And it's kind of weird because this book, the hydra
of the criticism, I mean, I was describing today earlier
that none of my writing feels very different to me
from each other.
When I'm writing it, it just kind of eventually
gets shaped into something.
The more of it I produce, that might take a different genre.
So a lot of this book, I wrote--
The Art of Cruelty, I wrote--
I moved to Los Angeles and I was living accidentally
in the middle of Hollywood--
West Hollywood.
And I was-- it was the middle of the era of George W. Bush
and the torture in the Abu Ghraib.
And I was surrounded by a lot of movie posters
and other things that were very involved in glorifying
torture and pop culture.
And I just started writing a series
of really angry political rants, tying together
pop culture and what was going on in our country.
And then, I also--
I kind of ended up marrying that whole ranting discourse
to a lot of artwork that I had both loved and hated
all throughout my life as a devotee
of avant-garde spectacle.
And everything from Artaud through Ana Mendieta through
the Viennese Actionists through a lot of ethically difficult
or just in-your-face difficult--
Paul McCarthy, Kara Walker--
a lot of different work.
And I had been amassing a lot of material
for that on the art side because I both love art and teach
in an art school.
And also because I've been trying
to think through questions about violence and representation
in other works of mine, the ones that Ander mentioned
about my aunt's murder.
So I married together all this stuff,
and it just ended up being this critical book,
The Art of Cruelty, which is a bit of a nod,
obviously to Artaud, Theater of Cruelty.
And I just thought I would-- it's a little dense,
but I thought just for the sake of hearing a little criticism
out loud and also because it really
leads into what I'm working on now
in a very maybe obvious way.
I will just read the very last couple of pages of this book
from the afterword.
And it might not make a whole lot of
per se because you haven't read the whole book.
But it's kind of doing a summation of some
of the ethical questions about cruelty and love
that the book has focused on heretofore.
So I guess all you need to know is that I talked elsewhere
in this book about this William Carlos Williams
epigraph or a line from a poem that
says, "The business of love is cruelty, which by our wills,
we transform to live together."
And earlier in the book, I'd talk
about how I have been very moved by that and had it on my wall.
But the more I looked at it, the more
I had no idea really what he was talking about.
And I eventually realized, it was not
going to be an epigraph at all.
It just sounded good.
So that's the beginning of this little part that I'll read.
This is, like I said the last two pages.
"So to return to my rejected Williams epigraph, which
takes love as its subject: The business of love
is cruelty, which by our wills, we transform to live together.
It still sounds good, but what could it mean?
I don't particularly agree with its temporal proposition
that the business of love begins as a form of cruelty, which
can be subsequently heroically altered until we all get along.
I do, however, like its calm admission of the coexistence
of love and cruelty.
Its acknowledgment that they can exist within one another,
rather than at opposite ends of the spectrum,
or locked in an oppositional embrace.
That there might be an alchemical, rather than
a conflictual relationship between them.
That the possibility of such a transformation
is always alive and always ours.
Such a proposition is in keeping with the work
of British psychologist, DW Winnicott, who concerned
himself primarily with the needs and behaviors of infants
and small children.
Winnicott differed from Freud, Melanie Kline,
and other analysts in that he did not customarily term
an infant's business of love sadistic,
no matter how aggressive the behavior.
He thought, such a term attributed more malice
to the infant than was plausible.
But Winnicott did spend a great deal of time
thinking and writing about the intense dance
between vulnerability and ruthlessness
that begins when we are infants and persists in its way
for the rest of our lives.
Our grappling with desire is so fierce,
one fears they might overwhelm or obliterate others.
Others that we may desperately not want to lose,
indeed that we cannot afford to lose.
For Winnicott, it was crucial and normal
that a mother feel hatred for her baby,
and equally so that the baby be able in turn to hate her.
Love occurs, Winnicott thought, when
the infant is able to test the love object, often
via aggression, and the object survives,
proves itself able to withstand the testing.
One of Winnicott's most well-known images
for the balancing act of parent and child
has to do with holding.
The baby must be held loosely enough to experience freedom,
but tightly enough that it does not fall.
Love in this case is a container,
a holding environment with the right amount of space provided.
Or-- and here is Winnicott's great generosity--
if not exactly right, good enough.
Such an image echoes that offered
by John Cage in his 1966 piece of writing
titled, Diary: How to Improve the World, You Will
Only Make Things Worse.
Here, Cage writes, 'The most, the best we can do,
we believe (wanting to give evidence of love),
is get out of the way, leave space around whomever
or whatever it is.'
These lines have always struck me as an admirable mantra
to live by, if not an exceedingly
difficult and perhaps at times impossible one.
Given the ruthlessness of our desires,
the fraught apprehension of our dependency,
the heavy chaotic experience of jealousy,
and the radical undoness that can
attend both loss and communion.
What a relief then, to return to the John Cage piece,
and find that its very next line reads, 'but there is no space.'
A protest of the previous line's serenity.
And so we are returned to negotiation, to paradox.
A similar dynamic animates Cage's title,
How to Improve The World, then in parentheses,
'You Will Only Make Things Worse--
Only Make Matters Worse,' which first acknowledges the desire
to change the world, and then pulls out the rug from under
it.
Such gestures are in keeping with one of Buddhism's most
enlivening paradoxes, that we can dedicate our lives
to ending suffering while acknowledging
the first noble truth, that life is suffering.
Such paradoxes are ours to keep.
A paradox is more than the coexistence
of opposing propositions or impulses.
A paradox signals the possibility, and sometimes
the arrival of a third term into a situation
that otherwise appeared to consist
of but two opposing forces.
Roland Barthes elaborates this third term,
which Barthes calls the neutral, with the utmost of beauty
and intelligence in his 1977 series of lectures
titled, The Neutral.
Barthes's neutral is that which throws a wrench into anything,
the system, the doxa, that demands, often
with menacing pressure, that one enter conflicts,
that one produce meaning.
That one takes sides.
That one choose between binary oppositions
(that is cruel; no, it's not) that are not of one's making
and for which one has no appetite.
As it disrupts such demands, the neutral
introduces responses that had heretofore been unthinkable.
Desires such as to slip, to drift, to flee, to escape.
In a world fixated on the freedom to speak and the demand
to be heard, the neutral proposes 'a right to be silent,
a possibility of being silent, the right not to listen,
to not read the book, to think nothing--' this is Barthes--
'to think nothing of it.
To be unable to say what I think of it.
The right not to desire.'
The neutral allows for a practice of gentle aversion.
The right to reject the proffered choices, to demur,
to turn away, to turn one's attention to rarer and better
things.
Preserving the space for such responses
has been one of this book's primary aims.
Of equal importance, has been making a space
for paying close attention.
For recognizing and articulating ambivalence uncertainty,
repulsion, and pleasure.
I have intended no special claim for art or literature--
that is, no grand theory of their value.
But I have meant to express throughout a deep appreciation
of them as my teachers.
For as Barthes suggests, insofar,
as certain third terms, however volatile and disturbing,
baffle the oppressive forces of reduction, generality,
and dogmatism, they too deserve to be called sweetness."
So that's how that book ends.
[INAUDIBLE] Thank you [INAUDIBLE]..