An earlier couple of posts on the Uncanny & the Inhuman are perhaps partly glossed by this paragraph from Zizek:
‘The paradox of moving statues, of dead objects coming alive and/or of petrified living objects, is possible only within the space of the death drive which, according to Lacan, is the space between two deaths, symbolic and real. For a human being to be ‘dead while alive’ is to be colonised by the ‘dead’ symbolic order; to be ‘alive while dead’ is to give body to the remainder of the Life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization (‘lamella’). What we are dealing with here is thus the split between A and J, between the ‘dead’ symbolic order which mortifies the body and the non-symbolic Life-substance of jouissance. '
Firstly, in what sense is the Symbolic order ‘dead’? The symbolic order of language pre-dates us and survives us; it is coldly indifferent to the span of our biological life. The Symbolic order has something obviously machine-like about it- its rules and structures are used by us, but are external to us and not dependent on us. Paradoxically, then, The Symbolic is ‘dead’ because is has a ‘life of its own’, and this is foreign to our own.
This is Bruce Fink:
‘The body is subdued; “the letter kills” the body. The living being (le vivant) – our animal nature – dies, language coming to life in its place and living us.”
Fink also cites Bergson’s phrase about language being ‘Encrusted on the living’ (a phrase with obvious relevance to his theory of comedy as those moments when the living body is rendered mechanical). This ‘encrusted’, ‘foreign’ and autonomous order stands opposed to our life-substance, it is the robust machine operating within us, so deeply intricated with our being that it is ‘inoperable’.
When James Joyce’s Stephen speaks of his relation to the English language, he also encapsulated this ‘extimacy’ of the language machine:
'His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language'.
(is the frequent uncanniness of the voice not to do with the fact that it’s never quite the invisible envelope of the Symbolic order, that it ‘holds it at bay’?)
We are thus dealing with two things here: the ‘dead symbolic order’ and that which ‘holds it at bay’, the living remainder. Are not each of these, in turn, uncanny (or is it inhuman)?
Would we not say that someone who perfectly embodied a particular Symbolic order – spoke in a smooth and pauseless grammatical fashion, someone who acted unflinchingly in accordance with the letter of some Law – was ‘robotic’, or, in a word, uncanny. This relates back, in some ways, to the previous post about ideology. Would not someone who, with poker-faced efficiency, carried out the corporate ethos or was completely keyed into the ruling letter of an organisation, strike us as a kind of replicant – as comic but scary. As uncanny?
Equally, when someone has died symbolically – their accounts have been settled, the story of their life seems to have arrived at some fitting terminus – but remains alive, like Oedipus after the catastrophe, is such a person not also uncanny. That which is ‘inappropriately alive’, that refuses to die, that ‘should’ be dead according to all Symbolic rights and prescriptions. ? In its ‘pure state’ the Life-substance, in all its blind repetitive action, is just as uncanny as the ‘pure’ Symbolic.
So according to Slav., what has been ‘opened up’ - or made visible - in both cases is the split between A and J; or perhaps, what has been shattered is the proper ‘equilibrium’ between these two. The dignity of the noble subject dissolves into its components, like the often quoted example of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where the meal dissolves into an image on the one hand and undifferentiated matter on the other. The 'magic trick' of the living subject breaks up into its two 'dead' constituents.
[add on, 1/4:
On the ‘dead’ symbolic order, I should perhaps have remarked more on the repeated rhetoric of the Symbolic ‘murdering’ the Real: it enters its ‘undifferentiated’ fabric and irreparably divides, quarters it. I remembered also this from Z.:
‘The word is a death, a murder of the thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.’
But in killing or silencing the Real, the Symbolic introduces various zones and pockets of jouissance; the body is now shot through with and irradiates significance. The ‘letter’ of the Symbolic thus seems to at once ‘kill’ and create – the erasure of the Real means that our bodies are now radioactive with a new and significant life. The Symbolic as a foreign body therefore acts like a creative irritant, around which the Life-substance crystallises by way of resistance/response.
Henceforth, is there not a new ‘artificial’ life: the foreign iron (of the Symbolic) is now in our soul, lives in symbiosis with it: we are part Life-substance, part dead thing
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Foreign Food ii
I have remembered something from Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory that relates directly to the other post (and may, who knows, have been in the back of my mind all along):
‘John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weeds’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the way it behaves, the purpose it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.’
Eagleton goes on to imply that searching for the defining quality of ‘literature’ may be about as fruitful as trying to pin down the essence of weeds. Irrespective of agreement/ disagreement with this particular spin on ‘literature’, the passage usefully suggests those ways in which language ‘congeals’ social relations into things. This in turn underlines one of the principle tasks of critical thought, which is surely to unpack the social relations encoded (and concealed) in our forms of words. It also of course implies that oftentimes the philosophical chasing after essences is utterly misguided, and needs to be replaced by a more ‘sociological’ dissection of those relations and functions which have taken on, through language, the false appearance of fixity.
A somewhat separate point. The previous post on this subject was, to be honest, a bit sloppy. For example, I carelessly added a ‘not’ to Borges’ ‘included in the present classification’. And ‘not included in the present classification’ is obviously a rather more deliciously self-undermining and impossible category than I really recognised. More, hopefully, on this later.
‘John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weeds’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the way it behaves, the purpose it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.’
Eagleton goes on to imply that searching for the defining quality of ‘literature’ may be about as fruitful as trying to pin down the essence of weeds. Irrespective of agreement/ disagreement with this particular spin on ‘literature’, the passage usefully suggests those ways in which language ‘congeals’ social relations into things. This in turn underlines one of the principle tasks of critical thought, which is surely to unpack the social relations encoded (and concealed) in our forms of words. It also of course implies that oftentimes the philosophical chasing after essences is utterly misguided, and needs to be replaced by a more ‘sociological’ dissection of those relations and functions which have taken on, through language, the false appearance of fixity.
A somewhat separate point. The previous post on this subject was, to be honest, a bit sloppy. For example, I carelessly added a ‘not’ to Borges’ ‘included in the present classification’. And ‘not included in the present classification’ is obviously a rather more deliciously self-undermining and impossible category than I really recognised. More, hopefully, on this later.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Santner on Schiavo
A reader has drawn my attention to a short piece by Eric Santner (whose interesting work I have mentioned before) in which he reflects, in an Agambenesque way, on the Terri Schiavo case and Abu Ghraib.
'In the one case we have human life violently stripped of the cover of a symbolic status/value, in the other, the intrusive imposition a symbolic status/value in the absence of sentient life. The results, however, are uncannily similar: the radical exposure of the body to the pure caprice of political power'.
'In the one case we have human life violently stripped of the cover of a symbolic status/value, in the other, the intrusive imposition a symbolic status/value in the absence of sentient life. The results, however, are uncannily similar: the radical exposure of the body to the pure caprice of political power'.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Foreign Food; or, 'not included in the present classification'
Occasionally, perhaps less so today, one encounters people who complain that they dislike ‘foreign food’, as though this were an actual cuisine with definable positive qualities. Or people refer to ‘weeds’ as if these had positive botanical properties, like mosses or shrubs.
The template for this usage can be found in Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia*, wherein animals are classified in various mutually heterogeneous ways, one of which is ‘not included in the present classification’. It is as if ‘not included in the present classification’ names a certain contingent of the animal kingdom, analogous to ‘omnivorous bipeds’ or ‘marsupials’.
Language has this capacity to give ontological consistency to that which is merely an effect of our system of classification. Language lends to ‘weeds’ or ‘foreign food’ a bogus appearance of identity. Language congeals relations into ‘things.’ These can then be assigned predicates, like ‘foreign food is greasy’ or ‘Weeds are unattractive,’ which are, strictly speaking, meaningless and themselves ‘predicated’ upon a basic misrecognition.
Sometimes, though, this trick of language is harder to spot, since it springs not from a particular pseudo-category like ‘weeds’ but from the use of an already meaningful category. So, for example, there are certain people who defensively reach for the word 'post-modernism,' or sometimes ‘poststructuralism’ when they encounter a theoretical or philosophical language unfamiliar to them, an idiom irreducible to common sense.In these contexts, ‘post-modernism’ functions like ‘foreign food’, having no positive content and simply expressing the speaker's distance from, or negative relation to the thing in question. That which ‘is not included in the present classification’ (i.e., the recognisable canon of received usage), is lent an ontological consistency of its own, and the term ‘post-modern’ designates this.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that:
1. There’s a precise philosophical term (perhaps a few) for the phenomenon I’m talking about, and wondered if anyone could remind me of it.
2. The gist of the above post creates a number of elementary problems, not least is that some would say that all ‘ontological consistency’ is merely an effect of our (Symbolic) system of classification. If this is so, how to address the specificity of the phenomenon I’m referring to, if you believe it has specificity.
3. There are of course, many many political examples of such usages. Various forms of racism immediately spring to mind. Initially, the purpose of the post was to try and identify and comment on some of these, but I’ve run out of steam, partly ‘cos I’m getting hungry, so I invite suggestions and examples from the armies of scribes and commentators, all dwelling 'outside the familiar canon of recieved ideas', who I assume read this blog.
*Before anyone says 'owt, it turns out I misremembered the Borges quote, but am forced to use my version as the whole post rests on it.
The template for this usage can be found in Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia*, wherein animals are classified in various mutually heterogeneous ways, one of which is ‘not included in the present classification’. It is as if ‘not included in the present classification’ names a certain contingent of the animal kingdom, analogous to ‘omnivorous bipeds’ or ‘marsupials’.
Language has this capacity to give ontological consistency to that which is merely an effect of our system of classification. Language lends to ‘weeds’ or ‘foreign food’ a bogus appearance of identity. Language congeals relations into ‘things.’ These can then be assigned predicates, like ‘foreign food is greasy’ or ‘Weeds are unattractive,’ which are, strictly speaking, meaningless and themselves ‘predicated’ upon a basic misrecognition.
Sometimes, though, this trick of language is harder to spot, since it springs not from a particular pseudo-category like ‘weeds’ but from the use of an already meaningful category. So, for example, there are certain people who defensively reach for the word 'post-modernism,' or sometimes ‘poststructuralism’ when they encounter a theoretical or philosophical language unfamiliar to them, an idiom irreducible to common sense.In these contexts, ‘post-modernism’ functions like ‘foreign food’, having no positive content and simply expressing the speaker's distance from, or negative relation to the thing in question. That which ‘is not included in the present classification’ (i.e., the recognisable canon of received usage), is lent an ontological consistency of its own, and the term ‘post-modern’ designates this.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that:
1. There’s a precise philosophical term (perhaps a few) for the phenomenon I’m talking about, and wondered if anyone could remind me of it.
2. The gist of the above post creates a number of elementary problems, not least is that some would say that all ‘ontological consistency’ is merely an effect of our (Symbolic) system of classification. If this is so, how to address the specificity of the phenomenon I’m referring to, if you believe it has specificity.
3. There are of course, many many political examples of such usages. Various forms of racism immediately spring to mind. Initially, the purpose of the post was to try and identify and comment on some of these, but I’ve run out of steam, partly ‘cos I’m getting hungry, so I invite suggestions and examples from the armies of scribes and commentators, all dwelling 'outside the familiar canon of recieved ideas', who I assume read this blog.
*Before anyone says 'owt, it turns out I misremembered the Borges quote, but am forced to use my version as the whole post rests on it.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Berger Talk
An intriguing and occasionally inspiring talk with John Berger earlier this evening, and one I would urge everyone to listen to. He was interviewed By Philip Dodd, who I once thought a vainglorious media goon, but who did ask some pertinent and searching questions (or questions that invited Berger to search). At one point he put to Berger the old Brechtian adage about starting with the bad new things rather than the good old things. Dodd suspected that Berger tarried with and loved the latter. 'The Europe you are drawn to is the good old Europe' prompted Dodd, to which Berger replied: "I suspect that you are a little right, although I would like to be with Brecht."
Berger spoke with inviting and eloquent precision of our provincialism not in space but in time, historically - this little province of history called the Present which we tend to imagine is the whole of space and time.
Berger's eloquence is of a certain sort. There is little connivance, embellishment, virtuoso's display. It is as if he is not so much trained on the language he is using, and trying to formulate 'memorable' and arresting phrases, but rather he is trained so intently on what he is thinking about that the words obey the call of this thinking.
He spoke of the influence (too dilute and familiar a word) of D.H. Lawrence; not at the level of literary 'technique,' for as Berger said: ' a writer can exercise profound influence on your imagination and your nerve without him necessarily exercising a stylistic influence.
Many have commented on the mixture in Berger of the mystic and the materialist. Dodd broached this issue. Berger mentioned Jacob Bohme, in whom a similar mystic materialism is discovered: 'In order to talk about metaphysics he uses material which is completely material and sensuous. Smell colour light.". The mystical adheres to and can only be found within the material. A lovely apercu, Berger talks about drawing a reindeer, and the drawer 'obeying the visible rhythm of the reindeer's dance'. This 'obedience' to the visual world, this attentive mimesis, and the conviction that in this quality of attention there dwells a Sense not to be found elsewhere, is perhaps at the root of the mystical-materialism to which Dodd refers.
This relates also to the ways in which Berger describes the process of his writing. There is a playing down of intentionality, and a stress on attentiveness and reception. Speaking of his new book, he says 'This fiction imposed itself upon me', elsewhere I have heard him speak of 'listening' to voices which solicit him, of receiving from the visible world the full weight of the Unsaid.
Today, literary style is often inseparable from self-advertising, and ends up as a knowing technique which processes and imprints everything which it comes into contact. In so far as 'style' is, or has become, a marketable signature (as it can be, I think, in writers like M.Amis), Berger is style-less and eschews style.
Berger recently had published in several European newspapers and at Open Democracy a short meditatitive piece on the poor.
The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls - walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.
It came up in the course of the interview that all the English newspapers to whom Berger had offered his article had refused it. "very beautifully written, but we can't find a place for it." In my head, I repsponded angrily: 'Yes - there is no place for this because critical thinking and anything not assimilable to the currency of the marketplace has left these shores. Anything not tailored to some perceived category of consumers or designed to promote a day's 'controversy' before being consigned to oblivion cannot be granted space. If a Hari is granted column space, but a Berger refused, all hope has left Albion. I must leave here as soon as possible.'
[To find out the relevance of the picture, you'll have to listen the the program]
Berger spoke with inviting and eloquent precision of our provincialism not in space but in time, historically - this little province of history called the Present which we tend to imagine is the whole of space and time.
Berger's eloquence is of a certain sort. There is little connivance, embellishment, virtuoso's display. It is as if he is not so much trained on the language he is using, and trying to formulate 'memorable' and arresting phrases, but rather he is trained so intently on what he is thinking about that the words obey the call of this thinking.
He spoke of the influence (too dilute and familiar a word) of D.H. Lawrence; not at the level of literary 'technique,' for as Berger said: ' a writer can exercise profound influence on your imagination and your nerve without him necessarily exercising a stylistic influence.
Many have commented on the mixture in Berger of the mystic and the materialist. Dodd broached this issue. Berger mentioned Jacob Bohme, in whom a similar mystic materialism is discovered: 'In order to talk about metaphysics he uses material which is completely material and sensuous. Smell colour light.". The mystical adheres to and can only be found within the material. A lovely apercu, Berger talks about drawing a reindeer, and the drawer 'obeying the visible rhythm of the reindeer's dance'. This 'obedience' to the visual world, this attentive mimesis, and the conviction that in this quality of attention there dwells a Sense not to be found elsewhere, is perhaps at the root of the mystical-materialism to which Dodd refers.
This relates also to the ways in which Berger describes the process of his writing. There is a playing down of intentionality, and a stress on attentiveness and reception. Speaking of his new book, he says 'This fiction imposed itself upon me', elsewhere I have heard him speak of 'listening' to voices which solicit him, of receiving from the visible world the full weight of the Unsaid.
Today, literary style is often inseparable from self-advertising, and ends up as a knowing technique which processes and imprints everything which it comes into contact. In so far as 'style' is, or has become, a marketable signature (as it can be, I think, in writers like M.Amis), Berger is style-less and eschews style.
Berger recently had published in several European newspapers and at Open Democracy a short meditatitive piece on the poor.
The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls - walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.
It came up in the course of the interview that all the English newspapers to whom Berger had offered his article had refused it. "very beautifully written, but we can't find a place for it." In my head, I repsponded angrily: 'Yes - there is no place for this because critical thinking and anything not assimilable to the currency of the marketplace has left these shores. Anything not tailored to some perceived category of consumers or designed to promote a day's 'controversy' before being consigned to oblivion cannot be granted space. If a Hari is granted column space, but a Berger refused, all hope has left Albion. I must leave here as soon as possible.'
[To find out the relevance of the picture, you'll have to listen the the program]
On Overidentification
First, I suggest you read this (and comments) and these comments. Most of what I would want to say are contained therein, and what follows are just some addenda.
'Overidentification' is a kind of 'utra-orthodoxy', taking a regime more seriously that it takes itself, relentlessly implementing the letter of its Law, unconditionally following its avowed beliefs, in a way that is radically embarrassing to the regime. This of course entails the idea that the ruling ideology doesn't take itself seriously. But if the ruling ideology doesn't 'take itself seriously', then how exactly does it operate?
Here are a few thoughts:
Firstly, Zizek is arguing against the commonplace that ironic distance toward an ideology is subversive. In fact, Ideological apparatuses rely on this 'ironic distance' to function, it is the very guarantee of their success.
[1] 'Ironic distance' functions to unify the group around the object of their irony. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or company will recognize this: all, equally, make jokes - of cynical commentary, stoic acquiescence - about the company, it's rules and personnel. It's as though a 'collective subject' is thereby produced; and for all its cynical detachment, this 'collective subject' is parasitic upon the company and an effect (and support) of its organization. Needless to say, the bosses frequently 'buy into' this collective irony to get what they want.
One could take any organization, political, religious or whatever. The participants do not take the official ideology seriously, are ironically detached etc, and in this common ironic distantiation, are unified into a collectivity. Of course, on one reading, it is this very unification which is the function of the ideology. Ideology works at a level 'beneath' - and more subtle than - that of adherence to belief. The 'letter' of the ideological text is beside the point, it is the dummy sold to the adherents, who, in refusing the letter (through irony) collectively enter the Spirit of the regime. The 'fanatics', on the other hand, represent the subversion of the spirit by the letter: poker-faced attention to and enactment of the ideological letter runs counter to the geist of the ideological regime, and embarrasses it by demonstrating that it is Other than it claims to be.
[2] The second point is that the Orders will be implemented more effectively if one does not fully identify with them: 'being ironic' about the orders grants you your small lease of subjective freedom, at the same time as you delegate all responsibility to the impersonal Orders, Directives etc of the Ideological machine. Better to be an instrument imbued with irony, than a fanatical adherent. Better not to 'assume responsibility' - an onerous and potentially psychosis inducing task - but to delegate it to the impersonal machine. And the name for this trick of delegation is irony.
(These thoughts were in part inspired by an example I wrote about previously, and one which, while not exactly identical to what I've just been talking about, nevertheless can be used to illustrate a point. Some time ago, while casually refuting a middle-brow polemicist, I commented on the recently publicised Nixon-Kissinger exchanges. It's noted that Kissinger adopts a 'sardonic tone' when talking to his underlings about the President. I speculated as to this 'tone':
'[1] A way, perhaps, of strategically distancing himself from the President in order to win over the underlings, pretend he's really with them- an utterly familiar little trick, used by bosses up and down the country. [2] Or do the sardonic noises serve simply to let Kissinger off the hook, as in 'Look, I'm just obeying these crazy orders, they're not mine.' I'm just an instrument.'
'Overidentification' is a kind of 'utra-orthodoxy', taking a regime more seriously that it takes itself, relentlessly implementing the letter of its Law, unconditionally following its avowed beliefs, in a way that is radically embarrassing to the regime. This of course entails the idea that the ruling ideology doesn't take itself seriously. But if the ruling ideology doesn't 'take itself seriously', then how exactly does it operate?
Here are a few thoughts:
Firstly, Zizek is arguing against the commonplace that ironic distance toward an ideology is subversive. In fact, Ideological apparatuses rely on this 'ironic distance' to function, it is the very guarantee of their success.
[1] 'Ironic distance' functions to unify the group around the object of their irony. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or company will recognize this: all, equally, make jokes - of cynical commentary, stoic acquiescence - about the company, it's rules and personnel. It's as though a 'collective subject' is thereby produced; and for all its cynical detachment, this 'collective subject' is parasitic upon the company and an effect (and support) of its organization. Needless to say, the bosses frequently 'buy into' this collective irony to get what they want.
One could take any organization, political, religious or whatever. The participants do not take the official ideology seriously, are ironically detached etc, and in this common ironic distantiation, are unified into a collectivity. Of course, on one reading, it is this very unification which is the function of the ideology. Ideology works at a level 'beneath' - and more subtle than - that of adherence to belief. The 'letter' of the ideological text is beside the point, it is the dummy sold to the adherents, who, in refusing the letter (through irony) collectively enter the Spirit of the regime. The 'fanatics', on the other hand, represent the subversion of the spirit by the letter: poker-faced attention to and enactment of the ideological letter runs counter to the geist of the ideological regime, and embarrasses it by demonstrating that it is Other than it claims to be.
[2] The second point is that the Orders will be implemented more effectively if one does not fully identify with them: 'being ironic' about the orders grants you your small lease of subjective freedom, at the same time as you delegate all responsibility to the impersonal Orders, Directives etc of the Ideological machine. Better to be an instrument imbued with irony, than a fanatical adherent. Better not to 'assume responsibility' - an onerous and potentially psychosis inducing task - but to delegate it to the impersonal machine. And the name for this trick of delegation is irony.
(These thoughts were in part inspired by an example I wrote about previously, and one which, while not exactly identical to what I've just been talking about, nevertheless can be used to illustrate a point. Some time ago, while casually refuting a middle-brow polemicist, I commented on the recently publicised Nixon-Kissinger exchanges. It's noted that Kissinger adopts a 'sardonic tone' when talking to his underlings about the President. I speculated as to this 'tone':
'[1] A way, perhaps, of strategically distancing himself from the President in order to win over the underlings, pretend he's really with them- an utterly familiar little trick, used by bosses up and down the country. [2] Or do the sardonic noises serve simply to let Kissinger off the hook, as in 'Look, I'm just obeying these crazy orders, they're not mine.' I'm just an instrument.'
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Unable to Identify..
Following a post at I Cite, I've been giving some thought to the notion of 'overidentification'. Jodi has provided a wonderfully lucid definition of this concept in her comments. I hope to post something considered on this soon. I have the sense, for now, that 'identification' itself is a kind of impossible point or optical illusion, in the sense that we seem to have only incomplete identification or over-identification: as we approach full identification, this suddenly flips over into overidentification. Identification - as some median point - constitutively eludes us in our very attempt to approach it. It is a spectre floating in front of us or a mirage glimped in arrears. And is this not because we identify with that which is non-identical with itself? Anyway, none of this doubtless makes any sense at this stage. So, for the moment, here's something I found by Zizek on overidentification, using the usual pop-culture egs:
MASH and An Officer exhibit the two versions of the perfectly functioning military subject: identification with the military machine is supported either by ironic distrust, indulgence in practical jokes and sexual escapades (MASH), or by the awareness that behind the cmel drill-sergeant there is a 'warm human person', a helping father-substitute who only feigns cruelty (in An Officer and a Gentleman), in strict analogy with the - profoundly anti-feminist - myth of a hooker who, deep in her heart, longs to be a good mother. Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, successfully resists this ideological temptation to 'humanize' the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing 'Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .') - in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, 'runs amok' and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself; the radical, unmediated identification with the phantasmic superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l'acte.
The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic 'human distance' towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription 'Born to kill' is accompanied by the peace sign, etc. - in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject. The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'
MASH and An Officer exhibit the two versions of the perfectly functioning military subject: identification with the military machine is supported either by ironic distrust, indulgence in practical jokes and sexual escapades (MASH), or by the awareness that behind the cmel drill-sergeant there is a 'warm human person', a helping father-substitute who only feigns cruelty (in An Officer and a Gentleman), in strict analogy with the - profoundly anti-feminist - myth of a hooker who, deep in her heart, longs to be a good mother. Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, successfully resists this ideological temptation to 'humanize' the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing 'Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .') - in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, 'runs amok' and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself; the radical, unmediated identification with the phantasmic superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l'acte.
The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic 'human distance' towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription 'Born to kill' is accompanied by the peace sign, etc. - in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject. The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'
Friday, March 25, 2005
A Note on 'Notes' & the Turkey ruse.
Notes On Rhetoric now has its own site here. There will be occasional updates. Many appear to be still as serviceable as ever, in particular this one:
Turkey - If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)
A nice example of this at the Tomb.
The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.
At worst, the 'Turkey' tactic can also short-circuit moral universality - the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with 'but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..'; patient criticisms of the 'democratic deficit' in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.
Turkey - If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)
A nice example of this at the Tomb.
The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.
At worst, the 'Turkey' tactic can also short-circuit moral universality - the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with 'but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..'; patient criticisms of the 'democratic deficit' in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.
Orwellian ironies
It's well known that the US was condemned by the World Court for aiding and abetting a terrorist war in Nicaragua. How grimly ironic then, to read this:
'Early in 2004, Dora Maria Tellez, a heroine of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution and now a professor of history, applied for a visa to study in the US in preparation to teach at one of the country's most prestigious academic institutions, Harvard University's Divinity School.
In January she was told by the US consul in Nicaragua that, under new provisions of the US immigration rules, her request for a visa had been denied. Only later did she discover that the provisions concerned people connected with terrorism.'
So, someone who suffered under a terrorist campaign directed against her country is barred from speaking on account of being a 'terrorist'. At the same time, the man involved in directing the terrorist campaign against her country is appointed 'intelligence chief' in the country from which she is barred.
'Early in 2004, Dora Maria Tellez, a heroine of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution and now a professor of history, applied for a visa to study in the US in preparation to teach at one of the country's most prestigious academic institutions, Harvard University's Divinity School.
In January she was told by the US consul in Nicaragua that, under new provisions of the US immigration rules, her request for a visa had been denied. Only later did she discover that the provisions concerned people connected with terrorism.'
So, someone who suffered under a terrorist campaign directed against her country is barred from speaking on account of being a 'terrorist'. At the same time, the man involved in directing the terrorist campaign against her country is appointed 'intelligence chief' in the country from which she is barred.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Note on Steiner
For some reason today I picked up a tattered copy of George Steiner's Death of Tragedy. It opens with 'We are entering on large, difficult ground'. This opening illustrates what I would call the gestural component of writing. I.e., Statements, as well as their ostensible meaning, are significant for the gestures they perform, gestures of disavowal, repudiation, self-dramatization etc. Let us take Steiner's line as an example. Of course, it has a literal meaning and can be interpreted as a bare statement of what is the case. But there is also the gestural component: it is, firstly, a gesture of 'humbling', the narrator is dramatized as a wrestler with the imponderable. It is a gesture of invitation: some modern day Virgil is offering to guide us through a hellish terrain. There is an implicit challenge: 'are you with me?' 'can you stay the course?'. This is not a book for passengers. It is a gesture of warning and a demand for readerly commitment and solidarity. There will be no easy answers, no short cuts. But of course, reader, we neither expect nor want any. We are courageous as well as suitably meek, and can look at things unflinchingly. Thus, over and above any prepositional content, the statement invites, warns, and positions both the writer and reader.
One of the tasks of the literary critic is to isolate and describe the gestures that are charactersitic of a writer's work. Having identified the gesture, the second task is to interpret it, not simply psychologically, but historically - weighted with historical freight.
The other point (all this spilling out of that one Steiner sentence!) is that, of course, as a reader we are frequently responding to, answering the gestures of the writing as much as its bare content. We respond to Steiner's prose because of how it interpellates us, positions us, because we like the image of ourselves involved in answering the call of his characteristic gestures. The prose, through its gestures, produces, in its reader the weak simulacra of a form of subjectivity which that reader finds appealling. I certainly think this is part of Steiner's appeal - I speak as one greatly drawn by his prose as an adolescent, being beckoned, so it seemed into a that terrain which he alludes with minatory solemnity at the beginning of the Death of Tragedy.
One of the tasks of the literary critic is to isolate and describe the gestures that are charactersitic of a writer's work. Having identified the gesture, the second task is to interpret it, not simply psychologically, but historically - weighted with historical freight.
The other point (all this spilling out of that one Steiner sentence!) is that, of course, as a reader we are frequently responding to, answering the gestures of the writing as much as its bare content. We respond to Steiner's prose because of how it interpellates us, positions us, because we like the image of ourselves involved in answering the call of his characteristic gestures. The prose, through its gestures, produces, in its reader the weak simulacra of a form of subjectivity which that reader finds appealling. I certainly think this is part of Steiner's appeal - I speak as one greatly drawn by his prose as an adolescent, being beckoned, so it seemed into a that terrain which he alludes with minatory solemnity at the beginning of the Death of Tragedy.
Be Evil!
Some time ago 'Lenin' made the following speculation about Fascism - 'the fascist regime says "You May!" - you may oppress, vilify, rob, abuse etc. In this way, the supporters of fascism are libidinally bound to its order.' I drew his attention to a remark of Genet's about a sojourn in Nazi Germany. At the time I couldn't remember the source, but have now found it (the beautiful Thief's Journal), so here it is:
"'I had just gone through Nazi Germany where I had stayed for a few months. I walked from Breslau to Berlin. I would have liked to steal. A strange force held me back. Germany terrified all of Europe; it had become, particularly to me, the symbol of cruelty. It was already outside the law... I had the feeling that I was strolling around in a camp organized by bandits..I thought that the brain of the most scrupulous bourgeois concealed treasures of duplicity, hatred, meanness, cruelty and lust.
'It's a race of thieves,' I thought to myself. 'If I steal here, I perform no singular deed that might fulfil me. I obey the customary order; I do not destroy it. What I desired above all was to return to a country where the laws of ordinary morality were revered, were laws on which life was based."
Indicentally, It might be interesting to relate this to Zizek on the obscene Superego:
'Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men, the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence.'
"'I had just gone through Nazi Germany where I had stayed for a few months. I walked from Breslau to Berlin. I would have liked to steal. A strange force held me back. Germany terrified all of Europe; it had become, particularly to me, the symbol of cruelty. It was already outside the law... I had the feeling that I was strolling around in a camp organized by bandits..I thought that the brain of the most scrupulous bourgeois concealed treasures of duplicity, hatred, meanness, cruelty and lust.
'It's a race of thieves,' I thought to myself. 'If I steal here, I perform no singular deed that might fulfil me. I obey the customary order; I do not destroy it. What I desired above all was to return to a country where the laws of ordinary morality were revered, were laws on which life was based."
Indicentally, It might be interesting to relate this to Zizek on the obscene Superego:
'Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men, the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence.'
Note on Blanchot & modern poetry
Blanchot:
'In the world of practical life satisfaction suppresses desire (I am thirsty, I drink; the matter is done with, classified) .... [The aim of art, on the contrary] is to organize a system of perceptible things able to make themselves asked for again and again without ever being able able to appease the desire they provoke. Creation consists in making and object that elicits desire'.
Poetic language is, therefore, a suspension and 'suppression' of the rules of practical life. The poem relishes and perfects, as it's own end, that desire which in practical life is immediately burned up in fulfillment. This is part of the way that modern poetry seeks to produce a micro-world foreign to - indeed the very inverse of - practical life. As part of this 'inversion', says Blanchot, there is of course a radical reorientation of language. Language loses its representional relation to the world and turns inward. We are meant to listen to the specific frequencies of language as never before.
The intention is not to empty language of its materiality, even if Mallarme et al appear to be jettisoning the material weight of the world to which language refers. On the contrary, the whole point of the project is to stop language evaporating into the world and to rescue, at some cost, its material density. This is meant not just in the sense that suddenly the material envelope of language - sound, rhythm, typographical embodiment - become objects of interest and enjoyment in their own right. It's rather that the whole relation between language and representation is being turned inside out, the very distinction is being attacked and transfigured. Here, again, is Blanchot:
'This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme's presupposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value.. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that can not be represented.. in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.'
Purged of the pragmatic burden of representation, words are free to be incantatory; they perform actions - conjuring, summoning, commanding. The implicit dream - surely - is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now a communal magic - unless we count those small esoteric societies, with their back room theatrics, that certain modern poets were drawn to. The new magic unfolds in the 'cell of pure inwardness'.
Blanchot quotes Valery thus:
'poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express."
A kiss or caress are not simply the representation of affects, they participate in those affects. A cry is not a representation of a feeling but a manifestation* - and an amplification - of that feeling. Its not that poetry aspires to actual sobs and grunts. Rather poetry aspires to have the same relation to being - that of pure emanation - as does a cry or tear. Once more words are wedded to things, not by force of representational accuracy, but by force of participation, or by themselves becoming thing-like.
But is not this spectre of 'lost materiality' generated retroactively by peculiarly modern linguistic usages. It is here one has to be (in the allotted space) some what of a vulgar materialist. For the world that modern poetry seeks to estrange itself from is surely one wherein language is commercially saturated, reduced to a pure means, empted and serviceable. Again, the argument is familiar - retreating from the degraded linguistic register of commerce, language clings to that is most irreducible in itself, re-discovers its specific weight and efficacy. It is this commercial register which produces the nostalgic dream of a language fat with being, still part and parcel of what it 'represents'. Hence the fascination with magic and conjuration - forms of language which are, as we would now say, performative, bringing into being or 'causing' that to which they 'refer.'
In the closed laboratory of the poem language has certain primitive rights restored to it, the evisceration of the word through commerce and instrumental reason is reversed. Poetry is an isolated cell of protest and a dream of Nondum. Indeed, it is no accident that years later the Situationists (Debord at least) would insist that their project was in effect to actualise modern poetry, to generalize this hermetic laboratory throughout society. Debord insisted on perceiving, in the microcosm of hermetic poetry, the germ cell of the total event.
cf Wittgenstein: 'A cry is not a description.. And the words 'I am afraid' may approximate, more or less, to being a cry'.
'In the world of practical life satisfaction suppresses desire (I am thirsty, I drink; the matter is done with, classified) .... [The aim of art, on the contrary] is to organize a system of perceptible things able to make themselves asked for again and again without ever being able able to appease the desire they provoke. Creation consists in making and object that elicits desire'.
Poetic language is, therefore, a suspension and 'suppression' of the rules of practical life. The poem relishes and perfects, as it's own end, that desire which in practical life is immediately burned up in fulfillment. This is part of the way that modern poetry seeks to produce a micro-world foreign to - indeed the very inverse of - practical life. As part of this 'inversion', says Blanchot, there is of course a radical reorientation of language. Language loses its representional relation to the world and turns inward. We are meant to listen to the specific frequencies of language as never before.
The intention is not to empty language of its materiality, even if Mallarme et al appear to be jettisoning the material weight of the world to which language refers. On the contrary, the whole point of the project is to stop language evaporating into the world and to rescue, at some cost, its material density. This is meant not just in the sense that suddenly the material envelope of language - sound, rhythm, typographical embodiment - become objects of interest and enjoyment in their own right. It's rather that the whole relation between language and representation is being turned inside out, the very distinction is being attacked and transfigured. Here, again, is Blanchot:
'This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme's presupposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value.. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that can not be represented.. in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.'
Purged of the pragmatic burden of representation, words are free to be incantatory; they perform actions - conjuring, summoning, commanding. The implicit dream - surely - is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now a communal magic - unless we count those small esoteric societies, with their back room theatrics, that certain modern poets were drawn to. The new magic unfolds in the 'cell of pure inwardness'.
Blanchot quotes Valery thus:
'poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express."
A kiss or caress are not simply the representation of affects, they participate in those affects. A cry is not a representation of a feeling but a manifestation* - and an amplification - of that feeling. Its not that poetry aspires to actual sobs and grunts. Rather poetry aspires to have the same relation to being - that of pure emanation - as does a cry or tear. Once more words are wedded to things, not by force of representational accuracy, but by force of participation, or by themselves becoming thing-like.
But is not this spectre of 'lost materiality' generated retroactively by peculiarly modern linguistic usages. It is here one has to be (in the allotted space) some what of a vulgar materialist. For the world that modern poetry seeks to estrange itself from is surely one wherein language is commercially saturated, reduced to a pure means, empted and serviceable. Again, the argument is familiar - retreating from the degraded linguistic register of commerce, language clings to that is most irreducible in itself, re-discovers its specific weight and efficacy. It is this commercial register which produces the nostalgic dream of a language fat with being, still part and parcel of what it 'represents'. Hence the fascination with magic and conjuration - forms of language which are, as we would now say, performative, bringing into being or 'causing' that to which they 'refer.'
In the closed laboratory of the poem language has certain primitive rights restored to it, the evisceration of the word through commerce and instrumental reason is reversed. Poetry is an isolated cell of protest and a dream of Nondum. Indeed, it is no accident that years later the Situationists (Debord at least) would insist that their project was in effect to actualise modern poetry, to generalize this hermetic laboratory throughout society. Debord insisted on perceiving, in the microcosm of hermetic poetry, the germ cell of the total event.
cf Wittgenstein: 'A cry is not a description.. And the words 'I am afraid' may approximate, more or less, to being a cry'.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Intellectual on the Carpet
Courtesy of Glueboot:
"Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say....? Don't you conceal something? You talk a language that is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man on the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to "come clear", to "put your cards on the table." Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us- in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry- that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we will do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language." (H. Marcuse)
Indeed. And not just analytic philosophy either.
"Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say....? Don't you conceal something? You talk a language that is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man on the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to "come clear", to "put your cards on the table." Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us- in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry- that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we will do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language." (H. Marcuse)
Indeed. And not just analytic philosophy either.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Lifers
"You see that you don't love them," says Roquentin. "You wouldn't recognize them in the street. They're only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you're touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.
In Sartre's Nausea there is famous attack on the Humanist. He is, says Roquentin, interested in people only as illustrations of an abstraction called 'The Human, ' he feels pity, concern etc for them only via his concern for this bloodless generality. In its negation of actual humans, Humanism is anti-humanism. I was reminded of this by the rhetoric of some 'pro-Life' campaigners, and by a genuinely unpleasant article on 'the Terri Schiavo case' linked to by Jodi Dean. The author states: '"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live." This is false. They don't care about whether Terri Schiavo lives, i.e., about this individual in her particularity - about which they know nothing. Their object of concern (if we are being generous) is that someone is in this situation, and they would campaign regardless of who it was. The particular and individual life is inessential to their point, which concerns Life in the abstract. Terri Schiavo counts as an illustration of this abstraction, as a convenient embodiment of Life. And it is precisely because she has, sadly, been emptied of her particular qualities that she can stand for this abstraction. 'Life' swims into view when actual, particular and individual life is absent - the person in a coma, the unborn. Only when it is no longer ensnared in the world, only when it is life-less, does Life become precious - Life beyond the original sin of actually living.
There is, then, a notable contrast between the abstraction which is necessarily the object of the pro-Lifers' solicitations, and the casual familiarity with they refer to 'Terri', discarding even the formality of the surname, as if she were a long lost member of the family; or as if (see comments) they 'are Terri's personally chosen spokespeople.' Indeed, this fantasy of intimacy is particularly ugly - the self-delusion of pretending merely to be ventriloquising the wishes of someone else; the indignity, for that someone, of having substituted, for her lost personhood, the cloying fantasies of some deluded ideologues.
[The above is a slightly modified version of the original post.]
In Sartre's Nausea there is famous attack on the Humanist. He is, says Roquentin, interested in people only as illustrations of an abstraction called 'The Human, ' he feels pity, concern etc for them only via his concern for this bloodless generality. In its negation of actual humans, Humanism is anti-humanism. I was reminded of this by the rhetoric of some 'pro-Life' campaigners, and by a genuinely unpleasant article on 'the Terri Schiavo case' linked to by Jodi Dean. The author states: '"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live." This is false. They don't care about whether Terri Schiavo lives, i.e., about this individual in her particularity - about which they know nothing. Their object of concern (if we are being generous) is that someone is in this situation, and they would campaign regardless of who it was. The particular and individual life is inessential to their point, which concerns Life in the abstract. Terri Schiavo counts as an illustration of this abstraction, as a convenient embodiment of Life. And it is precisely because she has, sadly, been emptied of her particular qualities that she can stand for this abstraction. 'Life' swims into view when actual, particular and individual life is absent - the person in a coma, the unborn. Only when it is no longer ensnared in the world, only when it is life-less, does Life become precious - Life beyond the original sin of actually living.
There is, then, a notable contrast between the abstraction which is necessarily the object of the pro-Lifers' solicitations, and the casual familiarity with they refer to 'Terri', discarding even the formality of the surname, as if she were a long lost member of the family; or as if (see comments) they 'are Terri's personally chosen spokespeople.' Indeed, this fantasy of intimacy is particularly ugly - the self-delusion of pretending merely to be ventriloquising the wishes of someone else; the indignity, for that someone, of having substituted, for her lost personhood, the cloying fantasies of some deluded ideologues.
[The above is a slightly modified version of the original post.]
Monday, March 21, 2005
Caravaggio
There is currently a lovely Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London. While looking into it, I came across Berger's essay about the painter online. It begins:
Once I was asked to name my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer.
I wonder, though, whether searching for the least knowing answer isn't itself a kind of knowingness. The very process of selecting a non-knowing response sounds close to a rhetorical ploy, as if one is going for the effect of naivety; as if one wants to appear boldly innocent of the socially defined canon.
But maybe not. Maybe he's onto something about the spontaneous/ 'knowing' distinction. Look, in the above passage the knowing answer presumably comes first. It's as if the 'naive, spontaneous' response has to be won through reflection, while the thought-at-the-front-of-our-mind, ready to pick, is, by contrast, already contaminated with social knowledge and/ or calculation. What's ready to hand is not the very pulse of intuition but a hardened and socially-astute response. Reflection does not dilute the spontaneous / 'least knowing' part of ourselves, it breaks through to finally access it. Well, what Berger accesses is this:
'Caravaggio'. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems - for the answer came unpremeditated - to whom I feel closer.
The few canvases from my own incomparably modest life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a life-long aversion.
Once I was asked to name my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer.
I wonder, though, whether searching for the least knowing answer isn't itself a kind of knowingness. The very process of selecting a non-knowing response sounds close to a rhetorical ploy, as if one is going for the effect of naivety; as if one wants to appear boldly innocent of the socially defined canon.
But maybe not. Maybe he's onto something about the spontaneous/ 'knowing' distinction. Look, in the above passage the knowing answer presumably comes first. It's as if the 'naive, spontaneous' response has to be won through reflection, while the thought-at-the-front-of-our-mind, ready to pick, is, by contrast, already contaminated with social knowledge and/ or calculation. What's ready to hand is not the very pulse of intuition but a hardened and socially-astute response. Reflection does not dilute the spontaneous / 'least knowing' part of ourselves, it breaks through to finally access it. Well, what Berger accesses is this:
'Caravaggio'. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems - for the answer came unpremeditated - to whom I feel closer.
The few canvases from my own incomparably modest life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a life-long aversion.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Note on Zizek
A lengthy debate here on Slavoj Zizek. The ostensible occasion for this debate was that someone had chosen to isolate a random piece of Zizek's prose as an example of 'question begging'. The passage came from Zizek's LRB article (see below). Now, my first thought was, of course a short article like this will beg (and provoke) questions, so what? Certainly the piece doesn't involve 'question begging' in the strict logical sense ("A democracy is where a democratic process of decision making etc"). But perhaps the obvious point is that 'question begging' is typically not a direct property of a text or speech but a function of the relation between speaker/ audience or text/ reader. So, at university, we had a lecturer who was keen to draw attention to how certain texts were 'true to human nature'. Now for us, with our newly worked through theoretical approach, this presupposed precisely what we were 'interrogating' (as we liked to say). But plug this same lecturer into a different context, Cambridge in the 1930's, the begged questions obediently disappear, and lecture glides effortlessly into the audiences' set of preoccupations. Similarly, unplug a liberal lecture from its intended audience and its suddenly shot through with outrageous and inexplicable assumptions that take for granted what its audience has long since debunked, discarded or at least started to unpick.
It's now the case that ZIzek has an interested and sizeable audience - even among the readers of the LRB - who do not need a promising argument first re-routed through yet another critique of liberal democracy; they can get off the ground without this diversion. They begin from a place outside familiar Liberal assumptions and do not need to have terms like hegemony, 'ideological imaginary' etc explicated. This is no more or less scandalous than people whose default position is within such a Liberal framework. Indeed, to assume that such a framework is the normative and natural starting point that any argument must embark from is, to me, not only begging a very big question indeed, but a patently ideological move.
But perhaps there is also something performative about Zizek's method, and his 'interested and sizeable' audience has partly been produced by Zizek himself: intransigently forcing his audience to read as if liberal democracy were not simply self-evident and hegemonic, in order to understand where he's coming from, the reader finds that somewhere along the line his faith in the reigning assumptions has disappeared.
c also Cprobes. [I forgot to add that my impression with some of the Zizek debate was of people feeling a ('liberal'?) duty to read Zizek, but - clearly aggrieved at this - looking to trip themselves up over the first (invented) obstacle. These obstacles (or defenses) fell into two familiar categories: it's 'nonsense' or practiced charlatanry vs its just old left stuff dressed in new clothes. Either it has no content or its' content is all too familiar. ]
It's now the case that ZIzek has an interested and sizeable audience - even among the readers of the LRB - who do not need a promising argument first re-routed through yet another critique of liberal democracy; they can get off the ground without this diversion. They begin from a place outside familiar Liberal assumptions and do not need to have terms like hegemony, 'ideological imaginary' etc explicated. This is no more or less scandalous than people whose default position is within such a Liberal framework. Indeed, to assume that such a framework is the normative and natural starting point that any argument must embark from is, to me, not only begging a very big question indeed, but a patently ideological move.
But perhaps there is also something performative about Zizek's method, and his 'interested and sizeable' audience has partly been produced by Zizek himself: intransigently forcing his audience to read as if liberal democracy were not simply self-evident and hegemonic, in order to understand where he's coming from, the reader finds that somewhere along the line his faith in the reigning assumptions has disappeared.
c also Cprobes. [I forgot to add that my impression with some of the Zizek debate was of people feeling a ('liberal'?) duty to read Zizek, but - clearly aggrieved at this - looking to trip themselves up over the first (invented) obstacle. These obstacles (or defenses) fell into two familiar categories: it's 'nonsense' or practiced charlatanry vs its just old left stuff dressed in new clothes. Either it has no content or its' content is all too familiar. ]
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Literature: Escape & Critique
J. Derbyshire draws our attention to his review of John Berger's new book.He has a nice phrase for Berger's signature clarity: 'Berger’s prose is a stealthy miracle of precision. His painterly eye for sensuous particularity has often been remarked on and it is on frequently thrilling display here: the “right” temperature for greengages is said to be the “temperature of a small boy’s fist”'
Now, an obvious question about that last sentence: why would it be unacceptable, and deemed bad literature, if Berger had simply given a celsius figure. From one point of view this would be 'more exact', for there is no matching the laser precision of science, so why is the 'small boy's fist' to be preferred? Is it not because (much) literature is the remembrance and dream of an 'epic' world, the world that precedes and has not yet 'emptied out' into abstract measure, where things are knit together by resemblance and analogy. And this knitting together recognises the haeccity of concrete and particular things, a recognition lost to our world - ?
To quote an earlier post:
[In the epic world] a distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
Literature clings to the concrete integrity of that earlier world. In offering this explanation I seem to be in agreement with a point made by a commenter to my soap opera post, who writes of 'the escapist comfort afforded by literary art in general'. I would add, repeating myself, that this 'escape' is a determinate escape, i.e., a reflection of what it 'escapes' and a revelation of what is lacking therein. It is, at the same time, anodyne consolation and potent revolutionary nostalgia (cf Adorno's 'Baby With the Bath Water' in Minima Moralia)
Now, an obvious question about that last sentence: why would it be unacceptable, and deemed bad literature, if Berger had simply given a celsius figure. From one point of view this would be 'more exact', for there is no matching the laser precision of science, so why is the 'small boy's fist' to be preferred? Is it not because (much) literature is the remembrance and dream of an 'epic' world, the world that precedes and has not yet 'emptied out' into abstract measure, where things are knit together by resemblance and analogy. And this knitting together recognises the haeccity of concrete and particular things, a recognition lost to our world - ?
To quote an earlier post:
[In the epic world] a distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
Literature clings to the concrete integrity of that earlier world. In offering this explanation I seem to be in agreement with a point made by a commenter to my soap opera post, who writes of 'the escapist comfort afforded by literary art in general'. I would add, repeating myself, that this 'escape' is a determinate escape, i.e., a reflection of what it 'escapes' and a revelation of what is lacking therein. It is, at the same time, anodyne consolation and potent revolutionary nostalgia (cf Adorno's 'Baby With the Bath Water' in Minima Moralia)
Friday, March 18, 2005
Atopos
For some reason this blog is the no.1 google citation for 'Ranciere'*. Odd. Anyway, am currently reading an interesting little book by Ranciere wherein he discusses Rossellini's Europe 51. I'd like to post something about this book and the 'Socratic' notion of 'atopos' - this concept surely underlies R's recognition of the symbolic place of the poor in philosophical discourse. Meanwhile, here is a useful essay on JR, from which this useful summary of Ranciere's Politics:
Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.
The political is an opposite process, and it is rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been given (we're not a surplus), to claim both a share in society and another name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality (we're a plus). This is because the equality of one speaking being with any other—the fundamental presupposition of democracy—does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal each time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it is a claim whose naked truth does not suffice; it has to be put to the test, publicly verified. This is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a crowd against the fixed frames of an institution.
* 17/01/06 Not any more.
Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.
The political is an opposite process, and it is rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been given (we're not a surplus), to claim both a share in society and another name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality (we're a plus). This is because the equality of one speaking being with any other—the fundamental presupposition of democracy—does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal each time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it is a claim whose naked truth does not suffice; it has to be put to the test, publicly verified. This is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a crowd against the fixed frames of an institution.
* 17/01/06 Not any more.
No surprise
"No matter how I imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens! The realization brings with it an unforeseeable nothing which changes everything."
Bergson, The Possible and the Real
Scragg, a small animated aquaintance who was once mistaken for a marmoset by a child in the street, reports on her recent visit to New York - 'It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly.' 'Oh, come on', I replied, 'nothing is exactly like you imagine it, not even the next room, isn't this the very mark of reality, that it always exceeds our imaginings?" "No", she insisted, obviously not having read Bergson, "I'm telling you it was just the same as the image I had of it". I wasn't prepared to grant this at all."The only way it could have been exactly as you imagined it, I retorted, was if you'd imagined that it would exceed your image of it", at which point she disappeared in a puff of logic.
n.b. Some excellent reflections on this post at new blog Fort Kant
Bergson, The Possible and the Real
Scragg, a small animated aquaintance who was once mistaken for a marmoset by a child in the street, reports on her recent visit to New York - 'It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly.' 'Oh, come on', I replied, 'nothing is exactly like you imagine it, not even the next room, isn't this the very mark of reality, that it always exceeds our imaginings?" "No", she insisted, obviously not having read Bergson, "I'm telling you it was just the same as the image I had of it". I wasn't prepared to grant this at all."The only way it could have been exactly as you imagined it, I retorted, was if you'd imagined that it would exceed your image of it", at which point she disappeared in a puff of logic.
n.b. Some excellent reflections on this post at new blog Fort Kant
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Bureaucracy ii: Objective mirage
[see previous post]
Adorno:
'.. the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down, and illuminating his face in such a way as to divide it pitilessly into bright utilizable parts and dark, disreputable areas of incompetence.'
But the light that so illuminates the candidate does not emanate from the manager. It is the Company's light, and the manager simply refracts it. He speaks with a voice, and looks with an eye trained by the the Company (no, not by training videos, but the very structure if the institution). His small talk, enquiries after your health and so on are all subordinate to testing your useability, suitability, adaptability etc. Thus, the designs of the company empty both the manager and language itelf into the merest instruments.
This is how bureacracy works. People represent and speak on behalf of The Company, but 'the company' is not localised in any individual, not even, or especially, the managing director. It is a kind of objective mirage, or working fiction. Because this objective mirage is never localised in an individual, it is always 'elsewhere,' deferred, absent.
For some revealing 'insider' reflections on bureaucracy, see State Street.
Adorno:
'.. the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down, and illuminating his face in such a way as to divide it pitilessly into bright utilizable parts and dark, disreputable areas of incompetence.'
But the light that so illuminates the candidate does not emanate from the manager. It is the Company's light, and the manager simply refracts it. He speaks with a voice, and looks with an eye trained by the the Company (no, not by training videos, but the very structure if the institution). His small talk, enquiries after your health and so on are all subordinate to testing your useability, suitability, adaptability etc. Thus, the designs of the company empty both the manager and language itelf into the merest instruments.
This is how bureacracy works. People represent and speak on behalf of The Company, but 'the company' is not localised in any individual, not even, or especially, the managing director. It is a kind of objective mirage, or working fiction. Because this objective mirage is never localised in an individual, it is always 'elsewhere,' deferred, absent.
For some revealing 'insider' reflections on bureaucracy, see State Street.
Ontological Bureaucracy
From Thomas Bernhard, Correction:
"We reject everything having to do with contracts, because we reject bureaucracy in toto, but in fact the world is only held together by a parchwork of contracts.. and in this network of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions of contracts the trapped human beings are squirming. There's no way to get arounf contracts except by suicide..
To suppose that it is possible to exist without contracts or other written agreements and run away, anywhere at all, is to find ourselves soon caught again in contracts and written agreements, anyone who thinks otherwise is a madman.. It's only in childhood that we don't know what kind of trap it is in which we squirm and despair, [] ignorant that these are the nets of contracts and other written agreements made by the grown-ups, by history. If anyone were to succeed in doing away with all these contracts and other written agreements, all he'd have accomplished would be the end of the whole world.
Our entire being is tied to contracts, written agreements, assessments, no matter who we are. Still we keep trying all our lives to escape from these contracts and other written agreements, efforts as painful as they are senseless.
Bernhard seems to move in this passage from a familiar enough aversion to the impersonality of bureaucracy to a perception that it is 'part of the human condition', and that the impossible struggle against it is both necessary and utterly futile. Bernhard could almost have been describing here, in metaphorical terms, Lacan's notion of the Symbolic Order. And perhaps the impersonal, inescapable structures of the Symbolic Order, or what we might call our ontological bureaucracy, become visible only with the development of bureaucracy proper. Thus, a provisional conclusion: The historical development of Bureaucracy as a form of organisation is a precondition of the perception of a certain ontological bureaucracy. The existence of a bureaucracy, a world where relations between people are always contractually mediated, where people speak and act on behalf of institutions, never 'in thier own voice', where these decisions seem to bear no individual watermark, does all this not alert writers and thinkers to the way in which there was always already a seam of 'bureaucracy' in intersubjective relations and at the core of the self?
Now, in considering this I first thought, as I say, of Lacan. But there was of course a more obvious first port of call, and one I came across, via the intermediary of Google, at Spurious. It is, you've already guessed, Kafka:'Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution' (Letters, 1922).
I intend to update and develop this post very soon, but am posting it in this notational form in case people want to leave comments and suggestions along these lines.
There are some ineresting reflections on this post here.
"We reject everything having to do with contracts, because we reject bureaucracy in toto, but in fact the world is only held together by a parchwork of contracts.. and in this network of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions of contracts the trapped human beings are squirming. There's no way to get arounf contracts except by suicide..
To suppose that it is possible to exist without contracts or other written agreements and run away, anywhere at all, is to find ourselves soon caught again in contracts and written agreements, anyone who thinks otherwise is a madman.. It's only in childhood that we don't know what kind of trap it is in which we squirm and despair, [] ignorant that these are the nets of contracts and other written agreements made by the grown-ups, by history. If anyone were to succeed in doing away with all these contracts and other written agreements, all he'd have accomplished would be the end of the whole world.
Our entire being is tied to contracts, written agreements, assessments, no matter who we are. Still we keep trying all our lives to escape from these contracts and other written agreements, efforts as painful as they are senseless.
Bernhard seems to move in this passage from a familiar enough aversion to the impersonality of bureaucracy to a perception that it is 'part of the human condition', and that the impossible struggle against it is both necessary and utterly futile. Bernhard could almost have been describing here, in metaphorical terms, Lacan's notion of the Symbolic Order. And perhaps the impersonal, inescapable structures of the Symbolic Order, or what we might call our ontological bureaucracy, become visible only with the development of bureaucracy proper. Thus, a provisional conclusion: The historical development of Bureaucracy as a form of organisation is a precondition of the perception of a certain ontological bureaucracy. The existence of a bureaucracy, a world where relations between people are always contractually mediated, where people speak and act on behalf of institutions, never 'in thier own voice', where these decisions seem to bear no individual watermark, does all this not alert writers and thinkers to the way in which there was always already a seam of 'bureaucracy' in intersubjective relations and at the core of the self?
Now, in considering this I first thought, as I say, of Lacan. But there was of course a more obvious first port of call, and one I came across, via the intermediary of Google, at Spurious. It is, you've already guessed, Kafka:'Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution' (Letters, 1922).
I intend to update and develop this post very soon, but am posting it in this notational form in case people want to leave comments and suggestions along these lines.
There are some ineresting reflections on this post here.
Bad Democracy
The Bush administration is apparently formulating plans to 'contain' the democratic government of Venezuela. Seems it’s not their kind of democracy: in taking decisions according to its own interests rather than those of a foreign government it's failed to understand what Democracy is about. Chavez is causing potential 'problems' - not for his own people, you understand, but for this foreign government, which is therefore trying to find ways to prevent the representatives of the Venezuelan people from carrying out their mandate. "Defying U.S., Venezuela's Chavez Embraces Socialism" a headline reads: naturally, the most important thing about a government proclaiming its political principles is not the repercussions of these principles for its own people, but the 'statement' it seemingly makes to the Superpower. Presumably any statement not affirming the principles of the Superpower is a 'defiance' of the Superpower. Anyway, the foreign power is monitoring Venezuelan democracy closely, in case it makes the wrong democratic decisions. If it does, and continues to pursue its own interests, who knows, it may have to be liberated.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Tact
There are certain writers whose style, intially carved out of nothing or against the grain of received modes of expression, has hardened into a kind of template or repertoire of riffs and formulas which they can now comfortably call on. And their thoughts, having initially struggled their way into the most appropriate form, now serve as a hoarded stockpile of private intellectual capital. Such writers are in effect tyrannised by the reified products of their former creative living self. It is as though, having invested their former energies in real thinking, they are now content to live off the interest.
Anyway, for some reason was thinking today about I talk I attended by John Berger some years ago at he Institute of Contemporary Arts. I have nothing momentous to report, other than, firstly, the visibility with which he thinks right infront of you - he wears thought on his face without disguise. Thinks, that is, as opposed to delivering polished phrases and prepared quips. To anyone who has attented a Berger talk this pained, halting delivery can be almost embarassing - great silences in which he seems to be racking his brains and the heavens itself for an answer. But if it's embarassing, its also a revelation to see someone of his age and eminence who has managed not to let his mind ossify into settled and comfortable formulas, who has nothing, absolutely nothing, of the robotic polish of those who have come to rely on their own impressive stock of finished forms.
Now, the other thing was a word that Berger hit upon in trying to think about the activity of writing: tact. Tact as in touch, tactility; but also, tact as in discretion, or not touching - knowing when to a steer clear. But, crucially, both these at once: the only way for a writer to come really close, to lay his finger on something, is to exercise a certain necessary discretion or holding back. To lay rude hands on a thing is not to touch it at all.
n.b. Berger's new book, Here Is Where We Meet seems now to be in the shops. At least, I saw it in Foyles, Charing X road.
Anyway, for some reason was thinking today about I talk I attended by John Berger some years ago at he Institute of Contemporary Arts. I have nothing momentous to report, other than, firstly, the visibility with which he thinks right infront of you - he wears thought on his face without disguise. Thinks, that is, as opposed to delivering polished phrases and prepared quips. To anyone who has attented a Berger talk this pained, halting delivery can be almost embarassing - great silences in which he seems to be racking his brains and the heavens itself for an answer. But if it's embarassing, its also a revelation to see someone of his age and eminence who has managed not to let his mind ossify into settled and comfortable formulas, who has nothing, absolutely nothing, of the robotic polish of those who have come to rely on their own impressive stock of finished forms.
Now, the other thing was a word that Berger hit upon in trying to think about the activity of writing: tact. Tact as in touch, tactility; but also, tact as in discretion, or not touching - knowing when to a steer clear. But, crucially, both these at once: the only way for a writer to come really close, to lay his finger on something, is to exercise a certain necessary discretion or holding back. To lay rude hands on a thing is not to touch it at all.
n.b. Berger's new book, Here Is Where We Meet seems now to be in the shops. At least, I saw it in Foyles, Charing X road.
'A fiction of constitutions'; or, colonial democracy
'our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too..." (Adorno, Negative Dialectics).
I have commented briefly before on recent attempts to identify the Left unproblematically with the values of, and the extant facts of, 'constitutional democracy', and Enlightenment principles of equality and enfranchisement. I suggested that this is tendentious revisionism: historically, the left have always been critical of these things, but- crucially - in their own name. For the left, these things failed to 'live up to their concept', and this failure was due to the political and economic situation in which we live. In short it was to do with capitalism. The left has always sought to analyse how these concepts work, or are put to work within a particular historical system.
I want to try and offer for consideration a historical situation which demonstrates some of the above. A situation where an 'enlightenment' text of equality and rights and democratic inclusion functioned actually to negate all of these things, and not because of corrupt implemention or accidents of misunderstanding
In 1801 Ireland was incorporated, by the Act of Union, into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Union was, if you like, an Enlightenment document: it spoke of equality, free trade; it included Ireland within a 'democratic' constitution. Surrounding the Union there is a whole language invoking a mirroring of rights and liberties between the two countries ( Joseph Chamberlain would speak of 'equal laws, equal justice, equal opportunities, and equal prosperity.') The Union was a contract entered into freely by equal 'subjects', its logic being 'parity of treatment for the inhabitants of the two islands.’ Thus, upon diverse political geographies, a new abstract space was imposed: everywhere, equally, within it – from Cork to Carlisle - was a point of distribution or exchange, supply or consumption, legislation or bureaucratic initiative. Everywhere was now subject (at least in theory) to place-blind legislation. The Union therefore addressed that level at which Ireland and Great Britain were the 'same', the very substratum of equality beneath false hierarchies. This, of course, is the point. They were not the same and would not prematurely become so by legal fiat, by a mere 'fiction of constitutions'*.
But it isn't just that this legal fiction denied the heterogeneous reality, that it spoke of a fictional legal entity that had no concrete existence. The more important point is the actual economic and political effects produced by the new ‘constitutional democracy’ of ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
What happens is this:
Post 1801, Irish representation now consists of a small minority grafted onto the English parliamentary system. Legislation is typically worked through in terms of the English nation: its internal situation, its external entanglements, and the pressure of domestic opinion. These are the priorities through which Ireland is 'refracted'. Politically, the Union turns out to be nothing less than a paradoxical attempt to preserve subordination through the fiction of inclusion. Something of this double logic emerges in the words of Pitt's undersecretary, Edward Cooke:
'By giving the Irish one hundred members in an assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be rendered impotent to operate in that assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority.'
The 'gift' of democracy is for the British simply a way of addressing 'their Irish problem’: Ireland is, in relation to the metropolis 'subversive' and must be rendered 'impotent;' there is a deficit of hegemony which must be rectified. Any potential growth in Catholic emancipation will, likewise, now take place in a context where Catholic are inevitably a marginal group. In all these instances, inclusion within the 'centre' is by that same stroke, an act of marginalisation; the granting of formal equality is the very means of increased subordination.
Economically, the effect is analogous: 'The Union threatened to expose the economy of the less developed partner to the competition of the highly developed nation on earth [...] which could not fail to benefit the more advanced country'. (Making Ireland 'extremely dependent on outside - in effect British - markets'.) Ireland is more and more integrated into a much larger system of production and exchange. The rhythms of its economy are increasingly determined by forces eccentric to Ireland itself ("The changing pattern of British demand", for example). To some extent, Ireland becomes a 'subsidiary' country, a market for 'the more cheaply produced English goods,' as well as a source of supply to that same absent centre. Marx describes post-Union Ireland as 'merely an agricultural district of England that happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle..'. The structural determinants of the Irish situation (whether 'British demand' or the economic and political logics of Empire) are now part of a system not directly present to the Irish subject, yet bearing on that subject's experience in a comprehensive fashion, from cultural consumption to the way land is farmed, from paths of career mobility to the content of political debate.
To recap, then: yes, the Union can be seen from one point of view in terms of enlightenment values, constitutional democracy and so on, but when this document is put to work in a particular context it systematically produces inequalities and oppression. The key point is that this is not some 'charade', it is not that a trompe l'oeil has been erected, behind which the dirty work is done; the Union is not simply there to hide something else. The Union is not the dissembling screen but the very underlying mechanism. It is the 'equalisation' or homogenisation of space, under one law for all, one franchise - this is the instrument of impoverisation and disempowerment.
If the legal fiction which the Union sets up, the fictive equality between ‘partners’, is precisely the vehicle of subordination, then to work inside the 'legal' or 'rational' structures of constitutional politics is to be silent about the power relations that these systematically reproduce. Needless to say, however, anyone working outside those structures can easily be condemned as an enemy of democracy, or even, to use the words of Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his writings about Ireland, a 'terrorist'.
[This post will hopefully be updated later. If anyone would like the footnotes, send me an email.]
*The reference is of course to Marx, who analysed that 'fiction of constitutions' whereby people are posited and interpellated as equal subjects, a fiction which only reinforces actual inequalities.
I have commented briefly before on recent attempts to identify the Left unproblematically with the values of, and the extant facts of, 'constitutional democracy', and Enlightenment principles of equality and enfranchisement. I suggested that this is tendentious revisionism: historically, the left have always been critical of these things, but- crucially - in their own name. For the left, these things failed to 'live up to their concept', and this failure was due to the political and economic situation in which we live. In short it was to do with capitalism. The left has always sought to analyse how these concepts work, or are put to work within a particular historical system.
I want to try and offer for consideration a historical situation which demonstrates some of the above. A situation where an 'enlightenment' text of equality and rights and democratic inclusion functioned actually to negate all of these things, and not because of corrupt implemention or accidents of misunderstanding
In 1801 Ireland was incorporated, by the Act of Union, into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Union was, if you like, an Enlightenment document: it spoke of equality, free trade; it included Ireland within a 'democratic' constitution. Surrounding the Union there is a whole language invoking a mirroring of rights and liberties between the two countries ( Joseph Chamberlain would speak of 'equal laws, equal justice, equal opportunities, and equal prosperity.') The Union was a contract entered into freely by equal 'subjects', its logic being 'parity of treatment for the inhabitants of the two islands.’ Thus, upon diverse political geographies, a new abstract space was imposed: everywhere, equally, within it – from Cork to Carlisle - was a point of distribution or exchange, supply or consumption, legislation or bureaucratic initiative. Everywhere was now subject (at least in theory) to place-blind legislation. The Union therefore addressed that level at which Ireland and Great Britain were the 'same', the very substratum of equality beneath false hierarchies. This, of course, is the point. They were not the same and would not prematurely become so by legal fiat, by a mere 'fiction of constitutions'*.
But it isn't just that this legal fiction denied the heterogeneous reality, that it spoke of a fictional legal entity that had no concrete existence. The more important point is the actual economic and political effects produced by the new ‘constitutional democracy’ of ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
What happens is this:
Post 1801, Irish representation now consists of a small minority grafted onto the English parliamentary system. Legislation is typically worked through in terms of the English nation: its internal situation, its external entanglements, and the pressure of domestic opinion. These are the priorities through which Ireland is 'refracted'. Politically, the Union turns out to be nothing less than a paradoxical attempt to preserve subordination through the fiction of inclusion. Something of this double logic emerges in the words of Pitt's undersecretary, Edward Cooke:
'By giving the Irish one hundred members in an assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be rendered impotent to operate in that assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority.'
The 'gift' of democracy is for the British simply a way of addressing 'their Irish problem’: Ireland is, in relation to the metropolis 'subversive' and must be rendered 'impotent;' there is a deficit of hegemony which must be rectified. Any potential growth in Catholic emancipation will, likewise, now take place in a context where Catholic are inevitably a marginal group. In all these instances, inclusion within the 'centre' is by that same stroke, an act of marginalisation; the granting of formal equality is the very means of increased subordination.
Economically, the effect is analogous: 'The Union threatened to expose the economy of the less developed partner to the competition of the highly developed nation on earth [...] which could not fail to benefit the more advanced country'. (Making Ireland 'extremely dependent on outside - in effect British - markets'.) Ireland is more and more integrated into a much larger system of production and exchange. The rhythms of its economy are increasingly determined by forces eccentric to Ireland itself ("The changing pattern of British demand", for example). To some extent, Ireland becomes a 'subsidiary' country, a market for 'the more cheaply produced English goods,' as well as a source of supply to that same absent centre. Marx describes post-Union Ireland as 'merely an agricultural district of England that happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle..'. The structural determinants of the Irish situation (whether 'British demand' or the economic and political logics of Empire) are now part of a system not directly present to the Irish subject, yet bearing on that subject's experience in a comprehensive fashion, from cultural consumption to the way land is farmed, from paths of career mobility to the content of political debate.
To recap, then: yes, the Union can be seen from one point of view in terms of enlightenment values, constitutional democracy and so on, but when this document is put to work in a particular context it systematically produces inequalities and oppression. The key point is that this is not some 'charade', it is not that a trompe l'oeil has been erected, behind which the dirty work is done; the Union is not simply there to hide something else. The Union is not the dissembling screen but the very underlying mechanism. It is the 'equalisation' or homogenisation of space, under one law for all, one franchise - this is the instrument of impoverisation and disempowerment.
If the legal fiction which the Union sets up, the fictive equality between ‘partners’, is precisely the vehicle of subordination, then to work inside the 'legal' or 'rational' structures of constitutional politics is to be silent about the power relations that these systematically reproduce. Needless to say, however, anyone working outside those structures can easily be condemned as an enemy of democracy, or even, to use the words of Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his writings about Ireland, a 'terrorist'.
[This post will hopefully be updated later. If anyone would like the footnotes, send me an email.]
*The reference is of course to Marx, who analysed that 'fiction of constitutions' whereby people are posited and interpellated as equal subjects, a fiction which only reinforces actual inequalities.
Note
A couple of additions to the links. Two sites produced by Cprobes: A Lacanian/ Zizekian glossary
and a page of Baudrillard links
Here, for no other reason than to fill up space, is an extract from one of the Baudrillard links:
'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages'.
and a page of Baudrillard links
Here, for no other reason than to fill up space, is an extract from one of the Baudrillard links:
'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages'.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Business is Business
In response to a recent post on soaps, someone draws my attention to a frequent Eastenders cliche:
"Maybe the most heavily loaded token in the lingua franca you mention (particularly in 'Stenders) is that word 'business': 'it's only business, nothing personal'". An action is thereby put beyond question and removed from accountability in one stroke. 'Business' is indeed 'nothing personal', i.e., a neutral framework of adjudication against which personal pleas and allegiances are worthless, or magically dissolved. The autistic tautology 'business is business', like 'law is law', means there is no external standard by which it can or should be judged. To 'judge' it is merely impractical or irrational, like condemning a gust of wind. If the economy is a machine - something built by human beings - it seems to have become, somewhere along the line, an ahistorical machine.
This a-historical machine will exploit and immiserate people on our behalf and exonerate us in the process. I use and humiliate someone, skim off the fruits of their labour and then discard them, and represent it to myself as 'submiting to necessity'. 'Sorry if I hurt you, but I only did what Business required me to do; go and talk to it if you have any objections.' (Business assumes here the place of the Big Other). In using the alibi of 'business' I therefore also hide the enjoyment I derive from such acts. And this is exactly the structure of moral disavowal; indeed, the shirking of moral responsibility by referring one's actions to some 'external' and 'unalterable' framework is in a basic Kantian sense the very definition of immorality.
At the same time, this is hardly just a question of personal morality. The underlying and facilitating premise, that the framework of 'business' is 'unalterable,' is first given in the culture itself. Ultimately (via subtle dialectical mediations of course) it reposes upon the depoliticization of the economy. Marx, who is writing when such depoliticization is trying to get off the ground, is among the first to condemn it, and with caustic logic:
the error of the bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are valid only for a particular historical development, for a definite development of the productive forces. Instead, therefore, of regarding the politico-economic categories as abstract expressions of the real, transitory, historic social relations, Mr Proudhon, owing to a mystic inversion, regards real relations merely as reifications of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves are formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.' (The Poverty of Philosophy)
&
the vulgar economists confine themselves to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is for them the best possible one."
Capital Volume 1
That no one now speaks of 'vulgar economists' or 'bourgeois economists' is not a sign of their defeat but the almost total victory of their assumptions. Indeed, this depoliticization of the economic system in which we live, and of economic relations, is surely one of the great achievements of (we might still call) bourgeois ideology. Depoliticized, it is relegated to a place beyond question, and 'politics' is strategically confined to the machinations and polemic of the parliamentary theatre. This 'confinement' works to block cognition of the the true workings of power, the limits and pressures exerted upon Democracy by economic determinants, and the very failure of democracy to approach its Concept. To use an out of fashion word, we are denied access to the totality of relations in which parliamentary democracy is intricated, and waylaid instead by a decoy theatre. This theatre, featuring various Andrew Marrs and other impressarios, brings with it a whole time-consuming entourage of commentary and analysis, and the lillipution disputes of these 'theatre critics' serve as indubitable proof of the healthyness of the democratic process.
From Marx (see above) onwards, the tradition of the left always sought to qualify 'democracy' with 'bourgeois' or 'capitalist', and said that such qualifications are a fatal brake on and contamination of real democracy. The task has always been not simply to defend democracy that is, but to posit a democracy to come and to idenitify what, in the present, blocks its realisation. It shouldn't surprise us if those trying to uphold this tradition are accused of being its heretics and saboteurs. To stick with this tradition involves a continual commitment and effort of thought. It is quicker and more rewarding to cut your moorings and enter the Market.
And politics? As in the old joke, many prefer to look for true politics under the bright spotlight of media debate rather than in the dark engines of the economy, not because it's likely to be found under the spotlight but simply because its easier to look.
"Maybe the most heavily loaded token in the lingua franca you mention (particularly in 'Stenders) is that word 'business': 'it's only business, nothing personal'". An action is thereby put beyond question and removed from accountability in one stroke. 'Business' is indeed 'nothing personal', i.e., a neutral framework of adjudication against which personal pleas and allegiances are worthless, or magically dissolved. The autistic tautology 'business is business', like 'law is law', means there is no external standard by which it can or should be judged. To 'judge' it is merely impractical or irrational, like condemning a gust of wind. If the economy is a machine - something built by human beings - it seems to have become, somewhere along the line, an ahistorical machine.
This a-historical machine will exploit and immiserate people on our behalf and exonerate us in the process. I use and humiliate someone, skim off the fruits of their labour and then discard them, and represent it to myself as 'submiting to necessity'. 'Sorry if I hurt you, but I only did what Business required me to do; go and talk to it if you have any objections.' (Business assumes here the place of the Big Other). In using the alibi of 'business' I therefore also hide the enjoyment I derive from such acts. And this is exactly the structure of moral disavowal; indeed, the shirking of moral responsibility by referring one's actions to some 'external' and 'unalterable' framework is in a basic Kantian sense the very definition of immorality.
At the same time, this is hardly just a question of personal morality. The underlying and facilitating premise, that the framework of 'business' is 'unalterable,' is first given in the culture itself. Ultimately (via subtle dialectical mediations of course) it reposes upon the depoliticization of the economy. Marx, who is writing when such depoliticization is trying to get off the ground, is among the first to condemn it, and with caustic logic:
the error of the bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are valid only for a particular historical development, for a definite development of the productive forces. Instead, therefore, of regarding the politico-economic categories as abstract expressions of the real, transitory, historic social relations, Mr Proudhon, owing to a mystic inversion, regards real relations merely as reifications of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves are formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.' (The Poverty of Philosophy)
&
the vulgar economists confine themselves to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is for them the best possible one."
Capital Volume 1
That no one now speaks of 'vulgar economists' or 'bourgeois economists' is not a sign of their defeat but the almost total victory of their assumptions. Indeed, this depoliticization of the economic system in which we live, and of economic relations, is surely one of the great achievements of (we might still call) bourgeois ideology. Depoliticized, it is relegated to a place beyond question, and 'politics' is strategically confined to the machinations and polemic of the parliamentary theatre. This 'confinement' works to block cognition of the the true workings of power, the limits and pressures exerted upon Democracy by economic determinants, and the very failure of democracy to approach its Concept. To use an out of fashion word, we are denied access to the totality of relations in which parliamentary democracy is intricated, and waylaid instead by a decoy theatre. This theatre, featuring various Andrew Marrs and other impressarios, brings with it a whole time-consuming entourage of commentary and analysis, and the lillipution disputes of these 'theatre critics' serve as indubitable proof of the healthyness of the democratic process.
From Marx (see above) onwards, the tradition of the left always sought to qualify 'democracy' with 'bourgeois' or 'capitalist', and said that such qualifications are a fatal brake on and contamination of real democracy. The task has always been not simply to defend democracy that is, but to posit a democracy to come and to idenitify what, in the present, blocks its realisation. It shouldn't surprise us if those trying to uphold this tradition are accused of being its heretics and saboteurs. To stick with this tradition involves a continual commitment and effort of thought. It is quicker and more rewarding to cut your moorings and enter the Market.
And politics? As in the old joke, many prefer to look for true politics under the bright spotlight of media debate rather than in the dark engines of the economy, not because it's likely to be found under the spotlight but simply because its easier to look.
Friday, March 11, 2005
The Content of Form
Yesterday I suggested that programs like Eastenders and Coronation St. embody a certain fantasy of community, of an older form of social and economic relations - a closed community, focused only on itself, face-to-face and self-sufficient. I suggested that these features of the soap were largely imposed by the form itself rather than being thematic preoccupations. This could also have been put the other way around: if, in order for certain kinds of story to get off the ground you must construct something like a hermetic village, then this also implies that the actual everyday life of contemporary capitalism - characterised by dispersal, atomisation, spectacular 'communities' - is radically incompatible with certain kinds of storytelling and certain story-shaped experiences. Anyway, the implicit point of what I was saying, that interpretation should pass beyond the content to the form, is something I would want to underline. Now, I find a loosely related point in Jameson's Marxism and Form. He's talking about representations of the scientist's laboratory in those old 50's disaster films, wherein he sees a kind of
'collective folk dream about the life style of the scientist himself: he doesn't do real work, his renumeration is not monetary or at the very least money seems no object, there is something fascinating about his laboratory (the home workshop magnified to institutional dimensions, a combination of factory and clinic), about the way he works nights (he isn't bound by routine or the eight-hour day), his very intellectual operations themselves are caricatures of what the non-intellectual imagines brain work and book-knowledge to be. There is, moreover, the suggestion of a return to older modes of work organisation: to the more personal and psychologically satisfying world of the guilds, in which the older scientist is the master and the younger one the apprentice... What I want to convey is that none of this has anything do do with science itself, but is rather a distorted reflection of our own feelings and dreams about work alienated anf non-alienated: it is a wish-fulfillment that takes as its object a vision or ideal of what Marcuse would call 'libidinally gratifying' work. But it is of course a wish-fulfillment of a particular type, and it is this structure that is important to analyze.'
By that last sentence I take Jameson to mean that this is not just some free-floating universal wish, but a wish produced by and reflecting specific historical conditions in which work is typically impersonal and alienated, wherein one is essentially an instrument within a bureaucratic structure, implementing directives that cannot be tied to any specific individual. Whether that structure happens to be that of a private corporation or a state organisation matters little. The fantasy of work he descries is therefore like the photographic negative - a precise inversion - of this alienated world, so that the latter can as it were (and as FJ might say) be read off from it in reverse. It is not just a fantasy but the fantasy of this situation.
Now the other, perhaps rather obvious point that Jameson raises, is the relation between fantasy and ideology. The science fiction movies of which Jameson, after Sontag, speaks, are of course part and parcel of the ideology of the Cold War. This Cold War story is their ostensible 'content'. What Jameson suggests is that this ideological content is almost an alibi or rationalisation, the proverbial piece of meat thrown to the guard dog. Meanwhile, the real and deeper fantasmatic content is smuggled in, and assumes the inconspicuous semblance of the scientist's laboratory and the forms of work made possible thereby. This is a recurrent Jamesonian motif: the ideological content, in order to be binding, must have some disavowed fantasmatic kernel embedded within it.
The model or template here is taken from Freud's interpretation of dreams and the distinction between manifest and latent content. Jameson, who has given (or perhaps restored) to this distinction a political edge, is suggesting that this 'latent' fantasy typically embeds itself in form of the film/ novel etc, while the content sells us the ideological dummy. Content based analysis therefore misses the point entirely, failing to see that the content is a mere form, and that the form has a content of its own.
'collective folk dream about the life style of the scientist himself: he doesn't do real work, his renumeration is not monetary or at the very least money seems no object, there is something fascinating about his laboratory (the home workshop magnified to institutional dimensions, a combination of factory and clinic), about the way he works nights (he isn't bound by routine or the eight-hour day), his very intellectual operations themselves are caricatures of what the non-intellectual imagines brain work and book-knowledge to be. There is, moreover, the suggestion of a return to older modes of work organisation: to the more personal and psychologically satisfying world of the guilds, in which the older scientist is the master and the younger one the apprentice... What I want to convey is that none of this has anything do do with science itself, but is rather a distorted reflection of our own feelings and dreams about work alienated anf non-alienated: it is a wish-fulfillment that takes as its object a vision or ideal of what Marcuse would call 'libidinally gratifying' work. But it is of course a wish-fulfillment of a particular type, and it is this structure that is important to analyze.'
By that last sentence I take Jameson to mean that this is not just some free-floating universal wish, but a wish produced by and reflecting specific historical conditions in which work is typically impersonal and alienated, wherein one is essentially an instrument within a bureaucratic structure, implementing directives that cannot be tied to any specific individual. Whether that structure happens to be that of a private corporation or a state organisation matters little. The fantasy of work he descries is therefore like the photographic negative - a precise inversion - of this alienated world, so that the latter can as it were (and as FJ might say) be read off from it in reverse. It is not just a fantasy but the fantasy of this situation.
Now the other, perhaps rather obvious point that Jameson raises, is the relation between fantasy and ideology. The science fiction movies of which Jameson, after Sontag, speaks, are of course part and parcel of the ideology of the Cold War. This Cold War story is their ostensible 'content'. What Jameson suggests is that this ideological content is almost an alibi or rationalisation, the proverbial piece of meat thrown to the guard dog. Meanwhile, the real and deeper fantasmatic content is smuggled in, and assumes the inconspicuous semblance of the scientist's laboratory and the forms of work made possible thereby. This is a recurrent Jamesonian motif: the ideological content, in order to be binding, must have some disavowed fantasmatic kernel embedded within it.
The model or template here is taken from Freud's interpretation of dreams and the distinction between manifest and latent content. Jameson, who has given (or perhaps restored) to this distinction a political edge, is suggesting that this 'latent' fantasy typically embeds itself in form of the film/ novel etc, while the content sells us the ideological dummy. Content based analysis therefore misses the point entirely, failing to see that the content is a mere form, and that the form has a content of its own.
Zizek on Nazism and Communism
A new Zizek article, from which this:
A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological identity.
....
Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.
Meanwhile, over at the New Statesman, Terry Eagleton reviews a nbew book on fascism:
If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive.
A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological identity.
....
Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.
Meanwhile, over at the New Statesman, Terry Eagleton reviews a nbew book on fascism:
If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive.
A Note from the Great Teacher
The headlong stream is termed violent
But the riverbed hemming it in is
Termed violent by no one.
The storm that bends the birch trees
Is held to be violent. But how about the storm
That bends the backs of the road workers
Thursday, March 10, 2005
More Soap: an Adorno-esque grouch
[See post below]
There are of course, within these soaps significant differences. Coronation Street at least seems to create genuine 'characters', wheras the 'characters' of Eastenders all seem to be emanations of a single ersatz-cockney Geist. And a single language speaks through them. Sure, it has a number or tricks up its sleeve. It can whisper menacingly, it can become suddenly sentimental about something that happened 'when i was a kid', but ultimately it's trapped in a single linguistic groove. And this language is one consisting almost entirely of pre-fabricated banaliites and recycled bits of received wisdom. Thus, someone can earnestly advise 'treat em mean, keep em keen' without registering the fatal damage inflicted on their ability to think. No actor can breath life into such lines; au contraire, they breathe death into the actor.
It is worthwhile pausing momentarily to consider these linguistic ready-mades, these formulaic sentiments, which are the lingua franca of Albert Sq*. They are semantic dead matter, uncoloured by interiority, sediments of experiences or thoughts now forgotten. But in using them there is a great echo of recognitiion, although an echo in which no distinct voices can be heard. This is the echo of the reassuring solidity of that 'Big Other' of received wisdom in which we live and breathe. To use such phrases is to be united with the serial anonymity of 'everyone else', whose hallmark such phrases are seen to bear.
Because the sole office of such phrases is to secure recognition, they are beyond or beneath the level of true /false. Their function is to plug the speaker in to the wiring of the Big Other. The castrating cost is the sacrifice of spontaneous free thought and individualised affect. To watch Eastenders, is to watch a community composed only of such people, whose thoughts, speech and intimate reactions are wholly reified, pre-packaged and impersonal. The world on screen may be an anachronistic village, a closed community, but it uses the debased linguistic currency which renders it wholly permeable to its millions of viewers.
There are of course, within these soaps significant differences. Coronation Street at least seems to create genuine 'characters', wheras the 'characters' of Eastenders all seem to be emanations of a single ersatz-cockney Geist. And a single language speaks through them. Sure, it has a number or tricks up its sleeve. It can whisper menacingly, it can become suddenly sentimental about something that happened 'when i was a kid', but ultimately it's trapped in a single linguistic groove. And this language is one consisting almost entirely of pre-fabricated banaliites and recycled bits of received wisdom. Thus, someone can earnestly advise 'treat em mean, keep em keen' without registering the fatal damage inflicted on their ability to think. No actor can breath life into such lines; au contraire, they breathe death into the actor.
It is worthwhile pausing momentarily to consider these linguistic ready-mades, these formulaic sentiments, which are the lingua franca of Albert Sq*. They are semantic dead matter, uncoloured by interiority, sediments of experiences or thoughts now forgotten. But in using them there is a great echo of recognitiion, although an echo in which no distinct voices can be heard. This is the echo of the reassuring solidity of that 'Big Other' of received wisdom in which we live and breathe. To use such phrases is to be united with the serial anonymity of 'everyone else', whose hallmark such phrases are seen to bear.
Because the sole office of such phrases is to secure recognition, they are beyond or beneath the level of true /false. Their function is to plug the speaker in to the wiring of the Big Other. The castrating cost is the sacrifice of spontaneous free thought and individualised affect. To watch Eastenders, is to watch a community composed only of such people, whose thoughts, speech and intimate reactions are wholly reified, pre-packaged and impersonal. The world on screen may be an anachronistic village, a closed community, but it uses the debased linguistic currency which renders it wholly permeable to its millions of viewers.
Soap and spectacular nostalgia
At Oxford, there used to be a graduate discussion group, OEL, devoted to cultural theory. On a couple of occasions they invited some of the producers and writers of Eastenders in to talk about the raison d’etre of the program. As you might expect, they talked about 'social relevance', about addressing issues like abortion and domestic violence. They were, they claimed, trying to portray contemporary society. Not naturalistically, but realistically nonetheless.
Now however people might appeal to 'relevance' etc as the alibi for their enjoyment (I doubt if many do), the appeal of British TV soaps lies elsewhere. For what we eavesdrop on in these programs is not the representation of a segment of contemporary capitalist society, but a kind of quasi-feudalism. If you take the three big TV soaps, Emmerdale, Eastenders and Coronation St., we see the same thing. It is a closed community. It has no outside. Okay, occasionally there are necessary visits from the police or ambulance service. But in general, these are communities which are concentrated inward. What unifies the community is not the media spectacle - news of distant catastrophes, fictions, the snuff theatre of reality TV. Soap people have no words for these distant things over which they have no control. They are preoccupied only with their own affairs, their own relations with each other. They are their own centre, and this centre has a binding force.
There is a local ‘landlord’ or benevolent property owner who seems to employ everyone and own all the cafes and businesses. One's needs, whether for employment or for consumption, can always be met by the immediate community. The local Patriarchs always seems to have vacancies for the strangers who intermittently arrive in the community. These strangers are of course not strangers for long. Whatever comes from outside the circumference of the hermetic village is effortlessly incorporated. The stranger is soon made familiar and divested of any ties to the outside world. Time is telescoped so that within months you are an old familiar face; your secrets and intimacies have been folded inside out and made the object of communal curiosity and solicitation. Bourgeois privacy has been abolished. Relations between people are relatively transparent.
Occasionally, there is a meaningless intrusion - a car crash, a murder, a freak fire. But these little bits of blind chance or Fate take out individuals rather than eroding the ties of the hermetic village. It is ultimately robust and inperturbable. It demands only that you sever all links to external family and friends.
Now, in a nostalgia for this quasi-feudal village, the spectacle of community, is to be found the appeal of the soap. It is precisely because these qualities are not to be found in the 'real life' of the audience, because they have long ago left the fabric of the everyday, that there is enjoyment in consuming in them as image. The serial anonymity of the millions of soap viewers is a 'community' exactly opposite to the one flickering before it on the screen. If there is canned laughter to laugh on our behalf, there is here canned 'community'. Both are a weak simulacrum of the real thing, but just as canned laughter appears to have an effect like that of real laughter - people feel perceptibly more relaxed etc afterwards, so canned community deposits within the spectator the weak facsimile of affects no longer possible within their own lives.
In this nostalgia for community some would discover utopian impulses, others would decry imaginary fulfilments as ideological. Indeed, the utopian and ideological dimension of these soaps are like two sides of a sheet of paper.
Now you’ll reply that all the features that I’ve mentioned are simply necessary to plot organisation, structural necessities rather than thematic considerations. Well, of course they are – this is the point. What the audience identify with are the apparently adventitious features imposed by the logic of the form itself. Which is why the earnest and ponderous talk about 'social relevance' etc from the producers is so much bluff.
Now however people might appeal to 'relevance' etc as the alibi for their enjoyment (I doubt if many do), the appeal of British TV soaps lies elsewhere. For what we eavesdrop on in these programs is not the representation of a segment of contemporary capitalist society, but a kind of quasi-feudalism. If you take the three big TV soaps, Emmerdale, Eastenders and Coronation St., we see the same thing. It is a closed community. It has no outside. Okay, occasionally there are necessary visits from the police or ambulance service. But in general, these are communities which are concentrated inward. What unifies the community is not the media spectacle - news of distant catastrophes, fictions, the snuff theatre of reality TV. Soap people have no words for these distant things over which they have no control. They are preoccupied only with their own affairs, their own relations with each other. They are their own centre, and this centre has a binding force.
There is a local ‘landlord’ or benevolent property owner who seems to employ everyone and own all the cafes and businesses. One's needs, whether for employment or for consumption, can always be met by the immediate community. The local Patriarchs always seems to have vacancies for the strangers who intermittently arrive in the community. These strangers are of course not strangers for long. Whatever comes from outside the circumference of the hermetic village is effortlessly incorporated. The stranger is soon made familiar and divested of any ties to the outside world. Time is telescoped so that within months you are an old familiar face; your secrets and intimacies have been folded inside out and made the object of communal curiosity and solicitation. Bourgeois privacy has been abolished. Relations between people are relatively transparent.
Occasionally, there is a meaningless intrusion - a car crash, a murder, a freak fire. But these little bits of blind chance or Fate take out individuals rather than eroding the ties of the hermetic village. It is ultimately robust and inperturbable. It demands only that you sever all links to external family and friends.
Now, in a nostalgia for this quasi-feudal village, the spectacle of community, is to be found the appeal of the soap. It is precisely because these qualities are not to be found in the 'real life' of the audience, because they have long ago left the fabric of the everyday, that there is enjoyment in consuming in them as image. The serial anonymity of the millions of soap viewers is a 'community' exactly opposite to the one flickering before it on the screen. If there is canned laughter to laugh on our behalf, there is here canned 'community'. Both are a weak simulacrum of the real thing, but just as canned laughter appears to have an effect like that of real laughter - people feel perceptibly more relaxed etc afterwards, so canned community deposits within the spectator the weak facsimile of affects no longer possible within their own lives.
In this nostalgia for community some would discover utopian impulses, others would decry imaginary fulfilments as ideological. Indeed, the utopian and ideological dimension of these soaps are like two sides of a sheet of paper.
Now you’ll reply that all the features that I’ve mentioned are simply necessary to plot organisation, structural necessities rather than thematic considerations. Well, of course they are – this is the point. What the audience identify with are the apparently adventitious features imposed by the logic of the form itself. Which is why the earnest and ponderous talk about 'social relevance' etc from the producers is so much bluff.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
MIssing the Mark
In fact, the mark only appears after and because we have failed to hit it.
When we say something and realise 'that's not what I meant', the 'what I meant' is produced retroactively. That's to say: it's not that you first have a fully formed and intended meaning in mind which the ensuing utterance fails to embody. Au contraire, the failure to embody makes you aware of the 'what you meant.' Your 'intention' is defined and clarified by your failure to give it form. Similarly when we say of some situation or experience 'this isn't what i want', it is only via the failed experience or situation that the 'what I want' has been disclosed to me. The negation (not what I want) in a sense precedes and generates that which it negates.
The 'subjective' - our wants and intentions etc - is a deposit, a residue left behind through various misses and failures. That this residuum is then regarded as the precious and original core of our being, that we need to be in touch with, is an optical illusion we seem unable to dispense with. Hence our default causal picture: of a subject whose intentions and meanings find realisation (or not) in speech and action.
When we say something and realise 'that's not what I meant', the 'what I meant' is produced retroactively. That's to say: it's not that you first have a fully formed and intended meaning in mind which the ensuing utterance fails to embody. Au contraire, the failure to embody makes you aware of the 'what you meant.' Your 'intention' is defined and clarified by your failure to give it form. Similarly when we say of some situation or experience 'this isn't what i want', it is only via the failed experience or situation that the 'what I want' has been disclosed to me. The negation (not what I want) in a sense precedes and generates that which it negates.
The 'subjective' - our wants and intentions etc - is a deposit, a residue left behind through various misses and failures. That this residuum is then regarded as the precious and original core of our being, that we need to be in touch with, is an optical illusion we seem unable to dispense with. Hence our default causal picture: of a subject whose intentions and meanings find realisation (or not) in speech and action.
Monday, March 07, 2005
John Berger
At the South Bank Centre and the NFT in London, there's a season of events devoted to the work of John Berger. Details can be found here and here. It includes readings/>
and discussions featuring Berger himself, and also authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels. The season is named after Berger's forthcoming book, Here is Where We Meet.
[Expect light posting for a couple of days, i've a pile of things to do.]
n.b., there is a lengthy extract from Berger's forthcoming book here. An encounter with the dead.
and discussions featuring Berger himself, and also authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels. The season is named after Berger's forthcoming book, Here is Where We Meet.
[Expect light posting for a couple of days, i've a pile of things to do.]
n.b., there is a lengthy extract from Berger's forthcoming book here. An encounter with the dead.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
This Post Was Written For You
There have a been a number of posts recently, here and at I Cite, among other places, on 'interpellation' or 'the call' in various versions. The versions are: Badiou's idea of the subject 'called' (and constituted) by the Truth-Event'; Heidegger's 'Call of conscience'; and lastly, Althusser's 'interpellation,' or the call of ideology.
In my previous post I did not address these different calls, and indeed may have blurred or ignored the distinction between them. I wrote:
'Hence, the call carries with it a blindness and a wager of trust. From the point of view of Common Sense, one is thus behaving utterly foolishly: leaving behind reasonable and predictable rewards for something undefined. Exactly, except this very 'common sense' point of view has been suddenly revealed as impoverished and mutinous and there is no going back to it. One has no choice but to choose fidelity to this new truth, which answers something in yourself, but also seems bigger than yourself, and will in the end perhaps destroy and recast the familar self, or, will produce a Subject.
Now, this is what Zizek has to say after a brief account of Badiou's notion of being 'called' by the Event:
'From this brief description one can already get a presentiment of what one is tempted to call, in all naivety, the intuitive power of Badiou's notion of the subject: it effectively describes the experience each of us has when he or she is fully engaged in some cause which is 'his or her own': in those precious moments, am I not fully a subject? But does not this very feature make it ideological? That is to say, the firsrt thing that strikes the eye of anyone versed in the history of French Marxism is how Badiou's notion of the Truth-Event is uncannily close to Althusser's notion of ideological interpellation.'
& Again: 'Isn't Badiou's notion of the Truth-Event uncannily close to Althusser's notion of (ideological) interpellation? Isn't the process Badiou is describing that of an individual interpellated into a subject by a Cause?
Here is Althusser:
..that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey. you there!'
Assuming the theoretical scene I have imagined taking place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognised that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that it really was him who was hailed. (Essays in Ideology, p. 163)
I'd like to try and post some sketchy thoughts on the various versions of 'the call', starting, below, with Heidegger.
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