Avital was born in Prague. She has taught all over the world.
Her books include Dictations: On Haunted Writing, The
Telephone Book, and Crack Wars. She teaches at UC
Berkeley in the Comparative Literature department. I met her at
Musical Chairs, the cafe/record store. But the sound of such
coffee addicts as Bach became too loud, so we retreated to the
campus offices.
- Alexander Laurence
- Let's talk about your last book Crack Wars. When
did you write it? It came out about a year ago?
- Avita Ronell
- The painful reality of American publishing--particularly
in the case of university presses--is that it takes years
for something to come out, so you write with a sense of
historical urgency but it stalls in the process of
getting out. For example, my reading of the Gulf War will
come out in 1994. Not to mention my "definitive
analysis" of the Rodney King trial! I have to write
a preface explaining why we no longer remember these
events. That's a political problem.
- AL
- We talked before about how the writing and artistic
community is divided in San Francisco. One of the
problems is that we don't have a big press or publishing
house that publishes San Francisco writers, or magazines
devoted to this where intellectual debates can be waged,
arguments can be presented. On the other hand, is the
speed of culture faster than the speed of assessing the
culture?
- AR
- It could be that the experience of assessing has
obsolesced. I was just saying that the time of
publication is so deferred that it actually has political
repercussions. It means that people who are very
concerned really won't take the time to write about
something, because by the time it comes out, there's the
sense of a dead issue. But one could say in a more
fundamental way, that the essence of the issue is never
dead. We're still not quite over Vietnam for example.
There's a real predicament of being out of sync with more
journalistic and technological modes of transmission. So
we're working with at least two or three transmission
systems simultaneously. One is the fast turn-over, MTV
kind of temporality, and then the more deliberate, slo-mo
kinds. But these oppositions may no longer obtain: the
deliberate, thoughtful, essential rapport to something
vs. fast paced sound bites.
- AL
- Yet serious deliberate thought takes time. Thoughts
become something else with time and over time. The
problem with the speed culture is you're making definite
judgments in an instant and moving on to the next
problem.
- AR
- That was a theme in Crack Wars. We have judgments without
having really taken the time to consider what a
definition of drugs might be. We have categories and
classifications. Soft or hard drugs. Or the narcotic
schedules, as they're called. We have taxonomies. Before
you make people serve time, no one has taken the time, or
given the time, to consider what it is that we're as a
culture so phobic about. Time is the major problem here.
In Jacques Derrida's recent work, Given Time (Donner
Le Temps), he writes, "The only thing you can
give is time." The only thing you can give to a
problem, to an "other," is time. There's
nothing else to be given. It is the gift.
In this book
of mine that is supposed to come out next year--Finitude's
Score: Essays for the End of The Millennium
(Nebraska)--there is a suspension between the distinction
dividing the mediatic fast-track and the slow, deliberate
philosophical trekking through problems. This is one of
the major problems of our modernity which is the speed as
Paul Virilio calls it, and also the need to resist
acceleration when thinking about it.
- AL
- We're enmeshed in a culture that's vampiric of time. It's
a difficult challenge to act constructively.
- AR
- California is the place where some emergency brakes are
being pulled, however. It seems very "out
there" with trying to Zen out and producing all
sorts of attempts at de-celeration, which always seem odd
and amusing, if not vaguely crazy. The opposite of that
is the compulsion to get things done. That's part of our
whole Western logos: to finish with something, to get it
over with, to have a decisive or clean-cut decision,
rather than passing things through the crucible of
undecidability. Taking your time and recognizing the
impossibility of making a clean-cut decision would render
some of our moves more flexible, strange, deviant.
- AL
- Could you talk about the structure of Crack Wars.
Partly it's about addictions, Madame Bovary, Heidegger's
work. There are divisions in it and I'm interested in the
non-linear aspects of its structure.
- AR
- I could track down some register and show its
cohesiveness. My purpose was not to show much complicity
with the metaphysics of continuity. In fact, I wanted to
move with a disruptive flow chracteristic of the types of
experience which we can still have which are
discontinuous, rhythmed according to different moments
and impulses, urges. I was trying to play precisely with
the question of speeding and slowing down, and the
relation of artificial injections to the way we can think
about temporality. So the book is on different types of
drugs, too: there's the more psychedelic moments, there's
the narcotized moments where it slows down into a heroin
experience, and there's the speed freak moments.
Different articulations. There's different angles and
approaches (or reproaches) to the problem. Since it's
also trying to argue for the relationship of drugs to
technology, I do try to sequence it according to this
discontinuous flow, in the sense that the electronic
media "makes sense" only by discontinuous
flows. So it would be an instance of non-technological
resistance to try to produce an uninterrupted linear
argumentation. It's really timed and segmented according
to the types of technologies that I link with drugs.
It
would have been very odd to present something so
discontinuous in a continuous, even in an archaic and
traditional way. I thought that the object of inquiry
posited some laws about how the book had to be written.
According to different types of experience of reading
that were simulated. In the beginning, there are
"hits." So, in a sense, I try to addict the
reader. I try to control the dosage. One of my arguments,
which I hope the material aspect of the book performs, is
that we're also addicted to reading. If culture implies
some notion of addictive investment, then what do we hold
against the addict? Anything can function as drug--music,
TV, love. When does the law step in, and according to
what discourse? How do we distinguish between good and
bad addictions?
- AL
- You coined this word: Narcossism. Can you elaborate on
this concept?
- AR
- I wanted to suggest that narcissism has been recircuited
through a relation to drugs. Narcossism is supposed to
indicate the way that our relation to ourselves has now
been structured, mediated, that is, by some form of
addiction and urge. Which is to say, that to get off any
drug, or anything which has been invested as an ideal
object -- something that you want to incorporate as part
of you -- precipitates a major narcissistic crisis.
Basically I wanted to suggest that we need to study the
way the self is pumped up or depleted by a chemical
prosthesis.
- AL
- It seems that addictions are the sine qua non of human
ontology. It would be interesting to hear you describe a
subject without addictions.
- AR
- Since I link it to the death drive and beyond the
pleasure principle, the Freudian readings of pleasure
that are never pure, they aren't necessarily on the side
of wholesomeness and health. I try to say how that's a
myth and a mystification: the virginal pure body that
would be non-addicted, absolutely outside of addiction.
That's why I include bodybuilding, vitamins, technology.
I think that the structure of addiction is fundamental.
That isn't to say that it can't be negotiated, managed,
or somehow brought into a rapport of its own liberating
possibility. I want to suggest that there are no drug
free zones. Now, it could be that there are good and bad
addictions. I don't see how one can write, or be an
artist, or think without some installation of the
addictive structure.
- AL
- Do you think that pleasure leads one towards the death
instinct? Or are there two types of pleasure?
- AR
- The double nature of pleasure is something that I wanted
to trace out. For pleasure to be what it is, it has to
exceed a limit of what is altogether wholesome and
healthy. Our idioms reflect this: when we like something
we tend to say we were "blown away" or "It
killed me," and other deadly utterances. To the
extent that pleasure is something that one seeks, it also
has to make us confront the limits of our being.
Otherwise it's something like contentedness, which can be
shown to be in fact an abandonment of pleasure. In our
Constitution, we're invited to pursue
"happiness" not "pleasure."
I'm
interested in a certain kind of honesty about thinking
what constitutes pleasure or human desire. That includes
our nuclear desire. We must wish to get blown away. If we
practiced Nietzschean indecency.... Nietzsche said you
have to be rigorously indecent, and really think about
those desires. Once desire is on the line, there's going
to be destruction and a turning around of values. What I
called in Crack Wars "a destructive
jouissance."
- AL
- In Crack Wars, you list the following people as
coffee addicts: Bach, Balzac, Voltaire. Were there more
coffee addicts?
- AR
- What interested me originally before I generalized this
into a book about addiction, mania, literature, was the
history of coffee. In Hegel, you can see the way he
grinds coffee into his argument--usually metaphorically.
You can really follow the coffee bean throughout the
history of philosophy, and come up with extraordinary
developments. There's someone called Malsherbes who wrote
about this. Just the relation to coffee as a miraculous
opening. At one point Hegel writes about coffee and its
substitute. One could trace the history of wars in terms
of the coffee bean. Even literary history: who drank how
much coffee? And where? What kind of a social space the
cafe produces? The Viennese cafe and Wittgenstein, Thomas
Bernhard, Arnold Schoenberg.
- AL
- In this section of CRACK WARS you talk about
"unchanneled pleasure" and "feminine
writing." I see this as a rare reference to the
French writer Helene Cixous. Could you talk about your
relation to Cixous?
- AR
- Cixous was one of my first bosses. She hired me to teach
in France at Vincennes. She is someone whom I continue to
admire immensely. She's brilliant, beautiful, generous,
and politically very astute and active. In that regard,
she's a model for me. She makes certain interventions and
makes things happen according to non-traditional ways.
She's also a friend. I imitate her way of teaching, which
is to say, she has so-called feminist hours. She teaches
every other Saturday or Sunday for nine hours, so that
women can come and aren't stuck at home during the week
with their children. So I've done that here at Berkeley.
I teach a Sunday seminar. I have learned things like
this, fundamental things about teaching, about political
responsibility from Helene. The section on feminine
writing owes a lot to her. Cites her work. It's about
writing for pleasure, writing that's on the loose, that
not phallically pointed, or doesn't make a point, or even
get to make dents in referential aspects of writing. The
problem of the woman who has all the equipment, yet no
one to write to, is a problem of feminine writing.
Concerned with the violence of non-address, it doesn't
have an institutional back-up or a support system, and
doesn't have a sense of its purpose or aim. That is a
kind of homage to Helene's work.
- AL
- Generally what are the differences between the so-called
French Feminists: Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Catherine
Clement, and others, and American Feminism: Susan Faludi,
Naomi Wolf.....?
- AR
- The standard spin on it is that American Feminists are
more concerned with pragmatic and referential effects of
their work. They seem to ease into the system to disrupt
certain moments of it. They're pragmatically oriented. Of
course each one of the women you named -- Cixous,
Irigaray, Clement -- is very different in her work. Even
Sarah Kofmann. Very often they don't get along. There's
not a sense of a "feminine" community, although
there are feminist tribes in France. The women you named
are philosophically highly sophisticated. They're dealing
with questions of the Western logos, and how to make
interventions. American Feminists tend to be more
empirical, and more concerned with the psycho-pathology
of misogyny, which is also extremely important. At the
time Helene Cixous showed up in America in the first
phases of her celebrity, in the early 1970s, a lot of
American feminists were shocked that she was so beautiful
in a French sense: she wears makeup. She dresses
elegantly and that was considered to be completely
contradictory with what feminism in the American
puritanical tradition would be. At that time, the French
feminists probably had a lot of scorn for the American
feminists. And the feeling was mutual.
- AL
- I think one difference was the dismissal of Freud's work
by American feminists. Whereas Cixous and Irigaray were
very interested in Freud's work. They read it closely and
wrote about it.
- AR
- It could be the pivotal point of dissension. The tendency
to dump on Freud I find to be somewhat anti-intellectual.
In that regard, I'm more hooked on the French feminist
theoretical side of things. Because the simplistic
tendencies to decide what constitutes a properly feminist
discourse really continues to shock me. Freud is
extremely complicated. He in many ways liberated a lot of
libidinal fields that were secret and repressed. There
were many moments that were problematic, but a
philosopher's point of view is to engage the problem and
to understand it, or even genealogically to interpret it
and give it a new force or a new aspect. Whereas the
non-philosopher's point is often to trash the whole
oeuvre. I dare say that those who trash Freud haven't
read him meticulously. I think that that's what my whole
work tries to address: the need for re-ambiguating areas
that need to be thought about. Freud's fundamental
insights are actually, as someone like Shoshana Felman
will have shown, very feminist, very subversive. He was
persecuted. He was, and continues to be, treated like
shit. Also by masculinists, writers and men. Philosophers
think he's a pansy. Only gays and some outrageous
feminists like Freud. So there's a conservative alignment
despite everything. Those people who dump on Freud tend
to be institutionally identifiable as conservative.
There's something about Freud that's not containable and
not conventional at all.
Nietzsche is a more difficult
case because he'll rant and rave against women. And
before you know it, he's turning around, and he's a
woman. His ear was inseminated by a woman, with his great
thought, the eternal return. She's the father of his
thought, he claims: Lou Salome impregnated Nietzsche's
ear! He's the womb. His itinerary is so complicated. I
think Derrida dealt with that. What happens when men
hysterically rant and rave, and yet nonetheless identify
themselves with women, creates a far more complicated
mapping than one can grant. Throwing away Freud and
Nietzsche can produce a ghetto of fairly homogeneous
feminism.
- AL
- The ideas of "self" and "identity"
continue to be interesting ideas. What are we talking
about? What is "the self?" What are we
referring to when we say this?
- AR
- It's a very complicated notion and it's certainly
historically derivable from the Romantics. The positing
of self and also the undermining of the possibility of
even having a pure, autonomous, strongly willing self is
part of the Western philosophical tradition. I think what
we mean by it nowadays is completely different. We tend
to call it agency or identity politics. Nowadays, we have
a borrowing system. We don't necessarily believe in an
essential self, but we seem to want to borrow attributes
from technology and from cultural entities. There's more
of a transaction taking place, in the economy of pumping
or building up the self. There's an awful lot of rhetoric
from technology. Already "attraction" indicates
a magnetic field. You're magnetized by someone. They turn
you on. They push your buttons. One would have to study
the rhetoric that makes "self" possible and
then undermines it. One would want to interrogate the
ideology that posits self as such a powerful figure. The
very fact that we're seeking identities means that we
don't have them. We're always dispossessed. There's no
"proper" self."
- AL
- The acquisition of self is phallic in nature. Is that
acquisition void? All the collage and technology that the
self absorbs is fundamentally empty and void.
- AR
- That resembles what Jacques Lacan would say about the
phallus. It's powerful but empty. This is not to say that
"nothing means anything anymore." That kind of
vulgar nihilism gets confusedly thrown at deconstruction.
The effects of deflating the phallus or positing a self
are tremendous, constitutive, and performative. The
effects of the notion of autonomy or self have produced
history. That doesn't mean that at bottom there is this
absolute sovereign kernel of being that radiates
selfhood. There are reasons for having produced these
ideologies.
- AL
- Is Post-Modernism dead? In Larry McCaffrey's Avant-Pop,
there is mention of this notion. In the new Review of
Contemporary Fiction, the writers William T. Vollmann and
David Foster Wallace talk about this. Kathy Acker has
also said Post-Modernism is dead.
- AR
- I would have to think about that one. But I think it was
always already dead. Wasn't it? (laughter).
- AL
- Why does Acker say this, when everyone knows she's as
post-modern as anyone?
- AR
- It could be her irony. Or her negotiation with the
border, the border patrol of what constitutes one
episteme or another. Maybe she's crossing over to another
region of her work and production, and she's clearly
disassociating herself from what she's nonetheless allied
with. First of all, art has always been dead since from
at least the Greeks. Since then, we have learned the
terrible lesson of Greece's finitude. Art has never again
been alive and in communion with the gods. It's passed
into aesthetics, which is its burial plot and stillborn
child. And of course Hegel reminded us that art was dead,
and that was a very late reminder. So any time someone
says that anything is dead in the field of art, it has to
be considered a little ironic. Acker's work can be
considered promethan, in the sense that it continually
rises from the ashes of modernism.
- AL
- Could you talk briefly about your new book? Finitude's
Score: Essays for the End of an Millennium.
- AR
- It's a book about AIDS, media technology, and the police.
I work on the police. On their omnipresence, and how
they're everywhere, even where they are not. They're
always present, but not in the mode of presence. Even
without that kind of monumental structure of a
panopticon. Just with electronic taggings, absolute
surveillance and monitoring, which becomes internalized.
I try to explain why it is not enough to "Fuck the
Police." It also includes essay on Nietzsche,
Goethe, Freud and a requiem for "GeoBush."
