Circa 1991…
FOUR fundamental concepts have governed my life, the first of which is that the God of my understanding communicates, you might say manipulates, through the media, this is personal, you understand, I don’t suggest it’s necessarily true for you, but the fact that you’re reading this could be an argument one way or another, primarily it’s books, occasionally a movie, less often, or maybe less obviously, television, which I assume is because you can’t really package TV discreetly, there are resonant moments of course, “He doesn’t want anything, he’s insane,” as you can imagine things have gotten rather strange since I subscribed to the New Yorker and got hooked on the Internet.
THREE weeks ago I started reading this book “RUA/TV? Heidegger and the Televisual” which I picked up while I was surfing the library, something I’ve been doing since I was about six or eight, which curiously enough was about the same time that TV came to the remoter suburbs of Seattle where I was diligently trying not to grow up, anyway I liked the title which I idiosyncratically assumed was supposed to call up some harmonic of RUR, anyway, like a lot of theory books it started off pretty cool which if you’re an American you have to imagine any Australian reading of Heidegger published by the Power Institute of Art would be, I scanned a few pages for future use, but also like a lot of theory books it got pretty forced pretty fast so I put it away and started looking at “Postmodern Sexualities.”
ONE of the things about a real University library is that you can find at least one aisle per floor devoted to sexuality considered in discipline specific realms and if you hit the right floor five or six shelves on the postmodern variety, this one was paperback so I confess it was initially the cover art that attracted me, beyond that I have the memory that the author was from Oregon, which is close to Seattle, but on checking back I see it’s Houston which while geographically slightly closer to Seattle than Syracuse, is climatically less related, still it had some interesting stuff like “…all discourses about sexuality are inherently discourses about something else…” and vice versa I say, but despite my overall enthusiasm for an ex-Kinsey worker who may be in the process of coming out of the closet, I found the writing unbearable; what are you supposed to do with sentences like: “The politics of sexual penetration, raising, as they do, the gestures of dominance and submission, the postures of control and permission, make of sexual engagement an optimally accessible staging area for both licit and illicit, both probable and improbable enactments of the politics of interpersonal relationships. The realm of the Phallus is the realm of social power,” but shake your head in wonder while keeping in mind that it’s a lot more fun to say “postmodernity” than to write it, and go back to TV.
“FIVE Myths of Television Power” another catchy title particularly for the Foucault fans but you’d be disappointed because basically the author’s points are that TV isn’t all that bad, but that we get off on thinking that it’s worse, an overall dated concept which is rendered interesting only his refusal to accept any data on anything including, how may hours per day we watch TV, where these figures come from, are they more or less reliable than the reported number of masturbatory fantasies involving same sex partners; but while the style here was readable, in the targeted for the average playboy reader sense of readable, the argument amounted to: “I don’t have anymore facts than my opponents but by restating my opinions several hundred times I can appear for the moment more credible that what you thought you knew when you started reading; boredom set in not too far from the table of contents, fortunately I was saved from proceeding to “The Scent of Eros,” an apparently over researched treatise on sex and scent, by the timely arrival of a post card form the library telling me that my recall was in.
FIVE years ago, more or less, Tom Sherman gave me a copy of “The Telephone Book” which I actually read more than half of, a testament to obsession right up there with wading though “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Infinite Jest” it’s that I like reading Avital Ronell, or maybe it’s just that I like the fantasies I have about her, nothing detailed or specific you understand, but she’s always wearing something sever and you know black, I can’t figure out whether this indicates that I’m turned on by intelligence, or a victim of a desire to debase intelligence, but it does make me think that there is some connection between mind and body as in, “Hey kids, what time is it…..It’s trauma time,” which sets up in my personal experience of the universe a direct link between the chakras of Buffalo Bob and Brigitte Bardot, and not simply that the first BB evolved for a generation into Annette and Doreen on the Mickey Mouse Club and the latter started with And God Created Woman so that both wound up with The Origin of the World setting up some correlation between the good breast which you could see in black and white guaranteeing an acceptably moral intellectual content to our dirty little secret which get problematized when you get back to Buffalo Bob because as Avital points out, “Television is always related to the law, to metonymies of the law, and the law always to power,” which is to say that being somewhat smart, at least art movie smart, gave you the material for masturbation and the doubly bounded guilt of whacking it over “The Seventh Seal” which in part explains why we get, if not need, several shelves of the sexual confusions of postmodernity; naturally I started reading the last bit about TV first, then thought maybe I should see where this starts, which turns out to be opera, so Catherine Clement comes up,
SIX months ago I tried to force a body of undergraduates to read Clement, another failed initiative in pedagogy in part because we were supposed to be studying Television but more because I was trying to get them to read a whole book about Opera, Clement has always been blonde for me, maybe not as much challenge as Avital but quite possibly more fun, depending on how you define fun, but she does make things clearer for the slow reader/learner, among whose happy community I count myself, the idea being that the undone one in Opera’s not so happy couple is the voice, at least that’s the case
NINE times out of ten, and so I wonder how much difference would it make to our world if Dan Rather and Jane Pauly had read every book I’ve mentioned and the books referenced by the books mentioned, the thing is, I can imagine Rather reading Heidegger and Pauley with her copy of Lacan; I think I’d be more comfortable, more at home in the world if I couldn’t,
We are left with a number and no Area Code.
