formal longing and the singular plot

Music: Spiritualized: The Complete Works, Volume One (1993)

It is wedding season, which means I've been thinking about Louis Althusser. I DJ weddings. I officiate nuptials. I attend that private publicity of pact-making. Last night, fortunately, I was a guest at a wedding between two lovely people whom I adore; it was the first wedding I've been to in two years in which I wasn't working. I had a great time.

In the thick of fun, however, the critical mind never shuts-off. As a number of scholars will tell you, it's difficult for many of us to avoid thinking critically about highly affective, symbolic moments. And so, as my friends and I tried to push back the tears the beautiful bride's quivering voice inspired, I found myself also thinking: nothing says interpellation like "I do," and strangely in a funerary tone. Caused to ponder a future, we face death and, over that unpleasant certainty, we make promises to others on our steady march. All speech pacts are made in relation to death.

So mote it be.

Overhearing such promises one can develop a lump in the throat and be tempted to sob; I thought about my tearing eyes and how my happiness for my friends was also in some sense un-self-reflectively mournful. This emotional tone is not simply the cultural bromide of two folks who now don't have to "die alone" (or, well, at least one of them won't have to); it has something to do with the completion of form, the packaging of desire into convention. It is curiously a return to the tonic. From a very early age the singular story of life provides little deviance from this plot-line: the couple unto death.

The language of life plots---and I mean to evoke both meanings here---is taken from Lauren Berlant's work on public feelings and intimacies. In a special issue of Critical Inquiry on "intimacy," Berlant argues that intimacy on the way to convention is really a kind of "wild thing" spanked into behaving through ideology:

Contradictory desires mark the intimacy of daily life: people want to be both overwhelmed and omnipotent, caring and aggressive, known and incognito. These polar energies get played out in the intimate zones of everyday life and can be recognized in psychoanalysis, yet mainly they are seen not as intimacy but as a danger to it. Likewise, desires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws and stable spaces of culture in which to clarify and to cultivate them. What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations, or fantasies that have no canon?

I think they get a Sunday. And a blog. They get the day after Christmas, or the day right after you've finished writing your dissertation. They get to occupy "the critique."

The couple unto death is a life plot all of us have, as a song of life, a certain melody that has made itself a raging earwig. I say to my shrink all that huffing and acid I did as a teen purged the plot from my innermost, but she often reminds me this is not true (especially when I have realized I have fallen in love, even if its with more than one person). It's not simply that there are alternatives, some better, some worse; rather, the couple unto death is part of who we are, as subjects. We cannot help ourselves; we must enjoy the plot because its the only one we got; there is nothing else. There is nothing behind the plot that it obscures. That is, there is no-thing. And no-thing---Das Ding?---is awe-ful. The pact is an admission of this no-thing, but the way we, as a culture, have attempted to create an affective net so that we can go live, in person.

And everyone is thinking it, perhaps not consciously so, but where there are tears, there are love and death. The couple unto death is neither good nor bad; I'm not critiquing the plot or the conventional way it gets elaborated (marriage). I'm just saying the formal declaration of the couple is a mournful scriptedness.

For example: the couple heralds the demise of the group (couples always threaten solidarity); Larry Rickels teaches us that you cannot understand the failure of social movements without recourse to a coupling. I would also insist that with any couple, there is always an invisible third person, too---but I won't go into the third today---the Other One, the body over which the pact is made, the altar.

The trouble with the couple unto death is that I've seen the story unravel because there was no affect driving the narrative. The narrative was sort of driving itself. That wasn't the case with last night's couple; you could feel it thick in the room. And like a virus, their true love started to infect the singularities.

Last night, for the second time, I spoke with a beautiful woman from Stockholm, a woman with the kind of idealism and personal politics that makes me want to cook her dinner (not possible, however, since she lives in Sweden). At times she had glassy eyes, when I had the courage to look into them. It is easy to fall into a kind of love at a wedding.

In short, the couple unto death is an inescapable plot because there is nothing else.