A Community of Foreigners?

From an interview with John Berger:

john_berger: Art questions what is, longing for something more, something further. Ruling power mostly defends and justifies (usually with lies) what is. Hence a potential, and often open, conflict between art and the powers that be. And so being an outsider, like being a foreigner, can be a stimulus.

beta_Nzos: And the isolation of a foreigner?

john_berger: Being a foreigner/outsider should not mean isolation. The idea of hospitality is essential for art--beginning with the song and theatre, and continuing to concept art (when it is good!)

Question: In cyberspace everyone is a foreigner? Over to you, beta!

beta_Nzos: Yes. If in the future, free access to the internet becomes a citizen's legal right, that would enable everyone to freely cross national borders and the place of their legal domicile, at any time. At that point, everyone will become a kind of foreigner.

CD update

I have made a few updates to the Critical Dictionary. If you haven't seen it before its a fairly eclectic list of definitions and quotes. Eg:

Art, and politics

'The limitations of art proclaim the limits of politics' (Adorno)

'The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better' (Adorno)

Novelty

All novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have all grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself. Any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon. " (Proust)


Most of the terms and definitions are from Zizek, Hegel, Lacan, Adorno and Deleuze.

The Critical Dictionary has a coherence and organisational rigour similar to Borges' Chinese Encyclopedia.

Ranciere, ICA

Having intended to write a brief report on Ranciere's ICA lecture, I find that Infinite Thought has done exactly that, in a way that thankfully pre-empts and renders obsolete all other other reports and commentaries. I'm particularly grateful that she was able to hear and record his remarks about 'cauliflowers'. What follows, therefore, is a mixture of notes made during the lecture (written up) and some other thoughts of my own. I make no great claims, only that some of my misunderstandings may have proved productive.

Place

Art and politics in Plato. People are identified with their social function, they occupy a place and a mandate which has been defined for them. This is right and proper and it is also the reason why art creates problems. Actors, for example, occupy, through imitation, the place of someone else. In doing so, however, they expose the fact that that place is empty - i.e., it can be filled by anyone and is not ontologically wedded to someone in particular. Art therefore reveals this 'emptiness of place' and the 'illegitimacy' of its current occupant. (This was one of the charges leveled against Elizabethan actors too, as a matter of fact). In this instance, art performs a political function - the disruption of that regime which assigns things and people their place, which prescribes a certain order.


Space

For Ranciere, art is political not on account of its message; nor on account of reproducing - through mimesis - the social structure (and thus perhaps revealing it to us). It is political because it creates a 'specific space-time sensorium' which can 'reframe' the practices and categorical imperatives of common sense. It is the space of a specific experience of freedom, and this experience is prefigurative of political freedom. (Sorel's related aphorism: art is the way all work will be in the society of the future). There is the aspiration, which is to be found in Schiller but also in the Modern avant-garde, that the freedom and equality of aesthetic experience can be generalised out into Life.

All art functions as 'installation art'. i.e., An installation is that which creates a defined space into which we can enter which is not simply a mimesis /reproduction of one of the spaces in the outside world. As such it creates a little pocket wherein our senses are addressed and configured in a new way.

This applies even to an art form like the novel. There is a 'phenomenolgy' of entering into, say, Proust's great novel, and of dwellng therein, such that we cling to this world we have entered and do not want to stop reading. The novel has created a habitation for us, and a habitation different from that wherein ordinarily we dwell, even though the novel may tell us all kinds of things about that world (as Proust's undoubtedly does). However implicit, Proust's novel constitutes a silent demand to 'change your life'.

Okay, What defines art is a 'specific sensorium'. But this definition of Art is comparatively recent. Say two hundred years. The museum 'reveals' this concept to us: here, art is disconnected from use, from social hierarchy, from its conditions of production. Infact this relation between art and the museum is the position, roughly, attributed to Proust in Adorno's cardinal essay Valery-Proust museum. Only with the museum, does the truly artistic dimension of art shine through, only now that the art-work has been sequestered from the context in which previously it had been put to work. Postumously, it comes into its own. In Hegelian language, we might say that here art arrives at its concept.

(Proust compares museums to railway stations. Railway stations are peculiar places, removed from 'the field of ordinary pragmatic activity'; they stand outside the town, yet somehow contain the 'essence of its personality'. Removed from the town, they thus return it to itself all the more forcefully. Perhaps, by comparison, the museum removes art to a place apart, only so as to return art to its 'proper home').

Fiction. There is a revealing doubling involved in Ranciere's concept of fiction. (Fiction, the power of fabulation; the giving to 'airy nothing' of a local habitation and name. ) Thus:

Fiction [let's call it F1] creates, inaugurates or opens 'new gaps and new bridges' between different levels of reality*; the undoing of the connection between sign and image, between what can and can't be said, or done, and other such 'ghostly demarcations' which consensus assumes to be pre-inscribed in things themselves. Presumably, this process is to remind us that reality is never simply given but that its borders are endlessly framed and reframed by fiction [F2]. Thus, fiction (F1) is the becoming visible of (F2), ie the work of fiction in unravelling and breaching levels of reality, reveals that reality to have been all along demarcated and framed by fictions which have sunk into the very texture of things and thus become invisible [lost to comprehension]. F1 if the truth of F2.


*reality is here the regime which assigns things their place and relation, polices differences and defines the bounds of the permissable, reality is the regime of signs and distinctions which are misrecognised as the way things are. Thus, reality does not = the Real.

Art and Art.

The chair, P. Hallward suggested there was a conceptual doubling inherent in what Badiou said, 'Art [a1] invents new ways of distinguishing art[a2] and non art'. I.e.clearly a1 and a2 here cannot be identical, even if the word is identical. But what is the difference? I wonder if we're dealing here with something like Badiou's event. Schoenberg's invention of the twelve tone system or whatever does not fall within the existing concept of music, yet cannot simply be written off as non-music. The non-identity of the concept with itself is disclosed by this event.

Put in general terms, then: we are confronted a newness that confounds the existing concept of art, but not in such a way that one can simply say 'sorry, this new thing is not art. It falls outside the concept.' The concept has to be revised or expanded. And this revision presumably reveals a truth about that concept.

n.b. Ranciere seems to have given a lecture very similar to the ICA one here.

For Ranciere's intriguing book on the 'Ignorant Schoolmaster' see here. What I take to be the central point of this book, of which I am wholly ignorant, is that it is the place of the teacher which is crucially important, the structural position of 'Pedagog'. This place has to be there to set the learning process in motion, but it is in a sense an empty place. To offer an anecdotal example along the same lines, many years ago I enrolled on a poetry writing course. Now the person teaching this course didn't seem particularly qualified, knowledgeable etc, but it was enough to have someone setting assignments, arranging meeting times, and someone in relation to whom the students could be defined as students. Consequently, I really did learn things and produce things that I couldn't have produced outside this context. What 'teaches' is the place of the teacher, and this place is 'ignorant'.

See also this interview: "Deleuze fulfills the destiny of the aesthetic'.

Politics and Rhetoric, an anecdote.

From a profile of Stephen Greenblatt in today's Guardian.

In 1995, in the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the literary scholar and cultural theorist, Stephen Greenblatt, had a momentary encounter with Bill Clinton at a White House reception. Clinton recalled being made to learn Macbeth at school. "Don't you think," said Greenblatt, "it's a play about someone compelled to do the morally disastrous?" "No," said Clinton, "it's a play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object." This insight, captured in such a "marvellous phrase", dazzled Greenblatt into thinking the president had missed his vocation as an English professor, especially when Clinton went on to quote reams of Macbeth by heart. Some time later, though, watching the TV news, he heard Clinton praise the late King Hussein of Jordan as a man "whose immense ambition had an ethically adequate object". Clinton's marvellous phrase, it turned out, was no more than multi-purpose rhetoric. "It suddenly occurred to me," Greenblatt recalls, "that although the phrase was marvellous, it was also somehow off. No one with immense ambition has an ethically adequate object. I realised that Clinton had chosen the right vocation after all!"

(Cf Lukacs on the reification of the subjective faculties, which receives its most 'typical' embodiment in the journalist, who must refashion his thoughts as sale-items:

it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand)

Human - inhuman

"For beauty is nothing /but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure./ and we are so awed because it serenely disdains/ to annihilate us."

'Oh and night: the emptiness of outer space feeds upon our face." (Rilke)

Flicking through some books today, I started thinking about the category of the 'inhuman' and how it differs from the non-human. Clearly the two are not synonymous. The Inhuman's privilaged objects are things like computers and machines, rather than say stones and plant life, which are 'merely' non-human.

In a sense, robots etc are more human, or more like the human, than rocks and stones and trees. And yet to say 'inhuman' sounds more alien than non-, as if almost diametrically opposed to or threatening the human.The inhuman is thus both closer to the human and further away: closer because of resemblance, but further away in that the inhuman is likely to repel us in a way the merely non-human does not. A provisional formulation: the inhuman is uncanny.

Computers, robots etc What is it that defines these Inhuman things? Their 'uncannyness' comes from the fact that although they resemble a human, something nonetheless is missing. Something has been subtracted. What chills us about the replicant is that some almost infinitesimal x is not there, and the replicant makes us see that very lack. By contrast, nothing is 'missing' from the rock or tree. What thus confronts us in the Inhuman is the confrontation with that indefinable x which is the place of the human, and which can never be captured by mechanical or cyber- reprodutions.

Has the Inhuman always been used in the way it is used now? Pascal seems to speak of the Inhuman when he confesses his dread at the vastness of infinite space. The inhuman freezes our humanity by reminding us of what is utterly indifferent to it. When, in Othello, Roderigo calls his compatiot Iago an 'inhuman dog', however, there is a different chill, that of radical Evil. Perhaps in both cases, though, the Inhuman is that which is beyond the limits of our World.

This is from Rilke's fascinating and brilliant essay on wax dolls:

.... in a world in which Destiny, and even God himself, have become famous above all because they answer us with silence. At a time when everything was intent on giving us a quick and reassuring answer, the doll was the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which was later to come to us repeatedly out of space, whenever we approached the frontiers of our existence at any point. It was facing the doll, as it stared at us, that we experienced for the first time that emptiness of feeling, that heart-pause, in which we should perish.."

This is an utterly characteristic Rilkean moment: when our fragile consciousness meets the chilling retort of a silence in which there is no answers, a silence at once reassuringly immoveable and scarily incurious. This is the 'terror and beauty' of the inhuman. And the doll is a place in which this stubborn silence is glimpsed or given accomodation. Rilke makes the connection explicit. The silence of stellar space and the silence of the doll are the same. The Thing which has a semblance of the human has this silence more than the utterly non-human rock or tree.

The doll is an interesting instance of the Inhuman, because we can perhaps link it to the more contemporary machines and robots. Dolls embody a particular articulation of the human and the mechanical or material. With the doll, it is not, as with Bergson's definition of comedy, that the human suddenly becomes mechanical but vice-versa. Not the human rendered material/ mechanical, but the material/ mechanical tricked into life. Matter lent the semblance of life. Whereas the former (human>mechanical) is comic, the reverse (mechanical>human) is disturbing.

Now Rilke sees in the doll a pocket of that silence which Pascal hears in outer space. In nature, the non-human, we can at least recognise our projects and needs. The 'landscape' organises itself around us. The Inhuman is that in which we can recognise nothing of ourselves. It is a blast of air from behind the mirror, a glimpse of a what actively negates the human. It is like seeing a gap where you expect to see a reflection, but a gap which seems to eat up your face (Rilke again).

Now it remains unclear whether the more recent concept of the 'inhuman' is on these lines or not. What is 'inhuman' about machines and cybertechnology etc seems, as i've said, not to be a chilling indifference (one thinks also of Rilke's terrible angel) but a chilling similarity, even a kind of intimacy. The inhumanity of the cyberworld and the robot seem to be insinuating their way into what we thought of as our 'deepest' humanity. One of the worrying things about the contemporary Inhuman is that the extent of this 'intimacy' - i.e., the extent to which the inhuman infiltrates our daily lives - is unclear. Our fear of the inhuman is that we may not recognise it as such.

And this must simultaneously involve a realisation that we cannot recognise or pin down what is 'human'. It is precisely because the human is so elusive, that we are passionately attached to it without knowing what we are attached to that makes the castrating threat of the Inhuman so anxiety provoking. We are attached to the missing thing, to the thing we cannot name. The missing thing is suddenly present when we are confronted with the inhuman - the robot, the machine, but also Rilke's dolls.

The fear of the 'inhuman' is not only the fear of losing this precious indefinable x. It is the fear that you never had it.

We seem to have turned things around: the silence is not that silence beyond the human, but the silence of the human. The silence of the x. 'The silence of these intimate spaces fills me with terror'.

____

A further thought. The insistent, mechanical, in-human: Do not certain psychoanalysts tell us that this is the very character of the life-substance inside us. A kind of blind drive? This blind life-substance, too, is also indifferent to our 'humanity' even as it subtends and supports it. The thin layer of the human is suspended between two modes of chilling indifference: that of Pascallian space, and that of inner space.

And another, more stretched: Doesn't the idea of the 'inhuman' sometimes have a perverse 'sexiness' in a way that the non-human very seldom does. Isn't the 'inhuman' sometimes identified with illict/ obscene excitement etc? If the inhuman seems to dissolve some of our basic distinctions, between terror/ beauty, organic/ inorganic etc doe this not in some way connect it with jouissance?

Anyway -
In a sense, isn't this the historical moment for 'humanism' to come into its own, just when the question of the human becomes most crucially signalled, suddenly experienciable in all its urgency over and agaisnt that which threatens it? or is what is human precisely the need of this undefinable x, the notion of the human. humans are those who need the notion of the human.

[The above will hopefully be updated to make it less bitty and repetitive, and more clear. In the meantime, feel free to email me with usefull references and suggestions mark_b_kaplan@hotmail.com

Blog things

A promising looking blog has appeared, describing itself as a kind of Autodidact Project (see here under 'Autodidacts'). Its declaration of intent includes references to Debord, Brecht and other things meriting approving red ticks. So many fledgling blogs seem, like Onan, to eject their intellectual seed only to keel over and die, but I suspect this one will be more durable, sprung as it is from the fertile heterogeneity of the autodidactic imagination.

Over at Lenin's Tomb, attention has been drawn to a paranoid - in a genuinely clinical sense - left-watch blog, with entries on Chomsky et al (except that the 'et al' is no 'al' at all). As one of Lenin's commenters points out, the structure of thinking here is pretty much identical to that of anti-semitism, for example the assumption that a collection of individuals automatically constitutes a 'network', because forming networks is the kind of things these people do. And these people are first and foremost lefties, so that the 'accident' of their actual personality can then only be construed as a sinister disguise. Their very individuality is citable as evidence for the prosecution. Needless to say, no one with any intellectual integrity could lend their name or their work to such a site.

Curiously, the section entitled 'Campus Support for Terrorism' begins by referring to card-carrying National Socialist Martin Heidegger, who - as a typical academic it is implied - capitulated to fascism. Heidegger, apparently, was also 'the intellectual idol of American academics.' Whether true or false, Heidegger does seem to have been 'idolised' by one Leo Strauss, who, George Steiner reports, held Heidegger to be 'incomparable'.

So, one could easily imagine an entry for strauss on a hypothetical 'Right-watch' site:

Official ideologue of the neo-con. movement. Fell under the spell of the Nazi Martin Heidegger, whom, he told students at Chicago was 'incomparable'. Propounded the sinister and anti-democratic doctrine that citizens should be sold lies (he thought them 'noble') to keep them in check. Believed also in esoteric meanings accesible only to the powerful elite, as opposed to exoteric doctrine suitable for the masses. This thinking is behind much curent US policy.

Of course, I present the above portrait not to discredit Strauss (his identification with the neo-cons contains many ironies), but to suggest how easily the truth can be so distorted and selectively presented that it becomes, in effect, a lie.

[re the 'Discover the Network' site, Jodi Dean makes the nicely dialectical point:"this site could be helpful in actually producing the network it claims to describe."

Herbert Marcuse & Language

If the linguistic behavior blocks conceptual development, if it militates against abstraction and mediation, if it surrenders to the immediate facts, it repels recognition of the factors behind the facts, and thus repels recognition of the facts, and of their historical content. In and for the society, this organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.


....any mode of thinking which is not confined to pragmatic orientation within the status quo - can recognize the facts and respond to the facts only by "going behind" them. Experience takes place before a curtain which conceals and, if the world is the appearance of something behind the curtain of immediate experience, then, in Hegel's terms, it is we ourselves who are behind the curtain. We ourselves not as the subjects of common sense, as in linguistic analysis, nor as the "purified" subjects of scientific measurement, but as the subjects and objects of the historical struggle of man with nature and with society. Facts are what they are as occurrences in this struggle. Their factuality is historical, even where it is still that of brute, unconquered nature.

from One Dimensional Man

Time

A reader has sent me an excerpt from his translation of Badiou’s Le Siecle.

'It is remarkable to see how today we have practically no sense of time. For almost everybody, what comes after tomorrow is abstract and what happened before yesterday is incomprehensible. We have entered an atemporal, instantaneous period, which shows to what point time, far from being an individual experience that is shared, is a construction and even, one can maintain, a political construction. Let's try for one moment to think back, for example, to the industrial five year-plans of the Stalinist Soviet Union. If the plan could be glorified in works of art, like Eisenstein's General Line, it was because beyond its economical signification (which was doubtful, as one knows), the planning signified the will to submit developments to the political will of man. The five years of a plan are something other than a number, they are a temporal material on which, day after day, the collective will is inscribed. It is an allegory, in time and by time, of the power of "we". The entire century wanted, in different ways, to be a constructivist century, which implies a mise-en-scene of a deliberate construction of time.

'There has been the immemorial time of peasantry, which was an immobile or cyclical time, a time of work and sacrifice, hardly compensated by the rhythmical return of feasts. Today we are to endure the couple of frenzy and total rest. On the one hand, the propaganda which says that everything changes every minute, that one should modernize in every aspect, that one will miss the train (of the internet and the new economy, of cell-phones-for-everybody, of innumerable shareholders and stock-options, of pension funds...). On the other hand, this racket can hardly conceal a kind of passive immobility, of indifference, of perpetuation of what is already there. This time is therefore a time on which individual or collective will has no grip. It is an inaccessible mix of agitation and sterility, it is the paradox of a stagnating hysteria."

Badiou, like a number of others, has for a while been concerned with the way that contemporary capitalism brings with it a fundamental transformation in our time-understanding. And as we know, time-understanding is not something tacked on to our experience of time but internal to it. The sentences above are, perhaps, informed by Debord's characterisation of the Spectacle as the false consciousnes of time: 'pastness', a flavour or consumable style with accompanying affects, replaces the past. 'False memory syndrome' is generalised and endemic. When people travel to a place for its history they mean little more than the odour of history - the equivalent of Barthes' 'italianicity'.

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.

Badiou's reminder of the 'immemorial time of the peasantry' put me in mind of John Berger and his books on the peasantry of the French Alps. The Historical Afterword to Pig Earth ends with this:

Finally there is the historic role of capitalism itself, a role unforeseen by Adam Smith or Marx: its historic role is to destroy history, to sever every link with the past and to orientate all effort and imagination to that which is about to occur. Capital itself can only exist if it continually reproduces itself: its present reality is dependent on its future fulfilment. This is the metaphysic of capital. The word credit, instead of referring to a past achievement, refers only in this metaphysic, to a future expectation. How such a metaphysic eventually came to inform a world system, how it has been translated into the practice of consumerism, how it has lent its logic to the categorization of those, whom the system impoverishes, as backward (i.e., bearing the stigma and shame of the past), is beyond the scope of this essay. Henry Ford's remark that 'history is bunk' has generally been underestimated; he knew exactly what he was saying. Destroying the peasantries of the world could be a final act of historical elimination.'

Berger is remarkably candid about his reasons for moving to, and to some extent becoming part of, a peasant community in the Alps. He acknowledges an element of fantasy even ('I am not one of them, although perhaps I would like to be'). But surely one of his principle motivations was to move to a space, literally and metaphorically extraterritorial, from which capitalism and La societe de consummation could be gauged in their specificity and resisted. A breathing space. To escape the tyranny of our rhythms of life, our rhythms and habits of thought, by living in a place where different rhythms and habits still persisted, beyond the reach of the market. Here in the margins, written off or scorned by dominant narratives of progress, some resources could be rescued that might help adumbrate a possible future. Berger gained little from this move financially, but the gains in insight and were incalculable

More Notes

The Tomb's keeper recently drew attention to one or two rhetorical tricks I'd missed in my notes on rhetoric. For instance, the old 'as you know perfectly well..' riff, used to suggest, among other things, that you're interlocuter is merely obfuscating and trying to pull the wool over your or even his own eyes. Well, I thought perhaps that I'd get round eventually to assembling all these invaluable little tips, this inventory of received ideas and defence mechanisms, into one mini-blog or separate page. And I shall do this, anon. In the meantime, here are a few add-ons:

University, your opponent is at. Bear with me. In the realm of doxa, the university is entirely seperated from the Real World (qv) and populated by Student Revolutionaries. This image of the university is unassailable, and safely entrenched beyond refutation, so don't worry. It is thus rather useful if you can insinuate a connection between your opponent and the University (the University of doxa, that is, not any particular institution). Moreover, there is, belonging to this University of Doxa, an equally mythic 'undergraduate' who reappears endlessly in statements such as: 'this is an elementary undergraduate error'; 'As every undergraduate would know..' , 'one can find this kind of thing in any standard undergraduate essay.' 'if this were an undergraduate essay.. etc' and so on and do forth. This poor mythic undergraduate has been kept at university for countless years by the requirements of rhetoricians and polemicists.


Self-Appointed. You outmanoeuvre your opponent's arguments by disputing his very right to make them; you by-pass his/her opinions by implying s/he has no authority to hold them. The rule is roughly this: any judgement made about you, any criticism of your arguments or your style, has been made by someone who has appointed him /her self rather than, presumably, being divinely or officially appointed. If you prose is criticised for its sloppiness it is by a 'self-appointed literary critic'; if your arguments are dismissed as irrational it is by the self-appointed rationality police; If your opinions are deemed offensive it is a self-appointed commissar of political correctness; if your taste in literature or art is ridiculed as vulgar it is by a self-appointed arbiter of taste; If your arguments are found to be false it can only be by a self-appointed Truth tribunal etc. You may run into problems if criticised by someone who is genuinely divinely or officially appointed (The Pope, High Court judge), but simply dismiss them as arguing from authority.

Goaded. (qv raw nerve). If an opponent responds to your comment, he has necessarily been 'goaded' into responding and is thus exposed as a fool. Your superficially inept or silly remarks are retrospectively revealed to have been a trick designed to 'provoke a response', and your opponent has 'fallen for it'. This ingenious 'trick' may itself provoke charges of puerility, but these are either 1. covered by the terms of the trick itself, or 2. evidence that your interlocutor is a self-appointed (qv) arbiter of 'maturity' .

Pseudo- A prefix which attaches to intellectuals. So tenacious is this attachment (which can be dowloaded from doxa.com) that intellectuals can never be mentioned without it. Indeed, many argue that only pseudo- intellectuals exists. The real thing is a mere mirage or retroactive illusion created by the prefix pseudo-.

Pretentious. Anything which cannot be paraphrased into journalese, (almost) anything French, anything not yeilding some sort of immediate and calculable return, anything which one cannot imagine being spoken by a 'bloke down the pub', (almost) anything you can imagine being spoken by an intilletukal.

Intolerable difference. It is axiomatic that your opponent does not, nor ever will, be objecting to the content of your opinion. He is necessarily stung by and unable to tolerate the sheer difference of opinion, and his arguments simply express this fact. (copyright J.Hari.)

Poem of the Day

Who Goes With Fergus

Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.

W.B. Yeats

Experience, Structure and Understanding: some stray thoughts.

"I rarely concentrate on on unravelling a problem of sociology or ethnology without having, beforehand, braced my thought by reading some pages of the 18th Brumaire or of the Critique of Political Economy." So Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Marx's restless energy of thought, his power to dissolve and to create concepts, innervated Strauss's own power to break open received ideas and conceive new ones. Perhaps we all have passages or authors like this, who seem like a shot of caffeine to the mind, who put us in touch with possibilities of thought and perception that the pragmatic accomodations of the daily-grind leach from us. Sometimes, too, we feel compelled not only to re-read certain totemic passages but to copy them out. In part this answers to a weak mimetic impulse in us: copying out these sentences, we are reduced to a receptive neutrality, so that the movement of thought incarnate in those sentences seems to lend itself to us for a moment, or we cleave to it, suddenly outside ourselves, our thinking subtly retuned and toned. Anyway, one such piece of writing for me is Hegel's Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, from which comes this:

'Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature, Understanding, sensibility and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid, and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface. Apprehending and testing likewise consist in seeing whether everybody's impressions of the matter coincides with what is asserted about these fixed points, whether it seems that way to him or not.
The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar....

Whereas we might spontaneously agree that familiarity blocks understanding, it is more difficult to say exactly why this is the case. It is tempting to say that familiarity is on the side of experience and that philosophy must pass beyond experience to the concept. But surely the point about the familiar is that it is not experienced. A commonplace example. Living in Oxford for five years, those buildings that visitors inspected with awe and fascination were to me practically invisible. The sheer presence for them of the architecture for me sunk back into the merely assumed. As such the familiar is scarcely an object for us at all. It has ceased to stand over against us and confront us. As such it is on the side of the subject. We must therefore find ways to objectify it ('to defamiliarise'), not so that we can pass beyond experience but return to it. The only sure route to the concept is actually to see something in its specificity, and it is this specific mark which familiarity misses. All that is familar has been 'filled out' with the memories and associations of the Subject. It has dissolved into us, or we into it - it amounts to the same thing.

The second little parable about 'understanding' is from Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology. As is well known, Levi-Strauss discovered a logic implicit in the behaviour of certain tribes, structured around clear and predictable oppositions (eg masculine/ feminine, for the sake of argument). But this logic was, at the level of conscious experience, unknown to the tribesperson. 'If he is asked why he built a hut in his village in such and such a place, his answer seems to have nothing to do with the fundamental oppositions that structure his world." '

Thus, although a concept or set of concepts organize actions/ are programmed into behaviour, these concepts do not feature as an object for the ego.. Indeed, were they to become an object this might impede the prior programming of the concept at the level of behaviour. The experiential story that the ego has been sold allows the Unc. to go about its work. 'Experience' is decentred. It becomes a 'moment' in the movement of understanding.The task of understanding is to grasp the place and function of experience within a system or structure unknown to it.

This reminded me of certain charges sometimes brought against 'understanding', especially in such contexts as 'understanding terrorism' etc. In such instances, to understand is said to concede too much, to at least flirt with exoneration. But this is perhaps because 'understanding' is being equated with a kind of 'attempt to empathise' (as in 'love and understanding'), to get inside the experiences of those perpetrating the terrorist acts or whatever. Such an understanding of understanding is misconceived. 'Understanding, ' rather than re-tracing - but in your own language - the experience of what is being understood - actually does violence to that experience, dis-members and displaces it. Funnily enough, in other contexts, understanding is accused precisely of this. Again, think of September 11th. Those who, although experiencing the shared affect of horror, tried also to understand why the thing had happened, were quickly accused of, again, flirting with exoneration. To depart from the level of experience was automatically suspicious.

A further permutation of the structure/ experience relation, and an intriguing one, relates to my previous post on Sartre. The situation is that of a colonialist beating a native. "the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself."

The interesting point here is that the colonialist seems to directly address a structural position rather than the person who is experientially present. And the native seems directly to live a structural position. Thus, in this instance, even in experience is experience is subordinate to structure.

Berger and Poverty.

John Berger on 'the great Russian writer, Andrei Platonov (1899-1951)':

He wrote about the poverty which occurred during the civil war and later during the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s. What made this poverty unlike more ancient poverties was the fact that its desolation contained shattered hopes. It fell to the ground exhausted, it got to its feet, it staggered, it marched on amongst shards of betrayed promises and smashed words. Platonov often used the term dushevny bednyak, which means literally poor souls. It referred to those from whom everything had been taken so that the emptiness within them was immense and in that immensity only their soul was left – that’s to say their ability to feel and suffer. His stories do not add to the grief being lived, they save something. “Out of our ugliness will grow the world’s heart”, he wrote in the early 1920s.'

The world today is suffering another form of modern poverty. No need to quote the figures; they are widely known and repeating them again only makes another wall of statistics. Perhaps as much as a third of the world’s population live with less than $2 a day. Local cultures with their partial remedies – both physical and spiritual – for some of life’s afflictions are being systematically destroyed or attacked. The new technology and means of communication, the free market economy, productive abundance, parliamentary democracy, are failing, so far as the poor are concerned, to keep any of their promises beyond that of the supply of certain cheap consumerist goods, which the poor can buy when they steal.

In the realm of opinion, certain things are thought to peculiarly affect 'The West' and to force it 'to ask questions about itself'. The obvious example is September 11th. Or the new 'threat of terrorism' . 'The West' must re-examine itself, reconfigure its priorities. But why is it that, for example, the fact that millions are living in utterly preventable poverty, that the accumulation of wealth at one ('Western') pole coexists with preventable immiseration and mass premature death at the other pole; why do these things not similarly throw the West into a crisis of self-reflection, why do these things not demand that we rethink 'our idenitity'. Why does the fact (random but symptomatic) that a Western celebrity will receive for advertising a product - say Nike trainers - more than the thousands of workers manufacturing that product receive collectively in a year not provoke rigorous self-questioning?

It may be because, in part, a whole section of the world system in which we live appears weither invisible or simply disconnected. For instance, men more knowledgeable than I have written:

''If one lives in a First World country the "working class" may indeed APPEAR to have diminished. Marx, however, would have us go beyond the (ideological) appearance. The pseudo-theorists in the West can afford to babble about the "disappearing working class" only because of the very "invisibility" of millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories (take a look at your designer labels - the traces are readily discernible). The USA is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing and so on, while its "disappearing working class" is reappearing in places like China, where a large proportion of US products is manufactured in conditions that are ideal for capitalist exploitation. Marx would have understood only too well both this international division of labour AND its ideological masking. If you want to understand (really understand, not just pragmatically from the inside) the dominant economic and political system, then Marx's Capital is simply - and one does not use the word lightly - indispensable'.


Nihilism, in its contemporary sense, is the refusal to believe in any scale of priorities beyond the pursuit of profit, considered as the end-all of social activity, so that, precisely: everything has its price. Nihilism is resignation before the contention that Price is all

A Useful Resource

This looks like a very useful resource. There are key works by Marx , Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, as well as range of authors from Lukacs to Chomsky to Naomi Klein. The texts are avaliable in German, English and several other languages.

Here's a well-known extract from one of the available texts:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and d istribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law".

A Different Shore

Needless to say, the Spectacle is full of object lessons in how not to think, or perhaps better, in un-thought masquerading as thought. Some time ago I offered the example of a 'tradition' of 'anti-Americanism', cobbled together from stray bits of Rilke, Heidegger and others. The passage quoted from Heidegger is this: "This circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a world which has become an unworld." Not immediately transparent, of course, and in need of careful contextualisation and unpicking. Heidegger's essay 'Overcoming Metaphysics', from which this passage is lifted, is part of a book that coincidentally dropped through my letterbox this morning. It is a dense and difficult essay, concerning technology and its relation to the Earth; it considers the radical mutation undergone by Being and our understanding of Being (the two things are inseperable). But it says nothing whatever about 'America'.

It thus struck me that our author and his 'anti-americanism' resembled nothing so much as a mad carpenter's table. Just as our author glued together various bits and pieces into a 'concept', so the mad carpenter builds a table from random bits and pieces of wood and junk taken from sundry different places and objects; finally he points triumphantly at his table saying 'see, this shows that all those bits of wood and junk were secretly all along part of this table.'

Heidegger's essay is, perhaps, 'reactionary' - heavy with nostalgia for a lost Earth, offering us in the end only the figure of the lone shepherd, as proudly isolated as Yeats' fisherman, a figure both literal and symbolic, a figure still attuned and responsive to the silent call of the earth, but a figure now little more than a dwindling image of Greek-ness on history's retina. But whatever the essay is, it is on a different shore from 'Anti-Americanism' and the world of pseudo-concepts into which 'anti-americanism' passes with painless facility.

A Place Without Content

In Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek has this to say about the gap between Imaginary and Symbolic identification:

"This gap is brought to its extreme with the obsessional neurotic: on the 'constituted' imaginary, phenomenol level he is of course caught in the masochistic logic of compulsive acts, he is humiliating himself, preventing his success, organizing his failure and do on; but the crucial question is again how to locate the vicious, superego gaze for which he is humiliating himself, for which this obsessional organizing of failure procures pleasure.'

The Symbolic point of identification is thus the place from which we are seen and to which our 'performances' are addressed. It is the 'perspective from which he [the neurotic or whoever] is observing himself and judging his activity'. An obvious and concrete illustration of this Symbolic place would be Renaissance court theatre, where the priviliged spectator was the king - the rest of the audience watched the king watching the play, and the actors addressed their Imaginary roles to this Symbolic place.

Now, Time of the Barmecides responds to an attack on the Tomb with this encapsulation of the 'political project' of Harry's Place

to endlessly plead before an imaginary tribunal, packed with neo-cons/ assorted members of the Right. This tribunal tirelessly, and with the immense ideological and economic resources at its disposal, accuses the Left of predictable crimes and complicities. HP's principle aim is to exonerate itself before this tribunal by placing before it endless examples of Left-wing venality. Secondly, it seeks to occupy and re-tread a terrain of argument mapped out for it in advance by the Right. It scuttles obediently back and forth between the points of this circumscribed territory, reiterating that this is indeed the correct and proper terrain..

If this were simply about an one rather tedious and mypoic blog it wouldn't be worth quoting. What it says seems rather to indicate a more general capitulation among many so-called left of centre bloggers and journalists. In what follows, then, let 'Harry's Place' refer not to a blog but to a structural position or place of enunciation, a place which Harry and others have chosen to occupy.

'Mangan' raises the question of the implicit audience to which a blog (etc) is addressed. There are people, nominally of the left, who seem acutely aware of the way in which the left is seen, and of the 'charges' made against the left. They are consequently keen to shake off this disfiguring perception, to exempt themselves from the charges by demonstrating that they are particularly vigilant in condemning what the left stands accused of. Such people might be compared to those intellectuals who are always sneering at 'intellectuals' and the 'intelligentsia' for their lack of contact with the real world or other familiar and well-rehearsed items from the charge sheet drawn up by Common Sense. Nothing is at stake in these tired polemics, nothing is achieved. Their writings are little more than symbolic rituals staged for the gaze of Rightist received wisdom. This external gaze, the place from which they are observed, is what they have always already identified with. It is this idenitification which castrates their thought and renders it spectacular and banal.

Superficially, 'Harry's Place' is caught between nominal identification with the left and effective identification with a Rightist agenda. But there is no contradiction here if we bear in mind the difference between Imaginary and Symbolic identification (above). The 'Imaginary' Left identity is signified by the retro Soviet iconography etc of HP. This 'left' is little more than the shrivelled visual remains of now lost Revolutionary possibilities which we need not take the trouble to try and re-invent. (Thinking through what it might mean to reinvent such possibilities is of course the very last thing that HP would be interested in.) It is the Left as a style and as a set of vague connotations. So much for Imaginary identification. All this begs the question - For whom is the left little more than hammer and sickle icons, the colour red, retro Soviet posters etc. It is of course the Right who regard the Left as little more than empty slogans and iconography. The Right and/ or the advertising industry and the Spectacle itself. And these are the audiences for which HP performs its symptoms. These symptoms will not be eradicated through rational argument, their tenacity derives from the way they constitute the very identity of HP, the very place from which they speak.

There is a Lacanian question which has a colloquial English equivalent - 'why are you telling me this?'. It's a question that recognises that over and above the content of an enunciation is another message, a plea or address which is the real raison d'etre of the utterance, such that to stick with the ostensible content misses the mark. What emerges here is 'the persistence of a gap between utterance and its enunciation: at the level of utterance you're telling me this, but what do you want to tell me with it, through it?'. Addressing the content of HP on its own terms fails to account for the obsessively narrow and repetitive nature of that content, the glaring omissions, the conspicous absence of a critique of capitalism and the conceptual armoury of such a critique.. it is such repetitions and omissions which need to be read, symptomatically. In this sense, there is no point in concerning yourself with the utterances of HP, you need only diagnose their place of enunciation. Anything else, and perhaps even this, is a culpable waste of finite energies. To join in polemical games with such people is foolish. As someone once said to me, the only way to win such games is not to play.

(That the element of humour in this post was missed most spectacularly by its target is entirely as it should be).

Nightmares & Bodyguards of Lies

Was reminded in conversation the other day of 'The Power of Nightmares', a BBC programme that I missed a few weeks ago. Anyway, it can be watched online, albeit in a barely watcheable version and with a useful transcript. It concentrates, initially, on the US neo-cons and their Straussian doctrines of the 'noble lie,' and the strict policing and propagation of the friend/ foe distinction. The idea was consciously to exaggerate various external threats in order to secure domestic cohesion. (All this also ties in with Strauss’s ideas about esoteric and exoteric meanings). Its contemporary relevance is obvious.

See also this article:

.. our Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld once noted in an off the cuff remark, strategic truths sometimes need be defended by a “bodyguard of lies.”[i] Here Rumsfeld was thinking no doubt of Churchill’s famous quip defending Operation Fortitude, the mock invasion force aimed at Calais that drew the attention of Herr Hitler and his high command away from the Normandy beaches and hid the Allies’ operational plans in the summer of 1944. Rumsfeld’s critics in Washington and London, however, have in mind more the history of contemporary philosophy than the history of WWII.

In the past few months, the “bodyguard of lies” metaphor has been redeployed and used to characterize the Bush Administration’s raw manipulation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies for propaganda purposes and for the gross deceit that seems to characterize the rationales put forward for their Iraq policy. Of these there were many--WMDs, a suspected connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, or the humanitarian rescue of the Iraqi people. They shifted depending on their intended audience and perhaps the day of the week. The “imminent threat” of WMD’s were emphasized for the British public while links to “Al Qaeda-like terrorism” were stressed at home – where the fiction that Saddam was directly involved in the September 2001 attacks has been firmly embraced by over two thirds of the American public. As Olivier Roy rightly noted last May, ”Washington’s stated war goals were not logically coherent, and its more intellectually compelling arguments were usually played down or denied.” [ii]

Citation

I Cite has been posting some very useful stuff on Zizek, eg this:


Politically, one of Zizek's examples includes the changes in Eastern Europe: all of sudden, the whole matrix, the whole system, fell apart. And, this change can't simply be explained by the fact that people lost faith in the system--that had been the case for years (if indeed there was ever much faith to begin with). No the change, was something different, like the signifier that held the chain together was suddenly gone. I think of this in the way that all sorts of reasons and evidence can be introduced to persuade a person, but if their fundamental framework won't admit the evidence, if that framework is based in faith, say, or an alternative matrix of desire, then going through the reasons simply misses the point. The key is what holds the chain together. And one of Zizek's key insights is that this can be held together by a contingent, irrational, element of libidinal investment.

Her blog also seems to attract intelligent comments.

Tarry & Revolt

As someone occasionally reproached for my rather relaxed style of life, my ponderous reluctance to 'get a move on', I was delighted to discover a fully-fledged philosophical and political justification, here:

"Our world is marked by its speed: the speed of historical change; the speed of technical change; the speed of communications; of transmissions; and even the speed with which human beings establish connection with one another. This speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency. It is because things, images and relations circulate so quickly that we do not even have time to measure the extent of this incoherency.... Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speec, will constitute a time of its own. I consider this a singularity of philosophy; that its thinking is leisurely, becuase today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed. This thinking, slow and consequently rebellious, is alone capable of establishing the fixed point.. which we need in order to sustain the desire of philosophy."

Thus, the injunction of thought is to arrest, to interrupt. It is a matter of road blocks and dams, of side-stepping 'efficiency' and of refusing to metabolise or to salute the stream of ready-made ideas and images which speed up time and speed us on to a future we have not chosen. This reversal of temporal priorities is not a hundred miles away from Walter Benjamin and his belief that the state of emergency was that things just kept going on as they were, so that the truly revolutionary action was not a dizzy acceleration of time but its sudden cessation or arrest.

A related, rather cursory thought: how the 'purple finger' icon was so speedily set in motion, 'a transferable motif to be worn and marketed', meme-ing through blog-space, now appearing on cups and other paraphenalia, a ready-made ideogram carelessly metabolised by the willing before any real thought about the elections had chance to get to work.

n.b., Adorno and Horkheimer on 'speed':

Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated economic forces – designated this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses enforced the general lines of culture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word – say, “intolerable” – over the loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying “intolerable.”

Curmudgeonly rant against a predictable target

Formerly, if you were doing a bit of writing in a cafe and there was a solitary person on the next table reading or whatever, you were safe. They were engrossed and silent and would not disturb. But this is no more. Not because a friend may join them. That wouldn't matter. Instead what happens is this. They are slouched against the wall, their features impassive. Suddenly, there's a tinny tune and in a second the little music box is clamped to their ear. This box, this prosthetic mouth-ear jerks the hitherto bovine individual into life, releases the squeaky voice, the gleeful soul, otherwise safely padlocked behind the vacant eyes. And so, for the next ten or twenty minutes, noises and gestures - the whole visible bodily surface is animated. Waves of emotion pass over the face and through the hands and vanish. Smiling, nodding furiously, suddenly puzzled: none of these things are connected to the immediate physical context nor to a publically audible voice. All that separates this gesticulating chattering person in front of you from madness is the small object held to the ear. Indeed, I can never help but reflect how I would perceive this person, how I would react, if I knew for certain that, all the while, the device was in fact switched off, and they were simply blabbering into some insane and echoing silence.

Anyway, today there was indeed one such person in the cafe, and the abrupt shift between bovine inaction and sudden stentorian animation was particularly marked. And I thought: because all her gestures and shouts of surprise etc are addressed to an absent being, because they do not connect to their immediate context nor to an audible voice, it is as though this person has been 'cut and pasted' from another environment - a board meeting, or a pub, a living room - onto this space right infront of me. Such an effect can be almost theatrical, in a Brechtian sort of way: these gestures, removed from their proper space, are placed in inverted commas, offer themselves, with lewd availability, to critical analysis, were anyone still that way inclined. Actually, although I said that if you didn't know that these people were talking on a mobile, you'd think they were mad, perhaps they are anyway, like the Lacanian example of the beggar - the beggar who thinks he's a king being no more/ less mad than the king who thinks he's a king. Or what's mad is this society of individuals, cut and pasted from mutually exclusive contexts, nuzzled side by side in autistic proximity, oblivious and deaf as never before, always elsewhere and in communication with the absent Other.

Digits

An obscure, neonate and splenetic blogger, found via comments at the Unholy Sepulchre, makes the following observation on the Iraqi elections,which I quote without comment (yes, that old trick):

One of many grim ironies - that the Iraqi elections are being used by some as retroactive justification for invasion and occupation, given the elections are the last thing intended by the invasion. The occupation is lent credence by what arose in its spite. If the elections were a triumph, they were a triumph for the Iraqi people in spite of the US government, who did not want them to take place and were compelled to allow them. This - the work of resistance - is misattributed to the largesse of an invading and occupying power in order to bag a few droppings of political capital. yadayada.. Cue all the unpaid scribblers and lackeys, prepared to communicate this version, or rather inversion, of events with earnest unblinking irony-free excitement. What was won in the face of US opposition is revealed to have been the secret telos of the whole thing. Fucking ingenious little ruse of history.

Our spenetic friend might have also pointed out the clever little trick whereby the occupation is vindicated precisely by an election in which Iraqis express their opposition to it. Anyway.. Points of interest = the above blog takes its name from a fairly obscure poem by James Clarence Mangan, a fascinating and relatively neglected Irish author, and subject of an nice little essay by Joyce and an interesting if costive book length study by David Lloyd. I think Terry Eagleton may have referred to him as the Irish Baudelaire. Mangan's poem refers to an episode of the Arabian Nights, in which a series of empty dishes is served up to a hungry man to test his sense of humour by one of the Barmecides. Hence the expression 'Barmecide feast', a useful metaphor for, well, loads of things.. use your imagination.

And here's Naomi Klein looking beyond the reassuring & easy iconicity of the purple finger.

n.b A correspondent informs me that the Times's knitting expert 're-discovered' Mangan a while ago; I followed this, erm, thread and found that Joyce's Mangan essay is online here, from which:

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age."

Political Symptoms

George Bernard Shaw, a much undervalued writer, has an interesting take on nationalism in his notes to John Bull's Other Island:

THE CURSE OF NATIONALISM’: ‘It is hardly possible for an Englishman to understand all that this implies. A conquered nation is like a man with cancer, he can think of nothing else,..... . A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation.
.....

There is indeed no greater curse to a nation than a nationalist movement, which is only the agonising symptom of a suppressed natural function. Conquered nations lose their place in the world’s march because they can do nothing but strive to get rid of their nationalist movements by recovering their national liberty.

From this point of view, nationalism's true aim should be precisely to put itself out of business, i.e., to attain a state wherein nationality ceases to be a preoccupation, just in the same way as an ill man wants to be healthy so as to stop having to think about his body and get on with his life. It is the aim of nationalism to forget itself, just as the aim of health is to forget the body. Of course, there are nationalisms that don't quite see it this way. These other nationalisms are like an ill man who says 'Oh, to be healthy, so that I can celebrate and rejoice in my body, have rituals and festivals in its honour' etc. But only from the point of view of the invalid does the body appear this way; and similarly, the vision of the nation outlined by many nationalists is only an optical illusion created by their 'invalidity' (being conquered).

This perhaps relates to a more general point about radical politics: that its ultimate aim is to make itself disappear. Thus, the left are typically accused of being preoccupied with class and exploitation and so on. But their aim is precisely to be in a position to forget these things and start really leading productive lives - again, like the invalid forgetting his body. Nationalism, of the kind Shaw speaks of, and other radical movements are thus like symptoms, to be cured not through trained introspection but through revolutionary action.

The boundaries of acceptable discourse

Further to my posts on 'Anti-Americanism', Adam at the Weblog, provides us with this nice precis of "the boundaries of acceptable discourse":

"Non-state violence is always automatically illegitimate, even though it is dwarfed by the death toll of state violence.

The violence of states other than the United States is generally also considered to be illegitimate.

Any suggestion that the culture of the United States is characterized by violence or that our foreign policy has consistently had a negative impact on other nations is an instance of knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Any attempt to provide facts in support of such a position will result in a swarm of people picking at the most minor parts of your argument in an effort to (a) avoid the main thrust of the argument and (b) discredit you personally".

I might only add a couple of things. Firstly, those lending their oddly defensive support to the world's only political and economic superpower are a valiant and beleaguered minority; their opponents, who dare question this power, exercise a near monopoly over academia and the press. Secondly, and this is only an impression: those who are quickest and most zealous in 'defending' America from the 'anti-Americanism' of European intellectuals are, paradoxically, European intellectuals. This is from Badiou talking about the position of certain French intellectuals vis a vis 'French intellectuals':

"to be against the US in this affair [the 'war against terror'] is to be against freedom. It is as simple as that. Bernard Henri Levy, who is never particular about details, states that anti-Americanism is fascistic."

And doubtless throughout Western Europe it is the same, the intelligentsia attacking 'the intelligentsia' for its anti-Americanism, European intellectuals scoffing at 'European intellectuals' for saying things which, in the US itself, are said every day by people like Adam. The defensiveness of the Henri-Levys (et al) on behalf of a foreign power is odd: it's as if what they say and write is perfomed on a stage, a stage illuminated by a light emanating from the Powerful, and as if they can never shake off that light and its accompanying gaze, so that anything performed in the shadows or backstage, is an object of shame.

Continental/ Analytical hair

A., who is sceptical about philosophy, asks me what a philosopher would have to say about her new haircut. Fortunately, I'd just read this:

If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure]).

A. finds this unintelligble, and says what she had in mind was something like:

Ok, Bob says 'I need a haircut', and Mary says to Bob 'You need a haircut' - how should semantic theory account for the similarities and the differences between these two statements?

Supervised self-government

Broadbent: "Never despair, Larry. There are great possibilities for Ireland. Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance."
...
Doyle: "I'm sure you are serious, Tom, about the English guidance."
Broadbent: "Of course I am. Our guidance is the important thing. We English must place our capacity for government without stint at the service of nations who are less fortunately endowed in that respect; so as to allow them to develop in perfect freedom to the English level of self-governement, you know. You understand me?

from: George Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island.

Meanwhile, The Tomb carries an excerpt from an unconvincing dramatic skit in which various imperialist cliches are trotted out and C.Hitchens is shadowed by a rather scary sycophant.

Exhibits D & K

Here is an excellent Deleuze resource, only just discovered.

If there was a museum of blogs it might , for one thing, include select examples of the many aborted blogs - some lasting little more than a day or so, enigmatic fragments, still glowing faintly with unfulfilled promise, like so many rusting hulks of space hardware floating off into infinity. This, for example, and this, and other pale flares of inspiration. But whatever we place in this imaginary 'museum without walls', it would have to include this unmissable and singular gem: Oliver Kamm on the politics of knitting.

Repetition

There is a very informative and interesting book on the Situationist International, published by October, which was until recently for sale at a very reasonable price at a certain second hand bookstore off the Tottenham Court Road. It contains, among stills from Debord’s films, and snapshots from the magic psychogeographical triangle in Paris where Debord spent (in an almost Bataillian sense) his days, several perceptive essays.Anyway, and to the point, there’s a nice essay by Agamben on repetition and stoppage in Debord’s films. The definition of repetition is particularly useful:

“.. repetition is not the return of the identical; it is not the same as such that returns. The force and grace of repetition, the novelty it brings us, is the return as the possibility of what was. Repetition restores the possibility of what was, renders it possible anew.”

It is this definition of repetition – not the antiquarian reproduction, the fossilised facsimile of the past, but the repetition of the ‘possiblity’ which was ‘in front of’ the now dead facsimile, which informs, for example, Zizek’s ideas about repeating Lenin. To give a concrete example: to repeat Shakespeare certainly doesn’t mean to rebuild the Globe. This is the facsimile, the external husk. If we repeat this mere externality we in fact betray the original impulse, which was the very opposite of such comfortable antiquarian revivalism. Repeating W.S. means to rediscover the possibilities that Shakespeare made visible in the 1590’s: a new form of cultural production (there had been no public theatres prior to 1576), outside the bounds of Society (literally, the playhouses were only permitted to build only in the ‘liberties’ outside the city walls), in an indeterminate zone of activities which were frowned upon and regarded as potentially subversive; a form of cultural production which challenged and confounded received categories, and so on…

Of course, this would be a Shakespeare that few would recognise, and that would appal many. So it is that authentic repetitions pass incognito, because the customary costume has been discarded so as to allow the original possibility to stand nude. And this nudity typically scandalises.

But if this sense of ‘repetition’ applies to radical impulses and possibilities, it also includes, for example, imperialism. We might expect to see it tricked out in its familiar costume, just as we expect ‘Shakespeare’ to be surrounded by the quaint Globe and performed in charming Elizabethan dress. Meanwhile, imperialism as a possibility can continue incognito, the same possiblities and patterns repeated, often unconsciously, by its willing footsoldiers, happy in the belief that they're doing something else entirely - bringing civilisation to the barbarians or whatever its modern equivalent might be..

Panegyric etc

The new edition of Debord's Panegyric, incorporating volumes 1 & 2 is now in the shops. Its a handsome little book, with the second volume consisting largely of nostalgia-heavy photos of Debordian Paris and various psychogeographical maps. This quote is from vol. 1:

"I have certainly lived as I said one should; and this was perhaps even more unusual among the people of my day, who have all seemed to believe that they had to live only according to the instructions of those who direct current economic production and the power of communication with which it is armed. I have resided in Italy and Spain, principally in florence and Seville.. but also in other cities that were still living, and even in the countryside. Much later, when the flood of destruction, pollution, and falsification had conquered the whole surface of the planet, as well as pouring down nearly to its very depths, I could return to the ruins that remain of Paris, since by then nothing better was left elsewhere. No exile is possible in a unified world.

Otherwise, always worth reminding people of the online Marxists.org resource from which this, for example, is taken:

What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now "Marxists" (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the "national-German" Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

Topoi

An article here on Zizek, Badiou and the subject, poses the following question:

“To return to our initial question, why are we seeing this resurgence of early Christian topoi in cultural theory today? And why are these topoi all tricked out as attempts to think in a contemporary mode the materiality of the subject? To put it differently, why is the Pauline subject being peddled as the subject of our time, and why precisely as one that functions as a potential revelation of materiality?”

The problem here is that the terms in which these questions are couched in fact preempt what is at issue. 'Tricked out', 'peddled' both imply the same thing: That the phenomena in question are only a disguised form of something else, and what we have to do is determine why they have taken this particular form or semblance. But this content/ semblance distinction is precisely what is being contested and turned round. For it is the work of St. Paul which is the semblance or form wherein an authentic concept of the subject is couched. There is a 'theory' of the subject here, but it is 'tricked out' in Christian language and awaits completion and decoding by the present.

In other words, the hermeneutic at work here is close to that of the utopian, redemptive intelligence as it appears, for example, in Marx's famous Letter to Ruge (1843):

So our campaign slogan must be: reform of consciousness, not through dogma, but through the analysis of that mystical consciousness which has not yet become clear to itself. It will then turn out that the world has long dreamt of that of which it only had to have a clear idea to possess it really. It will turn out that it is not a quesiton of any conceptual rupture between past and future, but rather of the completion of the thoughts of the past.


This is not to suggest that Badiou subscribes exactly to this 'Blochian' hermeneutic, but there is an analagous understanding at work. The task: delivering from the past meanings which otherwise pass incognito, and extracting the moment of truth from what is indeed, at a purely conceptual level, false.

At this point I refer the reader to Jameson's chapter on Bloch from Marxism and Form, from which this is taken:

What Marxism shares with Christianity is primarily a historical situation: for it now projects that claim to universality and that attempt to establish a universal culture which characterised Christianity in the declining years of the Roman Empire and at the height of the Middle Ages.

Ten Thousand Talkers

John Berger, 1991:

".. a scenario of lies can be written for the media which will then transmit it, with excitement, commentary, analysis, etc., as if it were the truth."

True, but at least some are listening. (Yes, I know its been linked to a hundred places elsewhere. Note incidentally, that rhetorical 'logic of accumulation' which we find many other places in American literature - Whitman and Dylan, for example -

I saw a new born baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with hammers-a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.


And speaking of broken tongues, a word on Iraq. It is not that one wishes to 'deny the people of Iraq' their day of democracy (oh, the choral security of such formulas). It is sufficient to note that the celebration of this day is readily available everywhere, that echoing what is readily available everywhere and rounding on those who do not echo what is everywhere readily available is hardly very interesting or challenging. Also, that there are substantial reasons for not merely joining the chorus, unless of course you work for the mainstream press and are renumerated for this spontaneous assent, and - because you are so renumerated -have installed a firewall against any residual scepticism. So, this questioning would concern the following: 1. Given that our access to these elections is mediated through reporters and journalists, what are the conditions under which these people are working. What are their conditions of access to the electoral process. 2. Given that we are dealing with an invading and occupying power, what is the history of elections managed by occupying powers and does this history shed any light here? 3. Given that it has by no means been proved that the occupying power's chief motive for occupation was the restoration of democracy, how might the elections figure in the occuping power's other plans? And so on..

A certain critical distance regarding the actions of the extremely powerful, a scepticism regarding the readily available representation of events of which we have no direct knowledge. Outrageous proposals perhaps. The blogger known as Lenin has links to a few who have dared entertain questions, as well as a few of his own.

Rant: 2.30am

Among those who have lost the capacity to think, statements like this are still to be found:

In essence, what we are witnessing is a pseudo-rejection of the USA. All this “I hate America as much as you hate America!” baloney is a cultural phenomenon, little to do with any meaningful or cultivated sense of “politics”. Across Europe, gigantic music stores stuffed to the gunwales with American pop, rock and urban do a sideline in hipster books. Virtually without exception these dazzling paperback digests are rabidly anti-American (Why do we hate America? ),

A 'left of centre' blog quotes this as if it were some insightful commentary. What these unnamed ‘hipster books’ are is anybody’s guess. Probably, these putative ‘hipster[?] books’ (note on rhetoric 101: left thought is always ‘merely fashionable’) are ones containing criticisms of the actions of the US government. Now various unreflective numbskulls seem to think that there is a contradiction between consuming American culture and being critical of the U.S. government. This ‘contradiction’ is unworthy of consideration. Allow me to quote myself:

A colleague tells me of a video made by one of his students ostensibly about ‘Anti-Americanism’ in the U.K. The video consists of footage of anti-war protestors juxtaposed with tracking footage of acres of MacDonald’s, Burger King and other U.S. companies. It illustrates, suggests the student, British hypocrisy in simultaneously hating and loving ‘America’. Meanwhile, a protest against the Iraq war in France can be lazily referred to as an ‘anti-American’ demonstration at the consistently puerile ‘No Pasaran’ site. Elsewhere, in a discussion at Crooked Timber, criticisms of Starbucks were taken to be ‘really about’ attitudes to ‘America’. Such examples are utterly quotidian, routine, legion*.Anyway, it seems obvious to me that enjoying burgers and protesting at what you consider to be an imperialist war are two different things, and not two ways of relating to a single abstraction called ‘America’ [….]An American, conversely, can like fish and chips but hate cricket, hate Labour and love the Beatles. They are not entertaining tortured, contradictory attitudes towards “Englishness’.

Elementary logic, perhaps, except for those whose thought has been impoverished by the crushing presence of doxa or have simply fallen victim to a generalised irrationality..

Seriously, after reading yet another bold denunciation of the non-entity Mr George Galloway, or some self-congratulatory demolition of a clueless sap from the Socialist Worker’s letter’s page one can only say, as one might to the police nicking a down-and-out on Tottenham Court Road, haven’t you got anything better to do? One can only wonder for whom these tedious repetitive denunciations are staged. And one can only hope, if only from irrational and lingering nostalgia, for a left blog that wishes to talk about social injustice, class and capitalism, that has some sense of this world’s obscene inequalities of wealth and power and never tires of drawing attention to these; that never tires also of pointing out the strategies whereby the powerful and the privileged legitimate and reproduce their rule, and that replies to the tyranny of what merely exists with reminders of what has been and what might be; that instinctively tries to disrupt the ‘obvious’ reading rather than rallying to its defence, and that aspires to that impossible point from which the world as it is can be seen in its terrible privation . So here’s an empty link, a link that holds open a place for such a blog, a vacant position. Keeping such a link open might be more important than many of the predictable stuff which currently purports to fill it, and which is plastered, like so many over-familiar facsimiles, over the virtual walls of the blogosphere.

Badiou

(Marx’s critique of abstract equality) + (Sartre’s notion of seriality) =

“If you are born in Africa you will probably live for around 30 years, whereas the figure is around 80 if you are born in France. Such is the ‘democratic’ contemporary world. But at the same time (and this is what keeps the democratic fiction alive in the people’s hearts and minds) there is an egalitarian dogmatism, that of an equality of their placement in front of commodities. The same product is offered everywhere. Armed with this universal commercial offer, contemporary ‘democracy’ can forge a subject from such abstract equality: the consumer; the one who, in his or her virtuality opposite the commodity, is ostensibly identical to any other in his or her abstract humanity as buying power. Man as shopping. As man (or woman) is the same as everyone else insofar as he or she looks at the same window display (that he or she has less money than others, and thus unequal buying power, is a secondary and contingent matter..)

Badiou

The spirit of music

George Steiner playing an unidentified musical instrument

George Steiner's rhetorical signatures are by now well known: the incantatory use of proper names, the self-dramatizing opening moves ("We are entering on large, difficult ground.."), the invokation of the 'unanswerable' and the accompanying poses of humility... well, anyway, for those who might be interested, the entire text of his 1971 In Bluebeard's Castle is online here. Although I find much of Steiner rather absurd, his 'cultural conservatism' is not uncongenial. Here he is on the subject of pounding youth music:

This is being written in a study in a college of one of the great American universities. The walls are throbbing gently to the beat of music coming from one near and several more distant amplifiers. The walls quiver to the ear or to the touch roughly eighteen hours per day, sometimes twenty-four. The beat is literally unending. It matters little whether it is that of pop, folk, or rock. What counts is the all-pervasive pulsation, morning to night and into night, made indiscriminate by the cool burn of electronic timbre. A large segment of mankind, between the ages of thirteen and, say, twenty-five, now lives immersed in this constant throb. The hammering of rock or of pop creates an enveloping space. Activities such as reading, writing, private communication, learning, previously framed with silence, now take place in a field of strident vibrato. This means that the essentially linguistic nature of these pursuits is adulterated; they are vestigial modes of the old "logic."
[…] When a young man walks down a street in Vladivostock or Cincinnati with his transistor blaring, when a car passes with its radio on at full blast, the resulting sound-capsule encloses the individual. It diminishes the external world to a set of acoustic surfaces. A pop regime imposes severe physical stress on the human ear. Some of the coarsening or damage that can follow has, in fact, been measured. But hardly anything is known of the psychological effects of saturation by volume and repetitive beat (often the same two or three tunes are played around the clock). What tissues of sensibility are being numbed or exacerbated? [..]
In short, the vocabularies, the contextual behavior-patterns of pop and rock, constitute a genuine lingua franca, a "universal dialect" of youth.

See also here, at Infinite Thought:

'Sacred music has the knack of making things seem sacred, just as rock music makes them appear dangerous and sexy. If you slowed down footage of sex, deep-sea fishing or dealings on the futures market and lashed Fauré over them, you could give any of those activities the look of a religion: speed them up and add Metallica and they look satanic. This is the result of the intervention of a video editor not a deity.'

Particularly like the last sentence. Music as ersatz Spirit; the grey quotidian world, deaf and meaningless as never before, is invested with the trick of significance from without, vibrates with a 'meaning' at once alien to it and yet little more that its sonorous equivalent.