The Acid-Washed Novel

A metaphysics of grit

Don DeLillo's Point Omega (2010) opens with an anonymous man standing transfixed in front of Douglas Gordon's video work 24 Hour Psycho. The installation projects a silent version Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, slowed down so that its runtime is exactly twenty-four hours. What seems to enrapture the nameless man is the distortion that Gordon has introduced into Hitchcock's film: "He approached the screen and stood about a foot away, seeing snatches and staticky fragments, flurries of trembling light."1 Through these snatches of static, the film becomes almost tactile, inviting the man to approach and, if not touch, at least absorb. The more he stares, the more the man becomes convinced that the film's distorted quality, its being stretched out to the point of breaking down, brings him closer to some primal source of authenticity: "For this film, in this cold dark space, it was completely necessary, black-and-white, one more neutralizing element, a way in which the action becomes something near to elemental life, a thing receding into its drugged parts."2 For the nameless man, the damage 24 Hour Psycho inflicts on Hitchcock's film ends up paradoxically de-mediating it, transforming it from a mediated spectacle into a live presence. Stripped of sound and narrative cohesion—and already having the benefit of being stripped of color—the film apparently leaves us, finally, with pure, glitchy, staticky things "receding into [their] drugged parts." The whole scene is animated by the conviction that, as the narrator in another DeLillo novel puts it, "the scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action."3 Which is to say, in the words of one character in Wim Wenders's The State of Things, "life is in color, but black and white is more realistic."4 In Point Omega, the film's degraded black and white seems to clear away everything inessential and confront us with what the novel considers to be the most basic metaphysical fact: the slow entropic drift of particles, the long process of cosmic decay.

Isn't there something familiar about all of this? For a certain strain of literary and artistic production, isn't the gritty thing — the dirty or damaged thing, the thing that's falling apart — the paradigm case of the real thing? It's not a coincidence that Bill Brown's field-defining essay on "Thing Theory" begins with the scene from A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale (2001) where a disaffected graduate student is lured away from a seminar on deconstruction by a "real, very dirty window, shutting out the sun. A thing."5 It's the dirt, like the "staticky fragments" in Gordon's video work, that forces the student to confront the window as a solid thing, to see it rather than see through it. Thanks to dirt and damage, what at first seems like a case of failed mediation — a window obscuring the sun; a film collapsing in on itself — becomes an occasion for direct contact with something deeply real. Indeed, for what we could call the metaphysics of grit that underpins these works, either the idea of mediation is beside the point, or it is the enemy. This anti-mediation refrain echoes in Richard Serra's deliberately rusted sculptures, which the artist describes as an effort to restore authentic, direct "tactility" in our fallen age of "virtual reality."6 Fellow believer David Shields makes much the same point when he writes that "we're clinging to anything that seems 'real' or organic or authentic. We want rougher sounds, rougher images, raw footage, uncensored by high technology and the powers that be."7 To meet this demand, Shields proposes that artists use "rough" and "raw" textures to strip away all the barriers between us and things, allowing us finally to lose ourselves in them — a statement that suggests that perhaps Shields's model for an authentic artwork isn't 24 Hour Psycho so much as "24/7 lo-fi study beats," a genre of background music that submerges the listener in a warm bath of crackly faux vinyl noise.8 For Shields and his fellow believers in the metaphysics of grit, to distress an artwork, to subject it deliberately to damage and attrition, is to make the artwork purer and more immediate.

It is telling that Shields, despite his sweeping claims on behalf of all forms of contemporary art, focuses his discussion of what he calls "reality hunger" particularly on literary form. For the formula Shields hands down — distress your work to make it more real — gets at a formal principle that has been gaining traction in recent novels. This essay is an effort to come to terms with the rise of a particular kind of novel: the novel that, like Serra's sculptures and DeLillo's version of Gordon's film, damages itself, that presents itself to the reader as already worn out (which is to say, of course, already worn in). It makes the case that recent novels' fixation on material distress, on objects like DeLillo's/Gordon's torn and distended film, stems from something more than a journalistic fidelity to observing the quirks of late-capitalist material culture. Rather, we're probably closer to the mark if we read the extensive descriptions of carefully distressed objects in these novels as something like artistic models or studies; miniature, preparatory versions of the novels themselves. To put it plainly: over the past few years, we can see the emergence of a genre of novel that views and treats itself as a distressed object. Intentionally inflicted damage, like the kind Gordon subjected his film to and the kind Serra brings to bear on his sculptures, has become an organizing form for the novel.

The first principle of this form is that damage is dialogic: it is an index of the artwork's contact with the "real world" outside, or else where it touches something "even deeper" like DeLillo's "elemental life." It is no surprise, then, that the distressed novel deploys intentional damage as a form of relationship management. Specifically, self-inflicted damage serves not only to give a particular shape and texture to these novels' relationships with their readers, but also to register their simultaneous inability and profound desire to escape determination by their conditions of production. Which is to say, following the metaphysicians of grit, that distress offers these novels a distinct set of techniques for drawing little pieces of the real into their fictive space. As we will see, these techniques, like the material techniques of distress they draw on, carry with them a fraught politics, which distressed novels at turns endorse and attempt to transcend. This essay focuses on two such novels, Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate (2018; originally published in German in 2014) and Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2014), whose shared autofictional bent inflects their distressed form in crucial ways.

Touching distress

A story, then, about a new trick the novel has learned from material culture. But is it really a new trick? On one level, not exactly. Susan Stewart has argued persuasively that the crush of "literary imitation[s] of folklore forms" that coincided with the historical rise of the novel in the early eighteenth century is best understood as a profusion of "distressed genres," or "imitation antiques," "objects both in and out of time."9 Especially as the eighteenth century progressed and brought with it the trappings of industrial modernity, faux-antique literary artifacts like fairy tales and ballads attempted to offer "compensation in the form of the encapsulated sense of 'community.'"10 The commons are being enclosed, but at least you can still access them affectively in the mannered-rustic verses of the ballad. A kind of mourning for a lost real, or what Stewart calls "a nostalgia for context, for . . . the collective experiences of preindustrial life," in this way marks these artificially aged literary objects.11 And isn't this mourning for the lost real also behind literary modernism's obsession with material damage, from Joyce's beach flotsam and jetsam to Eliot's shored-up fragments to Rilke's crumbling walls — to say nothing of the equally canonical postmodernist fixation on entropy and decay?12 Aren't these infamously dilapidated literary fetish objects equal parts mourning regalia and metaphysical portal, as Martin Heidegger suggests in his reading of "how elemental a way the world, being-in-the-world . . . leaps toward us from the things" in Rilke's description of a row of ruined houses?13

Certainly. And yet this essay worries that the conventional emphasis on mourning risks flattening out both the complexity of distress as a form in general and the strange richness of its apparent metaphysical charge in particular. Indeed, in what I want to theorize as the contemporary distressed novel, mourning and nostalgia are not the dominant notes. Rather, the accent is consistently on contact, on damage as an index of objects, bodies, consciousnesses directly touching — seeming to touch directly, that is — in the here and now. To better grasp this other affordance, distress's ability to convey an impression of immediate contact, we need to take a detour through the history of distress as a material-cultural phenomenon. For if Stewart's distressed genres modeled themselves after the imitation ruins and "new antiques" of the eighteenth century, it could be said that the contemporary distressed novel takes as its models two more contemporary kinds of distressed object: the deliberately mangled avant-garde artwork (think Serra) and the mass-produced, pre-worn-in commodity (think pre-ripped jeans).

The distressed artwork, at its origins at least, is a particular species of forged artwork. Arguably at ground zero for distress in western art history is Michelangelo's infamous marble sleeping cupid, which either the artist or an associate buried in the ground to give it an aged appearance and then sold as a genuine classical antique.14 This is the basic gesture of distress: intentionally inflicted damage endows the object with some surplus — in this case, the gravitas of the ancient, a shot of pure concentrated History. (As we will see, it is particularly telling that already in this fifteenth-century case, this surplus is precisely the source of the sleeping cupid's value on the market.) We can follow this gesture through art history, hitting high points with the imitation ruins conceived by Romantic theorists of the picturesque like William Gilpin and brought into being by architects like Augustus Pugin, as well as what Thorstein Veblen acidly termed the Arts and Crafts movement's "exaltation [and, we might add, deliberate production] of the defective."15 And yet it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that distress became a genuinely widespread form not just in art, but throughout material culture writ large. By the late 1950s, distress had become the organizing principle behind artworks like Alberto Burri's torn-burlap collages and the sculptures that the young Carl Andre "subjected . . . to drilling, burning, sanding, and other abuses until they emerged as weathered as driftwood."16 On top of this, distress, especially the careful "antiquing" of furniture, also played a central role in the do-it-yourself culture that took hold of the growing American middle class in the postwar years — a culture whose gender politics, with its curiously tight identification of the feminized sphere of social reproduction with acts of violent disfiguration, would come under investigation in pieces like Yoko Ono's "Wearing-Out Machine" and Mike Kelley's Antiqued (Prematurely Aged).17 By midcentury, artists and non-artists alike were routinely subjecting materials to every sort of abrasion, attrition, and scarification.

One meaning that distress came to take on over the course of this development — and maybe a paradoxical one — is that of spontaneity, of pure, uncut contingency. As Rosalind E. Krauss has argued, "the copy served as the ground for the development of an increasingly organized and codified sign or seme of spontaneity — one that Gilpin had called roughness."18 If the artistic avant-garde was spurred on by the urge to restore a sense of contingency, of materials breaking out of their conventional premeditated arrangements, to an otherwise sterile and academic artworld, the calculated and endlessly iterable gesture of damage presented itself as an especially swift route out of the conventional and into the spontaneous. A fragmented sculpture, a torn picture surface: surely these mark both the intrusion of the defiles of the external world into the artwork and what we could call the extrusion of the materials themselves; the materials revealing something of their true essence, shorn of all pictorial distractions.19 Of course, as Krauss wryly points out, the effort to harness contingency through these controlled marks of damage ends up being itself another repeatable stock procedure. Distress, in the last instance, is proof that in even the most advanced art, "the sign of spontaneity had to be prepared for with the utmost calculation."20

This dialectic of spontaneity and premeditation would become even more pronounced around midcentury, as two developments happened in quick succession. First, abstract expressionism proposed a new model of the artwork as a repository of gestures. This is more or less what Harold Rosenberg was driving at when he famously called Jackson Pollock's canvas "an arena in which to act": in Pollock's hands, the picture plane ceased to be a world apart and became instead a record of the artist's gestures, the raw impact of his off-the-cuff movements.21 But no sooner did this shift happen than, in a second development, artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg turned to mass production techniques, especially silkscreening — seemingly bypassing human gesture altogether. And yet it is all but conventional in art-history scholarship to read the ghostly persistence of gesture in Warhol's silkscreen prints from the early 1960s, particularly in what Thomas Crow calls the "characteristic imperfections and distortions of the process."22 With Warhol's careful deployment of the flaws of the silkscreening process, which Crow nicely terms his "orchestration of the void," all "the fractures and markings generated from the silk-screen process . . . become[] almost pure expressionist investment," which is to say pure gesture, a pure record of presence (even as the content of many of these works is notably death-heavy; scenes of suicides and car crashes abound).23 Distress, to the extent that it was deliberate, functions here as a kind of ghost in the machine — for Warhol's commentators, even the most disenchanted, endlessly repeatable art is spiritualized precisely through its flaws. Warhol would later viciously parody this identification of damage with bodily presence in his 1978 Oxidation paintings, where sprays and splotches of urine oxidize otherwise uniform surfaces covered in metallic paint, producing what Benjamin H.D. Buchloh calls an "expressively gestural" effect; a Pollock-effect.24 Pissing on wet paint: this is perhaps the purest case of distress as frozen gesture, as pure indexical mark signaling nothing more than, as Krauss puts it elsewhere, "I am here."25

In the second half of the twentieth century, this investment in damage as the mark of the presence of another warm body became one of those fast-multiplying points of overlap between avant-garde and kitsch. Perhaps due to the glut of products like pre-ripped jeans and "shabby chic" home decor especially over the past three decades, the majority of scholarship and criticism on distress has considered it under the rubric of "the aesthetics of consumerism."26 Daniel Harris describes distress as the act of "actively disfigur[ing]" mass-produced objects in order to "eradicate the stigma of their newness," which seems at least half right if we limit our subject to the world of consumer goods.27 Still, it might be fairer to say that what distress really wants to eradicate is these objects' impersonality, their status as abstract objects rather than concrete, meaningful things. Amid the shiny, impermeable surfaces of the Bauhaus-inflected, Apple-dominated world of high-tech commodities, distress promises a closer, more sensuous relationship between the consumer and the product being consumed.28 Sianne Ngai's argument that "the cute speaks to a desire to recover what Marx calls the 'coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects'" is doubly and quite literally true of distress.29 The distressed commodity, if it wants anything at all, wants to pull us into a relation of intimacy with its literally coarse sensuousness. It wants us to see and feel it not as an impersonal value that can be moved around in a system of perfect equivalences, but as a singular, unrepeatable thing marked by a unique (if fabricated) history. The distressed commodity, in other words, also plays out Krauss's dialectic of singularity and iterability, where the marks of spontaneity and originality are formalized precisely as marks of damage. Or in still other words, to use the industry terms for pre-worn musical instruments, distress is a set of repeatable processes for turning everyday objects into "relics" invested with "mojo."30

That is, to put things more brutally, we can see distress as an effort on the part of capitalist production to restore the very "warmth" that Walter Benjamin long ago worried was "ebbing from things" as a result of the ravages of capital.31 Distress effects this warming-over by turning otherwise impersonal objects into something like the old toys Benjamin celebrated: rough, imperfect things that invite us to imagine the other hands that must have touched them over the course of their production and use.32 While Stewart emphasizes distress's connection to "the individual life . . . the self's capacity to generate worthiness," the Benjaminian motif of other hands, hands belonging to any number of people, is crucial to the effects distress achieves.33 Rather than merely posing as a recovered transitional object that "promises, and yet does not keep the promise of, reunion" for an individual subject, the distressed object is ostentatiously social — more like a gift or an heirloom, objects that advertise and stand in for the web of social relations they're caught up in, than a commodity.34 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's account of distressed textures at the opening of Touching Feeling gets at this social quality:

I haven't perceived a texture until I've instantaneously hypothesized whether the object I'm perceiving was sedimented, extruded, laminated, granulated, polished, distressed, felted, or fluffed up. Similarly, to perceive texture is to know or hypothesize whether a thing will be easy or hard, safe or dangerous to grasp, to stack, to fold, to shred, to climb on, to stretch, to slide, to soak. Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.35

The textured object, of which the distressed object is a privileged example, serves here as a repository of gestures that connect bodies to other bodies. As Sedgwick's prose suggests, it's something like a materialization of Serra's Verb List (1967-68), or even better, Lawrence Weiner's list of "fifty isolated verbs," an accretion of participles that condense and make present again a whole series of past actions — except here the distressed object seems especially to stress the collective quality of these actions.36 Distress, through the magic of texture, apparently preserves others' gestures and makes them "immediately" available to Sedgwick's hyper-attuned "I."37

Clearly in distress we are dealing with a form with a range of affordances. In the most cynical reading, distress is a technique for folding the allure of the anticommodity — the thing charged with human warmth, the thing that reveals rather than occludes the social relations behind it — back into the commodity form. (And, as Warhol's urine paintings ask, will any source of bodily warmth do?) Indeed, if "the history of modernity," as Brown has argued, "is the history of proscribing objects from attaining the status of things," the proliferation of mass-produced distressed objects in recent decades indexes a ripple or mutation in this history.38 This is so because capitalism, it seems, is now in the business of producing vital, apparently defetishized things — things crackling with the energy of the real that DeLillo's nameless man reads into Gordon's distressed film — not just abstract objects that try to hide the social relations they represent. Part of what's at stake with distress is nothing less than the status of the thing under late capitalism. But more generally and more neutrally, it may be closer to the mark to say that distress has come to serve as a technique for turning objects into repositories of frozen gestures. It is a set of repeatable procedures through which an object both comes to be marked by the defiles of the world outside and, through these marks, absorbs the contingencies of the external world and passes them off as intrinsic features of its own form. Distress's form, as we see in Sedgwick, is participial: the object isn't "something that the world damaged"; it is a distressed object. In a shift that has a homological resemblance to but not a total overlap with both the commodity fetish and the modernist ontology of the autonomous artwork, the gestures that damaged the object are absorbed and become features of the object itself.39 Which is to say: the distressed object aspires to an intrinsic sociality.

Intrinsic sociality: we are now firmly back in the domain of the novel in general, and the recent autofictional novel in particular. After all, what contemporary literary form aspires more nakedly to the status of what Stewart calls a "speaking object" than the novel that passes itself off as a spontaneous emanation directly from a narrator's consciousness — a consciousness we are encouraged to identify with, but nonetheless know we must separate from, that of the actual author?40 A speaking book that doesn't quite work as a memoir, because what we think of as "the facts" have undergone torsion over the course of their translation into novelistic form; but that also doesn't quite work as a novel, because there is a rip or leak in its fictive universe from which the author's "real life outside" seems to seep in. It shouldn't seem too perverse, then, to say that the autofictional novel, of all forms, is in this way our most striking contemporary example of a "distressed genre."41 But while Stewart's eighteenth-century distressed speaking objects aspired to revive the warm feelings of an idealized premodern collectivity, the autofictional novels I will discuss imagine themselves as records of their writers' gestures, records that can both preserve and revivify these gestures; that can serve as a medium through which the reader and writer can finally touch directly. (That this touching in fact happens not directly, but through a surrogate or proxy figure, a figure marked by a fake history, is only another symmetry between autofiction and distress — and an issue, as we'll later see, that both novels try to address critically, to differing degrees of success.42) These novels turn precisely to forms of intentional, self-inflicted damage in order to achieve these pseudo-collective, gestural effects of immediacy. This damage takes place in a few registers. First, I turn to the images of material distress that abound in Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate and Ben Lerner's 10:04, taking them, as I've indicated above, as artistic studies for the novels' own form — studies in the apparent ability of even the most routinized forms of damage to condense sociability into their very materiality. Both Geissler and Lerner are notably skeptical of distress's immediacy-effects, especially when they're cynically deployed in the world of mass-produced commodities. And yet on a formal level, through the ways they encode the forms of damage and attrition that went into their own writing, both novels end up drawing their creative energy precisely from distress. It may be true that at its worst, distress for both writers is a process for formalizing and making-generic the damage that comprises an irreducibly singular life. But as we will see, ultimately it is exactly this genericizing quality that gives Seasonal Associate and 10:04 a powerful resource for addressing, even implicating, their readers.

Greasy structures

Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate follows, in second person, a writer-translator who takes a temp job at an Amazon fulfillment center in order to pay off some debt. The motion of the book is at once one of mind-numbing repetition — lifting product after product; enduring shift after shift — and one of descent into what Brown might call the late-capitalist "material unconscious."43 From the moment the protagonist enters the fulfillment center, we see that this disavowed object world is quite literally marked with the traces of damaged life, to use a phrase from a book of Adorno's that makes a cameo appearance in Seasonal Associate.44 Deposited in a waiting area, the protagonist encounters "people waiting on gray chairs, sitting like at a doctor's office, a doctor for those left over, a doctor for the distressed who don't make any great effort to lean away from the worn, greasy wall; they're all going to die anyway."45 The "distressed," those interviewing for temporary positions at Amazon, are chiefly registered indexically through the gunk their heads leave behind on the wall. Indeed, the first-person narrator (a distinct character from the protagonist) fixes the protagonist's attention not on their bodies, but on the damage they leave behind: "You see . . . the gray patina on the wall above the chairs where the heads and shoulders of many waiting patients have rested and made their mark"46 The whole scene, we might say, is a literary version of Viktoria Binschtok's Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller ("the absence of the claimants"), a series of photographs of the marks left behind on the wall of a Berlin unemployment office.47 As Walter Benn Michaels points out, with the bodies out of frame, the damage in Binschtok's photographs encodes gesture — the gesture of slumping one's head against a wall — on a scale larger than the personal; on a scale approaching the collective, even the structural.48 We were here, regardless of our particularities, which are after all inaccessible to the viewer, and by virtue of the same set of pressures. The same set of pressures, it should be said, brings the unemployed to the Amazon fulfillment center, which Seasonal Associate treats as the uneasy double of the unemployment office.49

A degraded but undeniable kind of sociability, then, in damage, in the form of an accidental Burri or Pollock on a waiting room wall. A patina of grease that registers the simultaneous untruth and truth of the slogan that, as the official mouthpiece of corporate puts it blandly, "every day is a first day" at Amazon — untruth in that the human suffering accumulates over time and is not set back to zero, as it were, at the start of each new workday; truth, perversely, in that Amazon's workforce is so casualized that every day is in fact a first day for a large portion of the workers, who come and go according to the company's arbitrary changes in demand.50 Seasonal Associate asks two questions of this sociability-in-damage. First, can it be formalized, recreated deliberately through a process of artistic making? Second, what might be lost or gained in such a process of deliberate damaging? It's in this context that we should understand the protagonist's confrontation with an endless series of

things, oh boy, things. . . . Strange products in your hands, for example this baseball cap that already looks so lived-in it could hardly get much more worn. Used- or distressed-look fashion, you get the point, but the cap is nothing but a ragged piece of cloth, more like something for adherents to a radicalized acceleration of the commodity cycle, people who only buy what has to be thrown away because it fails to meet its requirements as a usable product, serves only to move money and material. The cap has an Iron Maiden logo on it and has slipped out of its bag. You almost sense the greasy feel of sweat mixed with dust. You're tempted to try it on for a moment, perhaps because it looks like something you found on the street for which you might have some use.51

The distressed cap flickers back and forth between total repeatability (its tight fit in a recognizable, even played-out aesthetic category; "you get the point") and absolute singularity ("something you found on the street"); past wear ("so lived-in it could hardly get much more worn") and future use ("for which you might have some use"). Indeed, something about its intentionally "ragged" feel makes the cap an analog not so much of Binschtok's marks on the wall but of Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall," where what looks like a spot of damage triggers a series of wild speculative leaps in the narrator's consciousness. In this case the distressed cap prompts the protagonist to ask — or provides an occasion for the first-person narrator to force you, the protagonist, to ask — the two basic questions of Sedgwick's "textural perception": How did it get this way, and what might I do with it?

These questions, and the Sedgwick mode of touching-feeling-intuiting they stem from, are directed at the secret sociability that the damaged object tries to encode. This sociability, of course, is on one level obviously an ersatz one. Geissler's protagonist imagines rescuing the cap from the street in a tender act of urban conservation, but the scene she calls up also resonates with the first-person narrator's memories of her friend Jens, who "brings gifts for everyone he likes — things he finds lying around in the street like cauliflowers or skis — who distributes his gifts with thought."52 It is hard not to see the distressed cap as something a Jens would find on the street and give you as a gift, a rehomed throwaway infused with feelings of friendly care and tenderness. The cap, with its evocation of another body's sweat, tries to condense the feel of sociality in all its non-commodifiability, as Jens's trash-collecting and gift-giving exemplify, in its very form.53 The distressed object here derives its allure from its apparent ability to embody those two classic antitheses of the commodity: gift and waste. In other words, the trick the cap pulls off is one of reifying, in a kind of recursive second-order operation, what William Mazzarella has called commodities' "uncanny inability to reify completely the materials upon which they draw."54

And yet the "greasy feel of sweat" on the distressed cap, like the "worn, greasy wall" in the waiting room, doesn't just conjure up these effects of absolute, uncommodifiable singularity and stop there. Rather, the cap seems to get such sustained descriptive attention precisely because it is able to achieve, through gestures of calculated damage, what Michaels calls "the effect . . . of de-personification" that results from "replacing . . . people with the marks they leave."55 For Michaels, Binschtok's marks, the photographic analogs to Geissler's marks on the wall, in this way "represent, without personifying, not a group but a structural element."56 In a qualitative leap, the intimacy of bodily grease on a surface is transmuted into an index of something larger and more impersonal — something like what Fredric Jameson calls the "unrepresentable . . . global social totality."57 Or, in Geissler's words, the distressed cap becomes a medium through which "you," the protagonist, are made to feel the abstract churn of the "commodity cycle," the dizzying motion of "money and material" around the globe. Though the damage on the cap encourages us to take it as a record of the (fictional) life of its previous wearer, the "greasy feel of sweat" can't help but index, if only through an oblique hint, its own likely authentic origins in the sweatshop.58 This is what Seasonal Associate discovers about distress through its intense focus on the pre-worn cap: even a cheap trick, an object that wants you to take its formalized marks of damage as an index of a whole life not actually lived, can't help but serve as an index of the system that produced it — of industrial capitalism in general, and of the dire labor conditions in the global logistics and manufacturing industries, which of course include Amazon fulfillment center workers, in particular. The distressed object's curious combination of intimate address and utterly genericized abstraction make it an especially powerful tool for instilling this sort of feeling for structure.

The protagonist of Ben Lerner's 10:04 — also a writer, but one with a rare heart condition, a secure university job, and a "strong six-figure advance" on his next book — has a similar cognitive-mapping epiphany while doing some last-minute shopping before a hurricane hits New York.59 Holding a container of instant coffee in his hand, he intuits the social relations that went into producing it: "the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellín and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label."60 There is something about the atmosphere of crisis, he speculates, that defetishizes the instant coffee as a commodity. In case we missed this insight, the narrator spells it out in the language of Marxist theory: "It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura — the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and highways were starting to close."61

This encounter follows the same script as the scene with the distressed cap in Seasonal Associate — an apparent defetishization (only apparent because he still buys the coffee) that imbues the object with an "aura," a defetishization that works by fetishizing differently. This aura, the immediate tactile intuition of all the labor and wasted fuel condensed into the coffee, ends up being precisely part of the coffee's felt value; the allure of the anticommodity is folded back into the commodity. The instant coffee continues to function as a commodity, even as it appears to Lerner's protagonist more like a piece of materialized Marxist theory or a kind of anticapitalist installation art, something like Mika Rottenberg's meditations on how immiseration itself "become[s] a material" under late capitalism.62 Crucially, the impending crisis of the storm is what lends the instant coffee this auratic, artlike character. If crisis is a source of a flicker of defetishizing potential in 10:04, if only for a second before it gets reabsorbed into the market, distress figures in the novel as a miniaturized, further impoverished version of this potential. A few pages after the instant coffee scene, the protagonist takes in a series of "distressed" paintings that "seemed as if they'd been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from a future ice age."63 One of these paintings is an adaptation of a porn image "downloaded from the Internet" and "networked with fine cracks, making it appear like a painting from the past."64 Its subject "stares at the viewer as if from another century, the craquelure confusing genres and lending the image tremendous gravity; the title read: The Picture of Sasha Grey."65Besides being a punchline that deflates a passage of breathless ekphrasis, The Picture of Sasha Grey is an even further banalized version of the defetishizing dynamic at work with the instant coffee. The distress that has been inflicted on it transforms something that's in a sense immaterial or mystified — here a mass-mediated porn image rather than a consumer object brimming with metaphysical niceties — into something at once tantalizingly material and exceedingly fragile, a relic salvaged from some ruin in the wake of a disaster.

What 10:04 sees in distress, then, is not dissimilar from what someone like Serra sees in it: a will to materialization, a drive to make concrete the abstract and the ephemeral by doing damage to it — though crucially Lerner is highly skeptical of this base materialism, while Serra more or less embraces it. Even the content of The Picture, "a young woman . . . upon whose face a man beyond the frame has ejaculated," surely manifests an especially degraded form of this will to materialization.66 In a 2011 exchange with Rae Armantrout on her book Money Shot, Lerner writes that "according to a (poorly sourced and ungrammatical) Wikipedia entry, 'The pornography industry adopted the term "money shot" because [. . .] ejaculation proves to the viewer that they have witnessed an authentic sexual act.' As if the 'money shot' might serve to underwrite the reality of all the other moments retrospectively."67 Rottenberg makes a similar point in an account of her video work Squeeze (2010), a piece interested in making visible the immiserated labor that goes into the most banal and useless of commodities: "Pornography also tries," she says, to do this concretizing work, "Like in the money shot: the moment where inner feelings become a material."68 There is a perverse harmony, then, between the form and content of The Picture: just as it depicts a scene of (simulated) affects becoming material, the distress it has been subjected to is what fixes it in place as a material thing, a relic charged with "gravity." While the impending storm makes the instant coffee resemble something like a Rottenberg work, an avant-garde art object concerned with materializing the social relations behind commodities, the distressed Picture of a money shot shows us the will to materialization in its barest, most impoverished form, uncoupled from any political project. Distress figures here as a sort of literally masturbatory materialism, an indulgence in materiality for materiality's sake. The wicked joke here is strikingly similar to the one that organizes Warhol's Oxidation paintings: the spraying of bodily fluids as the paradigm case of distress as expressive gesture, the ultimate forensic proof that a real, warm body was here.

The Picture is a parody, in other words, of the metaphysics of grit; of how easy it is to turn generic objects into sublimated things through a repertoire of iterable damaging techniques. Or, in a different register, how easy it is for controlled damage to turn something as banal as an instant coffee container into an apparent source of immediate, mystical intuition into the "global social totality." In this way, we can read The Picture's masturbatory materialism as a sharp, if proleptic, rejoinder to the "new materialist" account of damaged art that Jane Bennett has advanced.69 "What kind of things," Bennett asks, "are damaged art-objects? Are they junk, trash, mere stuff?"70 Bennett answers these questions by way of a meditation on the Salvage Art Institute (SAI), a pseudo- or anti-gallery dedicated to showing works that art insurers have written off as a "total loss" due to the various kinds of damage they have sustained. The appeal of these often mangled, fractured, or shattered artworks (or are they former artworks?) can be visceral, as Bennett underscores by quoting Elka Krajewska, founder of the SAI:

When I arrived at an art conservation studio and saw 'the corpse': smears and clumps of chocolate stuck to its plexibox container and irregularly broken pieces accumulated at the bottom edge I thought I could simply take it. I was thrilled by its useless, demoted state, its orphan stance, its loss of ambition and almost erotic, glaring nakedness. But soon I found out I could not take it, and that though worthless it now belonged to the insurance company who as its new owner had rights to its future.71

The damaged object as an "orphan" object in search of a home: there's a distinct resonance here with Geissler's distressed cap. But even more than this, what's so significant to Bennett about this account is the metaphysical fullness of the damaged art object; how catastrophe and wreckage strip away all the layers of encrusted conventional meanings (though Bennett sets aside the issue of ownership, which remains decidedly intact in the SAI's salvaged pieces) and get at some ontological core of pure thingness:

Insofar as the object retains the aura of its former value, it remains for the most part a 'for-us.' But something really interesting happens with the demotion goes all the way, when the object falls so low, so below the standard as to be rendered irredeemable or, in the language of the insurance industry, a 'total loss.' What happens is that it becomes released from the tyranny of judgment — becomes, in my terminology, a thing. The radically demoted object becomes the orphan, who, appearing on the scene without external value or pedigree, floats on the surface of context and bobs over and shrugs off the grasp of established norms and judgments. As thing it paradoxically rises to a new status — that of a more active party in encounters.72

The damaged art object here is the paradigm case of "vibrant materiali[ty]," of what Bennett, following and updating a vitalist tradition that goes back at least to Spinoza, theorizes as matter's intrinsic agentic capacity.73 In a turn that scans more like Heidegger's reverie on Van Gogh's worn-out peasant shoes than Spinoza's speculations on bodies in motion, here damage is precisely what makes us alive to the thing's ontological richness.74

Significantly, Bennett makes this argument in explicit opposition to — who else? — Ben Lerner, who wrote a long essay on the SAI and the history of art vandalism for Harper's Magazine.75 Bennett takes particular issue with Lerner's discussion of "hyperkulturemia," or Stendahl syndrome, the feeling of total overwhelm at the sheer presence of "great works."76 While Lerner suggests that vandals may be some of the only remaining sufferers from hyperkulturemia, and that this condition results in part from the vandal's naïve willingness to take at face value official artworld ideologies about the imperative to transgress, Bennett insists that what's really at issue is the "latent . . . animacy of the art-object," its ability to act on us rather than sit there passively awaiting our disinterested contemplation.77 For Bennett, it is precisely the material damage on the works on display at the SAI that rubs our faces, as it were, in this quality of animacy. And yet for Lerner the appeal of the SAI lies decidedly elsewhere.

Lerner's ultimate (if, again, proleptic) critique of Bennett's metaphysics of grit comes in 10:04, when in the most discussed and arguably overexposed scene in the novel, the protagonist visits the "Institute for Totaled Art," a thinly fictionalized version of the SAI.78 Like the SAI, the "Institute" houses artworks that an insurer has declared to have no value due to the damage they've sustained. Some of these "total loss" pieces are "obviously compromised — badly torn or stained."79 But with others the damage, if there indeed is damage, is invisible. A seemingly immaculate Cartier-Bresson print baffles the protagonist: how did it come to be "declared of zero value without undergoing . . . any perceptible material transformation"?80 The formal act of declaring it a total loss transforms the art commodity into something like a pure work, disentangled from the market — restores, from a certain perspective, its rightful autonomy. The undamaged yet valueless Cartier-Bresson throws the formal, immaterial nature of this operation into high relief: it's not physical damage or even the threat of disaster that defetishizes the print, but the determinate negation that the insurance adjuster's signature effects.81

The result, as Lerner's protagonist puts it with reference to the "jar of instant coffee the night of the storm," is "no longer a commodity fetish; it was art before or after capital."82 The works in the Institute of Totaled Art, "not the shattered or slashed works" like the Picture, have been successfully defetishized.83 We might speculate that the novel considers this operation to be successful because unlike the distressed Picture, the Institute manages to defetishize without refetishizing differently. Indeed, one of the guiding "policies" of the SAI makes much the same point: "SAI," it declares, "eschews the aesthetics and sensationalism of damage. Rather, it is devoted to examining the structural implications of total loss across art's conceptual, material, legal, actuarial and financial identities."84 Like the SAI, Lerner's fictional Institute considers material damage to be too conducive to "sensationalism" to serve as a genuine means of wresting artworks from the market's clutches. For in the contemporary artworld, as Lerner points out in his essay on the SAI, material damage is just as likely to shore up the value of a work as it is to void it — a point he grounds in a reading of Warhol's Shot Marilyn paintings, surely distressed works if there ever was one.85 The whole point of this nested series of juxtapositions for Lerner is to hammer home that the object's sociability is never really intrinsic — rather, it is determined by the whole network of material relations (among producers, consumers, insurers, speculators) in which it is imbricated.86 The dream of the distressed object is the same as the dream of Bennett's vibrant materialism: to discover the sociability inherent in the object's very materiality, pulsating at its molten core. And, we might add, to hack, scrape, and burn our way to that molten core at any cost.

Distress as literary form

And yet if 10:04 is skeptical of distress's one-two punch of defetishizing and refetishizing the object, its trick of passing off the object's sociality as an intrinsic feature of its materiality rather than an effect of its position in a larger structure, the novel is nonetheless curiously unwilling to dismiss distress as an irredeemably reactionary form. In fact, to echo a refrain that repeats throughout the book, we could say that 10:04 ultimately regards distress as a "bad form of collectivity that can stand as a figure of its possibility."87 To understand what this might mean, we need to shift our focus to the form of the novel itself. As many critics have noted, 10:04 announces itself as a damaged novel, a novel that has been, in Jennifer Ashton's fine phrase, "totaled in advance."88 From its first pages, we are made aware that the novel is the result of a certain amount of financial speculation: the protagonist has parlayed a short story he wrote for The New Yorker into a "strong six-figure" advance for a novel, a novel whose "opening scene," we learn, we are currently reading.89 We find out later that the New Yorker story, the commodity being speculated on in the ensuing "competitive auction" among publishing houses, is also marred by concessions to "marketability."90 While the protagonist sets out to write a novel about "literary fraudulence," building on the New Yorker story, he eventually abandons this project and, to fulfill his publisher's bare-minimum expectations, includes the story word-for-word in the resulting novel, a lump of undigested matter.91 10:04 tracks the process of one book, the story about "fraudulence" that the protagonist initially proposes to write, getting "dilate[d]" into another, the book we're reading.92

Two kinds of damage mark 10:04: the concessions to market forces that dictate its form, and the torsion that the protagonist subjects his original, proposed novel to. While within the universe of the novel both forms of damage serve as evidence of the denaturing effects of capital on art, Ashton reminds us that Lerner nonetheless deploys them intentionally, controlling them to achieve a set of effects. Lerner is in a very real sense distressing the novel. For Ashton, if we see Lerner as subjecting the novel to what I'm proposing we call distress, a new possibility opens up: rather than serving as evidence of its "heteronomy," its status as a piece of literature that's been compromised by capitalism, 10:04's damaged form is in fact a powerful statement of its artistic "autonomy."93 "10:04 imagines," she writes, "that instead of the work of art being subsumed within the inevitable damages of capital, the damages of capital are subsumed within it. 10:04 presents itself as the achievement of this work."94 By intentionally incorporating the "inevitable damages of capital" in advance, 10:04 aims to make this damage part of its very form, not an imposition from the outside.

Whether this formal gambit is successful or not, the fact remains that 10:04 has learned this trick from the material culture of distress. Indeed, Ashton derives her crucial formulation, "totaled in advance," from a passage in the novel where the protagonist reflects that Alena, the painter behind The Picture of Sasha Grey, has little reason to worry about her work getting damaged by Hurricane Sandy because "she strategically damaged her paintings in advance; they were storm-proof."95 While 10:04 treats Alena's distressed paintings more or less as a bad joke, the novel ultimately appropriates their logic, their bid to protect themselves through an act of preemptive self-sabotage, and plays it out at the level of novelistic form. To the repertoire of distress's affordances that we've been tracking — turning objects into repositories of frozen gestures; playing at locating the object's sociability or even its metaphysical fullness in its tattered materiality — 10:04 adds another: distress as a shielding cocoon, something like the deliberate oxidation on Serra's weathering steel, a material designed to quickly accumulate a protective layer of rust that keeps the metal from corroding.96

Which isn't to say that 10:04 doesn't make use of distress's other affordances. Distress is central to 10:04's avowed project of finding a direct, "sincer[e]" form of expression, of finding a way for the protagonist's — even the author's — gestures to reach out and touch the reader directly.97 When the protagonist declares that

I decided to replace the book I'd proposed with the book you're reading now, a work that . . . is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures,

we get a strong sense that in its own imaginary, it is precisely the "dilat[ion]" — a figure of expansion and torsion drawn from the details of the protagonist's heart condition — or the damage it has sustained that makes the book, like Sedgwick's distressed texture, come "alive with multiple," shared "futures," both potential and actual. Dilation here names a process of genericizing, of stretching the details of the real Ben Lerner's experiences (at the SAI, during a poetry residency in Marfa), just as much as it names a process of damaging the originally intended book about "literary fraudulence" in an effort to "get real," to write a novel with a more direct, intimate style of address. Like the distressed object, 10:04 presents itself as lived-in, marked by traces of real gestures, but just generic enough to allow for "multiple futures," multiple ways of assuming these gestures as one's own — or, to pull a curiously bland phrase from a review that made it onto the book's back cover, just generic enough to "describe[] what it feels like to be alive."98 For 10:04, distressed form is what allows for a "flickering" between fiction and nonfiction, and with this flickering, the possibility of intimate contact, a sense that the narrator can reach out and address us directly through the cracks in the novel's diegesis: "I am with you," the last line of the novel goes, adapting or dilating a phrase from Whitman, "and I know how it is."99

Readers would be forgiven for detecting more than a whiff of desperation in such pronouncements. Is the narrator really with us? Does he really know how it is? How could he? In other words, doesn't this seem a bit like protesting too much? The novel's professed dream of "constituting a pronoun in which the readers of the future could participate" depends, after all, on an obvious ruse.100 "You," the "second person plural" that the narrator conjures up, may "participate" in the novel, but that is not the same thing as getting you, the empirical reader, to participate, whatever that might entail. The apostrophized "you" is a prop in a sort of pantomimed intersubjectivity that the novel labors to activate.101 As Lauren Berlant puts it, drawing on Barbara Johnson, "[a]postrophe... appears to be a reaching out to you, a direct movement from place x to place y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realizes something in the speaker."102 These moments of apostrophizing address testify to 10:04's aspiration to an intrinsic sociality; its imagination of itself as a space where genuine, not "bad" or compromised, "forms of collectivity" might finally be possible. In this straining toward sociality, this bid to "create[] a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place," in Berlant's words, we can see the ultimate form of distress that marks 10:04.103 For what is the distressed object if not a fake index, an index-by-proxy that conjures up a fake present moment of intersubjectivity — between the viewer or reader or toucher and the projected forces that distressed the object — which nonetheless can be "phenomenologically vitalizing" despite, or maybe because of, its very fakeness?104 Distress's fake shared present is a literally "stretched-out now," to borrow another phrase from Berlant.105 While for Berlant, this "physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalizing movement of rhetorical animation" in apostrophe allows "subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space [as] others," 10:04's moments of pantomimed direct address scan more as anxious performances, the novel's overheated efforts to break "out" of itself and into the real.106 For all its efforts to critique the metaphysics of grit, and for all its laboring to repurpose distress as a viable literary form, 10:04 ends up endorsing the most credulous version of the politics of distress when it desperately tries to suppress the fakeness of its indexicality and pass it off as the real thing. At the bottom of 10:04's rich engagement with — and ambitions to model itself after — distress as a form, we find a theoretically sophisticated but unmistakable kind of reality hunger.107 A fake index that wants desperately to convince us that it is a real one. If these moments of straining address sound cheesy or insincere, it is because they represent the novel's ultimate assimilation of the cheesy insincerity of the distressed commodity.108

While Lerner's second-person pronoun never quite arrives (at least until the novel's final line), Geissler's is there from the start: Seasonal Associate's protagonist is literally "you." This protagonist lives out a fictionalized, deliberately genericized version of the first-person narrator's experience working at an Amazon fulfilment center: "You're me," she tells the protagonist at one point, "but you don't have my entire life."109 The intersubjectivity that is ultimately passed off as genuine and immediate in 10:04 is explicitly thematized in Seasonal Associate as a heavily mediated pantomime. A pantomime, that is, with props. Geissler's narrator insists that we understand the narrative process of assuming her identity as a sartorial process. "You" are made to put on her experience like a piece of old, worn clothing. This figure gets literalized early in the novel:

From now on, you are me. That means you're female; please don't forget that because it's important in places. You're a writer and a translator, and at this point in your life you have two sons and a partner who suits you well, something you're usually aware of. Another important thing, which you rarely think about but which has to be said: You're German, but the country you were born in no longer exists. . . . You're wearing jeans and a sweater.110

"You" are simultaneously situated in the narrator's history — a history marked by damage, by financial hardship and workplace exploitation — and placed in her clothes. The logic of the distressed cap, a garment that tries to conjure up and make its wearer assume a whole ersatz history written in "sweat," turns out to be the organizing logic of Seasonal Associate as a whole. It's hard not to read Semiotext(e)'s choice of Gerhard Richter's Betty as the cover image for the novel's English translation in light of this dynamic. Warm and hazy, as if slightly out of focus, the figure faces away from us like the main character in a video game; a generic body to inhabit as a sort of avatar. (The narrator is adamant about this generic quality: "Yes," she says, "you are generic; I intend to regard you as generic and introduce you to your most generic traits."111) Seasonal Associate gives us a vision of the autofictional novel not as an unmediated emanation from a hyper-individual consciousness, but as a deliberately damaged thing, a thing that mobilizes the distressed object's dialectic between absolute singularity and total genericity in a bid to secure the reader's imaginative investment. As with the protagonist's encounter with the distressed cap, the novel as a whole is aware that this "reaching out," this intersubjectivity that it calls into being, is ersatz. Unlike 10:04, Seasonal Associate is not interested in convincing us that we are somehow included immediately in its fictive space after all. And yet its wager, as we will see shortly, is that even fake intersubjectivity can be, to repeat Berlant's assessment of apostrophe, "phenomenologically vitalizing."

Phenomenologically vitalizing how? While the distressed cap, along with most of the distressed objects we've considered so far, transmutes damage into cozy feelings of warmth and intimacy, Seasonal Associate's distressed form wants us to feel its constitutive damage as damage. And not damage in the abstract, something to contemplate in an aesthetic attitude: rather, damage that "you" yourself are sustaining. At one point, "[d]uring your break, you peel the Band-Aids off your hands to apply new ones. You examine your hands for a moment. They're chapped and dirty; you'd like to go easier on them."112 The novel encodes these damaged and damaging gestures and makes you assume them as your own. "That's how it is," the narrator says, "you're exhausted now, not just physically; your mind, which is also a little bit your heart, has sustained damage as well."113 The protagonist "you," who is also a little bit you, the reader — after all, you must read through these scenes in order to advance through the narrative; you must endure some repetition that is, by design, a little bit exhausting — is dragged through a narrative process of attrition, of enduring sexual harassment, draconian quotas, and the combination of unpredictability and stultifying repetition that characterizes so much contingent labor.114 The indexicality is fake, but it leaves a residue — or better, it still abrades, subjecting you to an affective process of wearing-down as you read. Even the novel's pacing reflects the rhythms of contingent labor, unfolding in a series of terse, broken-up vignettes, something like the narrative equivalent of shifts or gigs. Seasonal Associate, we could say, is both distressed and distressing: attrition constitutes its form, and it wants to subject the reader to this attrition, too.

The connection between Seasonal Associate's form and the form of precarious seasonal work is something more than homology. As Geissler recounts in interviews, the book came together from notes she took during her own time working as a seasonal associate at an Amazon fulfilment center: "You'd get these sticky notes at work, maybe for communication amongst colleagues or whatever, but I started taking notes on them. I wrote down whatever I found interesting and took those notes home with me and typed them into the computer every day or night."115 These sticky notes, the raw material for the novel, also appear within the space of the novel itself: "you keep rushed notes on yellow Post-Its," scribbled in stolen moments of downtime, in "your employee box."116 The novel's fragmentary form is in this way an index — and not even an entirely fake one — of the fragmentary nature of the work it depicts, the way the little moments of freedom within contingent labor only surface unevenly, episodically.117 Real or fake, the indexicality the novel claims by damaging itself in this way generates an affective surplus. More than the bland generality of "what it feels like to be alive," Seasonal Associate wants to "phenomenologically vitalize" our relation to, and make us alive to, material and emotional life under a specific kind of exploitation. Seasonal Associate, more so than 10:04, presents itself as "totaled in advance," formally hobbled from the start by the mode of production it both documents and emerges from. Ultimately, the novel seeks to hijack distress, with all the effects of faux immediacy and illusory overcoming of capitalism it produces, and turn it into a tool for making the reader feel viscerally the effects of exploitation. These effects, like those produced by the greasy marks on the waiting room wall, exceed the scale of the individual and quite literally gesture toward the broader, impersonal structure of contingent labor itself. In Geissler's hands, distress recovers its suppressed affective meaning: Seasonal Associate imagines its distressed form as a tool for communicating the precarious worker's own distress — but communicating it precisely as a generic problem, a problem endemic to a type of labor (maybe even to an entire mode of production) rather than one unique to an irreducibly particular body in a hyper-specific situation. Less specific than one body's individual pain, but more specific than what it feels like to be alive.

We should not, however, confuse Geissler's or Lerner's efforts to repurpose distress's immediacy-effects with what Michael Clune, writing more generally about contemporary autofiction, calls "mak[ing] it vanish."118 For Clune, the recent autofictional novel imagines itself "not [as] an object, but as a means of transferring consciousness, a wire through which experience moves."119 This operation of direct, immediate consciousness-transfer signals for Clune a new commitment on the novel's part to the "revolutionary" power of "radical subjectivity," a force he reads as productively corrosive to the already fragile structure of "liberal individualism."120 While thinkers like Arendt see the objectivity of the mediating "world of things . . . between those who have it in common" as the most effective check against such individualism, Clune thinks that such a belief in the salutary power of things can no longer hold today.121 Accordingly, for him "today's most revolutionary art," a body that for Clune includes 10:04, "attacks objects. 'Make it vanish' is its motto."122

Clune is surely right about at least one thing: we no longer live in the world Arendt theorized in 1958. (Indeed, Seasonal Associate encourages us to see a disquieting symmetry between "Hannah Arendt['s argument that] people come into the world as a beginning and that people have the ability for beginnings" and Amazon's dictum that "every day is a first day.")123 And yet Clune's vision of the autofictional novel as an unthingly, barely material "wire" for beaming subjective experience to the reader does not quite hold for either 10:04 or Seasonal Associate. If these novels want to transmit experience, they aim to do so not by beaming it directly to the reader, but by embedding it into their intentionally damaged form as a set of frozen gestures. 10:04 and Seasonal Associate don't so much "attack[] objects" as strategically damage themselves in an effort to become just singular enough to encode the intimacy of bodily gesture, but just generic enough to leave themselves open to "wearing" or "inhabiting," like a distressed piece of clothing or a pre-tarnished piece of installation art.124 They don't make it vanish; they make it distressed. In fact, 10:04's moments of lapse into the mode of immediacy Clune celebrates as successful are better read as proof of a failure, a failure to work all the way through the problematic of distress and appropriate its logic without uncritically reproducing its metaphysics. Success or failure, both novels' urgency of address depends precisely on the way they negotiate what they imagine as their thingly character — a thingly character, as we've seen, that only becomes more pronounced with each bit of damage the novels try to do to it.

If DeLillo, Bennett, and the other metaphysicians of grit are right that the damaged thing is in a sense the thingiest thing, the thing most palpably charged with human sociability and ontological richness, we ought to read the strategically self-damaging novels being produced today as reminders that despite all the vanishing and dematerializing happening around us, the category of the thing is still vital, maybe more vital than ever, to literature's formal imagination. Even if the metaphysicians aren't right — and this essay has tried to cast some doubt on their position — these distressed texts nonetheless sketch one path forward for the novel. One that entails a rigorous engagement with the novel's thingly character rather than skirting around it. A path that drags the novel through abrading stone, cauterizing flame, and acid bath, in hopes that it will emerge altogether changed.

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Mitch Therieau is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. His writing has appeared in Swamp Souths: Literary and cultural ecologies (LSU Press 2020) and A Gallery Guide to the Melancholy Museum (Cantor Arts Center 2019), as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Baffler.

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Banner image: Alberto Burri, Abstraction with Brown Burlap (Sacco), 1953, photograph by jean louis mazieres (cropped), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

References

I am immensely indebted to Mark McGurl, Mark Greif, and Marci Kwon for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. This essay also benefitted from generous readings by Bill Brown, Amber Moyles, Alberto Quintero, Allison Saft, and Luke Williams, as well as Mary Esteve, Annie McClanahan, Arthur Wang, Kristen Carlson, and an anonymous reviewer. I dedicate this essay to Molly Rothenberg, who encouraged and helped me clarify my earliest thoughts on distress.