Wednesday, December 29, 2004

This and This

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

This and this.

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, December 23, 2004

I will be

Away in Yorkshire until December 28th.

'Anti-Americanism" Revisited

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

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

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

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

As well as this from Heidegger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rand Omidyolog

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

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

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

Monday, December 20, 2004

Tarrying with the Negative

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

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

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

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Freedom precedes Liberation

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

Zizek

Friday, December 17, 2004

Symbolic Order as Parasite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inner/outer

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

Hegel, Aesthetics.


A Note on Yeats

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




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

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Epic World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jameson on Benjamin and Sartre:

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

And on Lukacs:

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

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

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

Being Invisible

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

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Being Seen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Much Ado About Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Some links

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

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

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

J.B.

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

John Berger

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Note

Normal blogging service will hopefully be resumed by this weekend.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

The Ballad of Franz Kafka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Pipelines, 1998.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Apologies

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

A Note On Genet.

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

Genet





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

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

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

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

Saturday, November 27, 2004

'the game that nobody plays and everybody can watch'

Recommended articles for today:

1. Zizek:

'In the eyes of the US evangelical populists, the state stands for an alien power and, together with UN, is an agent of the Antichrist: it takes away the liberty of the Christian believer, relieving him of the moral responsibility of stewardship, and thus undermines the individualistic morality that makes each of us the architect of our own salvation – how to combine this with the unheard-of explosion the state apparatuses under Bush? No wonder large corporations are delighted to accept such evangelical attacks on the state, when the state tries to regulate media mergers, to put strictures on energy companies, to strengthen air pollution regulations, to protect wildlife and limit logging in the national parks, etc. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.'

2. John Berger, "Towards a Theory of the Visible'. A beautiful essay, containing pearls of reflection:

'What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person's likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly.'

- as well as his usual intellectual guerilla warfare against the present of late capitalism:

The Marquise de Sorcy de Thélusson, painted in 1790 by David, looks at me. Who could have foreseen in her time the solitude in which people today live? A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. Yet their falseness is not an error. If the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, turn-over becomes the absolute priority, and, consequently, the existant has to be disregarded or ignored or suppressed.
To paint now is an act of resistance which answers a widespread need and may instigate hope.


Of course, finally the pearls and the warfare are inseperable.

3. Guardian article on Studs Terkel.

Friday, November 26, 2004

Sartre, ii

From 'Family Idiot, ii":

"The word 'mechanism' and the word 'ecstasy' - what are they" Things distinct in their very substance from the objects they pretend to designate."

This is the thought S. ascribes to Flaubert. It is in one sense an utterly child-like thought. Why should there be a fit between the molecular structure of language and the molecular stucture (this phrase is Sartre's) of the world/ reality?

Sartre's response is, it seems, that the question itself is false. Because the world itself is made by and inseparable from language. So, for example, the word 'mountain' throws into relief the mountain, retreives it from and sets it over against the indifferentiated continuum of 'background'. And the word does this because for certain human purposes it is useful, necessary, to be able to designate 'mountain'. The thing mountain and the word "mountain" exist in some kind of instrumental complex. It is not just that there is an order of things out there on the one hand, and an order of words on the other. As Sartre puts it, 'the actual is already verbal'.

Sartre; Family Idiot

'Flaubert is categorical: poetry is a silent adventure of the soul, a lived event that has nothing in common with language; more precisely, poetry takes place against language.'

Initiatially puzzled by this. Possible interpretation = poetry disturbs language, from the inside, like a wind disturbing grass or making a curtain flutter. It, poetry, is visible, like the wind, only in and through what it disrupts and displaces. Poetry, in this sense, is a kind of force of silence inside language itself - ruffling its surface, upsetting syntactical fluency, breaking up frozen metaphors...

Alternatively, Sartre thinks that for Flaubert language is always a kind of foreign substance introduced into one's being, eccentric to the haeccity of the self, a socially defined material imposed on the tender soul. The silence of poetry is the rebellion of this mute soul against the foreign power which has invaded and colonised it. The affirmation of the silence within language and against language is the affirmation of what can not be assimilated to this foreign body introduced into our souls. The soul is only visible in the warp or anamorphosis it introduces into the symbolic order of language. The soul is no more than this anamophosis.

'Seeing someone we know..'

"Even the simple act which we describe as 'seeing someone we know' is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formulated about him.. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously with the sound of his voice as if he were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions that we recognise and to which we listen." Proust

In effect, the person becomes a convenient and naturalised sign of the notions we have about them; those notions are suddenly congealed and localised in their face, like a meaning tucks itself into a word, so that the word appears to vanish into it.

Sometimes, of course, in 'seeing someone we know' a detail will appear, or confront us, so at odds with this picture, that we will disavow it as insignificant or 'out of character'. In fact, this little 'punctum' represents the ambushing of the imaginary by the real.

Thursday, November 25, 2004

We think in names

Reading Schulz this evening, struck by an elementary thought about language. The phrase was this (although it could have been almost any): ".. with old pots and pans stacked on top of one another." When we read such words, we of course understand them at once, unthinkingly. Yet we do so without having to visualise a particular pot, a particular pan. It is though what the mind grasps, in a cursory and impatient way, is simply the idea of these things - without colour, volume, height, or any tangible qualities at all. And it is as though such ideas become 'more real' than tangible and discrete things, which matter only as illustrations or examples of such ideas.

Needless to say, this is hardly an original thought, and after some reflection and digging around, I realised that I was probably dimly inspired by this passage from Hegel:

"Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image evn: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimagined simple representation. We think in names."

A further quote from the author discovered on an old index card

"We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.''

Giovannni Pico Della Mirandola

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Jericho

For some reason I was thinking tonight of years spent in Oxford, and in particular a converted public house in Jericho where I once lived, rapt in secret studies. Near the house was a delicatessen called, I think, Nellies, and almost every day I would pop in there for baclava or coffee, and chat briefly with the proprietor, 'Mr Nellie' as we used to call him, who seemed to be from Iran or somewhere, and was always effortlessly happy and content, so it seemed. And sometimes, when I was snowed under with work, I would stroll past this humble shop and see it warmly lit and familiar, and think how lovely it would be to lead the simple life of such a shopkeeper, sat reading on quiet days, or engaging customers in idle conversation. At times, it served as an elementary fantasy of comfort and secure and easy existence, undisturbed by uncertainty, ensconced one's own little fiefdom, a petit-bourgeois fantasy perhaps, but a fantasy thrown up and made appealing only in relation to the then instability and uncertainty of life, the burdens of work and laborious days leading who knows where. And so today, this little wish-image, swam towards me again: the yellow light in the window of the deli glimpsed in passing on a winter's night, the reassuring rhythms of Mr Nellie's comfortable life, the joys of possession. Like that inexplicable feeling one has, somtimes, passing a house at night and seeing through the window, what cannot appear but as some utterly desirable domestic scene, some place of inviolable refuge and contentment, like those house windows found only on Christmas cards.

I am currently wretchedly busy, hence this moment of nostalgic indulgence. And hence the absence of substantial posts.

Monday, November 22, 2004

Derrida: Avenir

Courtesy of Wood's Lot, one of Derrida's last speeches. It speaks of a vision of Europe..

This Europe, as a proud descendant of the Enlightenment past and a harbinger of the new Enlightenment to come, would show the world what it means to base politics on something more sophisticated than simplistic binary oppositions. In this Europe it would be possible to criticise Israeli policy, especially that pursued by Ariel Sharon and backed by George Bush, without being accused of anti-semitism. In this Europe, supporting the Palestinians in their legitimate struggle for rights, land and a state would not mean supporting suicide bombing or agreeing with the anti-semitic propaganda that is rehabilitating (with sad success) the outrageous lie that is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this Europe it would be usual to worry both about rising anti-semitism and rising Islamophobia...

In this Europe it would be possible to criticise the policies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz without being accused of sympathy for Saddam Hussein and his regime. In this Europe no one would be called anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic for allying himself with those Americans, Israelis or Palestinians who bravely speak out against their own leaders, often far more vehemently than we do in Europe
.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

Placebo World

I was travelling on the Northern Line earlier today, propped up near the door, reading a book. Anyway, an American gentleman politely pointed out that I was stood infront of the 'open door' button. 'Oh don't worry,' I reassured him, 'The door opens anyway - the button is a totally functionless placebo, designed to give you the illusion of agency.' 'Ah yes', he quipped, we've got something similar back in my home state. It's called a voting machine.'

Of course, when I left the carriage, I pressed the button nonetheless.

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Walnuts and nutshells

The Guardian has an article picking up on some of the fallout from the Derrida obituaries. It quotes, presumably for a laugh, the views of A.C. Grayling. P., who is French, commented"This grayling, he appears, albeit on this slim evidence, to be a conceited numbskull happy to reproduce the small accretions of doxa deposited in his walnut-like brain" (i'm paraphrasing). Other quotes, however, from Glendinning and Eaglestone, are not too wide of the mark:

Well, it is very difficult to summarise Derrida's thought," says Glendinning. "It, like any serious and penetrating thought, even resists summary - any philosophy that can be summed up in a nutshell belongs in one. People are troubled by a form of critique which challenges our most cherished assumptions - and so they want a caricature."

Eaglestone also points out the impatience of the modern world, the lack of time for anything complicated, and even suggests an uglier motivation, "a thoroughgoing English anti-intellectualism which leads to academics and intellectuals being despised, so any charge will stick." Modern thinkers challenge received ideas, such as the assumption that genes alone determine character, or that art can only be good for you. They are not afraid to tackle institutions on both the left and the right, which has left them with few friends. "People don't like to have their certainties questioned," says Eaglestone. "Sadly that's the academic's job."


Let me also, belatedly, recommend this post on Derrida.

Even his honesty is dishonest.

Lacan on the peculiarly human capacity to lie through telling the truth. Similarly, honesty as dishonesty:

He tells F. candidly about his recent romantic disappointment. He says how hurt he was, and not just hurt but stunned, as from a blow to the head. But he tells F. this only as a way of warding F. away, for he hopes that F. will be uncomfortable with such candour, such guardless intimacy, and therefore back off and give him more space. This space is what he desires, and the candour only serves to procure it. Unflinching honesty coincides with complete dishonesty. The open heart is a ring of barbed wire.

'The alien being must be in me'

".. I too have a pronounced capacity for metamorphosising myself, which no one notices. How often must I have imitated Max. Yesterday evening on the way home, if I had seen myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky. The alien being must be in me, then, so distinctly and invisible as the hidden object in a picture puzzle, when, too, one would not find anything if one did not know that it is there."

K., diaries, 30th Sept. 1911.

A dimension of ourselves forever escapes us like the reverse of the mirror. K.'s parable of the man with a hole cut in the back of his skull so that all can see in but him.

The self, shot through with forms, gestures borrowed from the Other, or staging its being for the other, like Sartre's Flaubert (see previous). Suddenly aware, like K., of being already colonised by this Other, compromised, outside oneself in the image that others have of you, right from the begining. Right from the onset, when language, foreign, enters the soul, infiltrates and partitions the body's plenitude, introduces absence; arises, indeed, only through the need to call back what is absent, to refer to what is absent, in terms borrowed from the Other. But the awareness that this 'I' which resists the Other, which seems to escape it albeit by a hair's breadth, comes after it, a necessary mirage and our most precious possession.

Friday, November 19, 2004

A note found on an old index card..

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), Oratio de dignitate hominis (Oration on the Dignity of Man).

Pico retells the story of Genesis as an explanation of human desire. God completed the universe without Man in it, each thing in its assigned place and according to its proper and invariant nature. Trees are content to be trees, likewise stones, clouds. They do not desire to be anything else. Then, looking at it all, God "longed for there to be someone to think about the reason for such a vast work, to love its beauty, to wonder at its greatness." The creation was entire onto and of itself, with no empty position in the Chain of Being for another creature. But God made Man "of indeterminate form." Man alone has no pre-determined nature fixing his actions, thoughts, and desires; Pico's God tells Adam, "You are the moulder and maker of yourself; you may sculpt yourself into whatever shape you prefer" . In Pico's thought, infinitely unsatisfied desire is at the core of the human person.


Image 2.

Caught in the image that others have of him, the child tries to enact, to act out this image, to become it, in order to elicit parental approval. He/ she learns to perform for that audience called his parents.

Of course, we can never wholly be sure that we have correctly understood this image that others entertain of us, that we have answered the question ‘what do they want from me? What do they want me to be?” the image that others have of the child is therefore a experienced as a kind of interrogation which the child must endure and answer.

Sartre, Family Idiot:

“Others can reach him through speech; they affirm in him alien phrases that designate him from the outside [such a good boy, so bright, so promising, that boy will come to nothing] and implant themselves in his head; he cannot make them his own…”
“.. the little boy is crushed by the weight of strange phrases that designate him, is informed by these phrases that in the eyes of others he has an other reality, which they take for his true reality. For them he is a person with fixed characteristics. He tries to be this person, to act it out.. expressing his desires and his pain in a certain style he thinks is expected of him.. in the object he is for others he recognizes an ontological primacy over the subject he is for himself. He (the child) thinks he really is this unknown being his parents have discovered.. he tries to represent it, not only to flatter them but to open himself to his objective reality, so that this reality, evoked by his miming and beseeching gestures, should slip into him and fill him with its density. In sum, he tries to incarnate his other self, to lend his living and suffering body to this collection of abstract determinations. But he recognizes that he will never be for himself what he is, perhaps, for others” He can never coincide with the ‘Gustave’ he is for others

Image 1.

‘What is at stake is the specific function of the image and its eminently historical character. There are a couple of important details here. First, man is the only being who is interested in images as such. Animals are only interested in images to the extent that they are fooled. You can fool a bird with an image of another bird, in order to trap it. But when the animal realizes its dealing with an image, it loses interest completely. Now man is the animal who is interested in images when he has recognized them as such. That is why he’s interested in painting and why he goes to the cinema [..] He is interested in images after he has recognized they are not real beings.”

From Georgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonagh (MIT: London, 2002).

“At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child’s actual helplessness and lack of coordination”

Concept and example

The concept: a statement that undermines the very position from which it is enunciated.

The example: "Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities.. without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability.?"

As Samuel Beckett once wrote, 'Uptherepublic'

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Random Voice from the Past 1: Thomas Carlyle

'All this dire misrery, therefore; all this of our poor workhouse workmen, of our Chartisms, Trade-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms, and the general downbreak of laissez-faire in these days, - may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of nature, saying to us: Behold! Supply and demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man, - how far from it. '

Protestation

'The author of Charlotte Street, Mark Kaplan, may well protest his innocence here, but if you scan his various posts there is often a veiled provocation or attack on some deserving victim.’

Naturally, I have no idea what he is referring to. None. All I will say is that some of my posts are themselves provoked by some particular act of imbecility or some particular instance of the journalistic cliché machine creaking and peddling it’s vacuous wares. The particular instance or act is undeserving of attention in itself, lest it be elevated to the false dignity of an object of thought. Instead it is jettisoned in moving towards some more general conclusion. This general conclusion no longer bears the traces of the particular offending item which provoked it. At least, I didn't think so. But perhaps the more canny readers can indeed read backwards from these general remarks and dimly perceive the vestigial outline of the example which occasioned them.

Deleuze, writing about Francis Bacon, suggests that the initial painterly canvas is not blank. Not for Bacon at least. It is already scribbled through with clichés and the dead weight of the history of painting. The painter must fend off this frozen scribble and win space and freedom for himself. Similarly, any piece of writing which enters the public sphere must presumably first budge and contend with the pre-existing encrusted ideas and the inertia of received opinion. It can therefore be thought to involve, where it does not simply confirm and slot into this pre-existing field, an act of low-level violence, a pre-emptive strike, or even just a sullen reproach. It is therefore entirely reassuring to me that my posts appear as challenges, incitements or whatever.

n.b. the above post is a calculated provocation and not to be taken seriously.

A NOte On Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic theory confers on the ego the function of accommodating intelligently to reality, and regulating the drives. When libidinal motivations are prevented from emerging as conscious intentions, they assume the features of pseudo-natural causes – that is, of the Id qua blind force dominating the subject behind his back. The Id penetrates the texture of everyday language by distorting grammar and confounding the proper use of public language through false semantic identifications: in symptoms, the subject speaks a kind of ‘private language’ that is incomprehensible to the conscious ego. In other words, symptoms are fragments of the public text chained to the symbols of illicit desires excluded from public communication

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

G.

'It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And this is because we are all too aware of what is continually traversing the story-line laterally. That is to say, instead of being aware of point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, as the centre of a star of lines. Such awareness is the result of our constantly having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities.'

John Berger.

ReadySteadyBlog wonders whether a better novel than G. has won the Booker prize. I think not. Nor has a better acceptance speech been made (sorry, couldn't find the whole thing online).

Monday, November 15, 2004

interval

I may be too busy to post for a couple of days. Would for the time being just like to draw attention to the two interesting items on the Lancet study and related literature cited at Dead Men Left.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

The Market Place of Ideas.

'There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other.'

Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle [1988], trans. Malcolm Imrie, London 1998, pp. 13–19 , Quoted in:

T.J. Clark etc, “The State, the Spectacle and September 11”, from which comes this neat encapsulation of the Spectacle:

“The notion ‘spectacle’ was intended, then, as a first stab at characterizing a new form of, or stage in, the accumulation of capital. What it named preeminently was the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.”

Unfixed

Curiously, I once considered adding to my notes on rhetoric the entry “Always Psychologise!: If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc…”. My only advice would be, make sure it is indeed more than once. Or, indeed, even once.

Coincidentally, Norman Geras has posted a tetchy and rather odd response to a recent post of mine, alleging I have a ‘fixation’ with him. He kicks off in avuncular chuckling mode but then cedes the initiative to the underlying irritation. Finally, he offers the following counsel:

“Here's some free advice for him about his fixation. Get over it. It will long have become evident to even the slowest of minds that I do not have the 'correct' left balance of views according to a certain blogospheric clucking company.”

As they say these days, “what’s that about?”. As far as I know, I have linked to Geras’s blog perhaps four times in seven months. Or, if you prefer, probably about two dozen words in 50, 000. Generally these have been extremely brief and either neutral or favourable. Recently I linked to him only to quote a passage he had quoted himself. The last (offending) passage referred to him again briefly on route to some more general and admittedly pretty sketchy thoughts on universal moral imperatives. If this is a fixation, it is indeed an ‘exquisitely indirect’ and intermittent one, so deliciously indirect as to work almost entirely by neglect and omission.

The peculiar thing, however, is that what Geras took as an ‘exquisitely indirect’ attack on himself was, rather, a direct and unexquisite post about something else - ‘universal imperatives’ , and merely posed a couple of open-ended questions in relation to these. I referred to his and Stephen Pollard’s sites in the way that bloggers do to indicate the path whereby they arrived at a certain place. I cheekily half-nicked a phrase from Geras to use as an example. This was obviously unwise judging by the misunderstanding it has produced, a misunderstanding utterly out of proportion with its polemical object. If you surgically subtract the assumption that the post is ‘about’ Norman Geras, you’ll find it makes rather more sense (You’ll find, for example, that the open-ended questions are actually genuine questions and not circuitous accusations). So yes, Norman, I alluded to you in passing on my way somewhere else. ‘Get over it’.

Perhaps we can now lay the matter to rest with one of those diverting little normblog games guessing which bloggers constitute the nameless ‘clucking company’ alluded to above.

Incidentally, for the record, I think ‘indirection’ can indeed be an interesting device. One alludes to, gestures towards one’s interlocutor without really specifying an argument. The interlocutor, bemused and unnerved, fills in the blanks and constructs an argument of his own which he then refutes. This argument, being entirely his own invention, can be highly revealing of his preoccupations and anxieties.

Friday, November 12, 2004

Presentiments of the Spectacle, ii

"The freedom of conversation is being lost. If earlier it was a matter of course to take interest in one's partner, this is now replaced by inquiry into the price of his shoes or his umbrella. Irresistibly intruding upon any convivial exchange is the theme of the condition of life, of money. What this theme involves is not so much the concerns and sorrows of individuals, in which they might be able to help one another, as the overall picture. It is as if one were trapped in a theatre and had to follow the events in the stage whether one wanted to or not, had to make them again and again, willingly or unwillingly, the subject of one's thoughts and speech."

Walter Benjamin.

“The situation is complicated by the fact that less then ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means they are no longer explicit.”

Brecht.

>>

Thursday, November 11, 2004

As I Walked Out Down Charlotte Place..

Mr Stephen Pollard the frequent object of Virtual ridicule, whose bizarre form I glimpsed waddling down Charlotte Place the other day, admitted some days ago to wishing Arafat dead. So, his wish is granted. Pollard also made a number of jokes at the expense of this terminally ill old man. He wished the terminally ill old man dead, invited our complicit laughter. Here I anticipate your objection: You note the rhetorical move - by refering to Arafat as a 'terminally ill old man' I am, you say, 'being emotive'. Even though I am using a more abstract category, and what I am saying is true, I am being emotive. Why? Because, you say, I am abstracting away from those particulars of Arafat which make him repugnant. Ok,

My question is, under what conditions does the invocation of a universal statement like

"Making jokes about terminally ill old men/ wishing people dead is wrong" or "Calling for people to be assasinated is wrong"

become a rhetorical ploy and when is it an instance of the stringency of the universal imperative, which demands that we include even what we intuitively hate under its rule.

When someone says, in relation to Bush, 'to call for someone's assasination is wrong' do we really believe that a call for Arafat's assasination would have provoked the same reaction? Is it really some universal principle that is being defended here, or is it GWB?

How many of us are prepared truly to follow a universal imperative all the way? How many only stick with the imperative until it crashes into some particular they do not like? If torture is universally wrong, then it is wrong to torture terrorists; if free speech is a universal right then you must defend it for the vilest racist; if you believe in the univesal imperative to love your neighbor, then this means an Israeli loving a Palestinian and viceversa.

Here is a related extract from Zizek's Organs Without Bodies [it begins with an interview with Emmanuel Levinas:

"Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the 'other'. Isn't history, isn't politics, the very site of the encounter with the 'other'? Isn't .. and for the Israeli, the 'other' above all the Palestinian?"

To this Levinas answered: [..] 'If your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy[..] There are people who are wrong."

[..] What Levinas is basically saying is that, in principle, respect for alterity is unconditional (the highest sort of respect), but when faced with a concrete other, one should nonetheless see if he is a friend or enemy. In short, in terms of practical politics, the respect for alterity strictly means nothing."

And yet, there is nothing in the concept of 'unconditional respect for alterity' that makes it bawk at this particular object; rather Levinas' own philosphical stringency is hijacked by his 'common sense'. Is this hijacking of the universal by the particular prejudice part of what me mean by ideology??

[n.b. A link to Norman Geras in the above seems to have led to some confusion (at least on the part of NG) and obscured the point of the post. So, for the sake of clarity, i've removed it.]

Derrida's legacy

An email received this morning draws my attention to 'some recent Zizek essays':

Henning Mankell, the Artist of the Parallax View http://www.lacan.com/zizekmankell.htm ;
Will You Laugh for Me, Please http://www.lacan.com/zizeklaugh.htm; Will She Ever Die (Leni Riefenstahl) http://www.lacan.com/zizekleni.htm; A Cup of Decaf Reality http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm


In today's THES there is a series of articles on 'Jacques Derrida's legacy'. Simon Blackburn's piece is rather smug, schoolmasterly and patronising. There is, apparently a sense in which "Derrida and his disciples are like mentors encouraging people not to read." I don't know about the unnamed 'mentors' but as far as Derrida goes, this is pretty much the exact reverse of the truth. Blackburn's article is peppered with nice everyday examples and images - speed bumps and drawers of socks - presumably there to signify 'plain common sense' and upset the unecessarily abstruse applecart of 'Theory'. Theory itself - critcal reflection on uderlying assumptions - is a way of 'avoiding the hard work' and claiming a superior vantage point. (Doesn't anyone who claims access to knowledge claim a 'superior vantage point' or am i being dense?) Derrida is subsumed under the 'pomo' rubric even as we're reminded that he's saying little new, he's both incomprehensible and simply dressing up old verities. I'm unfamiliar with Blackburn's work, but if a writer were to be judged by the strength and plausibility of his invented targets, then this invented target is very weak indeed...

Richard Rorty on the same subject is, typically, eminently and effortlessly lucid; not that I agree with him, but at least he entertains. Simon Critchley also has a piece which, as you might expect, is the most generous of the lot.

Monday, November 08, 2004

A Note on Spiritualism

Less than 100 years before Yeats a philosopher as eminent as Kant could deem spiritualism worthy of serious treatment. Adorno later dealt with ans derided it. For Kant, the problem lay in its indigent conception of the sensible/ super-sensible relation. Like Kantian philosophy, spiritualism intuits a reality/ realm ‘beyond’ what can be sensuously apprehended. But whereas for Kant, this is a radically Other realm, inaccessible to our frames and categories, to the very grain of our language, for spiritualism it is a kind of hallucinatory, ethereal version of the empirically given. ‘Reality’ is subtended, supported by a kind of pallid simulacrum of itself. The ‘ghost’ of a person, for example, is merely a second body – hazy, transluscent, perhaps, lacking a usual relation to space and substance, but a kind of body nonetheless. Thus, for the spiritualist the so-called ‘beyond’ – the impossible ‘beyond’ which subtends space and time – is little more than the ‘here and now’ with its weight and volume subtracted. What such a conception fails to register is that we are dealing with two qualitatively different dimensions.

Thus, treated as a proposition (or set thereof) spiritualism is obviously false, in the manner of a category error. But one should be concerned, however, only with rescuing its ‘moment of truth’, which is to say: its affective charge, its existential and/ or poetic possibilities, its use-value. This, rather than its epistemological solidity is why people like Yeats were drawn to it... and I intend sposting something on this shortly, as part of an ongoing piece on Yeats, as it happens.

[J.Derbyshire has disputed whether Kant was indeed dealing 'seriously' with Swedenborg and spiritualism. 'Substantial treatment' may have been preferable, but in any case, the matter is disputed, see Gregory Johnson's intro and notes to this. Zizek (inevitably) also assigns a key place to this essay in Kant's philosophy (I can't remember where - perhaps Tarrying.)

Performative and retroactive signifiers

think of the proverbial unexpected outbursts of the beloved: ‘I love you’ which surprises even the one who utters it.”

This 'unexpected outburst' is, simultaneously, a realisation and an inauguration of a state of affairs, an event. A birth, like a note out of silence, a silence which (afterwards) we take to have been pregnant with unresolved tensions. It is, among other things, an instance of the performative magic of the signifier.

C.f. the experience of saying something which is ‘not what I meant’/ ‘I didn’t intend that’ – that is, it is not that one has a fully formed content to communicate which one then ‘fails to express’ – it is only after saying something that one realizes it is 'not what one meant'. Only once speech has missed the mark can one see the mark itself.

‘What one intended’ thus flashes into view ‘in arrears’.

Charlotte Street, W1

On October 18th 1831, four years after her husband's death, Catherine Blake died at 17 Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. In this last home, a contemporary report states, she called "continually to her William, as if he were in the next room, to say she was coming to him and would not be long now".

I am assuming that what was 'Upper Charlotte Street' is now Fitzroy street. Curiously, 17 Fitzroy st. has associations with Yeats and ocuultism (if I remember correctly) and is also very near where Lionel Johnson used to live. If anyone can confirm whether Fitzroy Street used to be 'Upper Charlotte St.' I would appreciate any info. Otherwise, I'll have to trudge to the British Library.

Yes, this is a rather obscure footnote, nevertheless..

Sunday, November 07, 2004

The Scholars

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk their way?

-- William Butler Yeats

60 million copies sold.



From a recent Zizek article:

'Take the literary bestsellers of U.S. Christian fundamentalism, Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s “Left Behind” series of 12 novels on the upcoming end of the world that have sold more than 60 million copies. The Left Behind story begins with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of millions of people—the saved souls whom God calls to himself in order to spare them the horrors of Armageddon. The Anti-Christ then appears, a young, slick and charismatic Romanian politician named Nicolae Carpathia, who, after being elected general secretary of the United Nations, moves U.N. headquarters to Babylon where he imposes an anti-American world government that disarms all nation-states. This ridiculous plot unfolds until the final battle when all non-Christians—Jews, Muslims, et al—are consumed in a cataclysmic fire. Imagine the outcry in the Western liberal media if a similar story written from the Muslim standpoint had become a bestseller in the Arab countries! It is not the poverty and primitivism of these novels that is breathtaking, but rather the strange overlap between the “serious” religious message and the trashiest conventions of pop culture commercialism.'

Exactly this: the combination of the modern culture industry, dominant at the level of form, and the utterly retrogade contents enclosed by such forms, consumerist trash and myopic religious literalism. Only superficially is this a 'contradiction'. The strange magnetism that these two things exert upon one another, or rather their ultimate identity, is what needs to be understood.

Or does the alchemic arithmetic of consumerist democracy simply dictate that so many millions can't be wrong?

Some interesting, critical remarks on Zizek's essay, here.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Archaic/ avant-garde

A number of modern thinkers - from Yeats to Bataille - self-consciously choose an archaic, pre-modern 'episteme'; choose it for the cognitive and imaginative sparks thereby generated, for its oppositional and aggravational force. They stubbornly cling to their point of archaic negativity in the face of the overwhelming positivity of the new life world, and attempt even to interpret the New with the creaky conceptual machinery of the Old. Bataille's cosmology - a finite, bound world of humours, energies; his insistence on categories and oppositions borrowed from the world of religious orthodoxy and feudalism. The more dubious example of Pound's resurrection of 'usury'.

Of course, one cannot 'chose' tradition. Or rather, the very fact of being 'chosen' changes and infects the thing itself. For the last thing such archaic systems were was chosen. They were the very framework within which choices were made, the very inner substance of choice. To cling to such systems, therefore, always involves an act of stubborn and eccentric defiance wholly exterior t of he systems themselves.

Tradition is precisely the inherited, enduring, pre-conscious background to belief. To choose it is to negate it, and those who do choose it live in an impossible place, absurd yet defiant, standing haughtily on thin air.

These writers and thinkers are not answering tradition, but answering the New by quoting and tarrying with tradition. They would defy the New but have only the Old. Using old names, old tokens of interest only to the lexical and conceptual numusmatists, they try and lay their hands on and name what is lacking in the present.

I

"True, I have notions, that is to say, determinate notions; but the I is the pure notion itself which, as notion, has come into existence. " (Hegel)

"Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever." (Kant)


You will remember that in one of the early exchanges between Iago and Roderigo in Othello Iago makes the cryptic remark "I am not what I am". It is not quite "I am not what I seem" and is the converse of the more usual (to us) radiant tautology "I am what I am". What to make of this? Typically, to say 'what you are' involves attaching a predicate to a subject: 'I am a Jew'; 'I am a writer'; 'I am a King.' The I is that about which predicates are asserted. That, for Kant, is the definition of it. But Kant's point is that none of these predicates exhausts the 'I' to which they are attached. There is always a leftover. The 'I' is that which is never fully realised in those predicates, so that these last constitutively fail to hit the mark, and this mark which they fail to hit, this mark delineated in its negativity by this failure, is the I.

If we take into account that statements of identity take the subject predicate form 'I am Y' but that the predicate never accounts for, never counts as one the 'I', then the I is not the predicate. The I is not 'what it is'. 'I am not what I am'. Iago lurks behind his predicates - 'honest Iago' , his motives even ('I am envious') - he is this pure negation, this secret naught, this silence that will never speak word. Here it is that we glimpse the modern 'I", which to the Elizabethan age is daemonic. A glint of pure negation seen in the eye of the public self.

Friday, November 05, 2004

Letter from Lilliput

Over at Olio A. Ginous's blog, Lilliput, the following post:

The 'liberal-left,' that nefarious and spectral entity, have once again been showing themselves up, this time by responding with shameless chagrin to the re-election of George W. Bush. Their cries of "how could so many people have been so wrong" reveal undisguised contempt for American democracy. Why can these people not punctually recognise their errors or, assuming they have genuine objections to Bush (as opposed to mere histrionic posturing) muffle these genuine beliefs when the 'majority' decision comes through. Needless to say, the moral failure of the Liberal Left can be gauged by this nonsensical letter received from a nameless correspondent:

"In general those alleging this contempt for the People are the same ones who showed no such deference toward public opinion when it came to the majority of Europe objecting to the war in Iraq and their governments' participation therein. No. These anti-war protesters had no moral case whatsoever, were a disgrace to the Left adn [sic!!] so on, despite their millions. Their numbers counted for nothing. Thus, their governments could ignore them with impunity, as in, for example - 'Washington scolded German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining an anti-war stance supported by the large majority of Germans. In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94 percent of the people are opposed to allowing U.S. troops in their country for the war.' So, had the people whose governments went to war in their name been allowed to vote on it, or had indeed the governments taken seriously popular opinion, these pro-war people would doubtless have responded 'how could so many people have been so wrong', logically as it happens, from their point of view".

Another reader writes, this time not bothering to disguise his demotic hostility:

“Yes, I called Bush a chimp – it’s called satire you humorless prick. Like all ex-leftists you turn on your ex-comrades with Oedipal hatred, for you have to deny the very possibility of a genuine and principled left, otherwise your [sic!!] flooded with the self-reproach of the turncoat.”


Goodness!

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Earlier, in Gastro

Some days are smooth, unperturbed by real thought, they drift by under some unauspicious and slothful weather; one is reduced to the receptive flatness of a photographic plate, copying impressions, textual snippets, hoping these purloined letters and stray sense-data will leave a deposit in memory, will make themselves available for some future retrieval..

One reads a passage of a book and only has the energy to say, yes, that's right, I will copy it out, double it, as if to generate some weak simulacrum of thought. So, today, in Gastro, I wrote nothing at all, only copied this from Badiou:

"In politics, thinking searches within a situation for a possibility that the dominant state of things does not allow to be seen. For example: today, in Europe as elsewhere, the state of things is the market economy, competition, the private sector, the taste for money, familial comfort, the parliamentary elections, etc. A genuine political thinking will attempt to find a possibility which is not homogeneous with this state of things. A political thinking will say: here is a collective possibility; perhaps it is small and local, but its rule is not that of the dominant rule. And a political thinking will formulate this possibility, practise it, and draw all of its consequences." (Infinite Thought, p. 82).

No Comment

"A coalition partner must do more than just express sympathy," Bush said alongside Chirac. "A coalition partner must perform." And then he added a grim warning for non-performers: "Over time, it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity." To whom and for what? He did not elaborate."

(New Statesman November 12th 2001)

'We are in the midst of a 'silent revolution,' in which the unwritten rules that determine the most elementary international logic are changing. Washington scolded German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining an anti-war stance supported by the large majority of Germans. In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94 percent of the people are opposed to allowing U.S. troops in their country for the war. Where is democracy here? Those who pose as global defenders of democracy are the ones who are effectively undermining it'.

(Zizek 2003)

'Another stunning example of U.S. double-think was the two-sided pressure it exerted on Serbia in the summer of 2003. U.S. officials demanded that Serbia deliver suspected war criminals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (in accordance with the logic of the global empire, which demands transnational judicial institutions); but they also simultaneously pressured Serbia to sign a bilateral treaty obliging it not to deliver to the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) any U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with the logic of the nation-state). No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury'.

'When Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union message, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity," this apparent burst of humility, in fact, concealed its totalitarian opposite. Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people. And does the same not hold for Bush's claim? It would have been easier if freedom effectively were to be just the United States' gift to other nations; that way, those who oppose U.S. policies would merely be against the policies of a single nation-state. But if freedom is God's gift to humanity, and the U.S. government sees itself as the chosen instrument for showering this gift on all the nations of the world, then those who oppose U.S. policies are rejecting the noblest gift of God to humanity.

(ibid.)