The notions of a calling, of moral duty, of a life lived outside the imperatives of exchange value and les service des biens.. Watching a programme on children with HIV in Kenya. A man working with these children comments with beautiful concision:
"People say ' with all your qualifications and education why do you not get a better job'. They mean one with more money. But I am not doing this job just to collect a salary. It is a calling. I am not doing it because someone has to do it, but because I feel that I am the one to do it."
Thus, one is not just indifferently filling a structural position ('someone has to do it') but being faithful to something in yourself more than yourself, something which, were it refused or denied, would mean that you were unable to live with yourself. The man spoke with the radiant serenity of those who have, despite the alternative lures and pay-offs, chosen to be a free subject.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Philosophy is elsewhere..
Reading a recent collection of Conversations with Zizek, Z. suggests that one of the definitive facts about philosophy seems to be that it is never 'in its place'. Somehow its existence is nearly always unofficial, or conducted under some subterfuge. It must ceaselessly find itself anew, but finds itself always 'somewhere else'. By the time it has been codified and academically enshrined, it has already slipped out the back door, for such codification is eccentric to its very substance... It reappears only to to be dismissed as non-philosophy, and the philosopher ridiculed as a mountebank and corrupter of youth.
Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of) the ‘normal’ role of philosophy: in some of the nineteenth century nations like Hungary or Poland, it was literature which played the role of philosophy (that of articulating the ultimate horizon of meaning of the nation in the process of its full constitution); in the USA today, I.e., in the conditions of the predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy departments, most of ‘Continental philosophy’ takes place in departments of comparative literature, cultural studies, English, French and German [..] In Slovenia in the 1970’s, ‘dissident’ philosophy took place in sociology departments and institutes. [..] So where did philosophy play its ‘normal’ role? One usually evokes Germany – however, is it not already a commonplace that the extraordinary role of philosophy there was grounded in the belatedness of the realization of the German national political project? [..] Is there then a ‘norm’ at all? The closest one can come to it is if one looks upon the anaemic established academic philosophy, such as neo-Kantianism a hundred years ago in Germany or French Cartesian epistemology of the first half of the twentieth century – which was precisely philosophy at its most stale, academic, dead and irrelevant. What if, then, there is no ‘normal’ role? What if it is only the exceptions themselves that retroactively create the illusion of the ‘norm’ they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy, is exception the rule, but also philosophy – the need for authentic philosophical thought – arises precisely in those moments when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their ‘proper’ role? What if the proper space for philosophy consists of these very gaps and interstices opened up by the ‘pathological’ displacements in the social edifice?
Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of) the ‘normal’ role of philosophy: in some of the nineteenth century nations like Hungary or Poland, it was literature which played the role of philosophy (that of articulating the ultimate horizon of meaning of the nation in the process of its full constitution); in the USA today, I.e., in the conditions of the predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy departments, most of ‘Continental philosophy’ takes place in departments of comparative literature, cultural studies, English, French and German [..] In Slovenia in the 1970’s, ‘dissident’ philosophy took place in sociology departments and institutes. [..] So where did philosophy play its ‘normal’ role? One usually evokes Germany – however, is it not already a commonplace that the extraordinary role of philosophy there was grounded in the belatedness of the realization of the German national political project? [..] Is there then a ‘norm’ at all? The closest one can come to it is if one looks upon the anaemic established academic philosophy, such as neo-Kantianism a hundred years ago in Germany or French Cartesian epistemology of the first half of the twentieth century – which was precisely philosophy at its most stale, academic, dead and irrelevant. What if, then, there is no ‘normal’ role? What if it is only the exceptions themselves that retroactively create the illusion of the ‘norm’ they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy, is exception the rule, but also philosophy – the need for authentic philosophical thought – arises precisely in those moments when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their ‘proper’ role? What if the proper space for philosophy consists of these very gaps and interstices opened up by the ‘pathological’ displacements in the social edifice?
Friday, January 28, 2005
Neither to weep, nor to laugh...
“Neither to weep, nor to laugh, but to understand” (Spinoza)
“Nothing human is alien to me” (Marx, from Aristotle)
I have always been rather fond of both these maxims, especially when confronted with what might be called extreme phenomenon. Anyway, both came to mind y’day after reading two lamentable if not unpredictable utterances.
The first was a pure bead of inanity from Linda Grant, in response to a discussion on suicide bombers. The Eagleton article that triggered this discussion has received much attention, and I won’t add anything, other than saying his comments seem rather too coloured by his thoughts on hunger strikers, which he’s talked about elsewhere. Anyway, Grant’s two pence worth (initially via here) was:
1. In April 2003 two public school educated British men travelled to Israel via Jordan, declared themselves as tourists, wandered around the occupied territories for a few days, then went to Tel Aviv and one of them, in such despair at his miserable life, blew himself up inside Mike's Bar, killing three others.
2. Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.
The callous nonchalance, the sniggering derision is repellent. That young men and women, children even, through extremities of desperation, indoctrination or whatever, are driven to destroy themselves and others surely both defies and urgently demands comprehension.
There is a cliché, a default response, that ‘understanding’ is a kind of ‘wet liberal’ attitude. Understanding only in order to exonerate (if anyone actually does this) may well be. But Spinoza was of course no 'liberal' and the default response (as with so many default responses) is gibberish. Understanding is simply the precondition of intelligent action. Grant seems instead to have chosen laughter, proffering an ‘explanation’ so glib that it flaunts its cynical indifference to the phenomenon ‘explained’. Such actions, it is implied, have no real meaning, or deserve no more attention than a random anecdote or a half-remembered newspaper article. One suspects that what prevents people allowing such actions the dignity of ‘meaning’ is fear of being thought weak or ‘liberal’. But the desire to be thought 'tough' is of course itself the real weakness, and the lazy conflation of meaning and justification is simply foolish.
The tough ones in Northern Ireland were precisely those who were prepared to appear ‘weak’ in recognising that terrorist activity ultimately arose from genuine grievances and that these had to be addressed. If it takes ‘Weakness’ and ‘compromise’ to get some results, so be it.
The second utterance was Ariel Sharon, featured in the Independent commenting on the Auschwitz commemoration.
The Allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews and did nothing. Israel learnt that we can trust no one but ourselves. This phenomenon - of Jews defending themselves and fighting back - is an anathema [to] the new anti-Semites. Legitimate steps of self-defence which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror - actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake - are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.
Sharon, like the MCB, is unable to address himself to Auschwitz without also bringing in the actions of the Israeli state and telescoping the past through the pragmatic optic of the present. As so often, ostensible ideological opposites, like two great colliding trains, nonetheless run on the same rails.
update: Grant's comments appear more reprehensible after reading the article she seemingly had in mind, which she has clearly and carelessly travestied. The number of failed suicide bombers interviewed is three ("research"?). And the conclusions expressed seem, well, slightly at variance with Grant's synopsis:
"Their [suicide bombers] sense of there being no point to life was not personal, but existential, representing the entirety of the society. Their lack of interest in life and the sense that their future is totally blocked are shared by all [...] Thirty-five years of foreign occupation, sophisticated and undefeated, has not made the people living under it used to it, nor has it brought them to accept the ever narrower horizons the occupation dictates to its subjects. [...] Therefore, chances are Palestinian society will continue producing youngsters who see no point in living"
(Grant's reply was extracted by the dogged 'Lenin')
“Nothing human is alien to me” (Marx, from Aristotle)
I have always been rather fond of both these maxims, especially when confronted with what might be called extreme phenomenon. Anyway, both came to mind y’day after reading two lamentable if not unpredictable utterances.
The first was a pure bead of inanity from Linda Grant, in response to a discussion on suicide bombers. The Eagleton article that triggered this discussion has received much attention, and I won’t add anything, other than saying his comments seem rather too coloured by his thoughts on hunger strikers, which he’s talked about elsewhere. Anyway, Grant’s two pence worth (initially via here) was:
1. In April 2003 two public school educated British men travelled to Israel via Jordan, declared themselves as tourists, wandered around the occupied territories for a few days, then went to Tel Aviv and one of them, in such despair at his miserable life, blew himself up inside Mike's Bar, killing three others.
2. Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.
The callous nonchalance, the sniggering derision is repellent. That young men and women, children even, through extremities of desperation, indoctrination or whatever, are driven to destroy themselves and others surely both defies and urgently demands comprehension.
There is a cliché, a default response, that ‘understanding’ is a kind of ‘wet liberal’ attitude. Understanding only in order to exonerate (if anyone actually does this) may well be. But Spinoza was of course no 'liberal' and the default response (as with so many default responses) is gibberish. Understanding is simply the precondition of intelligent action. Grant seems instead to have chosen laughter, proffering an ‘explanation’ so glib that it flaunts its cynical indifference to the phenomenon ‘explained’. Such actions, it is implied, have no real meaning, or deserve no more attention than a random anecdote or a half-remembered newspaper article. One suspects that what prevents people allowing such actions the dignity of ‘meaning’ is fear of being thought weak or ‘liberal’. But the desire to be thought 'tough' is of course itself the real weakness, and the lazy conflation of meaning and justification is simply foolish.
The tough ones in Northern Ireland were precisely those who were prepared to appear ‘weak’ in recognising that terrorist activity ultimately arose from genuine grievances and that these had to be addressed. If it takes ‘Weakness’ and ‘compromise’ to get some results, so be it.
The second utterance was Ariel Sharon, featured in the Independent commenting on the Auschwitz commemoration.
The Allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews and did nothing. Israel learnt that we can trust no one but ourselves. This phenomenon - of Jews defending themselves and fighting back - is an anathema [to] the new anti-Semites. Legitimate steps of self-defence which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror - actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake - are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.
Sharon, like the MCB, is unable to address himself to Auschwitz without also bringing in the actions of the Israeli state and telescoping the past through the pragmatic optic of the present. As so often, ostensible ideological opposites, like two great colliding trains, nonetheless run on the same rails.
update: Grant's comments appear more reprehensible after reading the article she seemingly had in mind, which she has clearly and carelessly travestied. The number of failed suicide bombers interviewed is three ("research"?). And the conclusions expressed seem, well, slightly at variance with Grant's synopsis:
"Their [suicide bombers] sense of there being no point to life was not personal, but existential, representing the entirety of the society. Their lack of interest in life and the sense that their future is totally blocked are shared by all [...] Thirty-five years of foreign occupation, sophisticated and undefeated, has not made the people living under it used to it, nor has it brought them to accept the ever narrower horizons the occupation dictates to its subjects. [...] Therefore, chances are Palestinian society will continue producing youngsters who see no point in living"
(Grant's reply was extracted by the dogged 'Lenin')
Thursday, January 27, 2005
An arresting and poignant excerpt from an interview with Isaac Deutscher, courtesy of here:
My father was an orthodox Jew, in love with German culture, philosophy, and poetry. ... He was always wanting to read German literature and German periodicals with me. He had himself, in his youth, published essays in the Neue Freie Presse, the best-known Viennese newspaper; he had been correspondent of the Warsaw Hazefra, the first daily to appear in the Hebrew language; and he had also written a Little book in Hebrew about Spinoza, with the Latin title Amor Dei Intelectualis. Spinoza was one of his heroes; Heine the other. My father also had great respect for Lassalle, but the highest intellectual ideal for him, apart from the Hebrew writers was, of course, Goethe. I did not share my father's partiality for German poetry. I was a Polish patriot. Mickiewicz and Slowacki were dearer and closer to me. For this reason I never learned the German language thoroughly either. My father used to often say to me: 'Yes, you want to write all your fine poetry only in Polish. I know you will be a great writer one day' - for my father had a quite exaggerated idea of my literary talent, and wanted me to exercise it in a 'world language'. 'German', he would say, 'is the world language. Why should you bury all your talent in a provincial language? You have only to go beyond Auschwitz ...' - Auschwitz was just near us, on the frontier - 'you only have to go Auschwitz, and practically nobody will understand you any more, you and your fine Polish language. You really must learn German.' That was his ever-recurring theme: 'You have only to go beyond Auschwitz and you will be totally lost, my son!' Impatient as I was, I often interrupted him: 'I already know what you are going to say, father - You have only to go beyond Auschwitz, and you will be lost.' The tragic truth is that my father never went beyond Auschwitz. During the Second World War he disappeared into Auschwitz."
My father was an orthodox Jew, in love with German culture, philosophy, and poetry. ... He was always wanting to read German literature and German periodicals with me. He had himself, in his youth, published essays in the Neue Freie Presse, the best-known Viennese newspaper; he had been correspondent of the Warsaw Hazefra, the first daily to appear in the Hebrew language; and he had also written a Little book in Hebrew about Spinoza, with the Latin title Amor Dei Intelectualis. Spinoza was one of his heroes; Heine the other. My father also had great respect for Lassalle, but the highest intellectual ideal for him, apart from the Hebrew writers was, of course, Goethe. I did not share my father's partiality for German poetry. I was a Polish patriot. Mickiewicz and Slowacki were dearer and closer to me. For this reason I never learned the German language thoroughly either. My father used to often say to me: 'Yes, you want to write all your fine poetry only in Polish. I know you will be a great writer one day' - for my father had a quite exaggerated idea of my literary talent, and wanted me to exercise it in a 'world language'. 'German', he would say, 'is the world language. Why should you bury all your talent in a provincial language? You have only to go beyond Auschwitz ...' - Auschwitz was just near us, on the frontier - 'you only have to go Auschwitz, and practically nobody will understand you any more, you and your fine Polish language. You really must learn German.' That was his ever-recurring theme: 'You have only to go beyond Auschwitz and you will be totally lost, my son!' Impatient as I was, I often interrupted him: 'I already know what you are going to say, father - You have only to go beyond Auschwitz, and you will be lost.' The tragic truth is that my father never went beyond Auschwitz. During the Second World War he disappeared into Auschwitz."
General and Particular
"It is just this passing on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner accepted the particular than it reduces it to a thought station [...] Knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled."
Adorno, Minima Moralia
Adorno, Minima Moralia
Celan/ Beckett
John Felstiner, Paul Celan meets Samuel Beckett
'Celan me dépasse', Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, "Celan leaves me behind." But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett's trilogy opens with a mother's death and ends with The Unnamable's last words: "in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Six years before his suicide by drowning, Paul Celan had written this poem:
Where?
At night in crumbling rockmass.
In trouble's rubble and scree,
in slowest tumult,
the wisdom-pit named Never.
Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow — it fights its way
deeper down,
free.
Since "shadow" is masculine in German, maybe those final lines are saying, "he fights his way / deeper down, / free."'
'Celan me dépasse', Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, "Celan leaves me behind." But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett's trilogy opens with a mother's death and ends with The Unnamable's last words: "in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Six years before his suicide by drowning, Paul Celan had written this poem:
Where?
At night in crumbling rockmass.
In trouble's rubble and scree,
in slowest tumult,
the wisdom-pit named Never.
Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow — it fights its way
deeper down,
free.
Since "shadow" is masculine in German, maybe those final lines are saying, "he fights his way / deeper down, / free."'
Grandville (1803-1847)
For the importance of Grandville, see Susan Buck-Morss's excellent Dialectics of Seeing and Agamben's Stanzas.
For the importance of Grandville, see Susan Buck-Morss's excellent Dialectics of Seeing and Agamben's Stanzas.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Specious
"The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it." Adorno.
The twists and turns of a convoluted and untenable argument are frequently signs that some other content is being disavowed.
I’m obviously not alone in being rather dismayed by the contortions and confusions of the MCB over plans to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz.
What has stopped the MCB from attempting to think about Auschwitz in its particularity is, presumably, their view of the Israeli state. But whereas one might indeed, in thinking about the origins of the state of Israel, consider Auschwitz, there is absolutely no reason, in thinking about Auschwitz, to consider the actions of the state of Israel. What connects the two for some, and perhaps the MCB, is the signifier ‘Jew’. And it is precisely this conflation, used in whatever context, which should be avoided at all costs. Their is nothing "Jewish' about the actions of the Israeli state, and the 'categorical imperative' that Adorno speaks of, that Auschwitz not happen again, is universal in its address.
There is thus no reason why, in commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, we should consider the plight of the Palestinians, as the MCB suggest. And hopefully one does not need to add that what should merit our concern about the plight of the Palestinians is not the outrage that Muslims should be treated like this (many, of course, are not Muslims) but that anyone should be.
The twists and turns of a convoluted and untenable argument are frequently signs that some other content is being disavowed.
I’m obviously not alone in being rather dismayed by the contortions and confusions of the MCB over plans to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz.
What has stopped the MCB from attempting to think about Auschwitz in its particularity is, presumably, their view of the Israeli state. But whereas one might indeed, in thinking about the origins of the state of Israel, consider Auschwitz, there is absolutely no reason, in thinking about Auschwitz, to consider the actions of the state of Israel. What connects the two for some, and perhaps the MCB, is the signifier ‘Jew’. And it is precisely this conflation, used in whatever context, which should be avoided at all costs. Their is nothing "Jewish' about the actions of the Israeli state, and the 'categorical imperative' that Adorno speaks of, that Auschwitz not happen again, is universal in its address.
There is thus no reason why, in commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, we should consider the plight of the Palestinians, as the MCB suggest. And hopefully one does not need to add that what should merit our concern about the plight of the Palestinians is not the outrage that Muslims should be treated like this (many, of course, are not Muslims) but that anyone should be.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
The violence of a sign
"Who is in search of the truth? And what does the man who says "I want the truth" mean? Proust does not believe that man, nor even a supposedly pure mind, has by nature a desire for truth, a will-to-truth. We search for truth only when we are determined to do so in terms of a concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence that impels us to such a search."
Deleuze, Proust and Signs.
"There is always the violence of a sign that forces us into the search, that robs us of peace."
What kind of ‘signs’ are these? Not ones that immediately bare their signified. With the Proustian sign we intuit that it signifies without knowing what it signifies, and this delay and opacity between that and what is what incites the desire for truth.
You will say this is a familiar enough Deleuzian theme: the pursuit of truth, or thinking itself, is prompted always by a shock from outside thought altogether, a shock which puzzles and 'forces' thinking, and that Deleuze has simply read this ‘into’ Proust. But I wonder whether it isn't the other way around, and whether Deleuze doesn’t, at least partly, first learn this concept from Proust, as he seems to learn or generate so many of his concepts from literature (at least before his own thinking arguably ossifies into an endlessly repeated ensemble of concerns).
n.b., the distinction between that it signifies and what it signifies is taken up in a psychoanalytic context by Jean Laplanche, and also, very productively, by Eric Santner. (One of Santner's talks is available online here)
Deleuze, Proust and Signs.
"There is always the violence of a sign that forces us into the search, that robs us of peace."
What kind of ‘signs’ are these? Not ones that immediately bare their signified. With the Proustian sign we intuit that it signifies without knowing what it signifies, and this delay and opacity between that and what is what incites the desire for truth.
You will say this is a familiar enough Deleuzian theme: the pursuit of truth, or thinking itself, is prompted always by a shock from outside thought altogether, a shock which puzzles and 'forces' thinking, and that Deleuze has simply read this ‘into’ Proust. But I wonder whether it isn't the other way around, and whether Deleuze doesn’t, at least partly, first learn this concept from Proust, as he seems to learn or generate so many of his concepts from literature (at least before his own thinking arguably ossifies into an endlessly repeated ensemble of concerns).
n.b., the distinction between that it signifies and what it signifies is taken up in a psychoanalytic context by Jean Laplanche, and also, very productively, by Eric Santner. (One of Santner's talks is available online here)
Saturday, January 22, 2005
'Theory'
The subject of 'Theory' seems to have attracted several people's attention recently, including John Holbo, philosopher Jonathan Derbyshire and polemicist Oliver Kamm. As these all mention Terry Eagleton, it might be worthwhile quoting Eagleton's opening remarks on theory from this book:
“The economist J. M. Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory. This is also true of literary students and critics. [..] Some students and critics also protest that literary theory ‘gets in between the reader and the work.’ The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a ‘literary work’ was in the first place, or how we were to read it.”
What passes as spontaneous insight and theory-free close reading is shot through with the reified or shrivelled remains of earlier theories, which have now become mere second nature and therefore invisible/unconscious. The first task of Theory would then be to reverse this process and to demonstrate the theoretical genealogy of the naively 'pre-theoretical' standpoint. Thus, those who are 'spontaneously attuned to the text' and with a real 'feel for literature' are retrospectively revealed to have been Liberal Humanists (or whatever) who use literature endlessly to to re-tell the same old story or to extract conclusions anticipated or even generated by their own unacknowledged 'method'.
This indeed would seem to be the starting point of Theory - the naive, immediate stance is a exposed as a lie. The anti-Theory allegation that literature should not be 'contaminated' with politics or conceptual assumptions presupposes precisely what is at issue - the claim that 'contamination' was there from the start.
__
Is to ‘theorise’ simply to reflect rigorously upon one’s assumptions – concerning both the object of study (‘literature’ for example) and the method employed – and to engage in detailed analysis only after or in conjunction with such reflection? If this is the case, then any academic discipline without ‘theory’ would scarcely be a discipline at all and the opposition to theory would be baffling.
But the objection (or ‘resistance’) to theory is seldom theory in this sense. More typically, it refers to a phalanx of mainly ‘imported’ theories which have become increasingly influential in academia throughout the past 30 years or so. These are, very broadly: Marxism (in various guises), psychoanalysis and ‘deconstruction’. If what unites these various ‘theories’ or schools is equidistance from (what had been) orthodox criticism, then ‘Theory’ would hardly be a particularly coherent or useful category. I might seem odd, for example, that various theories, such as American New Criticism (Indeed, this omission might seem to reinforce Eagleton’s Keynesian point), seem to escape the anti-theory arguments altogether.
It might also seem that this concern with ‘theory’ is a rather Anglo-centric one, if one thinks of how, in Germany and France, for instance, theoretically and philosophically informed criticism has long been the norm. The brilliance of Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka and others, Adorno or Bloch’s thinking on and by literature, or the meditative essays of Blanchot, are all testimony to the rewards of a theoretically informed criticism.
The repeated objection to the various theories grouped under ‘Theory’ is that they typically act as no more than a conceptual template which is ‘imposed’ on the text, and which fails to reflect or respond to the text’s specific textures and rhythms – that they fail, perhaps, to recognise the extent to which literary texts (maybe unlike other objects of study) actually dictate or re-invent the criteria by which they are experienced and assessed. This is fine, although the implicit definition of literary objects, as things with their own singular ‘grain’ and demands, is itself a theoretical conclusion and one expressed very eloquently by the eminently ‘theoretical’ Adorno (amongst many others). It’s true that there is nothing more tedious than a critic ‘discovering’ in a text, yet again, an illustration of Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary. But this is hardly a problem with ‘Theory’ per se, and is more an amateurish ‘application’ of theory. Besides, the older ‘pre-theoretical’ approaches can be equally guilty of this – finding in a text yet another instance of man’s tragic dignity or whatever.
__
It seems to me that while the mechanical ‘application’ of theory or the use of texts to ‘illustrate’ pre-decided theoretical concepts and conclusions is indeed a tedious and undesirable aspect of current academic work, it is not really feasible or desirable to ‘subtract’ theory and get back to some putative ‘unmediated’ relation to texts. What is needed, for one thing, is a reminder that not only can theory open up and illuminate texts in new and various ways, but also that texts can in turn question and contribute to theory. It struck me, for instance, reading Deleuze’s excellent book on Proust, that Deleuze was not simply ‘applying’ theory/ concepts to Proust’s text, wasn’t reading the work according to the logic of pre-formed concepts, but actually generating concepts out of the text itself. His conceptual armoury was being innervated and refined by the challenge of Proust’s text.
“The economist J. M. Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory. This is also true of literary students and critics. [..] Some students and critics also protest that literary theory ‘gets in between the reader and the work.’ The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a ‘literary work’ was in the first place, or how we were to read it.”
What passes as spontaneous insight and theory-free close reading is shot through with the reified or shrivelled remains of earlier theories, which have now become mere second nature and therefore invisible/unconscious. The first task of Theory would then be to reverse this process and to demonstrate the theoretical genealogy of the naively 'pre-theoretical' standpoint. Thus, those who are 'spontaneously attuned to the text' and with a real 'feel for literature' are retrospectively revealed to have been Liberal Humanists (or whatever) who use literature endlessly to to re-tell the same old story or to extract conclusions anticipated or even generated by their own unacknowledged 'method'.
This indeed would seem to be the starting point of Theory - the naive, immediate stance is a exposed as a lie. The anti-Theory allegation that literature should not be 'contaminated' with politics or conceptual assumptions presupposes precisely what is at issue - the claim that 'contamination' was there from the start.
__
Is to ‘theorise’ simply to reflect rigorously upon one’s assumptions – concerning both the object of study (‘literature’ for example) and the method employed – and to engage in detailed analysis only after or in conjunction with such reflection? If this is the case, then any academic discipline without ‘theory’ would scarcely be a discipline at all and the opposition to theory would be baffling.
But the objection (or ‘resistance’) to theory is seldom theory in this sense. More typically, it refers to a phalanx of mainly ‘imported’ theories which have become increasingly influential in academia throughout the past 30 years or so. These are, very broadly: Marxism (in various guises), psychoanalysis and ‘deconstruction’. If what unites these various ‘theories’ or schools is equidistance from (what had been) orthodox criticism, then ‘Theory’ would hardly be a particularly coherent or useful category. I might seem odd, for example, that various theories, such as American New Criticism (Indeed, this omission might seem to reinforce Eagleton’s Keynesian point), seem to escape the anti-theory arguments altogether.
It might also seem that this concern with ‘theory’ is a rather Anglo-centric one, if one thinks of how, in Germany and France, for instance, theoretically and philosophically informed criticism has long been the norm. The brilliance of Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka and others, Adorno or Bloch’s thinking on and by literature, or the meditative essays of Blanchot, are all testimony to the rewards of a theoretically informed criticism.
The repeated objection to the various theories grouped under ‘Theory’ is that they typically act as no more than a conceptual template which is ‘imposed’ on the text, and which fails to reflect or respond to the text’s specific textures and rhythms – that they fail, perhaps, to recognise the extent to which literary texts (maybe unlike other objects of study) actually dictate or re-invent the criteria by which they are experienced and assessed. This is fine, although the implicit definition of literary objects, as things with their own singular ‘grain’ and demands, is itself a theoretical conclusion and one expressed very eloquently by the eminently ‘theoretical’ Adorno (amongst many others). It’s true that there is nothing more tedious than a critic ‘discovering’ in a text, yet again, an illustration of Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary. But this is hardly a problem with ‘Theory’ per se, and is more an amateurish ‘application’ of theory. Besides, the older ‘pre-theoretical’ approaches can be equally guilty of this – finding in a text yet another instance of man’s tragic dignity or whatever.
__
It seems to me that while the mechanical ‘application’ of theory or the use of texts to ‘illustrate’ pre-decided theoretical concepts and conclusions is indeed a tedious and undesirable aspect of current academic work, it is not really feasible or desirable to ‘subtract’ theory and get back to some putative ‘unmediated’ relation to texts. What is needed, for one thing, is a reminder that not only can theory open up and illuminate texts in new and various ways, but also that texts can in turn question and contribute to theory. It struck me, for instance, reading Deleuze’s excellent book on Proust, that Deleuze was not simply ‘applying’ theory/ concepts to Proust’s text, wasn’t reading the work according to the logic of pre-formed concepts, but actually generating concepts out of the text itself. His conceptual armoury was being innervated and refined by the challenge of Proust’s text.
Friday, January 21, 2005
A Mouth
Gareth at Any Street Corner (who, along with several others I must get round to Blogrolling) has this extract from a new piece by John Berger, "A Mouth Speaks Out Alone":
Yes it's my mouth. Alone on the white page. Outside it's snowing. My two lips and, in the night between, a tongue. You can see it? You lip-read? You are so young. But you do lip-read.The snow is falling everywhere. On lies and on what is true. The flakes make no distinction, they land gently on both. Did you notice I said 'on what is true', not 'on the truth'. The single truth is also a lie. This is something I have learnt since it began to snow.The blizzards were forecast, but, like any winter, they took us by surprise. The President of the Republic addressed the nation. Don't ask me which nation, for, if I tell you, the paper on which I am drawn may be torn up. Here I only have the status of an emigrant. Perhaps you can see that by my lower lip. You can see a little home-sickness? The President told the people they were living through a period of transition and that in his heart he was with every one of them. A transition towards what? one might ask. Perhaps a period of eternal snow? He didn't say. He himself was lost in a drift. He smiled and went on and on; the one thing which became clearer and clearer was that he was lying. At the end he was even able to turn words which mean nothing at all - words like development and modernisation - at the end, he was even able to transform these into lies. He was on the telly, immediately following the latest reports about the snow.Whilst he was speaking, I watched his mouth. I don't claim to be an expert but a mouth is all I am, albeit a foreign mouth, so I watched with a certain interest. His is like a bladder-wrack blister. I refer to his mouth. This is the effect of thirty years of using words, speaking them, to distract attention from what is happening behind his listeners' backs. Most stooges, decoys and stool pigeons get bladder-wrack. It comes from the indifference of the lips to what they're pronouncing. Also called Pop-weed, belonging to the kelp family, in the class of Phaephyceae! Did you see the tongue touching the back of the top teeth to make the c? Examine mouths carefully. Bladder-wrack comes from a contempt for words.For example, the President of the Republic argued that if we all consumed more, there would be fewer unemployed. When I heard this I thought of my old friend, the Arse, and I made one of his noises. The snow flakes now are as large as goose feathers. You can't see across the road. In Europe there are 30 million unemployed. I, too, taste their bitterness. Each of them speaks and not one is heard. They speak to their fear in the night. To each I'd like to whisper in the dark: may I kiss you? And then do it.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
States of Exception
This morning bought Agamben’s State of Exception.
On the ‘military order’ issued by Bush on November 13, 2001:
“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees”, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from juridical oversight.”
That British citizens were held for years on end without trial by a foreign government would, you’d think, be a cause célèbre for the tabloid press. Well no, not really. Reading the papers the other day in X café, The Sun is outraged that British Guantanamo Bay detainees had been returned to the U.K ‘at tax payers expense’ and were now ‘free to walk the streets’.
Many were highly critical of objections to Israel’s ‘defence wall,’ especially the ‘absurd suggestion’ that it would be used to annex or confiscate land. Well, this is from Haaretz.
(Noteworthy: how Haaretz seems to report many developments bypassed by the British press, and which, were they reported here would doubtless have Melanie Phillips gibbering and squeaking in the streets with rage. )
n.b. Quote of the day goes to this astute analogy at Harry's Place:
"one can't be against 'capitalism' per se - it's like being against humidity or escalators." Priceless. Personally, I'm all for air-conditioning and lifts.
On the ‘military order’ issued by Bush on November 13, 2001:
“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees”, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from juridical oversight.”
That British citizens were held for years on end without trial by a foreign government would, you’d think, be a cause célèbre for the tabloid press. Well no, not really. Reading the papers the other day in X café, The Sun is outraged that British Guantanamo Bay detainees had been returned to the U.K ‘at tax payers expense’ and were now ‘free to walk the streets’.
Many were highly critical of objections to Israel’s ‘defence wall,’ especially the ‘absurd suggestion’ that it would be used to annex or confiscate land. Well, this is from Haaretz.
(Noteworthy: how Haaretz seems to report many developments bypassed by the British press, and which, were they reported here would doubtless have Melanie Phillips gibbering and squeaking in the streets with rage. )
n.b. Quote of the day goes to this astute analogy at Harry's Place:
"one can't be against 'capitalism' per se - it's like being against humidity or escalators." Priceless. Personally, I'm all for air-conditioning and lifts.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A soft indestructible automaton
Having worked out how to upload pictures, I've posted a rather deceptive photo on my profile page.
Otherwise, have recently come across Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary online. Occasionally rather predictable, but here's a selection (including a rather Beckettian definition of 'Dead', a rather Humean definition of 'Effect', and a rather interesting definition of 'symbol':
CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement ofhis own wares to observe those of his neighbor.
DEAD, adj. Done with the work of breathing; done/ With all the world; the mad race run /Though to the end; the golden goal /Attained and found to be a hole!
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growthof a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together inthe same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate theother — which is no more sensible than it would be for one who hasnever seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare therabbit the cause of a dog.
EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect
EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created thefuture state.
SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand forsomething else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" — things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we haveinherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved onmemorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of thedead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
Otherwise, have recently come across Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary online. Occasionally rather predictable, but here's a selection (including a rather Beckettian definition of 'Dead', a rather Humean definition of 'Effect', and a rather interesting definition of 'symbol':
CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement ofhis own wares to observe those of his neighbor.
DEAD, adj. Done with the work of breathing; done/ With all the world; the mad race run /Though to the end; the golden goal /Attained and found to be a hole!
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growthof a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together inthe same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate theother — which is no more sensible than it would be for one who hasnever seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare therabbit the cause of a dog.
EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect
EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created thefuture state.
SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand forsomething else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" — things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we haveinherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved onmemorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of thedead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
I'm, like, a grammatical factotum
(From a teaching diary:)
Leaving the building I hear this exchange:
“Do you, like, like pubs, or do you, like, like bars?” I imagined some third party interjecting: “what about cafes, cafes?.”.
The frequency of ‘like’ in the speech of your average American student is increasing at an alarming rate, slicing syntax into jerky staccato bites. ‘Like’ is in fact a remarkably multi-functional device, serving alternatively as a sort of colon, speech marks, scare quotes and so on – a kind of grammatical factotum. One of these functions is to render things hedged, tentative, as if to say “this is a lazily approximate formulation, please fill in the blanks”, or ‘I hereby disown accountability for this statement”.
This hedging, provisional approach – compromising even the most flatly factual propositions - extends also to classroom discussion, often signified by the inappropriate rider ‘that’s just my opinion’, as in:
A student expressed the view that the English drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road in order to be different from the Americans. I point out that this isn’t historically the case. ‘Well’, she says ‘that’s just my opinion.’ ‘But it isn’t a matter of opinion” I reply. She becomes bemused and defensive, insisting people are entitled to an opinion on anything. It’s as if the phrase ‘that’s just my opinion’ removes a remark from the sphere of verifiability and turns it into an ‘expression of individuality’, which is of course a sacred and unquestionable good. The tentativeness of ‘that’s just my opinion’ is perhaps just intransigent subjectivism in disguise.
Leaving the building I hear this exchange:
“Do you, like, like pubs, or do you, like, like bars?” I imagined some third party interjecting: “what about cafes, cafes?.”.
The frequency of ‘like’ in the speech of your average American student is increasing at an alarming rate, slicing syntax into jerky staccato bites. ‘Like’ is in fact a remarkably multi-functional device, serving alternatively as a sort of colon, speech marks, scare quotes and so on – a kind of grammatical factotum. One of these functions is to render things hedged, tentative, as if to say “this is a lazily approximate formulation, please fill in the blanks”, or ‘I hereby disown accountability for this statement”.
This hedging, provisional approach – compromising even the most flatly factual propositions - extends also to classroom discussion, often signified by the inappropriate rider ‘that’s just my opinion’, as in:
A student expressed the view that the English drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road in order to be different from the Americans. I point out that this isn’t historically the case. ‘Well’, she says ‘that’s just my opinion.’ ‘But it isn’t a matter of opinion” I reply. She becomes bemused and defensive, insisting people are entitled to an opinion on anything. It’s as if the phrase ‘that’s just my opinion’ removes a remark from the sphere of verifiability and turns it into an ‘expression of individuality’, which is of course a sacred and unquestionable good. The tentativeness of ‘that’s just my opinion’ is perhaps just intransigent subjectivism in disguise.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Today's Readings
from Haaretz an interesting and revealing discussion on "To what extent should Orthodox Judaism shape the state of Israel?"
Looking at the Radical Philosophy website, I noticed the following: Lecercle on Badiou, plus something by Peter Hallward on singularity and on Critchley/ Badiou.
Meanwhile, seems that Schopenhauer wrote an appendix to my notes on rhetoric (see below).
Stephan Collini on Christopher Hitchens, concludes in near Proustian syntax with:
But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness - to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other 'I told you so's. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let's-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn't go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.
Looking at the Radical Philosophy website, I noticed the following: Lecercle on Badiou, plus something by Peter Hallward on singularity and on Critchley/ Badiou.
Meanwhile, seems that Schopenhauer wrote an appendix to my notes on rhetoric (see below).
Stephan Collini on Christopher Hitchens, concludes in near Proustian syntax with:
But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness - to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other 'I told you so's. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let's-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn't go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.
Economic History
"The economists have a singular mode of proceeding. There are for them only two kinds of institutions, those of art and those of nature. Feudal institutions are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who also establish two kinds of religion. Every religion but their own is an invention of men, while their own religion is an emanation of God. In saying that existing conditions - the conditions of bourgeois production - are natural, the economists give it to be understood that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed conformably to the laws of nature. Thus these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any."
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
Cole under the Settee
Via the Virtual Stoa, this site has some nice extracts from Alan Bennett's Writing Home:
"1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal's new novel about Lincoln. "I thought it was meretricious." "Really?" says Gore. "Well, meretricious and a happy new year." That's the way to do it.
7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at Univeristy College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who's like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, "And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole." Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, "Cole, not Dole." In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve".
"1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal's new novel about Lincoln. "I thought it was meretricious." "Really?" says Gore. "Well, meretricious and a happy new year." That's the way to do it.
7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at Univeristy College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who's like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, "And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole." Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, "Cole, not Dole." In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve".
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Regardez les fleurs du Palestine
From today's Observer, a review of Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries by Suad Amiry
'Marie Jabaji has been a refugee for more than half her life. She left her home in Jaffa, which is on the coast of what is now Israel, in 1948, for what she thought was a holiday. Unfortunately, while she was away, the Israelis moved in, and took her house. Marie found herself homeless and stateless. At first, she remained in Beirut. A few years later, she made it to Ramallah, on the West Bank, where she has lived ever since. Unsurprisingly, she has never been able to forget her loss. 'This is how we do it in Jaffa,' she'll say, serving dinner. Under fire, her instinct is always to stay put, because who knows what will happen if she doesn't? In 2002, when the Israeli army invaded Ramallah and began reducing the compound of the PLO leader to so much rubble, it took her worried family a while to winkle Mrs Jabaji out, in spite of the tanks that were lined up in front of her house. 'Shall I bring my purple dress?' she dithered, quietly. 'Shall we take the lemons? Shall we water the plants?'
It was during this dark time - I mean this literally; the electricity lines were often cut - that the seeds of Mrs Jabaji's unlikely fame were sown. Marie went to stay with her daughter-in-law, Suad Amiry, an architect. Trapped in the house together during the long curfew hours, Marie spent her days making marmalade. Her daughter-in-law, meanwhile, began writing emails - funny, bleak emails - to her relatives and friends. She wanted them to know what life was like in a city that was effectively a giant prison. Her friends loved these emails, and began to look forward to them. '
'Marie Jabaji has been a refugee for more than half her life. She left her home in Jaffa, which is on the coast of what is now Israel, in 1948, for what she thought was a holiday. Unfortunately, while she was away, the Israelis moved in, and took her house. Marie found herself homeless and stateless. At first, she remained in Beirut. A few years later, she made it to Ramallah, on the West Bank, where she has lived ever since. Unsurprisingly, she has never been able to forget her loss. 'This is how we do it in Jaffa,' she'll say, serving dinner. Under fire, her instinct is always to stay put, because who knows what will happen if she doesn't? In 2002, when the Israeli army invaded Ramallah and began reducing the compound of the PLO leader to so much rubble, it took her worried family a while to winkle Mrs Jabaji out, in spite of the tanks that were lined up in front of her house. 'Shall I bring my purple dress?' she dithered, quietly. 'Shall we take the lemons? Shall we water the plants?'
It was during this dark time - I mean this literally; the electricity lines were often cut - that the seeds of Mrs Jabaji's unlikely fame were sown. Marie went to stay with her daughter-in-law, Suad Amiry, an architect. Trapped in the house together during the long curfew hours, Marie spent her days making marmalade. Her daughter-in-law, meanwhile, began writing emails - funny, bleak emails - to her relatives and friends. She wanted them to know what life was like in a city that was effectively a giant prison. Her friends loved these emails, and began to look forward to them. '
The Subject of Revolution
Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary subjectivity:
“It will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of state power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions for the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘premature’ conquest of political power by the labouring class appears to be a political absurdity derived from a mechanical conception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution)
Zizek comments:
‘If we look at this argument closely, we perceive that what is at stake in Rosa Luxemburg's argument is precisely the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process. The revolutionary subject does not "conduct," "direct" this process from an objective distance. He is constituted through this process, and because of this‑‑because the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity‑‑we cannot "make the revolution at the right moment" without previous "premature," failed attemptshese objects have a kind of impenetrable density.’
&:
those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever--such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Lenin's counter-argument against the formal-democratic critics of the second step is that this 'pure democratic' option itself is utopian: in the concrete Russian circumstances, the bourgeois-democratic state has no chances of surviving--the only 'realistic' way to protect the true gains of the February Revolution (freedom of organisation and the press, etc) is to move forward to the socialist revolution--otherwise the Tsarist reaction will win.
“It will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of state power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions for the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘premature’ conquest of political power by the labouring class appears to be a political absurdity derived from a mechanical conception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution)
Zizek comments:
‘If we look at this argument closely, we perceive that what is at stake in Rosa Luxemburg's argument is precisely the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process. The revolutionary subject does not "conduct," "direct" this process from an objective distance. He is constituted through this process, and because of this‑‑because the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity‑‑we cannot "make the revolution at the right moment" without previous "premature," failed attemptshese objects have a kind of impenetrable density.’
&:
those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever--such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Lenin's counter-argument against the formal-democratic critics of the second step is that this 'pure democratic' option itself is utopian: in the concrete Russian circumstances, the bourgeois-democratic state has no chances of surviving--the only 'realistic' way to protect the true gains of the February Revolution (freedom of organisation and the press, etc) is to move forward to the socialist revolution--otherwise the Tsarist reaction will win.
Appendix to Notes on Rhetoric
A little appendix to the earlier notes on rhetoric - a couple you might recognise from other contexts.
The Left Rather than attacking the ‘Left’ as such, it is better to undermine the word and cause to be it ineffectual, either by constantly diluting it in ‘liberal-left’ or simply by using phrases that render it meaningless, as in ‘my fellow leftist Stephen Pollard’.
Profanity and the demotic. Used sparingly (so as not to be mistaken for some incensed half-wit), your use of the profane/ demotic is a right laugh and a sure sign that you represent robust common sense and can sniff out and debunk pretentious academics and pseudo-intilectukals. Try mixing it with more refined prose for full effect, as in “after careful and sustained reflection, I have now arrived at the inexorable conclusion that X is a clueless twat who talks counter-revolutionary shite.” “On balance and despite asseverations assuring us otherwise, it would seem that a&b who blog here [imaginary link] are, objectively, a pack of spineless bourgeois pricks.”
Always Psychologise. If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc.
Raw Nerve. If your opponent responds to you with anything like gusto/ feeling you have necessarily ‘touched a raw nerve’. This can be used against all but the most blandly neutral reply. Try saying it in various contexts, just to unsettle and bemuse e.g:
“Mark,
"I'd really like that reference for Hegel’s comments on Zoroastrian religion?”
“Ah, it touched a raw nerve did it?”
The Left Rather than attacking the ‘Left’ as such, it is better to undermine the word and cause to be it ineffectual, either by constantly diluting it in ‘liberal-left’ or simply by using phrases that render it meaningless, as in ‘my fellow leftist Stephen Pollard’.
Profanity and the demotic. Used sparingly (so as not to be mistaken for some incensed half-wit), your use of the profane/ demotic is a right laugh and a sure sign that you represent robust common sense and can sniff out and debunk pretentious academics and pseudo-intilectukals. Try mixing it with more refined prose for full effect, as in “after careful and sustained reflection, I have now arrived at the inexorable conclusion that X is a clueless twat who talks counter-revolutionary shite.” “On balance and despite asseverations assuring us otherwise, it would seem that a&b who blog here [imaginary link] are, objectively, a pack of spineless bourgeois pricks.”
Always Psychologise. If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc.
Raw Nerve. If your opponent responds to you with anything like gusto/ feeling you have necessarily ‘touched a raw nerve’. This can be used against all but the most blandly neutral reply. Try saying it in various contexts, just to unsettle and bemuse e.g:
“Mark,
"I'd really like that reference for Hegel’s comments on Zoroastrian religion?”
“Ah, it touched a raw nerve did it?”
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Adorno's Slippers
“How some things have gestures, and so modes of behaviour, inscribed in them. Slippers are designed to be slipped into without help from the hand. They are monuments to the hatred of bending down.”
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discretely, yet firmly…. Things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.”
Adorno
“.. the Sartre of the earlier work immediately links the experience of the we-subject to that of manufactured objects. There is, we might say, no personal way of opening a can, of punching a time card, of turning on a faucet: each of these objects has built into it an impersonal directive, a set of instructions as to the way in which ‘anybody’ must use them..”
“.. we apprehend things first and foremost as tools and only thereafter as static objects of contemplation.. Hence things may stand as shorthand for human actions, and such a point of view forms the very basis for the Sartrean evocation of the outside world as a network of frozen imperatives or a ‘hodological’ space, as objects filled with implicit life and feelings swarming about us as so many objective modes through which being is revealed.”
Jameson
The objects around us importune us with practical demands; there is programme of action immanent in things. The car door that asks to be slammed; or, for the child, the cracks in the pavement that ask not to be stepped on and so dictate a new pattern of steps and skips. These inert material things guide, direct, solicit our action, our practical activity. They divert our free activity along pre-determined grooves or behavioural tramlines, which unite us with the serial anonymity of ‘everyone else’.
(For Sartre, They speak to or direct us in this way because of the reserves of human energy or praxis stored up in them: Inert matter, once transformed and re-directed by human praxis in turn stands as an invitation to activity, a set of grooves along which our behaviour runs quiet unreflectively.)
But there are also linguistic equivalents of these material objects, pre-fashioned phrases and ready-to-hand words - such phrases are as it were the verbal equivalent of Adorno's slippers, which prepare and guide our thought in advance. Of course, we have full autonomy in this, in the same sense has one has full autonomy putting on slippers or turning on a tap.
Thus, when I read an article lamenting the presence of ‘theory driven radicals’ in our universities, I immediately recognise this phrase as one such ‘verbal slipper’. For the speaker, the ease with which a phrase such as ‘theory driven radicals’ trips of the tongue doubtless attests to his own verbal facility; in fact, it is merely facile. The ease and fluency resides, as it were outside him, in the pre-formulated efficiency of the machinery of expression.
Cf Sartre: “The inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them, to anticipate the terminology of the Critique, a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thoughts and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and this previous history of the material itself.”
Just as objects direct our action along pre-determined grooves, so language has a counter-finality deflecting our free thought and uniting us with ‘everyone else’, with the pre-agreed doxa of the They.
And it is a salutary reminder that this kind of pre-determined serial activity comes first, and is our default mode of being, and that free thought and action have to be won from this, wrested from it through sheer negation.
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discretely, yet firmly…. Things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.”
Adorno
“.. the Sartre of the earlier work immediately links the experience of the we-subject to that of manufactured objects. There is, we might say, no personal way of opening a can, of punching a time card, of turning on a faucet: each of these objects has built into it an impersonal directive, a set of instructions as to the way in which ‘anybody’ must use them..”
“.. we apprehend things first and foremost as tools and only thereafter as static objects of contemplation.. Hence things may stand as shorthand for human actions, and such a point of view forms the very basis for the Sartrean evocation of the outside world as a network of frozen imperatives or a ‘hodological’ space, as objects filled with implicit life and feelings swarming about us as so many objective modes through which being is revealed.”
Jameson
The objects around us importune us with practical demands; there is programme of action immanent in things. The car door that asks to be slammed; or, for the child, the cracks in the pavement that ask not to be stepped on and so dictate a new pattern of steps and skips. These inert material things guide, direct, solicit our action, our practical activity. They divert our free activity along pre-determined grooves or behavioural tramlines, which unite us with the serial anonymity of ‘everyone else’.
(For Sartre, They speak to or direct us in this way because of the reserves of human energy or praxis stored up in them: Inert matter, once transformed and re-directed by human praxis in turn stands as an invitation to activity, a set of grooves along which our behaviour runs quiet unreflectively.)
But there are also linguistic equivalents of these material objects, pre-fashioned phrases and ready-to-hand words - such phrases are as it were the verbal equivalent of Adorno's slippers, which prepare and guide our thought in advance. Of course, we have full autonomy in this, in the same sense has one has full autonomy putting on slippers or turning on a tap.
Thus, when I read an article lamenting the presence of ‘theory driven radicals’ in our universities, I immediately recognise this phrase as one such ‘verbal slipper’. For the speaker, the ease with which a phrase such as ‘theory driven radicals’ trips of the tongue doubtless attests to his own verbal facility; in fact, it is merely facile. The ease and fluency resides, as it were outside him, in the pre-formulated efficiency of the machinery of expression.
Cf Sartre: “The inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them, to anticipate the terminology of the Critique, a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thoughts and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and this previous history of the material itself.”
Just as objects direct our action along pre-determined grooves, so language has a counter-finality deflecting our free thought and uniting us with ‘everyone else’, with the pre-agreed doxa of the They.
And it is a salutary reminder that this kind of pre-determined serial activity comes first, and is our default mode of being, and that free thought and action have to be won from this, wrested from it through sheer negation.
Ray's Jazz Cafe
Foyle’s Jazz café in Charing Cross Road has fine music, free wireless access and very good coffee. Indeed, here's a couple of observations from that very location:
1. Few were genuinely surprised that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq; but how curious that the allies, having a perfectly good reason for conducting the war (the principled opposition to fascism) should have chosen to confect, for public consumption, a manifestly spurious one.
2. A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world. No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.
I told him that although I would support his venture I could hardly commend its originality.
N.B.
Those of you who saw in the above formula a “neatly comic comment on what the left-hand side of the World of Blogs is often like”, give yourself a pat on the back; others weren't so fortunate, and are still earnestly pondering what I was 'up to’.
1. Few were genuinely surprised that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq; but how curious that the allies, having a perfectly good reason for conducting the war (the principled opposition to fascism) should have chosen to confect, for public consumption, a manifestly spurious one.
2. A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world. No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.
I told him that although I would support his venture I could hardly commend its originality.
N.B.
Those of you who saw in the above formula a “neatly comic comment on what the left-hand side of the World of Blogs is often like”, give yourself a pat on the back; others weren't so fortunate, and are still earnestly pondering what I was 'up to’.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
On Lived Experience.
More from Jameson's Marxism and Form:
“.. For Sartre orthodox Marxism practices a reduction of history and experience. This, although true, tends to prejudice the argument somewhat. For it may be maintained that in a sense all understanding, all abstract thought is reductive: indeed, the very process of abstraction itself is in its very essence a reduction, through which we substitute for the four dimensional density of reality itself simplified models, schematic abstract ideas, and thereby of necessity do violence to reality and to experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how we could understand or deal with reality other than by such reduction.
Insofar as existentialism is in its very origins a reaction against this process of abstraction, we must, we must also observe that it depends on it as a prior moment: no return to things, no return to lived experience, unless we have first abandoned them in the process of abstraction.”
Thus ‘lived experience’ – as dense, messy, vivid, and disordered - is apprehended as such only when measured against ‘abstraction,’ is thrown into relief only through and by ‘abstraction’ and therefore coloured by it in advance.
The flight into ‘lived experience’ as a reservoir of intensities and multiplicity of sensations has abstraction as its very condition of possibility, like the returning Dead who (speculates Berger) experience ‘life’ with a gratitude and sudden clarity unbeknown to the merely living.
"Lived experience" is of course itself a concept, which cannot have been simply and inertly present in lived experience, nor can the question of how we arrive at this concept be answered by lived experience.
Both these points, however, presumably render problematic the initial idea of abstract ideas, or the conceptual, ‘doing violence’ to ‘reality and experience’ since these are already leavened with the conceptual to begin with, and the very idea of them as some precious pre-conceptual grain of being is itself a conceptual product answering to certain demands within our life-world.
Needless to say, Jameson – and Sartre – know all this already, and the quotation above is little more than the preparatory work for its own surpassing
“.. For Sartre orthodox Marxism practices a reduction of history and experience. This, although true, tends to prejudice the argument somewhat. For it may be maintained that in a sense all understanding, all abstract thought is reductive: indeed, the very process of abstraction itself is in its very essence a reduction, through which we substitute for the four dimensional density of reality itself simplified models, schematic abstract ideas, and thereby of necessity do violence to reality and to experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how we could understand or deal with reality other than by such reduction.
Insofar as existentialism is in its very origins a reaction against this process of abstraction, we must, we must also observe that it depends on it as a prior moment: no return to things, no return to lived experience, unless we have first abandoned them in the process of abstraction.”
Thus ‘lived experience’ – as dense, messy, vivid, and disordered - is apprehended as such only when measured against ‘abstraction,’ is thrown into relief only through and by ‘abstraction’ and therefore coloured by it in advance.
The flight into ‘lived experience’ as a reservoir of intensities and multiplicity of sensations has abstraction as its very condition of possibility, like the returning Dead who (speculates Berger) experience ‘life’ with a gratitude and sudden clarity unbeknown to the merely living.
"Lived experience" is of course itself a concept, which cannot have been simply and inertly present in lived experience, nor can the question of how we arrive at this concept be answered by lived experience.
Both these points, however, presumably render problematic the initial idea of abstract ideas, or the conceptual, ‘doing violence’ to ‘reality and experience’ since these are already leavened with the conceptual to begin with, and the very idea of them as some precious pre-conceptual grain of being is itself a conceptual product answering to certain demands within our life-world.
Needless to say, Jameson – and Sartre – know all this already, and the quotation above is little more than the preparatory work for its own surpassing
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
On Behalf of the Other
Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason contains some brilliant little theoretical apercus in the footnotes. E.g:
“The employee allows himself to be beaten, also in so far as he is an Other. If he were insulted or struck by a Muslim, he would react as a particular individual (or as a member of a particular family). But he feels the blows of the colonialist in so far as other men of his religion are, also, at that very minute, being beaten, like him; in so far as these provocations are addressed through his person to the native, a character who is as little realisable as the colonialist himself. Thus, through the two individuals, the Other relates to the Other; and both are alienated to serial unities which cannot even be realised here and which, dislocating and generalising, remove the event from itself and constitute it as the formula of the recurrence and as an archetype which exists elsewhere.”
There are many theoretical riches in this passage, but one thing that strikes me is the theatricality of the scene depicted, in a way that recalls some of Sartre’s work on the ‘Imaginary’. Sartre there remarked on how, when we see an actor playing Hamlet on stage, we do not see an actor walking from one side of the stage to the other in order to make his living. This ‘real’ and empirical level is suspended, derealised, so that we agree to see Prince Hamlet walking across the battlements at Ellsinore. The literal is ‘replaced’ and overwritten by the imaginary. The actual actor becomes the mere support, the invisible carrier of this imaginary being. Now, does not something similar happen in the case cited above: the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself. The two enact a scene, a beating, which is the local incarnation of an ‘archetype’ - the colonialist/ colonised relation; they allow this relation between two phantom Others to play itself out through them, using their enraged or suffering flesh. And in so far as the individual beaten realises that it is not him who is being beaten, but him as native, then this places him in solidarity with those Others who are addressed as ‘Native’ in the act of being beaten.
“The employee allows himself to be beaten, also in so far as he is an Other. If he were insulted or struck by a Muslim, he would react as a particular individual (or as a member of a particular family). But he feels the blows of the colonialist in so far as other men of his religion are, also, at that very minute, being beaten, like him; in so far as these provocations are addressed through his person to the native, a character who is as little realisable as the colonialist himself. Thus, through the two individuals, the Other relates to the Other; and both are alienated to serial unities which cannot even be realised here and which, dislocating and generalising, remove the event from itself and constitute it as the formula of the recurrence and as an archetype which exists elsewhere.”
There are many theoretical riches in this passage, but one thing that strikes me is the theatricality of the scene depicted, in a way that recalls some of Sartre’s work on the ‘Imaginary’. Sartre there remarked on how, when we see an actor playing Hamlet on stage, we do not see an actor walking from one side of the stage to the other in order to make his living. This ‘real’ and empirical level is suspended, derealised, so that we agree to see Prince Hamlet walking across the battlements at Ellsinore. The literal is ‘replaced’ and overwritten by the imaginary. The actual actor becomes the mere support, the invisible carrier of this imaginary being. Now, does not something similar happen in the case cited above: the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself. The two enact a scene, a beating, which is the local incarnation of an ‘archetype’ - the colonialist/ colonised relation; they allow this relation between two phantom Others to play itself out through them, using their enraged or suffering flesh. And in so far as the individual beaten realises that it is not him who is being beaten, but him as native, then this places him in solidarity with those Others who are addressed as ‘Native’ in the act of being beaten.
Moments of Legibility
Cited in the Arcades Project:
“The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly. Many pages in Marivaux or Rousseau contain a mysterious meaning which the first readers of these texts could not fully have deciphered.”
The intriguing suggestion here is that literary texts are ‘historical’ not only because they ‘belong’ to certain times, but because they become readable only at definite times, perhaps awaiting certain historical conditions before their meaning, or some of their meanings, shine through. What is historical here is not just the text, the text entangled in determinate historical conditions, but its conditions of legibility. Successive historical moments are like different optics through which different dimensions of a text are visible. Or perhaps particular authors are only legible at certain historical moments. Suddenly, Blake will seem urgent and necessary, or Swift will suddenly swim into view after years of comparative neglect. And of course, in such moments, it is not just that these authors or these hidden dimensions of a classic are newly readable; their new visibility comes about because they in turn seem to render legible the present moment. History turns a corner and at once John Webster’s concerns with putrefaction and soullessness are our own. The past reads us at the very moment when it becomes visible to us. Hence Walter Benjamin’s image of the lightning flash. The present has no sovereign rights over the past, unable to predict exactly when it will yield its meaning or which meanings it will yield. The present does not simply look at the past with a truth-demanding stare; it is in turn looked at, illuminated, by a gaze and a shaft of light from outside its own orbit.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Ontological Irony
Excruciating time in Wales. B’s relative, E., is an absurd Hyacinth Bucket figure, who measures everything against some imagined scale of Distinction. When she addresses me the malapropism count suddenly shoots up, as in “We’re just going to a small restaurant, nowhere very elusive”. This has little to do with me as an individual (who she’s never before met) and presumably relates to my education and qualifications. If she addresses her children in public space, in earshot of others, her remarks are in fact addressed to these others, conceived as representatives of Society. She will anxiously glance round, as if soliciting their approval. But, as she doesn’t know them, she is in fact soliciting Society’s approval by proxy. Her comments and actions are therefore addressed always to the Other – not simply the empirical others who she happens to encounter, but the big Other which they represent. Needless to say, these same empirical others may well also view everybody else as ‘representatives’ in this way, as mere incarnations of the Other, of ‘People’ (as in ‘what will people think’).
A similar mechanism is in evidence with her children and their choice of sportswear, which, they tell me, signifies ‘coolness’. It signifies this for Others, but of course these others are no less than others wearing the same sportswear in order to signify coolness to..[etc]. The ‘Other’ is always elsewhere, a kind of organising fiction which serves to link the diverse empirical individuals in empty seriality.
Cue Sartre's notion of seriality:
“For I make myself an other or the Other, and deliberately pattern my behaviour on what I imagine the Other’s to be. The ontological irony of this mode of being is, of course, that all the while I am modelling myself and my behaviour on the being of other people outside me, all the rest of them are doing exactly the same thing; in fact, there is no Other, only an infinite regression, an infinite flight in all directions. [..] and in this sense seriality is a vast optical illusion, a kind of collective hallucination projected out of individual solitude onto an imaginary being thought of as ‘public opinion’ or simply ‘they. But public opinion does not exist, and it is rather the belief in it and the effects of such belief which “unite” individuals in the series."
A similar mechanism is in evidence with her children and their choice of sportswear, which, they tell me, signifies ‘coolness’. It signifies this for Others, but of course these others are no less than others wearing the same sportswear in order to signify coolness to..[etc]. The ‘Other’ is always elsewhere, a kind of organising fiction which serves to link the diverse empirical individuals in empty seriality.
Cue Sartre's notion of seriality:
“For I make myself an other or the Other, and deliberately pattern my behaviour on what I imagine the Other’s to be. The ontological irony of this mode of being is, of course, that all the while I am modelling myself and my behaviour on the being of other people outside me, all the rest of them are doing exactly the same thing; in fact, there is no Other, only an infinite regression, an infinite flight in all directions. [..] and in this sense seriality is a vast optical illusion, a kind of collective hallucination projected out of individual solitude onto an imaginary being thought of as ‘public opinion’ or simply ‘they. But public opinion does not exist, and it is rather the belief in it and the effects of such belief which “unite” individuals in the series."
Prison House of Language
"There is a sense in which all sensory perception already constitutes a kind of organisation into language. Imagine the way in which, for a trained naturalist, the disorderly undergrowth of thickets and bushes pressing in upon each other sort themselves out into order, the peculiar outlines of each type of leaf standing as a visible sign and mark of their determinate species; imagine the way in which a wholly unfamiliar landscape would offer itself to such knowledgeable perception as a kind of language the words of which were not yet known, an order already making itself felt through the clear forms of the vegetation, where for the layman there would be nothing but the confused and jumbled vision of space."
Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language.
Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Art as custodian and promise
Today's Observer carries an article on Spanish Portraits by John Berger:
Each one of the hundred people painted is looking at the future with a question or declaration. We are walking between their life-experiences in a manner that could never happen if we were walking past photographs, however masterly the photographer. Photos are taken by surprise or take us by surprise. In photos, there is very little waiting-to-be-seen; photos are not attendant. Here, in the long gallery, there is nothing else but a waiting-to-be-seen. Therein lies the nakedness.
In relation not just to the above essay, but generally: The acuity with which Berger is attuned to history as a reservoir of untapped possibilities, promises, expectations; and the steady reproach, the nagging questions which these level at the present. What shines forth from art is not so much some endlessly renamed human nature, as if this were a trusty constant which art endlessly decks out in the fancy dress of different periods. It is rather that certain ‘possibles’ – certain promises, forms of life – are housed in art. These ‘possibles’ are contingent and frail. They indeed depend on history. They can, no matter how precious, rewarding, be lost, fall into disuse, be written of or systematically destroyed. Art is their custodian and a reminder, perhaps, of their frailty, of what is missing from our present, and a troubling augury of what might be. Art’s silent imperative for Berger is perhaps two-fold: on the one hand, the enjoinder to speak to and to hear the Dead; on the other, the command – famously issuing from Rilke’s archaic torso “change your life”.
From the interesting new blog Any Street Corner, John Berger on Susan Sontag:
Susan Sontag - quicksilver darting between past and future to shed light on the otherwise dark present -
and your conscience that travelled almost at the speed of light.
I recall playing ping-pong with you and your fast services, and your laughter, which was always about surprise.
One surprise prompting another. Twenty all. Your service.
And the flick of your wrist, which looked so young, and which long, long before had already been an example for your mind that later grasped the world.
Quicksilver, liquid metal, nickname for Mercury, keeper of eloquence and dexterity, protector of roads, deliverer of the messages we need.
Game and set to you, Quicksilver.
Each one of the hundred people painted is looking at the future with a question or declaration. We are walking between their life-experiences in a manner that could never happen if we were walking past photographs, however masterly the photographer. Photos are taken by surprise or take us by surprise. In photos, there is very little waiting-to-be-seen; photos are not attendant. Here, in the long gallery, there is nothing else but a waiting-to-be-seen. Therein lies the nakedness.
In relation not just to the above essay, but generally: The acuity with which Berger is attuned to history as a reservoir of untapped possibilities, promises, expectations; and the steady reproach, the nagging questions which these level at the present. What shines forth from art is not so much some endlessly renamed human nature, as if this were a trusty constant which art endlessly decks out in the fancy dress of different periods. It is rather that certain ‘possibles’ – certain promises, forms of life – are housed in art. These ‘possibles’ are contingent and frail. They indeed depend on history. They can, no matter how precious, rewarding, be lost, fall into disuse, be written of or systematically destroyed. Art is their custodian and a reminder, perhaps, of their frailty, of what is missing from our present, and a troubling augury of what might be. Art’s silent imperative for Berger is perhaps two-fold: on the one hand, the enjoinder to speak to and to hear the Dead; on the other, the command – famously issuing from Rilke’s archaic torso “change your life”.
From the interesting new blog Any Street Corner, John Berger on Susan Sontag:
Susan Sontag - quicksilver darting between past and future to shed light on the otherwise dark present -
and your conscience that travelled almost at the speed of light.
I recall playing ping-pong with you and your fast services, and your laughter, which was always about surprise.
One surprise prompting another. Twenty all. Your service.
And the flick of your wrist, which looked so young, and which long, long before had already been an example for your mind that later grasped the world.
Quicksilver, liquid metal, nickname for Mercury, keeper of eloquence and dexterity, protector of roads, deliverer of the messages we need.
Game and set to you, Quicksilver.
Pete's a Dud.
Laid up with flu I did little last night but watch television, including a programme on the top 50 comedians’ comedians. From the top ten I would have picked, in no particular order, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen and Bill Hicks as my top three. The winner, Peter Cook, I confess to regarding as an insufferable bore. What always struck me about Cook was his signature 'bold stare', little different in fact from the wide-eyed buttonholing stare of the coke-head, which will tolerate nothing less than cravenly complicit laughter. This stare is like an empty demand to laugh appended to whatever content Cook happens to light upon: laugh, or be a prude; laugh or be subject to the ignominy of ‘not getting it’. The stare says, defiantly prior to any utterance: “I’m in on the joke – how about you?.” It is as if, to rewrite Adorno’s dictum ‘he who has laughter on his side has no need of humour’.
"Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact."
Some of the programme’s commentators, in support of Cook, invoked the way he brought to the surface, with audible relief, all the obscene and filthy sentiments which people think silently or voice only in their living rooms. That this is ‘subversive’ or liberating however, is itself rather laughable. These things do not blow open the law but serve as its obscene support, its shadowy double, as Zizek and other have shown. There is nothing liberating or subversive about a man, describing with evident and repellent enthusiasm, kicking a woman repeatedly in the ‘cunt’ as Cook does in one of the Derek and Clive routines. And there is no reason why we should be blackmailed by laughter into obscene solidarity with such sentiments.
"Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact."
Some of the programme’s commentators, in support of Cook, invoked the way he brought to the surface, with audible relief, all the obscene and filthy sentiments which people think silently or voice only in their living rooms. That this is ‘subversive’ or liberating however, is itself rather laughable. These things do not blow open the law but serve as its obscene support, its shadowy double, as Zizek and other have shown. There is nothing liberating or subversive about a man, describing with evident and repellent enthusiasm, kicking a woman repeatedly in the ‘cunt’ as Cook does in one of the Derek and Clive routines. And there is no reason why we should be blackmailed by laughter into obscene solidarity with such sentiments.
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