exit 2005

Kafka:

Again and again I am drawn into the past, and the pleasure of experiencing human circumstances and ways of thinking in a finished yet perfectly intelligible manner (God knows, 1863 is only fifty years ago) and yet no longer being capable of absorbing them instinctively in every detail from within, thus being faced with the necessity of toying with them according to one’s own inclination and mood – for me this contradictory pleasure is immense, I always like reading old newspapers and periodicals. And then there is this ancient, heart-stirring expectant Germany of the middle of the last century.

(Letter to Felice , 17 Jan, 1913)

The way in which the past presents itself as 'perfectly intelligible' is partly because we read it through what it became. We are its posterity and look on it with amused condescension or infinite liberal tolerance.

These people, the denizens of the past, are trapped in a form of life whose determinants and destination they cannot know. We know more and know better, we think. As Kafka suggests, ‘instinctive absorption’ in these forms of life is for us no longer possible. This ‘absorption’ is precisely what has leaked away, leaving the props and rituals behind, forlorn and (to us) faintly ridiculous. And faintly ridiculous (it can seem) that the denizens of the past could have absorbed themselves so credulously in thse props and rituals. But here lies the false step – not so much the perception of the past but the implied exemption of the present.

For of course, there is a point of view - oh, not yet, but it's coming - from which our own props and rituals will appear equally ridiculous; they too will be left behind while ‘instinctive absorption has moved on elsewhere. And the work of critical thinking is not simply to await the work of time in sundering the props and rituals of our life from our ‘instinctive absorption’, but to do it now, in and on the present.

One of the most stubborn and spontaneous illusions, as Marx identified, was that there has been history hitherto, but no more. The present has emerged from the dust and blindness of history and now sits in judgement on the past.

And from Qlipoth:

Some twat at work today: "we've got to bring this up to 2005". His mantra. As if his only moral, intellectual and aesthetic compass is the calender on his desk. I say, no, let's bring it back to 1848. Or somesuch. We've got to escape from 2005 by whatever expedient we can, see it from somewhere else. Not only is the Present not the appropriate measure, it is precisely what stands in need of measurement.

Under the Sign of Saturn

An interesting review in the TLS of an exhibition and some books on melancholy. (Let me also put in a word for Agamben's Stanzas, which deals with the same subject in a suitably fragmentary and eccentric manner). And here's something I prepared earlier:




Melancholy, says Freud, is the withdrawal of interest from the external world, due to the prolonged and exhaustive investment in a love object (a person) irrecoverably lost. With emotion fixed on this absent centre, circumscribed in its passive embrace, intervention in reality is rendered pointless, and pleasures and activity other than mourning are prohibited from ever getting off the ground:

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity.

Yet the object lost can not be acknowledged, so painful has its absence become, and - leaving behind a deposit of inconsolable sadness - it disappears from conscious reach. Instead, the melancholic’s gaze is arrested by the racked eloquence of his own empty hands, he is left with the cadence of loss in itself, a sound disembodied from it originary sense, which distributes its sad and Lethean vibration over the vacant things of a once enjoyed world. Deprived in this way of its proper object, memory dwindles to its own elusive ghost. This memory of memory, this afterlife of grief, flickers over the surface of the visible world, attempting to discover some trace, glimpse or reflection of what is buried too deep ever to be recalled. This vagrant yearning seeks out some emblem befitting its state. All that is sorrowful and abandoned, discarded objects and physical remains, the parched chaos of a world in ruins: these are all suitable images for melancholic contemplation, and through them - through their myriad, shattered, partial surfaces - is dreamt that whole which was originally lost.

Idle thoughts on Kafka

“The onlookers go rigid as the train goes past”.

The sheer speed of the train steals their movement. As if it were a sudden metaphor for the collective force of the crowd. And their space - a determinate ‘scene’ - is sliced open for an instant, by this emissary, this promise. Then:

“’If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow.

These two sentences are at the opening of the published Diaries.

I sometimes wonder (it is an idle thought, born from two days with flu): Suppose you were to read Kafka’s Diaries, or his letters to Felice, under the impression that it was a work of fiction, using the questions appropriate to a fictional work, or (as befits a work of fiction) trying to discover the appropriate questions. How would such an assumption light up the pages in front of you? The two sentences above, for example, might appear as two perspectives on movement and escape. Something breaks free from its holding or frame. A word escapes from a sentence; a sound breaks free from a word. The body asserts its separateness and won’t be reigned in. These occasional moments of rude freedom punctuate the Kafka world. There is a leap of analogy between these two apparently disparate sentences, but a leap that immediately slips through one’s fingers and vanishes.

Of course, there is a sense in wihc we read the Diaries as fiction or as precursors of fiction. You remember near the very beginning, there are several versions of the same passage concerning the narrator’s education – I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects.

One of these alone would doubtless stand as a firm testament, eloquently final. Here, each version is jettisoned in favour of the next. Each reconfiguration of words and punctuation, each reorganisation of the net of language describes and constructs a new picture. Potentially, it is endless. No version quite ‘grips’ reality- each is 'revealed' as maddeningly provisional, the contours of one fade with and into the emergence of the next. But the effect of this is that reality itself seems to dissolve into the kaleidoscope of language. Reality can only be restored by the arbitrary imposition of the ‘final version’ – the Word as seal and guarantee. Again, the postponement of such a Word, and the consequent sense of suspended reality is hereby identified as a Kafka motif. As is the uncanny power accruing to the word through such postponement (power suspended and in reserve is thereby power augmented).

By ‘education’ Kafka isn’t just meaning the schoolroom. He includes all educators, transmitters of law and language, a ‘multitude’ of people, an adversarial world, the Symbolic itself, we might now say. They have ‘done him great harm’ because they ‘tried to make another person of me’: they barred the Self from emerging. And yet this bar was what let the self emerge and become conscious. This duality, too, is a theme, a herald of things to come.

The fiction of reading the Diaries as fiction produces identifiable ‘motifs’, signs, metaphors, correspondences. Particular sentences are suddenly antecedents or echoes of others. In fact, if you do this, if you bracket off the knowledge that this is a diary, or that the letters are to a real person, a whole new book is produced. From which we might conclude various things: that fiction is, in any case, perhaps always an act of such bracketing, or that reading fiction involves to some extent the ‘fiction’ that what you’re reading is indeed fiction. But also, and I think this might well be true of the letters to Felice, that writing was itself only an escape from events into their fictional equivalent.. Thus, the meeting with Felice and her Mother in the Hotel is simultaneously, a fictional meeting that any of us can step into. Here writing can be an extraction of the fictional seam implicit in facts and events.

Walter Benjamin & Mallarme

Gershom Scholem informs us that in Bern in 1919 Benjamin had on his desk Mallarme’s Un coup de des, ‘in a special quarto edition’. That volume, in various type and color, the text of which Benjamin confessed he didn’t understand, impressed upon Scholem ‘only the visual image of a pre-Dadaistic project’. Later (?) Benjamin will see in this book’s typography a prefiguration of the advertising billboard, and call Mallarme a ‘Bucherrevisor’, “someone who calls into the question the substance and the very foundation of the book and asserts that books will be replaced by some kind of file system in their mission to provide information”(Quoted in Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin 's Passages, 30. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen).

From here.

My question is: who knows where Scholem talks about this, and where WB might discuss the poem? update: And the answer to Q2 seems to have been provided by attested auditor of books, Matt Christie.

Secret Rose

Some time ago, I posted a ‘translation’ of a poem from the Czech, a poem told to me by a Czech speaker who had left the country in the Second World War. The poem’s ‘sprig of rosemary’ was taken by Alphonse Van Worden to be a reference to a tale by Leo Perutz, wherein the Emperor Rudolph 11 and his Jewish mistress are translated out of themselves in order to consummate an adulterous relation across geographical and religious divides. In fact, I knew nothing of the tale until Alphonse mentioned it, although it’s conceivable that the poem does allude to the tale. Anyway, just to say that Le Colonel Chabert has unearthed a version of the tale online. It is here.

ps, perhaps Le Colonel or someone else might know - is there a preferred spelling for bubkis/ bupkes/ bupkis? A friend is considering opeing a blog of that name ...

Benjamin/ Scholem, a note

After my attention was drawn to Walter Benjamin's remarks on Mallarme's Coup de Des, I'’ve been dipping into Gershom Scholem'’s Walter Benjamin, The Story of Friendship. Actually I have always been rather distrustful of Scholem'’s account, motivated as it seems to be by a certain annoyance that WB failed to arrive at the destination assigned him by Scholem. One hears Benjamin in the next room, but not directly. Still, many nuggets.

Benjamin discussed the scope of the concept of experience that was meant here; according to him, it encompassed man'’s intellectual and psychological connection with the world, which takes place in the realms not yet penetrated by cognition.

In experience a certain historical content announces itself. If its site of annunciation is experience, it can be deciphered only by conceptual thought. But thought must first catch what has been announced using the nets of metaphor.

Also, of obvious relevance to Benjamin'’s own technique:

I had for a long time reflected on the derivation of Kraus'’s style from the Hebrew prose and poetry of medieval Jewry - the language of the great halakhists and of the "“mosaic style"”, the poetic prose in which linguistic scraps of sacred texts are whirled around kaleidoscopelike and are journalistically, polemically, descriptively, and even erotically profaned. (WB himself uses the figure of the mosaic in the epistemo-critical prologue to the Trauerspiel book)

A brief note on Zizek etc

Enforced absence from the internet due to moving house and BT’s tardiness in installing a phone line. Last weekend attended the “Politics of truth” conference at Birkbeck. Very little to say that isn’t at Infinite Thought, including some excellent links (inc. PDF of Badiou’s talk).

On the Paris riots. Zizek: the riots contained “no pretence to any kind of positive vision”, “no particular demands, just a demand for recognition” & also referred to it as a “zero level protest which wanted nothing”. Meanwhile, the intellectuals were desperately trying to ‘translate’ these protests into their meaning. This line of argument, which he qualified later, seemed both wrong and self-contradictory. Why does a riot or ‘protest’ have to be about ‘demands’, particular or otherwise? Is not the implicit frame here a psychoanalytically informed one – Zizek's other characterisation of the riots as a ‘blind acting out’ would seem to suggest this.

But anyway, Badiou took the riots to entail the assertion “this country is my country but this state is not my state”. Why? “Because the only relation to this state is my relation to the police”. Riot creates a new visibility of the problem: ie the contradiction between country and state. State is not the state of the people but of something else.

Zizek wondered if this new visibility would immediately be appropriated by experts, no sooner raised than nullified, transformed into an old liberal problem of multi-cultural accommodation etc.

Incidentally, Zizek typically responds to a question with (something like) “ of course, my argument here is..” So, asked a question which contains a reference to irony, he’ll say “But my argument here is that irony is today the dominant form of ideology..”. But the ‘here’ is often not the place from which the question has been asked, but a point of terrain already mapped in advance by Zizek. That is, instead of arguing directly your point he invokes a pre-existing argument from Zizek the author.


Zizek’s actual paper was on populism. For populist politics, the flaw is never in the system as such, but has to do with an element – a corrupt oligarchy or egregious individual – not playing their role properly. The populist can always point to a “Them” who is the enemy. Anyway, K-punk has an excellent summary and response here. Just a random thought – I realised why Mr Christopher Hitchens had always underwhelmed me. Reading Hitchens, even in his ‘radical’ days, it always seemed to be a question of personnel not structure. It was Kissinger or Nixon or whomever, the venality of an individual, the indictment of some moral monster or ethical weakling. Now of course, he's found an altogether more monstrous enemy, and greeted it with 'exhilaration'.

Badiou

We may summarize the main points of the programme that inspired postwar French philosophy as follows.

1. To have done with the separation of concept and existence—no longer to oppose the two;to demonstrate that the concept is a living thing, a creation, a process, an event, and, as such, not divorced from existence;

2. To inscribe philosophy within modernity, which also means taking it out of the academy and putting it into circulation in daily life. Sexual modernity, artistic modernity, social modernity: philosophy has to engage with all of this;

3. To abandon the opposition between philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of action, the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason, and to demonstrate that knowledge itself, even scientific knowledge, is actually a practice;

4. To situate philosophy directly within the political arena, without making the detour via political philosophy; to invent what I would call the ‘philosophical militant’, to make philosophy into a militant practice in its presence, in its way of being: not simply a reflection upon politics, but a real political intervention;

5. To reprise the question of the subject, abandoning the reflexive model, and thus to engage with psychoanalysis—to rival and, if possible, to better it;

6. To create a new style of philosophical exposition, and so to compete with literature; essentially, to reinvent in contemporary terms the 18th-century figure of the philosopher-writer

via

Here be Monsters.

Monsters are highly polysemic — you can use them to “mean” almost anything. And the same monster can have four or five contradictory meanings in the same film or book.

Should we not include this polysemy in our very definition of Monster? That is, part of what’s monstrous about monsters is somehow this very agglutination of significance, these uncontrolled outgrowths of meaning. There is a passage in Zizek about Spielberg’s Jaws where how remarks on how the notable plurality of the meanings given to the shark is the key to its meaning. The shark’s monstrousness is produced retroactively by the fact that none of the proffered meaning stick to it. The failure of each successive meaning to enclose it seems to delineate, by negation, the magnitude of the monster. (In Othello, Iago’s evasive answers indicate some ‘monster in [his] thoughts’ which are producing the evasions. The evasions are the ripples formed by the hidden monster.)


Monstrousness is the name we give to what both generates yet refuses our interpretations. The very plurality of interpretations appears to have been generated by the monster itself. (And speaking of ‘generation’ isn’t there a persistent link between monstrosity and birth/ procreation? ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters..’ the suggestion is of blind propagation.)

Caliban as monster. He is ‘servant-monster’ ‘man-monster’ and ‘fish-monster’ all within the space of 50 lines. Polymorphous, then, as well as polysemic. But isn’t what makes Caliban a definitive monster the fact of his botched-humanity? Don’t we typically see the monstrous as a deformation or mutation of humanity rather than a thing in its own right? In MND, what do the mechanicals say on Bottom’s transformation into an ass - “oh monstrous’. An ass itself would not be monstrous, but the warping of humanity, the becoming-other, this animal enhancement…here lies the monstrous. The monstrous is a protrusion of the human beyond the human. An eyeball bulging from the socket like a boiled egg, a tongue growing out of a neck, or men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders – all might meet with the cry ‘oh monstrous’! ‘Nature’ has been perverted, distended, re-arranged. Some fly has entered the Natural ointment. (Indeed, one thinks of ‘The Fly’ movie, where a tiny laboratory complication, a microscopic interference, produces the utterly monstrous.)

There is also a tradition according to which a monster as portent: ie, it’s a sign, an index of a Catastrophe. It points beyond itself, it is a crack or kink in nature through which presses the Horror. The monstrous is a grimace in the surface of reality that discloses some Other Thing - not necessarily ‘under the surface’, but some Thing which at least bends the surface out of true.


R.W. Dent, researching Shakespeare’s use of ‘monstrous ingratitude’ in Lear, cites the following: 'The name of men is too good for them (i.e. those guilty of ingratitude), seeing they are monsters in nature the which hath seeded a certain sense of thankfulnesse in all creatures' (from R.Allen Oderifferous Garden of Charitie). Ingratitude is 'monstrous', because it is unnatural, it seems that nature has omitted something, and this subtraction produces monsters. Some little irregularity in nature, some minor variation in the DNA (Nature’s own Symbolic Order) allows the monstrous to appear. The monstrous, not as a thing in its own right, but a function of some slip up, bodge, omission. ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the monstrous is something against which we must be constantly vigilant – we take our foot off the peddle, we take our hand of the lid, and the monstrous emerges. The monstrous creeps into reality trough a loophole of inattention.



Why is it that deep sea fish appear monstrous? After all they are only fish. Is it not that these appear as:

1.formless, lumps of proto-matter, blind and undeveloped life.

2. they do not fit into our available grids of classification – they appear as anomalies, inexplicable lapses in nature, often from another time, surviving bizarrely into the present.

3. they appear only as the distended or abnormal form of more familiar creatures, a series of botched experiments.



Satan, who represents Evil, the utterly vicious, is yet not a monster because he also fits absolutely into a certain moral universe, a certain symbolic order. What would be monstrous would be some pathological outgrowth within that moral order.

The monstrous is always something that breaks through, distorts, or simply refuses our Symbolic ways of organising the world, our various symbolic orders – whether these be Nature, Good/ Evil, or whatever. The monstrous is the presence within these of something foreign, but a foreignness which seems to be nothing more than a mutation within the familiar.

In a certain way, the monstrous belongs to the realm of appearance. Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,

From the pre-Xian point of view, xianity can only appear monstrous. The ‘monstrous’ depends on the perceiving gaze, and which symbolic system one occupies. Perhaps the birth of the new is always destined to appear monstrous.

Notes.

Still to be explored: link between creation and the monstrous.

Q: Why mythic beasts creatures like satyrs and unicorns not 'monsters'?

[nb see comments for some v. interesting links and suggestions]

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Re-release of Debord's films - see this website. Includes clips. (thanks mc)

Abandoned MS?

Having copied it out in her own hand, she put it in a virtual casket...

Archaeologies of the Future

I'm curious to know whether anyone has looked at the new Jameson book. Your comments may influence whether I buy it. Or at least, whether wait for the paperback.


(I'm also curious, in a different way, to know whether anyone's seen this film.)

The (Sock) Puppet and the Dwarf

The following is a passage from a recent Zizek article in the LRB:

For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (which Benjamin never published), Eric Santner elaborated the notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts in the past. These attempts count as ‘symptoms’, and can be retroactively redeemed through the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary act.

The accusation against Zizek (see comments thread here) is that this citation of Santner is somewhat disingenuous. Luther Blisset links to the actual Santner piece (2003, I think) which, it turns out, cites Zizek’s own Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) as support for his argument. It would appear then that Zizek is citing as an authority/source someone who is citing as a source/authority Zizek himself. John Holbo refers to this referential circle as a ‘Munchausen’ tactic. Zizek has used Santner as a “sock puppet” another commenter states, and adds with obvious glee that this is the “killer” point against Zizek, and a suitable cue to “dismiss” him as a “clown”. Draw your own conclusions. Of course, those who are interested in Zizek are perfectly capable of recognising the lazy or ‘clownish’ elements, without seizing on these as convenient escape clauses.

But in any case, things are perhaps not quite as they seem. The offending passage, above, is basically something Zizek has cut and pasted straight from Revolution at the Gates (2002), where he is referring to an older unpublished version of Santner’s essay from 2001. We can assume that Santner’s citation of Zizek’s Desert of the Real (the offending citation) was added later. The fact that Zizek has simply pasted a 3 year old passage into his LRB essay unmodified is of course remarkable in itself. It’s lazy and frustrating, but readers of Zizek know this only too well. It’s become a signature of his journalism. Which is why, to repeat what Adam Kotsko, has been saying, those who want to engage with Zizek at his strongest are advised to look elsewhere.

ps There's a clip from the new Zizek film here.

pps Initially I thought Zizek might have been playing a little joke with the Santner citation, a la Debord in Panegyric:

Men more knowledgeable than I have explained very well the origin of what has come to pass: “Exchange-value could have formed only as an agent of use-value, but its victory by force of its own arms has created the conditions for its autonomous rule. Mobilizing all human use and seizing the monopoly on satisfaction, it has ended up directing use. The process of exchange became identified with all possible use and has reduced it to its will. Exchange-value is the condottiere of use-value, which finishes by waging war for its own advantage.”

He is of course quoting from Society of the Spectacle.

marginalia

The headless Scott has responded to some questions of mine about Foucault here at LongSunday. (also posted elsewhere in a controversial new blogging experiment). Meanwhile, the same author has a curious anecdote about Spivak. I'd say it's probably the Spivak marginalia story. Read into it what you will.

Melancholy

In an old copy of the NYRB, a long, (intentionally) rambling review by Charles Rosen of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. That certain kind of melancholy corresponding to situations where ways of life have calcified/ grown old. Cites Mme du Deffand corresponding with Horace Walpole:

Yesterday evening I admired the numerous guests who were at my house; men and women like machines with springs who came and went, spoke and laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling; each one played his role through habit: Madame the Duchess of Aiguillon burst with laughter, Mme De Forcalquier showed her disdain for everything, Mme de la Valliere jabbered about everything. The men were no better, and as for myself, I was buried in the blackest reflections; I thought that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had hollowed out for myself all the abysses into which I had fallen; that all my judgements were false and rash and always too precipitate; and finally that I had never really known anyone, that I had never been known, that perhaps I did not know myself.

Revolutionary Nostalgia?

An interview with Zizek in today's Guardian. Speaking of Zizek, here's something I posted as a comment elsewhere:

“‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the contrary, the Lenin who is to be retrieved is the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which the old co-ordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to re-invent Marxism – take his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word”. The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically re-enacting the “good old revolutionary times”, nor at an opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old programme to “new conditions”, but at repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism… “Lenin” stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates.. in which we live.. “

In a sense (as Zizek acknowledges) he reduces Lenin to little more than the name ‘for a certain revolutionary stance’. And it is this stance, rather than the contents and costumes of the Russian Revolution, that Zizek wants to find again. His ‘nostalgia’, he would doubtless insist, is for this stance and for the space of possibilities opened up by the revolution rather than the ensuing actuality. Needless to say, many would reject this distinction.

What particularly appeals (to Z) about Lenin is his refusal to wait for the right ‘objective historical situation’ to come along for revolutionary intervention, as though revolutionary initiative lay with ‘History’. This is an illusion (the illusion of the Big Other). Instead, Lenin demonstrates how we must fully assume this initiative ourselves, and in so doing precisely transform the very ‘objective conditions’ that others passively await.

(Zizek: “such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution")

notes

There are a couple of additions to Notes On Rhetoric, inc:

The Guardian A newspaper bought exclusively by people who wish to complain about the mentality of its readership and the venality of its columnists.

Now despite Charlotte Street being at a standstill, its hits have recently doubled thanks to this link:

Any ideas??????

Edward Said

Archive

Canned

I've recently done a number of posts at Long Sunday that form something of a series. A friend has asked that I collect them in one place for his perusal. In order of composition they are as follows, with the last in the series (for now) reproduced in full).

A Crack in the Picture

Spectacles for the Gods

A Note on the World Picture

Theatrum Mundi

Gaze (i)

Gaze (-1)

'The Can':

Just as motionless images can contain narratives, so stories also paint pictures. This is hardly news: the careful selection, accumulation and arrangement of details, interpolations, parenthetical remarks; all of which delineate a scene while dictating the point from which we see it.



Lacan’s well-known story of the sardine can, with its pointedly pointless ‘joke’ is both a story about pictures and a carefully drawn composition in itself. These two things are, I think related. What follows tries to explain this relation.

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at sea.

The first element of the composition is this image of the young intellectual striving towards, thirsting for, the world of action and conflict. This is what young intellectuals do - an utterly recognisable, commonplace trope. Isn't this is part of the comfort of stories – they move forward under a kind of spell, a spell cast by elementary recognisable scenes that promise to unfold in more or less predictable ways. Not that the exact content is predictable, of course, but the structure is predictable, the ‘parameters’ secure, and precisely so we can surrender to the content. So once more, the young intellectual longing for the ‘remedy’ of action. We know that the ‘action’ dreamed by his sedentary life is nowhere to be found, that reality will outrun and educate him.


One day, I was on a small boat with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time Brittany was not industrialised as it is now. Seen retrospectively, from the ‘now’ shared by L. and his readers, the fishermen are ‘innocent of industrialisation.’ We are looking at a lost way of life. Suddenly the scene is suffused with nostalgia; the actions of the crew are brushed with a rustic simplicity but also marked with the pathos of transience. Like the youthful ardour of the intellectual, this way of life is doomed. We, the reader, are the ones who know that these things come to an end – this is the reader the story has made us.

There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I so loved to share.

(No L., your ‘risk’ was the frisson of eyeballing reality as opposed to a sedentary everyday life; their risk was their everyday life. The fantasy of sharing: Imaginary.)

But it wasn’t all danger and excitement – there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young, from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class –

Petit-Jean too is marked, marked with Fate; we see him as already ‘someone who died young’. Suddenly his face and words are pregnant with a Destiny he cannot know. This type of character is well known to the storyteller’s art. His end is in his beginning.

this petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry,



‘Witness to the canning industry’ links with the earlier ref. to ‘not yet industrialised’. This sardine can is an emissary of the not-yet, an interpolation from the future. Is this why it cracks the picture? Yes and no. It is, simultaneously, the very prerequisite of the picture. How? Again, the scene painted by Lacan only appears as it does – framed and sepia-coloured by a certain nostalgia, from the point of view of industrialisation. Only from and for the industrial Now is the scene what it is. It is only imbued with sad charm, the pathos of the transient, because we view it from the other side of industrialisation, because we are marooned in the industrial present and cannot go back. And this industrial future winks at us from the sardine can. We see the place from where we are looking.

which we, in fact, were supposed to supply.

(Again with the ‘We’? Lacan is to be counted one with the pre-capitalist fisherman?)

It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me ‘You see that can? Do you see it?

Petit-Jean, too, invites Lacan into a collusive looking. ‘You see that’, he says, making Lacan’s eyes to converge on the same object, mutually focused. ‘We,’ indeed. L and P-J are equal in relation to this Third. And then:

Well it doesn’t see you!’

It is this precisely pointless punchline which ‘punctures’ the young Lacan of the scene but, at the same time, punctures the scene carefully composed for the reader by the older Lacan. We, like him, are caught out, cheated. Where we expected wisdom or pathos there is only a lame joke.

Moreover does not this remark, in cheating both Lacan and ourselves, collapse the carefully composed distance between us, in the industrialised Now and those fishermen, under the sign of Fate, wresting their living from a ‘pitiless nature’?

He found this incident highly amusing – I less so. I thought about it. Why did I find it less amusing than he? It’s an interesting question. To begin with, if what petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light at which everything that looks at me is situated – and I am not speaking metaphorically.


In Lacan’s version, his different reaction to the ‘punchline’ stems from a difference in knowledge: with his specialist knowledge he can see the place from which the line is true; he has a superior vantage point to P-J. It is this vantage point which is responsible for his not finding the line funny.

But doesn’t the very ‘puncturing’ effect of the anecdote reside with P-J occupying a position not anticipated by L., meeting Lacan’s expectation with a mockingly ‘pointless’ joke and a cackle of laughter, exploiting the naivety of the ‘young intellectual,’ making Lacan the object of a ‘punchline’ where he, lured into identification, expected to be a subject?

Indeed, is it just that L. found the joke ‘less amusing’, as if his own laughter were a dilute version of Petit-Jean’s, or is it that he himself was suddenly included in the joke? Isn’t it that L. thought that they both had the sardine can in their sights whereas L. himself was in the sights? Isn’t L.'s reaction one of discomfort that his position, and the ‘lines of sight’, have abruptly shifted? Doesn’t the point of P-J’s remark, ricochet off the sardine can and rebound into Lacan’s eyes; or is the empty unseeing gaze of the can that of L.?

In fact, Lacan seems to know all this, it is precisely his point:

The point of this little story, as it had occurred to my partner, the fact that he found it so funny and I less so, derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is because I, at that moment – as I appeared to those fellows who were earning their livings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what for them was a pitiless nature – looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was rather out of place in the picture. And it was because I felt this that I was not terribly amused at hearing myself addressed in this humorous ironical way.

Lacan’s picture, of the fisherman and their struggle with nature, the pre-industrial way of life that touches something vital, the pathos of this, the clouds of Fate that hang over it, its naïve charm (one thinks of Berger’s peasants) is only so from a point that the picture itself cannot admit.

Road Closed

picture from here

Ladies and Gentlemen, I've decided to have a break from Charlotte Street, for various reasons. So, it will be closed until December. I will, however, still be posting at Long Sunday. Comments at CS remain open, as do the archives

May I also just draw your attention to Mark Thwaite's revamped Ready Steady Book.

28 August: : Some new posts at Long Sunday: here, here and here.

Coda to coda

Below are just a couple of things rescued from the haloscan. Not a real post, then, and I'm not opening the comments. Any points/ questions and you can of course email me (mark_b_kaplan[at]hotmail[dot]com

Val Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)

A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.

The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.

Incidentally, claims about ‘context’ are I think misunderstood, and this has to do with the unsatisfactory nature of the word itself, which inevitably suggests something like ‘background’ or inessential frame. Thus, reminders that we should look at the context of X category can be met with impatient demands to put aside such peripheral and adventitious stuff and pass on to the thing itself. But the argument about context implies that this ‘context’ is in fact inscribed in the very concept and to such a degree that it is ‘inoperable’. To the extent that a concept opens up and reveals the world in a certain way and from a certain point of view, to the extent that there is, pre-programmed into it, a range of assumptions and implications that cannot simply be shaken off, the concept is the Special Agent of its context and its history. The reverse of this is that the concept is, simultaneously, readable as a clue to the ‘context’ that it serves and reflects. Without this 'context' it is 'bereft of the light that gives it colour'.

Haloscan

note: I was unhappy with the 'coda' post, so have deleted it**. The ensuing haloscan knockabout was, I think, much more revealing and more entertaining, and is produced below. The flavour of the anti-theory position is particularly sharp here:

Sean McCann: "the obvious incoherence of the more polemical anti-Theory positions"

Ah, thank you, Mark! Finally, an acknowledgment of the point you wouldn't concede before.

I wouldn't see the remark about Eagleton's pomo book as being very significant--for two reasons. It's late work and quite different, I believe, in style and sensibility from, say, the Machery or Benjamin stuff. For another, both Eagleton and his one-time American admirers seem to realize that a once perceived affinity no longer exists.

Your argument here is a clever version of Matt's endlessly reiterated point: the claim that there's no there there. This is a strange attitude for a materialist to take. There are recognizable facts of social practice in, at the least, the American academy. They are not in doubt--until, that is, Theory is criticized, when all of a sudden it's pretended that it doesn't exist. Yes, there is vagueness and even incoherence in what Theory entails, just as there quite frequently, in fact rampantly, is in individual works of Theory. (Someone like Judith Butler thinks nothing, for example, of throwing together Foucault, Lacan, Bourdieu, Derrida, Hegel, and Austin in a single work of 100 something pages. A bit of this a bit of that, all hard edges rounded off and incompatabilities resolved/ignored. See, e.g, Homi Bhaba or Lisa Lowe for a similar hodgepodge of big names. The practice is utterly commonplace. An indifference to incoherence is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of Theory.) But that fuzziness does not affect the recognizability of Theory. (There are a lot of fuzzy categories that are perfectly recognizable.) The institutions Scott has mentioned are testimony to this. There are many such. The anthologies, including the Norton are another. The prevalent curriculum of graduate and undergraduate programs is yet a third. The bookshelves of hip book stores (St. Mark's in NYC) is another. The discourse of publication and professional conferences is a fifth. (In those settings, there are names you are expected to know and work you're expected to be able to pretend a familiarity with. [...]
What people mean when they say doing Theory, as I've mentioned several times now, is predominantly poststructuralism and poststructuralist influenced work, with room made for the gentle absorption of various figures who can seem to be read in sympathetic ways--even if this depends on sheer ignorance. [...]Those people are often manhandled to share similar attitudes: assumptions about the non- or weak referentiality of language; about the epistemological and moral dubiousness of realism; about the pervasiveness of power operating primarily through cultural forces (and very rarely arising as a product of economic or political forces); about the terribly dangers of normalization and various informal forms of social enforcement; about the value of isolated acts of resistance to norms; about the subversiveness per se of this set of intellectual assumptions. All this means that in the American academy you can be seen to combine Gramsci, Foucault and Lacan (dubious though that combination should be) and will be called someone doing Theory, but that, if you want to, say, bring Chomsky's TG to the study of meter, no one would ever, ever consider you to be doing Theory. There you have it, a meaningful social distinction that distinguishes t from T.

There are stylistic traits that go along with this set of basic intellectual assumptions--including the kitschiness John H describes so well or the performative grandstanding mentioned by Culler. The premise to be addressing the fundamental features of social reality by practicing a high-test form of literary interpetation (on display, e.g., in CR) is another facet of the quality both Culler and Holbo and Cunningham identify.

To ignore all this requires a determined resistance to acknowledging social reality and, ironically, a kind of anti-intellectualism.

Mark Kaplan: ' a determined resistance to acknowledging social reality and, ironically, a kind of anti-intellectualism'.

Sorry, are these being attributed to me?? It's just that if they are my reply might be different than if they are not.

Anon: keep swinging, Sean, you've got 'em on the ropes!

Roy Genders: 'Those people are often manhandled to share similar attitudes'

Sounds like a matter for the police.

McCann: 'Sounds like a matter for the police'

Oh, for pete's sake, Roy! Objection to intellectual sloppiness = policing? How absurdly melodramatic is that?!

Mark, do I think you're anti-intellectual? No. I couldn't avoid tossing back an intimation so frequently sent my way in recent days. My mistake. That said, I think Matt, say, and Jodi and to a lesser degree CR have staked out almost explicitly anti-intellectual positions. What counts in their view of things is not your argument, but your attitude. [...]

Matt: I'll respect Sean to kindly stop using my name as associated with any sweepingly inaccurate positions as he sees fit. I'm sick to death of this whole anti-intellectual meme you've insisted on foregrounding. Nobody ever accused you of being anti-intellectual. Merely pointing out objectively that "there is a history of anti-intellectualism in America" and wondering where, if anywhere, in this history, and where on the political spectrum (in the absence of any exceptionally visible left critiques of theory or positive demonstrations of something better) _Theory's Empire_ may fall is *not* the same thing as accusing anyone--Sean, say--of being an anti-intellectual.

the premise that there is matter of intellectual affinity among Theorists to consider

Who could ever argue, honestly, against such a hopelessly vague premise? The problem is where one goes with it, the uses to which such a line is being put, the sweeping dismissals without bothering to engage with particular examples, the broad sociology, revisionist historiography, etc. etc.. But I'm just repeating things here now, and I'll stop.

I've "stake out" nothing; you just don't get it. And, quite frankly, you seem rather determined not to get it.

McCann: Sorry, Matt, was I accusing you of something? I should have said I wasn't talking about you, I was just talking about your framework. It's not what you insist you believe, it's just the frame you keep advancing. The anti-intellectual meme, btw, was first put into play by you. You can hardly be surprised if it returns to whence it came.

Agreed, though. You've staked out nothing. That's not your method. No stakes in fog.


Kaplan: I suppose it’s quite amusing. After asking whether I’m guilty of anti-intellectualism and the wilful denial of reality, I’m reassured that of course I’m not anti-intellectual! On this wilful denial, more in a moment.

So, just a couple of things:
"the obvious incoherence of the more polemical anti-Theory positions"

Ah, thank you, Mark! Finally, an acknowledgment of the point you wouldn't concede before

I’ve obviously always thought that the more polemical anti-theory positions were incoherent. Where have I been insisting on their lucidity & consistency? I take you to mean that I was refusing to concede the possibility of a non-polemical position. This is false. See, for example, my response to Scott’s initial comment to T1/t2.

wouldn't see the remark about Eagleton's pomo book as being very significant--for two reasons. It's late work and quite different, I believe, in style and sensibility from, say, the Machery or Benjamin stuff

This is a strange observation. The point was not about the book’s place in Eagleton’s corpus but whether some people seem to think that Theory and Postmodernism/ Postmodern Theory are practically synonyms. On Eagleton, incidentally, the books ‘on’ Benjamin and Macherey (I take it you are referring to Criticism and Ideology) are markedly different from each other, of course, both stylistically and in terms of the presiding influences. I’d say only the Benjamin book conforms to your definition of Theory. Eagleton has always been very critical of postmodernism, certainly well before 1997. He has remained, at some level, and by his own confession, a fairly classical Marxist. Criticism and Ideology is a failrly straightforward eg of Marxist aesthetics.

Now, let me be clear. The post above does little more than record some of my ‘cursory’ impressions and then go on to ask a number of rudimentary critical questions - how are certain definitions compatible, what is the referent of Theory, what kind of a concept is ‘Theory’ – are we talking about a philosophical turn, or the result of institutional dynamics; are we dealing with a ‘Post-modern’ phenomenon in some non-trivial sense. In other words: what exactly is the object under consideration.

When such elementary critical questions are impatiently brushed aside with a brusque ‘tsk, tsk’, and an invitation – or demand- to pass beyond them to a reality which is self-evident and obvious, then forgive me if this very gesture arouses my suspicions (and impatience). The familiarity and self-evidence you speak of is, of course, precisely the proper object of critical thought.

Critical theory as I understand it is always a reflection on the things themselves at the same time as being a meditation on the concepts and categories by which we apprehend those things. So, for example, when thinking about poststructuralism, which you also invoke, we should bear in mind that the concept is largely an Anglo-German invention, and so on.

How this elementary operation, and the broaching of elementary questions can be equated with psychosis (which is what, surely, the perverse resistence to reality is) I have no idea.

McCann: Mark, I'm afraid the primary brushing here has been done by yourself and your colleagues. It's like lugging a train up a hill to even get you guys to admit that there might be a thing called Theory and that to consider it critically might be intellectual feasible and politically legitimate. That's not psychosis [..] It's simply the invention of quibbles in the guise of critical thought.

The remark about concession refers to your "Breaking News" post. Despite your later complicated elaborations, the clear point there was that criticism of Theory is incoherent and dubious. Question decided in advance.

p.s. To remind you of the obvious, no critical questions were brushed aside impatiently at the Valve. If you'll review the discussion there, you'll see that beginning efforts at probing some of them were taken up before the conversation was waylaid by various imputations of illegitimacy or unwisdom.

Kaplan: Thanks for reacquainting me w/ 'the obvious', except I wasn't talking about the Valve I was talking about your post above. As for the Breaking News post, might I suggest - as it seems to have presented you with insuperable interpretative difficulties - you ignore it, for all our sakes.

McCann: Same objection. Since some of the issues you raise were anticipated in my posts, as well as elsewhere, it's clear that I'm not trying to brush them aside--or trying to dismiss them via reference to motivation, psychology, context, hidden or unconscious agenda, or intellectual incapacity, all tactics evident in your posts and in those of your colleagues.

The Breaking News post did not present me with insuperable interpretive difficulties. It's meaning was perfectly obvious despite extensive efforts to obfuscate it away.


Kaplan: Re the monster post, it’s odd that others, coming to the post with the necessary good humour and good sense, were able to grasp its meaning without authorial intervention. What I will happily withdraw is the suggestion that your misreading of the text may have been my fault. Your error first appeared, you will recall, in the ill-advised ‘ad hominem’ post, which you at least retracted, or – rightly - regretted, after most of its rather hasty claims were shown to be groundless. What you might have learned from this episode is that your ‘opponent’ is seldom likely to be so generous as to act out your low and tendentious estimation of him.

Your other assertion, that the meaning of the category ‘Theory’ is perfectly transparent or (again) ‘obvious’, that resistance to this obviousness can only be interpreted as obfuscation, becomes no less false with each iteration. The appeal to ‘obviousness’ should put any critical mind on read alert. Incidentally, none of what I have said assumes or asserts the non-existence of Theory, and so what obscure jouissance you derive from repeating this claim I have no idea

Finally, ‘my and my colleagues’ don’t exist, there is no ‘position’ corresponding to this entity. I speak only for myself and will continue to do so.


An aside: Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)

A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.

The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.


McCann: it’s odd that others, coming to the post with the necessary good humour and good sense, were able to grasp its meaning without authorial intervention.

Yes, e.g., Matt got the point because he was aware, as was I, of the intended mockery. The humor he saw was precisely the smugness I recognized. That was its meaning. You yourself were unable to offer any other coherent account.

Your error first appeared, you will recall, in the ill-advised ‘ad hominem’ post, which you at least retracted, or – rightly - regretted, after most of its rather hasty claims were shown to be groundless.

No retraction was made. I regretted bringing my colleagues into contact with intemperate and thuggish writers like AvW and CR, and I attempted to give you the chance to back off some of the nastier of your suggestions. I stand by every one of the assertions in that post. The Valve's effort to talk about Theory was met with innuendo, contempt, vilification, and least courageously, quibbling and pedantic mockery--all of which congratulated itself on its political bona fides.

[...]

Kaplan: If there are any readers left, other than the impressively indefatigable Sean, who would like to consult my gloss on the Monster post, please see here, here and here
I think it blindingly obvious that I am not proposing that “what would catch a Theory monster [would]be Theory itself”. Anyone having genuine difficulty should email me.

McCann: and good luck to you trying to make sense of it.

Kaplan: 'And that's good night from me',
'and it's good night from him.'

** After receiving an email request, I've now reposted the deleted post at the end of the comments.

The Para-Costives

Suppose we invent a collective name for those people not ‘doing theory’ in Literature departments. Suppose we call them the Para-Costives. Yes, it’s an arbitrary and possibly misleading name. We say: the name ‘Para-Costives’ refers to a cluster of related approaches to literature and other texts. And let us discuss the merits and demerits of Para-costive criticism. Let us say that Para-costive criticism suffers from a lack of coherence and has failed to theorise ‘it’s assumptions adequately. We point out various contradictory Para-Costive claims, the inexplicable gaps in its canon of criticism. But wait. Let those impugned or hailed by the label Para-Costive rally together in self-defence. Let them, in so doing, discover things about what their methods have in common – analogies, themes, and shared assumptions. And so let them start saying things like ‘Which way forward for the Para-Costives’, and editing new anthologies with titles like “The New Para-Costives”. And eventually, as they become older and self-reflexive, conferences will spring up on “What is Para-Costivism?” Let them break away and form their own sub-department, with its own canon and terms of reference. They compile anthologies of Para-Costive criticism. And their enemies, who have lost much ground, will compile a counter-anthology; its cover shows a man shovelling horse dung and it is entitled ‘Symbolic Ordure: Cleaning out the para-costives’

p.s. Theory, a 'house of cards'? nonsense!!

Rhetoric Class

Lenin sends me the following email:

Surely the most obvious entry for Notes on Rhetoric has been missed? Middle class! A letter writer to the New Statesman calls Richard Gott a 'middle-class lefty', Nick Cohen derides 'middle-class left-wingery' (what class does a well-paid journo fall into these days?), someone has just called me a 'middle class trot' etc etc.

So, here's an entry:

"Middle Class. Your opponent, (especially if left-wing or intellectual), exists in a materially and culturally rarefied realm, separate from the masses, whose common sense they scorn. As they are Middle Class, their views are likely to be dippy, unreasoningly and excessively liberal /radical, ill-conceived, insufferably smug, know-it-all, hoity-toity and with all the sympathies on the wrong side. They can be airily dismissed with a bit of common-wi-nowt-tekkin-owt wisdom."

Indeed. How many times must we see this stupid, dishonest gesture rehearsed?

It’s not only the vain, tedious pretence that arguments and viewpoints shared across the population are the preserve of the bourgeoisie (a bourgeoisie defined not by its position in the relations of production, but by its poncey ‘lifestyle’). It’s not the the trotting out of this feeble rhetorical trick in lieu of argument. Nor is it the dull inevitability with which these ‘critics’ of middle-class pomposity are in fact it’s most obvious and embarrassing representatives. Nor is it even the patronising and disingenuous adoption of a ‘robust working class common sense’ from which these attempts at satire are launched (Even though their audience is also middle-class, so that they rely only on some kind of collective class shame or bad faith). It’s that these self-dramatising comedians would never dream of any actual class analysis, any genuine critique of ‘bourgeois values’ or ideology. They’d run a mile before pronouncing something like this, for example:

...what makes them representative of the petit-bourgeois class, is that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter politically.

No, the invocation of ‘middle-class’ and ‘bourgeois’ as pejoratives is all dandy as long as it’s aimed at the Left. That’s the rule. And there are enough scribes who’ve read the script and appreciate the remuneration to pass these stock gestures off as their own spontaneous ideas.

A not unrelated matter. Adam Kotsko has a nice little post on 'Islamo-fascism':

Seriously, "Islamofascism?" Are the terrorists winning the sympathy of the common folk by promising to get the trains running on time? Is contemporary Islamic terrorism characterized by a militaristic aesthetic? Are there rumblings of a return to paganism? Is there an industrial-style operation currently attempting to exterminate one or more races of people? Is this supposed Islamic version of fascism an attempt to ward off the danger of communism in the face of the injustices brought about by rapid industrialization? Is it focused in on a messianic leader who speaks publicly to crowds of thousands? Are the terrorists of a nationalistic and expansionistic bent? Do they actually hold power in a legitimate nation-state at all?

The ‘meaning’ of the concept of Islamo-fascism, like so many other such concepts, is to be found outside it in the positions it allows people to take up, the roles its authorises, as in “Yep, I’m fighting fascism, just like o’ George did back in the 30’s, just like the old decent left did. And of course, reciprocally, ‘why ain;t you fighting fascism. You’d better have a damn good ex-coose’.

Similarly, the tired ‘middle-class lefty’ jibes permit self-dramatisation as a debunker of unreal flim-flam of posh people, an Imaginary little theatre piece to amuse and reassure, whilst the actual ruling class go about their business unscathed.

Interruption Continuation

I remembered that there was a chapter in Jameson's book Postmodernism entitled 'Theory'. The initial Theory in question here is that of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp, as featured in Against Theory. Anyway, the definition of theory here is an interestingly restricted one, at least according to Jameson:

Theory = '"the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable". This tendency is tehn identified and localised in two kinds of privileged error: the separation of "authorial intention and the meaning of texts", and a larger, or more 'epistemological' pathology, in which 'knowledge' is separated from 'beliefs', generating teh notion that we can now somehow "stand outside our beliefs", such that "theory" now becomes "the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without".

So, that's one point, and the thought that came to mind was that, regarding any definition of T/theory, one might always productively ask: what here would count as non-theory, or the opposite of theory (is it 'practice', is it 'Reason and Evidence' (!), is it 'analytical philosophy' or what?

Second thing of interest in Jameson's chapter is what he says about New Historicism, which was at the time (1991) the 'latest thing'. Jameson thinks that if this name corresponds to anything it is less ideological or intellectual content than a 'shared writing practice'. But he goes on to say that New Historicists are, in a sense, simply those who felt interpellated or were compelled to answer the label 'New Historicism'. Here it is in Jameson-ese:

"A crucial component of my particular situation as a unique individual
is always the general category to which I am also condemned by other
people and which I must therefore come to terms with (Sartre said assume) in any way I like - shame, pride, avoidance behavior - but which I cannot expect to have removed just because I am somebody special. ..A New Historicist, as Sartre might have said, is one whom other people consider a New Historicist. In our other terminology, this means, in effect, that individual immanence is here in tension with a certain transcendence, in the form of seemingly external, collective labels and identities."

Theorists are those people who, from a certain point of view, appear to be doing a single thing called Theory. This last (to parody FJ), is nothing but the name given to a kind of objective mirage, generated by distance and unfamiliarity, but then projected back onto the object itself. Those quite diverse individuals singled out by this name, nonetheless appropriate it in strategic defiance, hoping to evade the disempowerment of their interpellation by heroically becoming it.

Thought for the Day

A concept that has too many clothes may in the end be the same thing as a concept that has none.

The Deferral of Writing

'Unfortunately, the next day was not that vast, extraneous stretch of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it came to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer.'

Cover Charge

In response to someone pointing out that the NAS implicitly contrast Theory to ‘Reason and Evidence’, Robert [in the comments] makes this more general point:

'What this should alert us to is that the ‘Theory debate’ comes to us ‘pre-politicised’ – it’s already been framed in a certain way, certain stakes have been set up. And the way it’s been framed involves a rightist agenda. The appropriateness of using a term as pre-politicized as Theory, as if it were just some neutral academic term, seems to me questionable. It’s already radioactive with polemical charge. '

I agree that if you are fighting on a certain terrain it’s as well to know who circumscribed that terrain, when and for what purposes. That’s another argument. For now, though, speaking of polemic, take a look at the cover of Theory’s Empire:



The paratextual stuff on Theory’s Empire manages ingeniously to suggest a number of familiar tropes at once. The house of cards that can be blown down with a gust of ‘reason and evidence,’ a grand illusion (cards and magical tricks anyone?) At the same time, the sundry implications of Empire – a kingdom where authority and dogmatism have sovereign rights. Hints of grandiosity, of preening and pretension. Indeed, add title and image together, and the image forms of a reassuring little nude Emperor reigning over his empty fiefdom. This is pure polemic. Tedious and without subtlety.

But in order for the rhetoric of the image to be intelligible, a great deal of (ideological) work has to have been done beforehand. This ‘work’ is the 'framing' of which Robert spoke. Personally, I would think it wise to analyse this framing before simply settling on ‘Theory’ as your object of analysis.

update: The editor of Theory's Empire comments briefly on the cover design here.

Breaking News

THE THEORY MONSTER HAS ESCAPED

Its appearances mutate, it is amorphous yet threatening, its names are many. It sprouts a sinister Marxist head here, a sly post-modern smirk there, all the time waving an indignant Feminist finger at us and at itself. No sooner has it begun speaking the austere language of ‘structures’ and than it's rejoicing in pre-rational intensities and bodily fluid. It is fatally attracted to systems and totalities yet does nothing more than cobble together half-assimilated ideas from miscellaneous sources. Here it’s over-subjective, conflating meaning with reader-response; here it’s reducing a text to a mere illustration of objective forces. Over lunch it celebrates the text’s endless indeterminacy, by dinner it’s imposing on it an alien, fixed meaning. When and where it was born remain uncertain, but it is certainly a mutant offspring, buggered into existence by the indiscriminate coupling of incompatible ideas. Schools breed and multiply within it, and yet it remains One. Its poker-faced PC solemnity is forbidding, yet it is also a frivolous homo ludens, taking nothing seriously, forever playing and punning and putting the world in brackets. The rhetoric of hegemony and power pours from its mouth, but jouissance leaks from its arse. It is irrational, even as – and just because - it introduces into Literature the cold acids of conceptual thought and interpretation; it hates literature and is blind to literariness even as it adopts a grotesque parody of literary style. It speaks in dry and boring jargon, yet lewdly seduces the young with an inexplicable sex-appeal. It is costive and hermetic and yet obsessed with changing the world. It is merely fashionable (and has been now for some thirty-odd years), yet stubborn or obtuse enough to survive its several publicised and prophesied deaths.

The Theory monster must be caught and grappled with. Reward: A prestigious academic career.

Prosthetic Thoughts

Whilst we’re on the subject of Theory, I’d like to ask you about the curious locution ‘doing theory’. It is as if thinking were replaced by ‘doing thought’. Was George Lukacs ‘doing theory’ when he wrote ‘Theory of the Novel’? Is Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society” an instance of ‘doing theory’? The answer is no, they were thinking in as rigorous and critical a way as possible, using the conceptual resources at their disposal, within the tradition in which they had been trained - ie Marxism and dialectical thought, now deeply ingrained in their sensibilities..

‘Doing theory’ on the other hand makes theory sound like a profesional specialisation, some kind of technical skill, perhaps, to be used at work, but basically optional and detachable from your personality. Thus whereas Adorno or Lukacs were engaged in an activity that was so intimate to them as to be, so to speak, inoperable, the ‘theory’ of ‘doing theory’ is more a prosthetic device, or a series thereof – A Deleuzian hand, a Foucauldian eye, a false Zizekian-beard.

Perhaps in some quarters this is indeed what thought has become, professionalized and prostheticised; something to be left on the desk on the way out of the office. And this through prudence, since to really live (& really to think) these ideas might be to change your life or, at least, render your existing situation unsustainable. But if this is the case, then what we need to be looking at are the economic and institutional factors responsible for this. Instead, what can happen is that the ideas themselves receive the criticism which should be directed at the institution that has distorted and reified them. Where this happens it is clearly a form of displacement, one with ideological effects, and needs to be combated. (See Jodi's post).

This, at any rate, was my first thought on the phrase. Second: ‘Doing theory’: the other thing about this is its intransitivity. To talk about 'doing theory' sounds like ‘watching television’, i.e.., you’re no longer watching a particular programme; it’s the activity itself which is now an object of enjoyment. Now here we are touching, I think, on how Theory is seen. Theory has become its own object, its practitioners caught in some kind of self-referential enjoyment. Theory simply loops back into and feeds itself, self-grounding and self-perpetuating with no social issue. Now while this may contain truth, we may at the same time be dealing with a version of that long-standing suspicion of theory as non-instrumental thought, as irresponsible, playful, insufficiently plugged in to social and economic reproduction. And so I refer you again to Theo

btw, contrary to appearances, this isn't the promised follow up post to the one preceding it.

T1 and t2?

I was flicking through a copy of Theory’s Empire today (in a bookshop, that is), trying to get some sense of the ‘Theory’ that this anthology of dissent was dissenting from. Anyway, I’m certainly not going to write a post about a book I’ve only browsed for some ten minutes, but one name I noticed in the anthology was Paisley Livingston. Now Livingston is by no means anti-theory, or at least he wasn’t when he wrote Literary Knowledge, which is the only text by him I own. So, for example, we find this on p. 13:‘

Again and again, the supposedly nontheoretical approach amounts to a tacit reliance upon a complex host of invisible theories: the sedimented and unexamined theory of genres, a prejudicial nationalist parcelling out of ‘literatures’, an unreflective periodization, a Eurocentric and elitist canon mirroring a ‘great man’ view of history, a wholly idealist aesthetics, an arcane and incoherent semantics, colonial ethics, and so on'.

Livingstone mentions also a ‘pseudo-empirical’ and ‘immediate’ approach to “particular facts”. The scare quotes imply a false immediacy; an invisible frame determining what does and doesn’t constitute a 'fact'. Again, the sense is that because certain conceptual distinctions, demarcations etc, are invisible, they allow an illusion of simply dealing with things 'as they are', without mediation/ interference. And this must be combated.

Now, that notion of ‘invisible theory’, a theory which is not even visible to itself, is something that came up in an exchange at Charlotte Street. I’m not entirely sure I agree with it. That is, when Livingstone talks about ‘invisible theories’ isn’t he talking about guiding assumptions, presuppositions and ‘methodologies’ that refuse to acknowledge themselves as such? The reason I’m not sure about calling these hidden assumptions/ implicitly conceptual distinctions ‘theories’ is that, to me, one definition of theoretical activity is precisely the making conscious and reflecting on hitherto invisible frames and suppositions. Don't we speak of 'untheorized' assumptions? That said, I suppose I’d be happy with ‘implicit theories’.

Anyway, it was on the whole right and proper that these 'invisible theories' were dragged into the light and subjected to critical scrutiny. And part of what was experienced as exciting and liberating about (what is now called) theory was precisely this working through, this objectification of hidden suppositions and ‘methodologies’. Such ‘making visible’, and the attendant and remorseless suspicion of ‘self-evidence’, of immediacy, are surely all constitutive delights of thinking as such, and the experience of freedom, of enlarged horizons, that comes with it.

Some time ago, my attention was drawn to a post in which Theory was likened to a puffer fish. The idea was that, when attacked, it inflated to twice its original size. To be honest I was a little baffled by this, as some of the actual examples given seemed to show the opposite: i.e., when attacked Theory ‘deflates’ to a position of false modesty. It says, in other words, ‘I am simply critical or systematic thinking as such. How could you object to such a thing?’ And indeed, no one surely could. Or Theory says, along with Coleridge, that to think at all involves ‘theorizing’ – you may imagine you’re theory-free, but this is illusory. We’re back to ‘invisible theories’. Mr Holbo suggests we keep Theory separate from theory in this more modest sense. And doubtless we should.

Now all I want to do here and at this stage is make an anecdotal point. You would expect people who are anti-Theory to at least to be perfectly happy with ‘lower case’ theory. But my experience has been that those opposed to Theory (roughly: 'a relatively modern trend within academia characterised by the hasty appropriation and employment of select post-modern thinkers') are also uncomfortable with theory as such, with a 'theoretical' approach to literature and literary texts. So, I tend not to meet people who say "It’s so regrettable that literary theory has been hijacked by these ‘Theory’ people, or even ‘these Theory people just aren’t doing good and rigorous theory". And I do often meet people who object forcefully to Theory in the name of an 'immediate', 'one-to-one' relation with the text. In other words, in the name of an anti-theory position. And indeed, there genuinely are, within literary studies, those opposed to the idea that there can be something called ‘literary theory’. They are opposed to this in principle. Okay, so this is just anecdotal, and it’s therefore up to the reader to agree or disagree based on his/her own experience. But I have certainly encountered such people.

And so as well as making the distinction, as Holbo suggests between Theory and theory, we might also distinguish those who oppose theory and those who object only to Theory, and let these two objections not be conflated. And let those who oppose Theory not use this opposition to smuggle in an anti-theoretical position.

Nomination

When Barthes speaks of the Name as ‘the last trace that remains of things’, what does he mean? A mere appellation that has no material reality – how can such a thing be said to be a trace? (After all, we think of trace as a material residue).

Barthes proposition is explained with reference to the ship Argos. Gradually, and over years, each piece of the ship wears out and is replaced. Eventually not a single piece, a single pin, of the original ship remains. And yet, we are happy saying it is the same ship. What has remained the same, among other things, is the Name. A primal baptism bestowed upon the ship its identity – Argos: it is this name which binds together the ship through all its subsequent incarnations and adventures, even after it is no longer materially identical.



The name is not the only principle of identity. What also remained the same, perhaps, is the function of the ship, its place in a network of relations, the way people use it and the role it plays in their lives. Its identity resides here too, outside it in its context, in terms of the object it is for others. But these too pass away, are subject to time and history. The name is left behind, and this, partly, accounts for the aura of names.

Pop Quiz

Okay, a rather un-CS-like post, this one. I unearthed an old Joy Division tape earlier today. It contained what were at the time some of my favourite JD tracks. However, there’s no cassette card & track-list. So, some of them I can name, but others escape me. So full marks to anyone who can identify the following 3:

1. From the early Warsaw phase, contains the following lyric: ‘you’re on your own now/ can’t you see that it’s a shame/ that you’re the only one responsible to take the blame.’
2. I think this one is called wither Dead Souls or Dreams Even Here – ‘Here are the young men, a weight on their shoulders…where have they been, where have they been etc’
3. There’s an instrumental one which I think is, again, either of the two options mentioned in 2

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A monstrous footnote

We had heard that a monster had been born at Ravenna, of which a drawing was sent here; it had a horn on its head, straight up like a sword, and instead of arms it had two wings like a bat's, and the height of its breasts it had a fio [Y-shaped mark] on one side and a cross on the other, and lower down at the waist, two serpents, and it was a hermaphrodite, and on the right knee it had an eye, and its left foot was like an eagle. I saw it painted, and anyone who wished could see this painting in Florence.


It was March 1512, and a Florentine apothecary named Lucca Landucci was writing up his diary. He had much to write about. Northern Italy was engulfed by war. Maximillian of Germany and Louis XII of France were locked in combat with the Spanish, English and Pope Julius II for control of the Venetian Republic. City after city was ravaged as the armies traversed the campagna. Ravenna fell eighteen days after the monster's birth. 'It was evident,' wrote Landucci, 'what evil the monster had meant for them! It seems as if some great misfortune always befalls the city when such things are born.'

Landucci had not actually seen the monster. It had been starved to death by order of Julius II, and Landucci's account is of a drawing that was on public display in Florence. That image was among the first of many. Printed woodcuts and engravings spread the news of the monster throughout Europe, and as they spread, the monster acquired a new, posthumous, existence. When it left Ravenna it had two legs; by the time it arrived in Paris it had only one. In some prints it had bat wings, in others they were more like a bird's; it had hermaphrodite genitalia or else a single large erection. It became mixed up with the images of another monster born in Florence in 1506, and then fused with a medieval icon of sinful humanity called 'Frau Welt' - a kind of bat-winged, single-legged Harpy who grasped the globe in her talons.

As the monster travelled and mutated, it also accreted ever more complex layers of meaning. Italians took it as a warning of the horrors of war. The French, making more analytical effort, interpreted its horn as pride, its wings as mental frivolity and inconstancy, its lack of arms as the absence of good works, its raptor's foot as rapacity, and its deformed genitalia as sodomy - the usual Italian vices in other words. Some said that it was the child of a respectable married woman; others that it was the product of a union between a nun and a friar. All this allegorical freight makes it hard to know what the monster really was. But it seems likely that it was simply a child who was born with a severe, rare, but quite unmysterious genetic disorder. One can even hazard a guess at Roberts's syndrome, a deformity found in children who are born with an especially destructive mutation. That, at least, would account for the limb and genital anomalies, if not the two serpents on its waist and the supernumerary eye on its knee. (here)

Distance

Roland Barthes:

It seems to me I learn more about France during a walk through the village than in whole weeks in Paris…. The distance makes everything signify. In Paris, in the street, I am bombarded with information, not signification.

What distinction, exactly, is Barthes making here? How is ‘information’ being used and doesn’t information also have ‘significance’?

The phrase ‘bombarded with information’ recalls many descriptions of the city (most obviously Benjamin on Baudelaire) as a place where the individual is over-crowded with data, assailed with petty shocks on every side. Everything, and from every direction, is ‘in your face’. ‘In your face’ is not ‘near’, because ‘nearness’ presupposes distance, differentiated space. The city, says Benjamin, relates to the mathematical sublime: Number, we might say, eclipses significance. Signification has no room in which to breathe.

I take ‘information’, in Barthes’ statement, to be a kind of instant & consumable significance. Information lives and dies in being consumed. Units of information, moreover, have a neutrality and equality. A computer can store these units without having to discriminate between ‘information’ about casualties in a war and information about soap powder sales. And Information arrives at where we are. It comes to our desktop.

‘Signification’ cannot be stored, nor is it instantaneous. Signification is an invitation to depart. The instant, rather than being the unit of meaning, at once opens up into a duration of interpretation. It is a clue not a fact. Signification, also, asks us to weigh importance, not simply to divide into ‘bites’/ units.

The eclipse of distance is, says Benjamin, one of the defining experiences of the city dweller:

To move in this crowd was natural.. no matter how great the distance the individual cared to keep from it, he was still coloured by it and, unlike Engels, unable to view it from without.

Engels can see the city because he is not one of its children:

The charm of his description [of London] lies in the intersecting of unshakeable critical integrity with an old fashioned attitude. The writer came from a Germany which was still provincial.

Thus Engels can make observations like this:

In London one can roam for hours without seeing the slightest indication that open countryside is nearby.

This is essentially a ‘provincial’ perception, i.e., it is made from the point of view of a place where open countryside is an everyday experience. From this point of view, London appears as a place of privation. Its streets have pathos. The Londoner, Benjamin implies, lacks the distance across which to see this lack. Signification is elsewhere.

Starvation

While we are posting things written by others, here is a short piece by someone I met in Prague, in the lovely Café Blatouch. J. writes parables and, I suppose, you could say that he composes pictures which can be inspected. After I returned to London, he would send me his short prose pieces accompanied by a rough translation. Sometimes I would take this rough and smoothen it into lean unlovely English. Here is a little piece called ‘Starvation’. Those of you who don’t like this kind of thing (i.e., ‘literature’& all that), who have Charlotte Street filed under ‘Political blogs’ for example (which is your prerogative), look away now.

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'He is starving. He sits and dreams of food. But he has placed himself in such a position that the prospect of finding food is very small. Shadows line his ribs. One day, a day like any other, a day without augury or expectation, he is brought a fabulous feast on a silver platter. His reaction is two-fold. First, disbelief: why this sudden miracle? No, he thinks, starvation acts like an hallucinogen and the feast is only the product of his desperate fancy. But secondly, realising that there is indeed food infront of him, he begins to question whether his stomach can cope after such long abstinence. The woman holding the platter of food looks at him, expectant, waiting. Embarrassed by the extremity of his need and with little confidence in his chaste and withered stomach, he mumbles something about indigestion, politely shaking his head. As the woman walks away with his meal, he thinks he catches on her face a look of disappointment. It has been so long since he ate that hunger itself, defeated and ignored, had left his body. Only occasionally would its memory, like an empty word, flicker through his insides. But as the woman departs, he feels, foreign yet familiar, the recrudescence of hunger – a pain, a rodent pain – stirring once more in his anorexic stomach.

Perhaps it is slightly different. Yes, the starving man dreams of food. But his dreams have grown fantastical with desire. Fat ripe fruits bursting through their own skin, meats swollen with succulence, breads, gooey puddings and rich and steaming delights of all kinds. Indeed, so inflated with fantasy are these dream foods, so replete with want, that when real nourishment does arrive he simply fails to recognise it. As his starvation continues, so does the food of his dreams become even more rare and extravagant, more and more remote from the shapes, colours and textures of anything real. Finally, in the last days, he yearns for things which are entirely the product of his imagination, which have altogether lost contact with the world; things which, were they suddenly to materialise before him, would, of course, be inedible.