Post on “Sat On Your Lap”
I hear the above song/video as a tart and self-reflexive word on humility (and its failures) when one is attempting to actually “learn” something– or when one is undertaking such a serious pursuit as “attempting to learn something”.
And I go back to the drawing board, although truth be told I never left it and probably won’t leave it by project’s end.
Part of the challenge in branding my disaster is that its “site” and “iconography” are debatable: credit default swaps, overleveraging, etc, are all American manifestations of the global economic crisis and they are, at that, highly abstract. My disaster, in fact, could be read as a the triumph of abstractions over the material world: Marx’s famous quote, that has likely shown up in this blog before, seems apt: “All that’s solid melts into air..”. In this case, however, its as though the world economy was a saturated solution and that extra droplet was forced in, and, in skittering across the surface, drew all its sister molecules into a discernible precipitate.
The above is not literally what happened. Nor is it a particularly inventive or illuminating way to look at the disaster as it occurs, regardless: metaphors are useful, so far as they go. But, they only go so far as to link two concepts together in a relatively static fashion, however evocatively accomplished.
A figure or metonym, however, is not only what this blog has been tasked to produce, but also a means of producing an association with greater fluidity and registers of resonance.
So, to begin again, a quote from an essay by Bill Brown bout Virginia Woolf’s short story “Solid Objects”:
“The fragment appears in “Solid Objects” as the figure of the material metonym whose metonymic function has been arrested–the unconsummated metonym, as it were. The unconsummated metonym is the figure, or the conceptual image, that Woolf offers us to think the object/thing dialectic, to think the world anew. John collects broken parts that are not really parts of anything determinable: “it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass.” His materialism, where parts are related not to wholes but to other parts, enacts a kind of redemption that refuses the (Heideggerian) temporality of recuperation.”
Like Blanchot in Writing of the Disaster and John and his indeterminable fragments, the figure is the fragment by which the other fragments are held in a constellation– a sort of totality that makes intuitive sense no matter where you choose to pick it up (really– orion, cyngus, and caseiopeia would all make sense no matter how they are oriented). And so, so much for the time being for Malcolm Gladwell’s hair, frission, and perpetual motion. Even my cells!
