No Pomo

I am going to attempt to, as Deleuze says, try to insert myself in the history of philosophy through an "ass-fuck". No homo, no pomo.

In his essay "The Uncanny," Freud spends 10 pages going through the etymological history of the words "uncanny" (unheimlich) and "homely" (heimlich), reprinting the entire entry from a 1860 German dictionary and paying special attention to the examples of usage given. Heimlich is that which is "homely, familiar, intimate, belonging to the house, not strange, domesticated, tame"; it is "intimate, arousing a pleasant feeling of quiet contentment.

Yet it also means "concealed, kept hidden, so that others do not get to know of it or about it and it is hidden from them." In the German Bible, "die heimliche Weisheit," (the secret wisdom), "Gottes heimlichen rat", (God's secret wisdom).

Unheimlich - "arousing uneasy, fearful horror." Schelling is quoted: "uncanny [unheimlich] is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come out into the open."

We can see the "uncanny" semantic slippage between these two ostensible antonyms in a passage from Schiller that Freud quotes: "To the left of the lake lies a meadow hidden [heimlich] among the trees." The meadow is thus homely, comfortable - it is made comfortable by its seclusion, its intimacy. By the same token, it is "concealed, kept hidden".

What do we get from this digression? For Freud, the uncanny is the "return of the repressed": something that was meant to remain secret and hidden somehow bubbles up, makes itself known. Most interestingly, this is not simply a question of unconscious memories from childhood. Freud's examples of the uncanny are automatons, epileptic fits, dopplegangers. These throw into relief a certain lack, a certain absence: some sort of mechanical and meaningless Real underneath the veneer of apparent reality. The heimlich in the unheimlich, the "domestic" and comfortable space is precisely absent, and this is what makes the "homely" itself "uncanny".

Let's skip ahead a bit. I cite here the UrbanDictionary.com entry on the phrase "no homo".


1.
no homo

1363 up, 81 down

Phrase used after one inadvertently says something that sounds gay.
His ass is mine. No homo
by ELJ


2.
no homo

477 up, 65 down

Said to show that you aren't gay after saying something that sounded gay.
Hay man, pass the nuts. No homo
I cornered him in my room and nailed him with a board. No homo
by Anonymous

3.
no homo

567 up, 171 down

phrase NOT coined by Cam'Ron, but by his young protege Juelz Santana.used after a phrase that sounds ambigously gay or 'homo', so that your friends won't call you a 'homo'. very homophobic.
'no homo but we cockin' em' - Juelz Santana'
yo homie, i just spent five hours talking with my man on the phone, no homo' - random dude


What we should note so far is on the one hand the seemingly "unambigious" and "straight"-forward meaning -- "I am not gay," "what I just said did not have any homosexual subtext" -- and on the other hand, the contexts in which the phrase is used: sites of classically 'male' performance (threats of physical violence [his ass is mine, we cockin em, etc], eating [pass the nuts], and male friendships/bonding [i just spent five hours talking with my man on the phone]).

We come next to this:

5.
no homo

248 up, 96 down

It is added in a sentence:
1) to make it sound less gay.
2) to say if you're not kidding; Seriously.

1) Paul and I had each other's back all the time, no homo.
2) No homo though, Paul was a good friend.
by joooon crack

Thus "no homo" can both disavow a meaning that was felt to be implicit or at least potentially implicit for the listener, and it can also emphasize a claim as "serious" and genuinely intended. In the above example, a classically 'male' pact of solidarity through physical and perhaps psychological reciprocal defense (Paul and I had each other's back all the time) is cleansed of any 'accidental' or unwanted homsexuality. In regards to the same relationship, however, the male bond is affirmed by the use of the same phrase. Thus it is precisely the fact that there is "no homo" that we know that Paul really was "a good friend". Although joooon crack sees these meanings as distinct, it seems fair to say that the same work is accomplished in each instance: the straight male relation is affirmed through a disavowal of the threat of "homo." As in the "unheimlich" within the heimlich, it is the homo within the no homo that is in fact already accomplishing the no homo.

We might look briefly at what is probably the paradigmatic instance of no homo:


The scene is situated as an instance of urban male braggadoccio par excellence: a game of dice, money changing hands, male camraderie, displays of misogyny, etc. When one of the participants violates the unwritten code of ethics governing the interaction, Cam'ron must prove that he is not a pussy, that he is himself no(t) homo, and that he won't let this guy pwn him. What is so fascinating is that he does this via an action that he knows very well might be seen as homo. Thus when, while peeing in dude's face, he says "no homo? no homo. no homo. no homo" etc, it is, as we saw above, a refutation of any potential homo element and at the same time an affirmation of the sincerity of his act: this is for real, this is decisive, and thus, precisely in this decisiveness - in this decisively "homo" act - I have proved that I am not homo, I am "no" homo.

We might even extend this productive semantic ambiguity into a reading of the broader category in which the homo/no homo discourse is situated, that of pomo. It is clear that Cam'ron is here going quite pomo - this video is self-consciously exaggerated, its stereotypes are played up the nth degree, and it must be seen on some level as self-parodic and self-referential. Yet on another level Cam'ron, like David Lynch or Slavoj Zizek, is being quite sincere. His pomo is precisely no pomo: he means it to be taken quite seriously, his face-pissing is a genuine act of self-affirmation.

I would finally want to extent this question of pomo/no pomo to the critical project in which this blog is engaged. On one level I would claim that this blog is "no pomo", that it is itself attempting to gain some sort of critical purchase in regards to postmodernism (at least in regards to postmodernism on Jameson's definition, as the 'cultural logic of late capitalism,' a symptom); but on the other hand, postmodernism has itself already anticipated and preempted such a critique: pomo is already 'in' no pomo such that 'no pomo', especially in the way i have tried to perform it, is itself the height of pomo. My desire to be no pomo is predicated on the acknowledgement of a certain element of pomo within my discourse, and the disavowal of that element is itself the affirmation of that element's structural necessity and ultimate determinative power. The hope, I guess, is that being no pomo is able to productively include the pomo within itself, and that its reflexivity about its own conditions of possibility means that rather than disavowing one's pomo, one is able to use it. Still: could this not be the ultimate victory of postmodern qua "structural logic of late capitalism"? Is the pomo not "using" me? Does my blog not objectively function as cynical advertisement for e.g., Thom Browne, Cam'ron, Friday Night Lights? Stay tuned.