archive : s0metim3s

Some of Denise Riley’s beautifully nuanced writings on identification or, maybe better put, on I:

From “‘What I Want Back is What I Was’ - Consolation’s Retrospect” (diacritics 32.1, 2002):

the grand public and collective designations of nation, ethnicity, religion, which do operate as often devastating counters in the political world, are arguably reliant on the selfsame mechanisms of retrospective identification, on similar elements of submission and of complicit consent to interpellation, on the same saturation in fantasy. But in the case of our mourning for our lost looks, so evident in the flourishing of the beautification economies, there is a departure: here no exhilarated new selves can appear to rediscover their communality arising from the ashes of their subjugation. Unless a real belief is held in the resurrection of the body, there is no hope here of redemption through the assertion of a common identity. We — the godless ones, anyway — know our fate. So I don’t want to advance the instance of recalled beauty as a neat prototype of what happens, only magnified, in the historical formation of the larger identifications. Nevertheless, through this frivolous-sounding example of the ordinary mourning of extinguished beauty, the prominence of how we can now settle to become what we (think we) were told then, is highlighted. So is that other critical ingredient, an inhibited vicariousness: “So this is how I must have been seen by them, but only now do I realize that they were right.” The contribution our example of lost looks offers to some broader study of self-designation lies in its aspect of secretive assent to what “they” said once; a recall that may well be an invention, but whose historical accuracy or otherwise is beside the point of understanding how this grammar of retrospective retrieval operates. […]

the sotto voce laments for regretted beauty I have outlined here are clichés of feeling. Their tone is formulaic, sentimental, complacent, swathed in the nostalgia emerging from the effort to envisage oneself as one once was, an effort driven by our will to be flattered. As descriptions of how their speakers actually were, their truth value is at best shaky. But these ordinary utterances are, above all, linguistic structures of feeling. As such, their effectiveness rests on their apparent weaknesses, their bagginess and their porosity; these allow them to be open to everyone. Through their looseness their usefulness can emerge: that imprecision and inelegance which actually “speak volumes” in fostering the ability of the merely implied to become the perfectly understood, and in admitting the deep intelligibility of the not-said.

Among these linguistic structures of feeling, vanity’s habitual loneliness tries to console and fortify itself by appealing to itself as glimpsed from the outside. We might investigate how many other instances of identification depend on a tacit urge for consolation similar to this striking and peculiar kind of consolation, built on the uneasy supposition that since I can’t be certain of being (or of having) it in the present, then I must have been it (or must have had it) in the past; to make sure of this, though, I’ll need to recall (or invent) the witness of others. It’s as if we feel ourselves to have contrived to become human, to have managed to be “like everybody else” only in retrospect: which means, only through a very ordinary linguistic fantasy of retrospect. If other sorts of identification are indeed formed and sustained through the work of this syntax of compensating consolation — and such consolation is both habitually thwarted and habitually refashioned — this could account for a good part of their impassioned tenacity.

From “Bad Words” (diacritics 31.4, 2001)

I am a walker in language. It is only through my meanders and slow detours, perhaps across many decades, toward recognizing language’s powerful impersonality — which is always operating despite and within its persuasive allure of “intersubjectivity” — that I can “become myself.” Yet I become myself only by way of fully accepting my own impersonality — as someone who is herself accidentally spoken, not only by violent language, but by any language whatsoever — yet who, by means of her own relieved recognition of this very contingency, is in significant part released from the powers of the secretive and unspeakable workings of linguistic harm.

From “The Right to Be Lonely” (differences, 13.1, 2002):

The “traditional” family’s demise is coinciding with a furious intensification of its variants. It is as if one must count as a family in order to count at all; while the numbers of those living alone, across Western Europe at least, rise sharply. Yet, as households of single people grow, the admission of even occasional loneliness remains taboo, while to be without visible social ties is inexcusable. Such common solitariness may be willed and preferred by its bearer, or may barely be tolerated, enforced: yet a taint of vice always clouds it. (In 1757, Diderot sent Rousseau his play The Natural Son, whence umbrage was taken: “In reading it, Rousseau came upon Constance’s words ‘Only the wicked man lives alone’ and was instantly convinced that the remark was aimed at himself” [Furbank 151]). 25 And does to live alone render a woman not only wicked but de-sexed — need everyone be descriptively drawn into the meshes of the social, especially women, as if they owned a naturally greater emotional extensionality, had more tentacles, if you like? “The right to be lonely” could also suggest the hope of being alone, yet understood as also social even within one’s solitariness. Solitude, as a pretty noun often religiously linked to creativity’s desiderata, may be acknowledged to be necessary; this admission is anodyne. But there’s a stronger solitude that refuses to be understood as merely presocial and that rejects the benevolent will to make everything, and it too, familial. 26 This solitude groans at the prospect of being tenderly ushered into the domain of the new social; its bearers are in no constellation, but tolerate being units of one, are maybe childless, parentless, without siblings, unattached, unmarried, widowed, not communitarian — are transiently or even (they can’t know) permanently single, and are not in a panic. They simply find themselves alone. The question “how single is single” could ask: how might such singleness neither be considered pathological nor be swept up, in an ostentatious depathologizing, into a compulsive sociability? 27 The figure of the Solitary might yet be retrieved, and in terms other than her failure to attain to the family. Might a properly recognized state of singleness (to wrench the notion of “recognition” away from its usual oppressively gregarious tone) recast that desolate and resentment-prone metaphoricity of social exclusion — might it also somewhat allay the burden, or at least the embarrassed self-reproach, of those who may find themselves living in solitude at the very same time as they live within the family?

And, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony; Impersonal Passion: Language As Affect