Announcement

Today I have been moving to a new flat. Tommorow I am going to Dublin until Sunday. It is therefore unlikely that anything will be posted in the next four days. Thereafter, things should be back to normal.


4/10 I am, at this moment, in an internet cafe in Dublin. Will be in LOndon later this evening. Anyway, I referred casually in an earlier post to Bush as a 'karaoke president', a phrase which came to mind as I read this online:

"In the middle of an answer last night Bush said, "now let me finish" as if someone was interrupting him- yet nobody did- he was talking to the person in his earpiece".

Dreams

There is a peculiar mental state wherein the subject is at once absent and all pervasive. This is the dream state. As Adorno puts it:

In the dream, where the subject, absent from the start, colours and permeates everything that happens from the wings. (Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, p. 87).

The subject is here not a kind of isolated point, something which has predicates or relations to objects, it has, rather, flooded the objects in question. But again, there is a puzzling logic of inversion at work, for it is here, when the subject saturates the world of phenomenon, that what confronts us is most alien, most ‘uncanny’. Our dreams can frighten or confound us. The paradox: that a world flooded with our own subjectivity suddenly recoils from us into unfamiliarity, repels us at the moment when we are beyond even closeness. The subject, completely immersed in itself, becomes a stranger to itself.

Three Heideggerian reflections

Rilke:

The world draws into itself; for things too, do the same in their turn, by shifting their existence more and more into the vibrations of money, and developing there for themselves a kind of spirituality which even now already surpasses their palpable reality.

Things only exist as the embodiment or sign of their exchange value. Hence their presence, their palpable being, is extinguished. Things then exist in a mode of absence – their (abstract) essence is elsewhere. They themselves become exchangeable representatives of that ‘apriori’ value. Heidegger’s ‘turn’ to the thing, to the immediacies of presence, the jugness of jug etc, is an obvious attempt to counter-attack this evaporation of Being. Before that, Being and Time is among other things, a waving goodbye to certain categories of things, and a celebration of their (now disappearing) form.

***

Is the work of art a ‘truth event’ in the Badiou-ian sense? The formation of the art work reveals the ‘truth’ of the earth, a truth which was ‘already there’ yet at the same time does not pre-exist its emergence.

By contrast the temple work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glimmer and shimmer, colours to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, and the hardness and lustre of metal, into the lightning and darkening of colour, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word.

But how is this last on the same ontological level as the preceding examples?? How can language be grouped with ‘earth’? does language really ‘shine forth’ in a poem in a sense analogous to the shining forth of metal in the great temple.

**

Language is in the world, doing jobs within the world – telling, revealing, disclosing, calling. And this is where those who think of language in terms largely of representation or misrepresentation get it wrong. They pre-posit the world on the one hand and representations on the other. The error, perhaps, stems from thinking of language as a self-sufficient system, with relations only within itself. Language is ‘available’, ready-to-hand, already out there and involved. “Language is as Dasein is.” Saussure – or some of his avatars – treat language as ‘occurent’ and have thereby assumed both too little and too much. Language and world are equiprimordial. Just as, with the hammer, we go through and beyond the hammer in realising our tasks, so, in communicating, words disappear into their target situation. But when the word has come to rest, disengaged from the active cluster and kinesis of praxis, only then does it gaze back at us as something (merely) occurent, does it assume a magical autonomy and apophantic resonance.

Snapshots

There are a couple of interesting articles in today’s Guardian. One is a tribute to Edward Said penned by Tom Paulin; the other is Marina Warner’s article on optical paradoxes.

Paulin also draws our attention to a conference on Said, featuring a number of prominent speakers and information about which can be found here.

An edited version of John Berger's article "A Moment in Ramalah" appears here:

Certain trees - particularly the mulberries and medlars - still tell the story of how long ago, in another life, before the nakba, Ramallah was, for the well-off, a town of leisure and ease, a place to retreat to from nearby Jerusalem during the hot summers, a resort. The nakba refers to the 'catastrophe' of 1948 when ten thousand Palestinians were killed and 700,000 were forced to leave their country. Long ago, newly married couples planted roses in Ramallah gardens as an augury for their future life together. The alluvial soil suited the roses. Today there is not a wall in the town centre of Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority, which is not covered with photographs of the dead, taken when they were alive, and now reprinted as small posters


“Three stories from the walls.

Husni al-Nayjar, 14 years old. He worked helping his father who was a welder. While flinging stones, he was shot dead with a bullet to the head. In his photo he gazes calmly and unwaveringly into the middle distance.

Abdelhamid Kharti, 34 years old. Painter and writer. When young, he had trained as a nurse. He volunteered to join a medical emergency unit for rescuing and taking care of the wounded. His corpse was found near a checkpoint, after a night when there had been no confrontations. His fingers had been cut off. A thumb was hanging loose. An arm, a hand and his jaw were broken. There were twenty bullets in his body.

Muhammad al-Durra, 12 years old, lived in the Breij Camp. He was returning home with his father across the Netzarin checkpoint in Gaza and they were ordered to get out of their vehicle. Soldiers were already shooting. The two of them took immediate cover behind a cement wall. The father waved to show they were there and was shot in the hand. A little later Muhammad was shot in the foot. The father now shielded his son with his own body. More bullets hit both, and the boy was killed. Doctors removed eight bullets from the father's body, but he has been paralysed as a consequence of the wounds and is unable to work. Because the incident happened to be filmed, the story is told and retold across the world.”

Some will immediately respond: "Who can verify these stories?" The fact that we cannot verify them (because those who would verify such stories are not granted legitimacy, because the ‘legitimate’ scribes will not grant them verification), that official accounts have no interest in their verification or even registration, that History, written by the victors, does not feel answerable to such stories and can let them spill into oblivion with impunity, that even to draw attention to such stories is met by accusations of unacceptable complicities, that one is re-directed to more 'worthy' items and suddenly deafened by ideologues screaming for 'context'- all this is of course precisely the problem.

John Butler Yeats and Hegel

“History too can be so understood and related that through single events and individuals their essential meaning and necessary connection can secretly shine.” (Hegel, Aesthetics, p 129)

Hegel’s proposition, now almost universally dismissed or derided even, nonetheless addresses a problem presumably generic to any historical study; namely a kind of optical paradox, whereby what appears close up as a collection of random and capricious acts assumes, from a suitable distance, a certain necessity and coherence surely unbeknown to the actors themselves. The ‘subject’ of historical study such as the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, the Roman state, strikes us as having its own logic which is not simply the sum total of individual acts. Institutions, we might say, appear to the suitably retrospective gaze as ‘subjects’ of history in some meaningful sense not reducible to the molecular/ atomic level of subjective intentions. This, presumably, is partly because those same ‘individuals’ are themselves bearers of institutional and class identities, symbolic mandates and ideological imperatives which are transpersonal and which can be fulfilled or (sometimes) refused but hardly ignored (since to ignore in this context is to refuse).



These thoughts occurred to me whilst writing something on J.B. Yeats (W.B.’s father), who aborted his legal career and became a bohemian and (failed) portrait painter. Viewed pragmatically and from the inside, JBY’s destiny appears as the result of purely capricious and personal decisions, as the signature of his famously idiosyncratic self. His ‘destiny’ is then no more than the purely nominal unity or collective name we give to an ensemble of anecdotes; looked at awry, however, these highly idiosyncratic decisions seem utterly consistent with, typical of, a larger class destiny, and part of a collective narrative, the ‘subject’ of which is the Protestant Ascendancy, a being which, if only fictional, nonetheless appears, to the retroactive eye of history, to have its own coherence, ‘character’ and agency. And viewed this way, JBY’s own involvements come to be seen as strategic and local moves within a larger narrative. But it is this larger narrative, in turn, which seems to account for the ‘dissolution’ of the individual life into a series of colourful anecdotes and contingent, eccentric acts. And so we return to the question of what, in the historical fabric has ‘loosened’ so that the individual is now ‘at liberty’ in this sense, and wherein a series of (hitherto unthinkable) options and possibilities assume shape and plausibility, now unconstrained by any class mandate.

On The Face of It.

"It is true that the general spirit of an age leaves its imprint on the character of its celebrated individuals, and even their particularities are but the very distant and dim media through which the collective light still plays in fainter colours." (Hegel, Logic 279).

A cruelly exact delineation of the physiognomy of the decoy President, wherein the 'collective light' is indeed present, although the 'media' is perhaps a little dimmer than usual -

'Character tells in public appearances. W. often looks confused. His brow tightens as if he were enduring some pain he can’t quite locate. It could be on his foot, in his bowel. But it is only the cost of speaking, or thinking, itself.'

- or perhaps it is the foreign, unwelcome presence of the World Spirit, vexed at the paucity of its raw material.

Meanwhile, at the Republican Convention:

Suddenly, one of Fortuno's sentences came billowing across the tiers: 'President Bush believes in empowering his panics.'

I considered this for a moment. 'That's true,' I said to myself. 'That's obviously true. He empowers his panics, gives them a motivating role in policy formation. That's it. Bush's panics are the central element in his administration.' I looked up.

Fortuno: 'And for the first time, his panics . . . '

'Yes,' I thought. 'If only he could control his panics.'

'Yes, for the first time . . . '

'Hispanics!' I said out loud. 'He empowers Hispanics.'

'That's right!' said a woman next to me with Stars and Stripes doodlebugs bouncing about her head.

Thus, the misheard statement releases more meaning than the statement misheard. Perhaps henceforth people will grow deaf in deference to their intellect.

Critical Dictionary

Whilst sorting through some old files, I came across a disk containing a 'critical dictionary' from last year. My intent had been to provide myself with a ready to hand gloss of some key theoretical terms, largely through direct quotation from people like Zizek and Deleuze - mostly Zizek as it turned out. This was to be of use both for my own writing and for teaching. Here are a couple of examples:

Notion, Self-movement of (Hegel)

"What is, effectively, the Hegelian “self-movement of the notion” about? Recall a boring academic textbook that, apropos of a philosophical problem or discipline, enumerates the series of predominant opinions or claims: “The philosopher A claimed that soul is immortal, while philosopher B claimed that there is no soul, and the philosopher C that soul is only the form of the body”. There is something blatantly ridiculous and inadequate in presenting such a panoply of ‘opinions of philosophers’ – why? We, the readers, somehow feel that this is not philosophy, that a true ‘philosophy’ must systematically account for this very multitude of ‘opinions’ (positions’), not just enumerate them. In short, what we expect is to get a report on how one opinion arises out of the inconsistencies or insufficiencies of another ‘opinion’ so that the chain of these opinions forms an organic whole – or, as Hegel would have put it, the history of philosophy is itself part of philosophy .. This organic interweaving of opinions is that Hegel calls the “self-movement of the notion”. (Zizek, OWB, 50)


Big Other

"'Rule Girls' are heterosexual women who follow precise rules as to how they let themselves be seduced (accept a date only if you are asked at least three days in advance etc). Although the rules correspond to customs which used to regulate the behaviour of old-fashioned women actively pursued by old-fashioned men, the Rule Girls phenomenon does not involve a return to conservative values: women now freely choose their own rules - an instance of the 'reflexivisation' of everyday customs in today's 'risk society'. According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the 'Big Other') to guide us in our social behaviour."
(Zizek, 'You May')

Repetition

"Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin - to repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead," that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself." To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it's not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a "totalitarian threat" - it's rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, "out of sync" with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is "out of sync," that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it."


Anyway, I thought that I might as well put this 'critical dictionary' (a phrase which I think is stolen from Bataille) online for my own use and for anyone else who's interested, here at a new site. At the moment the references are a little sketchy, but this will be rectified. I intend updating this 'dictionary' weekly. As I say, it's mostly quotation although there is occasional commentary from me.

Decoy

Some time ago, John Berger drew scorn for making these remarks on (Michael Moore’s vision of) George Bush:

What do we see? Bush is visibly a political cretin, as ignorant of the world as he is indifferent to it.

Disgraceful. As is, presumably, this in last week's Guardian (courtesy of A Gauche):

But, as one of W's Yalie frat brothers tells Kelley, it's not the substance abuse in Bush's past that's disturbing, it's the "lack of substance ... Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn't interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn't travel; he didn't read the newspapers; he didn't watch the news; he didn't even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me." New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read - the only title he could find was The Fart Book.

Perhaps he thought it said the Frat Book. Not that I’m suggesting George Bush sometimes gets tangled up in his own language. Indeed, it’s precisely because language isn’t quite his own that he gets tangled up in it.

Yes, Bush is an easy target, but not an undeserving one. My American students admit to embarrassment that a paid yet apparently underqualified autocue reader, a karaoke president, a man who wipes his arse with the word ‘meritocracy’ is the leader of their country. And they don’t have to worry about the motor-response charge of anti-Americanism (although they find the facility with which the charge is used frustrating and trivial).

But if he’s an easy target he is also perhaps a decoy. This, the seduction of the decoy, is partly my objection to Moore’s film. The term ‘decoys’ was used some years ago by John Berger, author of the vile calumny quoted above. Before the emergence of Bush ii, he wrote of what he’d noticed about the new type of politician. He begins from the apparently impressionistic:

Unconvinced, they have to listen to themselves. When they move, they shamble, for they have no innate sense of aim. (Aim here must be distinguished from ambition). They dress smartly, but they look as if they have just stolen their clothes so as to make their getaway easier.

Their gestures, far from being sweeping as were the gestures of traditional politicians, are smallish and their gaze is close and uptight. Their anxiety seems less to do with what they already know and more to do with the latest unknown news they are awaiting.

They make many references to the future, yet it is clear they cannot see anything beyond the next election;suffering from extreme and chronic myopia, they speak about what they believe is on the horizon.

The space their words create is as uninhabited as that of a waiting room or a doorstep. Yes, it is as if they were talking on the doorstep while the hi-fi, the camera, the old man’s savings and the wife’s jewels are beginning a one way trip through the back window.

Their role, their on the doorstep, is to talk about something else while elsewhere the job is being carried out. Their profession is to create not a political debate but a diversion. Their speaking heads have become decoys.

How did this arise? Because the “free market” became the “triumphant global system”.

Now, everything everywhere on this earth can finally be sold or bought by those who have the means. [..] This power is more or less concentrated in the hands of the 200 largest multinational enterprises. It follows that many decisions determining life on the planet and its future are being taken, not by governments or elected bodies, but by those who grasp the market.

In relation to this, the decoys, “with their empty words, are as if speechless. They possess no language of endurance or struggle” with which to address what is happening. It's a shadow language. They might perform the traditional rhetorical moves, make the same dramatic speeches, gesture towards ‘history’ and so on, but the actual content over which they exercise determinate power is too small, too meagre for these gestures, which are therefore peculiarly empty, puppet-like, forlorn. They are managers acting the part of politicians.

The gap between the phantasmagoria of speeches, press conferences, rhetorical spats and lilliputian policy differences, and the overarching economic framework, the market decisions, the global and abstract logic of capital which render our lives intelligible, has become absurd, incomprehensible. And the traces of this absurdity are visible in the mien of our politicians. They shuffle in the foreground. They have the awkwardness of impostures. They bear symbolic, titular power whilst real power has migrated elsewhere. They are, constitutively, bluffers, stand-ins.

The most significant political division becomes that between those who buy into and are detained by this phantasmagoria (someone like Andrew Marr is an obvious example) and those who refuse and pass beyond it.

But if we live in an age where managers play the role of politicians, might not the ideal politician for this situation be someone who is guileless by default, incapable of seeing the truth of being a manager posing as a prime minister/ a president and innocent of the necessary cynicism that accrues to that truth; someone who signifies candour but is in no danger of revealing any truth. One thinks of the prescience of Forrest Gump, an idiot savant, whose ingenuous blunders somehow coincide with the demands of world history.

re September 17th

An article at Crooked Timber reminds us that 17th September was the anniversary of the Sabra and Chatila massacres. Some further articles are available here. Also here.

Here is a useful collection of Edward's Said's articles about Middle Eastern matters.

Untimely Bergson

We tend to think of time as consisting of instants, following one another in a kind of staccato succession – we ‘jump’ from one instant to the next. But time no more ‘consists’ of instants than a pencil ‘consists’ of centimetres. For Bergson, the symbolic system with which we measure time – instants - is eccentric to the ‘real’ of time itself. However, in a very basic and hard to eradicate conceptual error, we mistake this symbolic yardstick for the thing measured, for time itself, which we say actually breaks down into instants, which are then joined together like beads on a string.



I’m not sure, though, that Bergson’s alternative characterisation of time as ‘flow’ is any better. Why do we get nearer time by substituting an image (‘flow’) for a concept (‘instant’)? Must we not rather just surrender time to a Real which is outside the joints of language altogether? Is Bergson’s ‘flow’, moreover, not part of a (paradoxical) festishisation of the organic, the continuous, and the seamless in his work?

On the one hand, ‘flow’ is after all only a metaphor, where the function of metaphor is to hold the place open for a concept which is not yet formulated or available. The metaphor does not lay claim to its object but only says ‘this space is reserved’.

On the other hand, the value accruing to the fluid and organic only makes sense in contrast to the calibrated and mechanical, and is therefore mediated and ‘measured’ by them.. And it is only when the latter come increasingly to colonise our lives (e.g. E.P. Thompson on the introduction of clock time into the work place) that the fluid and the organic appear as objects of value, desire and nostalgia. It is as if the concept of ‘flow’ – amongst others - is a kind of spectre created by the disappearance of its referent.

This and That.

A variation of the 'why are you talking about x when you should be talking about y' trope is recently being trotted out in regard to the anti-foxhunting legislation. "Congratulations to the Parliamentary Labour Party on a magnificent victory in the class struggle," quips Harry, suddenly bristling with faux radicalism; others approvingly quote Polly Toynbee - "The left should wonder why they are unable to summon up a fraction of that anger about the things that really matter." What needs to be said in response to these non-arguments has, thankfully, been said by Norman Geras:

There are so many types of suffering and injustice in the world that any single person can only be active in protesting about and opposing a fraction of them. Given this, it can nearly always be said that you shouldn't be wasting time on this when what really matters is that. But everything that matters really matters. The fact that some things matter less is only an argument for ignoring them if you think that everybody should be constantly mobilizing over what matters most. Thus: unless you're protesting and active over (just for example) Darfur, you're not entitled to speak out about anything.

See also here, under 'Turkey'. Anyway, let's hope we've laid that inane and disingenuous little rhetorical ploy to rest.

Baby with the bath water

Chagall on the Russian Revolution:

The revolution troubled me because of the incredible dynamic vigour that penetrated you completely, exceeded your imagination, unfolded in your own inner world. And all this at the same time in which your inner, artistic world also seemed to you like a revolution.

A passage like this deserves to be treated as a genuine snapshot of something 'in its becoming'; whereas the temptation, I suspect, is to telescope all such statements through Stalinism, and to see here simply an example of 'false consciousness', delusion. This is not of course to approve of Soviet Communism. It is to insist that the revolution did open up authentically new possibilities - aesthetic and political at once - which one betrays by reflex references to Soviet Communism. It is precisely the latter that crushed such new possiblities.

'I' is another, and vice versa

Reading Proust (in translation). In this sentence, Proust is talking about Robert and his mistress who, after the relationship had ended, would still spend nights by his side:

He felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her, even when he was duly restless from insomnia or thinking of the things he had to do, so entirely usual that they could not disturb her.

Thus: how the contours, feel, smells of one’s own body can be for the Other something reassuring and emotionally confirming in a way we never experience ourselves. Our body is for them a kind of receptacle into which their emotions snugly fit, as if those emotions only know themselves in contact with our body, even though our body, in that particular form, is not something that we can experience directly at all, since we are on its ‘inside’. And so the lover reflects back to us a part of ourselves otherwise inaccessible.

Also, the above extract prompted the thought of how, subjectively and on a day to day basis, we experience quite significant, unpredictable shifts and variations in ourselves. The ‘I’ seems re-situated from one week to the next, unable to re-enter the mood or self-understanding it so easily occupied the previous day. And yet, on the other hand, our body as seen and experienced by the lover is reassuringly constant, stable and, indeed, a counterpoint to their own subjective instability. We receive from their eyes the constant image of our own self

Whether we are lying in bed asleep, in the kitchen with insomnia, thinking obscure thoughts, silently unhappy, the lover finds in our familiar folds and contours identity, stability, continuity. In looking at us they renew contact with something habitual and reliable in themselves. And, of course, the reverse is true. When we look at them we slot back in to a certain recognisable part of ourselves.

If this is true, then our identity resides ‘outside ourselves’ , with others and the image of ourselves they reflect back to us, so that we discover and are only able to fully name ourselves through them, when we see the spectral ‘I’, the constant ghost, visible only in their eyes, possessed by them, owned, almost, by them, so that when they leave us forever or die, it really is like a piece of us has gone, and not just an accidental piece either, but the every ‘I’ which threaded us together.

'He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.’

To make a book entirely of quotations was and remains one of Walter Benjamin’s most oft quoted ambitions. Text-fragments are to be arranged in constellations, knit together by montages of attraction and repulsion, which create new concepts rather than simply falling under the coercive rule of an existing Idea.

A superficially similar but diametrically opposed practice exists among certain bloggers. These bloggers are given to quoting certain passages ‘without comment’, as if they spoke for themselves. They forget that the white space around these quotes is hardly empty. It is rented out in advance to Received Opinion, to which the quote has been cynically surrendered, as one might report a neighbour to the authorities for benefit fraud. In Lacanian parlance, they have been handed over to the Big Other. This practice is not about arguing a point, but about confirming one already in situ. A consensus is assumed rather than challenged, and the reader feels bullied in to approbation of what is supposed to be radiantly obvious. In exchange, one is admitted to the company of those salute each other, point and laugh.

The poor bedraggled quote is paraded before the reader before being dispatched to its pigeon-hole. And far from speaking for itself, it is made to act as the ventriloquist dummy for what is ‘already known’.

lifework

The problem with the question “what is the relation between a poet’s life and work?” is that it is already an answer in disguise. This is clear if we consider why, for example, we do not ponder the relations between a poet’s actions and his life. We of course assume that these two cannot be separated. Actions are among the very element of a life. To inquire into the relation between life and work, therefore, already assumes that the work is not one of life’s essential constituents. Thus, the prepositional form “What is the relation between x and y” has an insidious ability to sunder what was once entire, and to raise false problems on the ruins of that former wholeness. The poet has been prized from his works by grammar.

Even to say that the work is an escape from the life is to propose that it plays a role within it. What would happen to the “life,” we might ask, if that getaway were blocked? What need or desire has generated that escape? What compelling necessity does it express?

The obvious borderline case when it comes to the work-life relation is letters. Their status is tricky. Sometimes, as in Proust (or Kafka) the letter can seem little more than a “pretext”, an occasion for writing. It is not, so much addressed to its nominal recipient; rather the author is testing a literary style, using the letter to enlarge, polish and refine his expressive range. The case of Yeats (for example) is rather different. Typically these letters do not even glance sideways at their own language. Recent issues of Yeats’ letters have, to be perfectly frank, been rescued for literariness by the Stygian labours of the poet’s editors and the goldmine of footnotes which belie and prop up the sundry ragbag of shopping lists and monetary demands etc. They are quick emissaries – persuading, requesting, haranguing, reminding or arranging. 40 or so years later, most of these would have been telephone calls. These pieces of writing are simultaneously and obviously ‘actions’, fully integrated within the ‘life’. .

But is there not a sense in which even the most recondite and hermetic poem, ostensibly self sealed and firmly/ staunchly closed to instrumentality, is nonetheless an action/ gesture/ event within the life of the poet. Writing, we might say, at least in certain instances, made a difference, and constituted a biographical “event”. (I would add that many of Yeats’ poems seem to be about this very “making a difference” – about an utterance or assured inscription that works like an action or gesture to intervene in and radically to alter the situation at hand.)

It seems to me that there are certain writers, moreover, who seem to render biography superfluous, precisely because of the peculiar reconfiguration of the life/work relation they have achieved. Kafka would be one of these. Genet, for example, would not. I will try and explain what I mean by this in a future post.

Precious Commodity

Occasionally, one encounters an article that is irrefutable, not because its arguments are utterly watertight but precisely because it has no ‘arguments’, because refutation can find no foothold in meaningfulness; an article which is little more than an attempt to dress up the proposition ‘I like x, I dislike y’ in the appurtenance of reason; an article whose assiduous eschewal of discernable content is almost impressive; an article that is only interesting as a living inventory of journalistic clichés, non-sequiters and vacuous propositions, a mere simulacrum of actual thought, an object lesson in what to avoid, a coagulated mass of confusion from which it is impossible to extract a valid idea. Initially, one is tempted to unpick a single sentence before realising that to do so would entangle one in a whole machinery of error from which there is no productive escape. Occasionally, one finds such an article, which in its utter typicality passes beyond itself and becomes a useful illustrative symptom of a larger malaise .

Oh, incidentally, here’s a recent piece by Melanie Phillips.

Nostalgia

Courtesy of Pas Au-Dela, this Tarkovsky tribute site.

John Berger has a short essay on cinema, "ev'ry time we say goodbye", where he talks about the cinema screen as a kind of sky out of which things can come towards us, over the horizon of familiarity, as if for the first time. And we, full of nostalgia for the real, are drawn towards them.

"The screen, as soon as the lights go out, is no longer a surface but a space. Not a wall, but more like a sky. A sky filled with events and people." It's perhaps no accident that those great skies in Westerns - and parhaps, also, vast desert expanses - are so quintessentialy cinematic. We are transported, into that new sky, into an elsewhere. There, says Berger, we are brought into renewed contact with things:

"Even as we wait to be transported elsewhere, we are held fascinated by the presence of what has come towards us out of the sky. The most familiar sights - a child sleeping, a man climbing a staircase - become mysterious..

This 'mystery' derives from the fact that the cinema can offer things to us nude and untranslated. By contrast with film, a thing in a book or a painting - a child sleeping, a man climbing - has been completly 'translated' into the medium of expression, language or paint. There is no exactly comparable process in film, where there is always the extra-linguistic: mute, unsubdued to words or paint. Things appear, in their sudden enigmatic density. A thing in a book cannot surprise us, ambush us with its presence, whereas, in film

"the surprise is that of rediscovering the world (a child asleep, a man, a staircase) after an absence elsewhere. the absence may have been very brief, but in the sky we lose our sense of time. Nobody has used this surprise more crucially than Tarkovsky. With him we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who have left it."

The curious thing about Solaris is that it makes the earth itself, earthly existence, the object of nostalgia. The space ship in Solaris is the very image of the place from which Tarkovsky sees the world in all of his films - across a space of radical separation and insufferable desire.

George Steiner once defined the utopian impulse as a 'nostalgia for a place that you have never been.' It seems to me that it is exactly this nostalgia that Tarkovsky, above all (and perhaps above all in Solaris) can make us feel.

Gnossienne

Satie: music for night time. It a path of notes to be followed, as the noises of the day drop away, into the dead of night, when all the lights in the adjacent houses have been switched off, one by one, so that one is left with something solitary, insistent, gentle, stubbornly pursuing its fragile melody, with a handful of notes, in the face – or on the face – of nothing. Half mad, child like, hilarious and piteous at once, it moves through silence, but not a silence that replies or offers it anything by way of reassurance, hence, the note of the absurd, the clownish. A man in a tattered suit, involved, myopically, in some elementary task, despite being surrounded by silent indifference.

That Narrative Were Grand

Brief but interesting article by Terry Eagleton on Postmodernism and 'meta-narratives'. Terry is a long-standing critic of certain trends in postmodern thought/ postmodern sensibility. See his excellent essay 'Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism' (partly summarised here).

'Postmodernism, wedded as it is to the particular, would be reluctant to accept that there are propositions which are true of all times and places, yet which are not simply vacuous or trivial. The statement ‘In all times and places, most men and women have led lives of fairly futile labour, usually for the profit of a few’ seems one such utterance. ‘Women have always suffered oppression’ is another. To narrativise these propositions is to help de-familiarise them — to recover something of our naive astonishment at what we had taken for granted. There is a sense in which we can forget or deny what is most common exactly because it is so common, as in Roland Barthes’s celebrated example of those names of countries which march across the map in such huge capitals that they are effectively invisible. Grand narratives are in this sense a bit like transcendental conditions, so much the very framework of our perception that it is hard to stare at them straight.'

As I'm quoting Eagleton, I found rather amusing this opening paragraph or so of his review of a book on George Orwell:

He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself. From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy. Coruscatingly intelligent though not in the strict sense an intellectual, he had the ornery, bloody-minded streak of the independent leftist and idiosyncratic Englishman, as adept at ruffling the feathers of his fellow socialists as at outraging the opposition. As he grew older, this cussedness became more pronounced, until his hatred of benighted autocratic states led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether.
Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered

P.S. I'm currently away from my computer. Back home Friday.

Pigments, Piggeries and Polemics

In an earlier post I quoted, only half tongue in cheek, Shakespeare’s line about the Dyer’s hand being subdued to what it works in. ‘What it works in’ was in that instance polemics, with all the obligatory gestures one is duty bound to employ, the pre-scripted moves and countermoves, the directives given by the ego - never to be countermanded - to destroy the ego of the other. Today, following up various links, I came across the following reaction, a self-confessedly visceral one, to Noam Chomsky (again). The author begins by dismissing Chomsky’s putative ‘defenders’

The Chomsky defenders--and there seem to be a surprisingly large number of them--seem to form a kind of cult. Arguing with them seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato's Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.

Lovely. Anyway, after applying himself to some 17 pages of a Chomsky Pamphlet, the author pronounces this summary judgement:

I had had more than enough. He's a sleazeball.

Frankly, I find it rather dispiriting to read sentences like this - ungenerous, snooty, lazily abusive. Easy rhetorical noise. More dispiriting when one is then lured to respond, to play the game. But to play it is to lose, because to play that game involves a politics all of its own, irrespective of content. It's a politics that Foucault identifies in an interview:

the person he [the polemicist] confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it examines a case; it isn’t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgment and by virtue of the authority he has conferred on himself.

Now i'm sure we can all think of examples. I wouldn't be surprised if some of us thought of the same example.

A reader has drawn my attention to Ed Herman's rebuttal of Delong and Delong's subsequent reply. Delong, who packed in reading Chomsky's pamphlet after some 17 pages, now confesses to being 'bored' by Herman's page length response. What he would call his own considered judgement thus looks suspiciously like attention deficit syndrome. Meanwhile, the quality and tenor of Delong's remarks suggest that he is to satire what a certain Deptford tavern was to Christopher Marlowe.

Readings

In today's Observer, Nick Cohen makes the following point:

Like the US Democrats, New Labour has taken classic questions about the distribution of wealth and regulation of the mighty out of political debate. The existing economic order is beyond question: it's just there as if it were the will of God.

Indeed, and isn't it just such questions that should be the starting point in discussing the current state of the Left?

Elsewhere, an interesting interview with Derrida, Seamus Heaney's tribute to Czeslaw Milosz, and an article on the Brazilian photographer Salgado - from whom comes this vertiginous snapshot of Hell:


May I also recommend this book on the 1973 military coup in Chile. "When they speak of the bombing of La Moneda Palace in Chile… you should know that this act is the equivalent of bombing the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue during the work day." - José Yglesias, 1974, a year after the coup

Homo Pseudos

I remember from university the following experience. Almost any conversation one chanced to overhear in the Senior Common Room, if it was about something other than everyday chit chat, if it was about politics or philosophy or literature, would invariably sound ‘pretentious’. I soon realised that this was less to do with the content of people’s conversations and more an effect produced by ‘interrupting’ them at a more or less arbitrary point. If you suddenly hear ‘but how can you square that with atheism’, or ‘you’re definition of class is a-historical’ or ‘but he seems to imply you can negate the lure of the image with the image”, then this can only meet with embarrassed giggles. One only has to remove certain kinds of language from their context to frame them with sniggers. Real philosophical work typically has to also create the frame through which you read it, so as to tear the reader away from common sense. Nothing is easier than to destroy this patiently wrought frame through an act of random quotation and an appeal to what everyone knows. Not Kant nor Hegel, nor apparently plainer speakers like Bertrand Russell would have escaped Pseud’s Corner. And as George Steiner once said, the English expression ‘Come off it’ would have stopped even Beethoven in his tracks.
The metastasis of irony touches everything and yet everything is left curiously untouched. To be ironic about one’s work, one’s beliefs or even one’s feelings saves one the trouble of finding different employment or of thinking and feeling differently. We are spontaneous dualists: our bodies can perform routinely what our post-modern consciousness wraps in quotation marks and treats with arch and careless levity. To change your life, to commit oneself to a cause or a project might be to take oneself ‘too seriously’ – two words which are for some almost a tautology. It is no accident that nothing seems more risible and unfashionable these days than the existentialist rhetoric of commitment and authentic choice. For the existentialists, the commitment of one’s being to a project was synonymous with Life. ‘Life’, however, has become merely pretentious. The enjoinder to 'get a life' means little more than ensuring a full and diverting social timetable.

If our beliefs and passions are placed in inverted commas then they are ultimately no more than pseudo-beliefs and pseudo-passions; the low current of feeling is short-circuited by the knowledge of contingency, that it’s all just a game. The claim to have real beliefs and passions, by contrast, is now the worst kind of affectation. Adorno spoke of the ‘jargon of authenticity’, but would have been dismayed to see authenticity treated as mere jargon. So it is that the ironic Pseuds are today’s realists and those who really believe are the Pseuds.

The false appearance is that the world is split into the ironists and the fundamentalists. We are told that what the ironists fantasise about is some traumatic or adamantine encounter about which irony would be impossible. And what the fundamentalist wants stridently and shrilly to shut out is the possibility that he/she inhabits just one culturally relative belief system. Each is haunted by the spectre of the other. Each is the bad dream of the other.

Tip

Always try and meet a text at the place where it is rather than plumping for an approximation that happens to be lying on the floor by your desk. What lies by the desk may well beguile with its familiarity but just for this reason is to be treated suspiciously. See below.

Lexicon

Courtesy of Pas au-dela, an amusing philosophical lexicon. A few examples below:

castaneda, n. An elaborate musical instrument, emitting a confused sound when agitated. "The original theme was lost in the sound of the castaneda."

dreyfus, n. (from "dry" & "fuss") An arid ad hominem controversy. "What began as an interesting debate soon degenerated into a dreyfus."

feyerabend, n. (fr. German "feuer" & "abend") The last brilliant moment of a conceptual framework before death and transfiguration. Every conceptual framework has its feyerabend

habermass, (from the Middle High German halber Marx; cf. ganzer Marx) n. A religious ceremony designed to engender an illusion of understanding through chants describing socio-economic conditions. Hence also, habermass, v. "He habermassed Einstein; he attempted to deduce the special theory of relativity from the social structure of the Zurich patent office." "Nothing but a gadam habermass" - H. S. Truman

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger."

macintyre, n. An inflated wheel with a slick, impervious coating; hence, derivatively, an all-terrain vehicle equipped with macintyres. "If you want to cover that much territory that fast, you'd best use the macintyre."

popper, adj. Exhibiting great moral seriousness; impopper, frivolous.

ricoeur, v. To interpret all philosophical questions by means of a limited range of insights and themes. Hence ricoeursive procedure, a recipe for generating infinite philosophical insights from a very limited subset thereof. "The Tractatus proceeds ricoeursively."

scrutonize, v. "To conflate two disciplines at a superficial level so that dinner party conversations could continue in the spurious belief that matters of moment were being discussed while the port was passed." - David Dunster, Architectural Design, December 1979, p. 327.

Perhaps a similar blog lexicon could be constructed, 'To harry, v. 'Maintaining an empty symbolic/ gestural claim to be on the Left whilst promoting a Liberal or Right Wing agenda. . “he’s merely harrying.."; 'To drop a Pollard..' Actually, best not get started.

The Clear and the Obscure.

"…… it is enough to evoke the fad for rapid reading and the habitual conscious or unconscious skimming of newspaper and advertising slogans, for us to understand the deeper social reasons for the stubborn insistence of modern poetry on the materiality and density of language, on words felt not as transparency but rather as things in themselves. So also in the realm of philosophy the bristling jargon of seemingly private languages is to be evaluated against the advertising copybook recommendations of ‘clarity’ as the essence of ‘good writing’: whereas the latter seek to hurry the reader past his own received ideas, difficulty is inscribed in the former as a sign of the effort which must be made to think real thoughts".

(Fredric Jameson)



“A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought, whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation will automatically meet with certain understanding […] Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what other people want [..] Anything specific, not taken from pre-existing patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion […] Only what they do not first need to understand they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and already alienated, touches them as familiar.”

(Theodor Adorno)

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument

Some days ago the polemicist Oliver Kamm [yes, we can all play that game] wrote a shoddy piece in which he contended that Noam Chomsky had misrepresented a transcript of the Nixon-Kissinger exchanges, a transcript that Oliver Kamm hasn’t seen of course, whereas Noam Chomsky has. Kamm bases his claims on a piece in the Washington Post, although lacking the transcript, he is clueless as to the accuracy or otherwise of the piece. On what grounds, then, did Kamm lend his credence to the Washington Post article? Presumably on the nicely circular grounds that it allowed him to defame Chomsky. His interpretation of the substance of the article is, however, in any case questionable and tendentious, resting largely and hazardously on an unintelligible noise and a sardonic laugh.. I’m sure Kamm must have received several emails pointing out the rather obvious interpretative shortcomings of his post. The responses he chooses to reproduce on his website, however, are from what I might uncharitably call some of his court eunuchs, who tentatively add a few deferential footnotes and minor additions to insights they regard as fundamentally correct.

Perhaps buoyed up by these virtual pats on the back, Kamm now seems to be on a roll and has launched into Chomsky again. I will deal here with just one of the ‘examples’ of Chomsky’s ‘egregious’ unscholarly practices, a mistranscribed ‘quote’ from a 1947 Harry Truman speech. The Truman speech is online here, which Kamm might have pointed out, assuming he knows about it. Chomsky’s mention of the address was initially based on paraphrased accounts which he misquoted as direct speech. He corrected this error but went on to maintain that he’d conveyed the gist of Truman’s argument. You can judge that claim for yourselves if you consult the online transcript. What I’m more concerned with here is Kamm’s uncritical reliance on the Schlesinger and failure even to attempt to gauge it’s accuracy. I offer you firstly the relevant passage from the speech itself and then Schlesinger on Chomsky’s misrepresentation of the speech:

“There is one thing that Americans value even more than peace. It is freedom. Freedom of worship--freedom of speech freedom of enterprise. It must be true that the first two of these freedoms are related to the third. For, throughout history, freedom of worship and freedom of speech have been most frequently enjoyed in those societies that have accorded a considerable measure of freedom to individual enterprise.”

“It is characteristic of Dr Chomsky’s unbeatable instinct for distortion that he can write in the October Commentary: “Truman argued that freedom of enterprise is one of those freedoms to be valued ‘even more than peace’.” What Truman actually said, as the reader will have observed, was that Americans valued freedom even more than peace, and he made it clear that he meant above all intellectual and religious freedom.”

Schlesinger should really say ‘what Truman actually argued’ if he is countering Chomsky, as what is in question is a form of reasoning rather than a form of words.. The rhetorical slight of hand is revealing as a statement of intent. Anyway, when Truman says ‘It is freedom. Freedom of worship--freedom of speech freedom of enterprise,’ it’s clear that the three freedoms mentioned gloss and explicate what he means by ‘freedom’. The rhetorical effect is that of a colon, for, as you can see, the named freedoms only really make logical and grammatical sense in relation to the previous sentence. Truman is, as he should, defining his terms. So, freedom of enterprise is, indeed, one of the ‘freedoms’ Truman speaks of as being ‘more important’ to Americans than peace. Now, does Truman ‘make clear’ that ‘he meant above all intellectual and religious freedom’? Here are Truman’s words again: ‘Freedom of worship--freedom of speech freedom of enterprise. It must be true that the first two of these freedoms are related to the third [emphasis added].’ If the third is a necessary condition of the first two, then it is surely as important, and indeed logically ‘more important,’ than the others. This is an elementary point, and a crucial point in the context of Truman’s speech. In any case, Chomsky’s phrase ‘one of those freedoms’ does not imply that those freedoms are of equal importance, so Schlesinger’s remark is an irrelevance – logically, at any rate, if not rhetorically. Previously, Schlesinger refers to Chomsky quoting Truman saying “All freedom is dependent on freedom of enterprise….”. and adds, “Truman said nothing of the sort, at Baylor or elsewhere. The quotation is fabricated.” Now, clearly Truman did indeed say ‘something of the sort’. Not certainly the exact words (Chomsky later admits this mistake) but it is pretty obvious what Chomsky is referring to and Schlesinger’s initial contention that this bears no relation to what Truman said, here or anywhere, and is pure fabrication does indeed seem rather disingenuous and misleading.

And so, once again, Oliver Kamm accepts a source solely on the grounds that it allows him to criticise Chomsky, without making any attempt to gauge the reliability of the source. His reading of the Schlesinger shows no analytical rigour whatsoever, a disregard for elementary scholarly procedure and an eager anticipation of polemical points. Speaking of which: While it might be tempting to attribute Kamm’s failings to incompetence, I fear that would be too generous. He has, to use the vernacular, been on Chomsky’s case for several years and admits to being a friend of the notorious Chomsky denier, Werner Cohn. You’re free to see a disinterested quest for truth if you like. To my mind, writing one review of an author you despise might seem excusable, writing two a little careless; writing many and over several years seems to suggest an orchestrated campaign.

P.S. I trust this will be my last post on this individual, as reading his blog is bad for my teeth. Also, in order to reply to his tedious polemics one's prose can become, like the dyer's hand, subdued to what it works in.

And I'd rather be writing about Hegel.

Update: Since I posted this, Kamm has another piece, objecting to some of Chomsky's rhetorical tricks, which is kind of like Polonius lecturing someone on prolixity. In particular he takes umbrage at Chomsky pretending that his interlocutor 'can't really mean what he says', and this from the man who is fond of upbraiding people being 'disingenuous', as in "the Liberal Democrats, whose opposition to war was combined with disingenuous declarations of support for British troops". Indeed, the word 'disingenuous' is almost up there with 'egregious' 'ostensible' and 'promulgate' in Kamm's lexical repertoire. He then returns to exactly the same ground as before - Chomsky and Schlesinger, as though some nagging doubt told him that he hadn't quite nailed his man first time round. Well, he still hasn't. Nor will he.

Traces

When we encounter an object from the distant historical past – say, a medieval tool – what makes it “past” is not age as such but the fact that it is the trace of a world (of a historical mode of the disclosure of being, of an interconnected texture of significations and social practices) that is no longer directly “ours”. (Zizek)

Whilst reading Marlowe's Dr Faustus, the following thought -

What is sometimes forgotten about literary texts – poems, novels, or whatever – is that they too are “traces” in the sense of remains of a world that is no longer “ours”. Typically, literary criticism emphasises, quite blindly and covetously, the ways in which these things (texts) are “ours” – their universal relevance etc. What is more interesting is the activity of putting under the microscope these artefacts from another life-world/ fragments from a world which is no longer “ours”. The poem before us discloses something, but this is not simply the vacant repetition of a “universal truth”, rather it alerts us to a possibility of being which is outside our own. (This is not to say, of course, that the literary object is essentially the same as a 'medieval tool' or an antique.) Those who cry for a text to be 'relevant' , as in 'Why read Marlowe today' should be answered that it is 'relevant' to the present precisely by being different from it, and enabling us to see and interrogate that present.

News Items

Underground Cinema, quite literally.

The War Against Terrorism. Not literally at all.

Jungle Book

I'm not sure I can be bothered posting anything substantial today. But here's a true story from someone I know who works in Waterstone's. He reports the following telephone enquiry:

A rather well-spoken elderly gentleman rang up for a book recommended by his nephew. My friend checked Waterstone’s database with no luck
“I’m afraid its not one we stock, sir”
“Does that mean it’s not in print?”
“Hang on; I’ll check the catalogue of books in print. […] No,. I’m sorry, its not in print, not in this country, anyway.”
“Oh dear, what a terrible shame”
“Could it be an American book?”
“Actually yes, my nephew does live in America, so yes, perhaps it is. Could you look that up for me”
The bookseller, not having ready access to an American database advised that the man might try Amazon.
“Don’t be absurd! Don’t be utterly absurd” replied the voice down the phone. The bookseller, a little taken aback, assured him that, on the contrary, Amazon would probably be the best place to go if he wanted to get hold of an American publication. The reply was even more emphatic – and scandalised - than before:
“Young man, are you being deliberately obtuse and provocative?” Perplexed, the bookseller attempted to explain himself a little more clearly..
“Amazon co.uk can get books from America over the internet relatively quickly, certainly quicker than going through us.”
“Oh, you’re talking about some sort of internet site?”
“Er, yes”
“Oh, I see, I see. I’m terribly sorry, you must forgive me. I thought you were suggesting that I should go to the Amazon to get the book.”

The Autodidacts

Readers educated at English comprehensives in the 70's and 80's may find that this rings a few bells.

On the subject of autodidacticism, see this excellent piece by Pierre Bourdieu, excerpted at the riotously eclectic "Autodidact Project".

Because he has not acquired his culture in the legitimate order established by the educational system, the autodidact constantly betrays, by his very anxiety about the right classification, the arbitrariness of his classifications and therefore of his knowledge--a collection of unstrung pearls, accumulated in the course of an uncharted exploration, unchecked by the institutionalized, standardized stages and obstacles, the curricula and progressions which make scholastic culture a ranked and ranking set of interdependent levels and forms of knowledge.

Also, the figure of the Autodidact in Sartre's Nausea. For Sartre, the autodidact is a palpably gross, awkward figure. His existence is solitary (because his pursuits go unrecognised/ unvalued) and (in every sense) misguided. He is his own master – where the suggestion of onanism is unmistakable. His failure to observe the correct academic etiquette is translated (by Sartre) into corpulence and utter lack of physical grace. The pathos of the Satrean autodidact resides in the nature of his “appeal”, the gaze for whcih he stages his bahaviour, the symbolic Big Other to which he submits his uncomplaining travail. For this invisible witness (called Canonical Knowledge) scorns his labours as, precisely, laboured and inept. No matter what quantity of knowledge he accumulates, his mode of acquisition is wide of the mark. His very activity therefore has the nature of a category error. To Knowledge he pays a grotesque homage, which Knowledge can meet only with embarrassment.

Update. Spurious adds the following reflection, which i tend to rather agre with:

Some of us are autodidacts ... stumblers, idlers ... But perhaps it is the strange chance which allowed many of us to fall outside a consensual determination of philosophy that will transform philosophy itself. No longer, then, reasoned discussions about brains in vats and cricket matches ...

Hitchens: the Physiognomy of Reaction

I caught a glimpse of the delightful Peter Hitchens the other night. His face is increasingly frozen in a grotesque rictus of appalled indignation, which seems to be his default response to the world. The chin has retracted into the neck, outrage has enlarged and locked the eyes and the head has tilted backwards to facilitate looking down the nose. His brother by contrast retains the louche and nonchalantly amused appearance that he’s always had. Curiously, these two used to look similar, but after seeing Peter the other night, it’s as though the same genetic material has been sculpted in two radically different ways by two different existential and political outlooks. So, a word of warning Christopher: political reaction can be bad for the physiognomy.

Repeat Performance

Various members of the western intelligentsia seem to be rather enamoured with Clive James’s pronouncement that “the performance of the Western intelligentsia has never been worse”. One recognises immediately, of course, the sneaky use of ‘intelligentsia’, borrowed originally from the Russian, employed here obviously for its soupcon of sneering irony and generally unfavourable connotations rather than any descriptive exactitude. But if this term has a referent, rather than just a mode of rhetorical employment, it presumably designates people engaged primarily in intellectual work, producers of words and ideas and arguments and so on. Now it should be obvious that this group consists of people on the right and the left. Numerically, I see no reason why 'Left intellectuals' (often used as if it were a tautology) are predominant. It consists of people like Jonathan Derbyshire and Norman Geras, both of whom approvingly cite James’s remarks.

It is worth noting that almost from the start, ‘intellectual’ and its variants have been used primarily to designate others rather than as a term of self-description. Byron’s dismissive references to intellectuals are well known and well quoted. As well as referring always to others, ‘intellectual’ invariably came prefaced with ‘so-called’ and ‘pseudo-‘ as if we lived in some strange world where only inauthentic copies existed and never the real thing, as if the very idea of a genuine intellectual was inherently pretentious. Typically, the people using these pejorative designations were of course themselves ‘intellectuals’, and their reluctance to admit what they in fact were, their readiness to off-load the label onto someone else before it was applied to them, could only be seen as defensiveness and a reflex concession to social prejudice.

It is because terms like ‘intellectual’ come pre-encrusted with habits of thought and pre-loaded with bias and because to use them unthinkingly simply reproduces such bias, it is for these reasons, among others, that we need intellectuals. (* *)

nb. Jonathan Derbyshire appears to find the meaning of the above post unclear. Unfortunately, he seems to have then reached for the meaning that was nearest to hand, namely an ‘accusation of intellectual self-hatred’. Needless to say, this is neither in the post, buried underneath it, nor lodged between the lines. What it was doing lying near Jonathan Derbyshire's desk I don't know.

Noises Off

Following on from the previous post. Suppose you were a historian or independent political commentator examining two documents, two accounts of the same incident in two reputable newspapers. Which account is the more reliable? How can one tell? Where does fact end and interpretation begin? These are pretty routine, necessary questions. I offer the following two accounts of the Nixon-Kissinger exchanges leading to the bombing of Cambodia, quoted here:

The telephone transcripts show how frustrated Nixon was becoming with the Vietnam War and his failing effort to withdraw American troops from Vietnam by expanding the war into Cambodia. He became especially angry on Dec. 9, 1970, with what he considered the lackluster bombing campaign by the United States Air Force against targets in Cambodia.
''They're not only not imaginative but they are just running these things -- bombing jungles,'' Nixon said. ''They have got to go in there and I mean really go in.'' Mr. Kissinger then cautioned: ''The Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war.'' But the president persisted, suggesting that the bombing campaign could be disguised as an airlift of supplies.
''I want them to hit everything,'' he said. ''I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's start giving them a little shock.'' He ended by saying, ''Right now there is a chance to win this goddamn war, and that's probably what we are going to have to do because we are not going to do anything at the conference table.'' Mr. Kissinger immediately relayed the order: ''A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.''

Then this:

The transcripts shed light on the extraordinarily complex relationship between Nixon and Kissinger during a turbulent period in American foreign policy, from the bombing of Cambodia in 1970 to the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and diplomatic breakthroughs with China and the Soviet Union. Even as Kissinger attempted to convince Nixon of his loyalty, he adopted a sardonic tone in conversations with Haig and other aides.
In the March 20 transcript, neither Kissinger nor Haig seems alarmed by threats to bomb Congress or "to go after the Israelis" after "he is through with the Europeans."
"He is just unwinding," Haig told Kissinger. "Don't take him too seriously."
On other occasions, as in December 1970, when Nixon proposed an escalation in the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger and Haig felt obliged to humor the president while laughing at him behind his back. During that episode, Kissinger was still serving as national security adviser, and Haig was one of his deputies. The Air Force is "not designed for any war we are likely to have to fight," Kissinger told Nixon after the president railed against U.S. pilots for "farting around doing nothing" over Cambodia and "running goddamn milk runs in order to get the air medal." Both men suspected North Vietnamese guerrillas of using Cambodia as a sanctuary and supply line to South Vietnam.
"It's a disgraceful performance," Nixon went on. "I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters, DC-3s, anything else that will destroy personnel that can fly. I want it done!! Get them off their ass."
"We will get it done immediately, Mr. President," Kissinger replied.
After talking to Nixon, Kissinger got on the phone with Haig to pass on the president's orders for "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia," using "anything that flies on anything that moves." The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like Haig laughing."

The second account is certainly ‘fuller’, but in what does this fullness consist? Not, substantially, in reported speech. It offers us a ‘sardonic tone’ and an ‘unintelligible noise’, neither of which come across particularly well in print. Neither of which are simply matters of fact, nor, if taken as ‘fact’ automatically yield one interpretation. We would be unwise to invest too much in these acoustic extras. But say we did? What of Kissinger’s ‘sardonic tone’ with the aides? A way, perhaps, of strategically distancing himself from the President in order to win over the underlings, pretend he’s really ‘with them’ – an utterly familiar little trick, used by bosses up and down the country. Or do the sardonic noises serve simply to let Kissinger off the hook, as in ‘Look, I’m just obeying these crazy orders, they’re not mine.’ I’m just an instrument. Again, a familiar device and one that is fairly repugnant and cynical if you then go ahead and transmit the orders anyhow, as if a few giggles and a raised eyebrow were sufficient exoneration. And what, then, of Haig’s incomprehensible noise down the telephone. Well, that’s a fair cop. Utterly incontrovertible proof, as are all electronically mediated garbled noises.

And if someone stuck with the first account rather than lending full credence to the second and its little acoustic details, would you lambast them for talking nonsense and worse? Wouldn’t this be a tad unwise, given the nature of ‘tones’ and garbled noises and their amenability to different interpretations? Wouldn’t it be rather unwise, especially, if you weren’t in possession of the original transcript and couldn’t really assess how far the report deviated from it, couldn’t in any way measure its accuracy or inaccuracy? And wouldn’t you have a certain reticence in criticising someone who was, indeed, in possession of that original transcript? Of course you wouldn’t. You’d say that ‘idleness and incompetence’ was too generous a judgement and accuse them of deliberate deception.

And you'd be wrong, i'd be tempted to say. But that would be too generous.

Too Generous

Our favourite Chomsky stalker has been rather 'too generous' in providing further fodder for my occasional ‘notes on rhetoric’ series. Actually, the first example I’m not too sure about. The author refers to the most influential linguist of the last 50 years, whose theories of transformational grammar and linguistic universals have provoked radical re-thinking in and beyond his own field, as “an intelligent man who knows how to use language”? Now, is this a shrewd rhetorical put-down or a patronising banality? You decide. Anyway, from the same article on Chomsky, a little device I completely missed in my “Notes on Rhetoric”:

‘It would be tempting to attribute the use Chomsky makes of this material to intellectual idleness and incompetence, but I fear this is too generous a judgement.’

Here, one gets to level a choice insult, only to withdraw it as ‘too generous’ thus congratulating yourself in the process (i.e. on your inclination to generosity and your integrity in putting aside such inclinations in deference to the Truth). Any one of a number of variants are possible: e.g. “It would be tempting to attribute the writer’s lexical ostentation to a too patent need to assert his cultural credentials/ an autodidactic zeal to display the fruits of his lexicological and bibliophilic labours/ social insecurity, and a frustrated desire to be admitted to the universe of Belles Lettres, but that would be too generous”. One has one’s cake and eats it. A rhetorical cousin of ‘but that would be too easy.”

By all means, install these pieces of equipment in your head along with the others; they will help to do your writing for you, functioning autonomously whilst you get on with more interesting matters. Like thinking.

See also here.

Private Language?

'Freud recognised that each signifier in the dream is linked – symbolically and/ or metonymically – to the signified through a largely private chain of reasoning and association. For Freud the explanation for this privacy of language (the encrypted, circuitous characters of the dream) was repression and censorship. Such encryption was a by-product of the censorship mechanism. But could not this encryption be, at least sometimes, the desideratum of the dream work. Could not dreams be that nocturnal avant-garde studio wherein we attempt, impossibly, to create a private language - non-conceptual, hot-wired to our mnemonic and nervous systems, and twisted to fit the obscure idiosynracy of our singular and defining jouissance? Can repression really acccount for the sheer joy-in-productivity of dream work- condensations, displacements, recodings of everday bric-a-brac, electrifying juxtapositions and all th eother customary signatures of Modernist experimentation'.

Unfamiliar Textures - another note on Schulz.

It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. [..] Theory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic.”

If Adorno, after Benajmin, set himself up as the philosopher of the eccentric and derisory, then Bruno Schulz gave to those things a fictional habitation and name.

‘Overlooked by the light of the day, weeds and wild flowers of all kinds luxuriated quietly, glad of the interval of dreams beyond the margin of time in the borders of an endless day.’

The world of Schulz exists in such a margin. No doubt part of the pathos of his prose derives from knowing that it records a world now dead, brutally eliminated. But this very knowledge seems itself obscurely present in the work. The shut doors of houses, the ancient tree in the town square, emit the weak half-life of the past. Schulz pores over these details like hieroglyphs, as if knowing that the time in which these remains might be redeemed is running away.

Arguably, the diffuse presentiment of catastrophe accounts for certain characteristics of his stories. Ordinarily, events in a narrative crave a conclusion outside them. When the conclusion is reached, the narrative ladder can be kicked away. The events are defined, satisfied, and explained: they disappear into that which, all along, was secretly calling them forth.

Perhaps Schulz senses that what is ‘calling forth’ is a catastrophe. And so, he is concerned with events that are in some way singular, isolated, that do not ‘feed’ a narrative, that are not necessarily explicable in terms of what comes immediately before and after them, that do not unfurl themselves, that do not simply dissolve into their consequences. The stories break off, fail to conclude.. .

Sometimes, Schulz’s own work can seem like the sketch or blueprint of some other work we can only faintly imagine.

The historical world that Schulz inhabited is perhaps encapsulated in what to my mind is one of his most arresting, beautiful and dark images:

‘The six days of creation were divine and bright. But on the seventh day God broke down. On the seventh day he felt an unfamiliar texture under his fingers, and frightened, he withdrew his hands from the world.’

Tact and Destruction

'In particular, it should not be forgotten that the division into embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology and clinical medicine does not exist in nature.'

(Quoted by Lacan, in Ecrits)

The elementary point here being that the categories of the understanding are never simply ‘given’ in the object understood. Indeed, it is the scandalous power of the understanding to sunder (and thus render intelligible) what had been (apparently) whole and entire. The categories of the understanding are arrived at, with taxing labour, against the grain of what merely appears. The form of and relations between these categories may be radically at variance with the contours of their object. Thus, understanding first quarters and ‘destroys’ (‘murders’) the thing in order to divulge its meaning, which then stands separate and complete like the prize of plunder. This is, in part, why ‘beauty hates the understanding’ - the necessary violence of knowledge.

At the same time, knowledge also depends on its mimetic moment, in which rewards are won only through absorbed contact with the object itself and patient surrender to its inherent form. Here thought 'penetrates into the immanent content of the matter'. Knowledge needs always to pass through this detour of selfless tact, whereby its forms are bent out of true by the shapes of what refuses its clutch.

Thus, these two moments, violence and tact have to be held in the balance, and the attainment of this balance would be justice of knowledge.

Crafty

At what point in history does the poet begin to understand his activity as a ‘craft’? The self-understanding of poetic activity as craft (as it appears, almost parodically, in Seamus Heaney) is predicated on the emergence of modern technology, or ‘the technological’ in general. As craft itself disappears it is then seen in its specificity, and swims into view as, finally, an object of nostalgia, to be appropriated metaphorically by poets and thinkers. Conversely, the giddy excitement of the Futurists is predicated on a still measurable distance between modern technology, with its speed and automation, and older, slower forms of life. ‘Craft’ is needed by the Futurists as that from which they escape; the one can only be experienced when silhouetted against the other, and the virility of the New is parasitic, by way of contrast, on the Old.. Thus, then the old dies the New does not triumph – it, too disappears. .

The Sadness of Imaginary Beings

Reading Sartre's fascinating early book, trans. as 'The Imaginary'. The following reflections:

If you were speaking of an actual door knob you might say, if you saw it from an odd angle or whatever “I first saw it as a piece of brass, only after a second realising it was a door knob.” You could never say the same about a mental image of a door knob. The mental image is co-extensive with our perception of it. It cannot exceed or surprise us in any way. For Sartre this is one of the definitive qualities of the mental image: there is no quota of the unknown:

The [mental] image does not teach anything, never gives the impression of novelty, never reveals an aspect of the object. It delivers it as a whole. No risk, no waiting: a certainty. My perception can mislead me, but not my [mental] image.

And whereas “the object of perception constantly overflows consciousness" the "object of an image is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it". In the world of perception every "thing” has an infinite number of aspects. But not in the world of the image. It, the image, is fastened to just one 'aspect'. It is that 'aspect'.

So, in the ‘real world’ things always have this ‘more than’. They offer resistance, they reveal only one side of themselves at a time, so inviting us to turn them around, explore them, and discover what in them resists our intentionality .This is what defines 'the real', this quota of the unknown, of a 'more than' which constitutively escapes us. The object in my imagination, however, offers no resistance, I cannot explore it further, it is synonymous with my grasp of it. Again, if you look at the table in front of you, you are seeing an aspect of it, a perspective. But if you imagine a table, you are not seeing a ‘partial viewpoint’ of something.

The mastery we can experience in the world of the imagination, therefore, is no mastery at all because nothing resists, defies us:

'none of these objects calls upon me to act, to do anything. They are neither weighty, insistent, nor compelling; they are pure passivity, they wait. The faint breath of life we breathe into them comes from us, from our spontaneity.'16 There is 'no risk, no anticipation, only a certainty.'

The apparent pure freedom of the imagination – we can apparently do anything and everything without opposition – is not freedom at all. Absolute freedom coincides with its opposite.

It is a poor and meticulous world, in which the same scenes keep on recurring to the last detail, accompanied by the same ceremonial where everything is regulated in advance, foreseen; where, above all, nothing can escape, resist or surprise.

This ‘poverty’ of the imaginary is a constant Sartrean theme. And Sartre extends this analysis to fictional objects. Again, if someone tells you they are about to go up the stairs you might reasonably ask how many steps the staircase has. If a novelist describes a character ascending a staircase, you cannot ask this question. Imaginary objects are not amenable to interrogation. This seems obvious enough, but Sartre seems to draw more poignant conclusions, portraying a world of sad and deficient things, lacking the completion of matter. The key Sartrean motif is that art works are in a sense 'untouchable'. His oft quoted example is that whereas a record can be scratched the tune is not scratched. The tune resides beyond matter and its accidents. A more contentious example occurs when he implies that although we might burn a painting, the image does not burn, because the image is not made of material stuff:

If the picture burns, it is not Charles VII as imaged that burns but simply the material object that serves as an analagon for the manifestation of the imagined object.

Strikingly, Sartre refers here to a ‘being that cannot be given to perception and that, in its very nature, is isolated from the universe [emph. added]. The tune or the image is ‘trapped’ in a world without weight, pigment, roughness, or any of the nitty gritties of substance. We have here an almost ‘tragic’ account of imaginary beings, a ‘sadness’ of separation.

Now granted, Sartre's account is highly partial. My suggestion here is only this: do we not sense, in certain imaginative or fictional worlds, that the beings of those worlds are somehow aware of their inviolable solitariness, their irreparable lost contact with the world. Imaginary beings are, to mis-use a phrase from Heidegger ‘poor-in-world’ and yet, Sartre implies, often depicted as somehow dimly aware of this predicament. There are certain authors who give to their imaginary beings a dim presentiment of the pathos of being only imaginary.

A Few Notes on Rhetoric

In negotiating the so-called 'blogosphere' you will need to be aware of certain obligatory rhetorical tools with which to rebut opponents. The following are a few I have noted at random, and can be used in comments boxes or when critiquing a publication:

A priori - your apriori supposition is that: ‘I operate by the clear light of reason, you according to preconceived notions’. You are using pure thought and evidence, your opponent is unthinkingly in thrall to canards, tired clichés, and various pieces of received wisdom.

Emotion –your opponent is necessarily and invariably ‘excitable” “agitated’ “animated”; you, by contrast, are immobile, impassive, devoid of emotion - a computer imbued with consciousness.

Entertaining - You find your opponent entertaining. His arguments are 'amusing', 'diverting' and so on, a kind of sport, which you have enjoyed. At some point, however, this becomes 'embarassing' and you should advise your opponent to retire before he humiliates himself. At all costs avoid suggesting you are seriously engaged with what he is saying.

Evidence – demand it. Always refer to as ‘empirical’. If actually offered, criticise the methodology.

Fascism - If all else fails either: 1. find some link between your opponent and fascism, and the Nazis in particular. 2. Wheel in some analogy about fighting/ collaborating with the Nazis. Refer any dispute to the Second World War as a point of comparison. (see also Godwin's Law, courtesy of Anon. at the Weblog).

“intoning” – when quoting your opponent's argument always interpolate ‘he intones/ intoned’. This works with almost any statement. Even if your opponent is not ‘intoning’ your remark will have a delectable sarcasm, as in '“fuck you” he intoned, solemnly'.

‘…is itself an example’ - E.g: : ‘”stale cliché” is itself a stale cliché’ ‘”I’m using no rhetorical ploys” is itself a rhetorical ploy’; 'your remarks on logical incoherence were themselves..". You get the idea. Endlessly adaptable. Creates the impression that your opponent has refuted himself, thus sparing you the trouble of doing so. c.f. 'unwitting'; 'precisely my point'.


Parody - Although you may want to attempt parody yourself, it is better to opine that your opponent has been the victim of a parodist. This can take a couple of forms:

1. ‘Please direct me to the original weblog of which this is evidently a parody.’
2. ‘A malicious third party is posting under your [the opponent’s] name/ has gained access to your blogging account, and is writing absurd risible nonsense in order to discredit you’

Precisely my point- the opponent’s argument is really yours, as in ‘I could hardly wish for a better confirmation of my point.’ (see ‘unwitting’)

Real World - Invariably, a place where things are different. Inhabited by ‘ordinary people’. Often located in Glasgow’s East End or even outside the First World altogether, as in ‘this might sound plausible in Christ Church common room, but it rings pretty hollow in the Guatemalan jungle’. Needless to say, your interlocutor is unfamiliar with it.

Reminders – are always ‘salutary’. Your opponent has a poor memory and needs many such reminders.

Sarcasm – always refer to as ‘clumsy’

Screed - if referring to your opponent's book at all costs describe it in some other terms: Screed, tract, glorified pamphlet, loose collection of essays, collation of occasional journalism, assortment of republished ephemera etc

Someone who has actually been there - someone who has ‘actually been’ to a place (eg Nicaragua/ anywhere in the Real World) obviously knows what they are talking about and is automatically deserving of respect. Their small sack of anecdotes is unassailable by logic, statistics or other documentation. Best admit defeat.

Tenuous - Your opponents grasp of logic, the facts, the English language.

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.)

“Unwitting” – almost everything your opponent does is ‘unwitting’, eg revealing his real sympathies, confirming your argument, showing his true colours etc.

“What I actually said” - your opponent has invariably failed to grasp this. Thus, you should suggest that he ‘tries addressing what you actually said’ or even ‘please address you remarks to the person who actually made the argument you refer to.”


If you read through the above a couple of times, they should be installed in your head as mental software. Please make sure, however, you have first disabled your 'critical thinking' facility.