26 This is a lexical aside.
Premise: there are words we must hold in common in order for meaning to develop from their interaction.
- A border is a line on a map which connects checkpoints; dots where one citizenship begins and another ends; locus where the dread of the refugee or the returning exile meets the uniformed Customs Official who polices the border for contraband, whether human or material. Poets who write over borders, or who speak to multiple audiences, carry difficult words (i.e. “they have baggage“) and this includes the materials left behind, the silences which could not be brought back from homelands. A border divides the self into citizen, nation, affiliation, and language.[1]
- A parenthesis brackets a statement from an addendum, a loosely connected thought.
- Language maintains its borders with dictionaries and lexicons.
- An official language is policed and maintained by administrators whose job involves keeping the borders of language “clean” by preventing the wrong kinds of words from entering.
- A servant is someone who serves another person for money.
- A censor is a public servant who assists the policing of internal and external borders by maintaining a system of files and surveillance.
- Both servants and censors are paid for their service. The difference is that the servant serves in a private setting (i.e. the servant is a “private servant”) while the censor serves in a public setting (i.e. the censor is a “public servant”).
- In a dictatorship, the border of language is policed by the censor. If you ask the censor, they will tell you their job is to protect the citizens from threats. Many of them take pride in their labor as public servants.
- Borders are made to be broken.
- “Only when a boundary materializes can it become a site for transgression,” Elvia Wilk writes in Death by Landscape. The boundary is the erotic space, the potential for longing, the developer of hunger, the blade dividing the difference between the self and contamination. On this reading, penetration reveals the self. Or, to paraphrase Wilk, the self which recognizes its boundaries must then “reckon” with them.
- In Middle English, the word “author” was occasionally confused with the word “actor.”[2]
- Here is hauntology, as described by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International: Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as a question of the ghost… Is there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up? Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology.
- Derrida’s description has been used by cultural theorists to describe the way the past remains buried inside the present. The past abides.
- Theorist Mark Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism” to refer to the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. As an ontological illness, capitalist realism marks a realism that feels unreal and positions us defensively towards reality.
- Nothing I see on “Reality TV” relates to the challenges or confusions of my own life. Real life is increasingly unbelievable. Real life needs endless amounts of capitalist-sponsored therapy. Real life needs gurus, Instagram influencers, hired affirmers, and life-coaches in order to “find” its bearings.
- I say find its bearings because I’m not sure that “finding oneself’ is a logical or even legitimate way of being in this world.
- The more hopeless all of this feels, the more writing matters. Radical creativity is the only challenge to capitalist realism.[3]
- (A border also delineates the fiction from the memoir, and the critic often stands at the border to administer literary genre. It is not that the critic wants this role—it is simply that this is how criticism developed.) ↵
- "The -t- changed to -th- 16c., on the model of a change in Medieval Latin which was made on the mistaken assumption of a Greek origin and from confusion with authentic," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, entry for "authorize." ↵
- What Wendy Brown called "left melancholy" hinges on the failure to imagine a radical future; the Left's attachment to what Fisher calls "its own marginality and failure" fulfills capitalist realism's requirement of hopelessness and futility. The market will provide solutions to all human problems—and left melancholy is added to the list of things which can be solved with group therapy. As progressives dwell on being ghosted by history, they invest the future with the defensive resentment that comes from feeling ghosted by it. ↵