Riffing on Little Phrases

01 Jun, 2024

It’s true: I seem to have gone missing from this or any other online platform of late, buried as I’ve been in trying ever so slowly to pull a larger project together—something that’s still only in the very loose stages of design, and that’s requiring at this point a lot of write–read–write some more–read some more cycles. Given the additional creative energy-suck of earning my keep via editing and writing for others, the thought of doing any more writing, period, in spite of the desire to do so, makes me wither and drop semi-catatonically onto whatever surface is available at that moment.¹

However! I really do miss sending out little missives to a handful of people on a regular basis. Here, then, is what I’ll do this time. As I read, I keep notes on scrap paper—and often, that involves just scribbling down a phrase or term that sounds fantastic in some way. Since I just finished Michael Warner’s excellent collection of essays, Publics and Counterpublics, and since I found myself noting long strings of great wording, I’ll share some of those here—and maybe go bit by bit through them all in the posts here to come.² Let’s get started, then, with the caveat that I’m taking most, if not all, of said phrases out of context, and am simply ruminating on their standalone powers.

“odd voicing devices”³

Man, the places you could go with that one. Here, Warner’s describing Walt Whitman’s weird (initially) pro-temperance novel Franklin Evans, and how Whitman’s style of writing it showed up his main character’s “problems of self-characterization” (itself a great phrase, and who among us with any modicum of awareness doesn’t have these problems?). But taken out of Warner’s discussion, those three words take on slightly sinister possibilities. Gaslighting techniques, anyone? The man behind the curtain selling himself as a grand wizard? Messing with your kid sister by speaking through air vents at night?

“an epistemology of stigma”⁴

Warner’s talking here about how Whitman listed a bunch of visible characteristics by which you could recognize boozehounds, and notes that in the “addiction literature” of the day, you’d probably see these same characteristics associated with habitual masturbators. It’s got me wondering what we think we can see (through) today, primed as we are by therapy and self-help culture to diagnose any number of conditions felt to run counter to one’s wellbeing within a particular social world. What your body language says about you (so many confidently crossed arms on all those LinkedIn profiles!), infallible indicators of so-called emotional intelligence, some neuronal defect lying behind your failure to beam constant enthusiasm at the office retreat … all the while seeming to forget that little word used above to describe the world in which the ill person doesn’t fit in: “particular.” I’ve got Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure on my to-be-read list, and I’m interested to see whether I gain any further insights through that book into this sort of epistemology, or any means of disturbing its certainties.⁵

“the dilemmas of self-coherence”⁶

These fraught conundrums are connected, of course, to the problems of self-characterization—and the phrase probably caught my eye because those dilemmas are central to the fields in which I’ve spent most of my educational life: ethics, philosophy, religious studies. How to explain doing something, having done something, that runs unarguably counter to the image you have of yourself, and/or the one you publicly present to the world? (Personal example from grad school? Little miss preacher of right-thinking environmental action getting a chance to race a friend’s Formula 1-standard vehicle down a straightaway and having a hell of a good time burning all that gasoline for no defensible purpose whatsoever.) These dilemmas aren’t oddities that intrude on a life naturally defined by smoothness, predictability, and wholeness—but are instead an inherent part of what it means to be a living being imbued with consciousness, will, desire, reasoning, susceptibility to temptation, and all those other add-ons to mere biological existence. Whitman’s novel, though it sounds pretty schlocky, is, Warner says, attentive to just these sorts of quandary.

“die in erotically thrilling ways”⁷

Warner uses the phrase to describe “what Indians do best in white American literature.” There’s no further exploration of this phenomenon, which is mentioned in an aside, but I’m wondering what could get included in this manner of meeting one’s maker. Willingly driving off a cliff, à la Thelma and Louise? Making a great heroic stand, maybe even with a speech to accompany it, as in any number of ancient Greek tales, or in less wordy endurance, as in seppuku? Must this thrilling death be a sort of deliberate sacrifice, or could all the exhilaration be heightened by its accidental nature—or even blend into something verging on evil, as in Sade, or something at least disturbing, as in J. G. Ballard? S. C. Hickman quotes Ballard saying in an interview that

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status—all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really, a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). That’s why the death in a crash of a famous person is a unique event—whether it’s Jayne Mansfield or James Dean—it takes place within this most potent of all consumer durables.⁸

I want to think further about the place of eros in all of this; if we take the idea as “life-preserving” or as “a fundamental creative impulse having a sensual element,”⁹ then maybe quite a few of those grand (or even weird) gestures could be considered erotic, even while being simultaneously destructive, as in a strange twist on the biblical gaining your life by losing it; more an honoring of spirit (though of what sort of spirit?) or of life itself, read as bigger than this individual piece of flesh, through a technically death-serving act. If that sensual element, though, necessarily entails some broad inclusion of “sexuality,” then I’m not sure how capaciously the concept could be applied to the cinematic and literary deaths I’ve mentioned—though as we’re all aware, the things one person finds so boring they don’t even notice are another person’s occasions for orgasmic celebration.

“campy feudalism”¹⁰

I've got nothing here. It’s just a pairing of two words I’d never before thought to see joined. Take this one and run with it on your own; maybe we’ll just wind up rehashing Monty Python sketches ("We’re knights of the Round Table,” etc.), but I think there’s a lot of freedom to move with this one, and should, if done right, bring up a lot of forms of social injustice (economic relations, various hierarchies, any number of living conditions) that never seem to disappear, just take on new forms.

I wish this site were able to host comments, so that I could get feedback on where these or other phrases encourage you to go. If you’re so moved, hop on Mastodon and chime in; I’m at mstdn.social/@Zwieblein.

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<sup>1. If anyone has a line to a better means of paying for rent, food, healthcare, and transportation, please let me know. I would love to be able to pay my fiscal way through life by shelving books and helping others find books they need or would enjoy. I am tired.↩
2. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). I’m working backwards here, from the last essay toward the front, just because.↩
3. The quotations from this section are taken from Michael Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” in Publics and Counterpublics, 282.↩
4. The quotations here are from Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” 281–82.↩
5. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).↩
6. Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” 279.↩
7. All quotations in this section are from Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” 278.↩
8. S. C. Hickman, “The Necrophilic Vision of J. G. Ballard,” The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts, June 18, 2017. The quotation is from J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, ed. Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). Hickman’s page citation comes from the Kindle edition: KL 708.↩
9. Merriam-Webster, “Eros.” ↩
10. Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” 275.↩</sup>