Who’s Afraid Of A Cluttered Memory Shack Of One’s Own?
the problem with going in there is getting lost in introspection
Author’s performative reading of the text (with ad hoc sound effects):
Memory shack might be haunted as it contains the bones of deceased Chinese immigrant railway workers not returned to their native soil
I’ve been trying to arrange my thoughts and memories amid the tension between two ideas about critical understanding:
1. David Graeber’s notion of social creativity from his article “Fetishism as social creativity”
2. Eve Sedgewick’s notion of critical understanding as a paranoid modality characterized by defensive reproduction of a negative affect in her essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”
Graeber asserts a distinction between material production as trapped in a capitalist economic system – whereby end-products are determined in detail before they are created – and social creativity which impels the advent of new social institutions without a blueprint of their achieved state of existence or even (one may infer) of their successful completion at all. He says that, according to Marx, the planning of a utopian society is not a project of socialism or communism, but the quasi-philosophical goal of a production-oriented bourgeois mentality. Graeber considers social creativity, by contrast, an inherently revolutionary endeavor.
Sedgewick sees critical theory and praxis as synonymous with, while also emerging from, the application of a hermeneutics of suspicion. The text is hiding its true intent, and one must pick it apart to find the actual forces behind it. There is a truer reading that reveals what the text doesn’t want to admit but cannot keep itself from confessing. And she finds the focus on suspicion continually reproduces its negative affect.
But then Sedgewick discusses reparative readings, “positions,” and practices – which sound a lot like motions toward the social creativity Graeber talks about – and suddenly the tension is broken and I can get on with going through my memory palace, or rather memory hovel or shack, and get to work putting things in order. I hate work, though, so it is imperative that all my actions feel like either relaxation or play, with an occasional good deed thrown in. If an action feels like work, I respond by going limp, like a protestor at a sit-in becoming dead weight, all the more difficult for cops to drag away. Lethargy as an act of civil disobedience.
My instinct when faced with work is to protest, and I used to think I was unique in this, or at least rare. But I’ve noticed that many men I know who are paired in heterosexual relationships, when they’re asked to do something maybe a bit out of their comfort zones by their partners, often respond by professing an inability to figure out how to accomplish the task, thereby passively getting their partner to do it instead. Within myself, reflecting on this habit, I’ve identified it as “learned helplessness.” But I flatter myself that I didn’t learn it to get a wife or girlfriend to do things for me, rather to force society to flexibly flow around me like a river. But I’m kind of afraid that it amounts to the same thing.
Then I start to feel bad for being lazy and entitled. But I quickly snap myself out of it by remembering that that’s exactly how the Protestant Work Ethic and the Evil Spirit of capitalism want me to feel.
So I go limp and relax. Until I realize it’s only mental labor, putting my memory garage in order.
I can do this, I’m a mental guy. Everyone says so.
Then again, I say to myself, brains have weight, maybe three pounds. That’s some heavy lifting to do all in my head. I subsequently remind myself that no one is going to profit from my mental labor but me. No bosses, no shareholders, no carceral state coercing me to pay fees and fines. That’s not exactly true, though, is it? I could end up in a very organized mental state, which is just the state that the state wants its workers to be in. I’d basically be doing maintenance on myself, myself being a potential drone for the system. And I hate that.
But I also hate my memories lying around all in disarray, cluttering up my memory hovel.
It’s a conundrum. What’s a mother to do? A lazy mother. An anti-social mother. A discontented mother. A single mother. A mother of dragons. A mother of all wars. A mothership. A mother of our revolution. A mother land. A mother courage. A mother tongue. A mother of vinegar. A mother of pearl. A motherlode.
Then I realize it’s time to watch the first episode of the new season of True Detective, starring Jodie Foster, the mother of all cinematic lesbians. This new character might be a defining role for her. Because she really hasn’t had any defining roles. Think about it. She always plays Jodie Foster in a particular situation. I haven’t seen Nyad or Dryad or whatever. The swimmer with all the passion and drive. But in this season of True Detective, Jodie Foster is a stringy-muscled old woman with some real gravitas, or maybe ag-gravitas. This character has a lot to be aggravated about and everything succeeds in aggravating her. She’s the only competent person in the show, as far she knows, and, I guess, the rest of us sympathize.
What is the point of the memory shed anyway? I never use it. I haven’t looked in there for ages. Maybe I should burn it down. When was the last time I looked in there? Oh, yeah, when I was looking through some old Theater Oobleck photos apropos of a friend’s memorial service and Moment of Truth essays for when This Is Hell! was replaying classic content while its host was undergoing medical treatment. Oobleck and This Is Hell! are both examples of social creativity. Very different from each other, and not new social institutions per se, but emerging from revolutionary desires and visions. And David Graeber liked them. He was a fan of both.
All right, I’m not going to interrogate the impulse, I’m just going to designate a “social creativity” section of the memory hovel shack or shed and put both Oobleck and This is Hell! in that section. So the day shouldn’t be a total loss. Not that it would be. But if it would’ve, it won’t.
Well done. I used to know a great woman named Angela, who was from Houston, who designed sets for at least 1 production at Oobleck, around 1990. She lived in an apartment next door to the Wrigleville Tap back when rents were cheap, rooming with an old buddy of mine named Sam who bounced at Ginger Man, until he started overdoing it on the free drinks, and ended up having to get bounced himself.