The Ability to Look

To be published in the journal disCLOSURE: A Journal of Social Theory, April 2008

I.

Sometimes
I think of myself as Coetzee’s tired magistrate
who is burdened by a historical palimpsest
of Empire.
If you recall, he would frequently sit
And try to identify with old stories and habits of peoples whose land he now administers.
He would look, and extrapolate,
but there was no object.
The magistrate was an Eichmann who desired
without reciprocity.
The magistrate would say,

"The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts,
new chapters, clean pages;
I struggle with the old story, hoping that before it is finished
it will reveal to me
why it was that I thought it worth the trouble."

But just like in Sartre’s fable of the voyeur,
the key-hole gazer is merely the object
an implicit being
without the Other looking back.
That is the ability to look.

II.

Demott wrote about his own colonization.
About the hard man who invaded his head,
and a cultivation of a desire, to see a world
mired in violence and lost hopes.
This hard man in his head
is a spectator of pornography,
of bombs raining upon the already-dead,
and nightly news casts of escalating numbers
and progress.
Demott is also an old man of Empire,
a spectator, who can never be seen.
An object.
He is his acts,
“His consciousness sticks to his acts”
and it will never be known whether he is watching.
Demott can never be shamed.
That is the ability to look.

III.

I often wonder about the victims of Empire.
About how they scream into the camera,
about dead families, lost children, and gods who look
otherwise.
I used to think that aspect of their struggle was futile,
but now I think
otherwise.
Their attempt is to create a social tie
To coalesce desires across mediums.
But that is the bitter irony.
The spectator
positioned far outside their circuits of desire
has no reality at all.

The Fate of Letters

What will soon become of historical scholarship when the access to personal letters becomes impossible? How can one write social and cultural histories or genealogies when the documents on which ideas are worked out, like correspondence between colleagues, is digitized (e.g., email) and without a paper trail? It would be impossible, for example, of writing a history of beginnings of psychoanalysis, such as Eli Zaretsky's brilliant Secrets of the Soul, without the important hand-written messages between Freud and his associates (Abraham, Jones, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi), where ideas emerged and sometimes waned without ever being printed in a book or article. How could one access, if one were interested in, say, the cultural turn in geography, the interpersonal correspondence between scholars if their epistolary relations are locked in the black boxes of personal computers and opaque networks?

In his analysis of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard understands part of the epochal shift of so-called "postmodernism" to be that moment when forces of information become centripetal, privatized, and consolidated into inaccessible spaces. While Lyotard's analysis may be laced with a hint of hyperbole, the very real threat to a more robust scholarship (and by that I mean the production of stories around the human condition) is of deep concern.

There has already been writings on the fate of libraries when they are digitized, particularly what is partly conceived as a loss of the library aesthetic. What is meant by this is the potential loss of strolling through a library aisle, and happening on books that are beside, on top of, or underneath the book you are looking for, not to mention those books that happen to catch an eye when one happens to walk up a wrong aisle or those books serendipitously placed on a cart near an aisle end. It is this tangible, perhaps supraliminal experience that is overcome when actions are determined by algorithms--such as the results that emerge on an Amazon or Google search. Of course, I am not trying to evoke an apocalypse; standing libraries will not be fossilized anytime soon. But I am more concerned with the expected ways in which one initially seeks out information in the first instance, not the fate of institutions, like libraries. In other words, the question is whether the library search becomes secondary to access knowledge and histories, treated pejoratively as a necessary chore if one wants to offer a nomothetic thesis on a social condition.

In sum, it is hard to see how email is going to make it into Selected Writings and Letters of So-and-So. Instead, it might just prove to be a starting point for another nostalgia industry, an industry recalling the good old days of the pen-in-hand, the stamping of an envelope, and the wait of receiving a response on an idea one took to the time to write down.

On the other hand, perhaps journal articles should turn into letters. Perhaps a journal should be started called Letters, where people can submit their feelings and thoughts around the unconscious, or the development of new conceptions of space in 1906, or the philosophy behind "giving an account of oneself." Perhaps, we should start a movement based on patience in letter writing, of working thoughts out slowly, of avoiding the keyboard. Which, of course, would mean journal would be, above all things, hand-written and with a paper-trail.