Friday, May 27, 2005

The Dud

Courtesy of here:

“Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate on the Quranic abuse at Abu Ghraib points out the inconsistency in attitudes towards the sacred: those incensed by the Newsweek report because of the desecration of their holy book do not extend the same principle to others who might hold the US flag to be sacred since "(o)ver the last week, the flag of the United States of America has been cheerfully incinerated by grinning crowds in several cities."

A rather obvious point: of course those Muslims who think the Koran sacred don’t ‘extend the same principle’ to some other thing. The idea that ‘I personally don’t value x but will defend and respect your valuation of it’ is of course the tritest liberalism, and there's no reason why Hitch's polemical target should be commited to it. The veneration of the Koran in no way involves a ‘principle’ that what is deemed sacred should be respected (a principle which could then be ‘extended’), it’s rather that this thing really is uniquely sacred and worth venerating (precisely non extendable). There is therefore no ‘inconsistency’ in failing to ‘extend the principle’. There is no ‘principle’ to begin with.

It’s perhaps worth adding that the many non-Muslims suspected that the Koran desecration was part and parcel of the humiliation of prisoners. Those reacting to the reported desecration were not doing so because certain texts are in principle sacred but because the deliberate humiliation of individuals is wrong.

It may also be worth adding a more general point here. There is an obvious difference between purposely humiliating an individual by desecrating something he/ she holds sacred, on the one hand, and, on the other, publicly burning as a political gesture what many happen to hold dear. (The flag is presumably not sacred in the same sense – nor should it be). One needs to bear in mind the difference between burning/ desecrating something that someone holds dear precisely because they hold it dear, ie because you want to defile that which is valuable to the other regardless of what it might be), and burning something because you oppose what (for you) it represents.

The point here is to look at how an action is embedded, for this ‘embeddedness’ is part of its meaning as an action. This does not, very obviously, involve a surrender to relativism, but rather allows one to clarify what exactly is at issue and therefore to speak in an appropriate and meaningful way rather than using empty abstractions.

Zz

Over at IT & Kpunk there are some engaging reviews of two recent Zizek talks, the most recent being last night at Middlesex uni. Had I known about it I would have gone, sunstroke and all. So, in future, any significant philosophical events in London/ thereabouts and I want to know about them, understand?

Also, I find that Mark K-Punk's thesis begins with a discussion of the Golem and other themes which have been a preoccupation of Charlotte St. and which are discussed here in an 'interview' at Long Sunday (scroll down to second and third question) prefaced with the shocking revelation that 'Kaplan' is an alias.

8 things

Someone dares to suggest by email that I do the '8 things i've never done' meme, or whatever it is. As if. Am tempted to reply something like this:

8 things i have never done:

Constructed a spear entirely from sand

Woke up on an broken exercise bench laughing manically

Injected a citrus fruit with language

Met an athlete who was simultaneously over and under six feet tall

Written a series of well-known comic novels about Henri Michaux

Solved some problem in set theory whilst hiding from wolves

Written this sentence in Hebrew

Had cause to imitate a sunlounger

Thursday, May 26, 2005

The posts below consist of notes made in the margins of Wittgenstein's Culture and Value. I have made only very slight modifications.

Preparation

“If I prepare myself for some eventuality, you can be pretty sure that it won’t happen.”

Recalls the very well known passage from Proust. The boy Marcel sits down and begins to compose, as an exercise in wish-fulfilment, a letter to himself from his beloved Gilberte. Half way through* he stops:

I had realised that, if I was to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it. And from that moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write to me, from fear lest, by first selecting them myself, I should be excluding just those identical words,–the dearest, the most desired–from the field of possible events
The laws of the universe are so arranged that anything so exactly imagined cannot, on that account, occur. And presumably many fantasies of disaster are presumably attempts to strike such things from the register of the Possible.

*After mentioning this episode to my sister she quips 'whereas now he'll only receive the last part of the letter'.

90e

Frequency of metaphors/ simile in Wittgenstein’s notes. Does this mark a kind of failure to attain the chaste abstractions of the conceptual? Is figurative language only a kind of place-holder for a not-yet-formulated concept? Are there things (even conceptual things) that can only be captured figuratively, if so why?

12e/ 28e

"When I have done with the world I have created an amorphous transparent mass and the world in all its variety is left on one side like an uninteresting lumber room.”

Isn’t this a rather common experience on the completion of an essay or other piece of work? One has bothered oneself with the form of the essay, making it internally consistent etc At the end, the distinct impression is that yes, it is internally consistent, polished etc but just on that account has lost touch with its object. The timbre of the essay and the timber of the world are different substances. In tidying up or polishing the former the roughness and irregularity of the latter is discarded like so much adventitious dross.

More generally: We have the sense that in producing a conceptual or poetic structure, there is always a price to be paid in the form of an ‘indivisible remainder’, something indefinable that our language has failed to grasp.

The illusion is often that this remainder was the essential thing, that the essence has therefore escaped you. But this remainder has no ontological consistency. It is simply that which remains.

A rough analogy: using a net of a x gauge will fail to catch fish of a certain size, but these uncaught ones are not a definite category of fish. Nor are they, rather than the fish you have caught, the hard indefinable reality of the fish world.

Also, W: “The pleasure I take in my thoughts is the pleasure in my own strange life”

In writing the essay, I have been pursuing (in part) my ‘own strange [singular] life’ – writing is the only place where this ‘strange life’ is revealed to itself. this has eclipsed what I have been writing about.

Expression

“Expression consists for us in incalculability. If I new exactly how he would grimace, move, then there would be no facial expression, no gesture.”

There is a sense in which a smile (for example) is part of a code of expression – so, for instance, it can be represented iconically. But a smile that simply conformed to the code would be expressionless (mechanical). It is a condition of expression that some tweaking or bending of this code must take place. This bending or tweaking of the code (Symbolic) is what is meant be individual expression. Each person negates the Symbolic in his/her own way.

‘Style is the picture of the man’

When the tweaks and deviations assume a quality that has some consistent and distinctive form we term this ‘style’. The tweaks and deviations appear as not just random twitches or kinks in the Symbolic, but form a pattern – the ‘picture of the man’.

(Wittgenstein underlines as important the distinction between ‘Le style c’est homme’ and ‘le style c’est l’homme meme’.?)

11e

“It is great temptation to want to make the spirit explicit [denGeist explicit machen zu wollen].”

But the spirit is precisely the name given to that which subtends and informs the explicit, i.e., that which is made visible. Eg, we might say these particular gestures express a person’s spirit. But the spirit itself could never be co-extensive with a gesture. Spirit is always ‘in reserve’.

(One of Zizek’s speculations about post-modernism: its obsession with ‘making explicit’ that which ordinarily is held in reserve.)

Q: On expression: ok, that which is ‘expressed’ is never exhausted in its ‘expression’. If it were synonymous with its expression, what would that be? Theatrical. (eg, theatrical anger is synonymous with its expression.)

48e

“What is pretty cannot be beautiful.” Interestingly, I intuitivelyagree with this. More difficult to say why.

The Beautiful needs to be set in contrast to the Sublime and the Pretty – as if equally distinct from both. From the point of view of the Pretty, the Beautiful is Sublime, but the beautiful, looked at from the Sublime, is merely pretty.

90e-2

'That writers, who after all were something, go out of date is connected with the fact that their writings, when contemplated by the setting of their own age, speak strongly to people, but that they die without this complementation, as if bereft of the lighting that gave them colour."

Wittgenstein's concern with the historical, esp. as it concerns understanding.

tapas

I return to England later today, Thursday. Have punctuated long days of pleasurable indolence with reading Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, and making some marginal notes. Will hopefully put some of these notes on the blog.

In the meantime, let me recommend this new site to you, where some of my posts, along with the writings of several excellent others, will henceforth be appearing.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Spain

I have been invited to Spain for a week’s holiday. It’s possible that I might have internet access; also possible that I’ll have other priorities. One slight drawback is that I’ll miss both of the Zizek lectures (ICA + Birkbeck). Can someone make a detailed transcript and/ or tape recording and send it to me, ta.


He would sometimes linger over a word, considering it from all sides, and in doing so, often discovered in its individual syllables an unexpected meaning. One night at my house, he was struck by the dominance of a certain color in a room with white walls, a dominance that had, occurred without any intention on my part. The color was red. Several bunches of roses, carnations, and pomegranate flowers presented an entire spectrum of reds to which was added the stark red of a peasant woman's handkerchief, made even more vivid by the light of a lamp. Benjamin was quick to give the room its definition: 'A laboratory designed to extract the essence of the color red.' He then uttered the German word rot (red). 'Rot,' he said, 'is like a butterfly alighting upon each shade of the color red.' Later on his attention was drawn by the red handkerchief: 'To me, it occupies a space between 'torch' and 'torchon' (cloth).' In this manner he associated two words whose difference in meaning had drawn them away from their common etymology (torquere, to twist)."

Jean Selz, 'Walter Benjamin in Ibiza'.

Foreign Language

Irving Wohlfarth on Walter Benjamin:

Contrary to received opinion, the task of the translator [is not] to assimilate another language to one’s own but to render both foreign to themselves.

This operation curiously reminscent of Deleuze’s idea of a minor literature, which always involves the “rendering foreign” of received (Major) language. The writer, suggests Deleuze (quoting Proust), is always a kind of foreigner in his own tongue. And this ‘foreigner’ activates or sets in motion what the familiarity of his host language has repressed.

This idea of “rendering foreign” does not mean colouring what is familiar with a particular foreign content (e.g. what is English is coloured with a certain French or Germanic tint); rather English, for example, is made unfamiliar to itself, some virus of ‘pure difference’ is introduced into it, without anchorage.

The assumptions underlying Benjamin’s notion are, of course, rather different. Wolf. adds the following to his reflections on Benjamin’s translation essay:

Like the “stranger” who disrupts the community’s false sense of symbiosis, translation accentuates an alienation that is endemic to all fallen languages. In estranging them from such estrangement, it prepares for their ultimate “integration”.

Thus the making foreign of language (the estrangement of estrangement) is really the making visible of a foreignness (an alienation) already in place, but a foreignness that adumbrates a lost homeland.

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Bourgeois Thinkers

Wittgenstein:

"Ramsey was a bourgeois thinker. I.e. he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community. He did not reflect upon the essence of the state - or at least he did not like doing so - but on how this state might reasonably be organized. The idea that this state might not be the only possible one partly disquieted him and partly bored him."

A note from the underground

There is a line in Hegel’s Aesthetics, which seems exactly to fit the Derridean idea that the illusion of ‘presence’ is related to the experience of hearing oneself speak:

The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself’

In the voice, words are flooded with soulful intentionality; the soul emerges briefly from the obscure corporeal dark and is suddenly there. But Hegel also qualifies this immediately (so to speak):

In the voice, ‘a vibration is set up in a body indifferent to the soul and its expression’.

The material body deposits, however obscurely, its trace in the voice – the vibration of air, the stretched muscle etc, are all opaquely present. And this materiality of the body is indifferent to the soul. Hegel reminds us that sound is always the index of a substance – the sound of wood, glass, metal etc. As such, a sound is one of the properties of that substance, like its weight or density. It is in this sense that sound is a ghost of matter, carries the latter’s after-trace within it.

There is in the voice, then, a residuum which escapes the ‘soul’ and which has an object-like quality. Only in certain privileged moments of illusion, some operatic climax, for example, do we seem to apprehend the voice-as-pure-soul.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

PSA

On April 7th I accidentaly posted the following:

There is a project of mine which has been on the back burner for too long. I now wish to turn to this project in earnest & am retiring to Hoeller’s garret. Posts here will henceforth become briefer and/ or more infrequent. Do not ask what it is, this thing. You’ll doubtless find out eventually (cue gleeful manic chuckle).

p.s. This will be temporary - perhaps 3/4 months.

Of course, it should have been posted today, May 14th.

Friday, May 13, 2005

Code and Punctum



If you’re very bored one evening, why not try and produce a (semi-humorous) semiotic analysis of George Bush’s head. Matt, at Pas Au-Dela provides us with some of the basic morphemes (above). Let’s number them 1-6, starting top left and moving left to right.

1. Alludes to thinking, to the head as the locus of presidential decisions. The hand indicates the point where the buck stops – the head of the President, now superimposed on his own. Implicit contrast between the fallible human clay of the individual and the burden of Presidential thoughts. A certain pathos thereby produced.

2. A look of resigned acceptance. ‘I guess that’s the way things are,’ or, I guess we’re gonna have to live with that’. Signifies pragmatic realism, a certain worldly knowledge..

3. Wide eyed, open-mouthed candour, a look appropriate to expressions of principle. Defies the audience to disbelieve him – he is opening his face, baring all.

4. ‘Your guess is as good as mine/ ‘look, I can’t tell you’, sets up a kind of ‘regular guy’ parity between him and his audience. Behind the President is someone like you with incomplete knowledge etc.

5. Dispelling some false imputation, the effect is of offended dignity, head retracts into neck as if preparing for a pre-emptive strike.

6. Triumphant, gleeful, almost childlike (a child who has wrested a prized object from his sibling’s grasp). This is the only look not part of the semiotic code. The ‘punctum’ of the series. A flash of the 'gremlin soul', winking obscenely at the audience from behind the semiotic polish of ‘Presidential expression.’

Now, my guess is that, despite everything, it is number 6 which really either attracts or repels people, this look of child-like triumph, the sudden ripple of an infant sadism. This is the trait – in a place where it shouldn’t be - that fascinates.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Erin's Hope

Was reminded by the Stoa that May12th is the anniversary of Irish socialist James Connolly's Execution.

'He was persuaded by the Irish Republican Brotherhood to support the 1916 rising, and about 120 ICA [Irish Citizen's Army] members took part. Connolly was commandant-general in Dublin, and led the assault on the General Post Office. His left ankle was smashed by a bullet, and after his court martial he was shot at Kilmainham Jail on 12 May 1916'.

"Our demands most moderate are – We only want the earth!

Links

A couple of Ranciere links:

Eleven Theses On Politics

The Thinking of Dissensus: Aesthetics and Politics

A Video Lecture

'It should be clear therefore that that there is politics when there is a disagreement about what is politics, when the boundary separating the political from the social or the public from the domestic is put into question. Politics is a way of re-partitioning the political from the non-political. This is why it generally occurs ‘out of place’, in a place which was not supposed to be political.'



note, incidentally, the conceptual doubling here: just as true art disturbs the boundaries between art and non-art, so politics questions the division between politics and the a-political. In both cases there is an obvious split and self-undoing between the first and second iteration of the concept in question. In the cases of both art and politics there is something that resists the very calcification into a fixed concept, cleaving the concept down the middle, separating it from its name.

Also, an ICA sponsored Zizek Lecture, May 18th.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

A brief introduction to the emptiness of the concept

Today I bought some very dark bitter coffee. The beans are black and shiny, like little varnished beetles. The taste is intense, pungent, gamey. It’s described as ‘heavy liquoring’, which means, apparently, it’s thick, almost treacly. Usually, I get a ‘lighter’ blend, with a slight ‘fruitiness’. There is a whole mini-vocabulary which attempts submit the multitude of different flavours to a grid of classification. There are gradations of ‘acidity’ and ‘body’. Language is bent into metaphor – ‘Sharpness’, ‘smoothness’ - in an attempt to render the specifics.

The plane of tastes and sensations referred to here could only really be approached through poetic language. Concepts are just the wrong instruments.

And yet, equally, ‘coffee’ itself is a Concept. All the diverse coffees – mellow, chocolaty, full-bodied – can be said to exhibit ‘coffee-ness’. 'Coffee-ness' is the invariable substratum of all these flavours. Yet there is no blend that simply has only ‘coffee-ness’ as its flavour. If some mad philosopher were to attempt to discard all flavours which were superfluous to ‘coffee-ness’, as if distilling an essence, s/he would be left with nothing, a flavourless container. To paraphrase Althusser, the Concept of coffee has no taste.

Report to the Academy

Last night I went to a talk by John Berger & others on ‘The look exchanged: The Human and the Non-human’.

I have little to report, to be honest. Berger thinks that years ago, at the beginning, it was not that we humans lived in a world with animals, rather we lived in the animal world – we were the minority and tried to understand and orientate ourselves through these creatures to which the world then seemed to belong.

And, says JB, If you burrow deep enough into language you find very often animal metaphors, analogies. In a sense, primitive Man finds itself in animals. This parallelism exists, vestigially, in the tradition of animal parables – Aesop > Robert Henryson. Today it is only perhaps children who find themselves in animals, before they are educated out of it. Beyond childhood, there is only sentimentality or indifference

But even until fairly recently, up to urbanisation, contact with animals was always there on a daily basis. When people were looking at animals (‘the look exchanged’) they saw in the animal something that had to do with their own relation to the world – the same puzzlement or whatever, so there was a kind of reciprocity between man and animal. (They perhaps shared a sommon task of survival/ endurance). When that ‘exchange of looks’ is taken away, Berger speculates, man feels increasingly lonely; 'and man, when he is lonely, actually becomes increasingly violent'.

I found all this rather, well, questionable, for reasons I can’t be bothered going into. ‘The look exchanged’ for example – isn’t this just what’s uncertain, isn’t it perhaps barter rather than exchange? Anyway, let me instead make a rather daft anecdotal observation. When Berger entered the room, he stood and looked round for a moment before spotting someone he knew. It struck me immediately, observing his idiosyncratically ‘lost’ expression, that he has the look of a dog or some other animal – wounded, disappointed by the human world, perplexed by its cruelties. Bear with me, and bear in mind that one of Berger’s books is indeed narrated from the point of view of a dog. In another essay, he tries to see the people at a zoo through the eyes of an ape. Perhaps in a few of Berger’s texts there is this moment of ‘regression into the animal soul.’ At such points he is like Kafka’s ape before the academy, pleading before the human community.

I think this holds the key to Berger’s preoccupation with animals: like Kafka, but also of course in a completely different way, the ‘animal’ is a point from which ‘the human community’ can be seen, by way of contrast. To posit and look at ‘the human’ can be done only from a position of minimal difference and distance. And this distance can be attained by retracting into the lost animal body. What Kafka’s little parable of the Ape before the Academy seems to suggest is that none of us are fully human, none of us are fully inducted into the human community, we are all, as it were, apes before the academy. Moreover, our ‘humanity’ is dependent in some way on this animal legacy/ residue.

A common defining fact about animals is that they do not have language. Thus, for humans, they seem to epitomise the mute suffering body, that basic corporeal fact that knows no translation into speech, which can never quite be ‘reported to the academy’. Humans thus typically see animals as beings who lack language, as the bearers of this lack. The pathos of the animal, the pity automatically extended to them – is it not a response to this perceived 'deprivation'? And in this perception, which is presumably an anthropocentric one, the human sees its own non-linguistic element. To have ‘humanity’ is frequently identified with this awareness of the mute suffering body, a body we see embodied most obviously in animals. And perhaps this is why for Berger the preservation of the link, the ‘exchange’ between humans and animals is key.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Nonsense Poetry

The future will be better tomorrow.

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure.

Expectations rise above that which is expected.

There’s a passage in Zizek* where he re-interprets some classic Bushisms and Quaylisms as subtle dialectical thinking. Its of course partly in jest, but the result is somehow productive, as if a perverse literalism (wilfully ignoring the [enfeebled] spirit of the utterance), or an apparently illegitimate interpretative generosity, or an assumed poker-faced seriousness (treating these casual blunders as cryptic texts that repay close reading) or the merest semantic tinkering, will ultimately redeem what are otherwise banal tautologies or a-grammatical nonsense. You don’t attack the statement from elsewhere, merely install yourself perversely inside it.

But we are dealing, here, not with some Freudian (or other) slip – as if a true ‘deep’ content is revealed, as if some Other suddenly speaks. The ‘deeper meanings’ are simply the effects generated when a tired language (familiar political rhetoric) breaks down, fed through an imperfect medium (Bush), or when language itself (eg the inherent logic of tautology) speaks, uncontaminated by a meaningful subjective presence.

Anyway, something similar happens in this satirical exercise, wherein Donald Rumsfeld’s pronouncements are re-rendered as poetry. It is as if just by isolating language on the page, introducing a certain spacing and lineation, the words are made to speak in a new way. Perhaps it is an effect not unlike the proverbial (now utterly boring) gesture of modern art, which, by placing a toilet or some other everyday object in the museum, sequesters it in silence and white space, and makes it different, an enigmatic thing surrounded by questions.

It is said that the classically ‘committed’ & charismatic politician is a thing of the past, replaced by the more neutral Manager. These managers pass on directives not their own, and their political language is just part of the manual, a set of appropriate noises and signals emptied of meaning or conviction.

But the withdrawal of subjective commitment from language can also hand over the initiative to language itself, a seditious instrument which, in the absence of an owner, will insist on speaking itself.

Subtraction Subtraction

The writer does not 'wrest' speech from silence, as we are told in pious literary hagiographies, but inversely, and how much more arduously, more cruelly and less gloriously, detaches a secondary language from the slime of primary languages afforded him by the world, history, his existence, in short by an intelligiblity which preexists him, for he comes into a world full of language, and there is no reality not already classified by men: to be born is nothing but to find this code ready-made and to be obliged to accomodate oneself to it. We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible; it is the contrary which must be said ...: the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's languages, which is the poor and powerful language of the passions, another speech, an exact speech.

- Roland Barthes (via here)

And so, once more, art is this distance from the pre-inscribed Symbolic Order, the carving out of a space. And this space is not one’s ‘true voice’ if by that we mean something inertly given which the social Symbolic codes have papered over. It does not at all pre-exist those codes. But what does pre-exist those codes, presumably, is some capacity to negate them, some ‘force of the negative’ with no positive content, but which lives in the gaps and distortions it introduces into the codes received from Society and History.

Monday, May 09, 2005

'Subjects and Truth'

Regarding the previous post, there are some related reflections in Terry Eagleton's essay on Badiou. It begins:
There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep seated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our comprehension. Change must presuppose continuity—a subject to whom the alteration occurs—if we are not to be left merely with two incommensurable states; but how can such continuity be compatible with revolutionary upheaval?
Here is the reference. If you have problems accessing it, email me.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Shock to thought



One of Deleuze’s 'insights', I read, is that thought does not have its origins within itself. It is incited, set in motion, by some traumatic x, some rebuff from the Real which troubles or unseats the settled forms of the Symbolic, some movement which reverberates through thinking without being directly present therein.

That both artistic and conceptual creation issue from a ‘shock’ is a familiar notion, as Deleuze is aware. He mentions Artuad’s essays on the cinema as a “matter of neuro-physiological vibrations, and the image must produce a shock, a nerve-wave which gives rise to thought". & Eisenstein:

“Eisenstein’s argument: if it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it.” &
What Blanchot diagnoses everywhere in literature is particularly clear in cinema: on the one hand, the presence of an unthinkable in thought, which would be both its source and its barrier .
And the motif is repeated in the essay on Francis Bacon. Bacon conceives his own ‘position’ in painting as being little more than the self-consciousness of accident and chance. Accident and chance are here the very ‘outside’ of thought itself, now simply channelled, developed.

The painter makes himself the instrument of the Real. (i.e.., where the real is that which cannot be accommodated by our symbolic organisation – nor by our strategies of imaginary closure.) The Outside, the meaningless and contingent, is allowed access the canvas.

The blank canvas, says Deluze, is pre-occupied with clichés, a delimited range of Possibles inherited from the history of painting but also from the contemporary world. The incursion of chance, like a random bullet, ‘takes out’ some of these pre-existing clichés and opens up a true space for the creative act. Creation is thus dependent on some meaningless intrusion, some inert pre-symbolic detail.

The tension of opposites here: on the one hand, fixed and reified symbolic forms; on the other, a violent meaningless incursion, is also recurrent in Deleuze, no? EG:

The modern Ulysses whose perceptions are clichés and whose affections are labels, in a world of communication that has become marketing and from whom not even Cezanne or Van Gogh can escape. (What is Philosophy?, 149).
Nothing but clichés, clichés everywhere… They are these floating images, these anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among others in the world which surrounds him. Physical, optical and auditory clichés and psychic clichés mutually feed on each other.

[…] In Taxi Driver Scorsese makes a catalogue of all the psychic clichés which bustle around in the driver’s head, but at the same time of the optical and sound clichés of the neon-city that he sees filing past along the streets: he himself, after his slaughter, will be the national hero of a day, attaining the state of cliché, without the event being his for all that.

But is not the ‘shock to thought’ a definitively modern idea, and one in need of further historicisation. I think there is much evidence for this, although not of course evidence that could be productively cited and explored in the pages of a weblog.

The image of the modern city in Deleuze’s example’s, above, suggest something of this. In a world thoroughly ‘humanised’, managed and pre-packaged as never before, where symbolic forms - speech and images – seem to circulate anonymously, and are inscribed in every artificial structure and surface of our metropolitan Second Nature, there is at the same time the craving and need for the pre- or non- symbolic, and for that which the Imaginary lures around us cannot begin to imagine.

This, the familiar modernist trope: Cliché, doxa and other symbolic norms on the one hand; on the other, the groping anticipation of the void, the ‘rush’ of the unprecedented, an opening in the tired fabric. And when the fabric is rent, what ‘appears’ can be the pulsions of the body, time in its pure state, or just some vertiginous absence. But one thing is always made clear; such opening can not come from within thought or imagination. Even if thought and imagination have some vague intimation of a limit, the limit can only be made known, or revised, from ‘outer space.’

In the end, then, a familiar interpretative paradox: if the (modern) notion ‘that thought does not have its origins within itself but is prompted by some exteriority’ is true, then this very notion needs to be analysed in terms of the exteriority which prompted it.

And whereas this ‘self-undoing’ quality can be dismissed by the analytically minded as a sign that we have approached the non-sensical and self-refuting, it is perhaps also an indication that we have hit on something so fundamental that it bends language into paralodox.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

A Pax on Both Your Houses

The lamentable spectacle of British Democracy is over for another four years or so. The tired monotonous rhetoric, the narrowness of available choice, the absurdly unrepresentative system, the predictable lines of media ‘analysis': these, and the ‘hardworking ordinary people’ obsessively invoked by the politicians can now be returned to their boxes, and the politicians - little more than managers - can continue as normal.

What I caught of election night only confirmed my sense of parody eclipsing parody. Especially bizarre, Paxman, who’s Name has now colonised and usurped his Self, so that he is now little more than a puppet operated by his own reputation (i.e., a Rottweiler interrogator feared by the slippery politician). He is, for example, now tyrannised by the trick that made him famous – endlessly repeating the same question with tired exasperation.

Paxman is of course the mirror image of the politics he supposedly interrogates, the proverbial victory of style over substance, the fixation with point scoring and polemical excitation. The hypertrophy of the adversarial style -the tricks and gestures of the Paxman ‘grilling’ - is exactly proportional to the dwindling of substantive content. His questions to Blair and Howard on immigration were cut from a pre-woven media cloth and simply lent extra colour by Paxman’s stylised rudeness and appalled incredulity. The fireworks may awaken the increasingly jaded viewer from his slumbers but invariably fail to unpick a single assumption.

Increasingly, Paxman’s questions are of the ‘have you stopped beating your wife’ kind. He robotically attempts to force an admission which he knows to be impossible. Attempts to question the question are gleefully seized on as evidence of evasion (the ‘evasive politician’ being of course another enjoyable little spectacular trope). In fact, the impossibility of answering the question is his very reason for asking it. He wishes to produce not a considered response, but precisely (what we can call) a ‘Paxman effect’ – the politician squirming on the hook of the question, refusing to answer it, Pax insisting on it. His questions are devices for the production of such specular moments, which are what ‘the public’ expects from a Paxman interview.

A recent example of this last was the nonsensical and patronisingly racist Q put to newly elected G. Galloway*:

‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in parliament?’

The sheer stupidity of the question hardly needs explaining, except to those so blinded by their hostility to the oleaginous Galloway that they can only – overlooking the implicit offensive tokenism - cite the interview as evidence for the prosecution*. Naturally, the BBC chose to upload the interview to their website - a little bearbaiting show for the disenfranchised.

Beyond Lilliput, beyond the obsession with portraying debate as confrontation or division, beyond squabbling over the ownership of keywords ('hardworking ordinary people'), beyond all such polemical excitations, circumscribed as they are within the limits ultimately set by contemporary capitalism, the question we need to be asking is: 'Under what conditions can the concept of democracy be fully actualised'? This is, contra Pax, the only impossible question worth askng and repeating.

*For non-British readers, Galloway superceded Oona King as MP for the London constituency Bethnal Green and Bow.

*Oona King has indeed objected to the assumptions behind Paxman's question.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Permanent Position

A man was offered a rouble a month by his community council to stand at the outskirts of town so that, when the time came, there would be someone present to greet and welcome the Messiah. He accepted the position. When a friend said to him, 'But the pay is so low!', the man replied, 'That's true; on the other hand, the job is permanent.

(via here)

Monday, May 02, 2005

?

"A poem is the liberation of what a language can do, once freed of the existing regime of re-presentation (habits, conventions, cliches, and so on). The poem subtracts language from the world in which it is normally put to work." Badiou.

All the World's a Stage

I used to notice that tourists in Oxford frequently walked around with the same benign, smiling somehow patronising look; it fell, this look, indifferently, on everything. If the tourist saw some student riding past on an old rickety bike, coat tails flapping furiously in the wind, this look would appreciably ‘dilate’ with pleasure, for this lone cyclist had the magical charm of a postcard brought to life, and embodied for them the living quintessence of ‘Oxford’. All their preconceptions were returned to them in the bell and the whirr of wheels.

Now this benign, patronising look is also to be found on many of the audience's faces at the Globe theatre. This ersatz-Elizabethan mock-up, approximating to some incomplete and sketchy idea of the original, provides an anodyne facsimile of Elizabethan experience, from which the roughness, stench, and hazard have been removed. But what really repels is the audience. What are they smiling at, these people? Throughout the whole performance – though despair, or violence, or death or sex – the same look of benign reassurance. The reassurance is that everything taking place on stage takes place within their little fantasy frame. (And, perhaps, that they have been allowed inside the frame). What is staged here is not simply a play but ‘Shakespeare’. And just as every rickety bicycle, every tweed-jacketed young man, every college portal monotonously signifies ‘Oxford’ to the grateful tourist, so ‘Shakespeare’, to the thrilled spectator, is the inevitable referent of every speech.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Discharging the Sentence

Some final thoughts on The Judgement (continuing on from here).
[The Father] in a louder voice: "So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you've known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!--And therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!"
Is not the judgement pronounced by the Father a little knot of sense, which suddenly condenses (and/or even disburdens him of?) his Paternity? His inchoate feelings towards the son have been ‘discharged’, expelled, taken over by the Other (ie the Symbolic, of which the decree is a manifestation). And there is, perhaps, a peculiar jouissance in this most Symbolic of acts – i.e., at this point the Father is gloved inside the Law, seems to speak as its mere instrument. He is suddenly taken over by the spirit of the Law. And ‘discharging’ this function bears also a discharge of perverse enjoyment, all the more enjoyable because it cleaves to what is supposed to be outside mere enjoyment (The Law).

And is not the sentence hit upon by the author a similar ‘knot,’ a point which (retroactively) gives shape and meaning to the entire story, so that the prior sentences ‘fall into place’ around this one? When the writer ‘discharges’ this sentence what is happening – the story becomes a story, which is to say fit for telling, publication, fit to be received by the Other.

Rewind:

The utterly naïve question here would be: who is the father to make such a judgement? Okay, the father makes judgements all the time – ‘this child is no good’ and so on, but a judicial decree?? A decree of unanswerable finality?

The point is that for a child, judgements like ‘this child is no good’ indeed do have the finality of a judicial decree. They indeed lodge in the child’s head as fatal pronouncements. The question, then, is not who is the father to make such a judgement, but from whose point of view is the Father a figure who can make such final judgements? It is the child’s. And so it is surely a fantasmatic father we’re dealing with here, a father who has undergone the anamorphosis of the child’s gaze.

Thus, the very father who reproaches him for prolonging his childhood is a father who exists only for childhood. The story constitutes an identification with childhood. Not an Imaginary identification (and the story seems to be precisely about breaking with this imaginary identification) but a Symbolic identification (by which Lacan means identifying with the point from which you are seen).

This on one level, the story stages a ‘death of childhood’. Indeed, might not 'death by drowning' indicate precisely re-birth/ baptism, the assumption of one’s Name, of adulthood itself? But the scène staged is staged precisely for or from the very perspective of childhood.

Sentence

In the previous post, speculating on the relation between Art and Act, I cited Kafka’s composition of ‘The Judgement’. I find in Santner’s Schreber book, which I am reading piecemeal, the following:
In a diary entry of September 23, 1912, Kafka registered the miraculous composition of “The Judgement” in the course of a single night’s labour, one he would, the following year, characterize as a kind of couvade [ha! shows what the spellchecker knows!] in which his story emerged covered with the “filth and mucus” of birth.
What one gives birth to is outside the Symbolic Order, smeared in formless matter, discharging its insistent, unanswerable pre-linguistic distress signal (activated by its passage into humanity). In some ways it is a repellent thing.

But K.'s metaphor is perhaps less about this delivered thing than about the experience of delivery – of being delivered of this alien, incipient being which is ultimately not-you, an Other. An experience that is minimally ‘miraculous’ in the sense that every conception is miraculous (immaculate) – there is this gap, this unaccountable interval between cause and effect. This ‘interval’, this void, is perhaps what draws and binds the writer.

The most obvious point about the text itself is that it concerns a binding – fatal – Paternal Sentence:
"[Father] How long it's taken you to grow up! Your mother had to die--she couldn't live to see the happy day--your friend is going to pieces in Russia, even three years ago he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you can see what condition I'm in! You have eyes in your head for that!"
"So you've been lying in wait for me!" cried Georg.
His father said pityingly, in an offhand manner, "I suppose you wanted to say that earlier. But now it is no longer appropriate."
And in a louder voice: "So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you've known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!--And therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!"
Well, there’s a lot to get one’s psychoanalytic teeth into there. Too much. The invitation to Psychoanalytic reading is itself almost lewdly suggestive, embarassingly visible. And if the aforementioned isn't enough, here's an excerpt from Bataille's take on the story, starting with Kafka's comments to Brod:
‘Do you know,’ he {Kafka] asked, ‘what the last phrase means? As I wrote it I thought of a violent ejaculation.’Does this ‘extraordinary declaration’ give us a glimpse of an ‘erotic basis’? Does it mean that ‘In the act of writing there is a sort of compensation for the defeat before the father and the failure of the dream of transmitting life’? I do not know, but in the light of this ‘declaration’ the phrase expresses the sovereignty of joy, the supreme lapse of being into that nothingness which the others constitute for the being.
Isn't there, though, a very telling ambivalence in what Kafka says. Does he mean that he thought of the Father's Sentence as a 'violent ejaculation', or that the thought of the the violent ejaculation attached to his writing of the sentence. Like two glimpses of the same jouissance.

How, dear readers, would you characterise the relation between these two 'sentences'? Or perhaps someone might tell me whether the Sentence/ sentence pun actually works in the original German??

By Proxy

I have discovered an interesting software program, as yet unavailable to the general public. It automatically discovers anticipations and approximations of Lacanian concepts. If you type in the name of any modern thinker, it will immediately produce a quote which anticipates a Lacanian notion. Eg:

Sartre-Lacan:
Culture, for him, is theft: it reduces the vague and vast natural consciousness to its being-other, to what it is for others. The word is a thing; introduced into a soul it reabsorbs the soul in its own generality.
(Sartre, The Family Idiot, vol.1, p. 30).
Bergson-Lacan:
‘What a childhood we should have had if only we had been left to do as we pleased! We should have flitted from pleasure to pleasure. But all of a sudden, an obstacle arose, neither visible nor tangible: a prohibition. Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents or teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves that from their status in relation to us. They occupied a certain station; that was the source of the command which, had it issued from some other quarter, would not have possessed the same weight. In other words, parents and teachers seemed to act by proxy.’ (Bergson, Key Writings, p. 295.)