Obstruction by Nick Salvato

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Drawing on an eclectic range of texts and figures, from the Greek Cynics to Tori Amos, Nick Salvato finds that embarrassment, laziness, slowness, cynicism, and digressiveness can paradoxically enable alternative modes of intellectual production.

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Obstruction
Nick Salvato

Nick Salvato

Obstruction

Nick Salvato

duke university press Durham and London 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Quadraat and Helvetica Neue
by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salvato, Nick, [date] author.
Obstruction / Nick Salvato.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-6084-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-6098-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7447-3 (e-book)
1. Affect (Psychology) 2. Doctrine of the affections.
3. Popular culture. 4. Culture. I. Title.
bf175.5.a35s25 2016
152.4—dc23
2015033382

Cover art: Liliana Porter, Untitled with Fallen
Chair II, detail. Courtesy of the artist and
Espacio Minimo, Madrid.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Tra<cking in Five Obstructions 1
1

Embarrassment 33

2

Laziness 63

3

Slowness 95

4

Cynicism 127

5

Digressiveness 157
Conclusion. Sober Futurity 193
Notes 205
Bibliography 233
Index 251

Acknowledgments

If it is with irony, then it is also with real gratitude that I begin these acknowledgments for a book called Obstruction by saluting two people, Robert
and Helen Appel, who helped to dislodge a signal, potential blockage to my
sustained work on the project: the loss of time to other obligations. Receiving
an Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists in 2012, I used the
leave time in 2013 that the fellowship a=orded to accomplish a great deal of
the research, thinking, and writing expressed in the pages that follow.
Though time away from Cornell proved useful in a late-ish phase of the
book’s construction, so, too, did the conversations at Cornell that helped me
to figure out that I was writing this book, and how and why it might matter, in
a much earlier, more porous stage of Obstruction’s percolation. Amy Villarejo
demonstrated typical, and typically beatific, patience as I came up with—and,
through many conversations with her, came to discard—dozens of ideas that
had to be both entertained and jettisoned as I set to work in a form that, well,
works. Sara Warner inspired and encouraged me to take the particular kinds
of risks that tenure ought to a=ord, as well as to trust that my feminist and
queer commitments would remain evident despite the riskier, weirder aims
to which I fastened them and in the service of which I contorted and recontorted them. Masha Raskolnikov reminded me more vividly and poignantly
than anyone else (could) how “the nineties” felt when we were inside that
formation and how to think about that feeling now. Sabine Haenni helped
me to let go of the nagging worry that coming “late” to writing professionally about cinema would harm the e=ort. Jeremy Braddock supplied some
thrilling book recommendations and sanguine beverage time to accompany
them. Tim Murray made possible a strange, fun Shanghai trip that taught me,

in less than a week, a lifetime’s worth about obstruction, work, value, (non)contemporaneity, and any number of the other keywords that animate this book.
And literally scores of other colleagues and students, especially those in my
seminars “Television’s Theatres” and “Theorizing Media and Performance,”
buoyed me in this work as they committed themselves to provocative and
engaged conversation, sustained critical inquiry, sober self-assessment, yet
at the same time the self-permission to indulge genuine flights of fancy.
Within and beyond Cornell, public occasions to share work in progress
challenged and also encouraged me. Earliest of all, Samuel Dwinell invited
me to speak on embarrassment and pop at a Cornell Department of Music
colloquium, on the heels of which Lily Cui helped me to understand better
anecdotal theory, unease, and why I was dragging Henry James into conversation with Tori Amos—and Liz Blake showed me the necessity of going once
more into the breach with camp. Anthony Reed and a group of wonderful
graduate students working in twentieth-century studies brought me to Yale
and gave me clarity about how to put more valuable pressure on terms like
leisure and lounge. At meetings of both the American Society for Theatre Research and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, giving presentations
on Kelly Reichardt’s slowness proved fruitful, particularly because of the
conversations that those presentations spurred with Jason Fitzgerald, John
Muse, Lindsay Reckson, and Phil Maciak. Lindsay was also present to an
American Comparative Literature Association forum on “Flatness,” where
she and a number of others, including Alan Ackerman, pushed me further in
my thinking on cynicism, animation, and mtv.
Alongside Anthony’s collegiality, I want to highlight the conversations I
had with Joseph Roach when I traveled to Yale in fall 2012; and alongside
Lindsay and Alan’s insights, I want to underline the e=orts of Maria Fackler,
who helped to organize the “Flatness” seminar at acla. Yet Joe and Maria
deserve thanks for so much more. When Joe told me, many years ago, that
advising was forever, I had no idea how committed to that proposition and
promise he would remain, or how e=ective his cheerleading would prove in
helping me stay the course while writing Obstruction. Joe also had the most
perverse, which is to say delightful, investment in the meanings and implications of bodily obstructions for this project—and, over the years, kept trying
to gross me out with his vivid invocations of them. I hope that he finds a suitable payo= in the words herein that salute his brilliant hijinks. As for Maria,
there are not enough words—or, rather, there have been too many words,
as she has, in her singularly loving and lovingly singular way, let me talk to
her for hours and hours about the ideas and objects (especially fourfour) that
viii

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make up the fabric of this book. Without her telephonic e=ervescence-cumdivinity, my life and work would be mightily impoverished.
In a further embarrassment of riches, many other friends have helped me
along by talking with me about Obstruction when I needed to, talking about
anything else when that was required, and in any event o=ering a=ection and
good humor in spades. I can’t name all of them here, but a partial list must
include Carlynn Houghton, Simon Pratt, Jane Carr, Tristan Snell, Megan
Quigley, Rebecca Berne, Kamran Javadizadeh (Wordsworth!), Jennifer Tennant, Brian Herrera, Aaron Thomas, Joseph Cermatori, Kate Bredeson, Josh
Chafetz, and Kate Roach.
Family supports have been likewise strong and grounding; and, while I
remain most grateful in this regard for the ongoing love and generosity of Annette and Nicholas Salvato and Lee Drappi, I have been touched in the years of
this book’s progress to find so much ballast, a<rmation, and intimacy in the
relationships forged with my new family, the Buggelns and Corletts. Cathy
was game and sweet enough to let me drag her to the Chocolate Factory to see
The Dream Express (and for so much more, from Scrabble in Michigan to hiking
in Peru), and Richard deserves a special mention for the appetite and stamina
with which he kept talking with me about obstructions and reading pages of
this book and a slew of others. I treasure our conversations.
At Duke University Press, I couldn’t have asked for more. Two anonymous
readers were incredibly generous yet also rigorous in assessing the manuscript, and they disclosed new and exciting potential dimensions of the work
to me, of which I hope to have captured some sliver or flavor in revision. Ken
Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault are a dream to work with, and I appreciate so
keenly the care and cheer with which they encouraged me to think clearly
and sharply about matters big, small, and at a variety of scales in between.
Likewise, all of the other personnel at the press have been peaches as they
have paid exacting and gorgeous attention to the verbal, visual, and related
elements of the book. Any errors are solely mine to acknowledge.
Samuel Buggeln, who always has the most interesting ideas for adventures, was particularly inspired to suggest that we spend half a year in Buenos
Aires—which we did, and where my work flourished as I learned unexpected
and shimmering lessons from a new desk, a new view from the window under which that desk was perched, a new regular walk through San Telmo and
Puerto Madero, and the countless other sensorial impressions and experiences that have shaped Obstruction in ways I am still endeavoring to understand. For this reason, my dear pal Jean Graham-Jones has suggested that
I dedicate the book to BsAs. (And certainly a special nod must be made to
ACkNOwledgmeNtS

ix

Porteña and fellow New Yorker Liliana Porter, who has permitted the use of
her stunning work to grace the cover of this book.) Jean almost has it right.
With gratitude for the perspective that Argentine times and spaces gifted to
me, I dedicate the book rather to Sam, who is always the biggest champion,
the best helpmeet, and the most beautiful partner in crime. In a turn of fortune for which I try every day to be as grateful and as nurturing as I can be,
there is nothing obstructive or obstructed in my love for him, or his for me,
and that love makes all the di=erence.

x

ACkNOwledgmeNtS

Introduction. trafficking in Five Obstructions

Object Lessons

This book proceeds from and elaborates on an argumentative framework
whose central lineament is deceptively simple: certain experiential phenomena prevalent at the turn of the twenty-first century, of which I highlight five—
embarrassment, laziness, slowness, cynicism, and digressiveness—are almost always taken to be incompatible with and detrimentally obstructive to
scholarly inquiry, but they may, if properly directed, be conducive to critical
work and valuable, more broadly, for intellectual life. If embarrassment, cynicism, and the like obstructions are routinely identified as detriments, then
that is because they really are, or at any rate, really can be and probably most
often are, damaging to the critical inquiry and to the intellectual life that I have
just invoked and in whose advocacy I write. That these obstructions need not,
however, be felt and understood merely as detriments to intellection, especially to intellection’s cultivation in writing—that the obstructive may, rather,
and rather paradoxically, form the basis for and sustain material manifestations of generative thinking—is the key claim for which the book Obstruction
itself is o=ered as a kind of token, emblem, or proof. In order to give that
claim texture, weight, color, and force; in order to determine how, exactly, the
obstructive, properly regarded, inflected, and deployed, may have value; and in
order to announce the delimitation of obstruction, in a special sense of critical
blockage that I have in mind, from other kinds of obstacle or blockade, I have
had to work both locally and globally: at once to consider particular objects
that could teach me in a fine-grained way about digressiveness, slowness, and
so forth, and to meditate at a more abstract level about particular qualities,
available for theoretical privileging, in which the potential benefits of obstruction inhere. Where the local is concerned, each of the five obstructions named

here is theorized through and illuminated by a consideration of an exemplary,
contemporary “case study” (circa 1990 to 2010) whose artistic contours are
instructive for related critical enterprise. Thus I limn an account of embarrassment’s richness by meditating on the corpus of a paradigmatically embarrassed and embarrassing popular musician, Tori Amos; redeem laziness
and lounging through a confrontation with the performances of a lazing,
lovingly parodic neo-lounge act, The Dream Express; uptake slowness as it
has been likewise taken up in recent, magisterial—and slow—films directed
and cowritten by Kelly Reichardt; challenge cynicism to be usefully mobilized
as I ruminate on the cynically fashioned mtv animated series Daria; and encounter the merits of digressiveness in the digressively styled yet strangely
encyclopedic blog of journalist and cultural commentator Rich Juzwiak.
Why do I begin with the assertion that the constitutive argumentative
sca=olding on which these more discrete assays build is a deceptively simple
one? First, there is nothing simple or straightforward about the use and
valuation of terms like generative, directed, work, and even value itself, begun
in this book’s opening gambit and extended and refined over the course of
its pages. To be sure, no determination of value is separable from the coordinating movements of capital through which all value gets routed at one
point or another; yet to observe only as much is to absorb at best half of the
lesson articulated in a well-established critical tradition—one in sympathy
with which I write—that alights on the constitutive indeterminacies in any
chains of value.1 Among other e=ects, these indeterminacies complicate the
very notion of value’s determination as strictly answerable to or captured by
capital and make provisions, however fleeting or fragile, for eccentric, sometimes nonce forms of value whose uses may accord with an equally fleeting
or fragile extrinsicalness to capital’s seizures, one echoed lightly in eccentricity.
(Certainly, no one who has read even casually about the ostensible “crisis” in
academic publishing—a condition perhaps better understood as a chronic
response to the ongoing fabrication, no less real for the fabricating, of crisis rhetorico-logic and attendant production strategies and distribution
platforms—would be likely to nominate exchange value as the primary analytic
through which to understand the rendering and circulation of often overpriced, under-purchased scholarly monographs.)2 Likewise, another critical
tradition with which I write in sympathy and solidarity has advocated not simply or easily for the repudiation, abolition, or supersession of work but rather
for the renovations of work in its various forms, because of or en route to
which careful a<rmations of work may be entailed, sometimes (but not only
or best) under the rhetorical banner of post-work.3 So to remark, as I do here,
2

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that I stand for locating value in intellective work is to make an assertion as
slippery as Portia’s when she declares her standing for justice4 or as Tammy
Wynette’s when she advocates standing by your man.5 Like the participation
in a recursive masquerade that thickens the former and the cracking of plaintive voice that cuts through the latter, this stand has layers, some of whose
edges are also fault lines, measuring, again, the eccentricity whose capacities
home my project.6 Such eccentricity is akin (in the distantly intimate—which
is to say, queer—manner that kissing cousins are kin) to the sort that Judith Jack Halberstam enacts in his performance of “fail[ing] spectacularly”;7
where that performance makes a success, indicated for instance in blurbs and
reviews, of failure’s in every sense winning embrace, this not quite obverse
one aims to pressurize its substance beyond the terms or forms described in
the binary suturing of success with failure.
Returning to the question of deceptive simplicity, I must also mark that to
value work in the funny way that I suggest in the preceding paragraph means
to wield or render each of my obstructions in ways neither straightforward
nor transparent. How, for instance (and to invoke and restage performance
elements of the sort used in classic psychology experiments), to be neither
the subject who runs from the room in extreme embarrassment—nor the
one who coolly designs an experiment in which a simulation of that scenario
unfolds—but, strangely, both? How to “do” real laziness or cynicism yet not
thereby capitulate, merely and banally, to the norms connoted in the worn
phrases goofing o= and selling out, respectively (and how, in the process, to
answer for not dropping out)? How to slow down without also sliding into
what Lauren Berlant calls, in an evocative phrase, a dance with “slow death”
or related versions of immobility?8 And how to digress in a fashion that avoids
distraction (of oneself, of one’s interlocutors), a source of no small amount
of recent critical despair, by rather manifesting attention (to twinkling details, to the larger constellations that they may star)? Ensuing chapters provide answers to these and related questions; and, as the manner and matter
of their posing here begins to intimate, the project that they animate does
not endorse getting over—or sidestepping—obstructions but instead champions taking them up as complexly comprehended obstructions and, in the
process, activating their potential, often surprising energies.
This insistence raises the further question of what, exactly, and for the
present purposes, defines an obstruction that has the particular valence(s) I
prize. Far afield as its object may be from the contemporary archive in which
this book invests, Paul Fry’s writing on Wordsworth, among the very few
scholarly e=orts to deploy the word obstruction with precision, may for this
trAFFICkINg IN FIve ObStruCtIONS

3

reason o=er an inroad to the question’s answering and model a version of the
di=erent but closely related precision with which the term becomes a keyword
here. Tracing the way in which Wordsworth routinely “replaces” an “epiphanic sense of ‘clearing’” with “a blockage or obstruction,” Fry accounts for
what (else) this sort of obstruction does as it “throw[s] a barrier across the
path” of the poet: “In many cases, at least, that is what it does; but what it
does yet more notably in nearly all cases . . . is simply to intensify the experience of being on the path itself, radically undermining the before-and-after
structure on which epiphany had traditionally depended.”9 An obstruction
“experience[d]” in the full, “intensif[ied],” and nonteleological way that Fry,
following Wordsworth, conceives might be further theorized not through
an emphasis “on the path” but rather through a redirection to “the barrier
[thrown] across the path” that Fry describes more briefly: the barrier whose
encountering we understand well—via a cliché that merits its exhaustion because of its exhaustive usefulness—when we metaphorize it as hitting the
wall. One response to hitting the wall is to climb over it, constituting relatively
uncomplicated achievement and perhaps an epiphany (depending on what is
more or less Romantic—but not, in this way, Wordsworthian—about the experience). Another response is, with equally uncomplicated cleverness or facility, to circumvent it: to refuse to stay “on the path” by finding another that
rounds the wall. Yet a third is to hang—dwelling, prolonging, and thereby
suspending—in the impasse that the path, no longer a path, has become
and that this word, impasse, has conjured so vividly in the recent writing on
a=ect that discloses with appropriate ambivalence the simultaneous promise and peril occasioned by hanging (out) in the impasse.10 Distinct from all
three of these modes—and perhaps most crucially distinct, in our current
critical climate, from the complex impassivity shading into impassion that
a=ect studies has imagined in the impasse—is the embrace of obstruction
that I a<rm and anatomize. To embrace obstruction is to scale the wall not
in order to surmount it but to cling to it, in such a way that the subject of this
“intensif[ied]” obstruction and the obstructive wall itself change, perhaps
move, precisely because of the clinging and the more granularly textured feeling of, up, and against the wall that the clinging enables. In the process, the
moving wall might become a dance floor. And, as this torquing of a common
metaphor suggests, the character of such an obstructive phenomenon is not
only spatial but also temporal, given the (decidedly nonepiphanic, but also
nonimpassive) interval that it would take to cling thus.
To think of these spatial and temporal qualities together, less metaphorically, and in a more prosaically definitional way, I would add that an ob4

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struction or blockage is both durable and durational—and, in these ways,
di=erent from a mere obstacle or blockade, which is passing and passable.
Turning to a literally more concrete example of an obstruction than the Wordsworthian barrier—one also more directly consonant with this book’s focus on the contemporary—may help to clarify further the distinction drawn
here between such obstruction and related obstacle. The example comes
from Matthew May’s In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something
Missing, which alights briefly and celebratorily on a design experiment that
Dutch tra<c engineer Hans Monderman implemented at a busy intersection
in the village Drachten (formerly troubled by a high number of accidents for
a crossing of its size). Guided by a vision of “shared space” and a speculation
that drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians will be more mindful in the absence
of tra<c’s ruling and regulation, Monderman removed all lights and signs
from the hazardous intersection—with the following results, as described
and interpreted by May:
There are no road divisions, no white lines, no curbs to separate cars,
bikes, or people. Finally it dawns on you that what is missing is the conventional prescription for order at a tra<c crossing: right-of-way.
If you were to observe the action for a few hours, you would soon see
that something else associated with most intersections is also missing:
obstruction. The wheeled and walking tra<c through [the four-way intersection] Laweiplein flows continuously in all directions across an equally
shared space.11
In his interest to locate and praise examples of elegant simplicity, May asserts
that “obstruction” is signally “missing” from the intersection in Drachten—
but it takes only a slight, albeit crucial, semantic recalibration to interpret the
tra<c phenomenon along di=erent lines. In the terms that I have established
here, we could say instead that Monderman has capitalized on the di=erence
between an obstacle (any given, particular tra<c jam) and an obstruction (the
ongoing existence of tra<c as such) in a way that exploits the obstructive
“problem” of tra<c and calls into question tra<c’s very status as a problem. In other words, the “problem” of tra<c is not exactly, elegantly solved:
“wheeled and walking tra<c,” as May calls it, still abounds in Drachten.
Rather, this tra<c itself is accepted as a constitutive condition of intersectionality; no longer construed as a phenomenon to eliminate, it may alternatively be taken up as a useful and usable obstruction, one whose adjusted
embrace enables the “continuous” “flow” of subjects who, together, make
the space a valuably, “equally shared” one.
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5

Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians cross through heavily tra<cked
intersections designed by Hans Monderman.

I.1 and I.2

A similar example of obstruction’s di=erence from obstacle could emerge
from a reading of the 2003 film The Five Obstructions (an artifact veritably begging for a gloss in a project fashioned as this one is and whose introduction
is titled and styled in this one’s way). Conceived by auteur terrible Lars von
Trier, the film documents a series of five agonistic challenges in which von
Trier invites mentor Jørgen Leth to remake his 1967 short The Perfect Human
within various sets of constraints that are, in von Trier’s estimation and language, “perverse” and even “sadistic.”12 On his own, initial (and predictably
Oedipal) understanding of the contest, the sadism will have a therapeutic
value and force a shattering of the cool, calculated methods with which Leth
6

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approaches filmmaking—and with that shattering, a like one of what von
Trier takes to be the cool, calculated performance of persona beneath which
Leth supposedly hides his deep “depression” and rage. For his part, Leth rejects von Trier’s model of surface and depth and dismisses the cathartic goal
toward which von Trier aims to drive the project as “pure romanticism”—yet,
all the same, he accepts the challenges for the “sophistic game” he understands them to comprise, one whose playing yields pleasure and the besting of whose obstacles allows him to render thoughtful, indeed beautiful
remakes of The Perfect Human (a feat that makes von Trier “furious” rather
than producing the intended e=ect of unleashing the fury that he supposes
unflappable Leth to conceal). Characterizing von Trier’s challenges as obstacles rather than, as in his own estimation, obstructions, I not only look to
develop further the premise established above but also attend to Leth’s interpretation of the first challenge as consisting in “quite a few obstacles for an
obstruction”: that is to say, with only minor tweaking, quite a few obstacles
that simply make for a multifaceted obstacle. When von Trier responds impatiently to the gamesmanship and artistry with which Leth greets the second
challenge—“You always try to be too good: this is therapy, not a film competition with yourself ”—what von Trier fails to grasp is that the “competition
with yourself ” is all too available a way for Leth to embrace the challenges as
a series of discrete obstacles, not as an overriding obstruction.
The embrace, rather, of “therapy” might have landed Leth in the space
of the impasse, as discussed above and as theorized in a=ect studies; but to
direct Leth thus is an outcome over which von Trier has no “control,” a key
term animating a pivotal conversation between Leth and von Trier (in what
may at first blush seem like an obversion of their expected positions, “pure
romantic,” von Trier admits to panic in the face of filmmaking conditions
that he cannot control, whereas Leth revels in the paradoxically “out of control” e=ects that carefully arranged and manipulated filmic inputs can yield).
Indeed, alongside the obstacles that Leth navigates deftly and the therapeutic
impasse that fails to obtain, The Five Obstructions’ actual obstruction turns out
to be von Trier himself: that is, his fantasy of hypercontrol as manifested in
his obduracy, which creates precisely the conditions for the circumvention of
the impasse and the gaming of the obstacles that Leth performs. Von Trier
is at once too controlling, too obsessed with the details of the game, and
too sure of his ability to break down Leth to produce an actual theater or
laboratory of cruelty. Instead, the great, initially unintended gift of The Five
Obstructions is the array of Perfect Humans that von Trier’s obstruction to his
own agenda positions Leth to create.13 It is an obstruction, moreover, that
trAFFICkINg IN FIve ObStruCtIONS

7

In The Five Obstructions, Jørgen Leth’s face is imaged in close-up as we hear “his”
words (penned by Lars von Trier) in voiceover.

I.3

von Trier belatedly and complexly positions himself to accept, when, for
the final challenge, he asks Leth to read in voiceover a letter from “Leth” to
“von Trier” hinging on “Leth’s” line, “I obstructed you”: von Trier’s reflexive
translation of the admission, I obstructed myself, where myself, multiply “constructed” and “mediated” and thus highly contingent,14 may nonetheless be
the (non) feeler of a pathos central to a final short “film that leaves a mark
on [that self ]”—and perhaps also on otherwise “unmarked” Leth and on
the film’s audiences.15 In ceding control by accepting obstruction, von Trier
draws, finally, nearer than we might expect to Monderman, who forgoes the
more usually engineered forms of tra<c regulation in order to reanimate the
subjects of the intersection, no longer also the wearied subjects of congestion
but instead the nimbler ones of possibility. Similar modes of control’s relinquishment will animate this book.
So much, then, for theoretical and material di=erences between obstacles
and obstructions: what unites rather than distinguishes obstacle and obstruction (as well as words like obversion, obtain, obduracy, and obsessed that I deployed with deliberation in the preceding paragraph) is their shared prefix;
and the special force with which that ob- combines with its stem in the case
of obstruction—indeed, the special force of ob- as such—draws me to privilege obstruction, here and throughout, over the blockage that Fry, for instance,
reasonably understands obstruction as synonymizing. Retaining “classical
Latin . . . senses” and “reflect[ing] [them] in English use,” the prefix ob- may
8

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mark the paradoxical conjuncture of seemingly opposed meanings: an obposition can be oriented both “toward” and “against” an object; likewise, an
ob- movement may obtain as a “fall down” (not incidentally, the final physical
act in The Five Obstructions) or as a “complet[ion]” in intensification (ditto, a final physical act that, repeating and reframing footage from earlier in the film,
also spikes it).16 Obstruction emerges as the most apt descriptor for the experiential phenomena that I investigate, in no small part because it carries within
it these countervailing connotations. To dispose, to face a subjectivity toward
that which would seem to run against or even deface it—or, more processually, to collapse into a heightening—is to work the aslant value of ostensive
impedition that I have otherwise been tracking in this introduction. As for obstruction’s stem, derived from the Latin struere (to build, to assemble), we may
well build on this account itself by asking, with the paradox of obstruction’s
embrace in mind: What is the “manner of building” opened in obstruction’s
grip?17 How does an ob-structed building or assemblage di=er from a more
typical con-struction, and how does it relate to pedagogical in-struction?
In framing a couple of key questions in this way, I owe a debt to Martin
Heidegger’s Being and Time, the most careful English translation of which lingers emphatically, as I do here, over words prefixed by ob- as it also unfolds
ideas about making and teaching. In a passage concerned with the “conspicuousness,” “obtrusiveness,” and “obstinacy” of things, Heidegger uses these
three concepts to delineate when, how, and why (otherwise) useful things
become no longer (merely) useful things: that is, when, in a “breach” or “disruption,” they announce themselves as impedimental to or unavailable for
use. This interval or gap marks a time for learning, insofar as it measures
a moment in which “noticing” may happen and at which the abeyance of
typical makings allows worldliness to “make . . . itself known.”18 In other
words, ob-like inutility is the condition for insight, for the apprehension of
the worldliness of the world—with the implication that so-called inutile
things have an intellective use value, precisely in their blockage of “use,” that
we could call obstructive in a philosophically positive sense. Following this
logic, I see the kind of instruction entailed by obstruction as fundamentally
reorienting the phenomenal—and with it the intellective—perspective of the
subject of both the obstruction and its implantation of instruction. If a more
concrete construction (for instance, a writing) proceeds and develops from
this instruction, then it, too, will be marked by the trace of reorientation, as
an e=ort of, in, and through redoubling: call it, if you’re Lars von Trier, and
to (re)name one example of such a redoubled e=ort already invoked, The Five
Obstructions.
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9

Contre Temps

Circling back to The Five Obstructions has a further purchase because of the
way in which continued interpretation of the film is uniquely well poised to
launch us toward some claims about the contemporary, a term that I have already used here to describe the archive—and, indeed, the impetus—to which
Obstruction owes its fabrication. More specifically, the film enjoins us to consider and di=erentiate a recently passed “present”—captured in the times
and spaces of the film’s making (and in the repeated remaking of The Perfect
Human)—from an older postmodernity, which is residually aligned with that
more recent past and of which the original The Perfect Human, with its coolly
devastating indictment of the white bourgeois subject’s claim to transcendent being and mastery, o=ers an exemplary chronicle. Contradistinct from
that quintessentially postmodern 1967 film, The Five Obstructions announces
its di=erence, its contemporaneity, in meditations on globalized manipulations of capital and the brutal, racialized inequities that those manipulations
produce; in a reflexively marked reliance on digital technologies; in a turn
to and wrestling with overtly ethical questions; and in a dissonant collision
of von Trier’s new—which is to say, old and renewed—articles of (Romantic, Freudian, religious) faith with Leth’s abiding skepticism.19 At the level of
form, another dissonant collision irrupts in the juxtaposition of Leth’s sleek,
crisp, exquisite, and comparatively expensive short films with the footage
of conversational encounters between Leth and von Trier and with behindthe-scenes footage of Leth’s shoots, both of which are noteworthy for shaky
shots from handheld cameras, confessionally oriented close-ups, and crude
wipes between shots—in short, elements we would find at play in almost
any example of slapdash reality television. Despite the juxtaposition of these
reality television–styled portions of the film with Leth’s variegated shorts,
each of which is rendered in a di=erent, referential style (including expressionist split-screen, surrealist animated, and hyperrealist travelogue works),
The Five Obstructions is not a pastiche of the sort that Fredric Jameson famously
identified as one of postmodernism’s signatures.20 Rather, the deliberately labored, repetitively contrasted movements between these respective portions
of the film position it, as a whole, to do a di=erent kind of cultural work,
neither pointedly parodic nor catholically pastiche but exhaustively—and
exhaustedly—eclectic. As for the reality TV–like scenes, the weird, winking
rigor with which the film refuses to deviate from an “unvarnished” (that is,
elaborately citational), populist-documentary approach to their making renders these scenes candidates for what José López and Garry Potter call “criti10

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cal realism” in their introduction to an assertively periodizing anthology, After
Postmodernism.21
In itemizing what features The Five Obstructions asks us to recognize as
constitutive of contemporaneity, I draw near to a list of keywords generated
by Terry Smith when he argues that multeity, adventitiousness, and inequity are
the “three antinomies that have come to dominate contemporary life.”22 This
list forms Smith’s partial answer to a question italicized and made a refrain
both in his introduction to the anthology Antinomies of Art and Culture and in a
shorter preface cowritten by Smith with Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee:
“In the aftermath of modernity, and the passing of the postmodern, how are we to know
and show what it is to live in the conditions of contemporaneity?”23 Sympathetic as
I am to what both von Trier and Smith show us about “globalization’s thirst
for hegemony in the face of increasing cultural di=erentiation, . . . accelerating inequity among peoples, classes, and individuals,” and “a regime of
representation . . . capable of . . . potentially instant yet always thoroughly
mediated communication,” I wonder at the same time whether Smith’s catalogue of distinctly contemporary antinomies runs the risk of defining an era,
even as he argues elsewhere in the same essay that he wants to resist both the
definitional and periodizing impulses of modernity.24 To remain open in the
face of the di<cult, refrained question about contemporaneity that Smith
and his collaborators pose is an e=ort that he models more closely when he
deemphasizes his three master antinomies and pauses instead over “the actual
coincidence of asynchronous temporalities,” oscillating before and behind the political and aesthetic ossifications that antinomously limn the contemporary
for him.25 Moreover, that pausing over the untimeliness of time itself—in and
as the contemporary—aligns Smith with other thoughtful commentators on
the temporal textures that make and mark the contemporariness of contemporaneity. In a comparatist framework, Natalie Melas conceptualizes such
untimeliness—to borrow her words, “a contemporaneity that would not
be premised on the exclusion of the non-contemporaneous, but that would
instead take critical account of non-contemporaneity”—precisely as an antidote to the “terminal presentism” that haunts so many (and such worn)
arguments about the end of history.26 Similarly concerned with how to attend
to historicity without sliding into a mode of positivist historiography tethered
to epochal thinking, Paul Rabinow a<rms of the contemporary (which is to
say, of its temporal slipperiness and the perhaps estranging curiosity that we
need to attend with precision and care to that slipperiness) that it is “a moving
ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space
that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical”; in the face of this
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11

ratio, critics must “find . . . means to remain close to diverse current practices producing knowledge, ethics, and politics, while adopting an attitude
of discernment and adjacency in regard to them.”27
Concurrent and recurrent times out of joint with themselves (and each
other), historicity without certain epochality or proscribed telos, responsiveness to these conditions through methods animated by simultaneous dwelling in and dwelling apart or aside from them: these common motifs, uniting work by Melas, Rabinow, Smith, and others,28 come arguably into most
acute focus in Giorgio Agamben’s meditation on what is noteworthy about
the contemporary (as a temporal phenomenon of ostensible presentness riven
by “disjunction” and “anachronism”) and about a contemporary (that “rare”
and “courage[ous]” subject who forges “a singular relationship with [her]
own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it”
precisely in order to comprehend what is anachronistic or disjunct about it).29
Agamben’s compelling theorization of contemporariness pivots, without finally depending, on an invocation of Osip Mandelstam’s 1923 poem, “The
Century” (or, as it is more typically rendered in English, “The Age”), whose
speaker—in Agamben’s argument, closely identified with the poet himself—
accomplishes what Agamben takes to be a “singular,” if also temporally
disorienting and self-splitting, act of becoming contemporary through his
“ability” to “hold . . . his gaze [firmly] on his own time”: a prelude to the
yet more active achievement of “weld[ing] with his own blood the shattered
backbone of [that] time.”30 Yet to understand “The Age”—and its stakes for
thinking the contemporary—in this fashion means to predicate the poem’s
interpretation on two yoked assumptions about its opening question, “My
age, my beast, who will ever / Look into your eyes / And with his own blood
glue together / The backbones of two centuries?”:31 first, that the question is
a rhetorical one; and second, that by asking it, the poet has also answered it,
and the answer is ipso facto none other than himself.
Yet a counter-reading of the poem (again, with implications for thinking
about the contemporary) is palpably available. After the introduction of what
would appear to be a bounded subjectivity in the poem’s first line (“My century, my beast”), that subjectivity, already indirect (“my,” not I), is immediately decentered or di=racted: “who” will do the work that the question asks?
What if this question is not rhetorical but uneasily open-ended, and what if
that which makes the poet contemporary is that he asks the question rather
than that he is its answer? Regarding the question’s open-endedness, one
possibility is that the answer is nobody, as the final lines of the poem suggest
strongly: “Cool indi=erence pours, pours down / On your [the age’s] mortal
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injury.” On this understanding, the movement of the poem is almost a nonmovement, stuckness, perhaps an obstruction: the beastly age, an animized
monster looking backward with a “cruel and weak” “smile” and a “broken”
“backbone,” is neither ocularly engaged nor haptically, viscerally “glue[d]
together” with curative blood; instead, it is met passively with “cool indi=erence.” The alternative posited in the third stanza—“To wrest the age from
captivity, / To begin a new world, / The knees of gnarled and knotted days /
Must fit together like a flute”—is imagined but unperformed and, for that
reason, appropriately conceived in a sentence without an explicit subject: a
syntactical move (inherent to Mandelstam’s Russian as well as to this English
translation) matched by the other figural ways in which the poem brackets,
almost entirely, agential human endeavor and highlights instead the motility of nonhuman actants: the blood of “things,” not people, “gushes” and
“build[s]”; “buds” (a word whose Russian equivalent evokes semantically,
only then to deny the copresence of, lungs) will “swell,” not breathe; and
the sea’s “cartilage,” replacing that of a now-bygone infant whose similar,
“tender” cartilage is also imaged, “splashes ashore.”
Agamben is correct that the poem’s proposed, hopeful measure—knotting together the gnarled bones of the age like a flute—is an “impossible,” or
at least “paradoxical,” task; far less certain is his conjoint claim that the poet
accomplishes this gesture, paradoxically.32 What he accomplishes instead is
(at least) twofold: the asking of his age a question that has as yet no definite
answer, and the making of a poem that can lyrically fit together (“like a flute”)
words that point to the age’s “gnarled and knotted” bones, not the fitting
together of the bones themselves. If this poet is indeed, as Agamben asserts
of his relationship to the broken time that he inhabits, likewise a “fracture,”
then he remains one; he is not the healer of his age, he is not a prophetic
seer and a welder, and he is not merely or simply possessed of what Agamben calls “capacity”; instead, he may be thought as an analyst of his age, as
a su=ering searcher and a maker of secondary or second-order things (that
is, poems), and as endowed with the capacity to embrace an incapacity of a
piece with—yet also apart from—the age’s own.33 The analysis constitutes
his movement with the age, the making of the poem its apartness, a critical mark, a meta-language; for that making, he is legible, in Agambenian
terms, as “a” contemporary, if in his minor, modest activity and unmitigated
misery not quite as heroic a contemporary as Agamben would portray him.
Yet to the side of that more or less plausible (when tweaked) reading, and in
keeping with the disbursal of subjectivity toward which the first stanza of the
poem gestures—a disbursal shored up by the third—the contemporariness
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13

on o=er here could be comprehended not as the poet’s but the poem’s. To
be sure, some of its magnetic attraction to contemporary readers, like Agamben, stems from its strange imagining of a century that is sutured to the
one that precedes it and that must, brutally and intractably, carry that other
century forward with it (in Russian, a portion of that brutality and intractability is conjured acoustically in the relentless repetitions of harsh, guttural
sounds).34 Yet, just as Agamben de-privileges the idea of century in favor of
age—and thereby moves away from strictly epochal or flatly chronological
thinking—so, too, may we de-privilege the conceit of “the poet” and take
up instead the untimely timeliness of the artifact left behind him (as Melas
does, for instance, with The Black Jacobins rather than with its author, C. L. R.
James): an assemblage of words at once poised on the modern “threshold of
new days” and sutured to the archaic “age of the earth’s infancy,”35 possessed
of or endowed with “a multidirectional aspect in which there is a complex
interplay between contemporaneity and noncontemporaneity.”36
Without aspiring to the agonized beauty of Mandelstam’s poem or pretending to the longevity of its contemporariness, Obstruction does, in a few
key ways, move in (perhaps gnarled and knotted) sync with its timely, untimely rhythms. The book’s attention is lavished on now-contemporaneous
objects that it aims to understand both tenderly, on their own terms, and
pointedly aslant from them. Those objects include the five obstructive phenomena themselves, which saturate the politics and aesthetics of the present;
with and simultaneously against their saturation in those spheres, Obstruction
works by torquing the phenomena toward the project of rethinking thinking itself. From time to time, the book collides its contemporaneous objects,
phenomena and artifacts alike, with noncontemporaneous ones whose tra<c
with the former a<rms the principles of multidirectionality and complexity
that Melas advocates. And, as the next section of this introduction explores in
greater detail, it foregrounds the shaping eye and hand of its author precisely
as the basis (to repurpose a generative term of Agamben’s) for his “fracture”
or fraying.
Homing (I)

By anatomizing the manner in which von Trier himself becomes the signal
obstruction of his film—but in such a way that the self in question is contingently, even phantasmatically, rendered—and then turning to Mandelstam’s
poetic giving of subjectivity, which is also its taking away, I have endeavored

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to lay some groundwork for a more explicit accounting of the role that the
author’s inscription, or “I,” plays in this book. Embarrassment, laziness,
cynicism, slowness, and digressiveness are the more discrete obstructions
that I examine in the following chapters, but the principal obstruction whose
blockages—which is also to say, in the context of this book’s argument,
whose conditions of possibility and value—prompt the five reckonings to
come is just this authorial I. Indeed, it is an I that, for a contemporary critic
writing after the poststructuralisms of the mid- and late twentieth century,
must occupy the status of a problematic—a status for which I ask you to take
my warrant that I have thought carefully about how it must be implied in
every deployment of I in these pages, even when the status and the thinking
are not explicitly marked as such. At the same time, such explicit marking,
in the forms for instance of reflexive meditation and metacommentary, will
also emerge over the course of the ensuing pages. Mostly located in the introductory sections of each of the book’s five chapters, these anecdotal—
in Jane Gallop’s precise sense of “anecdotal” as eminently theoretical 37—
exfoliations provide keen evidence; without it, the fleshly, reflexive (and
thereby, if it works) refreshing phenomenology of obstruction to which I aspire would not have its constitutively propre subject, however impedited and
improper a prop that propre constitutes. After a fashion, then, the authorial I
also becomes a “case study” here, an obstruction not dodged but embraced in
order to enable alertness to the loopy significance of language and the ruses
of intentionality and to demonstrate the continued generativity of a criticism
whose archive is thickly experienced, powerfully lived. In short, risking the I
makes for a valuable working with obstruction, insofar as it highlights that
which we cannot, finally, dislodge—but out of which and in which we can
make our lodgings. On the question of this risk, I can think of no better assessor than Amy Villarejo when she writes of the sharp di<culty we encounter in rising to the level of “engaged intellectual work, linking the self to the
process of study, linking one’s own political and intellectual investments to
the writing-work of cultural criticism”:
While I happen to be of the opinion that very few authors of academic
monographs successfully sustain that fragile balance between autobiography and critical argument, I do find useful those deictic gestures that disclose the production of the value of a given work. . . . The more clearly one
lays out the stakes of a given inquiry—the value of the study undertaken—
the more one might avoid the twin dangers of taking the self as an adequate
measure of the readership and, more perilously, of the topic at hand.38
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15

To attempt to “sustain [the] fragile balance” that Villarejo describes is, then,
not to indulge in I for I’s sake but to frame that I with regard for you and with
a like regard and a=ection for the objects of contemplation to which that I will
sometimes be hitched or stitched.
It is also, as Villarejo makes plain, to return to and redouble the question
of value with which this introduction began. Perhaps one value of obstruction
(and in Obstruction)—whether or not the precise obstruction in question is
the I and the body that it cannot help but conjure, ephemerally—is indeed a
value inseparable from the question of embodiment, one to which the word
obstruction makes a “deictic gesture” in its medical sense as “blockage of a
body passage, esp[ecially] the gastrointestinal, urinary, biliary, or respiratory
tract; an instance of this.”39 One such “instance of this” sort of bodily obstruction, transformed metaphorically in its brief yet potent invocation in the
queer theoretical tradition in which both Villarejo and I have worked, comes
from the pen of the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in collaboration with
Michael Moon. They write of the “fat female body,” which has historically
been “visible on the one hand . . . as a disruptive embolism in the flow of economic circulation,” that it has, on the other hand, “function[ed] . . . more
durably” as that flow’s “very emblem.”40 Doing the inside / out work so central
to some practices of queer theory,41 Sedgwick and Moon make out of the body
an embolism that we would more ordinarily expect to find in the body in order
to demonstrate, via a rhetorically performative enactment, how one kind of
body in particular, the unpredictably unruly and / or ruling “fat female body,”
has itself flip-flopped between its status as a signifier out of and in sync with
the flows of capital. Enlivened by this gesture and the argumentative work
that it supports, I perform a modified version thereof and ask you not to think
consecutively about Obstruction that it is “here and now” an “embolism” and
“there and then” an “emblem” but rather to identify one aspect of its value
in its simultaneous and coconstitutive figuring as emblematic and embolistic: emblematic of the “engaged intellectual work” that Villarejo salutes—
precisely because I have engaged and twisted five obstructions supposed to
be embolistic to “the writing-work of cultural criticism”; embolistic “in the
flow of economic circulation” that Sedgwick and Moon describe—precisely
as a monograph emblematizing densely felt intellective endeavor, activity that
has a number of potent opponents, to be sure, but also an oppositional potency of its own to value and to fight for.
When, in the prior paragraphs of this introduction, I emphasize (and will
now redouble an emphasis on) what is “thickly experienced,” “powerfully
lived,” “densely felt” work, I make those moves in part to pave the way for an
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ampler explanation of my archive’s shaping. The objects under close consideration here may strike some readers as minor, eccentric, and eclectic (and
to a certain, limited extent, they may be construed as such), but they also appear here out of necessity—albeit a cleaved, ambivalent necessity. On the one
hand, these objects grabbed me, durably, as much as I fastened onto them,
and thus became obstructions demanding that I grapple with them. On the
other hand, I only chose to meet that demand, after great care and deliberation, because of the special and highly specific pedagogical purposes in
whose service the objects are enlisted. To be sure, they form just one cluster
among a range of fascinating contemporary artifacts, which likewise hail me
and which o=er their own lessons about embarrassment, laziness, cynicism,
and so forth; but these other, related artifacts do not model the exact lessons
about the book’s five obstructions in which I could find the most compelling
value for myself and for the colleagues whom I seek to address. At the most
general and abstract level, I would say about the process of homing in on the
music of Tori Amos, the films of Kelly Reichardt, and the like that, to make
my obstructions work in the paradoxical ways that they do, I needed to learn
about them by moving in sync with texts, broadly construed (and the creators of those texts), as they are animated by precise admixtures of privilege
and precarity, fragility and force: blockages not so wholly blocked that they
could not also become building blocks. Yet to submit this global proposition
for meaningful consideration demands in turn a closer, local set of investigations of where the precarious may intersect with the privileged, how the
fragile may exhibit force, why the blockage builds. In order to explain more
fully, then, what my case studies o=er—and en route to likewise o=ering a
fuller and more shimmering context in which to appreciate them alongside
contemporaneous objects that I have also contemplated with curiosity and
regard—I use this moment to break down the arguments and (re)introduce
the key players of the chapters that follow Obstruction’s introduction (or, roadmap time!).
(1) Though a rich tradition of American cultural studies has worked to
dislodge the embarrassment that may attend work on such elements of mass
culture as pop music (for instance), an Adornian countertradition reveals the
value in continuing to privilege intellective sophistication. Aligning chapter 1, “Embarrassment,” with this countertradition, I highlight a further
complication: sophistication may now, itself, constitute a source of embarrassment, placing in a double bind any critic who would set aside neither
the objects producing embarrassment (for the critic as sophisticate) nor the
sophistication that is in its turn embarrassing (for the critic as champion of
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17

the popular). That obstructive double bind bespeaks a failure—perhaps,
if positively embraced, a refusal—to engage in precise role segregation, an
(in)ability that has been conceptualized by thinkers like Erving Go=man as
central to the production of embarrassment.
Building on sociological ideas about role segregation, as well as drawing
on work from a variety of other disciplines, I o=er a provisional definition of
embarrassment: one that begins by distinguishing embarrassment, a strong
feeling, both from the a=ects that Sianne Ngai theorizes as weak in Ugly Feelings and from another strong feeling, shame, with which it has been all too
often confused or to which it has been errantly attached as a subspecies. Unlike singularizing shame, embarrassment has a collectivizing potential and is
fundamentally relational, figuring the place of the other as one that could be
or become the place of the factitiously produced self. Factitiously produced in
its own right (as, for instance, adolescent “in nature”), embarrassment’s exposure of the environmentally situated, divided self—as divided—manifests
in such somatic markers as the blush and cringe, the latter of which has had
more cultural traction and visibility in recent years than in earlier historical
periods. Alighting on the cringe in (or as) criticism alongside its recent artistic mobilizations, I see this gestural sign as in fact more helpful than the
blush (so indelibly associated with transparent ideas about subjectivity and
the interiority on which such subjectivity is supposed to be predicated) for
a project that would comprehend the dance of self and other in embarrassment’s manufacture, given the cringe’s movement of a self from another or
from a part of the self as other. Situating the cringe in this way inaugurates
a movement en route to a more robust, poststructuralist-informed account
of subjectivity and feeling (foreshadowed in this introduction), which, like
Rei Terada’s work, a<rms pathos as the paradigmatic emotion constituting
the split or even nonself—and embarrassment as the corollary, paradigmatic
emotion experienced by that split self in the field of relationality.
In turn, I consider what distinguishes a specifically critical version of
embarrassment from this more generally relational form of the feeling. Via
an engagement with Henry James’s “Figure in the Carpet,” as well as recent
critical work on Rousseau’s Dialogues, I identify critical embarrassment as
undergirded by and bound to a sense of stupidity—moreover, a basically inchoate sense that does not direct the senser to a strict categorization of stupidity as either a thought or a feeling. The critical embarrassment founded
on category-upsetting stupidity is itself turbulent, o=ering the critic no safe
ground from which to work but rather a moving terrain in which what can
be counted stable is precisely the endurance of the stupidity that confounds
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the critic’s thinking self with her or his feeling self. To embrace this critical
embarrassment means then to share, carefully and caringly, such confounding and the curious kinds of insight to which it may lead critics and their
interlocutors. Understanding as much emerges, in this case, not just from
a reckoning with Go=man, James, and Rousseau, for instance, but also and
more fundamentally from pressing on and pressing through my embarrassed
experience of Tori Amos’s music: Amos, long recognized as a cultivator of
shame in her work, is just as much if not more a purveyor of embarrassed
feeling, corresponding thinking, and the blurring of the two. Indeed, the
sometimes shrewd management of this blurring or coextensivity makes
Amos herself a critic as well as an artist of embarrassment, who capitalizes
instructively—because reflexively—on the proliferation of “conflicting”
roles and their oddly desirable nonsegregation. The instruction is particularly apt for the critic who would keep generatively in tension and at play a
paranoid mode of engagement, its reparative obverse, and (in the process) a
reparation of paranoid criticism itself.
(2) Chapter 2, “Laziness,” begins with an anecdotal meditation on the
obstructive experience of finding oneself unable to bring a critical project
to fruition—yet just as unable, or unwilling (or unable to embrace willingness), to relinquish the project. Befitting the assay on laziness that the anecdote inaugurates, the realization of what to do with such a stymied critical
project—how to (re)do it—comes not epiphanically but in a gradual, trickling way: that is to say, liquid and lazing. Conceiving an active form of lazing,
distinguished from a more passive or even ossified state of laziness, as also
crucially fluid in its active movements is one key to finding value in such a
mode of intellection.
Indeed, for a long and varied line of writers working in a still underrecognized tradition of lazing thus (one inviting us to read its players’ e=orts as
constituting a genealogy of “laziness studies”), what unites their historically,
politically, and aesthetically diverse projects is the liquid set of styles that they
all embrace, as well as the liquidification of the contingent norms governing
work and value that all of their liquidly expressed writings a<rm. Far from
“doing nothing”—permutations and contestations of which phrase illuminate many of these writers’ works—their cumulative, abundant pages constitute precisely the proof that slacking, in the sense of un-tautening thought, is
not coeval with thought’s abandonment or, less dramatically, with the abandonment of its concretion. For the contemporary scholar aiming to work in
such a lazing mode, to do so responsibly means, as I endeavor here, to situate
such work in both the narrower context of critical university studies and the
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19

broader context of postwork studies that constitute the necessary horizons
for contemporary academic work and value. More far-reaching, any contemporary thinker angling toward lazing writing does well to address Hannah
Arendt’s still-timely concern that the concretion of thought constitutes its
instrumentalization and, in the process, its deadening. In fact, it is the very
loosening of the lazing writer’s grip on her or his product, the liquid or light
emphases on process that she or he is uniquely poised to generate, that o=er
such writing the potential to align with Arendtian ethics and politics.
Less obvious yet just as compelling, such projects in writerly lazing
may also align with a superficially, often quite di=erent tradition of artistic
lounging. Within a longer history and broader geography, lounge’s various
forms—adjectival, verbal, and nominal—converge with special potency on
a set of postwar, American performance practices (lounge musics) enacted in
a lazing manner (loungily) in a series of spaces marked by their disruptions
of normative time and work (hotel and motel lounges). Though critics like
Sigfried Kracauer read such spaces and related ones, like lobbies, as sites
of perniciously wayward, (self-)indulgent contemplation, the vivid attraction
with which Kracauer alights on such sites in order to condemn them suggests
the value of reading his attraction against the grain and, per Villém Flusser’s
celebration of (a slightly misnamed) leisure, as indicating the value in the
idling thought and related expressive behavior that the lounge, or lounging,
conduces.
Because the politics of some of the preeminent practitioners of such
lounging, like the paradigmatically “lazy” Dean Martin, are inhospitable to
progressively committed scholars, the genuinely if trickily instructive lessons
inhering in performances like Martin’s have been critically underattended.
More palatable and arguably more relevant to the twenty-first century are a
set of pointed, contemporary reckonings with the lounge idiom, parodically
reincarnated precisely so that the idiom may initiate progressive movement.
Among such reincarnators of lounge, the playwright / actors performing as
The Dream Express (and performing a set of meta-lounge pieces likewise
called The Dream Express) generate work with particular pedagogical value for
their lazing critical allies. Championing an anti-neoliberal restructuring of
work and value within the diegeses of their performance pieces, they are also
lazing developers and archivists of those pieces, and these e=orts model an
eccentrically apt way of making and maintaining work that relinquishes the
toxic pretension to mastery and that embraces instead the boons that come
from relaxation.
(3) To approach the topic of the book’s third chapter, “Slowness,” re20

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quires at the outset a clarification of what its title indexes. Though sometimes used interchangeably in both everyday and critical contexts, two di=erent meanings of slowness or slow time may be profitably distinguished from
each other: the long (slow) experience that takes time, and the stretched or
dilated experience that makes time feel slowed. Following a theoretical tradition that has directed much more attention to the former phenomenon,
chapter 3 fastens on the latter as it asks: When encountering the obstacle that
there is not (enough) long time to take, how best to make what time there is
arresting? That is, how to embrace the obstruction of arresting time in such
a way that time is not impassively and impoverishingly arrested but pleasurable and full? In the process of answering these questions, I also investigate
what further articulation may obtain between acts of taking (long) time and
making time (slow).
To begin that investigation requires an engagement both with a prominent critical literature of speed, in which a pervasive worry over contemporaneity’s accelerations has been powerfully expressed, and with a more minor
literature of slowness, in which some forms of slowness (in food preparation and consumption or travel, for instance) are—ironically—harnessed
too quickly to the agendas of neoliberal capitalism. Nonetheless, key texts in
the two literatures suggest commonly that an ethically and politically viable
mode of slowness—one that could imbricate taking slow time and making
time (of whatever duration) slowed—may be imagined. As yet, that mode
has been imagined imprecisely, raising the question of the exact nature of the
relationship between the two kinds of slowness. Engaging in a metacritical
act of bifurcating time, I propose that answering this question requires, for a
spell, its deferral in a non-Agambenian open: a space not for potential inoperativity but for an alternative operativity, one that keeps implicitly clocking,
as it were, the passing of taken time as it makes more explicit time for other
addresses and attentions.
Chiefly, that attention is given to two strikingly, if weirdly, overlapping
discourses in which the otherwise bracketed phenomenon of slowed time
has been intermittently considered: a strand of cognitive psychology, focused
on optimal experience and “flow,” and interwoven strands of Eastern and
popularizing Western Buddhist philosophy, focused on the dimensionality
of time (with an eye trained particularly on its fourth dimension). In the end,
neither discourse provides a model for the scholar who would wish to make
time feel intensively, valuably slowed: the latter rejects explicitly such a mode
of critical intellection as it advocates instead disengagement from the worldliness of the world, a reach beyond speculative inquiry; while the former’s
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21

method admits only descriptions of, not prescriptions for, slowing (flowing)
time. Tellingly, though, both discourses disclose an attraction to the cinema,
some of whose artists do, by contrast, enact a mode of stretching time that
may inspire a corresponding critical movement.
One such artist is writer and director Kelly Reichardt, who routes her techniques for the exemplary, pleasurable slowing of time through the stillness of
her camera. That still camera is at the center of a cinematic practice defined
by long(ish) takes, making time slow even when only a few minutes may be
taken for a shot; considerable depth of field, providing compositions with
arresting clarity and detail; likewise arresting figure behavior, as actors move
pointedly within or across the borders of the still, “static” frame; occasional
movements of the otherwise still camera whose very smallness is striking;
and recurrent motifs that spike the scenes and sequences of Reichardt’s films.
Once time has been slowed through these aspects of production, so, too,
may it be slowed in reception for the thinking viewer, who is indeed poised
to think further and better in the slowed (though not long) time spent with
Reichardt’s films. Likewise, these production strategies provide a model for
scholarly thinking and writing, which may develop homologous strategies
for time’s slowing. A further lesson emerges from Reichardt’s typically long
preproduction periods: taking long time may be the precondition and ground
for making time slowed; and, in a further wrinkle, pleasurable experiences
of slowed time may (re)fuel and replenish some subsequent endurances of
long time’s duration.
(4) Writing in sympathy with those who wish to move flexibly beyond the
cynicism in which so many contemporary subjects, especially in academe,
have been mired, I nonetheless ask a harder and, to a certain extent, more
initially distasteful question in chapter 4, “Cynicism”: Can value be located
in some version(s) of cynicism, whose wholesale relinquishment may not,
after all, be desirable or even possible? To pose this question of and in academe works well in tandem with an exploration of television, a field that has
likewise been thick with and thickly accused of cynicism. Yet in both cases,
at least some of that saturating cynicism is multifaceted, and this chapter
advocates in its turn just such a multifaceted version of cynicism’s embrace,
one animated by three interpenetrating attitudes: cynical accommodation
to systems and structures whose navigation is inevitable, but in navigating
which tactical accommodation need not become accommodationist strategy;
a critical cynicism that works precisely to identify and defend against such
accommodationism; and, following yet renovating classical models, a Cyn-

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icism (as such classical precedents are orthographically designated) that is
defined by risky acts of truth-telling and related, theatrical expressivity.
For all of its dimensionality, the version of tripartite cynicism that I advocate does not confuse cynicism (as some other accounts do) with nihilism
or pessimism or, more mundanely, with banally dishonest or evil behavior.
Nor does it ignore the trenchant critiques of “merely” accommodational
cynicism—or of accommodational cynicism that overwhelmingly compromises the critical cynicism to which it would be hitched—that have emerged
recently (for instance, in Alan Liu’s work) and that may be genealogically situated alongside similar postmodern critiques (most famously, in Peter Sloterdijk’s work). Nonetheless, a look yet further backward to antiquity and to
modern (alongside postmodern or contemporary) commentators on antiquity
discloses a staggeringly longstanding, albeit diverse, e=ort to understand
the relationships among Cynicism and what we may call critical and accommodational cynicisms as not simply or only damaged by transactions with
the latter form of cynicism’s experience. Inspired by, yet also wary of, those
scholars who would avoid such damage by yoking cynicism(s) to optimism—
and so wary because of Lauren Berlant’s stirring account of optimism’s likely
cruelty today—I look instead, yet in a related manner, to the perverse and
eccentric uptake of classical Cynicism (one that has generative implications
for its relationship to other cynicism[s]) in Foucault’s late work. Following
his account of how one may responsibly care for other and self, speaking
risky truth to power—and just as riskily accommodating oneself to power in
nimble, provisional ways—I treat that account as consonant in its aims with
projects guided by sanely and sanguinely radical incrementalism (or incremental radicalism).
Arguably, one such project is configured by the mtv series Daria, “cynically” fashioned in the tripartite way that the chapter otherwise delineates.
Indeed, the cynical-cum-Cynical creators of the series endow its eponymous
protagonist with a related version of their cynicisms and Cynicism as she
engages in Foucauldian (also Chekhovian) acts of parre¯sia and related forms
of protest and display. At the same time, the mobilization of cynicisms, plural, is registered not just in the diegetic content of Daria but also in the very
form of the series’ limited cel animation and the movements that it arranges,
as well as those that precede it at the level of production. Accommodating
some exigencies of global capitalism yet wishing at the same time to espouse
a critical, global cosmopolitanism—and, I argue, fulfilling that wish—the
series instructs the scholar, working within yet against the baleful features

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23

of the corporatized university, how to embody the gingerliness required to
make radical gains incrementally and to ensure that incrementalism retains
its radical complexion.
(5) Predicated on the act and idea of stepping aside, digressiveness may
inform both a working style and a working strategy—such as those informing chapter 5. Indeed, though veering away from a project (as I did during the
writing of this chapter to complete a “side” e=ort) may appear as an obstruction to the project’s sustenance, the embrace of such obstructive digressing
is situated, in turn, to allow a reengagement with the project that benefits
from the di=erently contoured and textured forms of attention that can then
be lavished on that project. Nor is attention a casually chosen word to describe
the renewed activity in question, because digressiveness must, as a valuable
obstruction, be distinguished from the distraction that has been the source
of so much critical concern, bordering on consternation, in recent years, particularly among literary critics predicting the end of print reading and related
interlocutors worrying more broadly over the means and modes of contemporary subjects’ engagements with “new” media.
Taking up key texts from these annals in “distraction studies”—no mere
distraction from digressiveness—is rather a generative digression from
digressiveness. Not only revealing that distraction may not be as corrosive
or pervasive as many commentators would claim and that certain forms of
distraction may even lead to insight, some of distraction studies’ dissenters
have also aimed, in a more far-reaching way, to redefine distraction: a redefinition, in fact, that draws distraction nearer to what I have identified here as
digressiveness—and that, as a consequence, helps to limn a further and fuller
definition of the renovated distraction or, more properly, digressiveness in
question. Drawing likewise from the small body of work on digressive practices in early modern and modern literary production, I conceptualize digressiveness as an art of strolling, a word whose capacity to echo both trolling and
scrolling begins to index the combinations of pleasure and ambition, waywardness and direction, curiosity and concentration that mark digressiveness as an ongoing practice—and to gesture toward its dialectical interplay
with an encyclopedic impulse.
The version of encyclopedism that I advocate is far from the one made
objectionable by its rigidly teleological orientation, its fascist insistence on
hierarchical ordering, and its morbid fantasy of completism. Looking to Diderot, his contributions to the Encyclopédie, and his most insightful critics to
pinpoint this alternative encyclopedism, I find that such encyclopedism may
instead be inseparable in its constitution—and in its appeal—from its stroll
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with digressiveness. And though it would be tempting to “link” the renvois of
the Encyclopédie to the hyperlink as a version thereof avant la lettre (as one contemporary critic has plausibly done), the broader Diderotian choreography
of digressiveness with encyclopedism has more explanatory purchase when
we turn to new media ecologies because of the ways in which that choreography’s combination of movement, modesty, and uncertainty provides a model
for how to think of related Web forays at the level of production and at the
level of reception: forays, like those of the Encyclopédie (itself now translated,
with important consequences, into a Web artifact), that are simultaneously
freeing and constraining—and, indeed, paradoxically defined by limited
freedom’s manufacture through constraint.
Turning to one such Web foray, Rich Juzwiak’s blog fourfour—celebrated
chiefly for its recaps of the television series America’s Next Top Model—I ask how
Juzwiak may help us, like Diderot, understand not only the tra<c between digressiveness and encyclopedism but also the tra<c between “newness” and
“oldness”: a tra<c that prompts Wendy Hui Kyong Chun to wonder (and me
to wonder with her) how the ephemeral endures and what forms of endurance that ephemerality may take. Asking as much means also and inevitably, in this context, to digress from both questions. That digressive swerve
leads me instead to take up remixing, a term deployed more or less literally by
Juzwiak, and to locate in the word’s multivalent, metaphorical meanings its
value as an umbrella concept through which to understand Juzwiak’s crossmedial and cross-generic work—and its specifically haptic portions. Indeed,
the commerce between the haptic and the optic in fourfour helps to coordinate its simultaneous courting of digressiveness and encyclopedism—and to
account for part of its ongoing interest as a “touching” object. At the same
time, the blog has a di=erent kind of ongoing interest and instruction to o=er
the scholar who would, like and with Juzwiak, find in dispersion a special
form of collection and in meandering an eccentric mechanism for staying an
intellective course.
To stay an intellective course begun earlier in this section of the introduction, I circle back now, with more information on array, to the question of
how and why I dwell with my objects yet also how to understand them as just
one part of a larger archive of contemporary culture marked pervasively by
embarrassment, laziness, cynicism, slowness, and digressiveness. Where the
last is concerned, I am touched by and learn a great deal from work in live performance like The Provenance of Beauty, poet Claudia Rankine’s collaboration
with The Foundry Theatre to produce a meandering bus ride through—and
to use a metatour guide to tell the meandering histories of—the streets of
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25

the South Bronx; as well as from work in television like Veronica Mars, which
both embraced and eschewed the logic of the procedural as it digressed away
from crimes-of-the-week toward baroquely serial, intricately multiseasonal
narratives. But in the end, Juzwiak’s fourfour tells me more about the particular, valuable interplay of digressiveness and encyclopedism, identified above,
than could for instance Provenance (whose painstakingly calibrated bus route
was not wholly digressive, though its catalogue of South Bronx tales approximated neighborhood encyclopedism) or Veronica (which “digressed” away
from the encyclopedism of its accretive, ongoing storytelling after a network
smack-down forced it to comply to more rigidly episodic norms). Likewise,
a range of limited cel animations—I think here especially of The Boondocks—
could help one to understand the uncomfortable marriage of what I am calling accommodational and critical cynicisms; yet that series, for all its wicked
satire and pliability to the expectations of cable network programming, does
not disclose a pedagogy of renovated Cynicism in the fashion that obtains in
Daria, rarer for this quality. As for slowness, a weird magic of slowed—yet
not very long—time is locatable in a series of YouTube videos in which pop
hits by the likes of Aaliyah, Beyoncé Knowles, and Justin Bieber are played
eight hundred times more slowly than in their original recordings; but the
trancelike upshots may tend more in the direction of the consciousnesse=ects associated with Buddhist pedagogy than toward the pedagogy of focused thinking to which I turn in moving to the side of Buddhist teachings.
Similarly, Occupy protesters performing as zombies have a great deal to teach
us about the critical and purposive uptake of laziness—and its stakes in the
face of the twenty-first-century capitalism that Rebecca Schneider, following
Chris Harman, has called its “zombie” mode42—if less to demonstrate about
the cognitive lazing that marks projects like The Dream Express. And while I
admit (cue the tune, “It Had to Be You”) that I have been on a collision course
with Tori Amos since I was thirteen, chapter 1’s argument about embarrassment’s role in subject-formation and relationality pushes through what is
merely personal or privatized in order to consider the collective forces and
social meanings of cringing, critical and otherwise. What’s more, I may—
may—have been able to exercise the volition to consider closely other “embarrassing” artists (though the dozens of interlocutors who have sought me
out to agree that Amos is distinctively embarrassing and to share their own
awkward relationships to her music since the appearance, in essay form, of
a version of chapter 1 testifies both to Amos’s value in a project like this one
and to what is relational, collective, and social about embarrassment), I’m
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ing on close inspection. They are cheesy, yes, and even subject to occasional
public mortification, but in ways that conform easily to the machinery of the
entertainment industry (which is perfectly happy to sell bathroom sex to the
tabloids, as Michael well knows and shruggingly accepts); whereas Amos’s
insistence on her activating of a politics and artistry more laudable than usually found in the pop arena is embarrassingly at odds with the relationship
to pop norms and successes that she nonetheless enjoys, one made uneasy
by her insistence on exceptionalism. In a further turn of the screw, her sometimes awareness of tensions like this very one, manifest in her marking of
them for her audiences, is thus idiosyncratically instructive.
To understand Amos relative to Michael, or Juzwiak in conversation with
Rankine, provides a way to ensure that the archive of Obstruction, while focused for the sake of detail and clarity, does not emerge as a hermetically
sealed one. In part for that reason, other subjects and objects make guest
appearances over the course of the five chapters to come (that is, get ready for
a parade capacious enough to include Janet Jackson, Split Britches, and Silk
Stalkings) and continue the work, begun in this introduction, of situating the
book’s most closely attended items alongside others. As that e=ort unfolds—
and as will already have been noticeable in a nascent way, here—we will encounter di=erential ways in which obstructions can and can’t, are and aren’t,
made to work. Recall my mention earlier of obstructions’ deployments hinging on “precise admixtures of privilege and precarity, fragility and force.”
When, how, and why a cultural scene does or does not yield these admixtures
is telling, and one of the many things it tells us is how complexly markers of
identity—like (but not only) class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality—are
set in motion in my case studies and the others in juxtaposition with which
they demand to be understood. In other words, meditating on privilege and
precarity requires attention to the markers of identity with which they are
often in close, though not saturating, correspondence: that is, to the (various) di=erences that (various) di=erences make, especially with regard to
the inequitable possibilities—or foreclosures of possibility—structured by
obstructions in general and by this book’s five obstructions in particular.
To start to think along these lines, again a matter for revisitation in the rest
of the book, I find helpful a turn to a longish, provocative moment in Hortense Spillers’s now-canonical essay on race and psychoanalysis, in which the
notion of unease plays a crucial, if only implicit and therefore underattended,
role—prompting me to reconsider my own uses of the word unease or its cognates in the course of this introduction and later in the book and, indeed, my
conceptualization of obstruction:
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27

There is much insistence, at least in our customary way of viewing things,
that the professional has little in common with the majority of the population. True enough as far as it goes, this truism is tinged with animus toward activity perceived to be esoteric, elitist, uncommon. But this simplified reading of the social map, sealing o= entire regions and territories of
experience from the reciprocal contagion proper to them, o=ers us a slim
opportunity to understand how the social fabric, like an intricate tweed,
is sewn across fibers and textures of meaning. There is the discourse in
which the professional, as de Certeau observes, dares and labors, the discourse of travail; but there is also the mark of the professional’s human
striving in terms of the everyday world of the citizen-person—coming to
grips with the pain of loss and loneliness; getting from point a to b; the
inexorable passing of time, change, and money; the agonies of friendship and love, and so on. . . . In that regard, the professional’s relationship to discourse is tiered, but it is also imbricated by forms of dialects
through which she lives her human and professional calling, as work is
rent through with the trace of the uncommon and the more common. On
this level, speaking is democratically impoverished for a range of subjects,
insofar as it is not su<cient to the greedy urge to revelation of motives
that the social both impedes and permits, nor is it adequate to the gaps
in kinetic and emotional continuity that the subject experiences as discomfort. Psychoanalytic literature might suggest the word desire here to
designate the slit through which consciousness falls according to the laws
of unpredictability. In that sense, the subject lives with desire as intrusive,
as the estranged, irrational, burdensome illfit that alights between where
she “is at” and would / wanna be. On this level of the everyday, the professional discourser, if we could say so, and the women commandeering the
butcher’s stand at the A&P have in common a mutually scandalous secret
about which they feel they must remain silent, but which speaking, more
emphatically, talking, about appeases, compensates, deflects, disguises,
and translates into usable, recognizable social energy.43
In what appears at first blush to be the key takeaway from this passage,
Spillers makes her provisional rapprochement with psychoanalysis through
the figure of desire and the process or project—if not exactly the cure—of
talking. Yet for those of us who, Bartleby-like, would prefer not to (fill in any
number of blanks) with psychoanalysis, we might fasten our attention not
on desire as “the slit through which consciousness falls” but rather on what
I nominate as unease and Spillers labels “discomfort,” the “gaps in kinetic
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and emotional continuity” that play just as foundational a role in the forming
and deforming of a split, or “slit,” subjectivity (again, comprehended as such
after poststructuralisms) as may the “estranged, irrational” vectors of desire. Neither as totalizing as anxiety nor even as locally determinate as worry
(about both of which I will say more in this book’s conclusion), unease may
designate the low, nagging hum within and conditioning of consciousness
as such: a hum intense enough to constitute noise in the circumstances—
that is, the encounters with obstruction—in which all kinds of subjects, from
the “professional discourser” to “the women commandeering the butcher’s
stand at the A&P,” confront the disjunctures “between where [they] ‘[are] at’
and would / wanna be.” Spillers’s generous, delicate e=ort to imagine what
such superficially yet meaningfully disparate subjects may “have in common,” beyond what is “perceived to be esoteric, elitist, uncommon” in the
work of the professional discourser—let us call her the scholar—suggests
a related imagining that I share, as an invitation, to whatever more and less
expected readers may come to Obstruction. This book lands squarely in “the
discourse of travail” at the same time that it takes up such mundanities as “the
inexorable passing of time” and “getting from point a to b.” I cannot know
precisely in advance, nor would I presume to predict, how the value that I
find in strategic embraces of obstruction, enabling the management of time’s
passage, the movement from a to b, and the like, will or will not emphasize
for each reader what is “uncommon” or what is “more common” about our
“everyday world[s]”—especially when at least some of those readers also approach the question of commonness or uncommonness from the perspective
of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called the undercommons.44 In
common, then, with their searching work, I ask you, whoever you are, to steal
what “translates into usable, recognizable . . . energy” for you, to put aside
what does not, and in these ways to test the possibilities and the limits of
“reciprocal contagion” that the reading experience may produce.
Coda: Homing (II)

With continued reference to the “everyday world” that I just invoked, and
by way of modeling a version of the value to be found in the anecdotal that
I a<rmed yet earlier in this introduction, I pause here to reflect briefly on a
complicated business that demanded my attention and engagement during
the years of Obstruction’s percolation: the e=ort to carry on and maintain the
integrity of my department’s work after the department’s annual operating
budget was slashed by university administrators, part of their multipronged
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29

response to financial precarities engendered by investment losses and endowment attrition amidst the Great Recession. Among other serious consequences of this budget cut, most painful was the departure of wonderful
colleagues who lost their jobs in the process of the department’s shrinkage.
And though, unsurprisingly, the ongoing employment of the department’s
tenure-track and tenured professors was much more secure compared to the
uncertainty—or, again, and more direly, the actual job loss—confronted by
lecturers and sta= members, the relativity of that security was nonetheless
clear: one distinct possibility that my colleagues and I faced was the shuttering of the entire department if we, as its stewards, could not develop a financial, pedagogical, and intellectual strategy for reimagining our work whose
coherence and sustainability (and a=ordability) satisfied our administrators.
Mournful a complexion as our response sometimes, inevitably took, we had
either to find what value we could in this obstruction or face the wholesale
erosion of our collective endeavor. Choosing the former way with as much
care for each other and dignity as we could muster, we initiated widespread
curricular reform, still in the process of implementation and signaled in part
by our name change from a Department of Theater, Film, and Dance to one
of Performing and Media Arts: a change meant to index the fuller integration
of the study and practice of live performance and of cinema and media that
the curricular renovations would entail.
I share this institutional narrative not for the basically personal reason
that I would have been less likely to gravitate to Obstruction’s topics and arguments had my professional lifeworld not been powerfully reoriented in the
manner toward which I gesture, but rather en route to making two claims,
one political and historical and the other methodological, about the book’s
artifactual status. First, even under less (and of course under more) extreme
circumstances than the ones that I describe, scholarly research and concomitant writing are always inseparable from teaching and administrative labor,
as well as from the larger institutional structures and imperatives that coordinate such research and writing (but do not, in my view, simply or strictly
contain these e=orts so long as academic freedom is a meaningful, activated
concept), ones that likewise participate in coordinating the broader “state
of the humanities” within whose sphere we operate and circulate our work.
Obstruction comes aslant at this nexus of issues and concerns, in part because
of my desire not redundantly to retread ground covered by other, lucid commentators on contemporary humanities work in the corporatized university
(including Louis Menand and Cary Nelson);45 and in part because of my hope
and warrant that those commentators’ e=orts may be valuably complemented
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by a book that o=ers a reflexively marked, phenomenal view—from avowedly
privileged, even if also shifting, ground—of what research and writing look
like as they are “transformed” by (which is just to say, made in) circumstances
in which obstruction is a constitutive condition of the work and of the life
shaping and shaped by that work.
Second, and as I have argued on other occasions and in di=erent ways (including in my advocacy for the curricular reform and corresponding departmental name change mentioned above), works on and in live performance
and media arts belong together, however small, still—though growing—the
number of researchers and writers whose scholarship moves across the disciplinary boundaries that distinguish performance studies and media studies
from one another. To be sure, those disciplinary distinctions have meaning
and use, but so, too, and at the same time may have an insistence on what media and performance have in common and thus what may be reckoned by an
intellective approach that draws on the methods that bind the two disciplines
as consonant versions of (once more, in Villarejo’s words) “cultural criticism”: commonalities that include the embodiment of expressive behavior
(or its proximation), the presentational or representational framing of this
behavior, and the likewise embodied e=ects of this framed behavior on the
audient subjects who engage it. As one such audient subject, I tra<c, over
the course of Obstruction’s chapters, with live and recorded popular music,
theatrical performance, cinema, television, and new media practices, constituting an archive whose specific uptake here provides one measure of the
more general ways in which, over the course of my career, I have moved from
earlier training in performance studies to more recent, e=ortful development
of deep competency in media studies. Indebted as one part of my thinking
about obstruction has been to Heidegger’s Being and Time, as elaborated in
this introduction’s first section, I reject that work’s condemnation of curiosity as merely “not-staying,” “never dwelling anywhere.”46 My own curiosity to
interpret objects di=erent from live performances—and thus my commitment to cultivate the skills necessary for such interpretation—is, by contrast,
precisely what enables me to keep dwelling, too, with live performance forms
in ways that are enriched, not compromised, by that dwelling’s location in a
many-roomed house.
That house may be conceived not only as many-roomed but also as multistoried—which is to say, I have, for Obstruction, been propelled toward a set of
objects that (in addition to the other qualities that I highlight in the previous
section of this introduction) are distinguishable as respectively “higher” and
“lower” than one another according to certain standards of cultural value.
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31

Whatever postmodernity accomplished toward chiseling away at such hierarchizing distinctions, and for all the ways in which much formerly stable categories of taste have been subject to long-standing contestation and fracture,
snobberies of various sorts have nonetheless persisted with a weird contemporary vengeance—and in equally weird, untimely, even afterlife-like guises.
The promise of nobrow may never have properly or fully obtained, yet it is in
part because so much cultural production has for so long flirted (cynically?)
with nobrowing promiscuities and volatilities that contemporary subjects respond with desire and need to the call to distinguish themselves from one
another along ever more obsessive, particularized, idiosyncratic, and minutiose axes of taste. Some of these subjects have responded with glee when I
have told them, for instance, that Obstruction takes up Old Joy and Daria—and
(quite opposed to those closet fans who come out to me) with awkwardness
or barely concealed disdain at the mention of Tori Amos, thereby exposing
the potential for disruption latent in even well-lubricated social dynamics:
an issue to be explored further in the ensuing chapter on “Embarrassment.”
At the same time, and from one compelling perspective on capital and
its global flows, what I am calling these “afterlife-like” persistences of taste
speciation may not be as “weird” as I also call them but rather make perfect,
and perfectly morbid, sense. Confronting what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,” a “‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects,
whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value,” subjects snobbishly cultivating more nonce systems of taste,
which endeavor to make equivalences and account for value along nonmonetary lines, find one weak, minor way to make the endurance of capitalist realism more bearable.47 In the face of this regime, as well as of the contemporary
e=lorescence of snobbisms that it incites, genuine (if complicatedly arrived
at) nobrow deserves a reinvigoration—resistant to the valuative norms both
of neoliberalism and of its taste-making “resistors”—in which my archive’s
activation participates. This tactic is just one element of the overall strategy,
sketched here and elaborated in the pages that follow, whereby Obstruction
transvalues obstructions as a way to conceive alternatives to the critical routines that capitalist realism tends to produce, encourage, and reward.

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Notes

Introduction

1 See, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the
Question of Value,” 73–93; Amy Villarejo’s reading of Spivak in Lesbian Rule:
Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, 31–36; and Christopher Nealon, “Value |
Theory | Crisis,” 101–6.
2 A sanguine approach to these issues—one that pulls back from the excesses
of crisis rhetoric—is to be found in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence:
Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. For an equally sanguine
survey of the field of “critical university studies” in which Fitzpatrick participates, see Je=rey J. Williams, “Deconstructing Academe: The Birth of Critical
University Studies.”
3 See, for instance, Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, eds., Post-Work: The
Wages of Cybernation; and Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism,
Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries.
4 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.
5 Tammy Wynette, “Stand by Your Man.”
6 Intersecting queer studies and disability studies, Jasbir Puar confronts prevailing assumptions about capacity and debility in her recent essay, “The Cost of
Getting Better.” With acknowledgment of that work’s insights, I mobilize the
word capacities rather in a sense nearer to Judith Butler’s when she celebrates
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing for bringing “into theoretical regions
precisely that ethically capacious sensibility which a<rms the necessity of the
incongruous, and where the trajectory of desire requires a detour from the
logic of either / or in order to thrive and—in whatever way—become known”
(119). See Puar, “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better. Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints”; and Butler, “Capacity.” This note anticipates as well my working with
and to the side of Agamben’s deployment of capacity, which features in a later
section of this introduction.
7 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 5.

8 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95.
9 Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry, 92, 94.
10 See, for instance, Berlant, Cruel Optimism, and Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A
Public Feeling.
11 Matthew E. May, In Pursuit of Elegance, 53.
12 The Five Obstructions.
13 In this aspect of my interpretation, I depart from the otherwise fine reading of
Claire Perkins, who asserts that “it is the documentary-style sections depicting
the two filmmakers in conversation that are most important, not the closed
‘interpretations’ of the remakes themselves” (155). See Perkins, “In Treatment:
The Five Obstructions.”
14 “In Treatment: The Five Obstructions,”157.
15 The Five Obstructions. In writing, as I do here, of pathos and its (non) feeler, I
look ahead to chapter 1’s fuller discussion of emotion and subjectivity.
16 oed Online, entry for “ob-.”
17 oed Online, entry for “structure.”
18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 68–71.
19 For a fuller unpacking of some of these issues (if one that is slightly imprecise
in its characterization of von Trier’s “postmodernism”), see Benjamin Ogden,
“How Lars von Trier Sees the World.”
20 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
21 José López and Garry Potter, eds., After Postmodernism.
22 Terry Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” 16.
23 Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, “Preface,” xiii. Italics in the
original.
24 Smith, “Introduction,” 16–17.
25 Smith, “Introduction,” 9.
26 Natalie Melas, “Comparative Noncontemporaneities,” 61, 59.
27 Paul Rabinow, Marking Time, 2, 29. Italics in the original.
28 See, for instance, Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, eds., The Mourning After; and John
Rajchman, “The Contemporary: A New Idea?”
29 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” 46, 41.
30 Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” 41, 42.
31 Osip Mandelstam, “The Age.”
32 Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” 43.
33 Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” 42, 39.
34 I thank my dear friend and colleague Masha Raskolnikov for sitting with me
and reading Mandelstam’s poem in Russian, alongside its English translation,
with painstaking care in order to help me formulate the ideas about the poem
expressed here and above.
35 Mandelstam, “The Age.”
36 Melas, “Comparative Noncontemporaneities,” 72.
37 Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory.
38 Villarejo, Lesbian Rule, 9.

206

NOteS tO INtrOduCtION

39 oed Online, entry for “obstruction.”
40 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, “Divinity,” 217–18.
41 See, for instance, Diana Fuss, ed., Inside / Out; and, in a more recent inside / out
turn, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
42 Rebecca Schneider, “It Seems As If . . . I Am Dead.” See also Chris Harman,
Zombie Capitalism.
43 Hortense J. Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s
Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” 399–400.
44 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons.
45 See, for instance, Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas; and Cary Nelson, No
University Is an Island.
46 Heidegger, Being and Time, 166.
47 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 4.
Chapter 1. Embarrassment

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Mark Greif, “Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop,” 23.
Greif, “Radiohead,” 24.
Russell Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse.
Greif, “Radiohead,” 28, 36.
Greif, “Radiohead,” 36, 38.
Nye, Unembarrassed Muse, 421.
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything, 3.
Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets, 18. See, for example, Lauren Berlant’s The Queen
of America Goes to Washington City, published contemporaneously with Strange
Gourmets, or essays in the more recent Fandom, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel
Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. In their introduction to Fandom, the editors
take stock of a return to and reimagining of Adornian concerns in (by their
count) a third generation of fandom studies when they note that “contemporary research on fans (like its predecessors) acknowledges that fans’ readings,
tastes, and practices are tied to wider social structures, yet extends the conceptual focus beyond questions of hegemony and class to the overarching social,
cultural, and economic transformations of our time, including the dialectic
between the global and the local . . . and the rise of spectacle and performance
in fan consumption” (8).
9 Litvak, Strange Gourmets, 3, 18. Litvak notes that egalitarian class politics animating critiques of sophistication often provide an alibi for underexamined
homophobia directed at the purportedly elitist (queer) critic; one impoverishing result is the typical failure to recognize that “embarrassment provoked by
sophistication has as much to do with sex as with class” (3).
10 Not every critic is equally susceptible to this double bind. As Litvak shrewdly
points out, in a passage that resonates with the work of Je=rey Sconce,
“many members of the academy are nonelite others. Or at least, were” (115),
in contradistinction to whom we might consider the kind of critic who, in

NOteS tO CHAPter 1

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