“Why don’t you develop a narrative arc in this essay?”

I am still thinking about this question, and my relation to linearity, MFAs, schools of thought, aesthetics, the gamut.

When first posed to me, the question felt aesthetic—- and one might say the answer begins there, in that hunger for beauty that relieves us of disorder, messiness, and discomfort. Nothing assuages like the elegance of clean lines; the affect is classical, sculptural, secure in its relation to time. Even darkness is groomed, streamlined, and poured into little black dresses that provide a form, a template, for how we adjudicate the value of complexity.

My initial response to the question riffed on constellations, or clusters of details that can be combined to find a figure. Unlike the endpoint or finale, the figure cannot lay a claim to being the only thing in the constellation. The figure is simply the seen thing, the discernible, limited by the gaze of time, place, subjectivity, culture, etc.

But a generalization glosses the failure to answer.

*

Vienna, 1904. Dots coalesce as a series of silences that mark the creative work. Composer Arnold Schoenberg is annoyed by how classical music resolves itself predictably, and how form depends on that resolution. Such romanticism ignores the world as Schoenberg saw. He wanted to depict a world in which hope was continually dashed and destroyed by irresolution. Closure, for him, was an illusion. 

What became the 'Vienna School of Music' was credited with the swerve towards atonalism— and the destruction of respectable romanticism. But no one studying in Vienna planned this.

One student of Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, wound up changing musical structure by refining it in accordance with experimental ideas. Webern's first composition was titled Five Pieces. In 1913, Webern presented this piece, his Op. 1, to Alban Berg with the following dedication: "Non multa sed multum, how I wish that could apply to what I offer you here." The Latin phrase he quoted means "little in quantity, much in quality." 

Brevity, the use of silence, and the stretching out of intervals characterized Webern's  aesthetic. Notably, his longest composition, Cantate (Opus 31), lasts only eleven minutes. Decades later, the French theorist Roland Barthes read a connection between Webern's compositions and Cy Twombly's paintings. At the time, Barthes was reading John Cage's For the Birds: In Conversation with David Charles. In case this constellation isn't visible to you, I will add that Theodor Adorno's music teacher, Alban Berg, was also Schoenberg's student. Adorno went on to co-found the Frankfurt School of critical theory who studied the world based on the constellations between events. 

*

Washington, DC, 2000’s. Returning briefly to Schoenberg's view that closure was illusory, which is to say, a facet of expectations created by form, something akin to a little machine that works on formulas and provides the desired resolution, I think the illusory is often packaged and sold to us in the much more solid, hardened delusions of eschatology. Frank Fukuyama's The End of History, for example, absolved many thinkers of critical thought during the Clinton years. The difference between an illusion and a delusion surfaces in the relationship we establish between what is and what 'has come to pass'. At its best, Critical Theory interrogates the illusions that have been accepted en masse, and become widespread delusions. Fake news speeds up the process and, in so doing, scatters the potential for critical analysis.

Theory that soothsays from the premise of finitude is always implicated in the metaphysics of the infinite. But the implication is sustained by concretizing the illusory.

Infinity and nothingness are not the termination points defining a line. Infinity and nothingness are infinitely threaded through one another so that every infinitesimal bit of one always already contains the other. The possibilities for justice-to-come reside in every morsel of finitude.

—- Karen Barad

The little black dress is easy on the mind. Elegance asks nothing whatsoever of the beautiful, horrible darkness. One must get messy. Unequivocally, one must fuck around to find out. Stigmatizing disorder is not unrelated to the punishment of transient persons or nomadic lifestyles. The little black dress is nothing if not the queen of hard borders.