surprised by my improvement in Chinese in the last month, I had this
moment of pure amazement at my own ability - these moments are few and
far between, amazed by my capacity to circumlocute, to sound like I'm
still learning the language and yet, not also sound like an idiot. I
could reflect on this point all day, but I won't.
But I did enjoy reading Juliana's post, I had this monstrous feeling
of simultaneity in space, what's the word? Of being in many places at
the same time, or having the feeling that one's position is expansive,
that spaces are connected in ways that rely on and transcend their own
physicality. Or maybe this is only to say that spatiality is mediated
by imagination and experience, filtered through the spatial
epistemologies we exercise as cognitive maps. I'm remember this
moment in that interview, Latour and Serres, that we read earlier -
where he talks about time and topology, that science of expanding
plastic sheets, where bunching up and impossible expansion produce an
experience of temporality as overlapping. We live in the overlap of
time on itself, and perhaps to that we may add the overlap of spaces.
How, in the extended cough that is Beijing air, how do I miss sunny
Berkeley where one never thinks about humidity? What this group needs
is a way of talking about weather, then, in this moment of global
atmospheric systems, which is basically the climatological incarnation
of a set of problems that as an anthropologist I suppose we think
about a lot - how do you talk about connection without subsuming
infinite interconnection to a kind of globalizing sameness. How do we
experience the alterity of spaces themselves while also recognizing
their interconnection? (Or am I just a climate ideologist, woefully
committed to my Spaceship Earth?).
But the question that Jules raised is a haunting question. I'm
suddenly reminded of Maxine Hong Kingston, but only because of the
phrase 'a childhood among ghosts' or something to that effect, and
through that, to the figure of the specter. I haven't read Huckleberry
Finn in ages, but my imagined Huck Finn is vivid, if possibly
inaccurate. The specter of slavery is already a glaring presence,
the horror of slavery is the condition of his narrative, and it
undergirds his corn-pone days lazing on the river. The horror of
slavery is physically manifest in the brute physicality of Jim's
blackness, in the course of his interactions with people and things on
the course of the river. The raft is a kind of liminal space where it
seems that Huck himself, passing through, is as haunting as the
spectacle of slavery, that in its very omnipresence is also ominously
absent in the book. Who is whose specter, here? Can we imagine
liminality with the caveat that liminality will always be an
in-between, where the precondition of the liminal is this structural
in-between-ness that presupposes and depends upon those stages that it
marks? Or here, will the raft be an inside outside, a space marked
not by its exteriority but by its being inside of the world from which
it seeks an escape.
Here, the terms of 'escape' are already overdetermined by a kind of
socius that works by orienting everything toward itself, by forcing
everything to pass through itself - literally, in that the raft flows
down the river thoroughfare that is also the main artery of a regional
plantation economy (and in this way, the river is both the way out
while paradoxically the precondition of the slave-driven economy
itself) - and then, figuratively, in that slavery will present itself
irresistably as a kind of epistemological conduit (that mirrors the
river itself), in that it forces all discourse to pass through itself,
even that which tries to escape it. After all, disavowal depends on
the originary presence of the disavowed, the escape reifies what is
being escaped. I guess I see a parallel here in the colonial project,
that 'gift of a world,' in which the colony orients all knowledge
toward itself, like one of those magnets that makes the iron in your
sand form neat lines which turn toward a center, or in more
charismatic forms of discourse that have the principle effect and
condition of asserting their very necessity in their capacity to
redirect knowledge toward themselves.
Sorry, this is incomprehensible. I'm thinking through something else,
and it seems that this trope repeats itself all over the place.
<3 <3 <3
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