'The appearance of his Things does not concern him: so much does he experience their being.'
The category which Rilke reaches for in explicating Rodin is Being: somehow, these works insist upon there own pure presence. Rodin makes Things, in the Rilkean sense of objects which represent nothing, which mean nothing – they simply, nakedly are, and their meaning is coterminous with their presence. They are 'full of themselves'. Every attempt to pass beyond a Thing to its meaning rebounds unerringly to its stubborn, radiant facticity. To be sure, this appearance of Things in Rilke’s Aesthetic may have been directly related to the emergence of a world of copies and counterfeits, as he himself intimates in some of his letters.
It is not that Giacometti’s sculptures are, by contrast, 'symbolic', referring us to a meaning which they merely embody or illustrate. Yet they do seem to point elsewhere, to invite us to pass on. Or they can appear like emissaries from teh unknown. The two key essays which I think help us understand this are John Berger’s and Jean Genet’s.
For John Berger, Giacometti’s figures seem always to look at us down a narrow corridor – no matter how close we are. If we walk down this corridor to meet them we remove ourselves from Life. Genet, curiously, had a not dissimilar experience:
“The beauty of Giacometti’s sculptures seems to reside in this incessant, uninterrupted oscillation from the remotest distance to the closest familiarity: this oscillation never ends, and that is how it can be said that the sculptures are in motion.”
The very act of approaching them causes them to recede, to shrink back into the unknown. As we come near, their strange familiarity becomes simply strange. Uncanny.
At this point, one thinks of the logic of anamorphosis. The most well-known example of actual anamorphosis in painting is the elongated skull at the bottom of Holbein’s Ambassadors. In order properly to see this skull we must place ourselves at an oblique to the image, remove ourselves from the customary frame. And when we truly see a Giacometti sculpture do we not stand at an oblique to life, do we not remove ourselves from its frame, in order to meet these elongated figures in the place that they abide? The elongation of these figures is brought about by a field of attraction emanating from a place radically eccentric to our everyday lives. Both Berger and Genet identify this place with Death and the Dead, with the terror and beauty of the negative.
“It appears now that Giacometti made these figures during his lifetime, for himself, as observers of his future absence, his death, his becoming unknowable.” (Berger)
“Giacometti does not work for his contemporaries, nor for the generations to come: he makes statues that ultimately delight the dead.” (Genet)
“Each statue seems to withdraw – or to advance – into a darkness so remote and dense that it merges with death […] I had the moving spectacle of a man who never made mistakes but who invariably got lost. He kept sinking deeper into impossible, ineluctable regions. His work is still shadowed and blinded by them.” (Genet)
There is no 'morbid' fixation with Death, with Death as object; rather Death is the only place from which life can truly be known and measured. At this point Rilke’s words, who sensed that Death was receding from us, are apt:
Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us but never truly acknowledged, forever surpassing and violating the meaning of life – it too was banished and expelled, so that it might not constantly interrupt us in the search for its meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that that the distance between it and the life-centre inside us cannot be measured, now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere In the void…
In another letter he states: “Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated.” He would, I think, have approved of Giacometti's emissaries.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Plinths
A recent post on Spurious makes a passing reference to those great plinths we find in some Giacometti sculptures.
A huge immobile mass, on which stands precarious figures. The slender figures, warped by an obscure anamorphosis, have been salvaged from the darkness, retrieved and figured. But something has slipped from the sculptor's grasp. It is as if we are being presented with, in the plinth, the weight of a materiality which has escaped figuration. The plinth becomes the very figuration of what cannot be figured.
The context in which this is mentioned is what Spurious names the ‘dark side of what is known’, that which we become aware of, however, only in the act of trying to know, or to represent:
Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood
Thus in Giacometti, this resistant X comes to bulk larger and larger in his sculptures. the gravity (in both senses) of what has been left behind looms larger that what has been brought back.
I thought, by contrast of Rodin, whose figures often seem by contrast to have been won, triumphantly, from the inertia of matter, or as if matter has found the form for which it was striving, Rodin has done violence to the material under his hand it but also pulled from it its own implicit forms. Rodin’s figures seem to complete the matter out of which, struggling, they arise.
In each case, the 'rift' between figure and ground is different. This rift is both aesthetic in consequence and, I suppose, ontological in implication.
See also Young Hegelian's comments, here. [I intend to update this post later]
A huge immobile mass, on which stands precarious figures. The slender figures, warped by an obscure anamorphosis, have been salvaged from the darkness, retrieved and figured. But something has slipped from the sculptor's grasp. It is as if we are being presented with, in the plinth, the weight of a materiality which has escaped figuration. The plinth becomes the very figuration of what cannot be figured.
The context in which this is mentioned is what Spurious names the ‘dark side of what is known’, that which we become aware of, however, only in the act of trying to know, or to represent:
Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood
Thus in Giacometti, this resistant X comes to bulk larger and larger in his sculptures. the gravity (in both senses) of what has been left behind looms larger that what has been brought back.
I thought, by contrast of Rodin, whose figures often seem by contrast to have been won, triumphantly, from the inertia of matter, or as if matter has found the form for which it was striving, Rodin has done violence to the material under his hand it but also pulled from it its own implicit forms. Rodin’s figures seem to complete the matter out of which, struggling, they arise.
In each case, the 'rift' between figure and ground is different. This rift is both aesthetic in consequence and, I suppose, ontological in implication.
See also Young Hegelian's comments, here. [I intend to update this post later]
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Decaffeinated Differences
I mentioned earlier that a trivial anecdote about a student not finding Starbucks in Italy had recently, courtesy of various links, boosted my hits fourfold. Again, the original post concerned not Starbucks as such, but had to do with a certain myopic conception of Otherness: an idea that if you venture abroad you will find slight, diverting and often quaint variations on the Same/ familiar. It is the ‘Le Big Mac’ version of cultural difference, as articulated vis-a-vis Europe in Pulp Fiction:
‘It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different’.
The John Travolta character, who articulates this ‘theory’, goes on to point out a number of such ‘little differences’ including ‘Le Big Mac’- same burger but with a wee Gallic addition, essential sameness but with a little topping of ‘French-icity’. It could equally be ‘Italianicity’ or whatever, just some little twist, flavour or style to be registered and consumed before moving on. The idea here is of the Europeans, or whoever, perversely adding some small nuance or inversion or behavioural shift in order to differentiate themselves from what is, after all, the Norm, the U.S. This was indeed brought home to me, again, by one of my American students who reckoned that the British drove on the left hand side of the road ‘just to be different from the U.S’. - History and cultural humility are thereby dispatched with the speed of a stray thought, and the way in which reality is experienced is mistaken for a property of the thing itself. For the tourist, ‘Experience’ in the sense of novelty and momentary shocks are libidinal goals in their own right and do not have to cede the initiative to the labour of knowledge. Nor can they, if the tourist is to ‘fit it all in’. Of course, this idea of cultural difference is hardly peculiar to the U.S. One finds something similar, perhaps, in the Time Out city guides, in which the same basic template is, like a 'cookie cutter', imposed on each place in turn – from Salford to Sao Paulo - Clubbing, Bars and Cafes, Gay Area and so on, regardless of whether cafes or homosexuality have the same meaning, status, structural place etc in those other cultures. Meanwhile, whatever excremental remainders don’t correspond to this invariable pattern can be left to the locals or the academics.
The tourists needn’t worry, however. In the centre of Dublin, not too far from Trinity College, there's a ruined vaguely Celtic looking monument, a fragment of Ancient Ireland miraculously poking through the urban fabric, reproaching the Present with the repressed Otherness of the dark past. Except it is nothing of the kind. A local historian, Lorcan Collins, tells me that it was constructed quite recently, presumably to meet the expectant gaze of visitors, for whom Ireland is still haunted by semi-Pagan energies, a place full of ruins and inconsolable melancholy, albeit covered over by bluff and blarney.
Thus, as if parodying the received version of the Hegelian dialectic, wherein things gradually approach their Concept, each place visited will gradually and obligingly approximate to the tourist's Misconception of it, and the Culturally Myopic will turn out after all to have been the most far-sighted visionaries.
n.b., just to clarify, there are of course no Time Out guides to Sao Paulo or to Salford.
‘It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different’.
The John Travolta character, who articulates this ‘theory’, goes on to point out a number of such ‘little differences’ including ‘Le Big Mac’- same burger but with a wee Gallic addition, essential sameness but with a little topping of ‘French-icity’. It could equally be ‘Italianicity’ or whatever, just some little twist, flavour or style to be registered and consumed before moving on. The idea here is of the Europeans, or whoever, perversely adding some small nuance or inversion or behavioural shift in order to differentiate themselves from what is, after all, the Norm, the U.S. This was indeed brought home to me, again, by one of my American students who reckoned that the British drove on the left hand side of the road ‘just to be different from the U.S’. - History and cultural humility are thereby dispatched with the speed of a stray thought, and the way in which reality is experienced is mistaken for a property of the thing itself. For the tourist, ‘Experience’ in the sense of novelty and momentary shocks are libidinal goals in their own right and do not have to cede the initiative to the labour of knowledge. Nor can they, if the tourist is to ‘fit it all in’. Of course, this idea of cultural difference is hardly peculiar to the U.S. One finds something similar, perhaps, in the Time Out city guides, in which the same basic template is, like a 'cookie cutter', imposed on each place in turn – from Salford to Sao Paulo - Clubbing, Bars and Cafes, Gay Area and so on, regardless of whether cafes or homosexuality have the same meaning, status, structural place etc in those other cultures. Meanwhile, whatever excremental remainders don’t correspond to this invariable pattern can be left to the locals or the academics.
The tourists needn’t worry, however. In the centre of Dublin, not too far from Trinity College, there's a ruined vaguely Celtic looking monument, a fragment of Ancient Ireland miraculously poking through the urban fabric, reproaching the Present with the repressed Otherness of the dark past. Except it is nothing of the kind. A local historian, Lorcan Collins, tells me that it was constructed quite recently, presumably to meet the expectant gaze of visitors, for whom Ireland is still haunted by semi-Pagan energies, a place full of ruins and inconsolable melancholy, albeit covered over by bluff and blarney.
Thus, as if parodying the received version of the Hegelian dialectic, wherein things gradually approach their Concept, each place visited will gradually and obligingly approximate to the tourist's Misconception of it, and the Culturally Myopic will turn out after all to have been the most far-sighted visionaries.
n.b., just to clarify, there are of course no Time Out guides to Sao Paulo or to Salford.
On Form II
I forgot to add in the previous post that Hegel's Aesthetics can be found online here.
Also, In fact, the most fascinating of Hegel’s reflections on the concept of the concept occurs a little further on in the Aesthetics (p.22) in a discussion of the Idea of the Beautiful, where he speaks of the need to think beyond the ‘the emptiness, which clings to the Platonic idea’. The Platonic Idea is ‘empty’ in that it seems to have no describable positive content. It is an immobile Standard, never fully present in individual phenomenon but against which any individual beautiful thing can be judged and found wanting. For Hegel, however, the relation between universal and particular is altogether more immanent:
‘..in accordance with its own Concept, it [Idea of the Beautiful] has to develop into a totality of specifications, and it itself, like its exposition, contains the necessity of its particularizations and of their progress and transition into one another; on the other hand, the particularizations, to which a transition has been made, carry in themselves the universality and essentiality of the concept.’
Again, Hegel seems to imply that the concept is, so to speak, the blueprint for its own unfolding, or at least contains that blueprint. It ‘contains the necessity of its particularisations’. This ‘syntax' of particularisation, the necessary lines and branches mapped out by the Particulars, these constitute the concept, so that the question of the ‘relation’ between Particular and conceptual Universal is suddenly reframed. Is this formulation of the relation between particulars and universals not itself an aesthetic one?
What I mean by that last remark is that the 'aesthetic' is one name for what's happening when particulars do not simply & indifferently 'illustrate' some greater whole but, instead, the whole just is the constellation formed by the particulars.
Friday, August 27, 2004
On Form
From the last (but one) post: "[fascism is] a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way."
A couple of thoughts on the concept of ‘form’: on the one hand 'form' refers to something merely apparent, as when we say ‘x took the form of y’ - for example, if someone were to say, ‘his anti-Semitism took the form of a violent animosity towards all things Israeli’. Here ‘form’ is an inessential appearance. On the other hand, 'form' refers to something like the inner structure, the essential workings – we might say ‘all Shakespeare’s sonnets have the same form despite the differences in content’ Or one thinks of the Heideggerian argument that Communism and Capitalist Democracy have the same form (the same technological hubris) despite stated ideological differences. Thus, on the one hand form refers to semblance, on the other hand to ‘essence’, or inner structure. One meaning seems to flip over into its exact opposite. The response to this ambivalence is not to concede that these are simply two different meanings, two different notions, but rather to ask what it is about the notion of form that produces this split. The ‘disposition’ toward these two contradictory meanings must in some sense be folded back into the notion itself.
The above might well be extended to thinking about Concepts in general. The sense that the ‘unfolding’ of the concept is internal to the concept itself can be related to this statement from Hegel:
The concept is the universal which maintains itself in its particulars (Aesthetics I, p.13)
Note the force of that ‘maintains’: isn’t the implication that the concept lives only in and through its ‘particularizations’, that it sustains and 'explicates' itself through these particulars, rather than being some rigid and invariable template. The Concept is nothing more than the very logic of this unfolding. This would in turn cause us to rethink Adorno’s philosophical ‘credo’quoted by me in another post:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
(Young Hegelian has some interesting thoughts on the above, here.)
A couple of thoughts on the concept of ‘form’: on the one hand 'form' refers to something merely apparent, as when we say ‘x took the form of y’ - for example, if someone were to say, ‘his anti-Semitism took the form of a violent animosity towards all things Israeli’. Here ‘form’ is an inessential appearance. On the other hand, 'form' refers to something like the inner structure, the essential workings – we might say ‘all Shakespeare’s sonnets have the same form despite the differences in content’ Or one thinks of the Heideggerian argument that Communism and Capitalist Democracy have the same form (the same technological hubris) despite stated ideological differences. Thus, on the one hand form refers to semblance, on the other hand to ‘essence’, or inner structure. One meaning seems to flip over into its exact opposite. The response to this ambivalence is not to concede that these are simply two different meanings, two different notions, but rather to ask what it is about the notion of form that produces this split. The ‘disposition’ toward these two contradictory meanings must in some sense be folded back into the notion itself.
The above might well be extended to thinking about Concepts in general. The sense that the ‘unfolding’ of the concept is internal to the concept itself can be related to this statement from Hegel:
The concept is the universal which maintains itself in its particulars (Aesthetics I, p.13)
Note the force of that ‘maintains’: isn’t the implication that the concept lives only in and through its ‘particularizations’, that it sustains and 'explicates' itself through these particulars, rather than being some rigid and invariable template. The Concept is nothing more than the very logic of this unfolding. This would in turn cause us to rethink Adorno’s philosophical ‘credo’quoted by me in another post:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
(Young Hegelian has some interesting thoughts on the above, here.)
Morning Reading
Just a few interesting items:
1. On Homophobia, Universalism and related issues. (check out the links - & esp. the Guardian letters)
2. Bush and lying
3. I'm with the cleaner on this one.
4. Some further thoughts on 'fascism' (Lenin's Tomb)
5. via the always interesting Wood's Lot, this interview with Jacques Derrida
6. Zizek on Timothy Garton Ash
1. On Homophobia, Universalism and related issues. (check out the links - & esp. the Guardian letters)
2. Bush and lying
3. I'm with the cleaner on this one.
4. Some further thoughts on 'fascism' (Lenin's Tomb)
5. via the always interesting Wood's Lot, this interview with Jacques Derrida
6. Zizek on Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Kamm's Tortoise
The great elephant that was Oliver Kamm’s discussion of ‘Fascism and the Left’ turns out to have been standing on nothing more substantial than the following fragile tortoise:
The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national [An utterly rebarbative hyphenation] radical Third Way."
The idea that Fascism is primarily a ‘form of thought’ [a form of thought??], i.e., that it is primarily a matter of ideas, is - to say the least - highly contentious/ culpably incomplete; the irony, of course, is that it is just this idea, a frankly idealist one, that a Left analysis would want to contest and, I would argue, it just this error that a left analysis is able to correct. Even in its own terms (which are false) it is dubious – if Fascism preached the need for ‘rebirth’ one surely needs to qualify this by pointing out that this typically took the rhetorical form of a ‘return to roots’, pseudo-atavistic appeals to ‘Blut und Boden’ and so on. (For some reason Shelley’s proto-fascist lines “the world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return” just popped into my head.)
Kamm continues: ‘The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism.’ And the redundancy of it is that it is unusably broad, yokes together inherently diverse phenomena and fails completely to address the historical specificity of fascism; perhaps worse, it makes fascism itself sound rather innocuous. Of course, all this could also be seen, depending on your point of view as a ‘value’, in that emptying fascism of precise intellectual and historical content also frees it up for all kinds of rhetorical and polemical trickery.
The second point I intended making was that Kamm, in his eagerness to glue together an argument, had quoted without comment an embarrassing piece of whimsy by one Jeffrey Ketland, who refers casually to ‘the post-modern literature’ as if this were an uncontroversial and understood canon, rather than a watery pseudo-conceptual solution in which Foucault’s thinking can be painlessly dissolved. . Anyway, it now seems that a number of Kamm’s correspondents, including his own brother, have alerted him to the fact that Ketland may not have been rowing with both oars in the water (the one oar being knowledge, the other analytical rigour). What I will add is that the phrase quoted by Ketland regarding Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of the Iranian revolution (‘political spirituality’) is exactly the phrase that appears if you type ‘Foucault’ and ‘Iranian revolution’ into Google. Now this may well be a coincidence, as might the fact that Ketland makes no attempt to allude to the original context of this phrase. For those of you genuinely interested in the matter (as opposed to those seeking only polemical returns on their cursory reading investment) see Foucault, 'A quoi revent les Iraniens?' in Dits et Ecrits (1978) and the interview translated as 'Questions of Method' , in (I think) the 'Power' volume of Penguin’s Essential Works. Anyway, restored to its context the phrase has nothing to do with anything that is specifically Islamic, quite the contrary, and is meant, I think, have a faintly provocative ring to it. Frankly, I don’t care if Ketland is a ‘philosopher’ -whatever rubric/ title he goes under isn’t prepotent enough to lend his argument any legitimacy.
Kamm however has an even more egregiously vapid interlocutor up his sleeve, one who has wisely remained anonymous after less than wisely offering the following pearl:
‘Just like the fascists, the New Left also work on the basis of assertion and resolution - there is no truth, so we must allow people to define their own and follow through the results.’
The ‘assertion’ with which this worthless proposition ends is ascribable to neither the New Left nor to Fascism. Fascism is hardly renowned for epistemological relativism and epistemological relativism has no one political consequence (on thinks of Richard Rorty’s liberalism), but in any case, the ‘New Left’ are not defined by such a stance, so it matters little.
So there we are, Kamm’s tortoise is belly up and, for what its worth, only historical materialism can stand it back on its feet. The following thoughts on fascism are by one of its victims, Walter Benjamin, who was sure also that historical materialism could ‘win every time’ in thinking about mankind’s protracted endgame. These musings represent not an exhaustive definition (of course), but an eloquent and arresting starting point, and a view of the fascist catastrophe as it appeared to a man ‘singled out by history at a moment of danger’:
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fiihrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
Benjamin knew that one should not do fascism the courtesy of taking it at its word (its 'ideas').
(For a critique of ideas based theories of fascism, see the text cited at the end of this post).
27/8 Actually, if one examines Eatwell's words, notice that the ‘forging of national unity’ is primary and the ‘thought’ of ‘social rebirth’ etc is only instrumental in procuring that goal. Thus the ideology of fascism (in this definition) serves an end external to itself. How this sheds light on the SWP is not clear.
Red Ink
This article on the potential 'ban' on red ink in certain American universities is a good example of a rudimentary semiotic error. Anyway, it reminded me, quite arbitrarily, of one of Zizek's nice little jokes:
In an old joke from the German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter from me is written in blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink..."
In an old joke from the German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter from me is written in blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink..."
(Zizek goes on: Is this not how ideology functions? We "feel free", now as then, when we lack the language - "the red ink" - to articulate our unfreedom. It is the basic task of critical art and culture to provide the red ink. )
Vending Machine
Why, I am asked by a reader, do I have such disdain for journalists. I don't, but let me clarify. There are some very good political and literary journalists – see the links column. One the other hand, I do think there is more than a grain of truth in the words of Georg Lukacs:
The specialised ‘virtuoso ‘, the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties [..] This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.
[See here - scroll down]
So, not journalists qua journalists, but journalists qua apogee of capitalist reification, vending machines of their own processed emotions and opinions.
n.b. I wonder whether, potentially, the weblog opens up a space outside the logic of journalism (- where is not merely an adjunct to journalism (e.g. Pollard) or a failed aspirant.)
(Adorno, comments thus on the Lukacs passage:
Under a priori saleeability the living has made itself, as something living, a thing, equipment. [..] All that is left are the light, rigid, empty husks of emotions, matter transportable at will, deviod of anything personal.)
The specialised ‘virtuoso ‘, the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties [..] This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.
[See here - scroll down]
So, not journalists qua journalists, but journalists qua apogee of capitalist reification, vending machines of their own processed emotions and opinions.
n.b. I wonder whether, potentially, the weblog opens up a space outside the logic of journalism (- where is not merely an adjunct to journalism (e.g. Pollard) or a failed aspirant.)
(Adorno, comments thus on the Lukacs passage:
Under a priori saleeability the living has made itself, as something living, a thing, equipment. [..] All that is left are the light, rigid, empty husks of emotions, matter transportable at will, deviod of anything personal.)
Team of Substitutes
What Glueboot says here is spot on:
football... have been reading football message boards for work recently. I find it strange that when a player is a member of a certain team the fans love him and when he leaves they no longer care. It seems that the people do not exist, just the signifier of the team name with transient bodies moving in and out. The driving force behind the movement of players is shifts in capital... 'I have more money so I will buy the better players,' little to do with the actual home city of the team. All the emotion of it comes from the fans... their emotion driven by the capital that shifts the transient bodies between different signifiers. Is football real? I think maybe not.
All I would add is that that the logic at work here - of transient, substitutable bodies bearing larger symbolic mandates; the abstract and determining logic of capital replacing any sense of local attachment etc, the atavistic and necessary libidinal glue (the fans' "emotion") - is hardly peculiar to football. Indeed, if you tinker with the above a fraction you could have quite a nice little social allegory.
n.b., The 'symbolic mandate' of the 'team name' is most obviously incarnate in 'the shirt', as when you say 'he's not fit to wear the shirt'. The shirt incarnates 'the team' which is never synonymous with its actual players. 'The team' is, so to speak, endlessly reincarnated in these flesh and blood individuals.
football... have been reading football message boards for work recently. I find it strange that when a player is a member of a certain team the fans love him and when he leaves they no longer care. It seems that the people do not exist, just the signifier of the team name with transient bodies moving in and out. The driving force behind the movement of players is shifts in capital... 'I have more money so I will buy the better players,' little to do with the actual home city of the team. All the emotion of it comes from the fans... their emotion driven by the capital that shifts the transient bodies between different signifiers. Is football real? I think maybe not.
All I would add is that that the logic at work here - of transient, substitutable bodies bearing larger symbolic mandates; the abstract and determining logic of capital replacing any sense of local attachment etc, the atavistic and necessary libidinal glue (the fans' "emotion") - is hardly peculiar to football. Indeed, if you tinker with the above a fraction you could have quite a nice little social allegory.
n.b., The 'symbolic mandate' of the 'team name' is most obviously incarnate in 'the shirt', as when you say 'he's not fit to wear the shirt'. The shirt incarnates 'the team' which is never synonymous with its actual players. 'The team' is, so to speak, endlessly reincarnated in these flesh and blood individuals.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
One more cup of coffee for the road
Recently some stray anecdote (here) about one of my students lamenting the absence of Starbucks in Italy has been posted on various (often unrelated) sites, leaping through cyberspace like an overcaffeinated meme, sending my ‘hits’ though the (albeit bungalow level) roof. This has completely scrambled the site profile, creating a sudden illusion of immense popularity, and brought me to the verge of removing said anecdote. It is perhaps a little sad that this random piece of chit-chat has become the most read (?) item on my web log. One can only hope these thousands of casual drop-ins managed to comb through the stuff on Guy Debord which preceded the story and are now taking to the streets mouthing Situationist slogans. Anyway, perhaps more sadly predictable is the lengthy discussion of this bit of gossip on Crooked Timbre, which immediately turned into a debate as to the pros and cons of Starbucks, with one contributor vigorously pleading the giant corporation’s case, arguing that the whole issue was inextricably bound up with perceptions of America. At this point I was compelled to intervene:
May I remind you also that the original post did not constitute an attack on Starbucks, making the direction taken by the subsequent discussion somewhat revealing. The eagerness to ‘defend’ what in any case was not been attacked would seem to smack of paranoia.
In fact, it wasn’t simply ‘paranoia’ that curved the discussion in this direction, it was a pre-existing set of preconceptions and conflations, the most obvious being the buttoning of the signifier ‘Starbucks’ to ‘America’ as signified. I quote: “Starbucks’ fame is inseparably intertwined with its Americanness and people’s impression of what an American brand will offer them.” that someone should feel she has something invested, personally, in defending a mutinational corporations is......... well, just file under ‘Example of successful ideological interpellation.' Thank you for your time.
May I remind you also that the original post did not constitute an attack on Starbucks, making the direction taken by the subsequent discussion somewhat revealing. The eagerness to ‘defend’ what in any case was not been attacked would seem to smack of paranoia.
In fact, it wasn’t simply ‘paranoia’ that curved the discussion in this direction, it was a pre-existing set of preconceptions and conflations, the most obvious being the buttoning of the signifier ‘Starbucks’ to ‘America’ as signified. I quote: “Starbucks’ fame is inseparably intertwined with its Americanness and people’s impression of what an American brand will offer them.” that someone should feel she has something invested, personally, in defending a mutinational corporations is......... well, just file under ‘Example of successful ideological interpellation.' Thank you for your time.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Eloquent Silence
When does language speak itself as language? Curiously, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without really giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential Being . (Heidegger)
Again, absence is the highest form of presence – only when the rug is pulled from under me is its existence really disclosed in its specificity. We are suddenly, when we stammer and pause, in a position to gauge the difference language makes, the revelation that if we cannot name something there is a real sense in which we do not have it. Language, the binding force of the name, therefore brings things into our ‘owning’.
To say, for example, 'mountain' is to bring the mountain itself towards us out of the seamless continuum of the visible. Henceforth, when we look at a mountain it is silhouetted with this insubstantial word. Our gaze is afflicted with the frames of language.
'Language has been called the house of Being, it is the keeper of being present..’ Think of Wittgenstein’s famous example – the dog can anticipate its master’s return, sure, but not that its master will return in a week. And why? Because it does not have language. But this then means that in a certain sense Time - specifically here the Present, set over against the horizon of the coming week - can only appear to us (Dasein), to the language user and not to the ‘poor-in-world’ dog. The Present is in this case a kind of privative category – a cleft has opened up separating the ‘now’ from ‘a week’s time’ and the present is defined as the point of that opening up. The present = the beginning of that week interval. All this shows itself only to the language-animal.
Again, absence is the highest form of presence – only when the rug is pulled from under me is its existence really disclosed in its specificity. We are suddenly, when we stammer and pause, in a position to gauge the difference language makes, the revelation that if we cannot name something there is a real sense in which we do not have it. Language, the binding force of the name, therefore brings things into our ‘owning’.
To say, for example, 'mountain' is to bring the mountain itself towards us out of the seamless continuum of the visible. Henceforth, when we look at a mountain it is silhouetted with this insubstantial word. Our gaze is afflicted with the frames of language.
'Language has been called the house of Being, it is the keeper of being present..’ Think of Wittgenstein’s famous example – the dog can anticipate its master’s return, sure, but not that its master will return in a week. And why? Because it does not have language. But this then means that in a certain sense Time - specifically here the Present, set over against the horizon of the coming week - can only appear to us (Dasein), to the language user and not to the ‘poor-in-world’ dog. The Present is in this case a kind of privative category – a cleft has opened up separating the ‘now’ from ‘a week’s time’ and the present is defined as the point of that opening up. The present = the beginning of that week interval. All this shows itself only to the language-animal.
Antique Map
Two isolated farmsteads [..] separated by an hour’s walk across the fields, can be the best of neighbours, while two townhouses, facing each other across the street or even sharing a common wall, know no neighbourhood. Neighbouring nearness, then, does not depend on spatial-temporal relation (Heidegger)
Thoughts on Neighbourhood:
A neighbourhood can of course be defined in terms of parametrical distance (square miles) or whatever, but what constitutes it as neighbourhood is not empty physical space but a network of relations. This network of relations comes first and is then calculated using metre or miles etc. One might say: okay, this neighbourhood is four square miles, it extends as far as the lake in the southwest. And one says this as though one has now precisely fixed and defined that neighbourhood, whereas of course the neighbourhood is not and cannot be defined by these terms. We might say there is a confusion of measuring and defining. It is if the question of what defined the neighbourhood could be referred to a ‘boundary commission’ . Too often, philosophers are simply boundary commissioners. And philosophical questions are treated as boundary disputes
All objectifying knowledge [...] is preceded by a relation of belonging upon which we can never entirely reflect. (Riceour)
If I understand it aright, objective (scientific) calculation and measurement take their cue from - and ultimately serve - circumspective involvement in the world. They re-present mathematically spaces (or whatever) already ‘mapped out’ through concern. A road map, for example, is the bare calibration, the empty ‘x-ray’ of our concernful dealings with a region.
Thoughts on Neighbourhood:
A neighbourhood can of course be defined in terms of parametrical distance (square miles) or whatever, but what constitutes it as neighbourhood is not empty physical space but a network of relations. This network of relations comes first and is then calculated using metre or miles etc. One might say: okay, this neighbourhood is four square miles, it extends as far as the lake in the southwest. And one says this as though one has now precisely fixed and defined that neighbourhood, whereas of course the neighbourhood is not and cannot be defined by these terms. We might say there is a confusion of measuring and defining. It is if the question of what defined the neighbourhood could be referred to a ‘boundary commission’ . Too often, philosophers are simply boundary commissioners. And philosophical questions are treated as boundary disputes
All objectifying knowledge [...] is preceded by a relation of belonging upon which we can never entirely reflect. (Riceour)
If I understand it aright, objective (scientific) calculation and measurement take their cue from - and ultimately serve - circumspective involvement in the world. They re-present mathematically spaces (or whatever) already ‘mapped out’ through concern. A road map, for example, is the bare calibration, the empty ‘x-ray’ of our concernful dealings with a region.
Open Cabinet
The perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it. (Heidegger)
But how attractive of course to the subject is the notion, the picture, of such a ‘cabinet,’ a treasure hoard of sense-impressions and sovereign reflections, each one bearing with it the hallmark of ownership (I ‘have’ these impressions/ experiences). The connotations here are of the pleasure of possession; one’s thoughts and reflections are like hoarded objects, the ‘objects’ of a collection. And how disconcerting, by contrast, to think of one’s precious lumber out there in the thick of things, contaminated and disseminated in worldly contact.
And yet in truth, is it not the worldly 'contamination' that comes first? Is not the Self first of all contaminated, intricated in things and people, and could not the booty of consciousness be seen, in part, as an unmetabolised remainder mistaking itself for an Essence??
But how attractive of course to the subject is the notion, the picture, of such a ‘cabinet,’ a treasure hoard of sense-impressions and sovereign reflections, each one bearing with it the hallmark of ownership (I ‘have’ these impressions/ experiences). The connotations here are of the pleasure of possession; one’s thoughts and reflections are like hoarded objects, the ‘objects’ of a collection. And how disconcerting, by contrast, to think of one’s precious lumber out there in the thick of things, contaminated and disseminated in worldly contact.
And yet in truth, is it not the worldly 'contamination' that comes first? Is not the Self first of all contaminated, intricated in things and people, and could not the booty of consciousness be seen, in part, as an unmetabolised remainder mistaking itself for an Essence??
Monday, August 23, 2004
Left in Pieces
[slightly modified 24/8]
As this excellent article makes clear, a colophon can be as good as a concept, and a concept little more than a colophon....
The phantasmatic comb of ‘The Death of the Left’ continues to be fought over by various ideological baldies. Nonetheless, perhaps Nick Cohen’s assertion that the Left has no ‘coherent message of hope’ is little more than a truism. Can one really expect what is in reality a globally heterogeneous collection of movements to have a single ‘message’? And what exactly would ‘a message of hope' look like? When did the left (singular) have such a ‘message’? How did it fare in the marketplace of messages? But when you ask these kind of questions, you realise that trying to analyse Cohen’s argument is about as productive as trying to tune in to the Olympics on a microwave. Anyway, might not this very ‘incoherence’ be itself an interesting symptom rather than a moral failing (an always suspect argument), as this – from a John Berger piece on subcommandante Marcos - suggests:
On the one hand, the new order does away with frontiers and distances bythe instantaneous telecommunication of exchanges and deals, by obligatoryfree-trade zones (such as the North American Free Trade Association) andby the imposition everywhere of the single unquestionable law of the market; and, on the other hand, it provokes fragmentation and the proliferation of frontiers by its undermining of the nation state - for example, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc. "A world of brokenmirrors," writes Marcos, "reflecting the useless unity of the neo-liberalpuzzle."
The seventh piece of the puzzle has the shape of a pocket, and consists of all the various pockets of resistance against the new order that are developing across the globe. The Zapatistas in southeast Mexico are one such pocket. Others, in different circumstances, have not necessarily chosen armed resistance. The many pockets do not have a common political programme as such. How could they, existing as they do in the brokenpuzzle? Yet their heterogeneity may be a promise. What they have in common is their defence of the redundant, the next-to-be-eliminated.... The seven pieces will never fit together to make any sense. This lack of sense, this absurdity, is endemic to the new order
When I think of hope and the Left I think of many things, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin for example, not necessarily ‘messages’ if by that you mean something that would fit on a billboard. But something that could indeed fit on a billboard is Antonio Gramsci’s’s: “pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” One way of reading this might be that 'hope' bypasses the register of 'messages' altogether, that hope exists precisely inspite of the messages registered by the intellect. Within the available categories, within the available consensus of what is legitimate, hope is itself 'incoherent', perverse, stubborn.
n.b., At the weekend I watched the old Lubitsch film To be Or Not To Be. Those of you who have seen it will doubtless remember the episode where an affected Polish thespian is called on to impersonate the Gestapo officer Erhardt as part of a clandestine operation. He does so in an overly-theatrical way with an uber-complacent bearing and loud aggressive laughter. We assume this is a grotesque parody, until later, when the real Erdhart appears and turns out to be exactly the same as his imitation – exaggerated gestures, belligerent guffaws etc. Some things preempt parody. Well, here is a completely unrelated item.
30/8 A critical but not unsympathetic review of the Berger essay mentioned above can be found here.
Sunday, August 22, 2004
Beyond the Touchline
The words spoken in jest at the end of the previous post, turn out to have been true.
There are at least two ways of supporting a football team. One is to choose a team, according to success or style of play, or even because ‘everyone else’ does. To my mind this is precisely not supporting a football team, but supporting ‘success’, ‘popularity’ etc. The other way consists in a kind of curse inflicted on one at an early age, a throw of the die that one cannot actually remember but which in any case determines one’s allegiance forever. In this second instance, you find yourself wishing you did not support the team in question, you wish you were indifferent to how they are performing, even as your hand reaches for the T.V., just out of curiosity you understand - before curiosity turns to quiet elation or frustrated disappointment. You can tell yourself you are no longer particularly bothered about football, that your choice of this team is in any case arbitrary, that practically none of the players even come from your home town. These nice observations are useless, the protestations in vain, for all are casually refuted when, driving back from a country walk on a Saturday afternoon, you find yourself asking your friend to put the radio on.
Anyway, as with the ‘unregistered letters’ post, I invite the reader to use the above as a metaphor for/ example of any one of a number of things.
There are at least two ways of supporting a football team. One is to choose a team, according to success or style of play, or even because ‘everyone else’ does. To my mind this is precisely not supporting a football team, but supporting ‘success’, ‘popularity’ etc. The other way consists in a kind of curse inflicted on one at an early age, a throw of the die that one cannot actually remember but which in any case determines one’s allegiance forever. In this second instance, you find yourself wishing you did not support the team in question, you wish you were indifferent to how they are performing, even as your hand reaches for the T.V., just out of curiosity you understand - before curiosity turns to quiet elation or frustrated disappointment. You can tell yourself you are no longer particularly bothered about football, that your choice of this team is in any case arbitrary, that practically none of the players even come from your home town. These nice observations are useless, the protestations in vain, for all are casually refuted when, driving back from a country walk on a Saturday afternoon, you find yourself asking your friend to put the radio on.
Anyway, as with the ‘unregistered letters’ post, I invite the reader to use the above as a metaphor for/ example of any one of a number of things.
X marks the knot.
Translation. For Walter Benjamin, in moving between two languages, or standing in the second and susceptibly attuned to echoes from the first, we somehow sense a ‘pure language’ prior to both. According to some readings this ‘pure language’ is no more than a kind of necessary fiction needed to account for the very ability to translate. It enables us to measure the distances between languages and maybe between language and the reality.
Anyway, some related thoughts, occasioned by the previous post on Adorno in English:
In attempting to translate a text from say French, one of course first consults the existing translations. Say there are three of these, three ‘approximations’. None of these approximations is quite ‘it’; the variations are all failed answers, and unavoidably so.
Imagine, then, that you do not have the original text but only the 3 translations and their variations. One is able to sense the ‘conundrum’, the hard knot of the untranslatable 'X' responsible for these variations – one infers the ‘Real’ of the ur-text through the necessary failures, the ‘disturbances on the surface', of the translations.
Is this not close to being a nice metaphor for what Lacan means by the Real – that which resists being translated - not, now, into one particular language, but into language per se. Each deflected attempt to translate, to bring to Symbolic articulation, attests to a stubborn ‘X’ responsible for those very deflections.
The next post will be on football.
Anyway, some related thoughts, occasioned by the previous post on Adorno in English:
In attempting to translate a text from say French, one of course first consults the existing translations. Say there are three of these, three ‘approximations’. None of these approximations is quite ‘it’; the variations are all failed answers, and unavoidably so.
Imagine, then, that you do not have the original text but only the 3 translations and their variations. One is able to sense the ‘conundrum’, the hard knot of the untranslatable 'X' responsible for these variations – one infers the ‘Real’ of the ur-text through the necessary failures, the ‘disturbances on the surface', of the translations.
Is this not close to being a nice metaphor for what Lacan means by the Real – that which resists being translated - not, now, into one particular language, but into language per se. Each deflected attempt to translate, to bring to Symbolic articulation, attests to a stubborn ‘X’ responsible for those very deflections.
The next post will be on football.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
A Note on Adorno
As part of his response to my post on individuality, the Young Hegelian rightly remembers Adorno's words:
"No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising."
Negative Dialectics, from which this is taken currently exists in an English translation by E.B. Ashton. This has been severely crticised by, among others, Fredric Jameson for glaring errors, a seeming unfamiliarity with basic Marxist categories and so on. Anyway, I've recently discovered alternative online translations of the book, in whole or in part. See here and here.
This, from the second of these translations, is Adorno's view of Philosophy's current proper concern:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
n.b. It is not that these other translations are necessarily always better; more that moving between these three translations seems to trace a kind of negative outline of their common source. It's as if we can read backwards from the 'misses' that which they have failed to hit.
"No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising."
Negative Dialectics, from which this is taken currently exists in an English translation by E.B. Ashton. This has been severely crticised by, among others, Fredric Jameson for glaring errors, a seeming unfamiliarity with basic Marxist categories and so on. Anyway, I've recently discovered alternative online translations of the book, in whole or in part. See here and here.
This, from the second of these translations, is Adorno's view of Philosophy's current proper concern:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
n.b. It is not that these other translations are necessarily always better; more that moving between these three translations seems to trace a kind of negative outline of their common source. It's as if we can read backwards from the 'misses' that which they have failed to hit.
Naming Names
My grandfather was a welder in Bradford when he joined the army as a private in the Second World War. He has told me of vigorous discussions about revolutionary socialism with fellow privates. Some of them were reading Marx. The doors of history seem to have swung shut on such meetings, at least here and for the time being, but my grandfather has remained a socialist, in a way that Tony Blair et al would find merely embarrassing. The auld fella has ‘failed to move with the times’ but then, the mere drift of time is hardly a moral compass. I can remember some of the political discussions he would have with my uncle, who was then a bank clerk. A familiar charge against Socialism was that it involved inertias of bureaucracy. Capitalism, as we are told, does away with bureaucracy. My grandfather would point out that capitalism indeed had a vast bureaucracy – what are banks but the bureaucracy of capitalism by another name. In this he was uncannily (and unknowingly, I might add) close to Lenin: ‘Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employee unions.’
Perhaps, then, one of the tasks of radical thought must address this question of names. What is ‘advertising’ for example, but corporate propaganda? Certainly the term ‘advertising’ is euphemistic nonsense, a kind of linguistic decoy. In truth, we are continually assailed with messages that have a palpable design on us. We are definitely not dealing with the disinterested transparency of ‘information’. It is scarcely information at all, since it offers us nothing as to the use-value or production details of its wares, instead turning these wares into signifiers of immaterial values, attaching cultural tags to them (‘coolness’ ‘masculinity’ ‘bourgeois sophistication’ or whatever), bumping up exchange value by reference to Symbolic Value and, in short, extending a promise that it neither can nor wishes to fulfil.
Take another example. ‘Governments skim off our earned wealth through taxation; this differentiates them from businesses which have no such power’. But what is the capitalist’s surplus value but a ‘skimming off’ of the wealth the worker has created. What we must do, then, is to strip things of their familiar names, which have merged with what they name and so taken on a spurious objectivity. Truth can only be arrived at through the violent act of renaming, ‘unnatural’ to Common Sense, where common sense is just solidified ideology - historical distortions that have become ‘second nature’ and consequently forgotten. It was Proust who said: “If God and the Father created things by naming them, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that the artist recreates them.” And so we might rewrite this as: If Ideology has created our present ‘reality’ by conflating things with their names, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that radical thinking opens up the world for transformation. The first baptism, however, must be to name capitalism itself – for the absence of this name systematically muffles our ability to speak meaningfully of anything else.
Perhaps, then, one of the tasks of radical thought must address this question of names. What is ‘advertising’ for example, but corporate propaganda? Certainly the term ‘advertising’ is euphemistic nonsense, a kind of linguistic decoy. In truth, we are continually assailed with messages that have a palpable design on us. We are definitely not dealing with the disinterested transparency of ‘information’. It is scarcely information at all, since it offers us nothing as to the use-value or production details of its wares, instead turning these wares into signifiers of immaterial values, attaching cultural tags to them (‘coolness’ ‘masculinity’ ‘bourgeois sophistication’ or whatever), bumping up exchange value by reference to Symbolic Value and, in short, extending a promise that it neither can nor wishes to fulfil.
Take another example. ‘Governments skim off our earned wealth through taxation; this differentiates them from businesses which have no such power’. But what is the capitalist’s surplus value but a ‘skimming off’ of the wealth the worker has created. What we must do, then, is to strip things of their familiar names, which have merged with what they name and so taken on a spurious objectivity. Truth can only be arrived at through the violent act of renaming, ‘unnatural’ to Common Sense, where common sense is just solidified ideology - historical distortions that have become ‘second nature’ and consequently forgotten. It was Proust who said: “If God and the Father created things by naming them, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that the artist recreates them.” And so we might rewrite this as: If Ideology has created our present ‘reality’ by conflating things with their names, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that radical thinking opens up the world for transformation. The first baptism, however, must be to name capitalism itself – for the absence of this name systematically muffles our ability to speak meaningfully of anything else.
Friday, August 20, 2004
I is empty.
“For every person, with all his functions, society has a stand-in ready, to whom the former is in any case no more than an intrusive occupier of his workplace” (Adorno)
The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.
Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.
Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.
21/8 n.b. Lenin (this one, but probably the other one as well) is right that the very idea of the 'individual' needs to be interrogated and re-thought. For a start, see Raymond Williams here.
The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.
Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.
Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.
21/8 n.b. Lenin (this one, but probably the other one as well) is right that the very idea of the 'individual' needs to be interrogated and re-thought. For a start, see Raymond Williams here.
A Warning From History
'Whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should also be quiet about fascism'
The quote is from Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer was one of the Co-founders of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In 1933 the Institute was closed by the Nazis, and Horkheimer, along with other members of the institute, forced to emigrate. The Institute was deeply informed by Marxism and many of its leading members were Jewish. On both counts it was targeted by the Nazis.
It is worth remembering Horkheimer et al’s hard earned truths about fascism, won at cost in a moment of immense danger, when the demand for truth had a genuine, possibly fatal urgency. It is worth remembering because it has recently been strategically forgotten and in some cases turned upside down. ‘Fascism’ is being re-written. For one thing, the Right are trying to disown it, engaging in the most shocking revisionism and paralogical torsions imaginable. Attempts to identify Fascism with the Left even go so far as quoting Goebbels to the effect that ‘we are socialists’, prepared, that is, to regurgitate Nazi propaganda if it means scoring a point. (They do not of course quote explicitly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Marxist statements). On the other hand, the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘totalitarian’ are banded around like so much devalued currency, without any attempt to define them or to situate them historically but with much concern for their resonances and rhetorical effects. Terms like ‘Fascist Left’ ‘Clerical Fascism’ ‘Islamic Fascism’ may, conceivably, I suppose, have conceptual content. But it needs to be argued and argued with rigour and theoretical labour. The first and obvious step would be a discussion of what Fascism was/ is, and it is precisely this that I have failed to discover in the polemical labours of those who use the cited terms. What I have encountered is the insistent repetition of these terms, like an underaged drinker insistently knocking on the door of a nightclub: “please let me in to the received political vocabulary.”
The ‘miscreants’ responsible for these frankly tiresome abuses shall remain nameless. They have had too much publicity already, and the point here is not about individuals and their agendas. It is about what I sense to be a gradual re-writing of the political vocabulary and the political spectrum, the end result of which will be finally to write off whatever still remains of a genuine and radical Left.
21/8 An interesting review of Fascism: Theory and Practice, by Dave Renton, at Voice of the Turtle.
The quote is from Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer was one of the Co-founders of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In 1933 the Institute was closed by the Nazis, and Horkheimer, along with other members of the institute, forced to emigrate. The Institute was deeply informed by Marxism and many of its leading members were Jewish. On both counts it was targeted by the Nazis.
It is worth remembering Horkheimer et al’s hard earned truths about fascism, won at cost in a moment of immense danger, when the demand for truth had a genuine, possibly fatal urgency. It is worth remembering because it has recently been strategically forgotten and in some cases turned upside down. ‘Fascism’ is being re-written. For one thing, the Right are trying to disown it, engaging in the most shocking revisionism and paralogical torsions imaginable. Attempts to identify Fascism with the Left even go so far as quoting Goebbels to the effect that ‘we are socialists’, prepared, that is, to regurgitate Nazi propaganda if it means scoring a point. (They do not of course quote explicitly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Marxist statements). On the other hand, the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘totalitarian’ are banded around like so much devalued currency, without any attempt to define them or to situate them historically but with much concern for their resonances and rhetorical effects. Terms like ‘Fascist Left’ ‘Clerical Fascism’ ‘Islamic Fascism’ may, conceivably, I suppose, have conceptual content. But it needs to be argued and argued with rigour and theoretical labour. The first and obvious step would be a discussion of what Fascism was/ is, and it is precisely this that I have failed to discover in the polemical labours of those who use the cited terms. What I have encountered is the insistent repetition of these terms, like an underaged drinker insistently knocking on the door of a nightclub: “please let me in to the received political vocabulary.”
The ‘miscreants’ responsible for these frankly tiresome abuses shall remain nameless. They have had too much publicity already, and the point here is not about individuals and their agendas. It is about what I sense to be a gradual re-writing of the political vocabulary and the political spectrum, the end result of which will be finally to write off whatever still remains of a genuine and radical Left.
21/8 An interesting review of Fascism: Theory and Practice, by Dave Renton, at Voice of the Turtle.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Blaise Pascal d. 19th August 1662.
A thought comes when "it" will and not when "I" will. Thus it is a falsification of the evidence to say that the subject "I" conditions the predicate "think."
One should not conceal and corrupt the facts of how our thoughts have come to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees. (Nietzsche).
A thought, for Nietzsche, ought to take us by surprise, ambush us and our tired preconceptions. The image of thought here is of lightning, in search of tinder, suddenly blazing into our heads. It disarms and discomforts.
At the same time we should attend, listen if you like, to where thought comes from – all the roughness and unevenness of thought that is erased by the final polish of the essay. Thought should display, without shame, its obscure and troubled origins.
Reading Pascal, we can see, as well as a series of luminous insights the underlying movements of the thought which has generated those insights. Pascal is thinker who never forgets thinking itself: he attends not only to the content of the thoughts but is preoccupied with their specific shape and realises that, finally, shape and content ought not to be separable:
Words arranged differently have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. (23)
Pascal’s writing of course tends towards the aphoristic. Aphorisms trap thoughts, but the trap is set not by a grasping eagerness but by utter receptive openness to the event of thought. Pascal knew that, as Nietzsche later says, a thought comes when it wants rather than being consciously willedby an 'I'. It typically has its roots in shocks and transformations external to thought itself (travel would be an obvious example). Man is a ‘thinking reed’ blown by and answering a summons external to himself and forever already in place.
And indeed, despite Pascal being a lover of thought, its singular path, there is also a consistent stress on the non-intellectual non-cognitive nature of human behaviour, from which, as it were, thought must painfully rescue itself:
We are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter.
The notion of ‘mind’, as something wholly separable from the body, troubles Pascal: “’My mind is disquieted.’ ‘I am disquieted'would be better."
Strikingly, Pascal has been a key reference for modern theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Zizek. This is, superficially, surprising, considering Pascal’s religious ultra-orthodoxy. However, as Zizek has pointed out, Pascal reveals the paradoxical but eminently dialectical relation between the avant-garde and the archaic – the way in which the very resolute attempt to be faithful to the Old or ‘outmoded’ in new conditions produces the utterly innovative, the radically modern (more recently, much Modernism was itself this ‘archaic avant-garde’). The hungry seeker after newness, by contrast, produces only the same old thing over and over. The monotony of the merely new can be countered with the genuine difference of the past.
One should not conceal and corrupt the facts of how our thoughts have come to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees. (Nietzsche).
A thought, for Nietzsche, ought to take us by surprise, ambush us and our tired preconceptions. The image of thought here is of lightning, in search of tinder, suddenly blazing into our heads. It disarms and discomforts.
At the same time we should attend, listen if you like, to where thought comes from – all the roughness and unevenness of thought that is erased by the final polish of the essay. Thought should display, without shame, its obscure and troubled origins.
Reading Pascal, we can see, as well as a series of luminous insights the underlying movements of the thought which has generated those insights. Pascal is thinker who never forgets thinking itself: he attends not only to the content of the thoughts but is preoccupied with their specific shape and realises that, finally, shape and content ought not to be separable:
Words arranged differently have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. (23)
Pascal’s writing of course tends towards the aphoristic. Aphorisms trap thoughts, but the trap is set not by a grasping eagerness but by utter receptive openness to the event of thought. Pascal knew that, as Nietzsche later says, a thought comes when it wants rather than being consciously willedby an 'I'. It typically has its roots in shocks and transformations external to thought itself (travel would be an obvious example). Man is a ‘thinking reed’ blown by and answering a summons external to himself and forever already in place.
And indeed, despite Pascal being a lover of thought, its singular path, there is also a consistent stress on the non-intellectual non-cognitive nature of human behaviour, from which, as it were, thought must painfully rescue itself:
We are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter.
The notion of ‘mind’, as something wholly separable from the body, troubles Pascal: “’My mind is disquieted.’ ‘I am disquieted'would be better."
Strikingly, Pascal has been a key reference for modern theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Zizek. This is, superficially, surprising, considering Pascal’s religious ultra-orthodoxy. However, as Zizek has pointed out, Pascal reveals the paradoxical but eminently dialectical relation between the avant-garde and the archaic – the way in which the very resolute attempt to be faithful to the Old or ‘outmoded’ in new conditions produces the utterly innovative, the radically modern (more recently, much Modernism was itself this ‘archaic avant-garde’). The hungry seeker after newness, by contrast, produces only the same old thing over and over. The monotony of the merely new can be countered with the genuine difference of the past.
Homo Academicus
If any of you were wondering about my 'oblique and sceptical' relation to current academia, it partly has to do with issues touched on here, courtesy of here. It has to do with lots more besides, including some things, like the transformation of academics into bureaucrats, which are fairly recent developments, and and other things, such as the pitfalls of what Pierre Bourdieu (here, for example) calls 'Scholastic Reason', which I hope to post on in the future.
p.s. Regarding an earlier post on an interview with Negri, if anyone's interested it turns out that the entire text of Negri's Empire is available online, here! Some of Johann Hari's alarmingly casual slurs ('old terrorist' etc) are dealt with here.
p.s. Regarding an earlier post on an interview with Negri, if anyone's interested it turns out that the entire text of Negri's Empire is available online, here! Some of Johann Hari's alarmingly casual slurs ('old terrorist' etc) are dealt with here.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Baron Munchausen & Pierre Bourdieu
You will remember that Baron Munchausen, drowning without hope of rescue, so concentrates his mind that he pulls him self out of the swamp by his own hair. We, lacking the Munchausen option, have only the labour of critical thought.
One of Pierre Bourdieu’s most significant contributions to critical thinking was the notion of ‘illusio’. ‘Illusio’ is basically our libidinal and cognitive investment in a particular – historically contingent – form of life. From a removed point of view, this investment will always appear somewhat absurd:
“When you read, in Saint-Simon, about the quarrel of hats (who should bow first), if you were not born in a court society, if you do not possess the habitus of a person of the court, if the structures of the game are not also in your mind, the quarrel will seem futile and ridiculous to you.”
And so:
“Illusio is the fact of being interested in the game, of taking the game seriously, being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is “worth the candle”, or, more simply, that playing is worth the effort. [it is] to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes.”
Paradoxically, this means precisely not seeing it a as a ‘mere game’. Once you see it as a game you are already outside it, and the game loses its power to compel. Knowledge changes the thing known. Such ‘games’ would include, say, parliamentary politics, journalism, business meetings and, indeed, academia itself. It is evident that many of the props and rituals of these practices, the customary modes of address, the required rhetoric, the shibboleths and in-jokes, will one day appears as ridiculous as the game of the hats, cited by Bourdieu, does today. Our natural inclination, of course, is to see the game of the hats as quaint and costumed history, but our own way of doing things as just plain ‘natural’ or the ‘way things are’ and therefore just to get on with them. This attitude is illusio at its purest. So it is, that the mere fact that a form of life exists seems to be sufficient proof that it should, or, at least, its mere existence induces instant amnesia that it was ever otherwise.
But, to repeat: once you see such a form of life as a historically specific game with rules, you remove yourself, albeit by a fraction, from the ‘plane of what is'. You pull yourself out of the swamp. There is however a certain mode of removal which is mere lip service – it is of course called irony, and it is nothing more than a device allowing one to participate all the more effectively in the game. At the level of belief you make ironic jokes about it the futility of what you’re doing, but at the behavioural level you continue to act as if it were not simply a historically contingent game at all. Irony is thus a kind of false consciousness, a part of the game masquerading as critical commentary. What is needed today is an irony towards irony - which, i suppose is a bit like pulling yourself up by your own hair.
Morning Pages
I was a little intrigued to see that Norman Geras had a post entitled 'Nightmare on Charlotte Street'. My paranoia was unjustified - turns out its a rather amusing and exasperated review of one of those restaurants that sets itself up as an arbiter of cool/ social distinction. Coincidentally, I am familiar with the eatery in question and the glorified bouncer who guards the door, paid his pittance per hour to stand and signify 'exclusivity'. Rather than being crestfallen by his transformation into a signifier, he mistakes himself for an emanation of the thing signified. Perhaps I'll point this out to him.
I read (here) that Wittgenstein thought the old English expression 'it takes all sorts to make a world' a 'kind and goodly phrase'. And so it is. It would be churlish of me to cite this by way of qualification.
Elsewhere the Young Hegelian has some brief reflections on the invasion of public space by corporate propaganda and related matters.
I read (here) that Wittgenstein thought the old English expression 'it takes all sorts to make a world' a 'kind and goodly phrase'. And so it is. It would be churlish of me to cite this by way of qualification.
Elsewhere the Young Hegelian has some brief reflections on the invasion of public space by corporate propaganda and related matters.
Exhibit H.
I am no fan of Antonio Negri. But read this. An interview with Negri by Johann Hari. It reminds me, distantly, of Andrew Marr’s interview with Noam Chomsky - in each case a constitutional phrase-maker & professional Middle-Brow guilelessly locks horns with an actual thinker. And so, presented for our edification: the embarrassing spectacle of an interviewer who combines a complete ignorance of his interviewee’s work with a complete absence of intellectual humility; someone who evidently thinks that anything which can’t be immediately paraphrased into journalese must be pretentious or boring; someone who giggles when confronted with a Concept, as if it were a minor indiscretion; someone who would prefer to salute a ready made idea in passing rather than unpick a tightly woven argument; someone who spends the best part of an entire article – note, an interview with a respected thinker – gossiping about the circumstantial details of the interview itself whilst assiduously forgetting to engage with a single substantial Idea. But, perhaps most depressingly, someone who knows that his easy sneers at ‘the intellectual’ (the full armoury of stereotypes are indeed on display) will receive ready and immediate echo among his readership – and perhaps, beyond that, within the culture at large. There is a pre-existing field of presuppositions and ready-made images, into which Hari’s piece painlessly inserts itself, so lending it the brief illusion of substance. And without this field, Hari’s interview would stand revealed for what it is – a hollow and inconsequential exhibit in the Museum of Ideology.
(For some critical but informed thoughts on Negri, see here)
19/8: The Virtual Stoa has some interesting observations on Hari's methods. Also, while I'm on the subject, the closing remarks of the original Hari article:
So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.
- where, ingeniously, the chance geographical location of the Institute of Contemprary Arts serves as a whole argument in itself.
19/8 Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for a transcript of the Chomsky-Marr interview mentioned above.
(For some critical but informed thoughts on Negri, see here)
19/8: The Virtual Stoa has some interesting observations on Hari's methods. Also, while I'm on the subject, the closing remarks of the original Hari article:
So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.
- where, ingeniously, the chance geographical location of the Institute of Contemprary Arts serves as a whole argument in itself.
19/8 Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for a transcript of the Chomsky-Marr interview mentioned above.
Wrong Choice
Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child.
We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless
Adorno, Mimima Moralia
We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless
Adorno, Mimima Moralia
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
A Tribute to Bruno Schulz
History carries with it the dead weight of the unrealised. The present – the existence of the present – is simultaneously the suppression of untold possibilities, possibilities which somehow still exist, grown sick or bodiless, and which crowd in on us in unguarded moments or wait patiently in the recesses of dreams.
Bruno Schulz: few writers have felt so acutely the quiet force of the Possible - except here the Possible is not only quiet but muted, timid, a tad disappointed; few writers sense more keenly the pressure on the present of the unfulfilled, no writer better seems to bear out Kafka’s aphorism 'there is an infinity of hope, but not for us’.
There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realisation.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Galicia. For most of his adult life he taught drawing and handicrafts in a local school. In November 1942 he was shot dead by a Gestapo officer as he returned home with a loaf of bread.
It is perhaps a cliché, but it is the mark of a great writer that he succeeds in creating a recognisable world, a micro universe which carves out its own space and insists upon its siren like singularity.. I would like to try and give you a sense of the world of Bruno Schultz.
It is a world which the fragments of a lost Meaning lie everywhere. The world as a ripped up book, an amalgamation of broken signs, awaiting completion and restoration though the Adamic hands of the writer.
An atomised world: chance gestures, stray unconnected glances, and supernumerary acts which know no completeness, which have been snapped away from a lost wholeness - or at least give that appearance.
The crucial passage here is the father’s monologue near the beginning of the book on the subject of the Demiurge.
We are not concerned with long-winded creations, with long term beings. Our creatures will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. [..] Our creations will be temporary to serve for a single occasion. If they be human beings, we shall give them, for example, only one profile, one hand, one leg, the one limb needed for their role. It would be pedantic to bother with the other unnecessary leg. Their backs can be made of canvas or simply whitewashed. [..]
Demiurge, the great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the other hand, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see beneath each gesture, behind each move, its inertia.
The father is a Gnostic madman, a collector and domestic demi-god, confecting a private universe incommunicable to all but himself (like so many fathers!). In this monologue he speaks of creating a universe where beings would exist, would be conjured into life, only for the sake of a single gesture, act or pronouncement. What was superfluous would remain in the lumber-room of Non-being. And perhaps Schulz here places in the mouth of this mad aphasiac father his own aesthetic manifesto: the creation of uncanny puppets, monsters, dwarfs and cripples – one legged, bodiless, coming towards us out of the fog of Perhaps before recoiling into silence.
The father’s aesthetic manifesto is a modernist one, where modernism forever lays bare the device, enjoys exposing the creaking mechanisms of communication. And so Schulz’s works are full of whirring machinery and exposed pipes. But there is another – but related - side to Schulz’s take on creation, and it concerns and extraordinary sense of Nature, not as a realm of pleasing appearances but as a dark and inscrutable matrix.
In Nature, language has its dark roots. The world of the book is the percolation into articulate consciousness, into graphemes and syntax, of the manifold silences, the teeming capillary life of nature. Nature is that which delimits us, the non-human horizon of our Being, without which we lose our definition and collapse into the boundless universe, without which our language, predicated on finite notions of time and space would turn to rubble. Imagine: sounds snapped away from their anchoring sense, aborted stammers flying off into the night, unable to hold in grammatical or semantic check the newly expanded world.
Of course, spring has its vernal breezes, thriving greenness, seasonal promises and so on. But out of what do these arise? A pregnant dark, a vast unseen region; and the dream of spring is born in the icy sleep of winter. The floral prettiness is merely spring’s cosmetic face. Underneath, the black underworld, a remote blind world of pods and seeds unfolding in inhuman time, refusing the measure of language, deaf to the trill of birdsong, and for which the sun is only a strange prickling warmth, an unfamiliar uprush in their vegetable souls.
This sense of nature as the inhuman, with its own non-human time, is part of a Schulzian recognition of what lies outside or in-between our ways of measuring and recording the real. It’s here we come back to Time.
Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd together and press hard one upon the other without any pause.
[…] Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too early or too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant?
What is so surprising is to find here, in the words of a provincial schoolteacher, an exact mirror of that other Saturnine Jewish writer Walter Benjamin's meditations; stripped of politics, yes, but insisting like Benjamin, on the discarded, the unfulfilled, the aborted and neglected - that which can find no place in official narratives, histories, canons, which has suffered the neglect or condescension of posterity, that which is, as it were incomplete, patiently awaiting the intervention of the Not-yet, the onset of some unimaginable zero summer.
And this little gem, which might serve as bit of messianic graffiti:
Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps.
(The Fictions of Bruno Schulz, trans. Celina Wieniewska, Picador, 1988) . A limited gallery of Schulz's drawings can be found here.
More recent and apparently more reliable translations of Schulz are now available here, part of an ambitious online project.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Dead Again
Give me a pound for every obituary for the Left penned over the last 100 years, and I’d doubtless be a very rich capitalist. The latest fatal announcement comes from Nick Cohen, in an article mixing perverse tristesse with perverse relief. Its one of those ‘with-bitter-honesty-reluctantly-and-in-the-face-of-sadness’ articles, which is of course a sure index of Truth. For those of you who don’t know, ‘brutal candour’ is Cohen’s patented style, it differentiates him from other commodities in the journalistic marketplace and so helps to sell papers.
Like some ghost of his own previous self, Cohen has come back to earth with some uncomfortable truths for us, in short: ‘The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race’. Not just here and in England, it would seem, but, 'ineluctably', anywhere in the world. Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war. In these paltry runes, the global death of radical thought is legible.
In the strange temporality of the media-world, great sea-changes in human consciousness, abrupt shifts in the Zeitgeist and epoch-inaugurating actions and speeches happen with alarming regularity, or can be telescoped through the lens of a few prepackaged headlines, before being inexplicably dispatched to oblivion by the ‘next big thing’.
Meanwhile, one can only hope that the rage against injustice and the silent weaving of hope persists, ineluctably, beneath the noise of the news.
Like some ghost of his own previous self, Cohen has come back to earth with some uncomfortable truths for us, in short: ‘The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race’. Not just here and in England, it would seem, but, 'ineluctably', anywhere in the world. Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war. In these paltry runes, the global death of radical thought is legible.
In the strange temporality of the media-world, great sea-changes in human consciousness, abrupt shifts in the Zeitgeist and epoch-inaugurating actions and speeches happen with alarming regularity, or can be telescoped through the lens of a few prepackaged headlines, before being inexplicably dispatched to oblivion by the ‘next big thing’.
Meanwhile, one can only hope that the rage against injustice and the silent weaving of hope persists, ineluctably, beneath the noise of the news.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
Proust, Motorcycles and Tail Fins
One of the curious characteristics of Proust’s insufferable bourgeois prig Mme Verdurin is that she does not laugh; she rather ‘makes a sign that she is laughing’ – it consists of a whole 'symbolical dumb show' of raising the hands to the face, while using the rocking body as a metronome. Why this curious gesture, this substitution of the signifier for the thing signified? A disdain for the body, perhaps, from whose guttural dark interior the laugh issues? A sense of ‘etiquette’, where etiquette requires that all behaviour submit itself to a socially agreed code, to an externalised language of signs from which spontaneous emotion has been expunged? What was once directly lived (laughter) has moved away into its representation, and if it has moved away into a representation, then one of the conditions of a representation is that it is repeatable and/ or exchangeable. It can circulate, it can be copied. It can, if necessary be sold. My laugh, like my death, belongs ineluctably to me; Mme verdurin’s sign of laughter, by contrast, can be anyone’s.
Next a brief anecdote from the Radically Inept Blogspot:
'I remember growing up in North Carolina that a lot of my friends and neighbors would take the time and spend the money to make their cars and motorcycles louder. When I would ask what the purpose of this was, they would tell me it was a demonstration of 'power'. The idea supposedly was that louder was more powerful. But, these cars could not out perform the Mercedez Benz 450 SLs, or various Porches that I had seen around, and these cars were 'quiet'. The loud motorcycles did not out perform the BMWs, and late the Hondas, which were far quieter. But that didn't seem to matter, they'd pay the money and buy glass packed thrusters or other device just to increase the volume with no appeciable increase in performance - louder was cool.'
Not the manifestation of actual power, but a sign of power. The empty signifier is more important, more desired, than the thing itself. Why? A signifier solicits, and is defined only in relation to, the Other. One signifies to and for Others, so that this ‘power’ which they desired was really a desire for Others' desire. But those Others also desired the Other’s desire. And so, the endless circularity of a world of empty signifiers .
One thinks also of Baudrillard writing about tail fins on cars:
'There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins.. the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space – and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relation to that victory (indeed if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome [..] Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. [..] It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord'
The fins bear no functional, real relation to speed. They signify speed, according to a certain fantasy, floating around in the social imaginary, of what speed is. Just as, in the previous example, we were dealing with a fantasy of power – not an individual’s fantasy but a collective and buyable fantasy. In short, then, a world where things are dematerialised, turned into signifiers, signifiers of an imaginary world which has replaced the real; and, simultaneously, a world where ideological fantasies - of speed, power etc - are directly materialised in objects and images.
Next a brief anecdote from the Radically Inept Blogspot:
'I remember growing up in North Carolina that a lot of my friends and neighbors would take the time and spend the money to make their cars and motorcycles louder. When I would ask what the purpose of this was, they would tell me it was a demonstration of 'power'. The idea supposedly was that louder was more powerful. But, these cars could not out perform the Mercedez Benz 450 SLs, or various Porches that I had seen around, and these cars were 'quiet'. The loud motorcycles did not out perform the BMWs, and late the Hondas, which were far quieter. But that didn't seem to matter, they'd pay the money and buy glass packed thrusters or other device just to increase the volume with no appeciable increase in performance - louder was cool.'
Not the manifestation of actual power, but a sign of power. The empty signifier is more important, more desired, than the thing itself. Why? A signifier solicits, and is defined only in relation to, the Other. One signifies to and for Others, so that this ‘power’ which they desired was really a desire for Others' desire. But those Others also desired the Other’s desire. And so, the endless circularity of a world of empty signifiers .
One thinks also of Baudrillard writing about tail fins on cars:
'There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins.. the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space – and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relation to that victory (indeed if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome [..] Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. [..] It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord'
The fins bear no functional, real relation to speed. They signify speed, according to a certain fantasy, floating around in the social imaginary, of what speed is. Just as, in the previous example, we were dealing with a fantasy of power – not an individual’s fantasy but a collective and buyable fantasy. In short, then, a world where things are dematerialised, turned into signifiers, signifiers of an imaginary world which has replaced the real; and, simultaneously, a world where ideological fantasies - of speed, power etc - are directly materialised in objects and images.
Friday, August 13, 2004
A note on Hegel's Aesthetics
‘Catholicism is heavy in symbolism’ [it is said], esp. as compared to Protestantism. But in another sense it is more accurate to say that Catholicism is heavy in literalism – e.g., the wine and bread literally become flesh and blood. Only Protestantism re-codes these as symbols, forbidding as sacrilegious any premature reconciliation between mundane and divine, reproaching the older religion for its naïve literalism. This observation is indebted to Hegel's Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 324:
In this mystical identity there is nothing purely symbolical, the latter only arises in the reformed doctrine, because here the spiritual is explicitly severed from the sensuous, and the external object is taken in that case as a mere pointing to a meaning differentiated therefrom.
Catholicism, then, knows immediate presence rather than symbolism. And, conversely, does this not entail that we ought to incorporate into our definition the Symbolic a suspension of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some immediate presence has departed; the symbol is always the index of an absence and a departure. Symbols, therefore, are always ‘haunted’.
What Hegel here says about the distinction between Catholicsm and Protestantism in fact runs through the whole first volume of his brilliant (A brilliance which is difficult to overestimate) Aesthetics: the distinction between immediate presence and defered or Symbolic presence. One can also see how Zizek might relate it to Lacan: for in a way it concerns our entrance into the realm of the 'Symbolic'. Children, we might say, start off as 'Catholics' and are forced to renounce this native faith and convert, under the duress of the paternal law, to 'Protestantism'.
The other relevant example here is Hegel's descriptions of (p. 325). of the Zoroastrian religion: Light is not a symbol of the Good; light is the Good:
Without explicitly separating this Divinity from light, as if light were a mere expression and image or symbol.
Not, then, a 'mere' (symbolic) 'expression'. In this sense, such religions do not worship ‘graven images’ since we are precisely not dealing with an image at all. Again, then, the image or symbol is a kind of leftover – it is the surplus remaining when existence (the sensuous immediacy thereof) and meaning are severed. Once the Absolute withdraws into uncategorizable abstraction the symbols are left clattering, only alluding to that which is now forever elsewhere.
In this mystical identity there is nothing purely symbolical, the latter only arises in the reformed doctrine, because here the spiritual is explicitly severed from the sensuous, and the external object is taken in that case as a mere pointing to a meaning differentiated therefrom.
Catholicism, then, knows immediate presence rather than symbolism. And, conversely, does this not entail that we ought to incorporate into our definition the Symbolic a suspension of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some immediate presence has departed; the symbol is always the index of an absence and a departure. Symbols, therefore, are always ‘haunted’.
What Hegel here says about the distinction between Catholicsm and Protestantism in fact runs through the whole first volume of his brilliant (A brilliance which is difficult to overestimate) Aesthetics: the distinction between immediate presence and defered or Symbolic presence. One can also see how Zizek might relate it to Lacan: for in a way it concerns our entrance into the realm of the 'Symbolic'. Children, we might say, start off as 'Catholics' and are forced to renounce this native faith and convert, under the duress of the paternal law, to 'Protestantism'.
The other relevant example here is Hegel's descriptions of (p. 325). of the Zoroastrian religion: Light is not a symbol of the Good; light is the Good:
Without explicitly separating this Divinity from light, as if light were a mere expression and image or symbol.
Not, then, a 'mere' (symbolic) 'expression'. In this sense, such religions do not worship ‘graven images’ since we are precisely not dealing with an image at all. Again, then, the image or symbol is a kind of leftover – it is the surplus remaining when existence (the sensuous immediacy thereof) and meaning are severed. Once the Absolute withdraws into uncategorizable abstraction the symbols are left clattering, only alluding to that which is now forever elsewhere.
Money Talks
The following is true, despite fitting all too easily into my pessimistic view of contemporary academia. Students at my university occasionally complain about their grades, which is of course fair enough. The grounds for complaint, however, are often rather revealing. A Professor reports the following exchange:
Student: “I don’t understand why I haven’t got an A”
Professor: “Well [I paraphrase] your work wasn’t A grade standard.”
Student: “but I really need to get a good grade for this course.”
Professor: “And is that a good reason?”
Student: “I suppose not.”
Professor: “So why Should I give you an A?”
Student: “Well, at the end of the day, my parents pay your wages.”
Yes, money talks. And it talks utter gibberish.
Student: “I don’t understand why I haven’t got an A”
Professor: “Well [I paraphrase] your work wasn’t A grade standard.”
Student: “but I really need to get a good grade for this course.”
Professor: “And is that a good reason?”
Student: “I suppose not.”
Professor: “So why Should I give you an A?”
Student: “Well, at the end of the day, my parents pay your wages.”
Yes, money talks. And it talks utter gibberish.
Once Upon a Time in the West.
Once upon a time, in the age of critical thought, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were terms that situated a group or individual with respect to capitalism. One’s politics were defined by a basic decision with respect to the economic system in which we lived and its political and cultural logic. But as capitalism penetrated every geographical and psychological crevice, so - in Hegelian fashion - its name disappeared from public space.
It goes without saying that there is now no room within the licensed spectrum of debate for any alternative to capitalism.
There is a sad comedy, too deep for laughter, in the groups and individuals who today refer to themselves or are referred to as ‘left’. Examples can be found even in the ‘blogworld’. Johann Hari, consumer of voyeuristic junk and an ideological gadfly who has settled on the corpus delecti of Noam Chomsky’s writings, positions himself on the Left. The ‘redoubtable’ Kamm and his bedfellow Stephen Pollard likewise. Inexorably, the political spectrum shrinks, whilst the name ‘left’ is retained perhaps through some lingering nostalgia for the idea of dissent, a love of certain lexical antiquities still in circulation even though the world to which they belonged has passed away.
In the U.S. of course, the task has been easier, so that today, the terms mapping out the political spectrum are ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which of course denote two pragmatic perspectives within capitalism, pushing capitalism itself outside the horizon of debate. The term ‘liberal’ rent from its original meaning, now refers to little more than a certain attitude to ‘permissiveness’ and ‘tolerance of the Other’. And indeed, even this lame term has long since taken on a pejorative ring. (Moreover, commentators who are resolutely and obviously on the Left - eg Chomsky- get referred to as ‘liberals’, since the available language, like some autistic Adam, is incapable of naming them). Similarly, ‘conservative’ has become a misnomer. It has nothing to do with the authority of tradition and distrust of abstraction, since all it wishes to ‘conserve’ is the abstract logic of capital and the capitalist-fundamentalist pursuit of profit.
The ideology of capitalism is, among other things, precisely this anamorphosis whereby language is bent and malformed in such a way that the system in which we live and breath disappears as an object of critical thought.
It goes without saying that there is now no room within the licensed spectrum of debate for any alternative to capitalism.
There is a sad comedy, too deep for laughter, in the groups and individuals who today refer to themselves or are referred to as ‘left’. Examples can be found even in the ‘blogworld’. Johann Hari, consumer of voyeuristic junk and an ideological gadfly who has settled on the corpus delecti of Noam Chomsky’s writings, positions himself on the Left. The ‘redoubtable’ Kamm and his bedfellow Stephen Pollard likewise. Inexorably, the political spectrum shrinks, whilst the name ‘left’ is retained perhaps through some lingering nostalgia for the idea of dissent, a love of certain lexical antiquities still in circulation even though the world to which they belonged has passed away.
In the U.S. of course, the task has been easier, so that today, the terms mapping out the political spectrum are ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which of course denote two pragmatic perspectives within capitalism, pushing capitalism itself outside the horizon of debate. The term ‘liberal’ rent from its original meaning, now refers to little more than a certain attitude to ‘permissiveness’ and ‘tolerance of the Other’. And indeed, even this lame term has long since taken on a pejorative ring. (Moreover, commentators who are resolutely and obviously on the Left - eg Chomsky- get referred to as ‘liberals’, since the available language, like some autistic Adam, is incapable of naming them). Similarly, ‘conservative’ has become a misnomer. It has nothing to do with the authority of tradition and distrust of abstraction, since all it wishes to ‘conserve’ is the abstract logic of capital and the capitalist-fundamentalist pursuit of profit.
The ideology of capitalism is, among other things, precisely this anamorphosis whereby language is bent and malformed in such a way that the system in which we live and breath disappears as an object of critical thought.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Bicycle Rider
One night walking back along Karlova
I was nearly knocked down by a bicycle rider
Lean with a black cap and goggles
What he was doing, Racing at night
Down those bone-shaking cobbles,
God nor man might know.
The above is excerpted from a short poem I wrote about something that indeed happened to me in Prague. Imagine, then, my uncanny shock on reading this poem:
While time is running away on Prikopy street
Like a racing cyclist who thinkgs he can overtake death's machine
You are like the clock in the ghetto whose hands go backwards
If death surprised me I would die a six-year-old boy.
The poem is "The Clock in the Old Jewish Ghetto" by Vitezslau Nezval (1900 - 1958) . With certain passages from Rilke and (of course) Kafka, the music of Janacek and, perhaps, the taste of a herbal liquor called Besherovka, this poem distills the essence of 'Prague', by which of course I mean my Prague, little more than a name, a pale flare over marshes, one of those Proustian names charged with the quiet dream of another life.
I was nearly knocked down by a bicycle rider
Lean with a black cap and goggles
What he was doing, Racing at night
Down those bone-shaking cobbles,
God nor man might know.
The above is excerpted from a short poem I wrote about something that indeed happened to me in Prague. Imagine, then, my uncanny shock on reading this poem:
While time is running away on Prikopy street
Like a racing cyclist who thinkgs he can overtake death's machine
You are like the clock in the ghetto whose hands go backwards
If death surprised me I would die a six-year-old boy.
The poem is "The Clock in the Old Jewish Ghetto" by Vitezslau Nezval (1900 - 1958) . With certain passages from Rilke and (of course) Kafka, the music of Janacek and, perhaps, the taste of a herbal liquor called Besherovka, this poem distills the essence of 'Prague', by which of course I mean my Prague, little more than a name, a pale flare over marshes, one of those Proustian names charged with the quiet dream of another life.
Ear to the Wall
A couple of essays - John Berger's brief and slightly cryptic tribute to his friend Cartier-Bresson; and Edward Said's late musings. Also, from Berger's reevaluation of Francis Bacon (he had previously penned a rather dismissive piece hilariously entitled 'Francis Bacon and Walt Disney'), this:
The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.
On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.
The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.
On the side of the powerful there is a conformism of fear - they never forget the wall - and the mouthing of words that no longer mean anything. Such muteness is what Bacon painted.
On the other side there are multitudinous, disparate, sometimes disappearing, languages with whose vocabularies a sense can be made of life even if, particularly if, that sense is tragic.
The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.
On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.
The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.
On the side of the powerful there is a conformism of fear - they never forget the wall - and the mouthing of words that no longer mean anything. Such muteness is what Bacon painted.
On the other side there are multitudinous, disparate, sometimes disappearing, languages with whose vocabularies a sense can be made of life even if, particularly if, that sense is tragic.
Zizek's neck & Other matters
We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror, when, all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of my face from the profile. The image replicated all my gestures, but in a weird uncoordinated way. In such a situation, "our specular image is torn away from us and, crucially, our look is no longer looking at ourselves." It is in such weird experiences that one catches what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship.
Thus, the alien gaze, which as Zizek demonstrates need not be that of an actual empirical person, disturbs the satisfying fullness of our self-image. The gaze of the Other refers precisely to the fact that I am seen from a point which is outside me and that I can never occupy or control. A part of my image ‘belongs’ to the Other and the object that I am for Others is not the me as I am for myself.
I was reminded of the above, curiously enough, by two blogsites, previously mentioned – ‘Biased BBC’ and ‘No Pasaran’ , of no interest in themselves save as symptoms of some yet-unnamed malaise. At ‘Biased BBC’ one finds that many contributors are Americans objecting to how Bush is represented by the BBC, relying on their trusty (and in some cases only) friend Google to nitpick and sift hours of irrelevant dross. So, why should a Bushite U.S. citizen, who does not even pay a licence fee, bother about this? Well, perhaps for the same reason that the Americans at No Pasaran seek to ridicule the French’s opposition to the Iraq war etc. In both cases, they see the ‘growth on their neck’.
In other words, the BBC - or the Le Monde or whoever - represent the alien gaze, the point from which Americans appear strange to themselves. Inspecting BBC or French coverage, they catch, as it were, a view of their face in profile. They are seen from a place from which they cannot see themselves, so that a portion of their being escapes them, like the outside of a mirror, producing a kind of symbolic castration.
It is this gaze which they wish to deny/ recuperate/ co-opt, so as to remain inside their own Imaginary space. They would prefer a world where nobody is looking at them from a position (cultural or political) external to them, and the only way to do this, presumably, is the cultural and political domination of the globe.
Incidentally, in a rather different context, Yeats has some lines on the ‘gaze of the Other’ which catch exactly what is at stake:
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyesCasts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
Yeats, ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’
Thus, the alien gaze, which as Zizek demonstrates need not be that of an actual empirical person, disturbs the satisfying fullness of our self-image. The gaze of the Other refers precisely to the fact that I am seen from a point which is outside me and that I can never occupy or control. A part of my image ‘belongs’ to the Other and the object that I am for Others is not the me as I am for myself.
I was reminded of the above, curiously enough, by two blogsites, previously mentioned – ‘Biased BBC’ and ‘No Pasaran’ , of no interest in themselves save as symptoms of some yet-unnamed malaise. At ‘Biased BBC’ one finds that many contributors are Americans objecting to how Bush is represented by the BBC, relying on their trusty (and in some cases only) friend Google to nitpick and sift hours of irrelevant dross. So, why should a Bushite U.S. citizen, who does not even pay a licence fee, bother about this? Well, perhaps for the same reason that the Americans at No Pasaran seek to ridicule the French’s opposition to the Iraq war etc. In both cases, they see the ‘growth on their neck’.
In other words, the BBC - or the Le Monde or whoever - represent the alien gaze, the point from which Americans appear strange to themselves. Inspecting BBC or French coverage, they catch, as it were, a view of their face in profile. They are seen from a place from which they cannot see themselves, so that a portion of their being escapes them, like the outside of a mirror, producing a kind of symbolic castration.
It is this gaze which they wish to deny/ recuperate/ co-opt, so as to remain inside their own Imaginary space. They would prefer a world where nobody is looking at them from a position (cultural or political) external to them, and the only way to do this, presumably, is the cultural and political domination of the globe.
Incidentally, in a rather different context, Yeats has some lines on the ‘gaze of the Other’ which catch exactly what is at stake:
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyesCasts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
Yeats, ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Life: An Unheard of Luxury
Guy Debord, courtesy of here:
'We may fairly say of the present organization of society that, no matter what angle it is viewed from, it simply cannot afford life. For one thing, it is generally admitted that all the basic necessities of life, whether the life of trees or the life of human beings, are far beyond the means of our economic system. A lifestyle that in the past would have seemed simple, not to say ascetic, is an unheard-of-luxury today, in a world where simply to breathe fresh air and to enjoy peace and quiet is practically impossible anywhere. At the same time -- and certainly more importantly -- the technical means that this society has chosen to develop are those that enable it to dispense more and more thoroughly with living activity and individual initiative (and hence with those practical skills that once underpinned the proletarian project). It does without them so easily already, in fact, that it cannot see the need for them at all: the production of robots is naturally (or, rather, unnaturally) accompanied by the development of an environment suitable only for robots.''
And courtesy of The Young Hegelian, this little snapshot of life in L.A.:
'Next to the condom dispensers, loo visitors will usually find racks of post cards touting trendy consumer goods. More often than not, they will have an advert speaking in their ear whilst urinating (I'm afraid I can only speak for the gents, however). They are activated by motion sensors as one draws near the urinal.'
'We may fairly say of the present organization of society that, no matter what angle it is viewed from, it simply cannot afford life. For one thing, it is generally admitted that all the basic necessities of life, whether the life of trees or the life of human beings, are far beyond the means of our economic system. A lifestyle that in the past would have seemed simple, not to say ascetic, is an unheard-of-luxury today, in a world where simply to breathe fresh air and to enjoy peace and quiet is practically impossible anywhere. At the same time -- and certainly more importantly -- the technical means that this society has chosen to develop are those that enable it to dispense more and more thoroughly with living activity and individual initiative (and hence with those practical skills that once underpinned the proletarian project). It does without them so easily already, in fact, that it cannot see the need for them at all: the production of robots is naturally (or, rather, unnaturally) accompanied by the development of an environment suitable only for robots.''
And courtesy of The Young Hegelian, this little snapshot of life in L.A.:
'Next to the condom dispensers, loo visitors will usually find racks of post cards touting trendy consumer goods. More often than not, they will have an advert speaking in their ear whilst urinating (I'm afraid I can only speak for the gents, however). They are activated by motion sensors as one draws near the urinal.'
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Charlottenstrasse
After some tinkering, this blog has firmly reverted to ‘Charlotte Street’, a partial explanation of this title is now to found in the right hand margin. The quote is from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Some of you may prefer the Kaiser and Wilkins translation:
‘.. and if he had not know that he lived in Charlotte Street, a quiet street but still a city street, he might have believed that his window gave on a desert waste where grey sky and grey land blended indistinguishably into each other.’
‘.. and if he had not know that he lived in Charlotte Street, a quiet street but still a city street, he might have believed that his window gave on a desert waste where grey sky and grey land blended indistinguishably into each other.’
c.f. Zizek, ‘Desert of the Real’:
[In the Matrix] the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
The ‘matrix computer programme could indeed be read as the symbolic order itself [even though it isn't really] – the codes and articulations without which the world collapses into an undifferentiated continuum, taking with it the tremulous compass of the ‘I’ .
[In the Matrix] the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
The ‘matrix computer programme could indeed be read as the symbolic order itself [even though it isn't really] – the codes and articulations without which the world collapses into an undifferentiated continuum, taking with it the tremulous compass of the ‘I’ .
Perhaps the clearest exposition of the Lacanian ‘Real’, though, is provided by Bruce Fink:
Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere.. It is a sort of smooth seamless surface [..] The division of the real into separate zones, distinct features and contrasting structures is a result of the symbolic order, which, in a manner of speaking, cuts into the smooth façade of the real, creating divisions, gaps, and distinguishable entities and laying the real to reast, that is, drawing or sucking it into th symbols used to describe it [..]
Cancelling out the real, the symbolic creates ‘reality’, reality as that which is named by language and can thus be thought and talked about .
Fink adds:
Language no doubt ever completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left.'
And in limit situations, at the penumbra of the Symbolic, we are uncannily aware of that residuum. It is here, at this limit, in 'Charlottenstrasse' that Kafka lives.
So, to return to Charlotte Street, house addresses do not exist ‘in the Real’, they are simply a more or less arbitrary way of partitioning it, a form of Symbolic articulation. Nonetheless, such arbitrary divisions and articulations, as Kafka saw, are the necessary infrastructure of the human subject. Indeed, this is why Kafka is barely human himself.
And so, we might 'translate' the above passage as : were it not for my ‘address’ (my registered place in the Symbolic Order, as well as my symbolic mandate) my world would collapse into the featureless greyness of the Real which subtends it. Gregor Samsa, losing his footing in the Symbolic Order (most immediately, that of the family), becoming progressively stripped of ‘world’ (in the Heideggerian sense) slides into the ‘undistinguished’ proto-world of animal or insect. His place in the Symbolic Order (his world) is so fragile that what is beyond that Order seems to seep though, like bubbles in the wallpaper. For Samsa, only the increasingly residual and delicate knowledge of his ‘place’ stands between him and the ‘desert’ of the Real.
In occasional airs his siren song sings
In occasional airs his siren song sings
With its terrible lonely elation
He flew from the world on folio wings,
His final transformation.
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