death drive

On Monday I went to Macondo Books, this terrific used bookstore I used to go to all of the time as a teenager. I bought three books:

Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte
(nice images - I figure one day I will deal in images again)

The Volcano Lover, by Susan Sontag
(hot eruptions? historical romance?? susan sontag??? need I imagine more?)

13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs, by William T. Vollmann
(interesting sounding author mentioned by Donald at 1st rehab, so I had my eyes out. Finding one with a first chapter entitled The Ghost of Magnetism, and a last chapter called The Grave of Lost Stories, I felt very lucky)

* * *

I started M1 in May of 2007. I was happy to be in Montreal, feeling weightless after eight months of Toronto winter and soul-killing office work. In love and seeing everything with bright eyes, I had no idea what to do for my thesis – the goal was to escape. (Yes, it’s funny that I find myself now desperately trying to escape my escape. Is this all we do, run in circles?) In class, forced to say something, anything, to my peers and professor, I improvised vague interest in doing a national archive for Vietnam, the country of my origin. It feels strange to write that – the country of my origin. But it also feels too distant to say, Vietnam, the country of my parents’ origin. One feels like a lie, or at least a fiction; and the other, a cold hard fact with no friction.

Either way, it didn’t fit. I suppose I thought that by delving into the past of this faraway country, this idea across the world, I’d kill two birds with one stone. What was it that I wanted to probe? The meaning and fallibility of origins? The strengths and weaknesses of cultural identity? What is an archive anyway, how does it work? What does it mean, to archive? What roles do memory and objects (and the memory held in objects) have in the construction of cultural history? In the construction of the self, of personal identity? How does this culture pass itself on, procreate, recreate itself generation to generation? How did this even relate to architecture? I had no clue. I won’t go into the superficial reasons why this plan fell apart. I'll just say that in the end, I was not reborn. There was no deeper connection to my amputated cultural past. (I had imagined roots surpassing myself, growing towards Vietnamese soil!) I did not finally feel whole. My parents did not love me more. And I still didn’t have a thesis, or even a passable proposition for one.

Along the way I did learn a bit (not enough) about Vietnam. It seems like a beautiful country with a completely fucked up history. But that’s sort of like describing someone as “complex,” as if that’s worth noting – aren’t we all complicated messy people with dirt in our pasts? The origins of most nations were bloody and cruel, their survival filled with death, lies, and violence. As far as recent history goes though, and of course this means history that America has had its hand in, it is a particularly interesting and devastating story. A story that I’m sure would touch anyone who knew of it, not only the children of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants.

In researching in my typical free-form, grab anything, sort of way, I came across Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. I liked the title and impressiveness of its author enough to buy the book. Archive. Fever. It was much too difficult for me to understand – I knew that. But I found its difficulty seductive and I still believe that, one day, I might be ready to tread past the Preamble.

An excerpt:
“It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivation implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make it into a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it cannot necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight that imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise.” (Derrida, Archive Fever, p29)

To be continued.