litter at your etc

When I suggested, in a previous post, that the anti-Theory people are often non- or anti- theoretical as such, the suggestion was pooh-poohed. It is widespread, even usual, it seems to criticise Theory for being insufficiently theoretical. How then, I wonder, does the old spectre of 'reading literature as literature' – raised by the Theory's Empire anthology – fit in here?

What might it mean, what would it look like, reading literature other than as literature ? Do you instead read it as moral lesson, as reality, as historical or biographical symptom? Does the reader misrecognise the nature of the literary object, inquiring about Hamlet's childhood or his diet, or demanding to know what happens to Bloom on June 17 th. One asks questions of literary objects that can only be asked of real objects, you make the casual category error of treating literary personae as real people with a 'psychology' and a past, discussing some specific dramatic or fictional situation as if it were a situation in real life.

But such errors are surely not that far removed from a tendency among not only university students but many traditional critics - to talk about literary creatures as if they were actual people, to overlook entirely their constructedness and the devices responsible for this construction. Yet not only does this failure to read 'literature as literature' tend not to be the bugbear of the 'literature as literature' crew, it is precisely the error that many of them commit. Literature is seen as the mere vessel wherein some ultimately non-literary value ('Life'or some such) gleams eternal and in full transparency.

More curious is that those who do attempt to isolate the specificity of the literary object (any attempt to read literature as literature presupposes such an operation) are often condemned or overlooked by those supposedly wanting literature to be read as itself and not some other thing. The preoccupation of The Russian Formalists with literariness, for example; or the efforts of Paul de Man to lay bare and name the manifold ways in which literary objects, wanting to touch reality, end up re-drawing only their own physiognomy: not only do these seem not to count, they are frequently viewed as precisely the enemy of 'literature as literature'. To make literariness too visible is to engineer its self-destruction. Literature, yes, but without literariness.

Thus on the one hand we have many para-costive critics who fail to reckon with the literariness of their objects; on the other, many Theorists who are precisely preoccupied with the isolation of literariness. It would be an idle game to draw up a list of those who do & don't treat literature as literature – where would it place Hegel, Lukacs, Mathew Arnold, F.R. Leavis?

There is, of course, no reason at all why 'L.A.L' should be the opposing term to Theory. This is mystification. Now, the reply sometimes given here is that the objection is to using literature to illustrate something else – eg Theory. Two things here: the use of literature to illustrate non-literary concepts, virtues, objects etc is by no means confined to Theory (it is everywhere visible in more traditional lit. crit.), nor does Theory invariably do this – it cannot be defined by this manoeuvre. The second point is that using literature to illustrate something else (eg using Shakespeare to illustrate something about Elizabethan society), or 'using' literature to think about Theory (or some other thing) doesn't of course necessarily involve overlooking its literariness.

If 'literature as literature' means inquiring into what's 'literary' about literary objects, isolating their specific forms and devices, then fine; although this should also involve a genealogy of the concept of the 'literary'; but the various red herrings and contradictions of those invoking this slogan indicate that it is, most often, a polemical term devoid of positive content, and that the real objection lies elsewhere.

The transformation of the public sphere

I was upbraided (see here) for not challenging someone in a cafe over an indolent accusation of imposture. Public space should involve engaging with strangers, I was told. So today, this woman was sat reading out loud from Bergson:

“We instinctively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in language. Hence we confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, with its permenant external object, and especially with the word which expresses this object…. Sensations and tastes seems to me to be objects as soon as I isolate and name them, and in the human sould there are only processes. .. the wordwith well defined outlines, the rough and ready word.. overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.

I eyed her suspiciously. she smiled and suggested that

'It's Language which ‘lends’ objects and impressions their immobility - the ‘illusion’ of immobility. In reality it's pure flux.'

I replied with:

'But isn’t this precisely what Hegel celebrates: the force of cognition to seize, immobilise and separate from the ‘mere continuum’ of pure sense (etc) the Word, the Word or Name which arrests an element of the ‘real’ and extracts its meaning?'.

she continued:

'For Bergson, the ‘articulations of the real’ never coincide with the articulations of language (the Symbolic Order) and perhaps, therefore, our inclusion within that Symbolic Order involves necessarily a severance from the organic immediacy of perception'.

To which I could only add:

'But in Hegel, the phantasmagoria of mere sensation is not the ‘most real’ level in any case. We must extract its underlying reality using the cold violence of conceptual thought'.

We agreed that I should move to another table.

Call Paine for the Prosecution

It is not only the word ‘enlightenment’ that is routinely pressed into the polemical service of the present; various enlightenment thinkers are also dragged into court to produce condemnations of islamofascism etc, before being returned to the oblivion and indifference appropriate to anything genuinely different from Today. The latest is Thomas Paine – & the intellectual sloth (and borderline plagiarism) with which his ventriloquist, C.Hitchens, makes him mouth various unexceptional platitudes is exposed rather lethally by John Barrell. He begins by quoting CH as follows: If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason.’ That’s it, isn’t it – the dark times, the islamofascist threat, are vile anti-bodies injected into our jaded imaginations, our etiolated ballet box world, so that we might once again discover democracy and 'our way of life' as precarious, threatened and (therefore) all the more prized.

In a world where economic and political power are increasingly unaccountable, democracy etc need to be re-thought and transformed from within, not simply given booster jabs from conjured external threats. What’s required is not an external demon which affords us a false measure of the value of our democracy etc, and consolidates its present state, but the intellectual and political work, the resetting of parameters, that allows us to measure the insufficiency of that present state, and make it, thereby, the object of radical transformation.

A Theological Approach to Zizek

Well, I was sat outside a certain café on Chalton Street today and these two academics from the British Library (just round the corner) plonked themselves on my table. One of them had a paper on ‘Philip Larkin: A Theological Approach’ (or somesuch) and was gleefully talking theology department politics with his sidekick – all the little buzzwords and terms of art. So at one point, and not for any reason I remember, the sidekick mentions Zizek, and the Theological Approach to Philip Larkin replies with ‘Oh, I understand he’s a complete charlatan’, where ‘understand’ means of course ‘have heard’ or ‘this is the consensus among the Theological Approach people isn’t it?’. He then goes on to reproduce his available stock of Zizek hearsay, to nods of recognition from the other. And the point of this anecdote is, well, not very much. Other than this word ‘charlatan’ and the concept of ‘charlatanry’ in the academic community – it is, in fact, a spectre they are constantly having to exorcise. It haunts all academic communities. Not because these communities are full of impostures, but there is an element of ‘imposture’ that accompanies their increasingly specialised activities.

One has to give off, to emit, certain social/group signs, which are not simply the same as intellectual content, but signs of elective belonging to a community, signs of a specific rhetorical competence, signs that one knows the recognised moves and the shibbolethic names. This includes what is pejoratively dismissed as ‘jargon’ but goes beyond it. It incorporates the in-house lingua franca, the 'correct' (but often quickly remaindered) capital, and so forth. And it can happen that someone who has mastery of the recognised insignia but little intellectual content can achieve greater success than one inversely blessed. So…there is always the haunting possibility that one has been seduced by the game and its signifiers, that one is responding to this as much as anything else.

Moreover, it is an unsurprising and frequently observed law that when one academic groupuscule encounters the linguistic and rhetorical signs of another, it can see only an empty game, a protective cordon around nothing. And in that moment, it catches sight of its own image in the glass.

Blogging out of place

Some time ago I was sent an email inviting me to write on the question ‘Why blog?’ The belated response below concerns, of course, only my own reasons.

For some time I’d kept a notebook with thoughts on things I’d been reading and so on. The blog was really a continuation of this. But what differentiates the blog from the private notebook is the fact of having a potential readership – this knowledge (irrespective of who or how many) is enough to enable and urge a legibility beyond the merely private. This, for me, touches also on one of the attractions of blogging. You don’t have to commodify your site to entice a certain ‘community’. You don’t have to worry about sales. You can pretty much write anything, no matter how idiosyncratic, esoteric, odd, and someone will gravitate toward it. The blog will, effectively, select its own audience. Needless to say, there are plenty of bloggers who worry terribly about 'hits', and modify their blog content accordingly (consciously or unconsciously). There are blogs that imitate magazines, or in other ways mime the forms and content of the printworld, some address their wares to an established category of reader, but none of these things are a necessity of blogging.

CS started somewhere in-between the private notebook and the academic text. The content and tone were to be experimental, draft-like. Thoughts and ideas, written in the pseudonymous voice of Kaplan could be cast into print and cast before the big virtual Nobody. They were to embody transient convictions and incomplete ideas. Out in the open, these would be tested, clarified, found wanting or whatever. The pseudonym was key, in escaping the censorship of the proper name. This brings me to a second more general point about blogging.

There is the line from Nietzsche, that a thought comes when it wants, it is not initiated by the ‘I’. Such self-manifesting thoughts have their own force and logic, which the I must listen to, pursue, develop. But ordinarily there comes a moment when the writer must make these thoughts accountable to (organise them around) his proper name. In short, the ‘I’ must ‘assume responsibility’ for its thoughts, make them consistent with one another and with the name of the I. Blogging escapes this necessity. Thoughts are collected under the pseudonym but not organised by it. The pseudonym need only differentiate you from other bloggers. It bears little responsibility. Any flack directed at posts is born by the pseudonym; the author escapes untouched.

Again, there are blogs which make the full facts of authorship available: name, picture, profession. The words on the page are given a reassuring Symbolic support. The blog is, as it were, registered. There are others who, for whatever reasons, have slipped the proper name and professional title that elsewhere slant or constrain their speech. Adopting something that’s obviously a mask, you can dispense with the necessary everyday mask that carries your name.

The pseudonym is not only a fiction that facilitates a truth. There is, I think, a further point.

The anonymity of blogging seems to irk some people. One does not know to whom (the category of person) one is speaking. Frequently, a convenient and stereotyped role has to be invented for the interlocutor – s/he must be a Revolutionary Student, a Hysterical Woman, a Middle Class Liberal etc. Once a place has been assigned his/her discourse no longer has to be taken as read but is coloured in advance by a Symbolic classification. Note also the glee/ relief when a bloggers identity is partially uncovered or disclosed– the routine appeal to Lenin’s student status , the change of tone when it was discovered, for example, that the author of Alphonse van Worden was a woman. One is no longer confined to addressing the posts themselves; one can now assign them their place, address some familiar Symbolic niche. The anonymity of blogging promises, perhaps, dialogue stripped of such Categorical supports.

The possibility of blogging here is related to a possibility inherent in writing. The written ‘I’ is stripped of its symbolic clothing – those signs in the voice or demeanour that lend it authority, register its ‘grade of culture’, assign it gender, class, age etc. The words must themselves speak, can circulate freely. It is for this reason I imagine a blogosphere of pseudonyms. There is nothing allowing us to ‘register’ the author, to assign him/ her Symbolic place. No pictures, no names, professions. No one declares their place of enunciation; nothing is delivered upfront to the Police*. There is only the romance of the Name: a disguise and revelation at once.

[* 'that regime which assigns things and people their place, which prescribes a certain order']

Aaronovitch Syndrome (once again)

China Mieville has an article on the lies of our rulers (via Lenin):

Of course, though the fundamental purpose of these lies isn’t to be convincing, that doesn’t stop some people being convinced. And as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, governments make the ‘reasonable assumption’ that ‘public intellectuals’ are the most gullible when it comes to propaganda. Witness, for example, David Aaronovitch’s thunderous 2003 declaration about the legendary WMDS: “If nothing
is eventually found, I – as a supporter of the war – will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US, ever again..”

In cases like Aaronovitch, there is a certain earnest investment in the game that seems at times to go beyond that of the actual players. They, the 'public intellectuals', have neither the cynical reckoning of the politician nor the cynical disbelief of the disenfranchised. What they appear not to countenance is that there is the selling of policy on the one hand, and the actual conception and planning of that policy on the other, and that these two may differ radically. Such suggestions are typically dismissed as ‘crude’ or vulgar (as if their own earnest literalism was a badge of maturity). A Pseudo-Zizekian defence of such people might be to say that there is something almost heroic about assuming as true and holding to a ‘symbolic fiction’ peddled with casual cynicism by those in power - as if adhering with ‘wilful naivety’ to the Order of the Lie might thereby secure its eventual truth; as if 'it's important that someone believes this stuff, so it might as well be me'. But anyways..

In the case of those who are ex-radicals, such ‘crude’ analyses remind them, no doubt, of the kind of arguments they used to advance in their elapsed youth, and must, on that account, be disowned all the more forcefully. There is a routine assumption, it’s grains of truth hardened into doctrine, that the opinions you form when practically caught up in the world - Home, Job, Family etc - are automatically more mature and nuanced than when, less socially and financially secure, you looked at the world askance.

It seems to me that the ‘cynical’ view of politics, far from being the badge of a phantasy middle-class, is a popular one, the view of those who are at ten removes from the spectacle, the disenfranchised. The journos and scribblers, the academics hauled before the Newsnight cameras, on the other hand, feel close enough to the spectacle, the game, to believe that they might just be players. They are in sight of the crumbs from the table rather than being excluded from the feast.

But back to the phantasy and real ‘middle class’, one last time. It’s clear that much pro-war opinion came from the middle class intelligentsia, journalists and scribes of one sort or another - not that they choose to see themselves that way, or to see their own opinion as a mere expression of their class or as the mental sublimate of their fancy diet. Indeed, as others have pointed out, if the dinner-party chatterati label names anyone, it names Blairite Islingtonians. (Similarly, the pro-war bloggers were academics, journalists, disgruntled sub-editors and so on). Anti-war positions, on the other hand, could be heard –among countless other places - in many a local working class pub, and it would be as meaningful referring to these as ‘pub orthodoxies’ as ‘bruschetta orthodoxies’ (i.e. equally meaningless), except this would backfire rhetorically and appear snooty.

So it is no accident, that in the face of genuinely popular opposition to the war, extending through all classes of the population, and despite commonly expressed cynicism regarding the official justifications, those same journos and scribblers chose to invent instead an infantile pantomime of stock characters, and to throw stones at the phantoms of their own brains.

(added to notes on rhetoric)

The Pub The Pub is always a sign of blokish familiarity and common sense. Do end a discussion with “right, I’m off down the pub”, so indicating a sensibly English awareness of the limits of mere intellectual debate and touching base with the Real World. (The mere mention of this last is sufficient to debunk certain kinds of high-flown jargon.) Of course, this gesture (of touching base with The Real World) can be performed without having to visit the pub or even leave your armchair – you can also break off a debate by reference to some favoured TV program that requires attention, preferably ‘the football’ or something Popular (never, God forbid, ‘an Ingmar Bergman film’ or ‘a documentary about Heidegger’). Always remember: You are at one with the Common People (who go down the pub and watch telly) and not at all part of the despicable Middle Class/ Intelligentsia.

“The Inoculation: […] this very general figure which consists in admitting the accidental evil of a class bound institution the better to conceal its principle evil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion.” (Roland Barthes)

Bach - Art of fugue - Contrapunctus4 - Glenn Gould

Bach - Art of fugue - Contrapunctus01 - Glenn Gould

Genet: "I seek the declared enemy"

J.G. seeks, or is searching for, or would like to discover, never to uncover him, the delicious enemy, quite disarmed, whose equilibrium is unstable, profile uncertain, face inadmissible, the enemy broken by a breath of air, the already humiliated slave, ready to throw himself out the window at the least sign, the defeated enemy: blind, deaf, mute. With no arms, no legs, no stomach, no heart, no sex, no head, all told a complete enemy, already bearing all the marks of my bestiality that now need never be used (too lazy anyway). I want the total enemy, with immeasurable and spontaneous hatred for me, but also the subjugated enemy, defeated by me before he even knows me. Not to be reconciled with me, in any case. No friends. Above all, no friends: a declared enemy, but not a tortured one. Clean, faultless. What are his colors? From a green as tender as a cherry to an effervescent violet. His size? Between the two of us, he presents himself to me man to man. No friends. I seek an inadequate enemy, one who comes to capitulate. I will come at him with all that I can muster: whacks, slaps, kicks, I will feed him to starving foxes, make him eat English food, attend the House of Lords, be received at Buckingham Palace, fuck Prince Phillip, and be fucked by him, live for a month in London, dress like me, sleep in place of me, live in place of me: I seek the declared enemy

(via Long Sunday)

John Berger on certain 'macabre denunciations ' of Gunter Grass

Terry Eagleton has an article entitled 'Political Beckett?' in the NLR. I'm not a subscriber, so if anyone has a copy, I'd be interested to see it.

nb see also this at IT.

The sole feature of fascism which is not counterfeit is its will to power, subjugation, and plunder. Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism.

Trotsky

Audio of Zizek's Lacan Masterclass at Birkbeck (via K-Punk).

Save the Lebanese Civilians Petition.

(Glimpse of) A Newly Discovered Shelley Poem

See here (Thanks Isak.)

Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things which now confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day –

Schopenhauer on Reading

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. For to occupy every spare moment in reading, and to do nothing but read, is even more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual labor, which at least allows those engaged in it to follow their own thoughts. A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it. Just as you can ruin the stomach and impair the whole body by taking too much nourishment, so you can overfill and choke the mind by feeding it too much. The more you read, the fewer are the traces left by what you have read: the mind becomes like a tablet crossed over and over with writing. There is no time for ruminating, and in no other way can you assimilate what you have read. If you read on and on without setting your own thoughts to work, what you have read can not strike root, and is generally lost. It is, in fact, just the same with mental as with bodily food: hardly the fifth part of what one takes is assimilated. The rest passes off in evaporation, respiration and the like.

'conspiracy theory'

Heard the other day someone say “I prefer cock-up to conspiracy theory every time”. Really? Every time, automatically, without critical thought or reflection? How strangely dogmatic. Sure, there are crazy conspiracy theories, just as there are crazy cock-up theories. But too often, ‘conspiracy theory’ means little more than this: anything that speaks of goals, tactics, strategies other than the ones officially declared; in other words, 'conspiracy theory' as anything that differs too markedly from the official account, anything which – in an age of unprecedented spin and careful government PR – refuses to take such PR on its own terms. And it’s interesting that the ‘conspiracy theory’ whistle is frequently blown before any ‘theory’ has even been advanced, when all that’s happened is that the official narrative has been challenged or asked a few basic questions. (Most recently, an predictably, those disputing – or exposing - the official statements of the IDF as to reasons and motivations in Gaza and Lebanon).

The Perennial Themes of Right-Wing Anti-Left Rhetoric

The motifs of right-wing discourse vis-à-vis the left have changed little over the years. The authors of such discourse fly under different flags, and the content naturally changes, but much repeats itself with dreary inevitability. I note only a few of these themes in passing:

* The pretence that there is left wing dominance in the fields of opinion and education. Thus, the use of terms like ‘the left (or liberal) establishment’, ‘the left-liberal consensus’ etc. Correspondingly, the dramatisation of yourself as a beleaguered iconocalst minority fighting an entrenched tyranny of consent. The most trite Daily Telegraph common sense masquerades as a samizdat.

* Much praise for ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ in the abstract, but no analysis of the concrete economic conditions in which these function or do not function. The invocation of these keywords almost always as something under threat, rather than as something we might radicalise, expand etc

* Attempting to discredit the vocabulary of the left. The use of this vocabulary only ironically or contemptuously. For example, capitalism is never spoken of directly, but phrases like “They [the left] blame all this on the evils of capitalism” or “I suppose you think this is all about nasty American imperialism”. The insinuation that this vocabulary is only a set of empty phrases and slogans.


* The production, by the actual right-wing bourgeoisie, of an ideological double, the ‘middle class’, imagined as isolated from the real world, dangerously naïve, treacherously permissive and implicitly unpatriotic (they are working against what the country stands for etc). In producing this spectre, you simultaneously lay claim to a fake populism.

* The requirement of an 'enemy without' and a corresponding 'enemy within'. The enemy without are necessary to rediscover ‘our values’ as something in danger. The enemy within are those (typically, of course, the left in its various spectral guises) who through their ideological blinkeredness and/or naïve tolerance are the conscious or unwitting representatives of the external enemy (previously communism).


* The support for Trade Union and/ or workers’ struggles only when they are abroad and in defiance of some designated enemy (eg Solidarnosc in Poland).

* The attribution to the left of a fixed and fanatical mindset. The enemy is in thrall to ideology, uses abstractions to measure reality, sees things in terms of a pre-conceived template etc. Similarly, the left is always ‘fashionable’, is merely ‘trendy’ and so on. In both cases, the left is seen as a psychological condition rather than a set of ideas to be engaged with.

It can be seen that each of these motifs is both a portrait of an enemy (who threatens) and an implicit self-dramatisation. Thus: The attack on the spectral middle-class is also the declaration of a no-nonsense populism; opining about left-wing dominance in the media entails a corresponding stance of valiant dissent; the charges of fanatical rigidity and trendyness lay claim to a normal commonsense viewpoint; accusations of left-wing ‘jargon’ and ‘sloganeering’ are also about legitimising one’s own ‘natural’ and transparent language.

In every age the self-appointed secretariat try to pass off these ideological machine-parts as the free products of their own brains.

Facts and Figures since beginning of Gaza invasion

See here.

"Dr. Barghouthi ended the presentation by addressing the issue of unbalanced media coverage of the Gaza crisis, and the terminology and narratives adopted by news agencies. He cited the example of the use of the terms “hostage” and “kidnapped”‚ in relation to Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, while Palestinian parliamentarians being held under Israeli detention without charge are referred to as “prisoners”.
He also stressed that sustained Israeli attacks on Gaza in the months leading up to the invasion illustrate that the current crisis was not sparked off by Shalit’s capture. Between 29 March and 27 June, Israel conducted 112 air strikes on, and fired 4,751 artillery shells into the Gaza Strip. A total of 65 Gazans were killed between 3 May and 27 June, including at least 34 civilians, 12 of whom were children and 5 of whom were women."

Chomsky & Language

From a 'critique' of Chomsky's linguistics here:

"By ‘language’, Chomsky doesn’t mean what you or I might mean by that term. He doesn’t mean French or Swahili and he certainly doesn’t mean people conversing or exchanging ideas."

Well, I'm not familiar with Chomsky's linguistics in anything but a second-hand and general way, but by 'language' I don't mean French or Swahili or people conversing or exchanging ideas, and neither, I suspect, do you. When we say, for eg, 'language is what differentiates us from animals' or 'X has a facility with language' or 'no thinking without language' or 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language', we use the word in the more abstract and non-specifc sense, a sense perhaps not that far removed from Chomsky's. And it's interesting, to me, that - even if we're monolingual and not at all theoretical - we can make this distinction, that we recognise, beyond our mother tongue and beyond particular conversations and speech acts, this deeper universal.

Away until Monday.

Homo Academicus

From the comments (some time ago) at Le Colonel Chabert. I'd like to return to this later:

Lcc: I like something I read by Ranciere about the relations bteween generals and spontaneity on the battlefield, but I'm not ready to call it 'Ranciere's idea' because the first time I encountered it described in detail was in Tolstoy, who, with the novelist's humility did not pretend to invent it, only to observe it: no commons enclosing! i don't want to have to obey ranciere's implications. qlip, qlip, qlip! we can begin qlipping in this our favourite hobby. after all that was already our gold the King stuck his profile on.


M: Agreed. Many of the distinctions made by a Ranciere or Lacan can of course be made in another language, and one can make and use these distinctions without tagging them with Names, and simply use them in so far as they help you to think. But what’s interesting is that if you do this – if you leave off the tags and the names – your ideas are much less likely to be noticed or discussed within the academic marketplace. In fact, they will often be invisible. People are reluctant to risk floating or discussing untagged ideas. Do not speak only of friendship, 'employ' or read instead X's notion thereof - unmediated access to concepts is forbidden.

This exchange came to mind recently, reading a book by Renata Salecl. She offers a brief and lucid paraphrase of Judith Butler.How easy, I thought, to articulate Butler’s ideas without ‘tagging’ them, without saying ‘Ranciere’s this’ and ‘Althusser’s that’, or ‘deploying’ Agamben’s notion in conjunction with Marx’s.. And it would be perfectly possible, perhaps, for Butler herself to do this, to present her ideas unadorned and untagged, as if she just wanting to talk about power or the Self, and reach certain conclusions about these things. But again, in certain quarters of academia the presentations of untagged ideas is inadvisible. You must show yourself to be using an existing currency, a currency of proper names. I wonder about the origins of this tendency. My sense is that it’s to be understood as an institutional demand and not finally indigeneous or essential to the thinking itself, although it may then enter and corrupt the thinking. [joke/] In fact, it would be useful to deploy Bourdieu’s notion of taste culture here [/joke].

spectacle

re Watching the World Cup. Have you noticed that when a crown member sees his/ her image on the giant screen inside the stadium they don't wave at the camera (or its implied position) but directly at the screen - as if it's a giant mirror.

Insert yr own subscriptio.

Free thought must be won by a historical anamnesis capable of revealing everything in thought which is the forgotten product of historical work (Bourdieu)

random thoughts on 'cultural relativism', II

In the ‘bloodless abstraction’ post, the position attributed to Rorty is that our “sensuous sympathies” are first of all extended to our immediate (culturally specific) group rather than to some generic ‘humanity’.

There is, though, another move, whereby one's folk is prematurely identified with this 'generic humanity' as such; so that the traits specific to this familiar group – historically and culturally local - are misrecognised as the physiognomy of humanity per se. The particular, disguised as the universal, can then dismiss other specific folks as enemies of the universal, as inhuman rather than as (so to speak) only pathologically different.

What is sometimes misnamed 'cultural relativism' can be seen as precisely the attempt to avoid this error of misrecognition. That is, what the understanding of cultural difference seeks to do is to move toward a comprehension of the true generic humanity. It does this through the cautionary insistence that no particular society is to be simply identified with it.

There may be some who experience a frission at the mere fact of difference, difference qua difference without regard to content, but this is an empty formalism. Difference is only a sign and summons to pass on.

The call to (in a contemporary idiom) 'listen to the Other' is not an invitation simply to be stimulated by the discordant yet enigmatic notes of Difference. Nor should it be an interdiction telling us to go no further. It solicits, rather, a re-tuning of our understanding and a timely awareness of our own finitude - of the categories and concepts through which the world has appeared to us. But this awareness of limitation only makes sense in relation to an implicit and coming universality, the prospect of which this finitude opens up.

So it is that the comprehension of cultural difference points beyond difference.

human

Two quotes I think are related to the posts on 'bloodless abstraction' and 'cultural relativism'. More later..

"The problem of what is man is always therefore the so-called problem of 'human nature' or that if so-called man in general'. It is thus an attempt to create a science of man (a philosophy) which starts from an initiallt 'unitary ' concept, from an abstraction in which everything that is 'human' can be contained. But is the 'human' a starting point or a point of arrival, as a concept and as a unitary fact? Or might not the whole attempt, in so far as it posits the human as a starting-point, be a 'theological' or 'metaphysical' residue?" (Gramsci)

'Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.' (Marx)

ohio impromptu

thoughts on 'cultural relativism', I

I'm not sure exactly who believes in 'cultural relativism' as it is defined by its adversaries, but I can agree that this version is false and/or contradictory. You know the idea: we can't judge another culture from the outside, there are no universal criteria that allow us to say that one culture's better than another etc.Well, firstly, 'We' are not homogenous and neither is the 'other culture'; and by what criteria have we identified it as 'Other' in the first place rather than simply 'different'? A New Yorker might be culturally different from a Londoner but is surely not irredemiably Other. To mark something as Other presupposes an interpreatative decision that cultural relativism arguably prohibits. Secondly, if there are no universals and all cultures are 'equally valid' , then you have to say equally valid in respect of what, valid as what? Logically, the criteria in question must be a universal one. For example, you say 'all are valid as expressions of life', then 'expressing life' is posited as a value. Needless to say, only for the Western intellectual are these other cultures 'expressing life' , they themselves are engaged in religious worship or whatever.

so far so obvious. It seems to me though, that the bugbear of 'cultural relativism' among the newly Enlightened is frequently a rhetorical device used to dismiss the interpretative generosity we should indeed extend to different societies. 'Cultural relativism' is one of various threats to an Enlightenment conceived of as a static set of attained Values rather than a necessarily ongoing process of critical self-reflection. In fact, Cultural Relativism, even in the self-contradictory variant above, continues with and presupposes enlightenment categories.

Anyway, as regards the question of cultural difference and truth, permit me a slight detour by way of illustration.

Someone asked me the other night about the question of 'Shakespeare's homosexuality'. They mentioned the infamous sonnet 20. Was their interpretation (revolving around 'thing'/ 'nothing') correct? Broadly yes. But I reminded them of the conventions of male-male friendship that existed back then, the important historical differences, the dnagers of prematurely applying contemporary categories (eg of 'sexuality') and so on.

One has to be aware of and 'respect' the cultural differences between the present and the past, not because we can't assess the past at all using our present categories, but because some of the most obvious and ready to hand categories would involve basic interpretetive error. We observe and allow cultural difference not in defiance of Truth but in its name. Moreover, it's not that we say - in the case just cited - ok, the past is a foreign country, they're allowed their quaint little differences. It is also, simultaneously, that these differences interrogate the self-evidence of our own values and expost them precisely as 'cultural'. To expose culture as culture is precisely one of the basic tasks of critical thought. To reveal something as cultural confiscates its self-evidence and makes it contestable and subject to human transformation.

Some of you will have seen this entry from notes on rhetoric:

Turkey - If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey

I received a brief email recently asserting that it’s perfectly reasonable to ask that someone who is talking about abuses in country a address themselves to far more sever abuses in country b.
Well, except that your criterion for talking about regime a is not simply the severity of the abuses but, precisely, the likely consequences of speaking out about regime a, as well as the complicity of your own government (ie your representative) in the abuses of regime a.

Those who favour the Turkey ruse might consider applying it to other areas of their lives:

“How dare you criticise me as a parent when there are far worse parents overseas about whom you are scandalously silent!”

That's not to say, of course, that people can't be quizzed about why (strategically, pragmatically, ethically) they are criticising this particular regime. Indeed, the question 'a rather than b?' might be supplemented with 'now rather than then?' Why are you suddenly criticising Chavez now? Come, Is it your own devising? How is it that the free movement of your own intellect happens to coincide exactly with the interests of the US administration? etc.

Alberto, different angle

via

Zizek, by way of example

[meant to post this last week] Zizek has been addressing his famously repetitive use of examples, according to F., who attended some of the early 'masterclasses' at Birkbeck. For those of you not familiar with this feature of Zizek's work, the same joke or anecdote is re-worked in several different contexts (sometimes within the space of 50 pages) often to 'exemplify' different points or conclusions. Apparently, says F., Zizek claims to be perfectly aware of this technique and its philosophical and pedagogical uses. It's by no means simply lazy recycling. The idea is to repeat with a difference, and in repeating to insist on instabilities and non-identities of meaning.

This argument is partly supported in his latest book. Take these two sentences:

"the explanation of a universal concept becomes 'interesting' when the particular cases evoked to exemplify it are in tension with their own universality" &
"One practices concrete universality by confronting a universality with its 'unbearable' example".

The idea then is:
-To keep open the tension between the universal and the particular examples (which never can never simply 'exemplify' it but retain a substantiality of their own).
-To find and insist on the Particular which the Universal cannot quite assimilate or which renders the Universal comic (zizek's example is applying the Hegelian dialectic to sex).

But this business of allowing the particular to breath, of endlessly revising or expanding the universal (and therefore questioning its universality), this seems to be the very reverse of Zizek's practice, where - it so often seems - the particular is gleefully embraced precisely in so far as it illustrates the same neo-Lacanian conceptual matrix. Kafka's Odradek is 'jouissance embodied'; something else is 'object petit a at its purest', and so on. Zizek's readings - and this is hardly news - are scarcely sensitive to the specifics of form and context.

Thus, on the one hand, we have the errant examples slipping their conceptual marker to turn up in some other unexpected place; on the other, the self-same conceptual matrix endlessly seizing on supporting examples. But the willful imposition of meaning & the re-usable non-meaning-specific example are in two sides of the same script.

Let's re-cap:
Yes odradek signifies jouissance but could (with a little tweaking), one imagines, just as equally have signified 'objet a'; a passage from Hamlet illustrates the nature of Symbolic mandates, but this Lacanian subscriptio will tomorrow be inscribed elsewhere. There is a line in Yeats where he exclaims "another emblem there!", performatively creating what he claims (perhaps ironically) merely to discover. And this gesture - "Another Objet a (etc) there! - is the silent accompaniment to much of Zizek's analysis.

What this ends up drawing attention to, as with Benjamin's allegorist, is less the object itself than the plastic powers of the author to impose and remove meaning by fiat. Objects, says WB, are 'enslaved' in the "eccentric embrace of meaning" by the allegorist, in whose world "any person, any object" "can mean absolutely anything else." Zizek's world is not quite as open and indeterminate as this. The interpretive matrix is finite, the range of concepts to be coupled with objects and examples relatively small; but he appetite is gargantuan.

This isn't of course to suggest that Zizek's practice isn't illuminating, but the illumination is fitful, often accidental, and the suspicion always what what has flashed before you is less some hidden recess of the object than the interpretive elan of the virtuoso.

Having said all that, there is a 'logic of example' visible in Zizek which he may or mayn't be aware of. What I noticed when I was trying to compile the (now more or less abandoned) Critical Dictionary is that Zizek's definitions - of the 'Big Other' or whatever - frequently don't square with one another. This he will triumphantly proclaim is what Lacan means by the subject (etc)! But 'this' is not quite the same as the definition implied in his previous example. The new example or context will suggest a different model of the concept. This is what I mean by the logic of example. There are, for instance, many subtly different definitions of the Big Other. There will always be something in the example that deflects, resists revises the conceptual matrix you bring to it. No matter how vampiric the concept, it will always bear the colour of its victims' blood.

But perhaps (and Z. would probably profess agreement here) this refunctioning of the concept, its contextual transformation, its 'transmigration' through particular examplifications, this is the concept.

Bloodless abstraction

the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who in an essay entitled "Solidarity" argues that those who helped Jews in the last world war probably did so less because they saw them as fellow human beings but becasue they belonged to the same city, profession, or other social grouping as themselves. He then goes on to ask himself why modern American liberals should help oppressed American blacks. "Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans--to insist that it is outrageous that an American should live without hope." Morality, in short, is really just a species of patriotism. Rorty's case, however, strikes me as still too universalist. There are, after all, rather a lot of Americans, of various shapes and sizes, and there is surely something a little abstract in basing one's compassion on such grandiosely general grounds. It is almost as though "American" operates here as some sort of metalanguage or metaphysical essence, collapsing into unity a vast variety of creeds, lifestyles, ethnic groupings, and so on. Would it not be preferable for an authentic critic of universality to base his fellow-feeling on some genuine localism, say the city block? ….. I have not, incidently, yet resigned from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, merely adjusted my reasons for belonging. I now object to nuclear warfare not because it would blow up some metaphysical abstraction known as the human race, but because it would introduce a degree of unpleasantness into the lives of my Oxford neighbors. The benefit of this adjustment is that my membership of the campaign is no longer the bloodless, cerebral affair it once was, but pragmatic, experiential, lived sensuously on the pulses.

For Rorty, contingency – i.e., being born into a certain place and its culture – is Fate: your affections, moral obligations, and your default understanding of ‘how things are’ remain wedded to this accident. Some might see this doctrine as simply a regression to tribalism + a soupcon of resigned irony. It’s not that you think your little tribe is humanity as such, its just that, realistically, and experientially, you act as if it is.

Eagleton’s précis of Rorty suggests that the philosopher presents his positon as being on the side of that which is ‘… lived sensuously on the pulses’ as opposed to ‘bloodless abstraction. The solidarities of community are identified with the former, the concept of 'human rights' etc with the latter. Rorty relies on a common perception that ‘bloodless abstractions’ are inhuman, whereas spontaneous compassion is the very defining trait of ‘humanity’. This may be the exact reverse of the truth.

To further extend one's moral intelligence, to break through the prison house, relies on a faculty of abstraction. It requires not only affect but conceptual thought and/or thought-experiments, acts of the imagination. The demand to be Universalist and apply to the Other the moral concern we apply to ourselves can be foreign to and opposed to some of our most ingrained pre-rational attachments. Such moral intelligence is frequently counter-intuitive and has to be won through intellectual work.

Thus, in ‘abstracting’ from those merely sensuous common sympathies, those shared cultural traits that are so immediately palpable, so easy on the eye and ear, those shared predicates with which it is all too easy to ‘identify’, one’s sympathy and comprehension are actually enlarged; you pass beyond the immediate to a more generic humanity: the bloodless abstraction is finally the more human.

And we should even be alert to the possibility that a too tenacious attachment to ones ‘folk’ blocks the perception of this generic humanity and results in an ultimately incoherent morality wherein there is one rule for Us and another for Them.

[A version of this was originally posted at Long Sunday. I thought it worth repeating (with a difference) after observing how 'universal' values are frequently invoked- polemically and rhetorically - only in order to prosecute a particular case. In such cases the true rigour of the universal is lost sight of. One passes off a particular and 'pathological' gripe as pure fidelity to the universal. Would like to return to this another time. For now, this]

Enter Fleeing

"Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderon, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers "enter fleeing." The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of non-participating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter "fleeing" takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with the expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of on looking strangers"

Walter Benjamin

Zizek Masterclass

Reports on the Zizek masterclass so far:

Thursday, May 25th: K-Punk

Tuesday, May 30th Different Maps

Thursday, June 1st: Different Maps & Sit Down Man..

Tuesday, June 6th: Infinite Thought

I made it to the 25th May one. It’s pretty well covered in the link above. Some of it certainly seemed to bear out the suggestion that Zizek is moving closer to Deleuze. At one point he used the ‘Hegelian-Deleuzian’ hyphenation in speaking about concrete universals. He claimed that Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’ is very close to Deleuze’s ‘reinterpretation of the Idea’. What follows are my lecture notes on this section of the talk (slightly edited for the sake of clarity). The repetitions are in the original, btw

Deleuze’s reinterpretation of an Idea: An Idea is not the fully elaborated concept but the problem. All particular empirical solutions are attempts to 'solve' this problem. This can be seen, for instance, in the way nature experiments with organs - the eye as a response to a certain 'problem'. (problem of light). Thus, the ‘problem’ is inscribed in reality itself.

Only way to grasp the thing concretely is to see it not as a self-contained thing but as an answer to a problem - as a sign of that problem. The relation between particular and universal is the relation between problem and answer/ response.

This is what characterises the Hegelian-Deleuzian approach. Can see this using the example of modernity.

What defines modernity is a problem, an antagonism. Actually existing ‘modernities’ are answers to the general universal problem, attempts to resolve the tension inscribed in the universal. It is nto just that a plurality of modernities have sprung up here and there (so let us not impose one model etc)... concrete modernities not simply ‘examples’ of modernity, but particular solutions to a single deadlock.

The particular examples of modernity do not fight each other/ compete with each other/ exist in tension with each other; no, the site of tension is universality itself. The Universal not an empty container but an antagonism.

The particular is only an attempt to resolve the tension of universality > concrete universal eg concrete forms of the state are answers to the problem of the state.

The modernity example is in fact a paraphrased version of The Parallax View, pp. 34-5. Some of it is conveniently online here (scroll down to 'jameson').

Joyce Carol Oates:

The writer's resistance to Nature:

It has no sense of humor: in its beauty, as in its ugliness, or its neutrality, there is no laughter.
It lacks a moral purpose.
It lacks a satirical dimension, registers no irony.
Its pleasures lack resonance, being accidental; its horrors, even when premeditated, are equally perfunctory, "red in tooth and claw," et cetera.
It lacks a symbolic subtext - excepting that provided by man.
It has no (verbal) language.
It has no interest in ours.
It inspires a painfully limited set of responses in 'nature writers' -
REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.
It eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all.

2 links

An interesting article on John Berger,by the author of a book on Guy Debord.

A new Lacan blog. Contains links to lectures by Badiou, Zizek & others.

Reading Scholem..

In chapter one of The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Scholem quotes a long passage from Maimonides’s “Laws Concerning the Installation of Kings”. Scholem then remarks that “In these measured words of a great master every sentence has a polemical purpose.” This does not of course mean that Maimonides is a polemicist. Scholem is talking about strategic strikes against an enemy in a larger battle. Each statement is simultaneously an attempt to displace and rebuff another position. This of course is what polemic is about. But, just to clarify my previous post, the Polemicist (as I defined him) is someone who makes the enemy into a kind of fetish, a fetish to which he constantly returns and derives some obscure jouissance from doing so. Furthermore, without this enemy he would evaporate, lose his drive and consistency. The one who only engages in polemic, on the other hand, strikes against the enemy only to move forward to his true object. The Polemicist invokes the true object merely as a stick with which to beat the enemy.

But actually, what I wanted to quote was this passage from chapter two of Scholem’s book:

THE 19th century, and 19th-century Judaism, have bequeathed to the modern mind a complex of ideas about Messianism that have led to distortions and counterfeits from which it is by no means easy to free ourselves. We have been taught that the Messianic idea is part and parcel of the idea of the progress of the human race in the universe, that redemption is achieved by man's unassisted and continuous progress, leading to the ultimate liberation of all the goodness and nobility hidden within him. This, in essence, is the content which the Messianic ideal acquired under the combined dominance of religious and political liberalism-the result of an attempt to adapt the Messianic conceptions of the prophets and of Jewish religious tradition to the ideals of the French Revolution.

Traditionally, however, the Messianic idea in Judaism was not so cheerful; the coming of the Messiah was supposed to shake the foundations of the world. In the view of the prophets and Aggadists, redemption would only follow on a universal revolutionary disturbance, unparalleled disasters in which history would be dislodged and destroyed. The nineteenth century view is blind to this catastrophic aspect. It looks only to progress toward infinite perfection.

This also, in part, is why utopia cannot be envisaged. Because the subject who does the envisaging, the frames and metaphors and concepts that are the media of that envisaging, will themselves be smashed or interfered with in the course of 'revolutionary disturbance'.

Schmidt's

A reader emails me about the German restaurant Schmidt’s that used to be on Charlotte St (ie the real Charlotte st. in central London). Schmidt’s was pretty famous in its day and frequented, I think, by T.S. Eliot and various writers & journalists. ( A quick Google search reveals that the first edition of Socialist Register was launched there in 1964 ). But anyway, my email correspondent is interested in any information or anecdotes about the place. I know some CS readers are familiar with that area of London as it is and was, so do drop him a line if you have anything: londonleben@mac.com

Polemic

Reflections on friendship inevitably involve thinking about the figure of the enemy (Although I wonder, is the enemy really the opposite of the friend? And talk of enemies made me think of polemics.

The polemicist is one who must always have an enemy. He must plug in to the enemy to get his desire going, to keep himself awake and angry.This is why the polemicist is a curiously castrated figure.

When he takes a position, makes an argument, this is usually on the rebound from an encounter with his adversary. Once the rebound loses momentum so do the polemicist's principles and logic. He is not the master of his own agenda.

I've written elsewhere of the polemicist Peter Hitchens. His stance of injured dignity and appalled indignation is fully dependent on what it recoils from and attacks.Were these things to disappear the stance would crumble in ruins, doubtless taking a sizeable chuck of Peter Hitchens with it.

That he owes his enjoyment, his stance, his very self-definition to his enemy, has to be disavowed by the polemicist. And the disavowed debt then serves as a useful ingredient in the bile to be heaped on the enemy's head.

The further point is that the polemicist's enemy is never an abstract noun like Injustice, Exploitation. It is always a this idiot or these morons. It is a person or group, or the chimerical image thereof. An argument or position is thus seldom analysed or articulated in its own right. The polemicist cannot breath in the rarified atmosphere of pure reason. The argument is attacked only as an emanation, reflection or signature of the person or group in question. (The chimerical 'chattering classes' or dinner-party liberals, or the 'bleeding heart liberals' attacked every other day in The Sun, the 'trendy lefties', 'Guardianistas' and other polemical spectres beloved by the Right.. ). You will find no critique of, say, the idea that economic imperatives determine political decisions, only an attack on the mentality represented by this idea.

The polemicist is thus a in thrall to the Imaginary. He is uncomfortable with structures and concepts, but when one of his designated targets swims into view then the world - and with it his ego - assumes strength and definition.

Charlotte Street, Literary connections...

Yeats:

"He [Lionel Johnson] and Horne and Image and one or two others shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon, the Pre- Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but fresh now from some low public house."

(Nowadays, Fitzroy Sq, leads into Fitzroy St., which then becomes Charlotte st. Not sure whether Yeats has misremembered things or whether Charlotte street extended further back then).

Request

Am looking for this article:

Deleuze, “Statements and Profiles.” Trans. Keith W. Faulkner. Angelaki 8.3 (2003): 87-93. (I understand it relates to some of the stuff on friendship posted below). If anyone has a copy, or knows if it appears other than in Angelaki, please email me.

Also, for those interested in Zizek's forthcoming London 'masterclasses' on Lacan, the details are here:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/lacan.shtml

Dispensable objects, Indispensable Relations

One of the failings of some of the cruder versions of psychoanalysis, whether in looking at literary texts or examining individuals, is a preoccupation with objects over relations and functions. (As well as the presupposition that origin is goal).

Let’s take this from Wordsworth:

“That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov’d / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song.”

The crudest of ‘psychoanalytic’ equations here is Nature (river) = Mother (nurse). Nature is described in terms of the maternal role (here performed by the first mother-substitute, the nurse), and so much of how Wordsworth relates to nature is really a relation to the Maternal object. His relation to nature is only a shadow play, through which he enacts the longing for the maternal Thing etc. The Mother is the original, nature is a copy. Nature is the merest of stand-ins for something now absent.

The point, however, is that the relation to the mother is precisely that, a relation. If this relation – of an impossible proximity but also a 'slow ecstasy' – can be repeated with another ‘object’, all well and good, for what is sought is the relation. The relation escapes its object and becomes desired in its own right. Alternatively, you can think of this in terms of function. The nurse’s song functions to, say, lull him to sleep. The child, in discovering that function elsewhere is content at that. He does not need the object that in the beginning provided that function. Relations and functions are not glued to objects, nor do they serve simply as signs of those objects with which they were originally associated.

Friendship/ Blanchot

Blanchot: “The distance that affirms itself in proximity” & “We must give up tying to know those by whom we are linked by something essential”

As I move toward the friend her distance from me, which would otherwise have been hidden, emerges and is measured. This specific distance is the secret which the friendship discloses. It is the creature of intimacy.

___

Learn to keep silent, O friend. Speech is like silver, but to be silent at the right moment is pure gold. (Beethoven)

I was wondering about a phrase (re Nietzsche) from Friday’s conference on friendship: “There are truths in friendship that are better left unknown”. Is this significantly different from “There are truths that are better left unsaid”. Surely yes: it's not saying 'don't disclose' but - in certain areas - don't begin to question or interpret. To choose not to know.. (The friend is the one who knows when to say ‘I don’t want to know!’.)

This reminds me of two things not directly concerned with friendship. Rilke’s decision not to go through with psychoanalysis so that the invisible ground of his writing would not be exposed (and therefore ruined). The ‘dispute’ between Breton and CAillois about the Mexican jumping bean. Caillois wanting to open the bean and examine its secret, Breton insisting it remain closed – ‘I don’t want to know’ the effects are sufficient (poetry, mystery etc). We require certain blindspots; let us keep them blind even if it involves a certain artifice.

And might the ‘unknown’ refer not to uncomfortable facts about each friend, but to something ‘unknown’ to both friends, something about the friendship itself, perhaps even concerning the very basis of the friendship. Someone at the conference mentioned the idea of an algorithm, which produces a program without being directly present therein. So, if I have misunderstood him correctly, couldn’t this be used to think about a friendship, the algorithm which having facilitated the friendship must remain hidden.

WB/BB & Friendship

One friendship that came to mind in thinking about this subject: Benjamin/ Brecht and the Benjamin-Brecht combination in contrast to the Benjamin-Scholem combination.

The WB-BB combination creates a kind of axis between two poles: the ponderer and master of allegorical detour vs the irreverence and brusque practicality of his friend. This is for WB the axis of a quite specific and necessary estrangement. There are conversations & thoughts which can take place only along this axis. There is a becoming which takes place noly along this axis.

Scholem is more like the vigilant friend, holding before the other the image of his best self and of a final destination. For him, the Brecht-Benjamin combination is disastrous, diverting his friend along paths contrary to his own singular bias and destiny.

Two ‘models’ of friendship are here. Scholem: one moves toward the pre-existing Concept of oneself. Brecht: one produces new ‘concepts’ of the self – new lines of thought - through entering into different combinations and configurations.

Nietzsche on Friendship

About friends. Just think to yourself some time how different are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among the closest acquaintances; how even the same opinions have quite a different place or intensity in the heads of your friends than in your own; how many hundreds of times there is occasion for misunderstanding or hostile flight. After all that, you will say to yourself: "How unsure is the ground on which all our bonds and friendships rest; how near we are to cold downpours or ill weather; how lonely is every man!" If someone understands this, and also that all his fellow men's opinions, their kind and intensity, are as inevitable and irresponsible as their actions; if he learns to perceive that there is this inner inevitability of opinions, due to the indissoluble interweaving of character, occupation, talent, and environment-- then he will perhaps be rid of the bitterness and sharpness of that feeling with which the wise man called out: "Friends, there are no friends!"Rather, he will admit to himself that there are, indeed, friends, but they were brought to you by error and deception about yourself; and they must have learned to be silent in order to remain your friend; for almost always, such human relationships rest on the fact that a certain few things are never said, indeed that they are never touched upon; and once these pebbles are set rolling, the friendship follows after, and falls apart. Are there men who cannot be fatally wounded, were they to learn what their most intimate friends really know about them?By knowing ourselves and regarding our nature itself as a changing sphere of opinions and moods, thus learning to despise it a bit, we bring ourselves into balance with others again. It is true, we have good reason to despise each of our acquaintances, even the greatest; but we have just as good reason to turn this feeling against ourselves.And so let us bear with each other, since we do in fact bear with ourselves; and perhaps each man will some day know the more joyful hour in which he says:"Friends, there are no friends!" the dying wise man shouted."Enemies, there is no enemy!" shout I, the living fool.

Condescension/ Respect

The cult of 'popular culture' is often simple a purely verbal and inconsequential (and therefore pseudo-revolutionary) inversion of the class racism which reduces working-class practices to barbarism or vulgarity. Just as some celebrations of femininity simply reinforce male domination, so this ultimately very comfortable way of respecting 'the people', which, under the guise of exalting the working class, helps to enclose it in what it is by converting privation into a choice or an elective accomplishment, provides all the profits of a show of subversive, paradoxical generosity, while leaving things as they are, with one side in possession of its truly cultivated culture (or language), which is capable of absorbing its own distnguished subversion, and the other with its culture or language devoid of any social value and subject to abrupt devaluations.. which are fictiously rehabilitated by a simple operation of theoretical false accounting

Pierre Bourdieu, Pascallian Meditations

Idea

Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics:

"..the unity of a word, which is not itself present but instead rpresents, as it were, the configuration of its various nuances and possibilities of meaning: an idea in Benjamin's sense of the word."

(> the meaning of a word thus lies 'outside' it, in its possible relationships and uses, just as the 'meaning' of the self is 'deferred' through its actions, relations, implication in a world. )

To argue is already to lose

Added to notes on rhetoric:

To argue is to lose The very fact that your opponents argue against you is the best evidence against them. It means that your post has 'upset quite a few people', 'got a few people quite agitated,' 'got under their skin' etc They have not made an argument but had a tantrum, they are not making reasoned points but ‘throwing their toys out of the pram’. As in Freudian theory, so in blog rhetoric, to argue or contest only confirms your guilt. (see also: 'always psychologize', 'Emotion', 'Raw Nerve' and 'Goaded'.).

V. much enjoyed seeing this the other night:



Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh-igh,
Shadows--(coughing, then almost inaudible)--of the evening
Steal across the sky.

The Watchword of Friendship

Hölderlin to Hegel

Waltershausen

July 10, 1794

I am certain that you have occasionally thought of me since we parted from one another with the watchword -- Reich Gottes! [Kingdom of God] I believe that we would recognize each other throughout every metamorphosis with this watchword. I am certain that whatever you become, time will not efface this trait in you. I think that this will also be the case with me. Every trait that we love one another for is exquisite. And thus can we be sure of everlasting friendship.

(here)

More coffee

Michelet:

“Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

Bach's coffee cantata:

"Dear father, do not be so strict! If I can't have my little demi-tasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just like a dried up piece of roast goat! Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee, and if anyone wishes to please me, let him present me with—coffee!"

"Hot coffee helped him breathe more easily and he was inclined to drink a great
deal of it." (Marcel Proust: A Biography by Richard H. Barker)

"...he had to prepare himself by drinking coffee-- seventeen cups of it, he said..." (Marcel Proust: A Biography by Richard H. Barker)

"Why had coffee survived as his only food? I never asked him. I didn't like to ask
questions." (Monsieur Proust: A Memoir by Celeste Albaret)

Friendship..

nb, Previous posts on friendship partly prompted by couple of things from the Derrida book (see also here):

.. although the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage [?] with the features of the brother - who is critically at stake in this analysis - seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics.

Why would the friend be like a brother? Let us dream of a friendship which goes beyond this proximity of the congeneric double..

&

..is the friend the same or the other? Cicero prefers the same ... the friend is, as the translation has it, 'our own ideal image'. We envisage the friend as such. And this is how he envisages us: with a friendly look. Cicero uses the word examplar, which means portrait but also, as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model.. Now, according to Cicero, his exemplar is projected or recognised in the true friend, it is his ideal double, his other self, the same as self but improved. Since we watch him looking at us, thus watching ourselves, because we see him keeping our image in his eyes - in truth in ours - survival is then hoped for, illuminated in advance, if not assured for
this Narcissus who dreams of immortality.

Friendship, 2

A reader comments on the Friendship post:

"We really will not form friendship bonds with people who do not share the same thought process though".

I wanted to qualify this, or turn it around: in a friendship you have 'thought processes' that you couldn't have had outside the friendship, no? (Granted, I may be talking about certain kinds of friendship here). A conversation inside a friendship will lead to a place neither friend would have arrived at individually. This is partly what I meant by 'composition' - the thought of a friendship, irreducible to the 'thought processes' of either friend.

Perhaps sometimes, the thinking of a friend, in its very obstinate refusal to mirror or correspond with our own thinking, acts as a creative irritant - the necessary creative irritant which, precisely, one could not fashion oneself. And so, the friendship turns on something beyond this difference in thinking. (The idea, here, of a kind of still point on which the friendship turns?)

Finally, is there not something in excess about friendship: it exceeds the plane of identity/ difference. There is nothing on that plane which explains the friendship - or rather, there always is, so that its explanatory value is limited. That is, there are always points of identity and difference, in varying degrees in varying friendships. (If there is close resemblance, it is a mirroring; if none, 'opposites attract' - and all that's in between). Rather, the relation exceeds its parts; the parts escape into the relation.

Virtual Cottard

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features....

The 'Cottard' is also a rhetorical stategy much used in the blogosphere. Comments should appear suitably encrypted, arch, playful, never quite divulging their meaning. Your interlocuter tries to pin you down, to answer you, but the indefinite ironical form in which your ideas are couched facilitates your escape - you're already elsewhere, or on another level, smiling knowingly. "That is not what I meant at all". Perhaps less Cottard and more the Cheshire cat, a smile without a body of ideas, concerned only to maintain your position of enunciation outside or above the conversation.

On Friendship

Bump into F. who is organizing a conference on friendship. Comments on how issue of friendship often framed by question of similarity & difference. Is the friend like or unlike; is the friendship based on the perception of resemblance or of difference.

2 things:

1. If we do think of friendship in terms of likeness, then isn't it often the case that I am friends with x not so much because she is like or unlike me, but because when with her I am unlike myself. I am translated out of myself, in this way, only with this person.

2. There is a presupposition that the basic units are two individuals, and that friendship is a relation between these two pre-existing individuals. But isn't a friendship rather a composition. Our commitment to the friendship is a commitment to the unity of this composition. The subject of the friendship, its 'we', is a third supernumerary 'we'.

Or, friendship as a line between two points, but the points are just the places the line ends; it does not 'join' the two ends.

Example. My frienship with G. This friendship has a code. It is not the code of friendship but only of this friendship. It is neither mine nor his, but composed only in and by the friendship - the creature of the friendship. This code is formed by the peculiar configuation of G. and I. (The code is the subject-language of the friendship).

This is why we often form friendships with people apparently 'unlike' us (or why the question of likeness/ unlikeness is not primary): because of the peculiarity of the composition. The elements of the composition are 'unlike' judged simply on the axis of resemblance, but as elements of a composition there is no problem.

Friendship:

M Foucault: Let us speak about friends, then, but I will not speakto you of friends as such. I belong perhaps to a rather old-fashioned generation for whom friendship is something at oncecapital and superstitious. And I confess that I always have some difficulty in completely superimposing or integrating relationships of friendship with organizations, political groups, schools of thought,or academic circles. Friendship for me is a kind of a secret Freemasonry, but with some visible points. You spoke of Deleuze who is clearly someone of great importance for me. I consider him to bethe greatest current French philosopher.

[will update this]

willing servants

'In 1855, the year of the first Paris Exposition, Victor Hugo .. announced: “Progress is the footstep of God himself.” '

In the crystal palace of modernity, the signs of Progress were put on display.. Here is exhibit a, the railway; here is exhibit b, the workhouse, exhibit c, the new labour laws..

Return now to the typical address of political leaders in the times we're living. Whenever they face contestation, they have to hide what is happening by swiftly erecting a wall of opaque words. The conclusion of Jacques Chirac's address was a perfect example: instead of challenging the false concept of modernisation, its brutal dismantling is referred to as if it were some chapter in natural science. "The world of work", as the president announced, "in perpetual evolution....."

The economy (rather than this economic system) has its own mechanisms and laws. To be intelligent is to recognise - the objectivity of the economy’s workings and, therefore, your comparative impotence; to recognise that our fate is to be the managers, clerks, administrators; to salute, or assist with guile, what is in any case inevitable - . Progress, Modernisation, the New…..

The particular world organised by capitalism is the Universal; it is synonymous with the natural development of humanity as such. The ideas which function in this particular situation for this particular class or group are universal ideas. 'Modernization' on behalf of humanity etc

An Enlightenment concept: Ideology. Withholding the human world from humanity by dressing it up as nature, as the unfolding of reason, as a process without a subject. An Enlightenment task: to reveal instances where what is taken for nature, or passed off as nature, is in fact merely custom or human contrivance, or even merely the alibi of the powerful; to show that what is proclaimed as a universal - Progress, Modernisation, is only the attempt to place a particular organisation of the world beyond scrutiny and discussion. Demonstrating that something is custom or convention, or mere deception, rather than a fact of nature, is to deliver it into the hands of humanity.

“But, once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants”

role call

'The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.'

(here)

Boo-Hurrah for the Enlightenment

One should always try and rescue words from the work they are made to do in the current rhetorical marketplace, to set aright what stupidity and polemic have turned upside down or reduced to convenient and misleading abbreviation. . One presently rather overworked term is ‘Enlightenment’.

The Virtual Stoa has some questions about the term. He writes:

I think it's worth having answers to questions like these -- otherwise you just end up in a position where you can cheerlead for "the Enlightenment" (the rule of law! democracy! science!) or just slag it off for the bad things you vaguely associate with it somewhere along the way (racism! sexism! Revolutionary Terror!) without letting anything as complicated as history or evidence get in the way of your arguments. And that'd be a shame.

The conditional tense is presumably ironic. But if Chris or anyone thinks that the polemicists who have reduced 'Enlightenment' to a cheap catchphrase just need a few hours in the library, or that the said phrasemongers would welcome enlightenment as to the meaning of Enlightenment, that they actually care about this as a historical or philosophical question, then we are dealing with something akin to a category error.

It will then become evident

The tribunal of reason comes not to terrorise the unenlightened with an external doctrine or fixed measure, but to squint at it sideways until its kernel of truth can be discerned. It does not present the world with an altogether new principle, but allows it to discover the meaning of its existing principles. It compels a mystified humanity to go beyond itself, not by starting again from degree zero, but by a more rigorous form of fidelity. See the following Enlightenment document:

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be – as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion – to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

Balzac on Coffee

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. ....... coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. ...Coffee changes over time. Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended. For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power. When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days. Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. ...this coffee falls into your stomach ... it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder. ...When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more,... you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie. The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing... One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state ... some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. ... We found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

I'm curious.. has anyone tried Balzac's 'brutal method'?

note on method 3

"I believe it is axiomatic that a philosophy which does not include within itself a theory of its own particular situation, which does not make a place for some essential self-consciousness along with consciousness of the object with which it is concerned, which does not provide for some basic explanation of its own knowledge at the same time that it goes on knowing what it is supposed to know, is bound to end up drawing its own eye eithout realising it."

Again with the Zizek

In the email this morning: the Winter edition of the Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory contains an mp3 interview with Zizek. Meanwhile, Jodi ponders the extent to which Z. has become the mere vendor of his own reified thoughts.

Tell me about your Motherland

The Enlightenment and its Romantic aftermath gave birth to two doctrines distinguished only by the letter s.* The first was that people had the right to self-determination; the second was that peoples had such a right. The former belief is the keystone of modern democracy, and indeed of socialism; the second is a piece of romantic mystification, a fact which has not prevented a good many on the political Left from endorsing it. Nor has its philosophical basis been much examined in the standard literature on nationalism.

from: Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism and the Case of Ireland".

Can you psychoanalyse A People and not be complicit with this 'romantic mystification'???

petit aspect a

It can be rhetorically useful to assert that an event/policy is identical with a particular 'positive' consequence/ aspect thereof, regardless of whether this was the primary purpose of the policy. Objecting to the event is nothing more or less than objecting to this single aspect. The carpet bombing of the village has stopped the operations of the terrorist cell, therefore 1) this action is henceforth deemed 'the removal of the terrorist cell' & 2) those objecting to this policy are simply 'those who wished to see the terrorist operations continue'. As with other rhetorical strategies, sheer repetition can more than make up for sheer vacuity.

Morning Reading

Jonathan L. Beller on Deleuze & Cinema etc, via comments at Le Colonel Chabert.

And L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze

A(nother) note on rhetoric

If your opponent supports some group of people on account of its being oppressed, persecuted, marginalised etc, assert that he/she actually supports their beliefs and culture. Suppose for example, your opponent expresses his solidarity with some oppressed Catholic peasants in Latin America, he is necessarily a supporter of neo-feudal theocracy, sexual repression, draconian anti-abortion law etc, in league with reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces etc

Say things like:

Are you really comfortable being on the same side as someone who believes that a piece of bread is the flesh of God??

Talks

Zizek's master class on Lacan at Birkbeck college.

Ranciere at the ICA, 27th March.

Letters

In relation to an earlier post on letters and letters writing, it is probable that I was thinking of this:

"It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters we receive from a person should be more or less similiar to oneanother and combine to trace an image of the writer sufficiently different from the preson we know to constitute a second personality"

Proust, ROTP, iii, 66.

Secure in the bay of his illness

The writer: someone who is most at home when (and in) writing. What makes someone a writer rather than, say, a philosopher who writes, is that his thoughts do not precede his writing. His writing reveals his ideas to him.

The experience the writer has is of his writing as a clearing
where he himself becomes visible.

Let's say this writer has been to a conference, a conference populated by speakers, by people who like speaking and know how to project their voice and lend to their words the appertunance of charm. The conference confiscates the writer's energies from him, forces him to submit to an alien rule of sociability. So then, on the train returning home from the conference, looking out of the windows at the old docklands, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the winter sun, then he begins to write. Becuase this returning home after conference exhaustion, this is itself a figure of writing.

"One day noticing a small swelling on 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 plaything of him, until the non-distant end'

Perhaps not to this extent, but the writer is sometimes caught wishing for illness, as for a bay into which he can sail and disembark. Here, disburdedned of temporal duties he can set up his work station. Here, with his writing tablet, his fountain pen, he can begin the ritual of summoning his hidden self to the table.

S.B Arkem-Low