The L657 Dialog

Part V: All the Paranoid Poltergeists

Catch up with:

A Brief Intro to the L657 Dialog, Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV

Relevant philosophical and theoretical works:

Touching Feeling, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“The Autonomy of Affect,” by Brian Massumi

Meeting the Universe Halfway, by Karen Barad

FADE IN:

INT. THE SIDE DOOR — MID-MORNING

The Student and Saussure the Cat enter The Side Door through the golden entrance. They come to a wide room, unimaginably long, filled with happy partygoers. Everyone is there: Brutus and Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Murasaki Shikibu and Plato and Abraham Lincoln and Simone de Beauvoir and Morris Kight and Martin Luther King Jr., who is talking to James Baldwin, and Hypatia of Alexandria and Harvey Milk and Audre Lord and Virginia Wolf, who sits watching the hours fly by on her pocket watch. People from every creed and stripe of life are glowing and drinking and enjoying their time together.

Closesest to the Student and Saussure the Cat, LI BAI and DU FU sit near one end of the bar passing cups of wine.

LI BAI

No mountain pass will separate us now!

DU FU

Have a bowl of Celestial Brew.

Du Fu pours a bit of starry night into Li Bai’s drinking cup as the Student and Saussure the Cat walk by. The Twelve Disciples, including THOMAS, are down the way a bit, talking with PAUL.

THOMAS

I can’t believe he managed to get in

with a body all his own.

PAUL
(flashing a knowing
and bright smile)

Don’t be

so blind.

SCHEHERAZADE, who sits on the bar, orders one drink after another.

SCHEHERAZADE

And all of it is true. I swear —

I’ll tell you a story that will save your life!

CHARLOTTE BRONTË sits nearby beside her sisters, staring out a large window opposite the bar.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

We’re surely having such a pleasant time,

but I can’t take my mind off what we’re missing

out there past the window.

IDA B. WELLS is sitting beside the Brontë sisters, working on her blog.

IDA B. WELLS

Listen people!

It’s unacceptable to think we can’t

accept a refugee or two or thousands,

or even tens of millions. Virtue knows

no color lines — no national boundaries.

A little further down VOLTAIRE is laughing.

VOLTAIRE

Now this is a garden worth attending to.

All the flowers all intoxicating!

Just past Voltaire, ACHEBE blows a house of cards down.

ACHEBE

Things fall apart, and you put them back together.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY is eating a decadent slice of upside down cake with a golden fork.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

I don’t know a single girl alive who desires

to eat the bread of dependence all her life.

BAYARD RUSTIN stands in the light of a small stage, sweating after an intense set, speaking his mind.

BAYARD RUSTIN

Just wait until the day we’ve armed our armies

with daisies — when we come dancing down the road

demanding freedom and security

and peace from tyranny, resisting all

your racist sentiments — then you’ll be damned.

SAINT GERTRUDE OF NIVELLE waves at Saussure the Cat from beside the stage and smiles radiantly.

SAINT GERTRUDE OF NIVELLE

Here kitty, nice floof — God save you from the woofs.

And somewhere HAMILTON, MULLIGAN, LAURENS, and LAFAYETTE are singing:

HAMILTON/MULLIGAN/LAURENS/LAFAYETTE

Raise a glass to the four of us
tomorrow there’ll be more of us —
let’s have another round tonight!

But none of these people seem to have caught the Student’s eye. His gaze is fixed on a woman, SEDGWICK, sitting to the side at the end of the seemingly infinite bar, where a bartender is drying cups with an old cloth. MASSUMI, a mass of hair, which is almost impossible to distinguish — two people or one person, a man or a woman — sits behind Sedgwick at a table all their own.

But it is Sedgwick, who silently observes the raucous crowd from the side of the bar, that the Student approaches first. She speaks before he can introduce himself.

SEDGWICK

I suppose you spent some time discussing things

with Deleuze and Guattari, and now

you want to ask me how a raven is like

a writing desk?

STUDENT

Yes.

SEDGWICK

Why don’t you take a seat?

The Student sits beside Sedgwick after placing the Fish in the Whiskey Bottle on the bar, and Saussure the Cat jumps into his lap. The bartender, BARAD, puts the half-dry glass back along the rack and turns to him.

BARAD

What do you want to drink?

STUDENT
(considerately)

Beer. Or Whiskey.

BARAD

We don’t have that here.

STUDENT

What do you have then?

BARAD

We’ve got Dr. Pecker,

Between the Sheets, the Famous Fuzzy Navel,

a Dirty Mother, Golden Showers, and of course

the classic — a good Slow Comfortable Screw —

and not to mention our house drink, the Side Car.

STUDENT

That’s all?

FISH IN THE WHISKEY BOTTLE

You think that’d be enough for you,

considering how much you’ve drank already.

BARAD
(eyeing the fish)

What if I fix this drink — with the best butter?

Barad grabs the Fish in the Whiskey Bottle. She dumps fish and all into a frying pan where butter is already boiling.

FISH IN THE FRYING PAN

I knew today was entangled with my end!

SAUSSURE THE CAT
(sadly resigned)

He wasn’t finished marinating…

Sedgewick acknowledges the Student.

SEDGWICK

You’ve come to ask

those questions left unanswered on the body

of our work — we’ll answer three, if that’s enough.

STUDENT

I feel compelled by something I can’t name,

and I honestly can’t tell you why I came —

but I have questions that need asking if

you’ll only listen.

SEDGWICK

Fire away while we’re here.

STUDENT
(feeling slightly
embarrassed, but
pressing forward with
the only question
he can suddenly
think of)

How do you explain the endlessness

of multiplicities that meet their end

as a dead door-mouse?

Barad turns away from the frying pan and grabs the glass she was cleaning a moment ago. She hands the glass to the Student.

BARAD
(her voice
mysteriously modulating
with each step,
with every glance,
with everything
she touches)

Look at the bar, now

look at the bar through this empty glass.

Do you see the difference, or is this

a real difference? The truth is that it’s both:

an onto-epistemological truth

constructed by phenomenal relations

between relata, which constitutes relata,

stretching from perception to the very

heart of being. Multiplicities

are governed by this relationship. You might

experience and construct more or less

of various examples depending on

fluctuating circumstances. In this way,

the door-mouse multiplicities have been

already limited by agential discourse.

The door-mouse’s death was only one of many

special situations that just happened

to catch your attention — for whatever reason.

STUDENT
(confused)

But the mouse was eaten by a cat!

SAUSSURE THE CAT

It’s true.

STUDENT

And how was I supposed to know if it

was alive or dead the moment that it set

churning in his stomach? I had to make

an individual assumption based on

their onto-epistemological

relationship, which you called agential.

But I want to know what happens when

a force of agency is such that it

passes by the scene unseen and leaves me

unable to say what’s in your gut. It might

never go away, but I think that we

can say a sign that permits assumptions on

some level is never always related to

the ontological, by which I mean

it doesn’t reference more than a self that leaves

no lasting marks on what it misses before

it disappears upon examination.

There has to be an eventual lack, a point

at which a sign is pure imagination,

at the very least. A ray of light might last

along a plane that projects forever

but at a certain point the intensity is

so low that any energy it imparts

demands to be disregarded, depending

on the traits of certain systems — and that is when

you have to make assumptions. That’s when you use

imaginary signs. It’s a matter of scope.

Barad, with a knowing smile, turns back to the fish frying in the pan.

SAUSSURE THE CAT
(salivating)

A little fishy.

SEDGWICK

Is that your second question?

STUDENT

Yes — what happens when we introduce

an agency that lacks into a system

defined by the infinite entanglement

of onto-epistemological sets

ruled by supposedly strict relationships?

The ball of hair behind Sedgwick bristles, continues to bristle almost supernaturally as it speaks, and turns to the student from where it sits at the table behind Sedgwick.

MASSUMI

What you have ascertained is the way in which

perceptions of the ontological

are trapped in the virtual. Context becomes a form,

forming intensities that we arrange

into ownable emotions. It takes

time to make arrangements, foreclosing

the present — it isn’t that there’s no relationship

between our epistemological

observations and ontological

effects — it’s that we’re really talking about

affect, which suggests delays within

a bio-feedback loop relating all of

your epistemologic-experience

to ontological effects. Thus, while

your epistemologic-experience

is related to ontological effect

in such a way that it is both affected by

and affecting the real, the relationship between

these things is an affective one in which

your epistemologic-experience

is a subtraction from the surplus

of ontological relationships.

In this way, every mouse has already been

consumed — your body must metabolize

the information you received as sensations

in your relation to the referred object

just as the body of the cat you mentioned

must reduce and metabolize the mouse

before the intensities produced can be used.

STUDENT

So even in that instance when we realize

an onto-epistemological

connection, we are still suspended in

a stochastic process? But how does that

undefined multiplicity condense

into a state of something that’s, for all

intensive purposes, what we call real?

By that I don’t mean to ask exactly how

we might quantify the moment when

intensities are qualified, but how

some intensities developed by

relationships with different forms and contents,

observed in the responses across a group

or a population of people, all appear —

at the very least — as ontological myths

despite the delay you spoke about and the way

you claim we are imprisoned in a blinding

virtual realization. At some point

you develop relationship in which

a similar reaction is distributed

through similar sensing-machines, suggesting

a death for doubts and doubles in one form

or another, if not to possibility —

maybe more or less an onset of

stability beyond the randomness

induced by individuality

that runs through our perceptions — constituting

an ontological region of convergence

where experiences correlate

over large expanses of time and space.

The Student pauses for a moment, thinking while he watches the fish fry in the pan before turning back to Massumi.

STUDENT (CONT’D)
(slowly constructing
a bit of inspiration)

I think I see a middle ground between

both your arguments. Just take a look

at the election and the turbulent moments

after, when everything was dominated

by information leaks. And what does the

establishment of an info-sensitive

political orientation suggest?

Control. But how can something be controlled

if possibilities can’t be guided,

which both a seamless mixture with the real

and a foreclosing of conscious relationships

with the real exclude? You’re almost talking

about a feedback loop — maybe you are —

but I want to talk about control systems.

I’m trying to talk about the way we lie,

and how a lie is useful, or how a nation

in its entirety can fall for a lie

as if the truth of words was rotten enough

to poison the whole well. Perhaps I want

to think in terms of matching, like the way

a radio can tune itself to certain

frequencies depending on the context

in given situations — some way to dial

context and disseminate a form

that matches what’s expected. And even though

I suddenly don’t believe that I can find

the perfect match anymore, I still think

I might discover a stochastic way

of describing something close. Eventually

we can predict electron flows, or we

would live half of our lives in the dark because

no one could make lightbulb come to life.

SAUSSURE THE CAT
(to the frying fish)

A little bit evasive aren’t we?

STUDENT

Exactly so.

SEDGWICK

Is that your final question?

STUDENT

No — I feel like I haven’t asked my first.

I wandered here tonight to see if you

could help me find a useful way to touch

the hidden bottom of the canal in Brooklyn,

and what I really want to know is if

any of this will help, or if it matters.

The bar becomes quiet as a crypt. All of the spirits stop and stare, and Barad serves the fried fish to Saussure the Cat, who devours it.

SEDGWICK
(apprehending
something)

Do you see all the spirits in this room?

SAUSSURE THE CAT
(speaking with a
mouth full of fish)

But we were told they had no whiskey.

STUDENT
(enjoying the game)

Yes —

everyone but you is gathered down

the long end of the bar.

SEDGWICK

Why do you think

I sit off to the side?

STUDENT

Because you want

to set yourself apart.

SEDGWICK
(suddenly serious)

Because I want

to see something besides my own reflection

in the empty glasses behind the bar.

I’ve tried my best to avoid the paranoia

that grips the saps who sip their drinks and think

they know it all. Did you not notice how

your responses to Massumi and Barad

were both reflected to a single point?

You said, “there’s a certain point” and “at some point”

so many times in your rebuttal that

whatever point you preached had surely come

and gone away again. The door you tried

to open with a mouse for a skeleton key

was closed before the wind could waltz on through

because you only perceived one door, when really

there are so many that no living key

could possibly begin to open each

and every one of them — not even thirty,

maybe five or six. I’ll admit that there

seems to be some number worth its salt,

which would provide a way to train your eye

on problems more productively than all

the abounding absolutes — but you can’t get

a grip on any glasses by yourself

while sitting parallel to the bar. That’s how

you spend a life uncovering some truth

in an effort to correct the lies

inherent in a previous perception,

only to congratulate yourself

and lock your soul inside an echo chamber

where no one serves an honest person a drink,

just fish and chips and starlight, like the people

passing by on the street outside this bar

who never cared about a neon door

that wasn’t there before. Because no one really cares

if anyone bends down to kiss their cheeks —

they keep on walking. The problem is that people

walk a million different paths. A mouse

does not construct a home: it digs a tunnel

that branches out in a dozen different directions,

which avoid a universal law

and every type of one-size-fits-all solution.

What people want is self-reflecting facts

they can control, which of course they can’t control,

because we never live a life of flows

no matter what Massumi says — although

we’d like to forget we can’t control ourselves,

which is what we really mean when we say

you can’t be paranoid enough. It’s better

to be reparative: to sit along

the shore reboarding your old boat until

it’s safe to ride along the river again.

Of course you can always find a single bottom

along the course of the canal, but I think,

and I hope you don’t mind me saying so

since you seem so bent on breaking your back

trying your best to find it, that looking for

a single bottom of the canal is stupid,

and I don’t know what you hope to achieve if

you find it, let alone how you’ll find it

if you plan on plumbing the depths all on your own.

STUDENT
(broken)

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

SEDGWICK

That’s what you heard.

Sedgwick grabs Saussure the Cat and places him on the bar in front of her.

SEDGWICK

May I?

SAUSSURE THE CAT

What are you doing?

SEDGWICK
(gently patting
Saussure the Cat
on the rump)

Exacting a bit

of truth.

SAUSSURE THE CAT

Oh — yes. Continue as you were.

Sedgwick reaches into Saussure the Cat’s ass and pulls out the recently digested fish, which has become transparent — almost magical. She holds it up by its lip like a prized bass. The DIGESTED FISH sings.

DIGESTED FISH

I thought it was a fin
but you’ve caught me by the lip again —

throw me in an ear
and by my spirit, you’ll learn to hear!

SEDGWICK

What would you learn if this translucent fish

could condense every voice around you into

one whisper only you could hear?

The Student takes the fish by the lip and slips it face-first into his ear.

STUDENT
(shocked, or maybe
disgusted)

Just noise.

Sedgwick shakes her head, and the Student removes the fish from his ear. He gives it back to Sedgwick, who begins to redeconstruct it.

SEDGWICK

That’s the problem, paranoia runs

like that — it’s noise or nothing. What you need

is something more specific, one or two

or maybe eight or so traces to hold

that can combine in certain contexts to

construct responses made of useful affects

in line with an analog reality.

Sedgwick hands the fish back to the Student. He wraps it in the map that Deleuze and Guattari gave him and puts both back in his pocket.

STUDENT

What if I disagree?

SEDGWICK

That’s your choice to make —

build what you need to survive, comrade.

STUDENT

Let’s go Saussure.

SAUSSURE THE CAT

I know another bar

on down the road, if you need another drink

before you jump head first into the canal.

The party starts again at The Side Door as the Student stands to leave. The Student, followed by Saussure the Cat, exits out the golden entrance.

FADE OUT.

Continue to Part VI.