Left-Liberal as Pseudo-concept

'Left-liberal': this hybrid pseudo-category gaining currency only through the mimetic zeal of those eager to participate in 'current debates' even at the expense of their own intellect, those unwillingly to suffer the ignominy of exclusion from the mediocracy and its ephemeral rewards. What is its function (for it has no intellecual content)?

Does not left-wing thought begin in antagonism to liberalism, as an interrogation of its assumptions, even as it promises to 'complete' it?. To yoke ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ together is a category error, but a politically motivated one. The hyphen anticipates their eventual conflation, the elision of the distinction between them. They are compressed into a false unity. It is as if 'the left' is now only those aspects of it continuous with Liberalism. The excremental remainder, which is to say, from our point of view, the very essence of the Left, is discarded, pushed off the spectrum altogether. 'Left-liberal' is a device whcih shrinks the political spectrum, illegitimately contracts the ‘left’ into an alliance with its historical adversary, and restricts political struggle to pragmatic positions within capitalism. Indeed, one’s stance with regard to this last (the very system within which we live) is henceforth off limits.

The conflation of left and liberal is found also in statements like: ‘historically, the left has stood for equality, rights etc whereas now it is supporting theocratic tyranny and siding with all sorts of nefarious anti-enlightenment forces'. The left has always been Liberal and is now being illiberal. ‘The Left’ has in fact often sided, strategically, with various anti-imperialist or anti-colonial liberation movements espousing non-enlightenment values. The obvious point being that they were not siding with them because of those values. And the even more obvious point being that the Right is no stranger to strategic alliances with groups whose ideology they in no way support.

But there is a further irony here. Multiculturalist tolerance, in its contemporary guise, is of course an eminently liberal ideology rather than a leftist one – the fight against racism, sexism and cultural discrimination, the insistence on understanding the Other and allowing the Other appropriate expression within society, these are all the historic concerns of Liberalism. For the Left, all of the above is fine, but the true lines of division are those of class. The idea that social conflict is primarily about cultural non-recognition is for the left an obfuscation of the reality of economic divisions, it is an abstraction.

The ‘over-tolerance’ towards various cultural particularisms (e.g. Islam) is surely an outgrowth of Liberalism. The left, by contrast, does not simply want to tolerate these particularisms as 'valid cultural expression', but to understand them in terms of the relations of power in which they are implicated. In this sense, the ‘left-liberal’ category serves to tar the left with the errors of liberal tolerance

Thus, on the one hand, the left are being tarred with the errors of liberal over-tolerance – understanding the Other rather than condemning their illiberality. On the other hand the Left is being condemned for not being liberal – i.e. universalist, fighting for equality, rights etc. Twin faces of Liberalism are criticized in lieu of the actual Left, which has been written out of the picture, and remains untouched but also forgotten.

Thus, the basic framework of thinking remains liberalism itself. And the noises of these polemics is that of Liberalism bumping its head against its own limits. The Left tradition alone has the true critique of this framework and its limits and contradictions, and it is precisely the tools of this critique which have been jettisoned by the facility of the ‘Liberal-Left’ conflation.

[n.b. I perhaps need to point up the difference between the pseudo-category 'left-liberal'- used as virtually synonymous with 'any left of centre thinking' and the older 'left liberal' used to refer to the left wing of Liberalism. I am of course talking about the former not the latter.

n.b. 2. A particularly hilarious and vacuous example of the use of 'left-liberal, ' and the typical ideological context in which it is embedded, can be found here]

Random things

Those who wish to write quickly a piece about nothing that no one will read through even once, whether in a newspaper or a book, extol with much conviction the style of the spoken language, because they find it much more modern, direct, facile. They themselves do not know how to speak. Neither do their readers, the language actually spoken under modern conditions of life being socially reduced to its indirect representation through the suffrage of the media, and including around six or eight turns of phrase repeated at every moment and fewer than two hundred words, most of them neologisms, with the whole thing submitted to replacement by one third every six months. All this favours a certain rapid solidarity. On the contrary, I for my part am going to write without affectation or fatigue, as if it were the most natural and easiest thing in the world, the language that I have learned and, in most circumstances, spoken. It’s not up to me to change it. The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never compelled to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language, the lie must reign

Guy Debord

A recent interview with John Berger on the American election.

A shrewd analogy:

'In the same way that very few people a few years ago could have predicted that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown in Iraq, his statues dragged down by jubilant braying mobs, who would ever have predicted the toppling of Cosmopolitan as Britain’s number one women’s monthly?' — Periodical Publishers’ Association conference. (Courtesy of Private Eye)


And 'the single most manipulative piece of Republican drivel I've ever seen' (truly emetic, & courtesy of here)

The so-called Traditional Left

It is becoming fashionable, or whatever one wants to call such contagious repetitions of doctrine, to say things along the lines of this -

traditionally, the left was universalist, basing its claims on notions of reason, truth, human rights, justice and democracy. On the postmodernist view, however, these standards themselves, indeed all norms whatsoever, merely express particular interests or power relations that arbitrarily favour some people, cultures or outlooks over others.'

Now what 'tradition' exactly are we talking about here and what would differentiate such a tradition from Enlightenment Liberalism? Statements such as the above mislead, perhaps wilfully, and can be seen as attempts to 'revise' the definition of the Left in order to meet the demands of present agendas.

Left wing thought, if we are including the Marxist tradition under this rubric (and if we are not then it is a patently and feebly ideological construction we are dealing with) has always been a critique of the cited 'enlightenment values' in their own name. Let me give an example,

Marx exposes how the state constitutes subjects as 'equal citizens' at a purely abstract level - in what Marx terms a 'fiction of constitutions' whilst on the other hand, the sphere of civil society, characterised by domination, exploitation and disperate need and conditions is left in tact. The state thus establishes equality only by abstracting away from such real differences, thereby disguising and reproducing inequality beneath a purely formal equivalence. (Marx: 'political man is only abstract, artificial man' (see Early Writings, 1963, p. 60).

Marxism, and the 'traditional' left, does not unreflectively salute enlightenment values nor does it say that they are always only rationalisations of class interests. It says, precisely, that in determinate social conditions these values work to enforce and perpetuate certain interests, or 'express certain power relations'. This is surely the crux.

If the Left was merely about saluting such values, formally, then there would be nothing to differentiate it from Liberalism of a certain kind. It is presumably the intent or unintended effect of statements like the one cited above to elide this difference between Enlightenment Liberalism and the Left, so shrinking the political spectrum and the possibilities of legitimate thought and action in the process.

The Left, from Marx to the Frankfurt School, to the New Left, has been concerned precisely to show the particular at work within the universal and disguised as the universal; to show that the universal isn't universal enough, that the universal supresses the particular,

'Postmodernism' as the statement above summarises it, has nothing to do with the Left, traditional or otherwise and is more aligned with modern forms of Liberalism/ neo-Pragmatism. Meanwhile, the so-called 'traditional left' is the invention of the Present. The 'traditional left' is a Left from which Marxism and its categories have been surgically removed, so that the anodyne hybrid called 'left- liberal' can live.

The task of the real traditional left, or a task at least, is precisely to insist upon what differentiates the Marxist tradition from liberalism and to delineate the blindspots and failures of liberalism. This is one of the positive features of Zizek's work, and one which has of course met with uncomprehending and asinine responses.


Some related reflections here.

[Norman Geras has responded to the above here. I’m not sure that his position (on this particular topic) is significantly different to my own, although I somehow sense he would like it to be. I may be wrong. I would, however, be genuinely interested to know, given his expertise in this area, what he thinks is historically and politically distinctive about the Left and what distinguishes it (if there is an 'it') from the Liberal tradition. ]

An aside

If Oliver Kamm did not exist, and if there was a weekly Private Eye column under that name, publishing the material that currently appears at his blog, few would question its excellence. The best approach to Kamm, the one yeilding the maximum quota of enjoyment from his prose, is indeed to forget the inconvenient fact of his existence and relish the excellent satirical fiction. I offer as evidence the following sentence -

I have received a lot of correspondence about my recent and continuing series on Noam Chomsky, most of it along the lines of – to quote one message in full and as it is written – “BANKER ASSHOLE UNLIKE YOU CHOMSKY DEFENDS THE POOR”. I don’t believe this is true, but in any event it doesn’t deal with the subject of my posts, which concerns Chomsky’s handling of source material.

Simply place Kamm's existence 'under erasure', as it were, to release the full rhetorical potential of these words, and to relish the Dickensian sharpness with which the character is delineated in all its ponderous self-importance. Priceless.

Tale of the Tail and the Tailor

Via Backword Dave, i was directed to Bush's "Wolves' campaign film. For some reason I was unable to get sound and was plunged into a dark, dense wood and then saw several wolves running across a landscape. I was reminded of nothing so much as the Wolfman's famous dream as reported to Freud, wherein the subject is stared at by several wolves perched on a tree:

Freud is quick to seize upon the details of the dream that occlude its main thrust: the wolves become the wolf in a picture-book used by his sister to scare him as a child; their bushy tails are drawn from a story grandfather told him about a tailor who caught a wolf by the tail and pulled it off; and they look like the sheep dogs he had seen copulating in the countryside. Most importantly, their number - six or seven - does not refer to the wolves themselves but to the goats eaten in the fairy-tale 'The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats' (1991: 260-262). In other words, Freud translates the Wolf Man's terror at seeing wolves at his window at night (a pack, a multiplicity) into a fear of the big bad wolf himself- the castrating father.

Ok, so tail ( = 'Bushy') removed and, Bush's, erm, tailor recently got him off the hook by explaining the curious bulge [!?] in his back which some thought might be a prompting device and would, if proven to be so, have proved rather emasculating. Is the President using campaign broadcasts to express a political castration anxiety? Or would it make a difference if I heard the soundtrack?

(One might also take in to account Deleuze's criticisms of Freud's reading of the dream:

he transcribes the varied, multiple and fragmented elements of the Wolf Man's existence into the singular significance of the dreadful phallus. The Wolf Man's sentient body, tortured by its multiple inhabitants and terrified by the prospect of becoming a multiplicity, remains silenced and misunderstood by Freud's univocal translation of its meaning. The dream of the wolves watching and desiring the Wolf Man, whose very name implies that he is between wolf and man, suggests a fear of becoming wolf- of joining the pack and becoming indistinguishable from it- of becoming a kind of singular multiplicity.

The President is supposed to be the single and univocal 'Daddy', the Master. In reality, the sentient being who occupies the symbolic mandate "President' is tortured and confused by the multiplicities of mandates, voices, of the 'Peoples' (African-American, Hispanics etc) he ostensibly represents.. )

Greenblatt on W.S.

An interesting and informative review of Stephen Greenblatt's recent historically and biographically rich book on Shakespeare. The celebated 'anonymity' of W.S., his elusive negative capability starts to look a little less self-evident.

Occasionally, the book seems to reprise the National Library discussion in Ulysses:

Yet Greenblatt argues persuasively (as Joyce had Stephen do in “Ulysses”) that the death of his only son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven, in 1596, was the crushing and transforming blow in his life. The heartbreaking lines about a lost child that begin “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,” from “King John,” were written just afterward, and before long he began a new version of an old revenge play bearing a variant of his son’s name.

Elsewhere, speculative daring that many might deem inadmissable:

A chapter of Greenblatt’s book is devoted to the horrible death of Ruy Lopez, the Queen’s physician, and its consequences for Shakespeare’s imagination of the “other.” Jewish by birth though not by faith, Lopez was found guilty of an attempt on the Queen’s life. (He was almost certainly framed.) When, on the scaffold, he cried plaintively that he “loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ,” the mob merely laughed at what they took to be an equivocation, before he was ripped apart.
Greenblatt conjectures that Shakespeare was there and was haunted by the laughter, and that “The Merchant of Venice” is in part a response to his shiver.

And nuggets of (re)discovery:

Greenblatt revives the great, too little known speech from a manuscript of a many-authored play about Thomas More, which includes lines, perhaps actually in Shakespeare’s hand, where More protests the expulsion of foreigners from England:

'Imagine that you see the wretched strangers/, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage/Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation. . . . / By this pattern /Not one of you should live an agèd man, /For other ruffians as their fancies wrought/ With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right /Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes /Would feed on one another'.

The gloss on this last, however, that Shakespeare was an instinctive Liberal Humanist, i imagine is the reviewer's rather than Greenblatt's, unless 'Liberal Humanist' is diluted to mean little more than someone intuitively responsive to the suffering of others (and of the Other), which may be cordial (pun intended) to the Present but is, in the end, a-historical mystification.

This article will not appear in tomorrow's Times

May I take this opportunity to state: a blog article should not (in my opinion) be written as if it were to be published in tomorrow's newspaper. Occasionally, such a piece may be suitable. Personally, my blog pieces are experiments, calculated provokations, ways of 'testing' random thoughts - the bits and pieces of what might, elsewhere, appear in a suitably polished form. There is frequently something ironic and provisional taking place here. And this is not to disclaim responsibility for anything I have written, but rather to allow it properly to be read. May I also say that, to my mind some of the best blogs have this quality, loosed as they are from the demands of accountability and finality, loosed also from the rules and self-censorship of professional writing, they open a space in which new thoughts might breath.

before me floats an image

"President Bush delivered a commencement speech at a university in Wisconsin. A very inspirational speech. Apparently Bush told the students, 'You can do anything in life if your parents work hard enough.' '"Political experts say President Bush was off his game. He looked distracted, confused, a little at a loss for words. Off his game? That is Bush's game.' Imagine if they delay the election. This could mean that Bush would be the longest serving president never to get elected.'

The endless Bush jokes underline his questionable 'legitimacy' - in electoral terms but also in terms of a man living off class capital, off the symbolic indemnities provided by the Name of the Father. His authority comes from his background, Name, his office - anywhere but from himself. He is on the train without a ticket, looking round nervously, in unguarded moments the critics detect the shifty anxiety of the imposter; they stress, of course, these jokers, his uneasy relationship to language, they invoke the image of a man suddenly hypnotized, trapped in indecision, on the morning when his country was under attack; they stress his vacant, incurious air, ' as ignorant of the world as he is indifferent to it', he is bombing a country he could not locate on a map and so on. None of this makes a difference. Au contraire, it consolidates his posiiton..

from Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology:

.. let us mention only the 1986 Austrian presidential campaign, with the controversial figure of Waldheim at its centre. Starting from the assumption that Waldheim was attracting voters because of his great-statesman image, leftisits put the emphasis of their campaign on proving to the public that not only is Waldheim a man with a dubious past (probably involved in war crimes) but also a man who is not prepared to confront his past, a man who evades crucial questions concerning it - in short, a man wose basic feature is a refusal to 'work through' the traumatic past. What they overlooked was that it wsa precisely this feature with whcih the majority of centrist voters identified. Post-war Austria is a country whose very existence is based on a refusal to 'work through' its traumatic Nazi past - proving that Waldheim was evading confrontation with his past emphasized the exact trait-of-identificaiton of the majority of voters.

The theoretical lesson to be learnt from this is that the trait-of-identification can also be a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other, so that by pointing out the failure we can unwittingly reinforce the identification. Rightist ideology is particularly adroit at offering people weakness or guilt as an identifying trait: we find traces of this even with Hitler. In his public appearances, people specifically identified themselves with what were hysterical outbursts of impotent rage - that is, they 'recognised' themselves in this hysterical acting out.

The example of Hitler is an interesting one. Was it not Benjamin who saw in German fascism the early aestheticisation of politics, the transformation of the public into transfixed spectators. He was among the first to see the curious Hitler-Chaplin mirroring*. If Chaplin was the floundering, frustrated 'little guy', Hitler was his bizarro double and specular confirmation, a rage-inflated 'huge imago' in Auden's words. The Frankfurt School, who followed up and developed some of these suggestions were, and are, sometimes accused of conflating the psychological and political structures of Fascism with those of Liberal democracy. They did not conflate them as such, but thought that extreme phenomena could lay bare the secret truth of the Norm, the median. Benjamin, for example, noted (in a different context) that "ideas come to life only when extremes are assembled around them" and that "From the point of view of the philosophy of art the extremes are necessary". The pathological retrospectively illuminates the normal.

If German fascism allowed Benjamin to see the coming spectacularisation of politics, this accounts partly for the popularity of Benjamin among critical theorists and philsophers. It represents not so much a nostalgia for a time before spectacular society, but nostalgia for a time when it could actually be seen and truly experienced in its difference and novelty. It is the gaze of Benjamin, his very ability to see what it for us the medium within which we move, that is the object of our nostalgia.

Bush, having borrowed his authority from others, immediately delegates it others. He acts on behalf of or has others act on his behalf; he is merely the zero point of these deferrals and displacements. Lacking authority, he lacks also actual political convictions, interests. He is, it seems, the exact opposite of the passionate intensity of A.H. But this opposition, which is genuine, exists also within a theatrical and 'specular' form of politics which is specifically modern and which Benjamin and also Adorno had begun to understand and which Debord, in a different way, brought to concentrated theoretical clarity.

n.b, Adam Kotsko offers a 'Lacanian reading' of Bush, here:

Lacan would note that Bush exemplifies the modern phenomenon of the "master-fool." This is a master who does not sieze power, but rather abdicates himself of responsibility, simply rubber-stamping "reality." Accusing Bush in person is always awkward, because he is presented as a complete tool of the ideologues who are really running things. Even a sharply critical article on Bush always ends up accusing the knavish underlings more than Bush himself, and Bush, when called upon to explain himself, can always, justifiably, claim that he was just doing what he was told. Even the master, in our modern age, is a parasite on real power, which is always somewhere else and is never my responsibility.

W.

"How Easy is a Bush Supposed A Bear." Shakespeare


After the previous post, it was refreshing to hear some irreveretial comments about Bush from two of my American colleagues. What did they say? Well, something along the lines of:

He is designated not by a proper name but by a letter, W., which signifies nothing but the sheer diacritical gap separating him from his Father. He lives in this space, the interstices of the paternal name, like some Lacanian allegory. Puling son of Noboddady, seemingly baffled by his own existence. The earpiece of the Symbolic Order introduces something foreign into his head – it is language. It passes through the refractory medium of his body and exits the mouth – only a few paralogical ripples betray the presence of the suffering individual speaker.

The blankness of Bush, his emptyness, the absence of distinctive qualities... these are not to be thought of in contradiction to his status as 'leader'. On the contrary, they are essential components. Bush is nobody and everyone, a template that any American might fill. He can act as a cypher, a mouthpiece for other's voices (and this is of course given an uncannily literal twist) Read, by way of further illumination, (and I suspect this will the first and only time you will encounter this juxtaposition) this description of one time Irish leader Charles Stuart Parnell:
The influence exerted on the Irish people by Parnell defies critical analysis. He had a speech defect and a delicate physique; he was ignorant of the history of his native land; his short and fragmentary speeches lacked eloquence, poetry and humour; his cold and formal bearing separated him from his own colleagues; he was a Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and, as a crowning disgrace, he spoke with a distinct English accent.

The author of this piece, one James Joyce, hits the nail on the head. It is precisely Parnell's 'empty neutrality' which allows him to represent the nation - that all-inclusive 'empty' set which has to include the multifarious sub-sets. Parnell is both no different from his people, unassuming and 'flawed', and yet set apart (Protestant, 'aristocratic') enough to act as a mirror.

With Bush, the logic of identification is similar to that posited by Judith Williamson about the Royal Family. The Royal family are at once removed and yet no different from us in terms of their intrinsic merits, their place is the result of an 'accident' rather than any necessity of talent or ability. It is this combination, Williamson suggests which renders them so suitable as a point of identification. Similarly with Bush, his symbolic place is almost adventitious, unrelated to merit or ability, the very mirror-image of Anyone at all, emptied of positive traits other than the inarticulacy, the puzzlement, the endearing failings of the Average. His apartness, as leader, has been visted upon him almost by chance, not something he has seized like a Destiny, like a fulfilment of his own innermost potential. In Bush, the conduit, the template, the They encounters its own specular image. Or is it the empty place of power itself which finds in Bush its local habitation and name, does he not somehow represent the very empty place of which he occupies?

n.b. some skulls seem to be too thick for the crowbar of humour or thought itself to prise open.

What is "Anti-Americanism"?

This seems a fairly clear example. The post has apparently given rise to skepticism, given its anecdotal nature and the context wherein it first appeared. No doubt counter-anecdotes could easily be produced. When the author says ‘The English are not known for public displays of fury except perhaps at soccer matches, but there is something about an American accent that brings out their pent-up rage’ I can only plead blank non-recognition, and reply ‘nope, not me’. The portrait of repressed hatreds stewing silently and erupting in ugly eccentric rage seems as stereotypical a portrait of Englishness as you’ll find. But anyway, this is the nature of such material – it is unverifiable and relies upon internal consistency of tone and pre-agreement with the reader’s assumptions. But whether the anecdote is representative or unrepresentative, literally true, fanciful embellishment or pure invention, it nonetheless makes, ‘en passant’, an obvious point i.e., when the author asks “Does anyone say ‘George W Bush’ or ‘Donald Rumsfeld’ or Dick Cheney’ when they fly into these tirades?” she draws attention to the folly of conflating the actions of Bush et al with ‘America’ per se.

It is perhaps ironic that Bush himself would want to make this conflation; ironic, also, that this is precisely the conflation frequently made by those who accuse others of ‘anti-Americanism’. A colleague tells me of a video made by one of his students ostensibly about ‘Anti-Americanism’ in the U.K. The video consists of footage of anti-war protestors juxtaposed with tracking footage of acres of MacDonald’s, Burger King and other U.S. companies. It illustrates, suggests the student, British hypocrisy in simultaneously hating and loving ‘America’. Meanwhile, a protest against the Iraq war in France can be lazily referred to as an ‘anti-American’ demonstration at the consistently puerile ‘No Pasaran’ site. Elsewhere, in a discussion at Crooked Timber, criticisms of Starbucks were taken to be ‘really about’ attitudes to ‘America’. Such examples are utterly quotidian, routine, legion*.

Anyway, it seems obvious to me that enjoying burgers and protesting at what you consider to be an imperialist war are two different things, and not two ways of relating to a single abstraction called ‘America’. It seems to me that one really can object, genuinely, to inferior coffee and to the homogenization of our city-space without this 'intending' some ulterior or master referent. An American, conversely, can like fish and chips but hate cricket, hate Labour and love the Beatles. They are not entertaining tortured, contradictory attitudes towards “Englishness’. The substantial empirical thing really can be enjoyed or opposed in its own right and is not simply the bearer of some abstraction, although there are understandable and vested reasons why things are seen this way, and it is these vested reasons that need to be cleared away.

In fact the Anti-Americans and those who casually use the term ‘Anti-American’ are joined by a common error, a common inadmissible conflation. They make some particular object or attitude stand for the empty universality of ‘America’. It is noticeable that only certain things are conflated with “America’, nailed to this ‘master signifier’. Not jazz or the American novel, not the American Trade Union tradition, not New York or Abstract Expressionism and so on and so forth (see Arundhati Roy, below). You can love all these things, but be accused of ‘anti-Americanism’ if you then criticize the actions of a government who failed even to win the popular vote. I recall somebody making the above point, I forget where, but they mentioned the novels of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin; they mentioned Langston Hughes and the Beat poets and a myriad of other things that they loves even as they opposed the war. The reply, quite strikingly, was that non of the things she had mentioned were quintessentially ‘American’ – she had named fringe or oppositional phenomenon. The Republican tradition, on the other hand, was a central part of ‘American tradition’ and if you hated it then it followed that you hated America. This is transparently political of course. Ultimately, we are talking here about hegemony. It is hegemony which attempts to attach some particular content (eg The Republican tradition) to some abstraction, some ‘master signifier’ like America. It is the hegemonic operation which says if you hate x then you hate America (or whatever) or, alternatively, if you hate America you hate Freedom , which tries to make the identification between the master signifier and the particular content indissoluble, self-evident. As Zizek puts it:

Each apparently universal ideological notion [e.g. ‘America’ ‘The Left’] is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency.

In the ‘Starbucks’ discussion alluded to above, the reason that someone scrambled to defend a multi-national profit making organization as though she had something personally at stake was that for her Starbucks was a signifier of America and she was American – hey presto, successful ideological interpellation. Elsewhere, in what may or may not have been intended as a joke, I read that to be ‘anti-American’ was in fact to be ‘anti-goodness’, simple as that. This and other cases of ideological misrecognition are, as I say, utterly commonplace and pass without comment.

And in the case of ‘anti-Americanism’, the ideological twist is particularly pronounced. Nobody can seriously maintain that 'Anti-American' is typically a neutral and descriptive term. Anti-American and ‘Un-American’ have, historically, been used, often fairly self-consciously, to exclude from reasonable debate certain radical points of view. If someone’s point of view is ‘Anti-American’ then it ceases to be an argument and becomes the manifestation of a syndrome. It is therefore in accordance with obvious political interests to equate certain particular contents with master signifiers like ‘America’, precisely in order to foreclose debate. At the same time, the force of anti-American relies on numerous illegitimate conflations of ‘America’ with, variously goodness, Freedom, the actions of a particular government, the actions of certain corporations and so on. ‘America’ itself is little more than an empty signifier that gets charged with competing particular contents for competing strategic ideological reasons.

One only has to contrast ‘Anti-American’ with ostensibly comparable terms, such as Anti-French to see that it functions in a different way. It seems obvious that when someone in Texas empties a bottle of French wine into the gutter in protest at a decision taken by Chirac and his cabinet that they are being ‘anti-French’ – a term which of course has neither the currency or the resonance of ‘Anti-American’ for reasons which lie wholly outside semantics. A term like 'anti-French,' or 'Anti-English' even, has none of the weight of ‘anti-American’. It has no force, rings hollow, and lacks resonance and consolidation within the culture at large. It is this cultural and political context which is the life support system for the phrase and which cannot simply be got round or ignored.

As you might expect Chomsky has a take on the ideology of ‘Anti-American’:

"Anti-Americanism" (equivalently "the left," or "Marxists") is defined by the author [ Paul Hollander's Anti-Americanism ] as "a generally critical disposition toward existing social arrangements," the "cultural belief" that "this is a severely flawed and possibly doomed society, though still a menace to its citizens and humanity." Kondracke agrees that "the left gets more respect and attention in the news media than its ideas merit," and is "strongly influential" in colleges and the church. But all is not lost: "there is not a single Marxist or `anti-American' major daily newspaper (or even major newspaper columnist) in the country" and the dangerous "mainline churches" are losing membership. Fortunately, those with "a generally critical disposition toward existing social arrangements" are almost entirely barred, though we must keep up our guard in case the heresy finds a tiny outlet.

As with much Chomsky, this has about it more than a soupcon of strategic provocation. One only has to imagine the stuttering apoplexy, the indignant rage of a Kamm to relish the force of Chomsky’s remark. Seriously, though, is it not astonishing that ‘Anti-American' can be defined as ‘a generally critical disposition toward existing social arrangements, ” which is to say synonymous with radical questioning and thinking as such. How convenient.

*In fact, this idea that America is the object of simultaneous envy and hatred is itself little more than an 'ideologeme'. This look of envy-longing represents the gaze as fantasy object, this gaze of envy-longing is an object of desire, the gaze in which we - Americans - appear as we would like to be.

Some related thoughts can be found in this article by Arundhati Roy.

Event

I mentioned before that I intend writing something about the notion of the 'Event'. By way of preparation, here is Zizek explicatiing Badiou's notion with reference to the French Revolution:

Take, for example, French society in the late eighteenth century: what is accessible to Knowledge is the state of society-its strata, economic, political, and ideological fights, and so on; no Knowledge, however, enables us to predict or account for the properly unaccountable Event which consists in the so-called French Revolution. In this precise sense, an Event emerges ex nihilo. But the fact that it cannot be accounted for in the terms of the situation does not mean that it is simply an intervention from Outside or Beyond: it attaches itself, precisely, to the Void of every situation-to its inherent inconsistency and/or its Excess. The Event is the Truth of the situation, that which renders visible/readable what the "official" state of the situation had to "repress," but it is also always localized, that is, the Truth is always the Truth of a specific situation. The French Revolution is the Event that renders visible/readable the excesses and inconsistencies, the "lie," of the ancien regime; and it is the truth of the ancien regime situation-what is localized, or attaches to it. An Event thus involves its own series of determinations: the Event itself; its denomination ("French Revolution" not being an objective-categorizing designation but part of the Event itself, the way its participants or adherents perceived and symbolized their activity); its ultimate Goal (the society of fully realized emancipation, of freedom-equality-fraternity); its "operator" (the political movements struggling for the Revolution); and, last but not least, its subject (the agent who, on behalf of the Truth-Event, intervenes in the historical multiple of the situation and discerns/identifies in it the signs-effects of the Event). What defines the subject is his fidelity to the Event: coming after the Event, the subject persists in discerning its traces within the situation. "Subject," for Badiou, is thus a finite contingent emergence: not only is Truth not "subjective" in the sense of being subordinated to the subject's whims, but the subject himself is "serving the Truth" which transcends him; since he is never fully adequate to the infinite order of Truth, the subject always has to operate within a finite multiple of a situation in which he discerns the signs of Truth

Harried and flustered.

J. Hari, being a good liberal, has cited a few critical responses to his article, including mine – to which he adds this rider:

‘Watch out for the 'you-don't-accept-our-view-so-you-are-intellectually-illiterate' mentalty [sic] there. This is a guy who thinks Antonio Negri can be intellectually engaged with.’

A couple of rather obvious points. If Hari didn’t think Negri worth engaging with then why on earth ‘engage’ him in an interview? Secondly, I was articulating my view not ‘our view’ – this rhetorical sleight of hand sneakily implies that I am speaking on behalf of some collective position, some pre-existing consensus, from which Hari is boldly dissenting. This is empty posturing. The ‘mentality’ he alludes to is non existent, glued together by a string of hyphens and little else. It is perfectly obvious that I disagree with lots of people, Derrida included, without thinking them ‘intellectually illiterate’. It is not the mere fact of non-agreement that renders something intellectually illiterate, it is what is being said. This is worth drawing attention to only because of a familiar rhetorical ploy: pretending that your interlocutor is objecting to dissent as such rather than the content of what you said, and thereby insinuating his irrationality and intolerance.

Anyway, I see that Hari has been scrabbling around for a few crumbs of logic, a few guarantors to lean on in support of is piece, even resorting to embracing his ‘mortal enemy’ Noam Chomsky, and citing Terry Eagleton, for whom Hari is undoubtedly one of the bone-heads casually dismissed in his Guardian article. Jonathan Derbyshire has a some relevant comments.

Homogeneous Heterogeneity (Badiou)

On the one side there is an extension of the automatisms of capitalism, fulfilling on of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization. [..] On the other side there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation [..]

The semblance of a non-equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge – taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities – of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs. And these infinite combination of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth. Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialised magazines, improved shopping malls, ‘free’ radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady ‘public debates’ at peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a constant creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenise its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole.

from St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

Insulting the Dead

Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook has drawn my attention to an article on Derrida by Johann Hari. I kind of wish that he hadn’t, as I was in a rather dyspeptic mood to begin with.

In a postscript, Hari notes ‘It’s very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher – even one as bankrupt and silly [deary me] as Derrida or Antonio Negri – you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics.’ Now this is obviously nonsense. Nobody is objecting to the fact of criticism. Duttman, whom Hari cites, has himself been critical of Derrida and Negri. I have myself. What they, presumably, are objecting to is an ignorant and insulting tirade, full of demonstrable falsehoods, rhetorical banalities and lazy and occasionally offensive metaphors (‘Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism”’). Hari objects that his article has elicited insult rather than refutation, but Thought seems to have left no indentations here in which refutation might find a worthy foothold. A serious argument, after all, also provides the criteria by which it is to answered.

Hari begins by expressing incredulity at Derrida’s ‘popularity amongst academics’. This ‘popularity’ has in fact declined in recent years, and in any case we need to know whether he’s talking about France, the U.S. or Britian. Anyway, Hari seems to think that what popularity there is is rendered puzzling by the fact that ‘Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free ‘. Don’t ask me what is being argued here. I have no idea why supposed ‘safety’ should put a stop to rigorous critical thought, although it may well have done in Hari’s case. This, 'popularity'says Hari, can only be understood as a ‘symptom’ – this last being one of a number of such insidious metaphors pressed into service by Hari in lieu of an argument (‘viruses’, ‘cancers’). Hari refers to Derrida, who made a career of patiently and closely reading canonical texts and re-directing students’ attention to these, ‘trashing’ the humanities. This and the ensuing statements are simply worthless, without any discernable meaning; ‘logocentricism’ is not ‘the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way’ nor does a philosopher who disputes this idea count as a ‘deconstructionist’. It's pretty much a default common-sense assumption that would be the starting point of any philosophical interrogation. Derrida explicitly does not maintain that ‘The Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition [sic] that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions’. Derrida’s investigation of Enlightenment concepts is, by his own confession, made from within the enlightenment itself. Indeed, this is key, for it is here that Hari is actively misleading, especially when he lapses into this piece of sensationalist headlining: “Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are’. Rather than ‘hacking’ at anything Derrida was in fact concerned to tease out language’s own implicit logic; his critique was immanent, microscopic, cautious, humble.

But there is little point in continuing: Once again, Hari has waded in, far beyond the cordon of his competence or knowledge, his shrill journalistic head bobbing above the water, repeating prefabricated banalities and in general gauchely and gormlessly exhibiting his own intellectual illiteracy. The fact that he cites, in his defense, a first class degree from Cambridge ‘specializing in philosophy’ only makes more indefensible his howlers and misconceptions. All of what he says about Derrida’s thought is, without exception, false. The nearest he gets to the truth is about ten rumours away. He cites not a single work, nor is there any direct quotation. His article is a disgrace, and after wasting my time writing the above I can see why Professor Duttman preferred a more concise formulation.

N.B., My old tutor Terry Eagleton was weighed in with some worthwhile thoughts on the response to Derrida's death.

Derrida and the Dead

Spurious asks the following question: "What did it mean to read and write while Derrida was alive? Alongside him (he was always there, on the other side of Channel or on the other side of the world. He was in Moscow, Shanghai, Sao Paulo ... and sometimes in Britain, too, passing through one colloquim or another)? There was always another book by him waiting to be read.."

Yes, the existence of a Derrida represented - however illusory this representation was - the possibility of an interlocutor or a reader, a co-participant. Someone in whom the concerns of one's own work might meet with recognition, tacit understanding. We are not speaking of 'Derrida' as some cultic figure, whom might oneday deign to approve one's work, but of a possibility of thinking which, in him, was concretly alive and did not have to be conjured out of one's own imagination. Take, for example, John Berger, whose writing I do not always of course concur with but whose place of enunciation I find utterly reassuring and sympathetic. I recognise the place from which he speaks. It is an outpost, the outpost of a native land which is increasingly being trespassed on, colonised, eliminated by the cultural logic of late capitalism. The denizens of this frail land are mostly among the Dead. When one read Derrida (at times, not always), when one reads Berger one feels the turf of this land under ones feet. It is of interest that both Derrida and Berger were/ are preoccupied with the Dead. This is not 'morbid' and is not of course some mere reflection of their years. Berger speaks, for example, of Glenn Gould's piano playing as being like one of the 'already dead, come back to earth to play its music'. The Dead, outside the world, feel it all the more gratefully and sharply. Yet in another sense they are indifferent to it, i.e., they are indifferent to its transitory rewards, pragmatic imperatives, immediate cash-back offers. Thus, the concern of writers like Derrida and Berger with the Dead, and, before them, writers like Rilke, Celan, Kafka, Proust, is about attaining this combination of gratitude and disinterest, intense receptivity and benign detachment.

"Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated. we must try to aceive the greatest possible consciousness of our existence, which is at home in these unlimited realms, and inexhaustibly nourished by both." (Rilke)

"Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring line at the vessel's brim: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full (for us) means being heavy.. We should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life's averted half)." (ibid.)

Derrida

Here are some apt and just rebuttals of the inanities published on the death of Jacques Derrida. I quote, by way of example, Judith Butler's letter:

Jonathan Kandell's vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time. Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual limitations so obvious? There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida's work, but there were none to be found in Kandell's obituary. If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility. Kandell reports that Derrida disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him most. This most outrageous obituary fails to demean Derrida only because his work will continue to be read unabated, but it does cast a shadow on those who wrote and published it. Why would the NY Times want to join ranks with American reactionary anti-intellectualism precisely at a time when critical thinking is most urgently required?

Interesting to note the number of British blogs who, always eager to point out supposed examples of 'anti-Americanism', were entirely unperturbed by the puerile anti-French (and anti-Continental) sneering so thinly veiled in many of these intellectually illiterate and cynical pieces of journalistic ephemera.

Commmodity

This is an extract from an occasional lecture I'm writing on the origins of spectacular society (well, that's my understanding). Its rather notational.

The commodity is an object whose use value has been postponed; an object laid aside, an object taken out of circulation (Denis Hollier)

Commodities are appropriated by consumers as wish images.. For this to occur estrangement of the commodities from their initial meaning as use-values produced by human labour is in fact prerequisite (Susan Buck-Morss)

The commodity has become an abstraction. Once it has escaped from the hand of its producers, and is freed from its real particularity, it has ceased to be a product controlled by human beings. It has taken on a ‘phantom-like objectivity, and leads its oown life. “A commodity appears at first glance a self-sufficient trivial thing. Its analysis shows that it is a bewildering thing, full of metaphysical sublties and theological capers.”’



Magic is a function of detachment. The city dweller is asked constantly and very day to survey a range of physical objects, goods on display, with no idea as to their provenence or laborious origins. The value of the commodity in the marketplace appears arbitrary, unpredictable: “How the price of the commodity is arrived at can never be wholly foreseen.” For value has been arrived at through processes which are not transparently available to the consumer, hence, its value seems to be ‘magical’.

But the commodity in the shop window is doubly estranged: from the labour that produced it, yes, but also, temporarily, from the circulation process, from the domain of potential use, to be displayed. One is asked merely to look at it, not to employ it: to gaze at its ‘suspended animation’, at the impression it conveys. Increasingly, and more generally, there is a valourisation of acquaintance, taste, surface, impression. The casual, desiruous investment, the cursory evaluation, the bracketing off or suspension of practical enjoyments in favour of a fetishism of the visible – these were the pleasures brought into being, encouraged, by the commodity world. These were in turn ties to the pleasures of dreaming. Divorced from its original productive context (to which it is value is ties invisible, mysteriously) and suspended from circulation to become an object of visual and fetishistic pleasure, the commodity can now be invested with wishes, like some archaic icon:

Commodities that, in their mere visible presence [..] veil the production process, and – like mood pictures – encourage their beholders to identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams.

This disembodies magic is consolidated by advertising: “Within advertising, a new dissimulating aura is injected into the commodity, easing its passage into the dream world of the private consumer.” It is through advertising that properties and and promises ascribed to the object wholly unrelated to its productive origin or use-specific destination. In other words, commodities – detached and injected with glamour – can be made to mean just about anything at all. A commodity is a modern allegorical object.

W.B. Yeats in the Marketplace

Partly through laziness, I am posting a couple of things unconnected directly to blogging. Below is a brief, sketchy and abbreviated version of a passage from a book i am working on. This particular extract concerns the work of W.B. Yeats in the 1890's:






In the new cities of the late nineteenth century, “the poet’s livelihood depended on the new, mass marketplace in order to sell his poems.” Yeats, despite attempts to circumvent this reality (attempting at first, in Ireland, to sell through a community of known subscribers), has a keen and pragmatic sense of its demands and a developed market competence. If he was identified by contemporaries as a myopic mystic, he was also recognized as a ‘shrewd businessman’ (Bertrand Russell’s words).

As has been said of Baudelaire, “In his attempts to compete in the literary marketplace, where poetry was an especially vulnerable commodity, he had to distinguish his own work from that of other poets.” In order to do so he needs a ‘trademark’, a reproducible poetic ‘signature’ which will act as a kind of patent for his work, a safeguard of his intellectual property. Yeats’s signature or trademark is ‘Irishness’, as he makes clear in various letters – to Katherine Tynan, and here, to Elizabeth White:

You will find it a good thing to make verses on Irish legends and places and so forth. It helps originality and makes one’s verses sincere, and gives one less numerous competitors.

‘Originality’ refers not to some auratic uniqueness in time and place. It means something like a patent, conferring market advantage. Likewise with ‘sincerity’, another mere ingredient or effect. Yeats’s poetic commodities are to bear the signature of ‘Irishness’. Place names and mythemes are the appropriate ‘exotic’ trademarks.

As well sidestepping competition, Yeats’s use of Irish mythemes represents an ingenious attempt, from the inside, the outmaneuver the very logic and ‘time’ of competition, in which “Products must stay up to date, or the competitive edge will be lost – which is to say they are caught up in the logic of fashion.’ Yeats is prepared to try out the latest poetic fashions – Pre-Raphaelite languor with its confiscation of medieval surfaces, desacralised and airbrushed with momentary desire. But such things are no sooner declared New than they are consigned to obsolescence. Instead, Yeats will seek his advantage by reaching back into the already long ‘outmoded’ Irish past. In poems printed in London magazines, like the Savoy, ancient Irish signs are presented as if they were the very latest thing. This use of the very old as the ‘latest’, profitably re-functioned within a metropolitan commodity culture, is crystallized by Yeats himself, when he speaks of a ‘Celtic Phantasmagoria’:

.. the whole hurly-burly of legends – Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace of the Gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years.. are all a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered…

‘Phantasmagoria’ is a term from the world of high capitalism and its advertising spectaculars, from the Great Exhibition: “The word phantasmagoria.. was used as the name of one of the many machines of illusion concocted by the nineteenth century. It worked by projecting slides from behind a translucent screen to viewers on the other side.” And so ‘Celtic Phantasmagoria’ is a curious but revealing term, as though these Gaelic mythemes, heavy with time, carried over by and in the thickness of tradition, are instead merely images projected on a screen, thrown out carelessly by some magic lantern, and, loosed of their temporal depth and context, poesy’s disembodied toys.

(Quotes are from Dialectics of Seeing by Susan Buck-Morss, unless otherwise stated.)

Thinker Under Arrest

There is a poem by W.B Yeats called “The Scholars”. I’ve quoted it here at CS before. It ends with the line (I’m quoting from memory) “what would they say, should their Catullus walk their way”. The point, made with the sharp brevity of a good espresso, is that the last thing academics would want to encounter is the actual, three-dimensional incarnation of their object of study, its repetition in the present.

The academic or ‘scholastic’ (Bourdieu) attitude is content to classify, to place in a canon, to assess ‘influence’, to trace allusion and to see the work reflected in the endless mirrors of intellectual – literary, philosophical - tradition. That their chosen author made also a fierce proposal about existence, that taking their author seriously might involve a commitment to something other than library hours, this lies outside the mirrors. It is not just true of the Catulluses, the literary and artistic figures whose work is an ongoing demand to ‘change your life’. Equally, there are philosophers, thinkers, whose ideas do not, so to speak, bear repeating. To study Walter Benjamin’s Theses is one thing; to turn them on the present, to re-open what the book of canonisation has closed (but without mentioning Benjamin, without the dutiful nod), to take him at his word rather than simply ‘editing and annotating’ his words, this would have the scholars calling the police.

Event/ 1916

Those of you who are familiar with Badiou's notion of the 'event' and with the Easter 1916 rising in Ireland, I would be interested to hear whether you think that the rising constituted an 'event' in Badiou's sense. I tend to think that it did and will be posting something on this shortly. In the meantime, you'll see that I've opened the comments box. In the absence of any comments or emails I shall of course post something anyhow.

Recommendation

Despite the arbitraryness implied by its title, '99 Poems in Translation' ed. Pinter et al is a beautiful little volume, with a coherence and timbre of its own. The poems are typically melancholy, clinging on to moments of earthly beauty before those moments become merely monuments. Humour is dark and belly deep. Few of them are gnarled with verbal ambiguity; many are radiantly simple. Leopardi is a presiding tutelary presence. I offer you this (conveniently short) example:

'No'

It's not because I'm now too old,
More wizened than you guess..

If I say no, it's only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.

Lady Ki No Washika, 8th Century.

May I also note in passing the depressing inanity and crabbed anti-intellectualism of so much of the reports of Derrida's death in the English speaking press. . Some interesting stuff, though, on the weblog-sphere, including, reliably, Wood's Lot.

N.b., a couple of talks organised by the LRB (in my email):

'To mark its 25th anniversary, the London Review of Books is organising a series of public discussions to be held at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, Thornhaugh Street (off Russell Square), London WC1.10 November: Europe: What is the Problem?
Moderator: Stephanie Flanders , Panelists: Anatole Kaletsky, David Runciman, Stephen Wall, Martin Wolf, Slavoj Žižek
19 November: What is Literary Criticism for?
Moderator: Andrew O’Hagan Panelists: Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Zadie Smith, James Wood
.'

re Walter Benjamin

The historical index of the image doesn't simply say that they belong to a certain time, it says above all that they only enter into legibility at a certain time. And indeed, this 'entering into legibility' constitutes a critical point of the movement inside them. Every Now is determined by those images that are synchronic with it: every Now is the Now of a specific recognisability.. an image is that in which the Then and the Now come together into a constellation like a lightening flash. (W.B. Theory Of Knowledge)

There are facets of the historical object which await the arrival of definite conditions in order to be seen, to be read; definite, i.e., as opposed to the passing of time per se. It is not the sheer empty elapse of a chronologocal span that enables the past to be read, automatically, but a historical situation that is related to the earlier by dint of similarity. Similarity, not anticipation, not causation. The relation between the Then and Now is like that between two halves of a metaphor, tenor and vehicle.

Benjamin speaks of 'legibility': the text of the present and that of the past align, and the one glosses the other. Or, certain historical phenmenon can only be observed at certain moments just as certain astrological phenomenon can. This is why Habermas' image of Benjamin's thought is so apposite:

History revolves like a dead star upon which, now and then, lightning flashes.

for both bodies are in motion, past and present. Only when their orbits are configured in a certain way does illumination take place.

It is not, then, only the object of interpretation which is historical, in the sense of 'belonging' to a certain period, embodying that period's style, concerns etc, the interpreting subject is equally historical. Nor is it only the past that is suddenly illuminated. To paraphrase Jameson, It is not only us who judge the past, but the past which in its recalcitrant difference, interrogates us.

For example, Benjamin's own early analysis of German Baroque drama glosses and is glossed by the Germany of expressionism, of catasrophe and inflation.

Restoration Theatre

Some sketchy thoughts on Restoration Drama

For, say, John Webster, the decay of the old symbolic order elicited disgust, repugnance (a moral category). It was still experienced as a lack, a falling away. Moreover, in Jacobean drama calculation and cynicism are typically coded as daemonic and intrigue is in league with Evil. But by 1660 it is merely self-evident and the occasion for jaded resignation that the regulatory social forms are empty, pure and mechanical custom without Absolute (Natural or Divine) guarantee

Those agreed and almost pre-cognitive beliefs that had, before the English Revolution, secured the socio-symbolic order – the self-evidence of official religion, belief in the divinely ordained right of monarchs - have been eaten away. A carapace of social conventions remains in place nonetheless, but no one quite takes them seriously. They are ironised, often deliciously, or they are treated aesthetically rather than in terms of ethical obligation. The divinely ordained substance has migrated from these social forms, but they themselves live on as a kind of game. The rules of the social game, because emptied of commitment or belief, are now eminently malleable, entirely visible; there is nothing at stake but appearances. And one lives in the space separating forms of life from their legitimacy.

The rules are to be ironised, knowingly ‘played’ and deployed, implicitly criticized, but not in the name of a fully fledged alternative, only in the name of a corroding cynicism which believes in little other than self-interest. Thus, everyone plays the game, not because they believe it, or are committed to it, but because it is (perceived to be) the only game in town and because, after 1660, revolutionary fervor is distinctly passé.

The real regulatory principle is now, increasingly, money, monetary exchange. It is this which renders the superannuated social forms, the whole delicious comedy of ‘manners’ - a pure appearance. The old social forms of aristocratic life still, though, have both aesthetic appeal and semiotic force; it’s just that they are no longer locked into socio-economic reality. These forms no longer express but costume – all is reduced to charade and simulacra. Everyday life becomes theatre.

What differentiates this Restoration cynicism from our own is this: theirs consisted in not having an alternative to the social forms they ridiculed, or in a deliberate amnesia towards a recently defeated alternative; we, on the contrary, have at least the illusion of an infinite number of alternatives, a whole range of lifestyles and ideologies culled from the entirety of human history. At the level of actual behaviors and praxis, of course, we remain utterly paralyzed. The mere existence of alternatives is sufficient. Any attempt to bring them about will result in a Gulag. If there is an analogy between our own age and the Restoration it is perhaps that for us what has been 'restored' is capitalist Liberal Democracy. What has been exorcised is the spectre of Socialism.

Understatement

Encountered today a criticism of 'English Understatement'. The following response:

Understatement, never quite calling a thing by its name, at least contains the implicit recognition that the name in any case never quite lives up to the thing. In understatement, the name respectfully keeps its distance. In doing so it actually comes closer to the real texture of things, that residue which cannot be metabolised by language but only pointed towards. The opposite of understatment is not so much calling a thing by its name but rather the effacement of the thing by a presumptive and rude nomination. Things, rather than being given their due silence, are deafened by language, or made to speak in a foriegn tongue.

K. diary, 10 Nov. 1917: "I haven't yet written down the decisive thing. I am still going in two directions. The work awaiting me is enormous." Quite.

Novelty

There are a few new entries in the Critical Dictionary today (see Links). I was going to include, under 'Novelty', the following passage by Proust, but am quoting it here instead:

"All novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have all grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself. Any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon. So when Bergotte - and his figures seem simple enough today - said of Cottard that he was a mannikin in a bottle, always trying to rise to the surface, people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual."

A note on method

I am currently writing a book which attempts to come to terms with the difference of the past in a way that simultaneously interrogates the present. What does it mean for something to be 'historical', to bear the stigmata of History? Anyway, I find these words, of Fredric Jameson ("Marxism and Historicism"), to be excellently suggestive:

We will no longer tend to see the past as some inert and dead object which we are called upon to resurrect, or to preserve, or to sustain, in our own living freedom; rather, the past will itself become an active agent in this process and will begin to come before us as a radically different life form which rises up to call our own form of life into question and to pass judgement on us, and through us on the social formation in which we exist. At that point, the very dynamics of the historical tribuneral are unexpectedly and dialectedly reversed: it is not we who sit in judgement on the past, but rather the past, the radical difference of other modes of production (and even of the immediate past of our own mode of production), which judges us, imposing the painful knowledge of what we are not, what we are no longer, what we are not yet. This is the sense in which the past speaks to us about our own virtual and unrealised 'human potentialities,' but it is not an edifying lesson, or any kind of personal or cultural 'enrichment'. Rather, it is a lesson of privation, which radically calls into question the commodified daily life, the reified spectacles, and the simulated experiences of our own plastic-and-cellophane society.... It is the past that sees us, and judges us remorselessly, without any sympathy for our complicity with the the scraps of subjectivity we try to think of as our own fragmentary and authentic life experience.

Indeed.

Object-Subject

Baudrillard on Objects:

If I use a refrigerator to refrigerate it is a practical mediation: it is not an object but a refrigerator. And in that sense I do not possess it. A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and then brought into relationship with the subject. In this sense all owned objects partake of the same abstractness, and refer to one another only in so far as they refer soley to the subject.

A thing is objectified when abstracted from its function, its use, and viewed from the point of view of the subject. ‘Objects’ no longer pass beyond themselves to an equipmental context, they no longer implicate a ‘referential whole’; rather they point back to the ‘I’, his fantasies and desires. They are dream rebuses. Advertising appeals to things as ‘objects’ in this sense. And so, in another sense, does the collector, who says, for example, not ‘what a beautiful lamp’ or whatever, but ‘what a beautiful object’, and sees it in terms of its lustre, sumptuousness etc – all those things that refer us to the clutches of the owner, all that is most eminently graspable, caressable, ripe for festishisation. The paradox therefore is that the thing becomes an object when transformed into a receptacle of subjectivity, that the vanishing point of objectification - its target and precondition - is subjective custody .

Open Ended Days of Penitence

From here:

Israeli occupying troops have continued their wide scale offensive on the northern Gaza Strip. In the last two days, 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops. Thus, the number of Palestinians killed since the beginning of this latest offensive has mounted to 60, including 27 civilians, 18 of whom are children. In addition, at least 280 others, mostly civilians, including a number of children, have been injured, and a number of them have been rendered permanently handicapped. Israeli troops have also continued to destroy houses, agricultural land, civilian facilities and historical sites. In the meantime, Israeli troops have continued to impose a tightened siege on the area, and electricity and water supplies have been cut. They have continued to obstruct the work of medical crews.

('Israel's military assault "Days of Penitence", was launched in northern parts of the Gaza Strip on 28 September, resulting in one of Gaza's bloodiest days since the start of the Intifada on 30 September with 28 Palestinians killed and over 130 wounded. Israeli officials have described this military operation as "open ended". The assault is directed at Jabaliya refugee camp, home to more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees. Israel intends to creat a 9-km "buffer zone" around the refugee camp, continuing its scorched earth policy in the Gaza Strip ahead of its "disengagement".')

Dublin - spectacular!

But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings

In an earlier post I referred to a ‘vaguely Celtic looking monument’ in Dublin, near to Trinity College. It is in fact a simulacrum of a Viking standing stone, put there, as I mentioned last time, by the authorities in the late 80’s. I walked past it again, as it happens, whilst in Dublin this weekend – someone was posing for a photo with it, clinging onto what was in any case arranged only for their gaze, an eyeball to eyeball encounter with Ancient Ireland as staged by the Office for Tourism.

Now the next day I bumped into an old friend, Old Troy let’s call him, showing some students around the courtyard of Dublin castle. Anyways, this American fella comes up to us, with an anxious and disappointed look, and hearing Troy sounding all knowledgeable weighs in with “Isn’t there a bit that’s a bit more castle-y?” How do you mean? “Well, I was hoping for something a bit more like a castle, y’know, with turrets an all.” This man, drawn there by the vague odour of ‘history’, was interested only in ‘castle-icity’, to use a neologism as rebarbative as the mentality seeking it out, something already part of his icon repertoire. I asked whether he was familiar with the history of Dublin castle (which might help explain its appearance). He was not, but thought he might get some nice pictures.

Both people – the one in front of the ‘Viking’ stone and the Castle man - knew neither what they were standing in front of, nor its significance; they nonetheless wanted its image; they were content to skim the meaningless surface off the thing and consign it to their digital store.

The image of the thing, shorn of being and meaning, slides effortlessly into the subject’s dream world. Reality is measured in terms of its quota of iconicity. What cannot be so measured induces only boredom, confronting the subject with the unattractive prospect of the labour of understanding