Asch & Agency

What is interesting in Asch's "In Search of America" with respect to agency is the conflict between the mechanistic circumstances the laborers endure and the vibrancy that occasionally flourishes in its spite. It seems that Asch implicitly agrees that agency is found in aberration from the preconceived course--whether nature or wealth is the conceiver.

Images of inclemency abound. The dust storm pervades all, the walls of the houses no sufficient shield. The accidental death of the lumber worker--nonchalantly deployed--suggests that what attracts Asch to the conditions of laborers is the inhumanity of the conditions in which they are compelled to live. This is an obvious point, but what is crucial is that it not be primarily political--rather cosmological: It makes me think of Yahweh, whose voice kills the listener, whose aspect kills who sees him. Then the subject or the agent is what dies in the storm of circumstance, or what is susceptible to death.

The point is that the agent cannot manifest himself but against the matrix that contains him. Or if not against, without reverence for: the soul shows in the useless. "The people living there had a sense of decoration," Asch remarks of the black sharecroppers. Later the saloon poet's refusal to share his verse--recalling subtly Asch's sensitivity to wordless expression, negative expression, his note that "I seemed to feel what [Aragon] said more in the pauses between his words, in the silence which he needed to arrange his thoughts"--humanizes him in obfuscating his interior. It proves, that is, that he is capable of action without impetus.

Violence too is the privilege of the agent, but I suppose only because Thanatos, like Iago's evil, though it is not chaos, not free, recalls the free, chaotic mischief of a Loki or a Hermes; recalls, that is, action without gain. The lumber worker's threat, "You tell that purchasing agent if he ever comes to camp 2, I'll cut him into pieces," summons more sympathy, renders him more tender than it ought because a man dismembered does less work.

The question is whether Moloch that compulsor (I have been thinking of a shot from Metropolis), the inexorable slog of days, is the germ-bed of spirit. Or whether the agent cannot but be dually born--because the agent needs an underminer. Whether to be is to fight.