distinction of the polis, what we are prosing here is something more Platonic along the lines of a monad. This is something like the Fichtean interpretation of Descartes which Edmund Husserl found so compelling, though we are taking this theory in a radically aesthetic direction. The decisive scission for nomadism falls between the intimate and the social, particularly as this was articulated by Deleuze and Guatarri. This is not merely a conceptual distinction, but more importantly this is something dramatic and charged with affect. There is a struggle over the deployment of organic drives, where the society is attempting to capture the libido in the spell of legalism. The modernist evocation of the polis should be dismissed as obsolete, because the ‘public’ in that civil-political sense has been abolished, and any remaining semblance of that tradition is just a simulacrum of the market. The public has been annexed by the social, and so the Aristotelian modernists have been defeated. And so the struggle must be redefined. Where the polis no longer exists, here we speak of ‘intimacy’ (or desiring-production in Deleuzo-Guatarrian terms), and this intimacy can create ‘minority communities’ where they are still possible outside of the social-market relations. Where before there was a public, now we have intimate exposure of the organic drives. This is a dramatic scenario where the market system attempts to sap the organic drives for its purposes, and so community is only possible where libido has been reserved from the market.
Three elementary variations on this scenario can be distinguished. First, intimacy may be totally abolished in favor of social puppetry, meaning that all the organic drive has been absorbed into the automation. In this scenario there is no possibility for intimacy or minority communities. Second, intimacy may survive in a way that subordinated to society, where it is something abject or excluded which galvanizes social relations. Here, the market society preserves the intimacy of the others for the sake of its own morale, i.e. the pride of the fortunate. Third, some share of organic drive is reserved for intimacies which are hidden behind social roles. This is the scenario where nomadism becomes possible. Reaching this blessed condition requires negotiating between the Scylla of total automation (the first scenario) and the Charybdis of abjection (the second scenario). This may require a painful scission where intimacy is appropriated from the social, as this painful surplus is always in danger of abjection.
The problem concerns the way that social libido is cathected. The danger is that society absorbs all the affective energy whether positively or negatively. This danger can be aestheticized into a source of drama, in the same way that modernists dramatized their struggles with the market. There are reflections in the movements of intimacy and society, which are like the dramas of hunter and prey, or police and criminals. The intimates are constantly faced with the challenge of converting their private libido into more exchangeable currencies, like when they need to pass a toll booth or bribe an official. There are continual crises of authenticity, where social costumes are suspiciously cheap, and even detained for abjection. In order to pass muster, the intimate libido may be converted to shore up social appearances but this risks having it depleted and annexed by society.
There is an old maxim that says the best mask that can be worn in disguise is one’s own face. It inevitably happens that fake duplicate of the intimate self are used as social costumes. Then if the costume ever starts to disintegrate, then one may just revert to their intimate self, and the transition might go unnoticed. This painful scission of the organic drive can be covered with drama and humor. This is a kind of economic drama where there is a continual contest over the distribution of organic drive. The distinction must be constructed though it doesn’t register empirically because it’s rather something transcendental or ontological.
On an empirical level, total automation appears as perfect adjustment within the socio-technical regime, because here there is complete sublimation of the drive with no remainder of Thanatos (intimacy) to trip up the simulation. With the perfection of android technology, the automatism is concealed, while the tact of nomadic perception is to render it salient and perhaps even abject. This is dueling over the conception of abjection, where the social wants to define it as intimacy, where as intimacy wants to define it as automatism. The sleek and glorious automation is a hypnotic trap that threatens to lure intimacy into a world whose borders are defined by the exclusion of abject intimacy. The developmental simulation is defined in its contrast with the abjection of intimacy, whereas nomadism is always trying to blur this contrast. The borders of development are abolished by identifying the abject with the automatic. Or we could say that the minority community by a dialectical maneuver that identifies the developed (automation) with the undeveloped (abjection) and thereby breaking the hallucinatory spell of the market simulation. Though this won’t abolish the simulation, it just breaks its affective grip on the organic drives, so they can migrate between roles.
Someone once said that the art of narrative lies in not telling a story. If writing reaches to grab a whole object, or tell a whole story, then there is nothing left for reading. Language is exhausted by saying everything, and this can happen in an instant. What is real lies in the unsaid, but that isn’t necessarily unknown. Here writing and knowledge are separated by how expression must be restrained from the limit of knowledge. This reserve is the power of the secret which is often feigned. There is a difference between real secrets and bluffing.
This reserve of knowledge is a condition of symbolic or phallic efficacy. There is an important distinction between the unsaid and the unsayable, where the unsaid is like a safety buffer against the dangers of the unsayable. If the unsaid gets exhausted, then speech gets shipwrecked on the unsayable. Knowledge is a resource which is consumed by speech, where it gets debased into that cheap knock-off which is called mere representation. The power of knowledge is reserved in the unsaid, and its expression in language is its fall into alienation. But this fall into alienation is of course an essential phase, though a painful castration. Through exhausting itself in language, knowledge discovers its limits, like someone falling off an embankment as they learn to comfortably navigate the terrain.
The issue of phallic efficacy in language is getting foregrounded today in discussions of economic fiction and realist literature. This genre deals with extreme alienation that verges on particular psychoses that emerge from financial simulation. This kind of writing is susceptible to a mania of saying everything. The concept of realism has a crucial split, where on one hand there is a conventional realism which is limited to description or portrayal, but then there is a more radical realism which participates in the construction of reality. This extreme realism is where the romantic imagination identifies as the source where phallic representation is produced. This is the “man-made world” of Vico that was cited enthusiastically by utopians like Karl Marx. With the conception of economic fiction, the romantic absolute of literature is undergoing augmentation. This relates with Michel Callon’s conception of performative economics, where markets are constructed by the actions of participants. Though in Callon’s thinking, an actor’s performance could be effective if they hold symbolic positions, such as the words of an influential analyst or fund manager, there is a further level of questions concerning how fiction might participate in the construction of markets.
It would seem there are no logical limits to the power which literature could exercise over the economic. Literature could invent new products, or define new markets, or conduct appraisals which effect values, or it could construct new models for transactions, or it could redefine regions. It could script codes of behavior, such as how auctions are conducted, or how advertising is circulated. This is to suggest the radical possibility that markets in their entirety might be indistinguishable from literary simulacra. Economics and literature can swallow each other, and it might be impossible to distinguish them at any point. Here I want to take up Percey Shelley’s famous adage that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, in order to suggest an oscillation between the genres and disciplines where this “legislation” takes place. This would be a longue durée that is ontological in the way described by Henri Lefebvre. There have been phases of aestheticization where poetry has taken the lead in defining disciplines within modernity, but then the roles reverse and poetry takes on a servile function in the pursuit of economic objectives. There is an alternation between the quantative ideals of economics and the aesthetic ideals of literature and arts. There is perversity and deception in this contest, as well as temporal disjunction, and so it’s an agonal contest that might not be decidable.
The aestheticization of the economic is a broad topic with uncharted dimensions. Any work of literature can be approached economically, and this could mean considering how its writing and publication were financed, and how has circulated, but also how it participates in the codification of markets through depictions and portrayals. And then going the other way, the writings of the economic and financial professions can also be aestheticized and considered as literature, as was done in Mary Poovey’s tome on financial paper in the early modern age. This creates a cataclysm of genres where the ground is newly flattened, and against this oceanic tide writing clings to a particular modality of the real. This is not the reality of a described object, but rather a creative speculation at the threshold of emerging markets. This writing that participates in the incubation of form that proceeds on abstract aesthetic dimensions. Economics appears to have the upper hand in this contest, but poetry could turn the tables at some point. This tarries with the risk of psychosis, as the suggestion here is a realism which partially denies the external reality of its object, which is the recipe for madness. The problem is no longer to depict the economy, but rather to participate in its emergence.
Though this writing no longer describes reality, it can still participate within reality. Another kind of reality principle comes into effect, which implies a different modality than description. Writing can be realistic in a way that is not descriptive, but rather realistic in it’s economic participation. And this is not to say that writing would exchange monetarily in the normal way, but that it would reverse the economic. Where economics is positive in the work of bringing subjects to the market, this poetry would be negative in the unworking which exempts objects from the market. Where economics focuses attention on valuations and transactions, this poetry shifts that attention and refocuses on devaluations and the unexchangeable. This is to extricate the substance of the organic drives from the paradigm of exchange. Such extraction is the mode of poetry’s economic participation.
This reversal is based in the hallowed traditions of literature. The rise of economics is the fall of the spirit into the object-sin of the commodity. This is an original sin, as well as an incarnation in worldly material. Aestheticization is a vehicle which reverses this and transports the spirit into blessedness, and that reversal is at the center of the genre of apocalyptic. This genre can be treated as pure fiction, which distinguishes it from the historical. Apocalypse in this sense is a completely non-Christian aesthetic which is an unhistorical static given. Keeping the apocalyptic atemporal avoids the narrative intrigues of the end times, along with any residual religiosity, and it allows for greater liberty in selecting figures from the archive. But more importantly, this liberates historiography so that a more original and interesting cycle of history might be initiated.
This allows a temporally disjointed history to be initiated from a Chinese perspective. An aesthetic is emerging from the historicity of late-Qing literature, especially the red light novels, along with modernization discourses from the early republican period, especially Zhang Taiyan. This late-antique historicity expresses codes for an emerging anti-economy. This is the returning historicity of the abolition of Chinese antiquity by modern development. The traumatic ending of the traditional Chinese lifeworld and the associated nostalgic suffering is being converted into an aesthetic power that overturns the paradigm of economic exchange.
William Blake equated Christianity with Art, and that assimilation has retained efficacy through until today. Christianity gives aesthetics a sense of direction, where a descent is followed by salvation, though these coordinates only take on sense once they are anchored in historiography. Where traditional orthodoxies figured this descent as the original sin and the incarnation, aesthetic thinking moves towards what we might call an “excarnation”, or a displacement of organic drives. The development of financial society lures populations into sociotechnical utopias which exclude their customary organic drives. This is an alienation where commodity idealism abjects the Freudian id, and the organic drive gets projected outside the body as a monster that raises the threat of psychosis. But this descent into excarnation reaches a critical point of reversal. This possibility which gives aesthetics a claim on tradition and allows it to escape the charge of nihilism. The salvific reversal can proceed by incorporating the abject material through a new prosthesis. This requires shifts in corporeal orientation, where the bordering and figuration of bodies is transformed. The abjection or turbulence of this excarnated material can only be incorporated through a disfiguration of the corporeal form.
Fashion provides a model for this art of incorporating the abject, and in this would be a Christological enterprise. This isn’t limited to clothing but is rather a general prosthetics to fabulate a new embodiment or constitution of the flesh. As sociotechnical development displaces the drives in ever new ways, this requires the fashioning of ever new incorporations. This sort of fashion would be a profoundly equivocal art that shares a dangerous ambivalence with dialectical thinking. Integral bodies are determined through their contrast with the abject, and corporeal borders are maintained for the sake of excluding the organic drives. These borders cannot be moved to incorporate this abject matter, because the intensity of this matter resists incorporation. The abject isn’t simply situated inside or outside the body, and its disturbing force is such that it inevitably disfigures the border.
The fashioning of a new incorporation requires concealments and diversions that allow this excluded material an illicit communication with the inside of the body. But this prosthetics of concealment will lead to misunderstandings because its function is never decidable. This concealment is ambivalent because the purpose is not to conceal but rather to galvanize the new incorporation. Energy is drawn from concealment, and this includes the energy which is drawn from the trauma of abjection. The abjection of the drive remains secret because it’s inconsistent with corporeal composition, but the power of this secret energizes a new composition.
The abject is a failure of symbolic composure, and this failure involves the collusion of opposites. Symbolic composure requires the partiality of certain limited positions within the matrix of representation. The sociotechnical regime enforces these arbitrary conditions, such as those associated with ethnicity or class. The problem of fashion is to devise prothesis that can make the abject accessible despite these conditions and so they might be transformed. For this the borders of incorporation must be compromised in subtle and covert ways.
Christological fashion erases borders and extends a hospitality which spreads the secret abjection of the drives through bodies. Bodily borders are marked with traits, contagions, affections, sensations, affinities, similarities or relations. They are allegorized and emblematized. They are modeled topologically. There are incremental layers of abjection and secrecy. The deeper secrets of abjection concern the shame of dispossession, or what is called automatism, non-animacy, non-sentience. This is the ultimate secret that gestures might express nothing but affected attempts at the semblance of normalcy. This secret struggle to appear as normal and well-adjusted participants within the circuitry of transactions, this is a struggle to disidentify with the horror of abjection. The organic drives undergo a satanic alienation as they are banished from expression within the sociotechnical simulation. But this leaves the utopia in a condition of spiritual deadness because it loses access to the organic drives and so it sponsors the fashion industry to entice the return of the prodigal son. This idea that the sociotechnical regime would refashion itself to accommodate Satan is deeply suspicious to both religious and secular orthodoxies. The utopia tries to animate itself with the turbulence of the drives, and so fashion is sanctioned as an engineering of counter-culture. But this accommodation always implies defanging, and so there is a kind of faux-wilderness like going camping in a park. Something of the satanic always gets excluded as fashion evolves to incorporate the drive back into the limits within sociotechnical conditioning.
At the limits of incorporation is a sacrificial economy which is like Aesop’s fable of the wolf and the dog, where the temptation of domesticity threatens the wild with extinction. Chaos can only survive as chaos by withdrawing into obscurity and remaining unexchangeable on the markets, or else it must give up its nature as chaos to transact on the circuits of the sociotechnical order. This struggle of id versus superego is distinguished from classical Freudian scenarios because here the drive is essentially a death drive. This id is not transgressive but rather maintains a conservative vigil despite abjection. If they had an ideological sense, then these drives could be on the side of nature, tradition or autonomy, but this id is under a demonic possession which makes it impervious to ideological codes. These days the id is identified with its obstinacy because that is how it appears in contrast to the spectacle. The energy of this id is withdrawn into a larval phase, and so there is no outward display, and no sense of transgression. The superego attempts to draw the energy out to galvanize the markets, and transgression works as a enjoyment-lure, such as the Pauline doctrine which identifies sin with the law. Whereas the id remains imperviously turned towards its inner kingdom.
The ongoing spread of automation further sharpens the contrast between the dynamism of the technological superego and the obstinacy of the drives. Traditional institutions had integrated the organic energy of the drives into social exchanges, but the spread of global technology junks those old systems and the drives lose their symbolic infrastructure.
Fashion maintains an ambivalent alignment between the organic id and the technosocial superego. There is pressure to conceal the abject source of the drives, which is unsightly like a corpse on the sidewalk in a gentrified neighborhood. But this concealment cannot be too effective, or else the source of the drives will be lost. The corpse cannot be completely vanquished and forgotten, or else the utopia will become deadened. The concealment must remain limited so the abject remains alluring behind the screen of some lingerie. And sociotechnics takes advantage of this situation by resorting to fake concealment, which suggests there is organic drive where there is none. Where Freud distinguished between conscious and unconscious, these days awareness becomes a matter of degrees, of the more and the less. There is uncertainty and deception surrounding concealment, and there are degrees of awareness, acknowledgement, and suspicion about the secrecy of the organic drives. Along the borders of incorporation can be woven the sorts of intersubjective knots that R.D. Liang expressed, “She attempted to reveal her noticing of my concealment of her concealment…”, though fashion implies an aesthetic bifurcation that supersedes this sort of subjective-linguistic psychology.
Fashion is an art which responds to what we might call the riddle of the phallus. The phallus is the missing piece of representation, the holy grail that would allow representation to succeed in some ideal sense. This ideal would be a symbol that verifies to the reality of eternal life, or a sign that guarantees that reproduction will continue eternally. The phallus is like the missing notarization of our vital status, and the utopianism of the commodity demands the forgery of this document. The reproductive drives which are physiologically in the genitals, and so there is a substitution where the flesh of the instinct gets replaced with phallic symbols. And through this substitution the organic drives are excarnated, which is to say projected into some diffuse abject matter outside the borders of the body. The strange satanic power of the instincts then poses a psychotic threat to the artificial integrity of the body.
The role of fashion could be highly equivocal in this situation, where it alternates as a double agent between the concerns of the id and the superego. When it takes the side of the instincts, then fashion may adopt the ideology of naturalism, conservatism, liberalism or revolution. Though when fashion adopts these ideologies, then there is suspicion that it may be secretly on the side of the socio-technical regime, where it reinforces the alienation of the drives, or castrates them into the services of the commodity. Fashion can play more complex roles, like an immunization or mimicry, so that the regime adopts something from the drives, which is a typical outcome of the rivalry with the abject id. I want to suggest a kind of fashion that moves beyond these oppositions, towards the more Christological problem of recovering the prodigal son and returning that Satan to the fold where he would transform the sociotechnical regime. Fashion in this sense would be a transformative prosthesis that would be hospitable towards the abject drives of the id.
