This is perhaps merely a footnote to some of my previous notes on the uncanny etc. I suggested (Plastic Things) that there seemed to be a 'Modern' uncanny object – those old Victorian dolls and puppets, who might be jerked into life by an alien (human) hand, or moved by the tinny melody of a music box, before returning to their crumpled, forlorn state in the corner of the room, irradiating a peculiar melancholy silence. By contrast, we have the ‘Koonsian’ plastic beings of post-modernity, benign and unaware of the humanity they lack, unperturbed by the poverty and muteness of their world.
Is there something analogous, or weakly related, in musical terms? There is a famous passage in Proust, where the violin is described as, basically, a little wooden box with a genie inside*. The genie is released by the violin player, and the sonorous notes of the instrument are somehow like the plaintive striving towards speech of this genie. This is part of the violin’s appeal - it is eerily reminiscent of the human voice, the pure voice uncoupled from content, searching out but never discovering that content. It both exceeds the eloquence of speech and fails to attain it.
One of my impressions when listening to Jazz (specifically old, Dixieland-style jazz), esp. the trumpet, is of a trapped voice trying to get out. It’s on the verge of speech, but – comically – never quite makes it. We have a drunken, jolly, swaggering anticipation of a voice which never itself appears. And the various instruments frequently seem to reply to oneanother, a crazy melodious bar room banter.
In such cases, then, there is a kind of implicit speech, a voice trapped in a foreign medium, but all the more expressive for this. The eloquence is that of melancholy, albeit a comic melancholy in the case of Jazz.
Now isn’t it a defining trait of modern synthetic music that it does not have this quality? It can simulate for sure, but it is not given in the instrument itself. The synthesizer is the appropriate accompaniment to those plastic Koonsian dolls who have forgotten what they lack. Such music has nothing to say about the eloquence of the unsaid.Because it is not lacking anything its ‘fullness’ is completely empty*.
[*Have now found the passage, which reads:
‘at times, too, one thinks one is listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness of the sapient, quivering and enchanted box.’]
As one commenter points out (below), this emptiness can indeed have its own unearthly/ chilling beauty - but it is of a different order than that of the searching note of the violin.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Act/ Art
There is an aphorism from Adorno that ‘every work of art is an uncommitted crime.’
cf this from Zizek:
‘From the perspective of the existing positive laws of a symbolic community, an act appears by definition as a crime.’
Also: ‘A work of art creates the taste by which it is to be consumed’ cf ‘an act.. defines its own conditions, retroactively produces the grounds which justify it.’
The question arises of the relation between Act and Art and of the resemblance between the two.
The work of art, like the act, confronts its author as something alien, object-like. It seems to have exceeded any intention, and redefines (claims a kind of ownership over) its author, rather than the author being able simply to claim it. The writer (or whatever) can never entirely ‘assume’ his/her work, for the work operates according to a logic that has finally escaped him/her.. Kafka writes 'The Judgement' in a single night. It is if he were able to key in to the logic of the story which then carried him, depositing him the following morning, tired and bewildered.
Sometimes a writer will live in the shadow of a great work, be unable to live down, or live up to it. Somehow his freedom and identity has been confiscated by that of which he was nominally the author.
Indeed, it is a commonplace, but many writers (see Kafka's visit to Dr Steiner) report on writing as an experience in which the ‘I’ is almost incidental. Doesn’t Rilke speak of receiving the ‘enigmatic dictation’ of the Duino Elegies. Beckett pictures himself as a 'clerk or scribe'. The writer is taken over, compelled, etc, and yet it is not quite he/ she who is doing the compelling. The writer is ‘de-subjectified’ by his work. The art work has an impetus of its ‘own’ and has made me its object; it calls me to work on it. As with the act, the (Imaginary) ‘I’ is not able to entirely ‘assume responsibility’ for what has arisen – daemons or supernatural instructors are invoked to paper over the gap.
The Act, we are told, transforms it bearer. What does the artwork transform? Is its 'bearer' the author or, somehow, the history of art within which it intervenes? Like the act, it demands new criteria of evaluation, but has also simultaneously given birth to those criteria/ created them through sheer declarative fiat.
So what is the relation here (if any) between the art work and the Act. Is the art work like the ghostly adumbration of the act, does it delineate the shape of the act? Or can it be, in fact, an Act? Or are we merely dealing with a forced analogy here?
cf this from Zizek:
‘From the perspective of the existing positive laws of a symbolic community, an act appears by definition as a crime.’
Also: ‘A work of art creates the taste by which it is to be consumed’ cf ‘an act.. defines its own conditions, retroactively produces the grounds which justify it.’
The question arises of the relation between Act and Art and of the resemblance between the two.
The work of art, like the act, confronts its author as something alien, object-like. It seems to have exceeded any intention, and redefines (claims a kind of ownership over) its author, rather than the author being able simply to claim it. The writer (or whatever) can never entirely ‘assume’ his/her work, for the work operates according to a logic that has finally escaped him/her.. Kafka writes 'The Judgement' in a single night. It is if he were able to key in to the logic of the story which then carried him, depositing him the following morning, tired and bewildered.
Sometimes a writer will live in the shadow of a great work, be unable to live down, or live up to it. Somehow his freedom and identity has been confiscated by that of which he was nominally the author.
Indeed, it is a commonplace, but many writers (see Kafka's visit to Dr Steiner) report on writing as an experience in which the ‘I’ is almost incidental. Doesn’t Rilke speak of receiving the ‘enigmatic dictation’ of the Duino Elegies. Beckett pictures himself as a 'clerk or scribe'. The writer is taken over, compelled, etc, and yet it is not quite he/ she who is doing the compelling. The writer is ‘de-subjectified’ by his work. The art work has an impetus of its ‘own’ and has made me its object; it calls me to work on it. As with the act, the (Imaginary) ‘I’ is not able to entirely ‘assume responsibility’ for what has arisen – daemons or supernatural instructors are invoked to paper over the gap.
The Act, we are told, transforms it bearer. What does the artwork transform? Is its 'bearer' the author or, somehow, the history of art within which it intervenes? Like the act, it demands new criteria of evaluation, but has also simultaneously given birth to those criteria/ created them through sheer declarative fiat.
So what is the relation here (if any) between the art work and the Act. Is the art work like the ghostly adumbration of the act, does it delineate the shape of the act? Or can it be, in fact, an Act? Or are we merely dealing with a forced analogy here?
Metaphor to the Rescue
Yeats invents a rich caste of conceptual and fabular personae. Yeats scholars are of course familiar with such ‘notions’ as the ‘gyres’, even as it is unlikely that a single of those scholars believes in these as historical realities or invests faith in their explanatory value. Yet their 'aesthetic appeal' is attested to. Thus, the gyres are not treated seriously as concepts but appreciated as fictions. A number of questions arise, the most obvious perhaps being which of these attitudes – belief or aesthetic utility – approaches Yeats’ own position. How far did he himself subordinate belief to fictional appeal. The second concerns the heuristic status of metaphor. How is it that we are able to ‘rescue’ as metaphors what are remaindered and vacuous in purely conceptual or propositional terms.
We say: as a ‘belief’ this is obviously ‘silly’ and without foundation; as a metaphor, however,, it is poetically and affectively productive. But what objects should come within the remit of this rescue strategy? Is the séance to be redeemed metaphorically? Fairies? The ‘deeps of mind’? reincarnation? And were these things always for Yeats only ‘metaphors for poetry' - this last been Yeats's phrase for what his Supernatural Instructors gave him.
(The latter (famous) phrase, or ‘get out clause’ depending on one’s point of view, is in any case ambivalent. Did Yeats mean that the instructors gave him metaphors which he was able to use in his poetry, or that they gave him a metaphoric representation of poetry itself as a process, a making. )
In a sense, what we are saying here is that the distinction between literal and metaphorical levels corresponds to the cognitive and affective levels or dimensions of a belief or practice. Thus, whereas the said belief or practice entails propositional content which now seems risible, we assert that its appeal was not at all on this purely cognitive level (i.e., it appealed because of its rigorous…) but rather for its affective charge and cathartic or dramatic power. And whereas the belief-as-belief is the obvious object-choice for the condescension of posterity, it is in reality a decoy or straw man, since people hardly embrace beliefs simply through disinterested cogitation.
‘Belief’ judged purely as belief is, from this point of view, merely the detritus left by history, the empty skeleton of a ‘habitus’, an ‘illusio’, a form of life.. the inessential husk of what had its raison d’être elsewhere… it would therefore be ‘category error’ for the historian to take such beliefs ‘in-themselves’.
To understand, for example, Yeats's attraction to the back-room theatrics of the seance, involves a minimal generosity towards its metaphoric content, and a bracketing off of its propositional truth content.
We say: as a ‘belief’ this is obviously ‘silly’ and without foundation; as a metaphor, however,, it is poetically and affectively productive. But what objects should come within the remit of this rescue strategy? Is the séance to be redeemed metaphorically? Fairies? The ‘deeps of mind’? reincarnation? And were these things always for Yeats only ‘metaphors for poetry' - this last been Yeats's phrase for what his Supernatural Instructors gave him.
(The latter (famous) phrase, or ‘get out clause’ depending on one’s point of view, is in any case ambivalent. Did Yeats mean that the instructors gave him metaphors which he was able to use in his poetry, or that they gave him a metaphoric representation of poetry itself as a process, a making. )
In a sense, what we are saying here is that the distinction between literal and metaphorical levels corresponds to the cognitive and affective levels or dimensions of a belief or practice. Thus, whereas the said belief or practice entails propositional content which now seems risible, we assert that its appeal was not at all on this purely cognitive level (i.e., it appealed because of its rigorous…) but rather for its affective charge and cathartic or dramatic power. And whereas the belief-as-belief is the obvious object-choice for the condescension of posterity, it is in reality a decoy or straw man, since people hardly embrace beliefs simply through disinterested cogitation.
‘Belief’ judged purely as belief is, from this point of view, merely the detritus left by history, the empty skeleton of a ‘habitus’, an ‘illusio’, a form of life.. the inessential husk of what had its raison d’être elsewhere… it would therefore be ‘category error’ for the historian to take such beliefs ‘in-themselves’.
To understand, for example, Yeats's attraction to the back-room theatrics of the seance, involves a minimal generosity towards its metaphoric content, and a bracketing off of its propositional truth content.
A Note on Method and Representation
In particular, it should not be forgotten that the division into embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology and clinical medicine does not exist in nature
The elementary point here being that: The categories of the understanding are never simply ‘given’ in the object understood. Indeed..
It is the scandalous power of the understanding to sunder (and thus render intelligible) what had been whole and entire.
The categories of the understanding thus require laborious construction. The structure of, the relations between these categories may be radically at variance with the contours of what is understood.
Thus, understanding first quarters and ‘destroys’ (‘murders’) the thing in order to divulge its meaning which then stands separate and complete like the rewards of plunder.
mmm??
The elementary point here being that: The categories of the understanding are never simply ‘given’ in the object understood. Indeed..
It is the scandalous power of the understanding to sunder (and thus render intelligible) what had been whole and entire.
The categories of the understanding thus require laborious construction. The structure of, the relations between these categories may be radically at variance with the contours of what is understood.
Thus, understanding first quarters and ‘destroys’ (‘murders’) the thing in order to divulge its meaning which then stands separate and complete like the rewards of plunder.
mmm??
'My Visit to Dr Steiner'
'My happiness, my abilities, and any possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) which in my opinion correspond to the clairvoyant states described by you, Herr Doktor, in which I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.'
FK, 1911
FK, 1911
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Act
What is an act?
This question has arisen from previous posts on Hamlet. But we are not speaking of act in the theatrical sense. Rather, a Lacanian definition is sought (as filtered through Slav. again).
An elementary definition is proffered in Ethics of the Real:
“The act differs from an action in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’ – after the act I am simply not the same as before.”
A second occurs in Plague of Fantasies:
‘The act occurs as a ‘crazy’, unaccountable event which, precisely, is not willed. The subject’s will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to and repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed into it, the subject can never fully ‘assume’ the act. In short, what Lacan calls ‘act’ has the precise status of an object, which the subject can never swallow, subjectivise – which forever remains a foreign body […] The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.’
One does not recognise oneself in the act. ‘I cannot believe I just did that.' Thus, one’s Imaginary identity is shattered. Or one asks, legitimately, ‘Who is the ‘I’ responsible for what just happened?’ If it is not the Imaginary I, is it not in some sense the Subject itself that flashes into view here – the pure freedom of the subject? Or is it that a new subject is born through the act.
Is the Act something like an Event on the level of the individual? Henceforth, things cannot be the same again, there is no way back. Your previous history has now to be rethought from the point of view of the act. The act enlarges the concept that the individual had of his/ her self. The new concept cannot be dismissed, nor can it be quite faced or metabolised. Any attempt to face or metabolise it comes from within the old self. Thus it can only be faced or metabolised from a point of view appropriate to and created by the act itself.
So, when Zizek says the Act is an Object, this can be understood to mean it confronts us as something foreign, as not owned by/ belonging to the Subject. It is experienced as traumatic, as ‘too much’ to deal with. One cannot say of the act ‘this is mine.’
One wonders what the attraction of the Act is exactly. Is it not somehow this ‘more than’? That is to say: The act is always ‘more than’ our intention to do it. The potential to act is like a vortex, like the proverbial heady desire to jump from the cliff edge. But whereas one’s attraction to the act, one’s fatal curiosity, is always fraught and contradictory, the act itself knows no ambivalence. It introduces a line of demarcation which cannot be re-crossed. The act represents a kind of judgement or fatal exposure.
The act, like Badiou’s event, is incalculable. I do not know whether you can anticipate an Act, but there is a poem by Patrick Pearse which might illustrate some of this:
Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost…
Pearse writes this poem shortly before his involvement in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. From every available point of view, in terms of calculable returns, what Pearse would go on to do was ‘folly’. (And it is folly partly because, precisely, its returns were not calculable). Pearse makes a wager, and an admission that what he is about to do will outrun any predictable framework. There are no existing criteria that he can appeal to in justification of his act. The act is thus perhaps a pure negative: it is the desire to blow open a hole in the existing framework, to transform the framework, but absolutely without any guarantees. Of course, if there were guarantees, then the act would be within the framework.
To accept this radical openness, this risk, this surrender to the incalculable is, I think, what is meant by the Lacanian phrase ‘to pass the act’. To ‘pass the act’ is to accept an empty desire: empty because it commits one the new, but not to any specific meaning. I am to set in motion a concatenation of events whose end or significance I can in no way envisage. And I am attracted to the act (as well as repelled by it) exactly on that account.
There is a line from Kafka that might be relevant here:
'From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. '
Anyway, comments and emendations most welcome, including examples of what you might consider an Act.
This question has arisen from previous posts on Hamlet. But we are not speaking of act in the theatrical sense. Rather, a Lacanian definition is sought (as filtered through Slav. again).
An elementary definition is proffered in Ethics of the Real:
“The act differs from an action in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’ – after the act I am simply not the same as before.”
A second occurs in Plague of Fantasies:
‘The act occurs as a ‘crazy’, unaccountable event which, precisely, is not willed. The subject’s will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to and repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed into it, the subject can never fully ‘assume’ the act. In short, what Lacan calls ‘act’ has the precise status of an object, which the subject can never swallow, subjectivise – which forever remains a foreign body […] The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.’
One does not recognise oneself in the act. ‘I cannot believe I just did that.' Thus, one’s Imaginary identity is shattered. Or one asks, legitimately, ‘Who is the ‘I’ responsible for what just happened?’ If it is not the Imaginary I, is it not in some sense the Subject itself that flashes into view here – the pure freedom of the subject? Or is it that a new subject is born through the act.
Is the Act something like an Event on the level of the individual? Henceforth, things cannot be the same again, there is no way back. Your previous history has now to be rethought from the point of view of the act. The act enlarges the concept that the individual had of his/ her self. The new concept cannot be dismissed, nor can it be quite faced or metabolised. Any attempt to face or metabolise it comes from within the old self. Thus it can only be faced or metabolised from a point of view appropriate to and created by the act itself.
So, when Zizek says the Act is an Object, this can be understood to mean it confronts us as something foreign, as not owned by/ belonging to the Subject. It is experienced as traumatic, as ‘too much’ to deal with. One cannot say of the act ‘this is mine.’
One wonders what the attraction of the Act is exactly. Is it not somehow this ‘more than’? That is to say: The act is always ‘more than’ our intention to do it. The potential to act is like a vortex, like the proverbial heady desire to jump from the cliff edge. But whereas one’s attraction to the act, one’s fatal curiosity, is always fraught and contradictory, the act itself knows no ambivalence. It introduces a line of demarcation which cannot be re-crossed. The act represents a kind of judgement or fatal exposure.
The act, like Badiou’s event, is incalculable. I do not know whether you can anticipate an Act, but there is a poem by Patrick Pearse which might illustrate some of this:
Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost…
Pearse writes this poem shortly before his involvement in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. From every available point of view, in terms of calculable returns, what Pearse would go on to do was ‘folly’. (And it is folly partly because, precisely, its returns were not calculable). Pearse makes a wager, and an admission that what he is about to do will outrun any predictable framework. There are no existing criteria that he can appeal to in justification of his act. The act is thus perhaps a pure negative: it is the desire to blow open a hole in the existing framework, to transform the framework, but absolutely without any guarantees. Of course, if there were guarantees, then the act would be within the framework.
To accept this radical openness, this risk, this surrender to the incalculable is, I think, what is meant by the Lacanian phrase ‘to pass the act’. To ‘pass the act’ is to accept an empty desire: empty because it commits one the new, but not to any specific meaning. I am to set in motion a concatenation of events whose end or significance I can in no way envisage. And I am attracted to the act (as well as repelled by it) exactly on that account.
There is a line from Kafka that might be relevant here:
'From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. '
Anyway, comments and emendations most welcome, including examples of what you might consider an Act.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Passwords
‘For Lacan the exemplary case of empty speech is the password. How does a password function? As a pure gesture of recognition, of admission into a certain symbolic space, whose enunciated content is totally indifferent? If, say, I arrange with my gangster–colleague that the password that gives me access to the hideout is ‘Aunt has baked the apple pie’, it can easily be ‘Long live comrade Stalin!’ or whatever else. Therein consists the ‘emptiness’ of empty speech: in this ultimate nullity of its enunciated content. And Lacan’s point is that human speech in its most radical, fundamental dimension functions as a password: prior to its being a means of communication, of transmitting the signified content, speech is the medium of the mutual recognition of its speakers.’
Perfectly clear. Just a footnote:
I wonder when, under what historical conditions, 'empty speech' becomes visible, or capable of being conceptualised? Isn't it the case, after all, that the emergence of a concept points back to and reveals something about the historical conditions of its emergence. And the possibility of conceptualisation always marks a particular stage in the development of the thing conceptualised (Marx, for example, accounts for his ability to conceptualise capitalism).
This is a slight problem I have with the whole Lacanian conceptual repertoire*. Its as though the 'Big Other', 'Symbolic Order' 'object a, ' (et al) were just inertly there awaiting 'discovery' and, once discovered, can be used retrospectively to decipher anything from Greek Tragedy onwards. Perhaps some of you, who know Lacan better than me, might point me in the direction of occasions where he attempts to account for possibility of his own thought.
(*not just him of course)
Please see Alphic comments below on Lacan & Judaism
Perfectly clear. Just a footnote:
I wonder when, under what historical conditions, 'empty speech' becomes visible, or capable of being conceptualised? Isn't it the case, after all, that the emergence of a concept points back to and reveals something about the historical conditions of its emergence. And the possibility of conceptualisation always marks a particular stage in the development of the thing conceptualised (Marx, for example, accounts for his ability to conceptualise capitalism).
This is a slight problem I have with the whole Lacanian conceptual repertoire*. Its as though the 'Big Other', 'Symbolic Order' 'object a, ' (et al) were just inertly there awaiting 'discovery' and, once discovered, can be used retrospectively to decipher anything from Greek Tragedy onwards. Perhaps some of you, who know Lacan better than me, might point me in the direction of occasions where he attempts to account for possibility of his own thought.
(*not just him of course)
Please see Alphic comments below on Lacan & Judaism
Hamlet the Dane
In the comments to a previous post (which I suggest you read before continuing) Jodi of I Cite has raised a couple of questions about my reading of Hamlet and Zizek. I thought I’d use another post to reflect on those questions:
The symbolic mandate given to Hamlet by his father (also ‘Hamlet’ of course), complete with superego blackmail - ‘if thou did thy dear father love’, is one he initially accepts: ‘Thy commandment all alone shall live in the book and volume of my brain.’ This position – making the self into a pure instrument of a Mandate – is of course impossible. It produces only a kind of castrating over-proximity, a ‘too much of address.’). It’s only when Hamlet adopts a parodic, ludic relation to his Father’s Name that he is able to act. (This is hardly an orthodox interpretation, I know).
Two things, though:
1. Is this ludic mockery of the Symbolic, of his father’s name and mandate, simply equivalent to ‘not taking it seriously’ or is it something more radical. I’m really not sure. Perhaps a bad analogy, but imagine a student using with bravado and parodic gravitas his father’s credit and business cards – is this reverence or mockery, or both? And suppose the use of the credit card is animated by a disgust with consumption as such?*
2.Again, it seems to me that Hamlet is first entangled or precipitated into the world of action and then is able slough off or gain distance from his Symbolic mandate. One interpretation here would be that Fate seems to have grabbed him by the throat, and to some extent he can now ‘resign’ himself to that. So the Big Other, in the form of Destiny, has wrested some of the initiative from him. Paradoxically, this awareness of Fate, the sense that part of you is apportioned to some dark power over which you exercise little control, actually licences/ enables action - you can act only against such an irrevocable/ inscrutable background, to which you can entrust a portion of yourself. On the infrastructure of necessity is raised the superstructure of free decision.
*Actually not helpful at all, I think, but do try and see the point!
The symbolic mandate given to Hamlet by his father (also ‘Hamlet’ of course), complete with superego blackmail - ‘if thou did thy dear father love’, is one he initially accepts: ‘Thy commandment all alone shall live in the book and volume of my brain.’ This position – making the self into a pure instrument of a Mandate – is of course impossible. It produces only a kind of castrating over-proximity, a ‘too much of address.’). It’s only when Hamlet adopts a parodic, ludic relation to his Father’s Name that he is able to act. (This is hardly an orthodox interpretation, I know).
Two things, though:
1. Is this ludic mockery of the Symbolic, of his father’s name and mandate, simply equivalent to ‘not taking it seriously’ or is it something more radical. I’m really not sure. Perhaps a bad analogy, but imagine a student using with bravado and parodic gravitas his father’s credit and business cards – is this reverence or mockery, or both? And suppose the use of the credit card is animated by a disgust with consumption as such?*
2.Again, it seems to me that Hamlet is first entangled or precipitated into the world of action and then is able slough off or gain distance from his Symbolic mandate. One interpretation here would be that Fate seems to have grabbed him by the throat, and to some extent he can now ‘resign’ himself to that. So the Big Other, in the form of Destiny, has wrested some of the initiative from him. Paradoxically, this awareness of Fate, the sense that part of you is apportioned to some dark power over which you exercise little control, actually licences/ enables action - you can act only against such an irrevocable/ inscrutable background, to which you can entrust a portion of yourself. On the infrastructure of necessity is raised the superstructure of free decision.
*Actually not helpful at all, I think, but do try and see the point!
Monday, April 25, 2005
The Communist inside us.
Just a quick follow up to an earlier post on the fascist/ communist distinction, or rather, the importance of making, maintaining and theorising the distinction rather than just lamenting that both fascism and communism are equally distant from liberal democracy (conceived of as the telos of History).
You remember some of the provisional differences outlined by Zizek, and other examples from Adorno, from John Berger. It seems to me there's another one that might be worth mentioning, which is that some (Deleuze, Foucault for example) talk about the 'fascist inside us', fascism as a mentality. No one, by contrast talks about the 'communist inside us' or the 'communist personality'. The 'Psychopathic god' named by Auden is of a piece with many who have seen in fascism something rooted in or corresponding to psychological structures.
Now admittedly, much of the 'fascist psychology' stuff is dismissable (one thinks of most obviously of early theories linking fascism to repressed homosexuality), but isn't it intuitively meaningful to speak of fascism as a kind of predisposition, an obscene injunction to be resisted perhaps, a lurking atavism cross-pollinated with certain definitively modern developments.
Communism, conversely, appeals to something impossible, unattained, 'the claims of the ideal'. I think George Steiner called it the 'blackmail of transcendence'. (The blackmail is that if you do not answer this call, you will not be able to live with yourself). The following, lifted from Marx, might have consoled or inspired a Communist, but it could never have served, and will never serve as a fascist's credo:
'Assume man to be man and his relation to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.'
You remember some of the provisional differences outlined by Zizek, and other examples from Adorno, from John Berger. It seems to me there's another one that might be worth mentioning, which is that some (Deleuze, Foucault for example) talk about the 'fascist inside us', fascism as a mentality. No one, by contrast talks about the 'communist inside us' or the 'communist personality'. The 'Psychopathic god' named by Auden is of a piece with many who have seen in fascism something rooted in or corresponding to psychological structures.
Now admittedly, much of the 'fascist psychology' stuff is dismissable (one thinks of most obviously of early theories linking fascism to repressed homosexuality), but isn't it intuitively meaningful to speak of fascism as a kind of predisposition, an obscene injunction to be resisted perhaps, a lurking atavism cross-pollinated with certain definitively modern developments.
Communism, conversely, appeals to something impossible, unattained, 'the claims of the ideal'. I think George Steiner called it the 'blackmail of transcendence'. (The blackmail is that if you do not answer this call, you will not be able to live with yourself). The following, lifted from Marx, might have consoled or inspired a Communist, but it could never have served, and will never serve as a fascist's credo:
'Assume man to be man and his relation to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.'
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Foucault & the background of emptiness.
I am posting (part of) a short intro. to Foucault's History of Sexuality I wrote years ago for an ephemeral book - one which hopefully none of you possess. Here it is, edited and badly typed:
‘Our notion of ‘sexuality’, suggests Foucault, is a peculiarly modern category of self-understanding. It would have been incomprehensible to (say) the Greeks.
The Greeks did not have a single sexual moral code which applied equally to everyone. Sexual conduct was tailored to an individual’s way of life and social position. No universal imperative could erase social distinctions. The key measure, however, was moderation. A sexual act was not considered bad per se, but only if performed to excess (like eating to excess), a question of degree rather than essence. Desire was taken for granted – it was not, as it would later become, an issue or problem.
Christianity replaces the moderate/ immoderate schema with that of Good/ Bad. It introduces a universal moral code by which acts themselves (i.e. divorced, now, from the social embeddedness of the actor) were to be judged. Moreover, Christianity made Desire itself the substance of ethics. The goal became purity, conceived of as the eradication of desire; not, as with the Greeks, self-mastery conceived of as the correct management of desires and pleasures.
These developments produced a radical mutation in subjectivity. The self ‘turned inward’; its every impulse and silent craving were to be examined and if needs be expurgated. So it is that ‘conscience’ arises: the universal code transformed into a reflex of the soul. The institution which both reflects and reproduces this Christian form of subjectivity is the Confession.
With the advent of modern society, though, this Christian ‘regime of truth’, its organising categories and habits of thought, began to be overturned. If up until roughly the nineteenth century, sexual acts were perceived according to a scheme of the permissible and the illicit, good and bad, sex henceforth is made intelligible through notions of the Normal and Pathological. And these notions defined not simply acts but individuals. ‘Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts, the nineteenth century homosexual was a personage’.
The whole realm of sexual pleasure was codified, particularised and made the object of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Every gesture or way of speaking became readable as a ‘symptom’. By creating and taxonomising ‘abnormalities’, medical discourse defined by implication the Norm.
Foucault’s celebrated move is then to see our present discourse as continuous with, not radically removed from, this nineteenth century obsessional scrutiny. The continued talk today of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ sexualities, the very recourse to ‘sexuality’ as the vital key to our identity, the now commonplace notion of ‘getting in touch’ with one’s sexuality, can all be seen as mere local shifts within a more basic horizon.
The idea of ‘sexual identity’, historically conditioned and bound up with certain forms of power subtends the line of demarcation which, we like to think, separates us from the repressed Victorians. Take the example of psychoanalysis (in some of its variants). It is often predicated on the idea of an inner sexual nature. Its questions and answers are delimited by the idea that we ‘have’ such a nature, and that this lies at the root of our person. Our sexuality has been ‘repressed’ or disguised and we need only uncover it to be ‘ourselves’.
Notions such as ‘sexual identity’ assume as self-evident what is, in reality, the product of certain discourses and historically specific habits of thought. The real ‘repression’ is the forgetting of such preconditions.
This last point underlines a basic aim of Foucault’s work, and one he has himself stated clearly:
‘To show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity.’
‘Our notion of ‘sexuality’, suggests Foucault, is a peculiarly modern category of self-understanding. It would have been incomprehensible to (say) the Greeks.
The Greeks did not have a single sexual moral code which applied equally to everyone. Sexual conduct was tailored to an individual’s way of life and social position. No universal imperative could erase social distinctions. The key measure, however, was moderation. A sexual act was not considered bad per se, but only if performed to excess (like eating to excess), a question of degree rather than essence. Desire was taken for granted – it was not, as it would later become, an issue or problem.
Christianity replaces the moderate/ immoderate schema with that of Good/ Bad. It introduces a universal moral code by which acts themselves (i.e. divorced, now, from the social embeddedness of the actor) were to be judged. Moreover, Christianity made Desire itself the substance of ethics. The goal became purity, conceived of as the eradication of desire; not, as with the Greeks, self-mastery conceived of as the correct management of desires and pleasures.
These developments produced a radical mutation in subjectivity. The self ‘turned inward’; its every impulse and silent craving were to be examined and if needs be expurgated. So it is that ‘conscience’ arises: the universal code transformed into a reflex of the soul. The institution which both reflects and reproduces this Christian form of subjectivity is the Confession.
With the advent of modern society, though, this Christian ‘regime of truth’, its organising categories and habits of thought, began to be overturned. If up until roughly the nineteenth century, sexual acts were perceived according to a scheme of the permissible and the illicit, good and bad, sex henceforth is made intelligible through notions of the Normal and Pathological. And these notions defined not simply acts but individuals. ‘Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts, the nineteenth century homosexual was a personage’.
The whole realm of sexual pleasure was codified, particularised and made the object of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Every gesture or way of speaking became readable as a ‘symptom’. By creating and taxonomising ‘abnormalities’, medical discourse defined by implication the Norm.
Foucault’s celebrated move is then to see our present discourse as continuous with, not radically removed from, this nineteenth century obsessional scrutiny. The continued talk today of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ sexualities, the very recourse to ‘sexuality’ as the vital key to our identity, the now commonplace notion of ‘getting in touch’ with one’s sexuality, can all be seen as mere local shifts within a more basic horizon.
The idea of ‘sexual identity’, historically conditioned and bound up with certain forms of power subtends the line of demarcation which, we like to think, separates us from the repressed Victorians. Take the example of psychoanalysis (in some of its variants). It is often predicated on the idea of an inner sexual nature. Its questions and answers are delimited by the idea that we ‘have’ such a nature, and that this lies at the root of our person. Our sexuality has been ‘repressed’ or disguised and we need only uncover it to be ‘ourselves’.
Notions such as ‘sexual identity’ assume as self-evident what is, in reality, the product of certain discourses and historically specific habits of thought. The real ‘repression’ is the forgetting of such preconditions.
This last point underlines a basic aim of Foucault’s work, and one he has himself stated clearly:
‘To show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity.’
No Comment
Election coverage: nausea.
Each election campaign a weak parody of the last. The click and whirr of the rhetorical machine. The gaudy baubles taken out each year at Xmas. The riffs and gestures of empty ritual. Changing of the guard.
Language hollowed out into noises (albeit the 'right noises'):
‘how it effects the lives of ordinary people… only making promises we can keep.. sums don’t add up.. I am answering the question, Jeremy… the British people are sick and tired… we want to see a Britain where… I’m not going to give you spin and sound bites’
Why this farce day after day?
Each election campaign a weak parody of the last. The click and whirr of the rhetorical machine. The gaudy baubles taken out each year at Xmas. The riffs and gestures of empty ritual. Changing of the guard.
Language hollowed out into noises (albeit the 'right noises'):
‘how it effects the lives of ordinary people… only making promises we can keep.. sums don’t add up.. I am answering the question, Jeremy… the British people are sick and tired… we want to see a Britain where… I’m not going to give you spin and sound bites’
Why this farce day after day?
The Example of Zizek
Some time ago, in a comments thread, I made the following point about Zizek’s use of examples:
Zizek's points can and sometimes should be understood even if he has misread or misremembered the example which carries the point. There's an instance where Zizek cites a 'strawberry cake' dream from Freud in order to illustrate a point about fantasy. Turns out he slightly misremembered the dream, but the point stands nonetheless.. the example is just instrumental.
I was, however, wondering about this ‘instrumental’ use of examples, in relation to this:
“Hamlet himself, the very embodiment of obsessive procrastination.. becomes capable of acting at the exact moment when, in the last act of the play, he answers the rhetorical question ‘Who Am I?’: ‘What is he whose grief/ Bears such an emphasis../ .. This is I, Hamlet the Dane’. It is the split between ‘I’ and ‘Hamlet the Dane’, between the vanishing point of the subject of the enunciation and his support in symbolic identification, which is primordial: the moment of ‘passage to the act’ is nothing but an illusory moment of decision when the subject’s being seems to coincide without remainder with his symbolic mandate’.”
Zizek refers to this example on a few occasions. The point is the same : Hamlet acts when he assumes his Symbolic Mandate and makes the imaginary move of conflating ‘I’ with his Symbolic title. This point, though intelligible in itself, is completely wide of the mark as regards Hamlet.
A few things:
Hamlet has already entered the field of ‘action’ well before this point, perhaps starting with the chance death of Polonius. This ‘accidental slaughter’ seems to have precipitated H. from the world of potentiality to that of the deed/ act. He is thrown into a scene he had hitherto observed. Despite the fact that his Act (killing Polonius) is ‘meaningless’, an almost motorial reaction to a noise, it almost immediately accumulates meanings and importance which H. cannot pre-empt, predict, control.
By the time we encounter H. in the burial scene he has already dispatched R & G to their deaths. He has done this, you remember, by using the royal seal (on his father's signet ring) to ‘authorise’ a counterfeit letter. The Symbolic here is thus the instrument of a kind of dark joke, the punchline of which is ‘R & G are dead’. It is the efficacy of the Symbolic insignia, unattached to a bearer, manipulated by H., which delivers the two gulls to their execution. H. thus demonstrates (in the most practical sense of that word) how authority and force are effects of the Symbolic. But he does this not by ‘assuming’ symbolic authority, but by cynically employing it.
Immediately preceding the burial scene, moreover, there is H.’s now all too familiar banter with the gravedigger, which of course mocks symbolic Gradations and Names with the hollow laughter of the Death’s head. It is impossible to imagine that H., after eloquently deriding and debunking Symbolic titles could then simply adopt one
Hamlet’s declaration of ‘identity’ is in fact a self-parodic and consciously bombastic intervention. His ‘I, Hamlet the Dane’ has something of the irony of Lear’s ‘Aye, every inch a king’.
Here it is again, along with the subsequent address to Leartes:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
Note the suggestion of rhetorical deliberation – ‘bears such an emphasis’ ‘phrase of sorrow’. And then, to Leartes:
‘Does thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
[…]
I’ll rant as well as thou’
H. cannot see Leartes’ grief as anything but affection, designed to ‘upstage’ H. Hamlet will prove equal to Leartes’ 'performance'.
It is as if any symbolic act can only be gestural, as if the Symbolic itself has been systematically reperceived as bombastic theatre – shapes, symbols, pre-agreed signals. Hamlet’s phoney assumption of his Symbolic title is in mockery of the empty symbolic rituals everywhere around him.
Indeed, one further point overlooked by Z. is that this very title ('Hamlet the Dane') is ordinarily that assumed by the King of Denmark. From this point of view, Hamlet’s ‘assumption’ of it is the illegitimate, mocking arrogation of a title not his.
Hamlet acts, then, when he realises the necessary hyperbole of the Symbolic, and its radical non-coincidence with the 'I'. To enter the Symbolic is to engage, willi-nilli, in theatrical posturing.
If one has to translate all this into Lacanese, it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet acts when he ceases to be troubled by the ‘too much’ of the Symbolic mandate foisted upon him, the traumatic excess of the ghost’s demand. He does this by an (enforced, partly) distantiation from the Symbolic Order as such.
To come to such an interpretation is surely to rethink the relation between Symbolic mandates and Acts, not just to venture another view of Hamlet. In the end, then, it does matter that Zizek’s use of examples is often purely instrumental. Not out of some abstract ‘fidelity to the integrity of the text’. No. It’s because, as in the present example, attending to the text actually produces a more theoretically suggestive result.
Theory is not only the Interrogator but the interrogatee; or, rather, if it is not also interrogated is it not theory at all.
Zizek's points can and sometimes should be understood even if he has misread or misremembered the example which carries the point. There's an instance where Zizek cites a 'strawberry cake' dream from Freud in order to illustrate a point about fantasy. Turns out he slightly misremembered the dream, but the point stands nonetheless.. the example is just instrumental.
I was, however, wondering about this ‘instrumental’ use of examples, in relation to this:
“Hamlet himself, the very embodiment of obsessive procrastination.. becomes capable of acting at the exact moment when, in the last act of the play, he answers the rhetorical question ‘Who Am I?’: ‘What is he whose grief/ Bears such an emphasis../ .. This is I, Hamlet the Dane’. It is the split between ‘I’ and ‘Hamlet the Dane’, between the vanishing point of the subject of the enunciation and his support in symbolic identification, which is primordial: the moment of ‘passage to the act’ is nothing but an illusory moment of decision when the subject’s being seems to coincide without remainder with his symbolic mandate’.”
Zizek refers to this example on a few occasions. The point is the same : Hamlet acts when he assumes his Symbolic Mandate and makes the imaginary move of conflating ‘I’ with his Symbolic title. This point, though intelligible in itself, is completely wide of the mark as regards Hamlet.
A few things:
Hamlet has already entered the field of ‘action’ well before this point, perhaps starting with the chance death of Polonius. This ‘accidental slaughter’ seems to have precipitated H. from the world of potentiality to that of the deed/ act. He is thrown into a scene he had hitherto observed. Despite the fact that his Act (killing Polonius) is ‘meaningless’, an almost motorial reaction to a noise, it almost immediately accumulates meanings and importance which H. cannot pre-empt, predict, control.
By the time we encounter H. in the burial scene he has already dispatched R & G to their deaths. He has done this, you remember, by using the royal seal (on his father's signet ring) to ‘authorise’ a counterfeit letter. The Symbolic here is thus the instrument of a kind of dark joke, the punchline of which is ‘R & G are dead’. It is the efficacy of the Symbolic insignia, unattached to a bearer, manipulated by H., which delivers the two gulls to their execution. H. thus demonstrates (in the most practical sense of that word) how authority and force are effects of the Symbolic. But he does this not by ‘assuming’ symbolic authority, but by cynically employing it.
Immediately preceding the burial scene, moreover, there is H.’s now all too familiar banter with the gravedigger, which of course mocks symbolic Gradations and Names with the hollow laughter of the Death’s head. It is impossible to imagine that H., after eloquently deriding and debunking Symbolic titles could then simply adopt one
Hamlet’s declaration of ‘identity’ is in fact a self-parodic and consciously bombastic intervention. His ‘I, Hamlet the Dane’ has something of the irony of Lear’s ‘Aye, every inch a king’.
Here it is again, along with the subsequent address to Leartes:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
Note the suggestion of rhetorical deliberation – ‘bears such an emphasis’ ‘phrase of sorrow’. And then, to Leartes:
‘Does thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
[…]
I’ll rant as well as thou’
H. cannot see Leartes’ grief as anything but affection, designed to ‘upstage’ H. Hamlet will prove equal to Leartes’ 'performance'.
It is as if any symbolic act can only be gestural, as if the Symbolic itself has been systematically reperceived as bombastic theatre – shapes, symbols, pre-agreed signals. Hamlet’s phoney assumption of his Symbolic title is in mockery of the empty symbolic rituals everywhere around him.
Indeed, one further point overlooked by Z. is that this very title ('Hamlet the Dane') is ordinarily that assumed by the King of Denmark. From this point of view, Hamlet’s ‘assumption’ of it is the illegitimate, mocking arrogation of a title not his.
Hamlet acts, then, when he realises the necessary hyperbole of the Symbolic, and its radical non-coincidence with the 'I'. To enter the Symbolic is to engage, willi-nilli, in theatrical posturing.
If one has to translate all this into Lacanese, it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet acts when he ceases to be troubled by the ‘too much’ of the Symbolic mandate foisted upon him, the traumatic excess of the ghost’s demand. He does this by an (enforced, partly) distantiation from the Symbolic Order as such.
To come to such an interpretation is surely to rethink the relation between Symbolic mandates and Acts, not just to venture another view of Hamlet. In the end, then, it does matter that Zizek’s use of examples is often purely instrumental. Not out of some abstract ‘fidelity to the integrity of the text’. No. It’s because, as in the present example, attending to the text actually produces a more theoretically suggestive result.
Theory is not only the Interrogator but the interrogatee; or, rather, if it is not also interrogated is it not theory at all.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Inhuman One
From Rilke, 'Black Cat':
But all at once,
As if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
And with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
Inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
Suspended, like a prehistoric insect.
(if anyone has the Paul Muldoon translation, I would be grateful if you could post it in the comments)
Whereas an animal is non-human rather than inhuman, the look of an animal might well be described as inhuman. No? Is it because in it ‘the human’ is estranged, rendered unrecognisable? In the animal's eye you sense an outside that can never be recuperated or made familiar.
But all at once,
As if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
And with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
Inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
Suspended, like a prehistoric insect.
(if anyone has the Paul Muldoon translation, I would be grateful if you could post it in the comments)
Whereas an animal is non-human rather than inhuman, the look of an animal might well be described as inhuman. No? Is it because in it ‘the human’ is estranged, rendered unrecognisable? In the animal's eye you sense an outside that can never be recuperated or made familiar.
Inhuman Three
Jameson’s Marxism and Form has numerous passages on Sartre and the ‘Inhuman’, at least it seems so to me. Here, from one of them:
“Thus the desert, as I try to survive it, is revealed as an inhuman landscape.”
Only the project of surviving or crossing the desert discloses its 'inhumanity'. It is ‘an inhuman landscape only in relation to a specific project. But what has also been made known is our 'humanity' - by way of what resists and threatens it.
The project, therefore, is ontologically prior – both the human and inhuman are made known in arrears, in the wake of the project. The project is that First Judgement which discloses to us the contours and content of our World.
Okay, we are defined by certain basic ‘projects’, even if the project is only survival (thus, it is not to be thought of as a formulated project). There is, however, an inflexiblity and perverse bias already present in the environing world, and it's this which defamiliarises and removes our projects from us. Language itself, for example:
‘the inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them […] a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thought and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and by the previous history of the material itself.’
That which confiscates from us our intentions and aims, and re-directs them along its own path – or the very product of such estrangement - can be defnied as the Inhuman.
This last also alerts us to the fact that the inhuman is not always simply non-human. The machines that enter into the mental activity of the factory girl (see below), the brutality of bureaucratic regulation and so on, are all human products, albeit rendered unrecognisable.
Sartre is also attuned to how the human takes on something of the colour of the inhuman. There is a famous, often quoted example from the Critique:
In the early period of semi-automatic machines, interviews have shown that girls involved in this specialised work drifted into specifically sexual daydreams while working, recalled their room, their bed, the night, the most private details about the couple in solitude. But in reality it was the machine that dreamed through them about their erotic experience: for the type of attention required in that particular kind of work allowed neither for complete distraction (thinking of something else entirely) nor complete concentration (thinking interferes with physical operation); the machine thus requires and creates in the human being an inverted semi automatism in order to complete itself: an explosive mixture of unconscious vigilance and; the mind is absorbed without being used, involving a kind of lateral control, while the body functions mechanically under a kind of surveillance.
The demands of the machine are met, internalised, by the worker. The specific bodily and mental disposition of the worker ‘answers’ the requirement of the machine, lives in symbiosis with the machine. The human organism has restructured itself around an inhuman presence and is now irrevocably modified. In trying to ‘subjectify’ the machine, the worker’s substance is subtly altered.
It seems to me that in all the variants of the ‘Inhuman’ I’ve mentioned rest on or relate to ideas of alienation or self-estrangement. The Inhuman seems to designate experiences which produce such estrangement or the material/ institutional embodiments thereof. Not particularly helpful, perhaps. So no more inhuman ruminations from me for the time being.
“Thus the desert, as I try to survive it, is revealed as an inhuman landscape.”
Only the project of surviving or crossing the desert discloses its 'inhumanity'. It is ‘an inhuman landscape only in relation to a specific project. But what has also been made known is our 'humanity' - by way of what resists and threatens it.
The project, therefore, is ontologically prior – both the human and inhuman are made known in arrears, in the wake of the project. The project is that First Judgement which discloses to us the contours and content of our World.
Okay, we are defined by certain basic ‘projects’, even if the project is only survival (thus, it is not to be thought of as a formulated project). There is, however, an inflexiblity and perverse bias already present in the environing world, and it's this which defamiliarises and removes our projects from us. Language itself, for example:
‘the inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them […] a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thought and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and by the previous history of the material itself.’
That which confiscates from us our intentions and aims, and re-directs them along its own path – or the very product of such estrangement - can be defnied as the Inhuman.
This last also alerts us to the fact that the inhuman is not always simply non-human. The machines that enter into the mental activity of the factory girl (see below), the brutality of bureaucratic regulation and so on, are all human products, albeit rendered unrecognisable.
Sartre is also attuned to how the human takes on something of the colour of the inhuman. There is a famous, often quoted example from the Critique:
In the early period of semi-automatic machines, interviews have shown that girls involved in this specialised work drifted into specifically sexual daydreams while working, recalled their room, their bed, the night, the most private details about the couple in solitude. But in reality it was the machine that dreamed through them about their erotic experience: for the type of attention required in that particular kind of work allowed neither for complete distraction (thinking of something else entirely) nor complete concentration (thinking interferes with physical operation); the machine thus requires and creates in the human being an inverted semi automatism in order to complete itself: an explosive mixture of unconscious vigilance and; the mind is absorbed without being used, involving a kind of lateral control, while the body functions mechanically under a kind of surveillance.
The demands of the machine are met, internalised, by the worker. The specific bodily and mental disposition of the worker ‘answers’ the requirement of the machine, lives in symbiosis with the machine. The human organism has restructured itself around an inhuman presence and is now irrevocably modified. In trying to ‘subjectify’ the machine, the worker’s substance is subtly altered.
It seems to me that in all the variants of the ‘Inhuman’ I’ve mentioned rest on or relate to ideas of alienation or self-estrangement. The Inhuman seems to designate experiences which produce such estrangement or the material/ institutional embodiments thereof. Not particularly helpful, perhaps. So no more inhuman ruminations from me for the time being.
Inhuman Two
One of Sartre’s contemporary commentators (IT) remarks:
'Similarly, man exists in the first place and in general for everyone as non-human man, as an alien species.'
This perhaps recalls a famous Sartrean passage:
‘The century would have been good if man had not been tracked down by his relentless, immemorial enemy, by the carnivorous species that had set out to slay him, by that hairless, sly beast,.. Man himself’
And to me, free associating, it calls up this from Kafka:
'What is it that binds you more intimately to these impenetrable, talking, eye-blinking bodies than to any other thing, the penholder in your hand for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don’t belong to the same species, that’s the very reason why you raised the question.”
What is ‘inhuman’ here, Man, or the point from which he is seen? To name Man as a ‘species’ - from where is this nomination made? A species, clinging to a dying planet, hopelessly governed and defined by its species-being, playing out some logic of genesis, flourishing and self-destruction unbeknown to itself.
The ‘inhuman’ is the way we are seen, captured in a foreign look, the object of a desire or project wholly extraneous to us.
As our commentator points out, for the USA the Soviet Union was 'inhuman' partly because it seemed to be pursuing a project in which the USA was an object, and this object was something it felt unable to quite reappropriate or make plain.
But, more generally, as Sartre suggests, we are forced, in pursuing our projects, to regard others as objects, instrumental to the realisation of that project. And so, for them, we are inhuman – we speak and act from a place eccentric to their freedom, praying on them, bringing about a self-estrangement against which they must perpetually fight. We must take on and subjectivise the disfiguring picture that the Other has of us, recast it, claim ownership. I assume this is partly what IT means by:
For Sartre, every action aiming to transform the inhuman into the human must, in the first instance, interiorise a particular inhumanity. Man only humanises himself by assuming against the inhuman order his own subjective part of inhumanity
But I may have missed the point entirely.
'Similarly, man exists in the first place and in general for everyone as non-human man, as an alien species.'
This perhaps recalls a famous Sartrean passage:
‘The century would have been good if man had not been tracked down by his relentless, immemorial enemy, by the carnivorous species that had set out to slay him, by that hairless, sly beast,.. Man himself’
And to me, free associating, it calls up this from Kafka:
'What is it that binds you more intimately to these impenetrable, talking, eye-blinking bodies than to any other thing, the penholder in your hand for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don’t belong to the same species, that’s the very reason why you raised the question.”
What is ‘inhuman’ here, Man, or the point from which he is seen? To name Man as a ‘species’ - from where is this nomination made? A species, clinging to a dying planet, hopelessly governed and defined by its species-being, playing out some logic of genesis, flourishing and self-destruction unbeknown to itself.
The ‘inhuman’ is the way we are seen, captured in a foreign look, the object of a desire or project wholly extraneous to us.
As our commentator points out, for the USA the Soviet Union was 'inhuman' partly because it seemed to be pursuing a project in which the USA was an object, and this object was something it felt unable to quite reappropriate or make plain.
But, more generally, as Sartre suggests, we are forced, in pursuing our projects, to regard others as objects, instrumental to the realisation of that project. And so, for them, we are inhuman – we speak and act from a place eccentric to their freedom, praying on them, bringing about a self-estrangement against which they must perpetually fight. We must take on and subjectivise the disfiguring picture that the Other has of us, recast it, claim ownership. I assume this is partly what IT means by:
For Sartre, every action aiming to transform the inhuman into the human must, in the first instance, interiorise a particular inhumanity. Man only humanises himself by assuming against the inhuman order his own subjective part of inhumanity
But I may have missed the point entirely.
Morning reading. (Well it's morning to me.)
A new Zizek book is in the shops, in London anyway. Its basically a collection of articles, interviews and essays, with an introduction by SZ entitled 'The Inhuman'.
The LRB carries a considered and intelligent piece on the 'War for Oil' argument. Its nub is: "The invasion of Iraq was about Chevron and Texaco, but it was also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI and DynCorp."
Now, I had no idea that Freud collaborated with William C. Bullitt in writing a psychological profile of Woodrow Wilson. After much scepticism from the Psychoanal. community, it seems that he did. Read about it here.
The LRB carries a considered and intelligent piece on the 'War for Oil' argument. Its nub is: "The invasion of Iraq was about Chevron and Texaco, but it was also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI and DynCorp."
Now, I had no idea that Freud collaborated with William C. Bullitt in writing a psychological profile of Woodrow Wilson. After much scepticism from the Psychoanal. community, it seems that he did. Read about it here.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Addendum to last post but one
On the 'non-existence of the Big Other' & Kafka: The remarks of RMUtt rescued from the comments box:
I believe Kafka should be read in a somewhat different way; "The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’" are the way to uphold the illusion that there is a Big Other - and thus the way to maintain the Big Other. This is, I think, especially clear in the fragments that are related to his planned novel about The Great Wall of China.
"The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death--all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire--before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcoming hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate--but never, never can that happen--the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself."
Now, I think that Mutt and I may be somehow talking about two sides of the same coin. The Big Other has the quality of being 'everywhere and nowhere' and the oscillation between these, the perpetual ambivalence, is the secret of its success. Kind of like the gaze of the panoptican - you sense it constantly, but turn round and its vanished, its somewhere else.
The logic is something like this: That which is everywhere is nowhere in particular; conversely, that which can be found nowhere in particular acquires the appearance of omnipresence – that it cannot be local-ised attests to its magnitude rather than its non-existence. Each time the inquirer bemoans ‘that’s not it’, ‘it’s not here’, anxiety mounts, and this cumulative anxiety is misrecognised as the shadow of its object.
This last implies that the illusion is generated precisely by the fact of there being an inquirer (after the Big Other); or rather the Big Other is a spectre (forever 'just round the corner) thrown up by the very process of inquiring into it.
I believe Kafka should be read in a somewhat different way; "The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’" are the way to uphold the illusion that there is a Big Other - and thus the way to maintain the Big Other. This is, I think, especially clear in the fragments that are related to his planned novel about The Great Wall of China.
"The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death--all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire--before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcoming hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate--but never, never can that happen--the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself."
Now, I think that Mutt and I may be somehow talking about two sides of the same coin. The Big Other has the quality of being 'everywhere and nowhere' and the oscillation between these, the perpetual ambivalence, is the secret of its success. Kind of like the gaze of the panoptican - you sense it constantly, but turn round and its vanished, its somewhere else.
The logic is something like this: That which is everywhere is nowhere in particular; conversely, that which can be found nowhere in particular acquires the appearance of omnipresence – that it cannot be local-ised attests to its magnitude rather than its non-existence. Each time the inquirer bemoans ‘that’s not it’, ‘it’s not here’, anxiety mounts, and this cumulative anxiety is misrecognised as the shadow of its object.
This last implies that the illusion is generated precisely by the fact of there being an inquirer (after the Big Other); or rather the Big Other is a spectre (forever 'just round the corner) thrown up by the very process of inquiring into it.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Charlottenstrasse revisited
Eric Santner on Kafka and the Big Other.
“Gregor’s fall into abjection [can] be understood as a by-product of his encounter with the ultimate uncertainty as to his place in the community of which his father is the nominal master. Gregor’s mutation into an Ungeziefer , a creature without a place in God’s order… points to a disturbance within the divine order itself.
Gregor discovers one of the central paradoxes of modern experience: uncertainty as to what, to use Lacan’s term, the “Big Other” of the symbolic order really wants from us can be far more disturbing than subordination to an agency or structure whose demands are experienced as stable and consistent. The failure to live up to such demands still guarantees a sense of place, meaning, and recognition; but the subject who is uncertain as to the very existence of an Other whose demands might or might not be placated loses the ground from under his feet. The mythic order of fate where one’s lot is determined behind one’s back .. is displaced by a postmythic order in which the individual can no longer find his place in the texture of fate.”
A thought: In my ‘Ontological Bureacracy’ post I assumed that the affinity between bureaucracy and human nature which Kafka suggests resided in the fact that bureaucracy made into a kind of huge exoskeleton - embodied in buildings, paperwork, dictates, Organisations - the Symbolic Order that regulates and defines subjects.
What the passage above suggests, on the contrary, is that what bureaucracy lays bare, at least in Kafka’s understanding, is that this Symbolic Order is ultimately without transcendental guarantee. The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’ but never what they represent.. all this carries with it the ominous rider that there is no Big Other.
What happens therefore is that when the Big Other achieves its most complete historical embodiment (modern bureaucracy) instead of this being its apotheosis, its Truth, it is instead the moment it is revelaed as as lie, or a as a gaping absence.
“Gregor’s fall into abjection [can] be understood as a by-product of his encounter with the ultimate uncertainty as to his place in the community of which his father is the nominal master. Gregor’s mutation into an Ungeziefer , a creature without a place in God’s order… points to a disturbance within the divine order itself.
Gregor discovers one of the central paradoxes of modern experience: uncertainty as to what, to use Lacan’s term, the “Big Other” of the symbolic order really wants from us can be far more disturbing than subordination to an agency or structure whose demands are experienced as stable and consistent. The failure to live up to such demands still guarantees a sense of place, meaning, and recognition; but the subject who is uncertain as to the very existence of an Other whose demands might or might not be placated loses the ground from under his feet. The mythic order of fate where one’s lot is determined behind one’s back .. is displaced by a postmythic order in which the individual can no longer find his place in the texture of fate.”
A thought: In my ‘Ontological Bureacracy’ post I assumed that the affinity between bureaucracy and human nature which Kafka suggests resided in the fact that bureaucracy made into a kind of huge exoskeleton - embodied in buildings, paperwork, dictates, Organisations - the Symbolic Order that regulates and defines subjects.
What the passage above suggests, on the contrary, is that what bureaucracy lays bare, at least in Kafka’s understanding, is that this Symbolic Order is ultimately without transcendental guarantee. The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’ but never what they represent.. all this carries with it the ominous rider that there is no Big Other.
What happens therefore is that when the Big Other achieves its most complete historical embodiment (modern bureaucracy) instead of this being its apotheosis, its Truth, it is instead the moment it is revelaed as as lie, or a as a gaping absence.
Bog roll
Via a blog that links to mine I came across a Linguistic Profiling test. Its of no interest to me, except I would be grateful isf someone could please explain question 4:
4. The act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper is called...
1. Toilet papering
2. Rolling
3.TP'ing
4. The act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper is called...
1. Toilet papering
2. Rolling
3.TP'ing
Post-
In much of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, ‘the modern was not yet total, and as such could be measured and its meaning assessed, against that which it was not. Across Europe, the sharply felt experience of the modern could still be silhouetted against a sense of tradition.”
The ‘modern’, a term itself now fallen into disuse, thus names a contrast. The Express train hurtling through a peasant countryside. The ‘post-modern’, which can sound nonsensical (where the modern is taken to mean the most up-to-date, or just ‘how we do things Now), is a term which is reached for when this contrast is no longer available, when the break can no longer be registered.
What makes John Berger a modern writer is that he has placed himself, quite literally, in a position where this contrast can still be registered, seen, rounded on with critical intelligence.
“Being but a negative of the old, the new if subservient to the old”. So Adooorknob. The New has no consistency in itself. It is merely the negation of something else, and therefore an empty formal category. But when the Old has itself disappeared, or almost, the New is necessarily stillborn. On the one hand, the effect of ‘pastness’ is endlessly simulated, invoked, but ‘pastness’ as an effect, unmoored from history. On the other, the endless repetition of proclaimed newness. These are twin aspects of what Benjamin called endless sameness.
The ‘New’ is often merely the latest instalment of Progress, a progress whose terms are laid out in advance. The genuinely New would make a tiger’s leap (Benjamin again) outside progress.
The Moderns were frequently critical of Progress, not because they favoured old verities and consuetudes, but because Progress attempted to pass itself off as Nature, or as History itself. It assumed too much, and had time only for what was placeable within its continuum.
Blowing open that continuum was the dream and stated aim of Walter Benjamin. The historical materialist scans the world for signs not of the merely new but the Unprecedented.
And perhaps the project of philosophers like Badiou is to renew this quest for the genuinely New, the New that is more than just novelty.
The ‘modern’, a term itself now fallen into disuse, thus names a contrast. The Express train hurtling through a peasant countryside. The ‘post-modern’, which can sound nonsensical (where the modern is taken to mean the most up-to-date, or just ‘how we do things Now), is a term which is reached for when this contrast is no longer available, when the break can no longer be registered.
What makes John Berger a modern writer is that he has placed himself, quite literally, in a position where this contrast can still be registered, seen, rounded on with critical intelligence.
“Being but a negative of the old, the new if subservient to the old”. So Adooorknob. The New has no consistency in itself. It is merely the negation of something else, and therefore an empty formal category. But when the Old has itself disappeared, or almost, the New is necessarily stillborn. On the one hand, the effect of ‘pastness’ is endlessly simulated, invoked, but ‘pastness’ as an effect, unmoored from history. On the other, the endless repetition of proclaimed newness. These are twin aspects of what Benjamin called endless sameness.
The ‘New’ is often merely the latest instalment of Progress, a progress whose terms are laid out in advance. The genuinely New would make a tiger’s leap (Benjamin again) outside progress.
The Moderns were frequently critical of Progress, not because they favoured old verities and consuetudes, but because Progress attempted to pass itself off as Nature, or as History itself. It assumed too much, and had time only for what was placeable within its continuum.
Blowing open that continuum was the dream and stated aim of Walter Benjamin. The historical materialist scans the world for signs not of the merely new but the Unprecedented.
And perhaps the project of philosophers like Badiou is to renew this quest for the genuinely New, the New that is more than just novelty.
Leakage
After encountering an old Irish speaker on a mountain road, George Moore wrote to this friend A.E.:
"Can the dreams, the aspirations and traditions of the ancient Gael be translated into English? I asked if the belief of the ancient Gael were not a part of his civilisation and had lost any meaning for us."
'In the 17th Century' writes Walter Benjamin, "the word Trauespiel was applied in the same way both to dramas and historical events'. And if there is an allegorical gaze, which estranges objects in its sad embrace, this also has an objective correlative, and describes historical states of affairs. When, in time of historical catastrophe or epochal change, the thread of intelligibility seems lost from events; when once thriving ways of life have calcified into hollow conventions, or when traditions enter the stages or their terminal decline; when particular histories, their time of potential lost, congeal into the closed shape of a Destiny and are surrendered to the condescension and abuse of posterity's gaze: it is in such conditions that the 'allegorical' (in Benjamin's sense), no longer our way of perceiving the world, is the very ruined appearance that the world returns to us, asking only, it seems, our own empty mimesis, its own gloomy picture of a world in devastation or else grown tired.
"Can the dreams, the aspirations and traditions of the ancient Gael be translated into English? I asked if the belief of the ancient Gael were not a part of his civilisation and had lost any meaning for us."
'In the 17th Century' writes Walter Benjamin, "the word Trauespiel was applied in the same way both to dramas and historical events'. And if there is an allegorical gaze, which estranges objects in its sad embrace, this also has an objective correlative, and describes historical states of affairs. When, in time of historical catastrophe or epochal change, the thread of intelligibility seems lost from events; when once thriving ways of life have calcified into hollow conventions, or when traditions enter the stages or their terminal decline; when particular histories, their time of potential lost, congeal into the closed shape of a Destiny and are surrendered to the condescension and abuse of posterity's gaze: it is in such conditions that the 'allegorical' (in Benjamin's sense), no longer our way of perceiving the world, is the very ruined appearance that the world returns to us, asking only, it seems, our own empty mimesis, its own gloomy picture of a world in devastation or else grown tired.
Monday, April 18, 2005
citation a l'ordre du jour
In Walter Benjamin’s brilliantly eccentric definition of the Allegorical, he returns constantly by way of example, to the recoding of the old pagan gods by Christianity. The Pagan world leaves in its wake idols, ritualistic objects, symbols of worship, which Chistianity, far from discarding, seizes and re-uses, presiding over these dead gods - in all their recalcitrant otherness and antique dignity - with a sovereign interpretative and destructive power.
Thus, allegorical materials are signs and symbols that have fallen outside their place within a definite Symbolic support system (here, the old pagan world). No longer plugged into their living context, these ruined signs can now be overwritten by a different Symbolic Order (Christianity).
But if Christian allegory is an attempt to recode and ‘contain’ the old gods, their dangerous potency is never entirely extinguished. The exorcism of translation is never complete. Something has escaped, leaked away into silence. And what leaks away (i.e., in recoding the old gods) returns as occult mists, an obscure presentiment or spiritual exorbitance. This x which has escaped the re-coding operation nags at the mind of the allegorist, filling him with a creeping awareness of occult forces & the knocking of the dead.
Thus, a purely aesthetic veneration for the old & defeated culture coexists with an intimation of its still unquiet daemonic power.
This in part explains the affinity, the sympathy, between allegory and melancholy.
Let me remind you of the now familiar distinction between mourning and melancholia. Mourning would translate the lost object into symbols. If the absent thing can be dragged into representation its binding force will be exorcised. The melancholic, instead, recognises that there is that which resists translation into the symbolic. There is that which cannot pass into language, and the melancholic is locked in fidelity to this unspoken thing.
For the Benjamin allegorist too, there is often this intimation of a lost root, of that which has escaped the recoding operation, fallen outside the net of symbolisation. Wanting to rescue for Meaning the old gods, the allegorist finally, says Benjamin, comes away empty handed. When confronted by the ruined signs of an older form of life, the allegorist (to re-employ a distinction I have drawn on before) recognises that they signify without knowing what. Lacan has a relevant phrase here: Hieroglyphs in the desert. A jug from the seventeenth century, some medieval chasuble, even the embossing on a volume of Yeats’s early poems all have this quality to varying degrees. They seem pregnant with a blocked significance. We can see that they have significance – it’s like a nimbus surrounding them – but the absent and inaccessible content haunts us. And this nimbus without content is the sure index of a form of life which we are now unable to restore or enter into.
Thus, the allegorist recognises a ‘jagged line of demarcation between sign and meaning’, and inhabits a world pregnant with the glow of a Meaning which has itself slipped out of reach. This incidentally also characterises Kafka’s world, where the constant rumour of significance, the perception that things signified, was in bewildering excess of any actual interpretive returns.
But the allegorical condition, as Benjamin describes it, is in fact, ultimately the condition of historical interpretation as such: the awareness of lost forms of life, the limitations of our own temporal horizon, the nostalgia for a meaning which doesn't require endless and deferred unpicking. The time lag between sign and meaning is the definitive property of the allegorical. And allegory, in so far as it recognises this time lag, is thought to bear witness to humanity’s alienation.. But this, Benjamin implies, is the very Truth of our life in time, and will only become untrue when time stops:
To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.
Thus, allegorical materials are signs and symbols that have fallen outside their place within a definite Symbolic support system (here, the old pagan world). No longer plugged into their living context, these ruined signs can now be overwritten by a different Symbolic Order (Christianity).
But if Christian allegory is an attempt to recode and ‘contain’ the old gods, their dangerous potency is never entirely extinguished. The exorcism of translation is never complete. Something has escaped, leaked away into silence. And what leaks away (i.e., in recoding the old gods) returns as occult mists, an obscure presentiment or spiritual exorbitance. This x which has escaped the re-coding operation nags at the mind of the allegorist, filling him with a creeping awareness of occult forces & the knocking of the dead.
Thus, a purely aesthetic veneration for the old & defeated culture coexists with an intimation of its still unquiet daemonic power.
This in part explains the affinity, the sympathy, between allegory and melancholy.
Let me remind you of the now familiar distinction between mourning and melancholia. Mourning would translate the lost object into symbols. If the absent thing can be dragged into representation its binding force will be exorcised. The melancholic, instead, recognises that there is that which resists translation into the symbolic. There is that which cannot pass into language, and the melancholic is locked in fidelity to this unspoken thing.
For the Benjamin allegorist too, there is often this intimation of a lost root, of that which has escaped the recoding operation, fallen outside the net of symbolisation. Wanting to rescue for Meaning the old gods, the allegorist finally, says Benjamin, comes away empty handed. When confronted by the ruined signs of an older form of life, the allegorist (to re-employ a distinction I have drawn on before) recognises that they signify without knowing what. Lacan has a relevant phrase here: Hieroglyphs in the desert. A jug from the seventeenth century, some medieval chasuble, even the embossing on a volume of Yeats’s early poems all have this quality to varying degrees. They seem pregnant with a blocked significance. We can see that they have significance – it’s like a nimbus surrounding them – but the absent and inaccessible content haunts us. And this nimbus without content is the sure index of a form of life which we are now unable to restore or enter into.
Thus, the allegorist recognises a ‘jagged line of demarcation between sign and meaning’, and inhabits a world pregnant with the glow of a Meaning which has itself slipped out of reach. This incidentally also characterises Kafka’s world, where the constant rumour of significance, the perception that things signified, was in bewildering excess of any actual interpretive returns.
But the allegorical condition, as Benjamin describes it, is in fact, ultimately the condition of historical interpretation as such: the awareness of lost forms of life, the limitations of our own temporal horizon, the nostalgia for a meaning which doesn't require endless and deferred unpicking. The time lag between sign and meaning is the definitive property of the allegorical. And allegory, in so far as it recognises this time lag, is thought to bear witness to humanity’s alienation.. But this, Benjamin implies, is the very Truth of our life in time, and will only become untrue when time stops:
To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
erinbound
"Here is a country, part and parcel of England, a few hours removed from the richest and most civilised country in the world, in a state so savage, barbarous and destitute that we must go to the most inhospitable regions of the globe to look for a parallel."
So wrote the English Diarist & Traveller Charles Greville about a place to which I'll be heading tommorow. I will perhaps have intermittent internet access, and be able to check email, but no posts (i think). Until Sunday.
So wrote the English Diarist & Traveller Charles Greville about a place to which I'll be heading tommorow. I will perhaps have intermittent internet access, and be able to check email, but no posts (i think). Until Sunday.
Red Boroughs
Perhaps the army of excited commentators following the election campaign, transmitting, discussing, speculating, busy with the myopic sifting of Lilliputian disputes, unravelling pre-ravelled spin, might, if they have any spare time, try their hand at a little topographical exercise. Simply, they have to map two variables. On the one hand, they map those areas where there is democratic accountability and participation; then, they chart exactly where significant political and economic power is concentrated; the regions of non-coincidence between these two are then coloured in red and made available to the people.
Grateful Dead
Do the returning Dead relate to the world in a way resembling this from Adorno:
‘To a child returning from holiday, home seems new, fresh, festive. Yet nothing has changed there since he left. Only because duty has now been forgotten, of which each piece of furniture, window, lamp, was otherwise a reminder, is the house given back its Sabbath peace, and for minutes one is at home in a never returning world of rooms, nooks and corridors in a way that makes the rest of life there a lie. No differently will the world one day appear, almost unchanged, in its constant feast-day light, when it stands no longer under the law of labour, and when for homecomers duty has the lightness of holiday play.”
Or this from Berger writing about the films of Tarkovsky:
“The surprise is that of rediscovering the world after an absence elsewhere. .[..] With [Tarkovsky] we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who have left it.”
‘To a child returning from holiday, home seems new, fresh, festive. Yet nothing has changed there since he left. Only because duty has now been forgotten, of which each piece of furniture, window, lamp, was otherwise a reminder, is the house given back its Sabbath peace, and for minutes one is at home in a never returning world of rooms, nooks and corridors in a way that makes the rest of life there a lie. No differently will the world one day appear, almost unchanged, in its constant feast-day light, when it stands no longer under the law of labour, and when for homecomers duty has the lightness of holiday play.”
Or this from Berger writing about the films of Tarkovsky:
“The surprise is that of rediscovering the world after an absence elsewhere. .[..] With [Tarkovsky] we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who have left it.”
Political Coverage
“We owe our life to the difference between the economic framework of late capitalism, and its political façade. To theoretical criticism the discrepancy is slight: everywhere the sham character of supposed public opinion, the primacy of the economy in real decisions, can be demonstrated. For countless individuals, however, the thin, ephemeral veil is the basis of their entire existence.”
Tundish
In an earlier post I commented on Kafka's canny suggestion that there was a kind of pre-concordance between bureaucracy and 'human nature'. The impersonal Organisations around us are our spider's web, spun from and revealing the effective constitution of 'the human,' where individuals are the dispensable bearers of larger symbolic mandates, occupy a pre-est. structural place etc. (Although Kafka perhaps also posits an animal community to which we simultaneously are fastened.)
But does not, a reader asks, positing an 'ontological bureaucracy' lend to actual bureaucracy a 'guarantee' in human nature and so foreclose any critique of the thing itself? If, as Kafka suggests, bureaucracy makes plain and sensible the very structure of the Human then there is a sense in which it is grimly unassailable. My text indeed provokes this question.
This raises familiar problems: sifting the ontological wheat from the historical chaff, prematurely ‘ontolologising’ specific historical phenomenon, and conversely, the need to historicise what wears the presumptive look of ontological fixity. Innit.
Instead of answering this question, let me offer another example of this 'ontologisation' from a different sphere. In Portrait of the Artist there is a well known passage in which Stephen tangles with the Dean of Studies over the word 'tundish':
'The language he is speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, Ale, Master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. '
For the colonial subject what should be most familiar, language, has been rendered foreign; the subject is fretfully 'outside' language, unable fully to inhabit it. Language is already owned by the (more powerful) Other, and despite being Stephen's mother tongue, it is not 'his own'. Stephen doesn’t quite feel himself present or reflected in the ‘I’ or ‘my’ which he utters. The pronouns are somehow outside the self, objects in the field of vision rather as opposed to the eye that sees. His linguistic 'home' is at one remove.
Now one response to this passage might be to say: the colonial condition in fact makes visible a truth about language as such. It really is the case that language is a foreign substance whose alien presence in our soul is both necessary and troubling. As a subject we do not occupy language, but squirm within it. Between the enunciating subject and the subject of enunciation there is an inevitable short circuit. Yous know the spiel. Thus, from the particular vantage point of a colonial condition, Joyce is granted privileged insight into a more universal truth, and is able to register experientially what would later be grasped conceptually: the dissolution of the Imaginary unity of word and being.
Perhaps. But this knowledge of language’s treacherous Otherness does not just reveal a Truth which it then leaves untouched. The relations to language, the possibilities of ‘expression,’ or experience itself, are themselves transformed by this ‘discovery’. As language 'enters into its concept' the concept too is enlarged and altered.
But does not, a reader asks, positing an 'ontological bureaucracy' lend to actual bureaucracy a 'guarantee' in human nature and so foreclose any critique of the thing itself? If, as Kafka suggests, bureaucracy makes plain and sensible the very structure of the Human then there is a sense in which it is grimly unassailable. My text indeed provokes this question.
This raises familiar problems: sifting the ontological wheat from the historical chaff, prematurely ‘ontolologising’ specific historical phenomenon, and conversely, the need to historicise what wears the presumptive look of ontological fixity. Innit.
Instead of answering this question, let me offer another example of this 'ontologisation' from a different sphere. In Portrait of the Artist there is a well known passage in which Stephen tangles with the Dean of Studies over the word 'tundish':
'The language he is speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, Ale, Master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. '
For the colonial subject what should be most familiar, language, has been rendered foreign; the subject is fretfully 'outside' language, unable fully to inhabit it. Language is already owned by the (more powerful) Other, and despite being Stephen's mother tongue, it is not 'his own'. Stephen doesn’t quite feel himself present or reflected in the ‘I’ or ‘my’ which he utters. The pronouns are somehow outside the self, objects in the field of vision rather as opposed to the eye that sees. His linguistic 'home' is at one remove.
Now one response to this passage might be to say: the colonial condition in fact makes visible a truth about language as such. It really is the case that language is a foreign substance whose alien presence in our soul is both necessary and troubling. As a subject we do not occupy language, but squirm within it. Between the enunciating subject and the subject of enunciation there is an inevitable short circuit. Yous know the spiel. Thus, from the particular vantage point of a colonial condition, Joyce is granted privileged insight into a more universal truth, and is able to register experientially what would later be grasped conceptually: the dissolution of the Imaginary unity of word and being.
Perhaps. But this knowledge of language’s treacherous Otherness does not just reveal a Truth which it then leaves untouched. The relations to language, the possibilities of ‘expression,’ or experience itself, are themselves transformed by this ‘discovery’. As language 'enters into its concept' the concept too is enlarged and altered.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Quotation
'Philosophers are often like children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and then ask an adult "what is that?"
Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein
Monday, April 11, 2005
The Stubborn Machinery of Belief
Just an addendum to the previous post about irony as the position of the ‘good [not bad] subject’. The attitude that a subject assumes with respect to what s/he does can be anything from amused mockery, outright rejection, cynical indifference – the whole spectrum. This subject will insist there is a gap between h(is/er) performance and his beliefs, and his/her Irony is his negotiation of this gap. Blah blah
This needs to be complemented by the insistence on a ‘vulgar materialism’ of belief. That is to say (and I may have written about this before so forgive any repetition here) Belief as stated is one thing; but more stubborn is that belief incarnate in practice - I.e., ‘materialized’ in what we do. Teaching for example, will involve certain implicit ‘beliefs’ about power, pedagogy and so on, which inhere in things as seemingly trivial as the layout of chairs etc. Belief circulates in objects and actions as much as in (or before) the mind of the individual teacher.
If belief resides in, has its ‘proof,’ in the behaviour, the practice, then what we think of as ‘beliefs’ – i.e., articulated propositions – are often defences against, or ways of evading the actual belief. (At the very least, these ‘theoretical’ beliefs need always to be seen in relation to those concrete and embodied beliefs).
We are speaking here of a ‘machinery of belief’ wherein the belief ‘continues’ and ‘flows’ through the ‘machine ‘of behaviour, irrespective of the ideas entertained by the conscious subject/ ego. Thus is the Tibetan prayer wheel the true emblem of belief as such.
In this sense, also of course, ‘belief’ can (paradoxically) precede ‘knowledge’ – we can ‘believe’ something (inscribed in our behaviour) before it reaches the plane of conscious/ explicit recognition. our belief was there all along in the rituals. And religious or political ‘conversion’ is just belated recognition of the fact that I already believed.
This last example also reminds us of, I suppose, the flip-side of the above, the more Gramscian reading. This is to say, a ‘significant social group’ may embody in its behaviour commitments to ideals of solidarity, collectivity, or whatever, that are absent from their explicit pronouncements and which received ideas would deny.
[Thunder responds here.]
This needs to be complemented by the insistence on a ‘vulgar materialism’ of belief. That is to say (and I may have written about this before so forgive any repetition here) Belief as stated is one thing; but more stubborn is that belief incarnate in practice - I.e., ‘materialized’ in what we do. Teaching for example, will involve certain implicit ‘beliefs’ about power, pedagogy and so on, which inhere in things as seemingly trivial as the layout of chairs etc. Belief circulates in objects and actions as much as in (or before) the mind of the individual teacher.
If belief resides in, has its ‘proof,’ in the behaviour, the practice, then what we think of as ‘beliefs’ – i.e., articulated propositions – are often defences against, or ways of evading the actual belief. (At the very least, these ‘theoretical’ beliefs need always to be seen in relation to those concrete and embodied beliefs).
We are speaking here of a ‘machinery of belief’ wherein the belief ‘continues’ and ‘flows’ through the ‘machine ‘of behaviour, irrespective of the ideas entertained by the conscious subject/ ego. Thus is the Tibetan prayer wheel the true emblem of belief as such.
In this sense, also of course, ‘belief’ can (paradoxically) precede ‘knowledge’ – we can ‘believe’ something (inscribed in our behaviour) before it reaches the plane of conscious/ explicit recognition. our belief was there all along in the rituals. And religious or political ‘conversion’ is just belated recognition of the fact that I already believed.
This last example also reminds us of, I suppose, the flip-side of the above, the more Gramscian reading. This is to say, a ‘significant social group’ may embody in its behaviour commitments to ideals of solidarity, collectivity, or whatever, that are absent from their explicit pronouncements and which received ideas would deny.
[Thunder responds here.]
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Dead Already
Conversation with G. over a game of Chess, in the unlikely location of a Pub in Soho that houses a sizeable plastic bust of Tony Hancock. G., suriously [sic] enough, looks like (Hancock + beard). Anyway, after hearing John Berger’s recent radio talk, G. expresses consternation, or at least perplexity, at Berger’s preoccupation with the Dead. G. asks baldly whether this is a ‘supernatural’ thing.
I think, in response, that when writers speak of the Dead they are often speaking about a point of view. It can be a point of view from which one speaks or sees, or one to which one speaks. As an impossible point it is, I suppose a fantasy, but a fantasy necessary to thought. EG:
‘Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’ Kafka
“The philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness.” Deleuze
“ For philosophers are beings who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one.” Deleuze
“I know perfectly well that I will have the truest tone of voice when I will speak, when I will write for the dead” (Genet)
“To free the subject from his anecdotal self and to place him in the light of eternity. Recognised by today, by tomorrow, but also by the dead.” (Genet)
“His works are filled with meditations on death. The peculiarity of these spiritual exercises is that they almost never concern the future death, but rather being-dead, his death as a past event.’ (Sartre on Genet)
So, it is a point from which to measure things - without envy, covetousness, need, self-interest. Berger speaks, for example, of Glenn Gould's piano playing as being like one of the 'already dead, come back to earth to play its music'. The Dead, outside the world, feel it all the more gratefully and sharply. Yet in another sense they are indifferent to it, i.e., they are indifferent to its transitory rewards, pragmatic imperatives, immediate cash-back offers. It is a keen gratitude. But this has nothing to do with acquisitiveness; nothing is being grabbed or hoarded. Released from the pragmatic imperatives wherein they are ordinarily enmeshed, disrobed of their familiar Symbolic freight, objects and people are received and perceived anew.
Another take. Sometimes, this point of view is equated with, or momentarily coincides with the Eye of the Camera. For this mechanical eye, like Death, is at the frontier of the human.
‘In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. ‘
-- Roland Barthes
Interview with Cartier Bresson:
“As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.’
Is the Camera a kind of a-temporal eye? Does it have an affinity with that Eye dreamed of by the Jacobeans:
“When they are up and dressed and with their mask on,
Who can perceive this save that eternal eye
That sees though flesh and all.”
It may seem that the camera is captivated by ‘flesh and all’; but, especially with photos that have lost the sheen of the developing room, it is difficult not to share Barthes’ intuition, that these captive faces have been seen and named by the catastrophe; the little flash bulb was an emissary from the death of the Sun.
That last contrived phrase was introduced only as a tenuous link to this article at K-Punk on the most recent episode of Dr Who, wherein the Doctor and his companion, travel through time to witness the end of the Earth. K-Punk comments on what happens at this terminal point:
"… the scene in which she talked to her mum across time with a mobile phone hastily 'jiggery-pokered' by the Doctor by turns funny, sad and genuinely philosophical. Rose in effect flips from immersion in 'lived duration' to the perspective of Eternity, which is to say, she attains a detachment from any particular pathological 'horizon'. She sees that not only her own organism, but her species and planet are ephemeral."
K-Punk continues:
'The death of the sun is a catastrophe because it overturns the terrestrial horizon relative to which philosophical thought orients itself. Or as Lyotard himself puts it: “[E]verything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which [philosophy] now draws energy to defer answers, if in short thought as quest, dies out with the sun.” Everything is dead already.'
Facsimile
There was a program on TV the other night about male escorts. One of the escorts interviewed was asked what he thought his clients got out of the whole transaction. He replied with a rather brilliant image. He said that what his clients wanted was a 'facsimile of intimacy', a facsimile so thin and ephemeral that it could be torn up and forgotten right away.
The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification. (Lukacs)
Apostate Windbag, who has been positing some interesting stuff, asks of the journalist Johann Hari:
'How does someone like him get an £80,000 a year gig at a national newspaper while NUJ members are toiling away in the provinces for Newsquest on literally a tenth of that salary?'
Perhaps the newspaper wants someone who can produce a facsimile of thinking, but a facsimile so thin and ephemeral that it can be torn up and thrown away immediately afterwards.
The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification. (Lukacs)
Apostate Windbag, who has been positing some interesting stuff, asks of the journalist Johann Hari:
'How does someone like him get an £80,000 a year gig at a national newspaper while NUJ members are toiling away in the provinces for Newsquest on literally a tenth of that salary?'
Perhaps the newspaper wants someone who can produce a facsimile of thinking, but a facsimile so thin and ephemeral that it can be torn up and thrown away immediately afterwards.
You Cannot Be Serious! redux
Following the earlier post on overidentification, a reader has drawn my attention to this passage from Lacan's The Psychoses:
"Don't we analysts know that the normal subject is essentially someone who is placed in the position of not taking the greater part of his internal discourse seriously? Observe the number of things in normal subjects, including yourselves, that it's truly your fundamental occupation not to take seriously. The principal difference between you and the insane is perhaps nothing other than this. And this is why for many, even without their acknowledging it, the insane embody what we would be lead to if we began to take things seriously. So let us, without too great a fear, take our subject [Schreber] seriously."
ta D.S.
"Don't we analysts know that the normal subject is essentially someone who is placed in the position of not taking the greater part of his internal discourse seriously? Observe the number of things in normal subjects, including yourselves, that it's truly your fundamental occupation not to take seriously. The principal difference between you and the insane is perhaps nothing other than this. And this is why for many, even without their acknowledging it, the insane embody what we would be lead to if we began to take things seriously. So let us, without too great a fear, take our subject [Schreber] seriously."
ta D.S.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
The ghostly watermark left by the objective conditions of the age
On the interpretation of the art of the past:
“A structure is reconstructed which we translate into contemporary terms, leaving behind a period narrative which we can no longer stomach and must be repressed or ignored, if the older text is to be revived without too much guilt or intellectual recrimination. Thus the reconstructed part of a Beethoven sonata is tacitly separated from the cloying period melody that comes to stand for Viennese enlightenment frivolity, class guilt, luxury, the self-indulgence of culture at its most gratuitous and intolerable.”
No, the cloying period melody and all the other drek has to be translated too.
“A structure is reconstructed which we translate into contemporary terms, leaving behind a period narrative which we can no longer stomach and must be repressed or ignored, if the older text is to be revived without too much guilt or intellectual recrimination. Thus the reconstructed part of a Beethoven sonata is tacitly separated from the cloying period melody that comes to stand for Viennese enlightenment frivolity, class guilt, luxury, the self-indulgence of culture at its most gratuitous and intolerable.”
No, the cloying period melody and all the other drek has to be translated too.
Maskings
When we study the art of the past, it should be with an awareness as to how it questions us, how it removes us from our received assumptions; and this as opposed to appointing it to a premature ‘Universality’. Exemplary here are Hegel’s meditations on aesthetics.
Take his comments on the Greek theatrical mask. The mask functions to suppress character and make the actor the pure instrument of speech. In Greece the actor is no more than a ‘vitalised statue.’ ‘Character’ is not what we want to hear in the speech, we want, rather, to hear language. As Hegel puts it “words had full poetic rights”. Thus: the suppression of the actor as a means of sur-charging the voice> voice as disembodied power, de-subjectified and therefore not ‘borrowing’ its authority from that of the 'individual' in which it resides and from which it emanates.
As well as making us hear language, the mask also helps to isolate specific affects. The mask liberates affects and dispositions from the entanglement of a ‘who’. In other words, when we see an attitude, a pathetic feature embodied in an individual empirical person it is contaminated by the ‘flavour’ of that person, our sense of their personality and status – them as a totality colouring all individual manifestations. When you have a mask, by contrast, the attitude achieves an effectiveness of its own.. The ‘pathos’ of the mask (a fixed attitude of woe, horror etc) is not yet ‘particularized’, i.e., not woven into the fabric of an individual character/ psychology. It is free-floating, with its own efficacy unattached to a subject . The mask is thus in part a way of isolating and extraneating certain ‘characteristics’ – sundering these from ‘character’ and the contingencies thereof.
To read Hegel on the Greek mask, then, is not simply to recognise a common ‘universality’; nor is it to take antiquarian delight in quaint and obsolete practices. It is to revivify our thinking about the present, our psychological and aesthetic categories, notions of ‘expression’, ‘Subject’ and so on. It is to be made aware, also, of certain New potentialities, perhaps: not simply the empty re-staging of Greek forms, but potentialities of thought which these older practices urge and imply.
Take his comments on the Greek theatrical mask. The mask functions to suppress character and make the actor the pure instrument of speech. In Greece the actor is no more than a ‘vitalised statue.’ ‘Character’ is not what we want to hear in the speech, we want, rather, to hear language. As Hegel puts it “words had full poetic rights”. Thus: the suppression of the actor as a means of sur-charging the voice> voice as disembodied power, de-subjectified and therefore not ‘borrowing’ its authority from that of the 'individual' in which it resides and from which it emanates.
As well as making us hear language, the mask also helps to isolate specific affects. The mask liberates affects and dispositions from the entanglement of a ‘who’. In other words, when we see an attitude, a pathetic feature embodied in an individual empirical person it is contaminated by the ‘flavour’ of that person, our sense of their personality and status – them as a totality colouring all individual manifestations. When you have a mask, by contrast, the attitude achieves an effectiveness of its own.. The ‘pathos’ of the mask (a fixed attitude of woe, horror etc) is not yet ‘particularized’, i.e., not woven into the fabric of an individual character/ psychology. It is free-floating, with its own efficacy unattached to a subject . The mask is thus in part a way of isolating and extraneating certain ‘characteristics’ – sundering these from ‘character’ and the contingencies thereof.
To read Hegel on the Greek mask, then, is not simply to recognise a common ‘universality’; nor is it to take antiquarian delight in quaint and obsolete practices. It is to revivify our thinking about the present, our psychological and aesthetic categories, notions of ‘expression’, ‘Subject’ and so on. It is to be made aware, also, of certain New potentialities, perhaps: not simply the empty re-staging of Greek forms, but potentialities of thought which these older practices urge and imply.
Old and New
There are a range of modern thinkers and writers, from W.B. Yeats to Bataille, who have self-consciously chosen an archaic, pre-modern ‘episteme’ or world view – chosen it for the imaginative and cognitive sparks generated thereby, for its oppositional and aggravational uses, and as a stubborn cleaving to a point of negativity in the face of the overwhelming presence of the new (modern) life world. Needless to say, however, the very fact of being ‘chosen’ transforms the thing itself, for the last thing such pre-modern ‘systems’ were was objects of conscious choice. They were, if anything, the very unreflective framework within which choices were made. And so to cling to such systems can only involve and act of stubborn wilfulness wholly alien to the systems themselves.
“Tradition” is precisely the hereditary/ inborn, enduring, pre-conscious background to belief. To choose it is therefore to negate its very ground. To choose it is impossible, and those who do ‘choose’ it live in and with such impossibility, absurd and defiant, standing haughtily on thin air.
If the artificial resurrection of such obscure 'traditions' has an antiquarian crankiness to it, it can also be seen, perhaps as utopian. (The antiquarian and the revolutionary both suspect the present to be insufficient). What appeals about certain ‘remainders of the past’ such as peasant storytellers (Yeats through to Berger)etc is precisely their seeming inability to be ‘metabolised’ by the logic of capital/ modernity… their stubborn recalcitrance and non-inclusion. (It is of course (by definition) modernity itself which reveals them as such.)
So, for example, Bataille: his perseverance with categories stolen from the world of religious orthodoxy and from feudalism: all of this is in fact a stab at keeping open the unfilled/ vacant place of the New, by using old and borrowed names hitherto of interest only to lexical & philosophical numismatists.
And conversely, did not Benjamin see in the Old allegorists, who exercise an arbotrary command over a realm of dead objects, a kind of antique blueprint of the Modern avant-garde?
The implicit recognition here is that the past is never simply past; it awaits completion, but in a different form. So, isn't one of the critic's undertakings to liberate the useable or even revolutionary kernel from the congealed forms in which they are embedded.
“Tradition” is precisely the hereditary/ inborn, enduring, pre-conscious background to belief. To choose it is therefore to negate its very ground. To choose it is impossible, and those who do ‘choose’ it live in and with such impossibility, absurd and defiant, standing haughtily on thin air.
If the artificial resurrection of such obscure 'traditions' has an antiquarian crankiness to it, it can also be seen, perhaps as utopian. (The antiquarian and the revolutionary both suspect the present to be insufficient). What appeals about certain ‘remainders of the past’ such as peasant storytellers (Yeats through to Berger)etc is precisely their seeming inability to be ‘metabolised’ by the logic of capital/ modernity… their stubborn recalcitrance and non-inclusion. (It is of course (by definition) modernity itself which reveals them as such.)
So, for example, Bataille: his perseverance with categories stolen from the world of religious orthodoxy and from feudalism: all of this is in fact a stab at keeping open the unfilled/ vacant place of the New, by using old and borrowed names hitherto of interest only to lexical & philosophical numismatists.
And conversely, did not Benjamin see in the Old allegorists, who exercise an arbotrary command over a realm of dead objects, a kind of antique blueprint of the Modern avant-garde?
The implicit recognition here is that the past is never simply past; it awaits completion, but in a different form. So, isn't one of the critic's undertakings to liberate the useable or even revolutionary kernel from the congealed forms in which they are embedded.
Friday, April 08, 2005
Wrong Address
A letter arrived today addressed to :
The Present Occupier
1 Charlotte st.
London
W1
Inside, a sinister message: ‘we know where you live’.
I placed it back in the envelope and reposted it, after writing on the front ‘not at this address’.
The Present Occupier
1 Charlotte st.
London
W1
Inside, a sinister message: ‘we know where you live’.
I placed it back in the envelope and reposted it, after writing on the front ‘not at this address’.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
'But where is the soul'?
From time to time at I Cite, Jodi posts pictures of plastic beings like this:
They are frequently scary, disturbing, but what category should we use to describe this effect? It doesn’t seem to be ‘uncanny’ (although you may disagree). It has to do with kitsch and banality for sure, but why are these unsettling??
It probably has to do with Post-modern objects as Jameson defines them. You remember the famous opposition between Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes and Heidegger’s Peasant Shoes. Whereas the latter have clinging to them a whole peasant world of toil and ripening corn, the former carry no traces of their laborious origins, they are lacking in affect, bleached and without memory. They are the heralds of the new object world.
The new object world is not, contrary to received wisdom, one of appearances. As Baudrillard says, ‘There is something secret in appearances, precisely because they do not readily lend themselves to interpretation.’ The postmodern object has no secrets; on its surface there are no glimpses of the Hidden.
Now what struck both Rilke and Baudelaire about Dolls was the sense, the illusion, of interiority. The Doll (those older dolls, the Victorian dollies we find in classic horror films) contained the promise of a soul, and simultaneously frustrated this promise.
‘I can not say what it is like, when a little girl dies and refuses, even at the very end, to let go one of her dolls (perhaps one which had always been quite neglected), so that the poor thing is completely dry and withered in the consuming heat of her feverish hand.. does a little bit of soul then form within it?.’
And there is an apostrophe in Rilke’s essay to the ‘Doll-soul,’ but it is a mere 'question mark' of a soul. It is as if, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, they are ‘poor in soul’, they appear to have some dim presentiment of that human world which they lack, or it's as if there is some being trapped inside the doll. Thus these older dolls seem plaintive. There is the illusion that they entreat us in some way. They beseech.
But what do they want? The doll gives us no answer, clams up, refuses dialogue, cleaves to some inconsolable secret; eventually the child’s frustration can take this maddening silence no more:
'The child twists and turns his toy, he scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From time to time, he forces it to resume its mechanical motions, sometimes backwards. Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child... finally prises it open... But where is its soul'. (Baudelaire)
The child tries to prise it open because he intuits that this mute wooden creature has a secret, something hidden. The look of the modern doll contains no such intimation of a hidden life. No sad soul will be expelled by shaking it or throwing it against the wall. Such violence will meet only with the same happy indifference.
This is why the modern kitsch dolls seem peculiarly vacant and banal. They are ‘soulless’ but not in the same way. They have no presentiment of that ‘soul’ that they lack; there is nothing melancholy about them. They are benignly indifferent to their emptiness. And it is this which is so disturbing
They are frequently scary, disturbing, but what category should we use to describe this effect? It doesn’t seem to be ‘uncanny’ (although you may disagree). It has to do with kitsch and banality for sure, but why are these unsettling??
It probably has to do with Post-modern objects as Jameson defines them. You remember the famous opposition between Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes and Heidegger’s Peasant Shoes. Whereas the latter have clinging to them a whole peasant world of toil and ripening corn, the former carry no traces of their laborious origins, they are lacking in affect, bleached and without memory. They are the heralds of the new object world.
The new object world is not, contrary to received wisdom, one of appearances. As Baudrillard says, ‘There is something secret in appearances, precisely because they do not readily lend themselves to interpretation.’ The postmodern object has no secrets; on its surface there are no glimpses of the Hidden.
Now what struck both Rilke and Baudelaire about Dolls was the sense, the illusion, of interiority. The Doll (those older dolls, the Victorian dollies we find in classic horror films) contained the promise of a soul, and simultaneously frustrated this promise.
‘I can not say what it is like, when a little girl dies and refuses, even at the very end, to let go one of her dolls (perhaps one which had always been quite neglected), so that the poor thing is completely dry and withered in the consuming heat of her feverish hand.. does a little bit of soul then form within it?.’
And there is an apostrophe in Rilke’s essay to the ‘Doll-soul,’ but it is a mere 'question mark' of a soul. It is as if, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, they are ‘poor in soul’, they appear to have some dim presentiment of that human world which they lack, or it's as if there is some being trapped inside the doll. Thus these older dolls seem plaintive. There is the illusion that they entreat us in some way. They beseech.
But what do they want? The doll gives us no answer, clams up, refuses dialogue, cleaves to some inconsolable secret; eventually the child’s frustration can take this maddening silence no more:
'The child twists and turns his toy, he scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From time to time, he forces it to resume its mechanical motions, sometimes backwards. Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child... finally prises it open... But where is its soul'. (Baudelaire)
The child tries to prise it open because he intuits that this mute wooden creature has a secret, something hidden. The look of the modern doll contains no such intimation of a hidden life. No sad soul will be expelled by shaking it or throwing it against the wall. Such violence will meet only with the same happy indifference.
This is why the modern kitsch dolls seem peculiarly vacant and banal. They are ‘soulless’ but not in the same way. They have no presentiment of that ‘soul’ that they lack; there is nothing melancholy about them. They are benignly indifferent to their emptiness. And it is this which is so disturbing
Second Hand Books
It’s rare, isn’t it, that one has a dream with a joke in it (at least for me).
At B_____s bookshop in Oxford there’s a sizeable second hand section. Students and others can sell their used books there. It was sometimes a useful expedient in hard times. They gave reasonable rates (about 25% of the cover price) and paid cash. Now, among the staff in the second hand department, some seemed willing to buy more of your books and give a better price than others. One who I always tried to avoid was a glum & terminally ‘unhurried’ woman who seemed to have been there for untold years, so that the mustiness and yellowed surfaces of the second-hand book world had somehow seeped into her very soul and coloured it sepia. Anyway, she always seemed to reject more of one’s books that the others, returning them to you with a doleful expression and the inevitable, disappointing words ‘these, I’m afraid, we can’t use’.
So G., who I was talking to the other day, tells me she’s still there, although looking rather parched and cadaverous. And this must have prompted her appearance in my dream, in which she and the other second hand booksellers die in a motor-racing accident. They find themselves at the proverbial Gated Community called Heaven, whereupon what happens is that the gatekeeper allows the first two in and then looks at her shaking his head – ‘You, I’m afraid, we can’t use’, and shuts the gate.
Well, I thought it was amusing. Not so that it woke me up, mind.
At B_____s bookshop in Oxford there’s a sizeable second hand section. Students and others can sell their used books there. It was sometimes a useful expedient in hard times. They gave reasonable rates (about 25% of the cover price) and paid cash. Now, among the staff in the second hand department, some seemed willing to buy more of your books and give a better price than others. One who I always tried to avoid was a glum & terminally ‘unhurried’ woman who seemed to have been there for untold years, so that the mustiness and yellowed surfaces of the second-hand book world had somehow seeped into her very soul and coloured it sepia. Anyway, she always seemed to reject more of one’s books that the others, returning them to you with a doleful expression and the inevitable, disappointing words ‘these, I’m afraid, we can’t use’.
So G., who I was talking to the other day, tells me she’s still there, although looking rather parched and cadaverous. And this must have prompted her appearance in my dream, in which she and the other second hand booksellers die in a motor-racing accident. They find themselves at the proverbial Gated Community called Heaven, whereupon what happens is that the gatekeeper allows the first two in and then looks at her shaking his head – ‘You, I’m afraid, we can’t use’, and shuts the gate.
Well, I thought it was amusing. Not so that it woke me up, mind.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
A Being from Another Realm
"His room is a shelter, it becomes an outer body, one can call it his 'forebody'" Canetti on Kafka.
'It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body'
Proust
I wonder to what extent this sense of the body as something foreign, and almost inhuman, is a relatively modern one. I also wonder whether there is a term in psychoanalytic theory for this perception of our body's radical alterity.
Of course, there is something superficially similar in other literatures, the Jacobeans for example. But John Webster’s perception that “continually we bear about us A rotten and dead body” is something different. It carries with it not just disgust (in itself lacking from Proust or Rilke) but repugnance, a moral category. It seems to be connected to the decay of the old Symbolic Order, as if the sinful, mechanical, ‘box of wormseed’ that is the body stands revealed in its horror just as the Symbolic Order (The good old ‘Elizabethan World Picture’) recedes.
Indeed, Webster’s ‘skull beneath the skin’, the body as death’s corrupt machine - Is this body even really a foreign presence? Isn’t it rather a reminder of a Death all to familiar to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans?
The body ‘discovered’ by Proust is something else. I am not at home in my body, I do not coincide with my body, but this isn’t simply because my body is matter rather than soul. Rather, the bosy is a foreign form of life.
The substratum of our conscious existence, our familiar and chosen world, is this Thing with its own silent, imperturbable drives, imperatives. In sickness we feel subject to it, that it is pursuing, in its own time, its own blind directives and that it does this in spite of, or at a level indifferent to, our conscious life with its acquired meanings, projects . Its motions are not human motions; they are not informed by intention. The wavelike contractions of the intestine, rhythmic insistence of the heart and lungs, are five fathom beneath any intentionality on our part.
Its my feeling that there are certain modern writers who feed off this corporeal foreignness. They feel its proximity - the Other lodged inside, with whom dialogue is impossible. These writers are: Proust. Kafka. Rilke.
Are these not writers who see, even, a certain pay-off in sickness and somehow engineer this condition of sickness for themselves, so that they might live in proximity to this Other, live in symbiosis with it.
But what possible advantage is to be gained from such proximity?
‘… one day, noticing a swelling in his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a play thing of him, until the non-distant end.’ (Proust)
Is it that sickness wrests from them the duties of everyday life, of le service des biens, so that one is excused from certain Symbolic obligations. And this placeof excuse and exclusion is the ideal place in which to write. It is a place outside the human community. To make the foreignness of the body your home is to make the human home foreign.
‘At night, when I withdrew into my lungs, into my intestines, into the last bare chamber of my heart’ (Rilke)
Proust in his corklined carapace, Kafka in his burrow, Rilke secure in the hut of his sickness: these writers have removed themselves from the human community, watching now from the opposite shore.
The phrase ‘human community’ is Kafka’s, as are the following quotations:
‘Accept your symptoms, don’t complain of them; immerse yourself in your suffering.’
‘It was as though, through all these years, I had done everything demanded of me mechanically, and in reality only waited for a voice to call me, until finally the illness called me from the adjoining room and I ran towards it and gave myelf to it more and more.’
‘For about ten years I have had this evergrowing feeling of not being in perfect health, the sense of well-being that comes with good health, the sense of well-being created by a body that responds in every way, a body that functions without constant attention and care, this sense of well being is for most people the source of constant cheerfulness – this sense of well being I lack.. Just as this condition prevents me from talking naturally, eating naturally, sleeping naturally, so it prevents me from being natural in any way.’
The retreat into the body is a movement from the world (The Human community) into an inhuman solitude which Kafka insisted was the precondition of his writing (‘I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit, that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man’.)
The ‘human community’ I have always thought an extraordinary phrase, because so casually assumes that K. himself is the adoptee of this ‘community’, not a genuine offspring. And perhaps this is why, in a strange way, he allies himself with that inhuman saboteur, his body – the being from a different realm.
“I strive to know the entire human and animal community, to recognise their fundamental preferences, desires, and moral ideals, to reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules so as to be pleasing to everyone. In short, my only concern is the human tribuneral,” Letters to Felice (1/10/1917)
'It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body'
Proust
I wonder to what extent this sense of the body as something foreign, and almost inhuman, is a relatively modern one. I also wonder whether there is a term in psychoanalytic theory for this perception of our body's radical alterity.
Of course, there is something superficially similar in other literatures, the Jacobeans for example. But John Webster’s perception that “continually we bear about us A rotten and dead body” is something different. It carries with it not just disgust (in itself lacking from Proust or Rilke) but repugnance, a moral category. It seems to be connected to the decay of the old Symbolic Order, as if the sinful, mechanical, ‘box of wormseed’ that is the body stands revealed in its horror just as the Symbolic Order (The good old ‘Elizabethan World Picture’) recedes.
Indeed, Webster’s ‘skull beneath the skin’, the body as death’s corrupt machine - Is this body even really a foreign presence? Isn’t it rather a reminder of a Death all to familiar to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans?
The body ‘discovered’ by Proust is something else. I am not at home in my body, I do not coincide with my body, but this isn’t simply because my body is matter rather than soul. Rather, the bosy is a foreign form of life.
The substratum of our conscious existence, our familiar and chosen world, is this Thing with its own silent, imperturbable drives, imperatives. In sickness we feel subject to it, that it is pursuing, in its own time, its own blind directives and that it does this in spite of, or at a level indifferent to, our conscious life with its acquired meanings, projects . Its motions are not human motions; they are not informed by intention. The wavelike contractions of the intestine, rhythmic insistence of the heart and lungs, are five fathom beneath any intentionality on our part.
Its my feeling that there are certain modern writers who feed off this corporeal foreignness. They feel its proximity - the Other lodged inside, with whom dialogue is impossible. These writers are: Proust. Kafka. Rilke.
Are these not writers who see, even, a certain pay-off in sickness and somehow engineer this condition of sickness for themselves, so that they might live in proximity to this Other, live in symbiosis with it.
But what possible advantage is to be gained from such proximity?
‘… one day, noticing a swelling in his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a play thing of him, until the non-distant end.’ (Proust)
Is it that sickness wrests from them the duties of everyday life, of le service des biens, so that one is excused from certain Symbolic obligations. And this placeof excuse and exclusion is the ideal place in which to write. It is a place outside the human community. To make the foreignness of the body your home is to make the human home foreign.
‘At night, when I withdrew into my lungs, into my intestines, into the last bare chamber of my heart’ (Rilke)
Proust in his corklined carapace, Kafka in his burrow, Rilke secure in the hut of his sickness: these writers have removed themselves from the human community, watching now from the opposite shore.
The phrase ‘human community’ is Kafka’s, as are the following quotations:
‘Accept your symptoms, don’t complain of them; immerse yourself in your suffering.’
‘It was as though, through all these years, I had done everything demanded of me mechanically, and in reality only waited for a voice to call me, until finally the illness called me from the adjoining room and I ran towards it and gave myelf to it more and more.’
‘For about ten years I have had this evergrowing feeling of not being in perfect health, the sense of well-being that comes with good health, the sense of well-being created by a body that responds in every way, a body that functions without constant attention and care, this sense of well being is for most people the source of constant cheerfulness – this sense of well being I lack.. Just as this condition prevents me from talking naturally, eating naturally, sleeping naturally, so it prevents me from being natural in any way.’
The retreat into the body is a movement from the world (The Human community) into an inhuman solitude which Kafka insisted was the precondition of his writing (‘I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit, that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man’.)
The ‘human community’ I have always thought an extraordinary phrase, because so casually assumes that K. himself is the adoptee of this ‘community’, not a genuine offspring. And perhaps this is why, in a strange way, he allies himself with that inhuman saboteur, his body – the being from a different realm.
“I strive to know the entire human and animal community, to recognise their fundamental preferences, desires, and moral ideals, to reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules so as to be pleasing to everyone. In short, my only concern is the human tribuneral,” Letters to Felice (1/10/1917)
We faux ecumenicalists
Terry Eagleton (who shares with me the dubious honour of being a one time contributor to the Catholic Herald) has a candid evaluation of the late Pope here. Reading it, I was (for no reason) reminded of a story T.E. tells elsewhere about a disingenuously ecumenical Catholic Priest, who agrees with a Protestant Bishop that that we can all worship god in our own way, adding ‘You in your way, I in His’.
But isn’t this faux ecumenicalism true of even the most hardened ‘postmodernist’? No one really believes that their firmly held convictions are just one rhetoric or discourse among others, no less or more grounded than anyone else’s. And someone who does make this claim nonetheless believes it to be true. And if he believes it to be true, he must simultaneously believe that those who think that their view is not ‘just one rhetoric’ are deluded. But he also cannot think them deluded by his own criteria. So he's knackered.
Forgive me, these are familiar and uninteresting paradoxes and not really worthy of your time. But when I was an undergraduate I would put these problems to a resident post-graduate Rorty fan, and she would say ‘Don’t you think Rorty’s already taken that on board’ as if that were the end of the matter.
But isn’t this faux ecumenicalism true of even the most hardened ‘postmodernist’? No one really believes that their firmly held convictions are just one rhetoric or discourse among others, no less or more grounded than anyone else’s. And someone who does make this claim nonetheless believes it to be true. And if he believes it to be true, he must simultaneously believe that those who think that their view is not ‘just one rhetoric’ are deluded. But he also cannot think them deluded by his own criteria. So he's knackered.
Forgive me, these are familiar and uninteresting paradoxes and not really worthy of your time. But when I was an undergraduate I would put these problems to a resident post-graduate Rorty fan, and she would say ‘Don’t you think Rorty’s already taken that on board’ as if that were the end of the matter.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Readings
Today's Observer carries an interview with John Berger, prior to the London season devoted to his work which starts on April 11th.
A couple of other readings from this week which I might have mentioned before:
This on Venezuela. It's funny, of course, but what it's laughing at should have been considered laughable to begin with, not greeted with earnest political commentary.
Also this from Gore Vidal.
And this, from an article by Ron Suskind, which has been quoted numerous other places, to be sure, but is nonetheless noteworthy:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
A couple of other readings from this week which I might have mentioned before:
This on Venezuela. It's funny, of course, but what it's laughing at should have been considered laughable to begin with, not greeted with earnest political commentary.
Also this from Gore Vidal.
And this, from an article by Ron Suskind, which has been quoted numerous other places, to be sure, but is nonetheless noteworthy:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Friday, April 01, 2005
A Priori False
Zizek’s recent LRB essay really seems to have caused problems for various (self-proclaimed) Liberals. Now Mr Clive James has weighed in. For those unfamiliar with the man, he’s a Cambridge educated media personality with an inimitable rhetorical style used indifferently for both speaking and writing. He famously hosted a program laughing at foreign popular culture, esp. the Japanese (yes, always easier to see it in others, isn’t it).
As with others, James has particular difficulty with Zizek’s contention that
‘The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences…[etc] is a priori false.’
Now the ‘a priori’ bit may indeed need a few moments consideration, but it really doesn’t merit the blank non-recognition that seems to be the default liberal response. It is a priori, I assume, in the sense that it’s not something that will be decided by empirical exercises such as (as some have done) counting the respective dead of the Gulags and the Camps. It’s not that some new factual discovery about Nazi or Soviet atrocities will decide the issue once and for all.
Zizek is saying there is a basic difference between the two that results from the fact that Communism was a failed emancipatory project. It's clearly this that he wants to debate; but this position, the failed emancipatory project, is one that Zizek’s respondents seem not to address or even recognise. It’s really not too difficult to grasp. You might think its nonsense. Fair enough. But don’t pretend you don’t get it.
Zizek draws attention to a number of phenomenon worthy of discussion. Why is it senseless to speak of ‘really existing fascism’ as opposed to ‘really existing socialism’? How is it that an advertising campaign can use a hammer and sickle whereas using a swastika is inconceivable? Why would ‘fascist nostalgia’ be abhorrent where Ostalgia is acceptable or tolerated? Why did the Soviets, in particular, go through the spectacle of show trials – totally unnecessary to the Nazis? Or take Adorno’s example: why is it that (German) fascism was unable to produce "a single work of art, a single mental structure capable of satisfying even the meagre liberalistic requirement of ‘quality’" whereas the Bolshevik revolution led to breathtaking artistic innovation. And so on. All this, note, comes before the ‘a priori’ bit, making the latter rather easier to comprehend. Granted, these are not elaborate arguments. They are questions appropriate to a short journal essay.
But to engage with such questions is clearly to concede too much. Why? For the Liberal both fascism and communism are equally distant from the only yardstick that matters, Liberal democracy. Because they are equally distant they must, logic goes, be the same, at least in the essentials. ‘Totalitarian’ is thus a way of giving name and consistency to this ‘sameness’. We are dealing with a kind of interpretive error in which the Identity between two things is merely a function of the device used for measuring them. Now since this is an error of method it is, indeed, a priori false, because any ‘empirical evidence’ will simply feed into and consolidate this error*.
But of course, none of this can be conceded. There is an insistence that Zizek should speak their language and make himself intelligible to them, but that they are under absolutely no obligation to extend any interpretive generosity to his language at all, but only question why, inexplicably, he has chosen that language.
[*I am neither agreeing nor disageeing here, merely trying to interpret, generously, Zizek's argument]
p.s. There seem to be a few tickets left for the Zizek talk at Birkbeck on May 20th.
As with others, James has particular difficulty with Zizek’s contention that
‘The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences…[etc] is a priori false.’
Now the ‘a priori’ bit may indeed need a few moments consideration, but it really doesn’t merit the blank non-recognition that seems to be the default liberal response. It is a priori, I assume, in the sense that it’s not something that will be decided by empirical exercises such as (as some have done) counting the respective dead of the Gulags and the Camps. It’s not that some new factual discovery about Nazi or Soviet atrocities will decide the issue once and for all.
Zizek is saying there is a basic difference between the two that results from the fact that Communism was a failed emancipatory project. It's clearly this that he wants to debate; but this position, the failed emancipatory project, is one that Zizek’s respondents seem not to address or even recognise. It’s really not too difficult to grasp. You might think its nonsense. Fair enough. But don’t pretend you don’t get it.
Zizek draws attention to a number of phenomenon worthy of discussion. Why is it senseless to speak of ‘really existing fascism’ as opposed to ‘really existing socialism’? How is it that an advertising campaign can use a hammer and sickle whereas using a swastika is inconceivable? Why would ‘fascist nostalgia’ be abhorrent where Ostalgia is acceptable or tolerated? Why did the Soviets, in particular, go through the spectacle of show trials – totally unnecessary to the Nazis? Or take Adorno’s example: why is it that (German) fascism was unable to produce "a single work of art, a single mental structure capable of satisfying even the meagre liberalistic requirement of ‘quality’" whereas the Bolshevik revolution led to breathtaking artistic innovation. And so on. All this, note, comes before the ‘a priori’ bit, making the latter rather easier to comprehend. Granted, these are not elaborate arguments. They are questions appropriate to a short journal essay.
But to engage with such questions is clearly to concede too much. Why? For the Liberal both fascism and communism are equally distant from the only yardstick that matters, Liberal democracy. Because they are equally distant they must, logic goes, be the same, at least in the essentials. ‘Totalitarian’ is thus a way of giving name and consistency to this ‘sameness’. We are dealing with a kind of interpretive error in which the Identity between two things is merely a function of the device used for measuring them. Now since this is an error of method it is, indeed, a priori false, because any ‘empirical evidence’ will simply feed into and consolidate this error*.
But of course, none of this can be conceded. There is an insistence that Zizek should speak their language and make himself intelligible to them, but that they are under absolutely no obligation to extend any interpretive generosity to his language at all, but only question why, inexplicably, he has chosen that language.
[*I am neither agreeing nor disageeing here, merely trying to interpret, generously, Zizek's argument]
p.s. There seem to be a few tickets left for the Zizek talk at Birkbeck on May 20th.
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