Wednesday, December 29, 2004

This and This

I have been ambushed by a cold, consequently scarcely able to think of things more productive than this:

This and this.

The concept of singularity is curiously self-contradictory. It denotes a quality of utter uniqueness. If two objects ‘have’ this quality, then what is unique about them cannot be this – i.e., having singularity. Or in other words: Object A is singular; object B is singular. Do they therefore share some quality, X? if so, then this cannot be what is singular about them.

And yet, how to designate the singular quality without using some name which renders it exchangeable? Indeed, it, whatever it is, would seem in its nature to refuse the span of a name, so that to designate it (the singular quality) is a kind of performative contradiction.

What is singular would seem in some way to be non-linguistic, and to shine forth only when, using language, we have created a kind of circumference of error around the thing in question.

Update. A reader has written to me, relating my reflections to Badiou. I am not entirely qualified to respond fully to his comments, esp. as I'm rather ill, but I reproduce them here for those interested:

re: your comments on singularity, I'd like to draw your attention to the mathematics of the contradiction you describe. It's a variation on Russell's Paradox: "The set of all sets that are not members of themselves." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox There have been several set theoretic attempts to avoid this contradiction, the most important of which is the Axiom of Separation. "Given any set A, there is a set B such that, given any set C, C is a member of B if and only if C is a member of A and P holds for C." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_separation This means that the operation P (in this case looking for, or naming, singularity) is performed only on the members of pre-existent set A, not on the set B (all singular objects) that is the result of this operation. There is an exclusion: one looks for singularity regarding qualities x, y, z, but not for singularity regarding singularity itself. Badiou has an interesting discussion of this in his Theoretical Writings (p. 178-180). He remarks on Russell's paradox that "a certain kind of confidence in the concept is thereby undermined", and concludes from the Axiom of Separation: "it means that existence always precedes the separating activity of the concept."

Thursday, December 23, 2004

I will be

Away in Yorkshire until December 28th.

'Anti-Americanism" Revisited

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. --James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son

It would be easy to construct a ‘concept’ of ‘pro-Americanism” cobbled together from, say, some quotes from Blake, Kafka, Foucault, Kristeva and other ‘European intellectuals’. One could then claim this was a kind of ‘syndrome’, a stubborn tradition to which we’re still in thrall when we say anything that is pro-American. One could cite various contemporary pro-American statements as ‘evidence’ of this ‘syndrome’. This concept would doubtless have many polemical uses. Except, of course, it is unlikely that such a ‘concept’ would have or accrue any intellectual credibility or be seen as anything other than a rather crude device for forestalling debate.

How curious, then, that the similarly structured ‘concept’ of ‘anti-Americanism’ seems to be going from strength to strength, as in this recent essay, wherein Heidegger, Rilke and diverse others are conscripted into illustrating what is essentially foreign to them and, stripped of their particular contexts and their inherent differences, frogmarched into serving as mere examples of an ‘idea’ having as its ultimate referent and sticking place only the polemical demands of the present. The author, the instrument of ideological forces of which he seems wholly ignorant, cites the following passage from Rilke:

Now is emerging from out of America pure undifferentiated things, mere things of appearance, sham articles.... A house in the American understanding, an American apple or an American vine has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, or the grape that had been adopted in the hopes and thoughts of our forefathers

As well as this from Heidegger:

Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld.

Each of these comments [ok, so the second one doesn’t actually mention America. Let that pass] can be located in (and against) a tradition of thought; each deserves to be heard and answered in its specificity; but a ‘thinker’ able to extract from such comments no more than the anaemic and mechanical concept of ‘anti-Americanism’ resembles nothing so much as a winemaker able to extract from a grape little more than its stem. What is inessential is elevated to spurious magnitude and what is essential discarded as so much unserviceable dross.

Yes, Rilke uses ‘America’ to name – gropingly - something that he sees emerging, a new object-world, something which we might, perhaps, call the Society of the Spectacle; Heidegger was trying to conceptualise something perhaps related, although certainly not the same. And the name America was indeed, perhaps, a moment in this conceptualisation. But such comments are not ‘about’ America. One can easily jettison the name ‘America’ in understanding such comments, indeed, it is crucial to do so. Such names block access to the true object of thought. Nor can such invocations be situated, without ignorance and wilful distortion, on a smooth continuum ending in the present.

This is not to suggest (very obviously) that there are not anti-American sentiments or remarks, but surely no one believes that the current concept of Anti-Americanism is simply a way of neutrally referring to these, nor that an ‘anti-American’ sentiment is automatically a manifestation of ‘anti-Americanism’. This last is an ideological notion which I suspect will become more prevalent as it becomes polemically and politically more necessary.

Anti-Americanism, if we can use the term non-ideologically, might refer to instances where there is a false conflation between ‘America’ and some specific action of its government or, alternatively, some general concept like ‘aggression’ or ‘consumerism’. The point, however, is that any such conflation is illegitimate, favourable or unfavourable. Thus, a statement like ‘they hate America because they hate freedom’ (not an e.g. that I have invented incidentally) makes exactly the same false equation, as does a statement like this, from the anti-Frenchist ‘No Pasaran’ blog (so puerile that I refuse to link to it):

‘Why has it become so acceptable that — at elegant dinner parties — very distinguished people openly say, 'I'm not anti-American, but Bush disgusts me and makes me physically sick? He is a war criminal and a real threat to world peace.' I can only interpret such statements as being partly about Bush and partly about using him as an acceptable cover to bash America.’

The criticism that people say “America” when they really mean the Bush administration (or Starbucks, or whatever) typically sits cheek by jowl with the assumption that nobody speaks of the ‘Bush administration’ (or Starbucks, or whatever) without meaning ‘America’. Bsljukhl;kljeh

To bash America: the covert aim of so many particular arguments and objections, which are thus robbed of their force and rewritten as mere resentment. Is this – America as the object of resentment and envy - not among the most clichéd and stubborn tropes of contemporary polemics? And this ‘gaze of resentment’, far from being something which the polemicists wish to abolish is their cherished object of desire and indispensable ideological support.
__
Genuine dialogue between America and the Soviet Union will only become possible when Americans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of capitalist ideology

Rand Omidyolog

Every era of course has its Rand Omidyologs. Anyway, for some reason, I forgot to add the following to my earlier comments on an essay on ‘anti-Americanism’. I quote: “A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media's coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans.”

Let’s be clear what’s being said here: You encounter perspectives and accounts different from the one you are familiar with. They render what was familiar to you almost unrecognisable. Does this excite your interest, activate your curiosity, lead you to reappraise the familiar; does it set in motion a process of questioning? No, the very fact that these perspectives render your world unfamiliar is enough to impugn them. And all that is questioned are the (perforce malign) ‘motives’ of those responsible for disturbing your familiar picture.

And the essay ends by stipulating the terms of any future European admittance to the negotiating table: ‘Genuine dialogue between America and Europe will become possible only when Europeans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of anti-Americanism’ It is, presumably, a ‘long and arduous’ process because anti-Americanism is so ingrained and inveterate that we can barely gauge its extent. Europeans are, perhaps, steeped in it even against their conscious intent or knowledge. They ‘carry it’ and reproduce it willy-nilly – scarcely subjects of their own thoughts. Much soul-searching will be needed. So, ‘Europeans’, before you venture to speak, re-examine yourself, see if any anti-American sentiments breed about your hearts, and if you sense such sentiments expurgate and correct them. You’ll be rewarded with admittance to ‘genuine dialogue’ albeit in Caeser’s terms [sorry, my mistake- the author's name is in fact Ceaser]. A blogger has drawn my attention to his own piece on 'anti-American prejudice', which he admits to being 'prone to'.

Monday, December 20, 2004

Tarrying with the Negative

Fredic Jameson on, respectively, Schiller, Breton & the Surrealists, Herbert Marcuse:

"..it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom, in three such profoundly different moments in history: its reinvention by the historian playwright, dreaming the heroic gestures of political eloquence in his tiny feudal city-state open to the fields, stimulated by the news of revolutionary victories there where in a few years the shock of Napoleanic armies will cause the earth to tremble; by the poet, stalking his magical fun-park for the neon omens of objective chance, behind the hallucinatory rebus of the street scene never ceasing to hear the pop gun volleys of the vicious, never ending military pacification of colonial empire; by the philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing - from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of the freeways and the ominous stape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, and as it were from beyond them, in the future - the almost extinct form of the utopian idea."

Well, it pleases me too, partly as a counter-truth to the ceaseless instrumentalisation of thought within academia, and the transformation of this last into a kind of corporate bureaucracy little different in kind from those other corporations which it mimics and prepares for at a formal level, despite whatever ostensibly radical contents it contains and continues to peddle. And it is perhaps worth adding, for those who dismiss Marcuse and his notion of the recuperation of critical thinking, that this has little to do with the range of opinions on offer per se; it is not the mere existence of a range of 'radical' perspectives but their function and structural position within the system, their transformation, for example, into fads, commodities, 'life-styles', or, precisely, into living illustrations of the impressive tolerance of modern liberal democracy.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Freedom precedes Liberation

"Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, so sadly forgotten today, put it in a very nice way in his essay on liberation, "freedom is the condition of liberation." In order to liberate yourself you must be free.We see this today, with feminists, that the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom. The problem is not, at first, that the situation for women was bad, but [rather] that they just accepted it as a fact. Even in revolution it goes like this. If you look at the French Revolution, the shift was purely ideological. They overthrew the king when they started to perceive that position as unjustified. Look at it in an objective way. The ancienne regime was, in the second part of the 18th century, much more liberal and open than before. It's just that the implicit ethical standards changed. My big obsession with Christianity is that there is something extremely precious in this legacy that is being lost today."

Zizek

Friday, December 17, 2004

Symbolic Order as Parasite

Those of you consulting my ‘Critical Dictionary’ will find the following definition of ‘Symbolic Authority’:

The king, the judge, the president, and so on, can be personally dishonest, rotten, but when they adopt the insignia of authority, they experience a kind of mystic transubstantiation.’

The distinction, very simply, is between the empirical individual and the structural and Symbolic position they occupy. From this structural position, from this Symbolic title they borrow authority. Those who genefluct to them are in fact signalling their deference to this Symbolic Position. When a student respectfully addresses a Professor on the first day of classes, they address his symbolic position as opposed to him/ her as an empirical individual. They address the Other, of which he is the bearer.

The empirical individual can experience and relate to this Symbolic title in different ways. He may identify with it utterly, as though the authority and respect appropriate to his structual symbolic position is a direct emanation of his self. (Lacan’s famous assertion that a beggar who thinks he is a king is no more or less mad than a king who thinks he is a king.)

Alternatively, the individual may experience his symbolic title as a kind of foreign body, an unwelcome burden, a constant imperative. The father who feels not quite up to the mandate of ‘father’, as if the title doesn’t fit him, as if has invaded him from the outside, clamped itself upon his substance. When someone says, by contrast, you’ve been 'such a good father', it means – ‘you have utterly met, lived up to, your symbolic mandate.’

The Symbolic mandate – king, father or whatever – is, nonetheless, whether embraced or refused, always a kind of eccentric imperative, which colonises the subject, demanding the commitment of and preying on his life substance. And this status of the Symbolic as a kind of parasite is beautifully expressed in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, part ii.

The history plays as a whole arguably concern the way in which people are interpellated by their symbolic titles, assume or fail to assume their symbolic titles, are transformed by those titles. Towards the end of part ii, Prince Hal, soon to be Henry v, first thinks his father dead, seeing the crown (the very material embodiment of his title) lying beside him on the pillow. On realising that his weary and ill father is in fact still alive, Hal comments -

Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art worse than gold.

The Symbolic leaches life out of the real body, the Symbolic title is like a parasite feeding on the living body.

Falstaff, by contrast, is the life substance itself, negligent of Symbolic ‘honours’. Ultimately Falstaff has to be disowned by Hal when he assumes his symbolic title of Henry V.

Inner/outer

'Even our physical life, and still more the world of our spiritual aims and interests, rests on the demand to carry though into objectivity what at first was there only subjectively and inwardly, and then alone to find itself satisfied in this complete existence. Now since the content of our aims and interests is present first only in the one sided form of subjectivity, and this one-sidedness is a restriction, this deficiency shows itself at the same time as an unrest, a grief, as something negative. This, as negative, has to cancel itself […] The individual in his essential nature is the totality, not the inner alone, but equally the realization of this inner through and in the outer.'

Hegel, Aesthetics.


A Note on Yeats

Yeats despite the voiced antipathy to ‘abstraction’ is consistently attracted to geometric & quasi-algebraic formulae. One finds it especially, of course, in a Vision but it is already there in the early occultist activity. The diagram, the conceptual scaffold of reality rather than its vivid immediacy. This can be related to the Modernist tendency towards mathemes, inner structures, the unseen algebra of the sensuous.




The materialisation of the image (Imaginary) is underwritten by a prior geometry or a structure, with the resultant gap between structure and percept which is a signature trope of modernist literature and thought. Increasingly the appearance of the world and its conditions of intelligibility are at variance.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Epic World

Epic language is one of simile and analogy rather than concept and abstract measure. A distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.

“Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.”

Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. It never migrates into some purely conceptual realm, a pure dictionary-like definition.

What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.

In this respect, the world of Homer seems to me utterly unPlatonic - if in Plato there is first of all a realm of disembodied concepts, which then descend to and reside within this lower world, availing themselves of a transitory material envelope.

Moreover, in the Homeric there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium - things address not only our sense of sight; touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” (Iliad) is not just ‘memorize’ – it addresses the sensory experience of registering something, it also ‘metaphorizes’ the physical world in order to talk about (what we would now call) the ‘mental’, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Perhaps ‘mind’ is, indeed, more ‘transparent’, since implicitly it is intelligible through the optic of action/ being-in-the-world.

It was of course Hegel and his heirs who thought of ‘the epic’, ‘the novel' etc not simply as literary genres intelligible within the “laws” and biases of literary development, but as embodiments of Worlds, as presupposing certain historical shifts which can then, as it were, be read off from them in reverse:

Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires[1]

Vital in this regard, in Hegel and later in the criticism of people like Lukacs, was the historical truth disclosed in the novel, and the distinction between the novel as a genre and earlier forms such as the epic and the traditional story.

Jameson on Benjamin and Sartre:

The two forms [the tale and the novel] are opposed not only in their social origins (the tale springing from collective life, the novel from middle-class solitude) and in their raw materials (the tale using what everyone can recognise as common experience, the novel that which is uncommon and highly individualistic), but also and primarily in their relationship to death and to eternity.

And on Lukacs:

In the artworks of a preindustrialised, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences […..] the works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. [..]

The village, the city-state, is a whole world in itself
[1] Cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 166.

Anyway, thinking about 'nostalgia' for the Epic world as a motif in Modern thought, eg Heidegger. Will try to post something on what I mean by this if I have time.

Being Invisible

Being is invisible in the following sense: although we can see that something is smooth, we can not see its ‘being smooth’. The actual quote, from Husserl, reads: “I can see colours, but not being-coloured. I can feel smoothness but not ‘being smooth’ Logical Investigations.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Being Seen

There is an essay by Berger, although I forget where, in which he suggests that a painting, a significant painting, is not so much a record of an appearance but of an act of seeing. A photo has trapped an appearance, rent it from time and context, and flattened it into something like a fact or factum brutum. The painted image is not a copy, not even a copy of the act of seeing. The painting, its rhythms, its inner constitution, the decisions that have knit it together – all these are the act or process of seeing. “Every painted image announces: ‘I have seen this’.” The photo copies ‘reality’, where reality is the world firmly and securely accommodated in and by language. To really see something involves breaking through this ‘reality’, searching beyond it, and this process is indissociable from what is before us on the canvas.

Rilke once said that everything that has truly been seen must become a poem. It must, we might put it, break through into poetry. But what is really being said here, surely, is that its ‘being seen’ is incomplete until it reaches or achieves poetry. The poem is its final and condign lodging.

Perhaps what both Berger and Rilke are talking about is the presence of a thing. The presence of a thing cannot be captured by photographic facsimile. The photo skims of precisely what is reproducible about the thing. Recognisable. That which is answerable to the Other. The painting or poem accommodates the ‘aura’ of the thing.

This seems to be the subject matter of one of Berger’s finest pieces of work, "Will it Be a Likeness", initially a radio programme performed by Berger and Simon McBurney. It is a programme about the presence and silence that adheres to things and the denial or emptying out of this presence by commerce and by the perpetual migration of reality into a series of representations; the fate of presence in an age when “everything everywhere on the planet is for sale.” The latter mentality, of universal buyability, or commodification, is given insistent voice in Berger’s essay:

‘Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm – to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.”

What exists outside this kind of language is, increasingly, pushed, under duress, into what sounds like mysticism or madness. It is bullied into silence by the absolutism of profit, or its own proper and integral silence is inundated by impatient noise.

One of the signal and enduring qualities of Berger’s prose is the protective silence it builds around itself, the cordon of silence with which it insulates itself from the insistent noise of the world, the precious Nothing which is its stony rejoinder to the fanaticism of ‘how much?’.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Much Ado About Nothing

Having being roped into doing a little extra teaching on Shakespeare, I found myself reading Terry Eagleton’s sparky little tract on the subject, short but good value at about 10 concepts per cubit of prose. Particularly interesting were his remarks on Nothing, from which ensued the following reflections.

There are, of course, different kinds of nothing and different ways of seeing nothing. To be shown round a new unfurnished flat involves, in a sense, seeing nothing – seeing a place with nothing in it. But if you were to return home one evening, expecting to see your computer in its familiar place on your desk, and it isn’t there, you actively see – with dizzy anxiety - an absence, a vacancy whose volume is coextensive with that of the computer. Here, Nothing is the ‘absence of’ something - it’s a disturbing refusal of being where you expect something, where your gaze instead meets with a lack, a gap in reality.

The obvious precedent of this kind of Nothing, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is of course the male child’s surprise and anxiety at seeing the female’s ‘missing’ genitals. Where he expects to see a thing, he instead encounters an absence. This produces, among other responses, castrating anxiety, the sudden spectre of a subtraction, actual and symbolic. This idea is conveniently underwritten in Elizabethan English, where ‘thing’ and ‘nothing’ are slang for the male and female genitals respectively. Or at least, it is thought that ‘Nothing’ was slang for the female genitals, as when Hamlet replies to Ophelia’s ‘nothing’ with ‘that’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs’. As Eagleton jokily points out, though, when Lear asks Cordelia “what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters” we aren’t to imagine that she is replying ‘Female genitals, my lord’. Nevertheless, Cordelia’s reply perfectly fits the pattern described above. It’s a silence where Lear expects speech, a castrating absence. It ‘castrates’ his ego, for the solicitation of fawning and fulsome speech from his daughters is little more than an egotistical pageant, a flattering glass, cracked by Cordelia’s truncated response.

In Othello, the absent handkerchief is a ‘nothing’ in this sense. We have the anxiety of the eyes meeting with a gap, a blank in place of something. This nothing acts a vacuum into which Othello’s fantasies and ‘blown surmises’ are sucked. It is the task of an Iago to introduce silences, absences, tears in the fabric of the word-woven world. And it is this which then ‘motivates’ Othello’s desire – which is the desire to fill-in and re-possess these absences, these Nothings - just as the uncertainties or ambiguities of a text motivate us to go on reading – to go on and possess it, which is to say to resolve its ambiguities.

Eagleton relates all this stuff to a more basic anxiety about Nothing. Things themselves are mute, they do not have signs inscribed in their surface, but ask to be ‘completed’ by language. This muteness is unsettling, somehow pregnant with infinite meaning and utterly devoid of any at all. Reality only ‘settles down’ when covered with the radiant net of words. Words lend reality the illusion of stability, or: Language is a way of ‘muffling’ the anxiety-producing silence of the world. Thus it is the absence of words that open up ‘anxiety’, like the absence of the computer on the desk or the absence of the ‘thing’ in the imagination of the Freudian child.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Some links

Some of you may be interested t know that William Gibson, author of neuromancer and cardinal reference point in discussions of all things cyber- has his own blog, here, which I found courtesy of here. Paul Virilio writes on cyberspace and related issues here. An interesting review of G. Agamben's latest book here. Also, rather belatedly, Terry Eagleton on 'intellectuals':

With the decline of the critical intellectual, the thinker gives way to the expert, politics yields to technocracy, and culture and education lapse into forms of social therapy. The promotion of ideas plays second fiddle to the provision of services. Art and culture become substitute forms of cohesion, participation and self-esteem in a deeply divided society. Culture is deployed to make us feel good about ourselves, rather than to tackle the causes of those divisions, implying that social exclusion is simply a psychological affair. That to feel bad about ourselves is the first step towards transforming our situation is thus neatly sidestepped. ...

.... University academics are discouraged from fostering adversarial debate, in case it should hurt someone's feelings. Why indulge in it anyway, if what matters is not truth but self-expression? "Student-centred learning" assumes that the student's "personal experience" is to be revered rather than challenged. People are to be comforted rather than confronted. In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service. This phoney populism, as Furedi points out, is in fact a thinly veiled paternalism, assuming as it does that ordinary men and women aren't up to having their experience questioned. Rigorous discriminations are branded as "elitist" - an elitist attitude in itself, given that ordinary people have always fiercely argued the toss over the relative merits of everything from films to football clubs. Meanwhile, libraries try frantically not to look like libraries, or to let slip intimidatingly elitist words such as "book".

J.B.

"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."

John Berger

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Note

Normal blogging service will hopefully be resumed by this weekend.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

The Ballad of Franz Kafka

He came to Prague in a fragile boat,
His hair was beetle black.
His thin ribbed body was barely afloat
And stretched and pale as if on a rack.

As white as a bone in a dying throat
He stumbled along and clutched his coat,
With a siren's song he'd learnt by rote
And a fardel of stories and fables.

The road was narrow and dimly lit,
It skirted the foot of the palace.
He simply requested a permit to live
But was greeted with laughter and malice.

Granted a visa, he trained as ascribe
And hardly slept a wink.
Thin, unloved and barely alive
He lived and breathed in paper and ink.

He rattled around in a form of speech
Old German and dead bureaucratic;
And when he got home from the office at night
He padlocked himself in his attic.

One evening he met a young woman -
A Jewish Berliner, Felice,
She smiled and stroked his thin pale hands,
He sensed an unusual peace.

'If only you'd leave your attic bower,
This tiny circle of light,
With me you could blossom into a flower
And not be a creature of night.

'You stay couped up in this small gloomy space -
It like putting yourself in detention.
But I have to keep bottled up, Felice,
For constraint is the nurse of invention.'

He began to sweat and to pace the floor,
He threw away bundles of paper.
Would he enter the strange world of daylight and flesh,
Or burn up alone like a taper?

With equivocal purpose he made for the door
Yet he ached as if on a rack;
One of his feet seemed stuck to the floor,
And the night was insect black.

As he reached the threshold and snuffed out the candle
He felt a sharp pain in his lung;
His thin pale hand never reached the handle,
Like a song of love never sung.

He staggered around, collapsed on the bed,
It felt like a metamorphosis;
Out of his mouth it spilled dark red:
He had tuberculosis.

Love had been slain - a violent thief
Had struck him and stolen his breath.
Instead of the beautiful voice of Felice
His companion from now would be Death.

Yet he felt inside him a certain relief.
He as spared the momentous decision.
Was he himself the shadowy thief?
Had he made the fatal incision?

'Too much blood has been spilled,' he wrote,
'We'll never be joined as one.
There's a dry rattle deep in my throat,' he coughed,
'I must shield myself from the sun.'

Hand in hand he danced the dry roads
With a fluttering under his ribs.
His companion's limbs were beetle black,
Like a vein of ink or a hairline crack,
And they danced to asilver nib.

In occasional airs his siren song sings,
With its terrible lonely elation.
He flew from the world on folio wings -
His final transformation.

from Pipelines, 1998.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Apologies

Really too busy to post at the moment, having taken on a bit of extra work. The post below was written very hastily and will be corrected anon.

A Note On Genet.

"The memory with the quickest sting is of the toilet outside the house with the slate roof. It was my refuge. Life, which I perceived as distant and blurred through its shadow and smell [..] Life reached me as singularly sweet, tender, light,or rather lightened, stripped of its heaviness [..] Life seemed to float a bit a like a painted dream while I, in my own hole like a larva, took up a peaceful nocturnal existence, and sometimes had teh feeling that I was slowly sinking deeper, as in a sleep or a lake or a maternal bosom toward the spiritual centre of the world."

Genet





An emblematic passage; for could one not describe Genet's world as a world of light and unreality glimpsed furtively, perhaps greedily from behind a latrine wall: the combination of glimmering surfaces, glittering films and skeins, and the dark and humid interiority of the toilet. The latrine is also here the body, or a prosthetic extension thereof, the body as an engine of life and putrefaction at once, a clammy hut where the heart jet and the knocking of Death are indissociable, where customary oppositions between life and death glide into the one another. Genet inhales his own smells with the delicacy of the wine-taster, delights in the dark interior as well as the smooth exterior of the body. Flatulence and grace, balletic harmony and formless shit are not longer arranged on a ladder of aesthetic distinction.

The obscene is folded inside out and made beautiful. Beauty? It seeps out of a tube of vaseline, or flashes from a policeman's truncheon, as if promiscously indifferent to its object.

Genet compares the latrine to a confessional. There is something of the same 'economy' of release: All that is festering inside is allowed egress and recognition. The good Freudian child offers his shit as a gift, and so does the sinner offer his moral corruption to the priest. The anal child, or Genet, relishes his shit, a strange repulsive miracle, a slimy larval soul.

For Genet, the body, eroticised by the restless 'I' inside it, becomes a kind of soft prism through which the external world is perceived and received. Genet's true home is his body, his nomad's shell. The latrine, in turn, is the body's carapace. Everythign outside this febrile territory is foreign, remote, an object of curiousity or violent desire (the violence is needed to break through the screen separating him from the world of light and Others). Yet if he is detached from the world, its alien shapes and pungent colours, the inexplicable exchanges of its citizens, crouched on the beached margins, something seemingly contrary is also true; for often Genet seems the very addresee of the world - the details of the world mutely implore him to give them a voice, translate them into what will then become his style. Style gives a local habitation to the nude Things which, out there in the foreign world, transfix the vagabond poet. Genet is a magician who makes the world speak. So it can seem, at least. It is never entirely clear whether he is teasing out from the world its hitherto trapped language, or whether he is simply putting words into its mouth, as one puts flowers in a jar. He scarcely knows himself.