Code and Critique

— Felix Bernstein

Except from James Malton and Brook Taylor, The Young Painter's Maulstick, London, around 1800

Except from James Malton and Brook Taylor, The Young Painter’s Maulstick, London, around 1800

If we demystify, it is only to mystify further[1]
—Pierre Klossowski

 
 

&Verbal Regimes

The Authentic Regime – Voicing Words
The “real” voice burbles over from the organic urges and inner passions and enchanting
communal spirits that are later forced into the “symbolic” realm by being made
seeable and sayable (through the technological imposition of codes such as writing).

The Factual Regime – Saying Words
Speech signifies the depth and soul of an interior subject, whose words can be decoded
into clear and distinct semantic messages. In other words, speech is reducible to
what can be stated and to what is sayable. Speech is taken as binding, confessional,
and unequivocal.

The Synesthetic / Aesthetic Regime – Seeing Words
Words are an effect of graphic, motor, and sonic gestures and inscriptions; it is
irreducible to the thinking subject and always can be visiblized. Tropes, schemes,[2] conceits, and ornaments are primary while moral pathos, subjectivity, and argument are secondary effects.[3] All sound is scored (the effects of hearing are marked).This is either condemned by the factual regime as sophistry, decadence,
mannerism, fancy, or adopted as decoration, or a fetishistic and ecstatic interest in
alphabetic letters. By visible, I do not mean retinal but rather, exterior in the sense
of irreducible to the subject including tactile codes (Braille, typing) and machine codes
(programming languages).

Before modernity, Saying took priority over Seeing.[4]

Seeing (design, illustration, diagram, scheme, icon) only thrived when it could be productively used in the service of Saying (transparently displaying or improving the biblical, moral, logical message). Allegory was hegemonic—all images were said to ‘prefigure’ the latest message, all martyrs and prophets in history were only ever prefigurations of Christ.[5] Saying led univocally to the truth of the voice and the flesh, so even though the unmediated voice remained a sacred outlier to the law, the two could be enmeshed through confessional testimony so long as it was sanctioned by doctrine. Seeing Words was marked by psychology as crazy, akin to infantile word salad, literalism, or concrete thinking; and academics demeaned flights of fancy based on homographic similitude as intellectual errancy or masturbation.[6] Psychoanalysis encouraged associative flights of fancy but only by making each chain reducible to an underlying code.

The decadents (Victorian, modernist, and postmodernist) reversed the course of history by flipping Seeing over Saying. The shallow glittering surface of alphabetic characters took dominance over the depth hermeneutics of traditionalist code (as is evidenced by the excessive use of punning or homophony in postmodern theory). Foucault celebrated this turn (of seeing over saying), which he found exemplified in Andy Warhol and his “Camp Bell” soup cans, a neo-belletrism.[7] The signifier was said by Lacan to take precedence over the signified. In a vengeance against meaning, meta-narratives were reduced to captions in the service of the image. Codes were employed only for the sake of guessing games without termination. (Lewis Carroll was very important to poststructuralist theorists: the sense of a chessboard is often at play).

Since postmodernism, decadence has accelerated with the dominance of “optics” forging chains of similitude based on retinal resemblance through instagrammatic algorithms, the rate of literacy declining,[8] and graphic design becoming queen of the arts. But this has occurred alongside the rise of the deep code that seems to capture even the most nonsensical gesture. The clear and distinct caption returns in the form of the tagging that preemptively governs all encounters, ensuring that a detectable and retainable signal will be generated for and by the gadget (which increasingly replaces the psyche as mnemonic database and designer of fate).

A new species of aestheticism[9] has triumphed over Reason, but only insofar as it enables self-evident signals of ethos/pathos/logos (vice/virtue/topicality). We can see everything and everyone at all times with no pressure to make any sense of it all, but this insight is always platformatted by the brand (and there is nothing that can’t be branded—there’s another darker, deeper, more exilic platform for you, the uncountable inconsistent multiplicity of yous to come).[10]  The synesthetic chains of ‘likeness’ (all images look alike, look like you, or look like your type) is based not on qualitative shades of beauty or chance encounters but only quantifiable tags, which ensure that mimetic rivalry precedes taste (i.e. I like this because I see you like this): thus forming a new mode of equivalency between discrete images that are categorized based on a mix of your real reflexive urge to click and your imaginary sense of social triangulation.[11] The ultimate tag, signifier, and exchange value will be the brand but even the brand will be subjected to the ratio of followers, as calculated by the platform (the larger platform eating up all the smaller ones, as we see in art fairs). But it is our schizoid greed, envy, and polarization that makes the platform tick, not an oligarchic coder in a high tower.

The deep code ensures each retinal linkage be marked by a clear-cut menu of categories and preferences that will come to make up the digital footprint of the user. No matter how ‘schizoid’ or ‘free-flowing’ a user is, their digital footprint coheres into a new index of personhood, an incriminating or dignifying social credit score that does not simply re-present a user’s preferences but also conditions them—that is, the device does not simply ‘survey’ the user but entraps, doses, and suckles the user through a regimen of recommendations and a cycle of uppers and downers. Pumping you up with facial capital then imposing detoxes and curfews for mediated wellness. Even reflexes and tics manifest through social mirroring as in TikTok Tourette’s. i.e., Totally Administered Consumption.

As we start to critique the code, we must be careful not to reduce code to what is phenomenally and imaginarily “present” to our perception to our hunches and opinions about what seems most “complicit” and “subversive.” But nor can we reduce code to 0s and 1s or an invisible calculus. We must think of code as a three-personed god.

The Holy Trinity of Code

 
The Real Code: the hormonal grasping, stimming, and clinging that keeps our tech deep
in the pocket of our folds [Gadgets]

The Imaginary Code: the avatars and networks we consciously observe and train under
the influence of mimetic rivalries often inducing an inverse semiotics whereby the human
starts to mirror the iconic image that is supposed to represent them and is moved as an
effect of the icon’s movements as if controlled by an influencer machine, i.e. the subject
is trained/conditioned by the object it trained/conditioned [Avatars]

The Symbolic Code: used to instruct computers and written in formal programming language [machine code; programming code]

Dogmatists are unsure of how to handle the contradictions of the trinity—make the code more apparent (so we see through the imaginary cloud and phenomenal image to the symbolic ‘truth’ or the hard drive); detach from the code and make your own ‘platform’; retreat into old ‘platforms’ (paper books and galleries); embrace the code but use it to strategic ends that benefit your political position; use the code against itself to produce accidents, etc. So many shufflings of the shell, so many fetishes and counterfetishes, so many bug fixes, i.e., Totally Administered Critique.

The Code, as Alan Turing designed it, was meant to solve the question of foreign enigmas, sexual difference, and the human-machine difference, but ended up producing the enigma of fractally recapitulating numbers via the halting problem.

The halting problem introduced by Turing in 1936 is the question of determining whether a given computer program will eventually stop running (halt) or continue to run forever given a particular input. Turing proved that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. This means it is undecidable; there is no single algorithm that can determine the halting behavior of every possible program given every possible input. He used a proof by contradiction involving the concept of self-referential programs.

The Paradox program uses a halt-checking function (HaltChecker) to determine if a program halts when run on itself, but it is designed to behave oppositely: if HaltChecker says it will halt, the program runs forever, and if HaltChecker says it won’t halt, the program stops immediately.

Gregory Chaitin claimed to find the solution to the halting problem by discovering a new number, an “omega number” (or Chaitin’s Constant), a real number between 0 and 1, whose output is infinitely calculable and endlessly quavering and thus a species of negative infinity. Such a quavering number recalls the suspended chance of Mallarmé: irreducible to any roll of the die (producing a number left quavering inside the poem, as Quentin Meillassoux puts it in The Number and the Siren).

The digital (binary) of 0s and 1s, which was meant to resolve non-digital contingencies, ended up producing a novel mode of non-digitality. Such a paradox seems to be the terminus of the dialectic between code and critique, identification and disidentification, digital and nondigital—a self-reflexive system of escaping systems.

How to expose the ‘loaded dice’ of the supposedly spontaneous or escapist tyche (chance) of the encounter?[12]

Associations are never free but are “weighted chance” controlled by various kinds of incentive and bias. The avant-garde chance operation [like (n+1)] is  not a mere act of random or mystical juxtaposition but rather, a way of highlighting the lexical network that we as “speakers” are embedded within, the social programming that informs, platforms, and formats us. That is, the speaker is always secondary to the names of the father, the brand, and the clan: names which determine relations of property and propriety. Submission of our “writing” to autocorrect, or grammarly, or ChatGPT renders it pristine, sanctions it with the watermarkings of Big Data: mixes our property and enjoyment with theirs.

The Baroque and dandyism are two ways to expose these contradictions—Deleuze proposes that the Baroque was founded on an antithesis between the façade and the monastery, which the artist undoes with trills, folds, and antechambers; the virtuosic rimming of pitches performed by the soloist; the blending of dark and light in chiaroscuro; the soft folds in hard marble; and the architectural passageways that lead into the nesting doll of the soul. Bernini exemplifies these tendencies not just in his sculptures and paintings, but also in his plays: one play builds a simulacrum of the audience on the stage, producing a hall of mirror effect; another shows the intrigues of an artist’s studio, their rivalries, patronage, and secret crafts (in the sense of crafty social machinations and esoteric techniques).

According to Austrian writer Oswald Wiener, the dandy is subject to the exteriority of the social network and can only produce a provisional ‘self’ through ad hoc ‘aphorisms’ (rather than ‘rigorous’ arguments). This does not mean a nihilistic empty subject nor a reduction to exterior ‘style’ but a set of folds that threshes the ins and outs of each encounter. The dandy submits to the sheer façade or absolute shell of exteriority by making letter, paint, and code into a base matter for experimentation.

Victorian closet dandy Gerard Manley Hopkins theorized that letter and color are incontrovertible givens, so the artist can only make patterns. However, the dandy’s submission to exterior givens often produces sudden in-folds, as when Oscar Wilde writes De Profundis (1905), his ode to the depths of the soul, pictured as a private monastery that mirrors the wretchedness of prison, wherein he found the light of humility. Marcel Broodthaers’s La Salle Blanche (1975) makes the interior chasm of the ‘poet’ and his ‘words’ into the advertised and wide-open façade of museological spectacle, just as he reduces Stéphane Mallarmé’s letters to black bands across the page and encrypts his own failed poetry books in plaster. The seeming encryption of the interior into the exterior invites the interpreter to decrypt the message only to find the hard kernel of base matter in place of a meaning. Through these kernels of pigment and pitch, the incontrovertible facts of aesthetics can be experimentally rearranged and inflected to produce new subjective aeffects, which are sensational if not sensical.

To take two recent dandy gestures—In his installation “A work in situ” (2024),[13] John Knight floods the gallery space with its own luminosity simply by bringing down the ceiling lights meant primarily to light artworks so that they become footlights beaming onto the viewer. The ‘background’ luminosity becomes foregrounded without any alteration of the apparatus, just a rearrangement of the conditions. The interior monadic space of the artwork is unfolded into the exterior conditions of audience, setting, electricity, and architecture, literalizing the theatricality of Minimalism despite being absorbing and stupefying (insofar as we are absorbed and stupefied by ourselves as onlookers). Michael Krebber lays out the exterior conditions of ‘painting’ as a Rube Goldberg machine that has devoured itself and has halted by presenting the elements of his studio in the gallery, including framed notes and artworks by others (including a sketch of a Turing machine, Oswald Wiener lecture notes, a Balthus drawing [14]). Every ‘option’ is present as in a fractal tree of decisions but what’s missing is the switch that would turn the machine on or off. Is the switch in the artist, and if so, does someone else have to pull it? Is the artist frozen before the potency of his instruments and influences; self-canonizing or self-deflating; relinquishing or reinventing or succumbing to the pressures of the names and brandings of other authors? Is the process halted or quavering? Both Knight and Krebber’s gestures recall Warhol’s use of silver foil as wallpaper and Dan Graham’s use of reflexive transparencies and mediated footage to redouble the participants in a feedback loop. These dandyisms overtly do not “decide” between transparency vs. opacity; interiority vs. exteriority; immediacy vs. dialectic; absorbing vs. theatrical; real vs. symbolic.

A conceptual work that parallels these strategies is Cady Noland’s use of a chain-link gate and road blocks (traffic cones) inside the gallery in her 2021 show at Galerie Bucholz in New York.[15] One can provide a rather blatant 1:1 semantic meaning for the work: galleries are gatekeepers and roadblocks to access, privilege, etc., complicit in gating and policing, their supposed interior escape is a superstructural sham. However, despite her overly political content, Noland has cautioned against reducing any single work to transparent symbolism that would override questions of form.

How can we stop pitting the symbolic against the real as if they did not thresh each other? How can we stop re-uncovering the ‘real plenum’ of the voice, body, spontaneity, gesture, blood, infancy, psychosis—and re-discovering the ‘symbolic mediation’ of language, networks, machines, systems, codes, abstractions, ideas?

Plato threw away the prison house shell of the body to reveal the pure soul of the Idea. Foucault reversed this: the exterior body is the prisoner of the interior soul. This chimes with Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man who recuperated the exteriority of writing, following Nietzsche in seeing writing as a mnemotechnical device for inscribing language onto the body. These attempts at overcoming metaphysics have produced an endless trail of caves in caves in caves; each new exposure turns out to be a new enclosure. The earth and blood; the phantasmic shadow; the simulacral technology; the abstract ideal; and return.

The problem is that we continue to think of power-knowledge (symbolic) as something inflicted upon the body (real) instead of something the body (real) produces. Attempts to correct this have insisted on the priority of the body/voice to speech acts, but this still makes a unilateral argument.[16] In terms of sexuality, Joan Copjec and Paul Preciado respectively have pushed Lacan and Foucault to polemical conclusions: sex as symbolic-psychic-familial vs. sex as real-bodily-historical (notably, neither has much to say in favor of depth or interiority). The task remains to thresh the moments of reciprocal causation between the body and the letter. I’ve found hints of this in the works of Piera Aulagnier, Serge Leclaire, Françoise Dolto, Didier Anzieu, and Deleuze. While all of these theorists draw on Lacan, each shows a distinct degree of affirming and splintering. In general, focusing on presymbolic infancy was deemed by mainline Lacanians after his death to be an “archaic” deviation. However, I would contest the notion that a simple unsymbolic real never prevails in any of these thinkers.

The Writing Drive

1) writing (active)
2) being written on (reflexive)
3) making yourself written on (passive)

The body is encoded by the parental finger, which acts like a pen, or index: encircling the areas of significance through affirmation or neglect, and carving out intersections where the touch ‘ought’ to be but has vanished—where the touch comes and goes, forging a bodily mnemonic device that puts the ‘key’ to every code in the invisible hand of the other—this letter-writing on the body precedes “reading” and follows a drive grammar of writing and being written on.

The plaintext of the unaroused flesh is encoded into a cipher of irritability, arousability, and iterability. The flesh is erogenized by inscriptions into the Other, where the Other means bodily memory, psychic memory, and parental others—each sector keeping its own score of this budding economy. This erogenous band threshes the exogenous and endogenous stimulations.

The writing drive as tactile motor inscription is inevitably ‘lost’ as writing becomes about messages that are transmittable and readable across distances like flares—writing becomes reduced to what can be examined by “reading comprehension” and “literacy.” Writing is delegated to erogenous forepleasure for the sake of making sense, or else a belated afterpleasure to document sense that was made.

This is the fundamental alienation by the signifier in Lacan. The signifier functions as a name that brands and delimits the zones that are private and those that are public. The symptom will be the way of “encoding” one’s real impulses under the governance of the law of the signifier: i.e. producing a compromise formation. But Lacan can’t put his finger on what precisely is lost in signification besides das Ding, which for Freud is the mother’s breast. Das Ding once it is ripped out of your mouth or grasp is thus substituted with the phoneme (a),[17] as in the scream from the gaping Munchian mouth of the tragic mask, but also as in the attempt to sound and spell out what the Other wants, but also the variable that will be endlessly replaced in the search for what the Other wants, and the spasmic holophrase that is easily pitched by the open vowel shape that can flow when the cry falls out the rim forged by the cut-open mouth. For the letter to become a signifier will involve a learning curve of ‘reading’ the emotional temperature of others so as to gain back bits and pieces of das Ding (which has been stolen like a lump of flesh from your own body). The carving out of a nothing forges an empty mouth jug waiting to be filled by fresh letters—a guessing game begins to decode the skin and make it whole again, perhaps the game of hang man, but a game that ties you in tautological knots insofar as no progress is made.

Lacan says we never mature out of our passion for the part object phoneme thing called (a)—unlike Winnicott, and almost all analysts, who think we transition away from the part object and find whole beings in an intersubjective world (lest we become fetishists, idolizing the partial letter in lieu of the whole word). And yet we often think Lacan means that the ‘real’ returns at sudden temporal moments (regressions to states of immediacy, etc.). In fact, the strata are always cooperating—there in an eternal concurrence of the real, not an eternal recurrence. We have become used to temporally stratifying the orders, so as to gain a ‘mastery’ over their causal or intellectual ordering (or really to just reveal our own preferred modes of enjoyment).

The Holy Trinity of Critique—

1. real [immediacy/absorption/voice/index/impulsive/body/gesture/oral/ aural/substance/surface as material substrate] VOICING

2.     imaginary [similarity/fantasy/narcissist/icon/pictogram/illusionism] DECEIVING

3.     symbolic [differential/theatricality/opaque/arbitrary (which either adds up to a message that can ‘decode’ the real & imaginary surfaces based on the truth of psychic depths [belief] or can ‘encode’ the real & imaginary surfaces through a forced
retroactive construction of a semblance of meaning [irony])] SAYING

Cue the historicist narratives that begin with kinesthetic tactile vocal paradigms replaced by surveying, gazing, perspectivizing, inscriptive, enframing paradigms. Or the auteurist version: Picasso is symbolic irony (juxtaposition of signifiers), Acconci is imaginary narcissism (deception and lure), and Duchamp is the return of the real (the base matter of the index as irreducible to signification).

When I began writing in the 2010s, conceptualism, network theory, and formalism as “symbolic achievements” and game changing paradigm shifts were often pitted against affective and personal “real truths.” At the same time, the golden mean (post-conceptualism) was often celebrated. This duelistic aesthetic contest was inevitably “redeemed” by the discovery of the “excluded middle” using terms like hybridity, traumatic irony, new lyric, and eventually, autotheory.[18]

This duelism has returned with Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh, which finds fault in the immediacy of digital art and autotheory.[19] She verges towards the conservative strand of Lacanians who would recommend a return of the “middle man” that is the strong symbolic father to break up the autistic shell of infantile enjoyment that has no delay or desire.

Immediacy is instant; mediation dilates.
Immediacy is urgent; mediation displaces.
Immediacy flows; mediation bars.
Immediacy confesses; mediation intermixes.
Immediacy laps; mediation relates.[20]

Here Kornbluh pits the infantile immediacy of the real starkly against  the symbolic. Her implicit academic targets are Surface Studies and Post-critique, which claim to follow Foucault, Susan Sontag, and autotheory in displacing the “depth hermeneutics” of Fredric Jameson, vulgar Marxists, vulgar Freudians, and paranoid readers.[21] This new formalism is presumably a kind of aestheticism, but also asserts itself as a rigorous methodology that ought to be used across the humanities and includes autobiographical and affective accounts of reading.[22] However, as these methods are premised on a Foucauldian reading of surfaces, they are, if anything, hypermediated. That is, post-critique (and its progenitors: Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, and Foucault) is only rival critiques of immediacy, whose minor difference from Kornbluh makes them an all-the-more tantalizing target for the necessary misprision of discursive self-authorization.[23] Korbluh would do better to aim specifically at theorists who are primarily influenced by Heideggerian models of care and affect, which pointedly and iconoclastically attempt to destruct technologicalenframing” (what I’ve been calling the authentic regime). Instead, she seems to take aim at simply another species of mediated aestheticism that is only a degree of minor difference from her own.

If one of the problems with the reign of immediacy is “polarized extremity,” Kornbluh’s antagonism towards post-critique is exemplary. Kornbluh attempts to critique post-critique, though she shares with post-critique the notion that there should be a shared university discourse that governs reading.[24] While Jameson found fragmentary schizopoetics to be emblematic of postmodernism,[25] Kornbluh finds autotheory to be emblematic of the post-postmodern immediate delivery systems of content. To postmodernism, Kornbluh attributes the notion of speed-time compression, flatness, evacuation of affect, but not immediacy per se (in fact, Jameson discusses immediacy in similar terms to her in unreferenced passages). The novelty of post-post is the return of the real (affect, authenticity) through a “blurred” aesthetic in contrast to the meta, ironic pastiche of postmodernism. The return of the real is encased in the prefix “Auto,” as in autotheory, suggesting a cluster of tropes related to the “real” (automation: infantile reflexes without reflexivity; immediate rather than delayed gratification; autoeroticism: sexual narcissism; autism: undifferentiated pre-sexual inertia). The issue is that much autotheory (just like Immediacy) is precisely about critiquing the structures and limits of immediacy by examining the simulacral status of the author (think of Chris Kraus). On the other hand, Gen Z and TikTok immediacy is perhaps more self-reflexively mediated than anything in postmodernism’s wildest dreams. If anything, the dominant cliché of the postpostmodern is not unmediated authenticity but stark oppositions between the symbolic and the real, framed either in a schizoid contest or as a hybrid synthesis.

Moreover, the discovery that the ‘real’ returns seems to be the most endemic cliché in the American reception of Lacan. Rather than seeing the real, imaginary, and symbolic as tropological modes that authors and artists utilize like pigments of paint, they are taken quite literally by academics. This is not to deny that a return to authenticity is occurring, but if it is a perpetual return is it not better to see the “return” itself as a trope or cliché rather than an actual temporal movement? That said, there is, of course, in, let’s say, cul-turally consecrated media a higher interest in “corporeality, affect, and polarized extremity” than there was in the ‘80s. But this “interest” is at the level of the press release and the blurbing, not at the level of the work. Moreover, you cannot fight blurb language with blurb language without merely undoing the reductionism of one style of blurb with the reductionism of another.

Like Jameson, Kornbluh extols a kind of symbolic mediation she associates with dialectical thought but only points to stylistic signals. Rather than listicles of fragments (“itemization”), Jameson’s style suggests symbolic mediation: “his dialectical sentences, his promiscuous semicolons, his ‘well-nigh’ flourishes, his gallant tone.”[26] I would call this (following Morris Croll) Baroque Style, which is meant to reflect inductive thought (through semicolon lists) and offer the sense of weighing items in real time: to convey a sense of active thinking. To my mind this is a style and not evidence of mediated or reflexive thinking.

Kornbluh and Jameson betray a fear of breakdown. The threat of the elimination of the middleman (symbolic mediation) was already present in Jameson, but for Kornbluh the threat is amplified and thus requires new terminology for scholars to handle it (maybe a color-coded “threat-level” system would be helpful?). Jameson’s fear of breakdown is evidenced in his analysis of art in Postmodernism. Warhol incarnates the aesthetic regime: interiority is evacuated and only the superficial surface survives. The surface-network model, which Jameson attributes to Foucault, is in full swing and has eliminated both psychic interiority and the material base. Warhol’s glitter shoes mark a return of the repressed investment in the commodity fetish in art. Presumably this is a “return” because the authenticity of Expressionism and modernism denied this sort of prurient superficial interest: his point of comparison is Van Gogh’s peasant shoes and Munch’s scream—the Expressionists demonstrated non-fetishistic confrontation with the void (maternal lack) and expressed their horror by voicing it through authentic gestures. Warhol’s glitter is a “compensation” for the evacuation of the subject and the maternal lack that have all been disavowed. The world of “bad postmodern immediacy” is a world without holes or distance or space for [paternal] intervention/mediation (i.e. the pure presence of the maternal real). His implicit diagnosis is that Warhol is a pervert but also possibly psychotic (due to his decentered and fragmented subjectivity). Though Jameson asserts he is “obviously not” making a clinical diagnosis of Warhol with schizophrenia or diagnosing the culture at large like Christopher Lash does with narcissism.[27]

Jameson’s notion of fragmentation without transcendence is rooted in basic psychophobic tropes (flights of fancy as infantile and dangerous breaks with symbolic/paternal mediation). Jameson finds most fault with versions of fragmentation (parataxis) that do not ultimately unite with symbolic signification, which he does link to the schizophrenic aesthetics of Language poetry (which includes poets like Hannah Weiner who “see words”). He can only commend art where the break with the Symbolic is thematized but not literalized and contains a larger unifying frame or map (which he finds in novels more than in poetry). The danger is to isolate and fetishize the signifiers, letters, brands, and names of the father-culture instead of “associatively” linking with them by producing normalizing compromise formations (symptoms). Jameson seems terrified by breakdown,[28] explicitly citing Lacan’s definition of psychosis as a breakdown around the name of the father: the father is broken into fetishistic part objects rather than seen as a whole person who can be clustered into a whole social order.

Jameson attempts to mediate the ‘buzzing swarm’ of immediacy with conceptual totalities (abstractions), knowing full well this will make him a gadfly to cultural producers of the era. Rather than allowing the decentered morass of postmodernism to unfold across the surface, various kinds of affiliation and synchronized subject positions are encoded into newly named “groups” by way of idiolectic theorizing. However, instead of examining the codes from a neutral distance and comparing the old ones to the new ones (which he thinks makes them all seem like optional fads), Jameson claims there is something interventive about naming the present codes (transcoding them) in self-implicating totalizing forms (cognitive maps) so as to make them visible and ‘workable’ as signs. This is also to suggest that there are codes in play that cannot be ‘opted out of’ at least insofar as the historical conditions do not change (i.e. codes cannot be toggled by the individual agent). He makes a point of differentiating this from the immanent “institutional critique” of Hans Haacke—because the proper theorist would preserve a semblance of transcendence from the simulacra under discussion and not just fight shadow with shadow. A binary between a more active and passive mode of critique seems to appear in his way of discerning his method from immanentism.

Despite the totalizing (cultural and market) fact of dedifferentiated immanence, Jameson doubles down on a “symptomatic” reading that would articulate a quasi-transcendental layer or strata of coding or mapping that is irreducible to the plane of immanence—a plane invented in writing, but which he is at pains to ensure is more than just another stylistic genre that would add to the fragmentary heap. He does not deny that there is something provisional and constructed about his naming of symptoms: as in psychoanalysis, the symptom must be narrated retroactively (afterwardness, Nachträglichkeit, après-coup). But even the most fictional construct serves a real function in Jameson (as in psychoanalysis): the fictional decoding of the symptom provides a roadmap to a concrete future of transformation (just as utopian fiction might point the way to a societal mode that could exist when market conditions do actually transform). The work of transcoding the culture has a political and ethical horizon but cannot be reduced to cataloguing trends (unlike for Baudrillard, Foucault, de Man, and other extreme immanentists who would seemingly deny utopian, revolutionary, and base-materialist possibilities altogether).

Kornbluh is correct that autotheory has become an “overcorrection” to critical theory and thus can no longer be counted as subversive to university discourse since it has become dominant and incentivized, chiming with the speed of digital (il)literacy. However, the problem of digital speed conditions all writing, so making minor market differentiations within the brand of Verso between an allegedly more or less mediated method is not enough to exempt an author from devolving into clickbait.[29]

Kornbluh commits the Derridean Fallacy: the hubristic assumption that the critic is more aware of a certain problem than the critiqued author,[30] as if the critiqued author could not have arrived at the same conclusions and seeing the potential flaws in the kinds of argument the critic is making chosen to take up a more seemingly naïve position for the sake of mythopoetic elegance. Derrida’s fallacy appears in his reading of Rousseau and the romantics: because they do not signal overt self-consciousness about their use of conceits such as innocence, naiveté, immediacy, and authenticity, Derrida presumes that his critique is a supplemental counterpoint to these works. De Man, however, suggests that Rousseau deliberately and even ironically employed these tropes, as did other Romantics, in the very face of their absurdity, and that this can be discovered by examining the multiple competing tropes in a given work (sometimes he employed the term “autocritique” for this, sometimes “allegory”). Of course, this can go too far—the de Mannian fallacy might be to ascribe too much authority to the author, so that they are the master of all tropes, and the critic can never outsmart them.[31]

The Derridean fallacy is nowhere clearer than when Kornbluh states: “Redacting fictional construction, duration, and figuration, autofiction delivers identity, instantaneity, it-ness. It moves ‘to get to the things in themselves.’”[32] How precisely is figuration redacted in any literary text? This is precisely what will set de Man’s reading of Rousseau into motion: the figural construction of the death of figuration (a reading that Jameson dwells on in Postmodernism in part because of the absurd conclusion that metaphor is both an error and a necessity).

To assume that a book of so-called autotheory like Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat (1993)[33] involves immediate or instantaneous identifications rather than a dialectic of misidentification, missed encounter, and delay would be to simply not have read it. Note that post-critique spearhead Rita Felski[34] holds up Koestenbaum as an example of reading that is saturated with affective responsivity to the formal surface of aesthetics, while Kornbluh mentions him in a listicle of autotheory practitioners.

The fact of flat (footed) reading may be the larger problem at play. By rehashing and threshing Foucault and Derrida, etc., I am trying to recover something of their writing that was not reducible to the affirmation of a surface biophysical exterior universe without psychic interiority. This biophysical theory reduces them to a gospel that can be spread as scientific and legalistic rigor and produces a shallow unconscious that reduces all writing to the effect of networks (and here I think Kornbluh’s distant reading and Felski’s surface reading overlap).

In contrast to proximity-based reading (from close to distant), threshing as method enfolds varied topological strata only to unfold them moments later, turning theory into an accordion—expanding from coincidence to closeness to surface to depth to distance. No single interval of these schemes can be crystallized into an unequivocal message or polemic without losing the train of thought altogether.

If we need an “erotics” and not a “hermeneutics” of reading, as Sontag claimed, we can assume that there is nothing erotic about university discourse and its continuous flow of subversive new modes of reading that ought to compel universal assent and allegedly erase all prior paradigms: hermeneutics of the flesh, of the eye, of the gut, of the strong father, etc., etc.

The issue is not anyway with reading but writing. We still do read or, at least, scan the content generated at our fingertips. But do we write?

Writing has been largely replaced by autogenerating and swiping (editing) i.e., platformatting since the platform’s character counts seem to contract or dilate our thinking. In this sense, we are all brand ambassadors more than we are ‘authors’ and the name-of-the-brand has replaced all other names (so you better make your name into a brand or an –ism).[35]

Big (and little) tech is not to blame, as the most pernicious algorithm remains our unconscious drives and/or our family systems, which always already have branded and platformatted us through the legislation of the name and ideal.

I do see a tight link between what Lacanians call the law of the mother, without appeal, which precedes and conditions our impulses, knows us without our having to speak, eats and fucks on our behalf, and the algorithm that not only predicts and surveys us at the prereflexive level of eye-hand movements but also conditions and preempts our reflexes. Can there be desire under such swaddling?

There would have to be writing as in writhing and tearing and scratching and grasping and gasping for an out side. Not an active intervention but a passive overwriting.

For Derrida there is no outside of language and certainly, there is no outside of the political unconscious or the algorithmic code. But there is also no inside. This should be a relief.

  1. [1] Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 131. ↩
  2. [2] The scheme in classical rhetoric was the production of patterns (sonic and optical), such as alliteration or rhyme, that did not contribute to the content or moral lesson of the work but served ostensibly as ornament, but with the possible force of transforming meaning. Tropes (figures of speech) were also taken up only to ‘vivify’ facts or beliefs. The use of schemes and tropes in inappropriate places (outside of poetry) is a hidden link through the history of aestheticism. ↩
  3. [3] Many of these thoughts took off from a conversation with art historian Annie Ochmanek on the work of Hannah Weiner, a poet known for “seeing words.” Ochmanek’s scholarship on Weiner shows her to be reading Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, documenting the relation of the word to the cityscape, advertising, and television, and writing poems using various kinds of code and encryption. This got me thinking about my own research into the history of diagnosis (and the psychotic symptom of “seeing words”: that is, experiencing the symbolic in the real), as well as the history of concrete forms of poetry and the relation between the potential subversion of aestheticism given the hegemony of advertising. As Ochmanek pointed out to me, Walter Benjamin was already noting this as regards the layout of print and graphic design as it mirrored Mallarméan poetics and put the poet in competition with the designer. ↩
  4. [4]
    Michel Foucault’s division between Saying and Seeing appears in his little-examined writings on René Magritte (who says what he sees and sees what he says but in the form of a negation: this is not a literal pipe but it is the literal word for pipe and it is the literal image of the pipe, which by “not being” the pipe itself, demonstrates the negation of the thing itself through its represen-tational affirmation. That is, following Sigmund Freud, representation begins with the negation of the thing itself and the mnemonic translation of the perceptual apparatus into an iconic image). Foucault does not properly spell out this idea but Gilles Deleuze in his work on Foucault makes clear that this is an extremely important division for him. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
    Foucault’s theory is centered on the calligram: “the calligram aspires to playfully efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.” “By ruse or impotence, small matter, the calligram never speaks and represents at the same moment; this same thing that is seen and read is hushed up in the vision, masked in the reading.” Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 24. I would call the calligram, in gestalt theory terms, an “ambiguous image” (like the duck-rabbit), which has a dual interpretation but oscillates rather than presenting both sides at once. Because the double-face is oscillating, there is a neat division between saying and seeing, the tension of say ‘binocular rivalry’ or competing images does not come to bother the viewer. Moreover, there is a reference to a supposed isotropic point of connection between word and thing (a shared real referent). Ultimately, for Foucault the typical calligram suggests a rapport between word and image that has been disrupted but not dismantled. In contrast, Magritte’s “unraveled calligram” undoes any sense that there is a shared referent and thus destabilizes altogether the illusory sense that a signified is provided in the ‘depths’ of the painterly surface, so long as one looks from the correct perspective, and instead destabilizes perspective altogether. This ultimate movement towards aestheticism is often enough framed by Foucault (and Foucauldians) as freedom from the tyranny of the illusion of depth, interior perspectival space, and indeed immediacy in favor of the opaque mediacy and exteriority of the biomaterial surface or plane. However, Foucault should not be reduced to affirming modernist opaque flatness but rather, the artist and intellectual as scheming game players operating slyly within the coordinates of their given paradigm—a game that cannot simply be vanquished by affirming the surface or the homoerotic play of signifiers, etc. I also think that Deleuze’s emphasis on the fold (of in and out) is a useful corrective to the notion that the Foucaldian perspective ought to simply terminate on the emphasis on opaque exterior materiality. ↩
  5. [5] This is how Eric Auerbach critiques the figuralism of Christian dogma. See Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 126. ↩
  6. [6] The pejorative terms ‘fancy’ (flights of speech based on whim) and ‘infancy’ (non-verbal babbles are rooted in the etymological meaning of fans as “to speak”). Even when infantile primitive speech was valorized by the phonocentric Romantics, the mute letter, babbling voice, and spontaneous gesture was always distinguished from the empathic and coherent lyric subject of reflection and confession, who rarely relented his communicative clarity, efficacy, and the transparent relation of the signifier to the signified (idea). Thus, the Romantic dutifully linked the regime of fact with the regime of authenticity and prevented their unbinding by recollecting from a position of “romantic tranquility.” This gives a sense of how authenticity, while culturally extolled in the West, is also the abject preserve of madness and thus takes on the double-edged sword of the sacred. ↩
  7. [7] Foucault has by now been reduced to the factual regime of predictable controllable messaging and the fictional, sophistical, rhetorical elements have been pruned away as unnecessary ornamentation, as if we’ve finally extracted the hard truth from his corpus. Foucault made this oscillation possible by occasionally professing to be transparently presenting fact and occasionally claiming to be writing fiction. This produces a liar’s paradox: is the constructivist more factual than the theories he claims to deconstruct? Hayden White clarified quite forcefully that Foucault’s allegedly descriptive histories were organized via the mythic and tropological narratives of Giambattista Vico, which present history as a cyclical movement from authenticity to irony and back again. See Hayden White, “Foucault Decoded: Notes From Underground,” History & Theory 12, no. 1 (1973): 23–54. ↩
  8. [8] In 2022, reading scores for 9-year-olds in the U.S. showed the largest decline in over thirty years, but there is also a decrease in reading for pleasure. So the question of aestheticizing reading and finding its surplus (unproductive) pleasures is not simply a question for decadent dandies to ask in their salons but would seem to be a paradoxically “productive” line of thinking in terms of resolving an educational crisis that has likely been caused by AP Lit focus on textual analysis as mining plot, unequivocal meaning, and context. That does not mean we should wholeheartedly embrace a formalism that is merely practiced for the sake of keeping up appearances (I think of the ladies who lunch rushing to their classes in optical art wishing it would pass in Sondheim’s Company). The solution lies in forgetting Reading Comprehension altogether in favor of Writing Comprehension, an ungradable form of synesthesia induction. ↩
  9. [9] Today’s aestheticism survives only insofar as its ‘contents’ are condensable, sharable, paraphrasable, lifestylizable, attainable, realizable, clickbaitable (miniaturizable speed-readable) or else can be used to ‘spice’ up otherwise generic, repetitious, dogmatic, law-abiding memoirish or journalistic prose with “enigmatic” stylistics usually used to glamorously cover over a dearth of intellect or else in the service of vice signaling in a hall of hollow mirrors. ↩
  10. [10] While deconstruction deflated the logos or claims to precedence and presence of the phallus, these claims of presence seemed to have been displaced onto new loci: oral testimony, optical gesture, immediacy, and the biomaterial world. That deconstruction had anything to do with the perpetual forgetting of writing has been forgotten. ↩
  11. [11] The only comparison to this classification of images would be the psychometric testing of arousal through pupillometry. See Sylvère Lotringer, Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2007). ↩
  12. [12] Lacan adapts the dichotomy of tyche (chance) and automata from Aristotle’s theory of causation. ↩
  13. [13]  John Knight, “A work in situ,” Greene Naftali, New York, February 2–March 2, 2024. ↩
  14. [14] Krebber’s press release reproduces a 2000 essay by Friedrich Wolfram Heubach (German psychologist and founding editor of Cologne art magazine Interfunktionen, which ran from 1968 to 1975) describing Krebber’s work as an inverse of Picasso’s maxim “I do not seek. I find”—which becomes: “I do not find. I seek.” The simulacral signifying of the completed artwork (including the requisite fanfare) is deflated in Krebber by a return to the quavering of the seeking (which Heubach finds in Picasso before Cubism was properly ‘completed’ and reified). ↩
  15. [15] Cady Noland, “The Clip-On Method,” Galerie Buchholz, New York, June 17–September 18, 2021. ↩
  16. [16] Shoshana Felman, Le Scandale du corps parlant: Don Juan avec Austin ou la Séduction en deux langues (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980). Lacan is shepherded by Felman to root the linguistic- rhetorical theory of tropes and performativity in the bodily voice. This book signaled a paradigm shift in deconstruction (a shift from symbolic irony to the real body) and was a major influence on Judith Butler, who enacted a parallel shift. ↩
  17. [17] Lacan’s insistence on the visible letter or phoneme should be contrasted with the (until very recently) dominant form of American pedagogy called “balanced literacy,” which made the letter totally fade behind the signified or idea, producing the ultimate Saying-Voicing Regime. In balanced literacy, the alphabet was viewed as an alienating and arbitrary code to be ignored in favor of the imagination. So you’d look at a word and say the idea you’ve learned to associate with the word shape (the signified as interior ‘thought’ and fact). The letters were practically scotomized. In the typical saying regime, alphabetic letters are at least suffered through as a means to an end, but in America, they are simply sped over. We could see the word ocean and say the word sea and be perfectly in the right. Unsurprisingly, this led to illiteracy but it took thirty years to be uprooted (from the early ‘90s to the early 2020s). The rise to prominence of Balanced Literacy was billed the “reading wars” pitting phonics (focused on decoding words) against “holistic” language learning (emphasizing meaning and context). Actually, phonics and semantics are both a question of decoding so this way of framing the opposition is mind-boggling. ↩
  18. [18] What is autotheory? At its worst, the autobiological incarnation of Theoria (abstract speculation) with all the grandiosity of eschatology. At its best, essaying in the sense of rehearsing, note-taking, trialing—polymorphic but always embedded perspectivism. ↩
  19. [19] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2024). ↩
  20. [20] Ibid., 240. ↩
  21. [21] Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. This anti-symptomatic theory paradoxically reduces Marx, Freud, and Jameson to ‘symptoms’ of the paradigm of symptomizing. ↩
  22. [22] A fairly confusing binary set off within this discipline is between affect as an exterior network and emotion as an interior feeling: sometimes it seems like academics are in a racketeering operation: constituting absurd strawman binaries and then heroically resolving them. ↩
  23. [23] The difference is really between the transcendence explicitly proposed by Jameson and the surrender to immanentism proposed by surface-studies, actor-network-theory, and flat ontology. However, these positions are all premised on a critical awareness of immediacy. The fork in the road crops up elsewhere: it is a question of how to encode, decode, and diagnose the (largely agreed upon) state of affairs—and what sort of hubris to enact or inhibit around the position of the critic. ↩
  24. [24] Practitioners both of surface studies and depth hermeneutics seem to think rival methods follow unquestioned dogma, and yet they trace this dogmatism to the content of the method rather than to the position the method holds in the university; couldn’t it be the cultural prominence of the method and not its content that leads to seemingly unthinking usage since the method becomes a prerequisite or fad? If so, wouldn’t jockeying for status of game-changing method be more the problem than the method itself? ↩
  25. [25] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). ↩
  26. [26] Kornbluh, Immediacy, 239. ↩
  27. [27] Warhol is a good “pivot” to show that there is really little difference between the postmodern and postpostmodern version of this problem—Warhol’s evacuated affects, while perhaps some-times being read as irony or flat-affect, can just as well be recuperated as a kind of post-traumatic. ↩
  28. [28] See also Jameson’s description of the breakdown of subjectivity in the “hyperspace” of the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles: the dizzying disjunctive maze forms a mise en abyme, which he takes as an “analogon” for “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.” The sublime object of critique, which exceeds the critic’s mapping, is precisely the cause of desire of his exertion of the map, his attempt to foster clear and distinct abstract and general representation (genus) onto a fragmentary and inchoate synesthetic mess. ↩
  29. [29] Without explicitly framing her reading method, Kornbluh seems to opt for “distant reading” rather than close or surface reading—using graphs that historicize trends in the novel and reading press releases and interviews over books. ↩
  30. [30] I believe I was guilty of this fallacy in earlier works, where like Kornbluh I took the return of authenticity (or the real) too literally, although I saw this trend to be accompanied by excruciating self-critique and an embrace of hypermediation that tipped over into confessional presence, as if evacuated bodies were suddenly puffed up with affect. I still see the trend in consecrated media to be one of amplifying overt emotionality in what is otherwise still a postmodern style. See my Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry (Los Angeles: Insert Blanc Press, 2015). ↩
  31. [31] Notably, de Man is the ultimate enemy to symptomatic reading because he seems to eviscerate any possibility of either an unconscious or a material base. (Symptomatic reading or “the herme-neutics of suspicion” is regularly said to stretch from Marx’s base to Freud’s unconscious. De Man is probably the best demonstrator of the paradoxical feats required to be suspicious of this suspi-cion without providing a new diagnosis). ↩
  32. [32] Kornbluh, Immediacy, 81. ↩
  33. [33] Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993). ↩
  34. [34] Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Note that Felski has a fairly robust rebuttal to the vulgar notion that immediate identification or responsivity to characters and plots in a novel is morally, politically, or psychologically suspicious. “Identifying involves ideas and values as well as persons; may confound or remake a sense of self rather than confirming it; and is practiced by skeptical scholars as well as wide-eyed enthusiasts.” (“Identifying with Characters” in Amanda Anderson, Toril Moi, and Rita Felski, Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019], 77). Her target is the Althusserian-Lacanian critiques of imaginary identification as a mode of deception that the critic can stand outside of (by looking at, for instance, the real material or symbolic coordinates of the apparatus). ↩
  35. [35] To behave like a brand or machine was endemic to postmodernism (Warhol) but to have a brand or machine behave like you is more of a contemporary phenomenon. ↩