That Obscure Object of Ideology

I had planned a number of posts dealing with the seemingly obsolete concept of ‘false consciousness’, but as the 'first in the series' produced little in the way of interested responses, my enthusiasm withered. However, what follows is just a quick note and one which has as its backdrop the following well-known quotation:

With the change of the economic foundation of the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness

There is a question here as to exactly what force ‘ideological’ has in the above statement. If you remove ‘ideological’ what is lost? What makes the ‘forms’ ideological?

I don’t want to answer these questions directly, only to comment on what seems to be the basic distinction: between what a thing or process is and the ways in which it appears/ is perceived or experienced by its participants. And perhaps ‘false consciousness’ is first of all the name for the gap between these two.

Again, the most ready-made examples spring from the pages of psychology books – wherein we might say a hatred of the father takes the form of excessive reverence, or where the collector’s obsession is the form taken by an unresolved anal fixation (these are just a couple of cartoon examples for illustrative purposes). The form/ content distinction here is recurrent and crucial in Marx's thinking (I'd be interested if anyone knows of books essays on this particular topic).

‘False consciousness’, then, might name a kind of interference between content and form, with the latter both expressing and blocking or scrambling the former – the content is prevented from being fully present in the form, and it is this interference or blockage which is the object of consideration for those thinking about ideology.

Needless to say, this form is not ‘false’ if by that we mean either ‘incorrect’ or, more interestingly and more humorously, ‘fake’. Taken literally, it may be hard to extract a useable meaning from Engels’ phrase. But, again, one needs to bring the form/content distinction to bear on ideas like ‘false consciousness’ itself; ie., as an idea it may not be identical with the form in which it came to expression. If that form now seems rather antiquated, couched in a language encrusted with nineteenth century assumptions, there might nonetheless be something worth rescuing – a content which surpasses the form.

There are reasons for not taking Engels’ proposition in isolation. It should, rather, be seen as one of a number of failed or incomplete conceptualisations of ‘ideology’ in Marx and Engels - as if they are repeatedly grasping at something the nature of which stubbornly eludes them. In other words the sheer plurality of Marx’s attempts to conceptualise ideology is an object of interest in its own right, so that the question to ask might be: what is this stubborn problem around which Marx circles, what is this mark that seems to be so consistently missed?

The Tribute of Theory?

For a genuinely dialectical criticism, indeed, there can be no pre-established categories of analysis: to the degree that each work is the kind of end result of a kind of inner logic or development in its own content, it evolves its own categories and dictates the specific terms of its interpretation.

(Fredric Jameson)

It seems to me that the implications of this statement for theory are interestingly the reverse of what is often implied. That is to say, the work demands that we invent the categories appropriate to its interpretation. Conversely, we must re-think and if necessary discard the existing categories, even where the ‘existing categories’ have lost the name of ‘categories’ and become the very the shape of our intuitions.

In order to be true to the work, we must be able to recast these old shapes, and produce concepts and measures capable of seeing a work for what it is - rather than have it appear as simply nonsensical or a ‘deviation’ from generic or aesthetic judgements in any case inappropriate to it and unable to gauge its specificity.

Now it is this production of new concepts and categories (and the simultaneous revision or destruction of assumed categories) which some might define as theory itself.

It’s a cliché that Theory is what we do when something becomes problematic. We only need a theory of writing or a theory of the novel when such things are no longer self-evident, or when what is before us does not simply agree with the available modes of perception. By the light of these available modes, things do not add up, there are meaningless details, blind spots. New optics must be tried so that (what had been) meaningless or deviant or deficient points are reconfigured and restored to sense and intelligibility.

Theoretical activity, far from being an imposition on the work, an artificial ‘cookie-cutter’, is precisely a sign of fidelity to it. That you have been required by the work to reorientate your thinking so that the work can become truly visible – this is the tribute of theory.

Sur Face

Spurious: 'Nothing mysterious about the otherness of the other, I think to myself, it's all there on the surface'

Yeah, but.. this ‘surface’ on which everything about me is visible is available to the Other but not to me. The look of the Other embodies this lost knowledge. And this lost knowledge remains inscrutably other because I can never by definition acquire it, this precious secret thing which is yet freely & indiscriminately available to everyone else.

Of course, this only works, presumably, inside a determinate culture. If I encounter someone from a remote culture – not only with a different language but with, perhaps, different affects, then there is, on the surface, only hieroglyphs. Suddenly we are like a child again who knows only that these shapes and sounds carry a significance from which he/she is excluded.

Here the ‘surface’ seems to be a veil covering secret depths and truths so important they have to be padlocked in riddles. To have access to this language, this culture, would be to speak this mysterious tongue, to trade in secret treasure. Except this sense of encrypted depths - of 'mystery' - is an optical illusion produced by one’s exclusion. For those on the inside, everything is on the surface.

2 portraits

I see today that CF has a book out. I knew her when she was just starting an MA. Virtually incapable of disagreement. The embarrassing readiness with which she would submit to an argument. This was because she seemed to think that there was a ‘correct’ line on everything, and although she didn’t know what this line was, she nevertheless yielded when she sensed its proximity. She imagined a canonical landscape of thinkers and concepts - it was out there, this landscape, independent of her, waiting to be explored and mapped. At the same time a curious arrogance. She demanded immediate access to this landscape, and if a book or tutor didn’t grant her this access it or s/he was ‘inaccessible’, ‘hermetic’, ‘pretentious’. So may publication be her passport to the sacred landscape.

For some reason also thought of G., a contemporary of CF. self-sustaining myth of his own shrewdness. Except what he took for shrewdness was precisely his obtuseness or unawareness. Example: G. tells me we’ve been invited to dinner by a friend of his. ‘What time?’ I ask? ‘Well, we’re going round at 7.25’ ‘7.25? What kind of a time’s that?’ He looks at me with a familiar knowing smile ‘The thing is, he always says ‘Come round at 7, but its never actually ready at 7, so I always go round twenty minutes or so later.’ ‘You’re a wily one,’ I reply. He suspects nothing, sure in the knowledge that he has outwitted his host. Afterwards, I ask him if he enjoyed the (Indian) meal. Him: 'I don't like Indian food. I prefer Pizza!'

Years later, visiting Oxford I bumped into him in the streets. He'd been up all night writing a play and smelt, quite unmistakably, of urine. 'Let me buy you a caffe latte' I suggest. 'Caffe Latte! what's that!' he retorts, 'I've never heard of that'. 'It's espresso coffee and steamed milk'. 'ah,' he reassures me, 'You must mean cafe au lait - it literally means coffee with milk' - underlining each word with his finger.

Theory, what is it??

'Theory involves the power to abstract away from one’s starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental ‘conditions of possibility’'(Zizek)

The commentator Glob adds the following gloss (henceforth, Glob gloss:)

To remove oneself from the starting point in order to be able to see it, to see what has enabled it, to see what it presupposes. What enables the starting point and what is presupposed by the starting point are not themselves present in the starting point. The starting point only becomes present as something known once we have 'abstracted away from it'. Except that once it becomes an object for us it can hardly be termed a starting point - we have simultaneously made it present and undermined it.

left unsaid

Speaking of Edward Said, I remember years ago a Columbia student telling me that a group of them would go round the library removing Said’s books from the shelves and hiding them away – in palaeontology or whatever. It was an orchestrated campaign – the student (who was a friend at the time) was completely open about this Of course, what prompted them to do this were Said’s writings about and on behalf of the Palestinians.. Bear in mind also that Said’s apartment and university office were almost always under police protection, that he was inundated with death threats and so on. Now if a Professor supporting, for example, certain Israeli policies (occupation, the Wall, settlements) was subject to this kind of intimidation, imagine the uproar. And imagine how immediately this would be used to support a rhetoric of ‘left-wing extremism’ ‘enemies of free speech’ and so on. Now I don’t recall the right, who are constantly opining about ‘left intimidation on campuses’ getting particularly vexed about what was happening to Said, or pointing the finger at ‘Zionist extremists’ etc. I may be wrong. Not that I want to make a big point about it. Just an elementary one: typically people invoke universals like ‘freedom of speech’ when it affects their particular interests or chosen gang/ community. When it affects someone they don’t like they’ll find some little contextual glitch to prevent the universal being applied, or else they won’t even try to be consistent.

The cold blooded complex human being

Edward Said tells of ‘an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam war. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naively trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. “You know,” my friend said, “the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn’t fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on his desk.” He paused meaningfully… The further implication of my friend’s story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been… "

What came to mind when reading this was the question of fascism, or Nazism more specifically. I’m thinking of what has been rightly reiterated by the likes of George Steiner: the realisation that unspeakable brutality and inhumanity could indeed co-exist with a ‘civilised’ culture, a culture which had known the enlightenment, not one consumed with religious wars or still suffering feudal despotism, a culture in which the fully autonomous ‘bourgeois subject’ could engage in witty and erudite conversation with his peers, relax on Sundays, exchange pleasantries, eyes twinkling with playful irony, and so on and so forth. None of this was a bulwark against the inhuman. That was the alarm call. And on an individual level, being a cultured, psychologically ‘complex’ individual, sensitive to music etc – this alibi no longer worked. It was no longer a tenable case for the defence. Evil was no longer something that invaded from the non-European world or from an earlier stage in history.

There were various get-out clauses proposed: It was a specifically German thing - Hitler the lunatic demagogue was indeed the symbol of the whole (rather than, for example, Speer); or it was a regression to pre-modern irrationality; it was ultimately foreign to Western European culture, a pathological aberration. (Ironically, such rhetoric of the healthy and the pathological, of the purely ‘irrational’ were themselves all too current in the Germany of the 1930’s.)

But perhaps the inhumanity that co-existed alongside or in the midst of industrial civilisation, perhaps this wasn’t just the old inhumanity returning, a regression or even aberration. Perhaps we were dealing with a new inhumanity, genetically linked to the new industrial civilisation. At the time, wasn’t this idea examined with some urgency, wasn’t it obvious that the language of regression, of a return of the repressed was an evasion? Barbarism and Civilisation – could they be twinned?; could there be links other than that of temporal succession (the idea that industrial civilisation came after and was synonymous with the vanishing of barbarism)? Steiner, for one, advised eternal vigilance – it could indeed ‘happen here’, not necessarily in full dress, the whole thing, but strains of it, tendencies held in check.

Does anybody today really take such ideas seriously? Are we as suitably unimpressed as we should be by the ‘complex human being’ alibi? The ‘lesson’ famously underlined by the George Steiners, that yes, ‘it could happen here’, has it been consigned to a history lesson? Are we still thinking through the idea that modern industrial civilisation and its culture can actively foster and reproduce forms of cruelty, of inhumanity – or do we still believe, on the whole, that these are most likely to come from the Outside, from elsewhere?

la voix sacree

Previously, I cited a short passage from a book by Agamben, and expressed the hope that I might write more on it. What follows are some (frustrating) preliminary thoughts. But let me be clear that they issue not from a close and patient reading of Agamben’s book. They are the result of a petty burglary, a raid into the book, born of indolence and dilettantism.

Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. In them la voix sacree de la terre ingénue (the sacred voice of the unknowing earth) – which Mallarme, hearing the chirp of a cricket, sets against the human voice as une and non-decompose (one and indivisible) – knows no breaks or interruptions. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits his single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language

So: What implicit definition of language is in operation here? One thing is for sure, it predates and unseats the idea of an 'organised system of signs'. From the point of view of this new definition, the system of signs becomes not language itself but a falling away therefrom. (Be patient).

The chirp of the cricket – why is this is 'one and indivisible' (why is the human voice split?) how is it unbroken, uninterrupted (why is the human voice fractured, what interrupts it?). What is exactly is Mallarme’s interest in this ‘call of the earth’? Does Mallarme’s poetry, wherein the filaments of language, having forgotten nature, seem to be savouring their own vibrations, not stand at the extreme opposite end of the language spectrum. I’ll try and come back to this.

Meanwhile, Agamben quotes his own question:

Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey? And if it exists, is this voice language?

There may be a number of problems with that formulation as it stands. But let me bracket them off. Of course, we never hear ‘man’ as we hear a cricket etc. One response might be: we always hear, say, a person from Yorkshire, a middle-class person - the voice as social / cultural sign. The voice assigns you a position in an order which is not simply natural.

Another response, a familiar psychoanalytic one: The voice as that which bears signification before any precise content is articulated - yet again, I rely on a familiar distinction: we know that the voice signifies irrespective of what it happens to say. A demand is embedded in the very grain of the voice qua voice irrespective of the meaning it carries. And this distinction, this split between that and what, the animal world is innocent of - the voice and what it carries are always perfectly synonymous.

The ‘voice’ is here – when Agamben speaks of the chirp of the cricket - something like the signature note of the species. The song of the bird or the chirps of the cricket are the immediate manifestation of their species-being. The human voice is never simply this, but is always entangled in an arbitrary and culturally specific sign-system. Agamben links his reflections to Marx’s description of the animal as ‘immediately at one with his life activity’. To be at one (undivided, uninterrupted) with ‘life-activity’ means, in effect, not reflecting on it, not having it as an object. And presumably what separates Man from his life activity is this foreign symbolic medium which has to be learned, acquired, and mastered

Perhaps a key here lies in an early text of Agamben’s great mentor, Mr W.B. On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. Two passages are worth noting:

1. It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice that has nothing directly to do with those in which German or English legal judgments are couched.. language in such contexts means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned.. toward the communication of mental meanings. To sum up: all communication of mental meanings is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language… There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings.

[After the fall]:

2. The word must communicate something (other than itself). That is really the Fall of language-mind. The word as it were externally communicating, as it were a parody by the expressly mediate word of the expressly immediate, the creative word of God, and the decay of the blissful, Adamite language-mind that stand between them.

The word must now bear a meaning external to itself; it must point beyond itself to a significance, a significance to which it has no necessary link. It signifies something as opposed to being that something. That signification has split from being, this is the sure mark of fallen human language.

And so back to Mallarme:

……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.'

When Blanchot speaks, in speaking of Mallarme, of the ‘evident power’ of words, I want to hear not just the obvious sense but, instead, a power of self-evidence, a power that evidences itself in words (rather than being represented by them). This power is embedded in the material of language and not in the signified of language. This is a language that immediately does something that cannot be done by some other material.

According to Clarence Brown, Mandelstam 'felt poetry to be immanent in nature, to be there in the silence, a presence with which he could be fused', and he could be fused with it because there was already 'black earth inside us'.



Now is there a connection between the ‘earth’ that Mallarme discovers in the bird’s cry and the ‘black earth’ of Mandelstam’s invocation? This is nature’s language, wherein meaning and presence are one, where there are no mere ‘representations’, where a thing is not just a token of some other unseen thing elsewhere.

In Mallarme, Poetry stages a war on ‘meaning’ so that, no longer meaning anything, all that remains is the irreducible presence of the Word – its rhythms, affects, and the aspiration to music running through it.

In a way these are opposites. On the one hand the free-sounding language of nature, pure manifestation of Earth and Creation; on the other the poetic ‘lace curtain’ – we are consumed in watching it consume itself, so that we no longer care what is ‘behind it’:

‘.....l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inegalites mobilises’

The initiative passes to words, and the force of their mobilised inequality (feel free to correct my attempt at translation)

In a way, just as Benjamin says there is a language of sculpture etc, so Mallarme is saying there is a language of (human) language. In other words, to say there is a language of sculpture, painting etc- what does this mean? It means there is an expressive logic immanent to the medium as such, immanent in the material as it were. And so to tap into the language of language is to align yourself with and make speak the expressive logic specific to a human language, that which is already given in the medium prior to any specific propositional content. This, this ‘pure language’ – or rather purified (of content) language speaks for itself.

And this is perhaps one devious way of returning to and old literary fantasy: The dream of a poetry that is no more than a cry – ie, that hasn't passed through the opacity of a foreign symbolic medium. The desire to hear the spontaneous music of the soul, without the 'interference' of a pre-existing symbolic system.

And this can take at least two forms. The elimination of representional language, of a language that is ‘about’ something. About Finnegan’s Wake, Samuel Beckett says ‘it is not about something, it is that something’. Typically this involves a retreat into the material of language, the language of language.

And then, there is the Mandelstam line, of the dark earth that we must simply ‘let breath’, let speak, as if language – human language – might be reduced to a pure openness, invisible and receptive.

Sometimes it is those who have an acute consiousness of Death who entertain this idea. Rilke, for example. Why? If you imagine one of the dead having some back to the world, granted leave, and the consequent gratitude, surprise, receptivity, nostalgia, sheer joy in the simplest of things – the ‘this’ and ‘that’ of the world in their pure state. He, the already dead, would sidle up to a rock, a flower, and these things would ‘impress’ themselves upon him as upon clay – not their mere names but themselves.

Because the language in which it might have been given me not only to write, but also to think, is neither Latin nor English nor Italian nor Spanish, but a language of which I do not know only one word, a language in which dumb things speak to me, and in which I may once, in my grave, have to account for myself before an unknown judge.

Hugo von Hoffmannstal, The Lord Chandos Letter.

(nb Thursday night - this is doubtless full of typos and errors, but I'll post now and correct later)

Finished

Caught on the TV this evening a crap/ ‘simply ghastly’ program called ‘ladette to lady,’ in which various women – from the East End and elsewhere – were to have all signs of their origins ironed out and replaced by ‘ladylike behaviour’ at a 'finishing school'. Or, in other words, in which one class specific taste culture is allowed to sit in judgment over another, and present its own values as synonymous with Value as such. Yes the program is supposed to be a ‘bit of a laugh’ (in which we are perhaps meant to position ourselves equidistant between 'working class vulgarity' and an impossible 'poshness') but it’s nonetheless irritating to see people for whom the tired conventions of a moribund aristocracy are still self-evidently a benchmark of absolute distinction, and for whom working class habits, turns of phrase, etc, are simply deficient or lacking and in need of 'correction'. These people should be made to read Pierre Bourdieu - and watch IF (esp. the ending).

A recommend

The Young Hegelian, who, for those of you who don't know, was resurrected on a Sunday, describes Lars' most recent posts as 'like David Lodge meets Thomas Bernhard'. Now he means this in a favourable way, and so he should. Here's an example:

In the end, a new breed will appear, as I said, as it is already ppearing: the administrator-academic, the all-purpose university robot, I said, adept in the languages of funding proposals and quality management. Fluent in all the tounges of Capital, I said. Ready for all weathers and all terrain, I said. With little caterpillar tracks instead of feet, I said, rolling around from here to there, I said, efficient and ever ready I said. We'll keep them in empty lecture rooms, I said, switching them off at night and on in the mornings. And they'll roll about, I said, ready for every challenge, I said.

. For anyone inside academia, realising with creeping dismay that the university is (increasingly) no longer - if it ever was - some little enclave, some little parenthetical place where thought is possible, realising that it is increasingly included in something more corporate, and that, therefore, one's initial justification for entering into it has been eaten away, leaving one sequestered on a little imaginary island - for any such person (and not just for such a person either, since if the university is caught in the same logic as everything else, then anyone caught in this logic can also share the joke), i can heartily second the Young Hegelian's recommendation. Of course, there is categorically no similarity between the attitude of disaffection outlined above and the attitude of the present author.

Machado on the Spanish Landscape

You will see battle plains and hermit steppes
-in these fields there is nothing of the garden of the Bible -
here is a land for the eagle, a bit of planet
crossed by the wandering shadow of Cain.

Antonio Machado

Theory of the fragment: Rilke.

Theory and practice of the fragment in German Romanticism. To be contrasted with Modern concept of the fragment. Not fragment as enigmatic object of melancholy contemplation, the pathos of the incomplete etc, but fragment as material for construction. See this:

Rilke, Letter to Clara about Rodin

1. Each of these fragments is of such a peculiarly striking unity, so possible by itself, so little in need of completion, that you forget they are only parts and often parts of different bodies which cling so passionately to one antother.

2. Here the torso of one figure with the head of another stuck onto it, with the arm of a third… as though an unspeakable storm, an unparalleled cataclysm had passed over his work. And yet the closer you look the deeper you fel that it would be all the less complete if the separate bodies were complete.

3.You feel suddenly that it is more the concern of the scholar to apprehend bodies as wholes – more that of the artist to create new combinations from the parts, new, greater, more legitimate unities..

The commentator Glob adds:

'What is the 'cataclysm' but the artist's own energy - some deviant energy which blows apart the world's habitual shapes, dislocates things out of true, only to imbue the remaining fragments with a new intensity. To tear apart the world as God or Nature made it and to reinvent and rename it in accordance with another force, a force which excarnates itself in several works without being ever exhausted by them, leaving them behind as 'evidence' of the energy which moulded and animated them but which is now alreaedy elsewhere'.

And back to Rilke:

This is the essential, that you should not stop at dreams, at intentions, at being in the mood, but that you should transpose everything into things with all your strength.

Silence

Silence. I turn off the helmet lamp. A darkness. In the darkness the silence becomes encyclopedic, condensing everything that has occurred in the interval between then and now..

from a short piece by John Berger

The thing is more present in its representation

Every now and then I heard the sound of a lift coming up, but it was followed by a second sound, not the one I was hoping for, namely its coming to a halt at our landing, but another very different sound which the lift made in continuing its progress to the floors above and which, because it so often meant the desertion of my floor when I was expecting a visitor, remained for me later, even when I had ceased to wish for visitors, a sound lugubrious in itself, in which there echoed, as it were, a sentence of solitary confinement.

(Proust)

> the way emotions seek out ‘representation’ in objects, come to know themselves by fastening onto certain smells, colours, sounds.. of course, there is nothing in the lift’s sound ‘in itself’ which makes it a signifier of melancholy. The relationship builds up through association. Henceforth, the sound of the lift is for Marcel no pure sound, but replete with pathos - a pathos it clarifies and makes present. Its as if emotion learns to fit the sound of the lift – comes, like water in a glass, to fit the shape of its receptacle, so that, even when the emotion’s initial occasion has disappeared (ie the expectation of the visitor), contact with the ‘container’ is enough to drink the melancholy pleasure. And for Proust, the melancholy pleasure is more present in this second contact - it comes into its own after becoming detached from the circumstances that gave rise to it. Or, as the artist realises: The thing is more present in its representation.

The Man With the X-Ray Eyes

There are perhaps still those who think of literature as rescuing the concrete and the sensuous and dwelling with what is irreducible to concepts and laws. Proust, for one, turns this around, and reveals the real abstraction behind the unreal 'concrete' exchanges. What he says here about dinner parties is indicative:

I was like a surgeon who beneath the smooth surface of a woman's belly sees the internal disease which is devouring it. If I went to a dinner party I did not see the guests: when I thought I was looking at them I was in fact examining them with x-rays.. the patterns of lines I had traced took the form of a collection of psychological laws in which the actual purport of the remarks of each guest occupied but a very small space.

I know the feeling. But yes, the ostensible (propositional) content counts much less than the nature of the rhetorical act, the strategies of distinction, the ways people have of postioning themselves and others. However, these 'psychological laws' are invariably also markers of class and not just psychology. (Which is why Proust is such a touchstone for Bourdieu).

Through Proust’s ‘x-ray vision’ and faculty of abstraction, the empty chatter of the dinner party is suddenly reperceived as so many signs and signals, so many fascinating markers of an otherwise hidden social structure.

Who are the great X-ray writers of the present??

Surplus Value

see here

Foucault on Sunday

There is always room at the capacious Long Sunday for posts of length.. so there is where you'll have to go if you want to read a rather baggy piece by me on (sort of) Foucault and Iran.

**

Isn’t this what the thinker does - comb the world for signs, traces of the not-yet, of what might dispute the extant. The thinker sees in the extant figures for something else, and tries to make these figures legible. On the other side are the literalists, those who refuse the notion that the extant is not-all, and who see the future only as the accumulation of more units of the extant

Bloomsday

Did you get money
For your Joycean knowledge?
I got a scholarship
To Trinity College.

I made the Pilgrimage
In the Bloomsday Swelter
From the Martello Tower
To the cabby's shelter.

Patrick Kavanagh, 'Who Killed James Joyce'

Discuss

Entre Nous

Here is an intriguing passage from (the early) Agamben, which I hope to look at later. In the meantime, comments welcome:

Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. In them la voix sacree de la terre ingénue (the sacred voice of the unknowing earth) – which Mallarme, hearing the chirp of a cricket, sets against the human voice as une and non-decompose (one and indivisible) – knows no breaks or interruptions. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits his single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language

Possible points of reference: Blanchot on Mallarme (discussed here) & Rilke. The dream of a poetry that is no more than a cry, unmediated expression, that hasn't passed through the opacity of a foreign symbolic medium. Mandelstam: 'We have dark black earth inside us' - the desire to hear this 'earth' directly in the poetic voice. The desire to hear the spontaneous music of the soul, without the 'interference' of a pre-existing symbolic system.

Work in progress

“Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or moulds of other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks.”

So Georgio Agamben, echoing or paraphrasing his mentor Walter Benjamin, for whom ‘the work is the death mask of its conception’.



What was open and fluid – the work in progress - becomes closed and immobile. It can no longer develop. Its elements assume a kind of necessity, and it becomes impossible to imagine that it might have been otherwise.

This is the melancholia inherent to composition: always the awareness that you have proved inadequate to the realm of possibility that you opened. Even though you know that possibilities are always locked out, left to starve.

The death mask analogy reminds us how this is true existentially. Its either John Berger or Walter Benjamin who remarks that someone who dies at 35 is then seen, always, as someone who was going to die at 35. In other words, his life, which was open to infinite possibility, congeals into the closed shape of a Destiny.

To tarry with the work in progress, or, in life, to occupy a space in which all possibilities remain open is not to write or to live at all. It is to remain virtual. But to commit oneself to a course of writing or a course of life entails the foreclosure of many precious ‘conceptions’, and this leaves always death’s watermark.

Where Benjamin uses the phrase ‘The work is the death mask of its conception’ is notable. It occurs in the very much ‘open’ text called One Way Street, in a section named ‘The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’. This section of text simultaneously lays bare the rules by which the text is produced. Indeed, other sections of OWS, like ‘construction site’ reveal the textual wiring of what is in front of us on the page – the rules and grammar of ‘conception’. They are about production and also an invitation to produce.

Here, the open-endedness of the work in progress enters the content and form of the work. ‘The work is the death mask of its conception’ is countered by a writing which is not allowed to assume the finish of a ‘work’, which claims only to be a construction site.

Political Instincts - 2 passing thoughts

So, back in the mid-eighties, support for the IRA was a stated policy of the Socialist Workers Party. Now imagine, if there were blogs back then. The Kamms and the Krapps et al would be writing post after post on how sections of the left had thrown in their lot with terrorists and fascists. (Come to think of it, this was the kind of thing they were saying about left support for the ANC). Now I, if I were a politically minded individual at that time, would have been writing about other things. Not because I wouldn’t have had an opinion about SWP policy, if asked, but because there were at the time rather more pressing things to get articulately angry about. And to concern myself with the internal politics of a relatively small and more than relatively powerless party, this would have seemed a rather wasteful and perverse way to spend my time in the age of Thatcherism and Apartheid and the terrorist war against Nicaragua (to name but a few things).

You see, it’s a question of priorities, isn’t it. And given the political struggles of the mid-eighties, it might seem not only ineffectual but also culpably negligent to have as your priority repeated and myopic criticisms of a sect or certain sects of the left. When the angel of history catches you in the rear view mirror, s/he might think ‘didn’t you have anything better to do, hadn't you heard the terrible news?’

Alphonse has a post about US correspondents’ reaction to the French EU vote, and quotes this:

I read the reports filed by U.S. correspondents and pundits from Paris, after the French Non! to the EC proposed constitution a couple of weeks ago. It was striking how many of them, presumably without any direct orders from the owners of their publications, started lecturing the French in the tones of nineteenth-century Masters of Capital.

The "Non", they howled, disclosed the cosseted and selfish laziness of French workers. On inspection this turned out to mean that French workers have laws protecting their pensions, health benefits, leisure time and other outlandish buttresses of a tolerable existence.

> Paid servants of the ruling class, registering not simply their own disdain, but the contempt of Capital itself for the worker who demands to be recognised as anything other than a resource, a pair of hands, a commodity.

There will be different instinctive responses to the above of course, which brings me to my second passing thought. As well as a question of priorities, it’s also a question of instinct, isn’t it? It’s not that the people of the right and left have, from some position of sober neutrality, carefully weighted up the respective arguments and sided with the most reasonable. It’s that based on - or stung by - what you’ve experienced and seen around you, certain basic political instincts have formed, and these have sent you to seek out the truth.

For example, some will read (say) -

‘only extremists could endorse a global capitalist system which in 1992 is said to have paid Michael Jordan more in advertising Nike shoes than it paid to the entire South-East Asian industry which produced them’.

and fail to see anything wrong at all with Jordan’s remuneration, or think ‘bloody lefties’. Others reading it, or similar reports, will feel a rising cry for justice, a sense of outrage, of moral absurdity. In other words, it’s a question of what really gets you impassioned, instinctively.

Now, if what really gets you going, what sends you to your keyboard, hot under the collar, is not the arrogance of the powerful, needless poverty, overt exploitation, the fanatical pursuit of profit at any cost, the deliberate crushing of any attempts to build collective workers organisations, but instead, simply the carryings on of parts of the left, – if that is what really gets you worked up, then what are you, after all? A snitch, a nobody, a shit.

[anyone who tries to turn the comments thread into a debate about the SWP and its policies will be deleted. It was just an example]

Expression, continued.

'It is only by the corporealization of its inner determinations that the subject is enabled to feel them.

Shame, which is closely akin to anger, likewise corporealizes itself in the circulatory system. in shame one begins to be a little angry with oneself; for shame contains a reaction to the contradiction between what I appear to be and what I ought and want to be, and is therefore a defense of my inner self against my incongruous appearance'.

Hegel, Philosophy of Mind

enemies of liberal democracy

Here is a document from 1966 in which pro-third-world anti-American lefties attempt to apply to the United States strictures they fail to apply to far worst regimes elsewhere in the world. Their selective attacks on a liberal-democratic polity and their unwillingness to confront the crimes of others show the deterioration of the left, and its lamentable failure to adhere to liberal democratic values…. The self-appointed ‘tribunal’ insists on judging the foreign policy of a democratic polity just as it would judge any other polity, reflecting thereby its inability to discriminate between enlightened democratic regimes and oppressive quasi-fascistic ones.
**
And speaking of tribunals, hereis someone who has arrived at the tribunal of Reason armed only with some trite and infantile scribblings, and lewdly and artlessly revealed his befuddlement and lack of knowledge to the world. (Learn, among other things, how Leo Strauss's mentor Martin Heidegger was a 'post-modernist' and 'hero of the left'.)

***
This bloke in't pub other night argued as follows:

Now see this is how it works: true democratic subjects, yes, ceaselessly question and hold to account their own ‘polity’ and its allies, on account of the fact that this ‘polity’ is accountable to them; that’s what democracy entails, see. Meanwhile others, who have failed to comprehend this, will ceaselessly urge you to concentrate your attention on other regimes which are not accountable to you and over which your influence is zero or at 29 removes. For them, liberal democracy is about ritual impotent cursing directed at tyrannical third world regimes - not so as to effect change in those regimes but so as, by contrast, to exculpate one’s own.

Fair point bloke in't pub.

nb, rescued from an obscure mineshaft of comments
about Thomas Jefferson, this brilliant gem: '"does his [TJ's] injustice and malfeasance match up at all against nazis, stalinists, maoists, the french bourbons, Bonaparte, jacobins, bolsheviks, brit. aristos, muslims etc.?" What next - 'those who condemned Contra atrocities had suspiciously little to say about the far worse crimes of Ghengis Khan'.

Play me False 2

"Just as we do not judge an individual by his own idea of himself, so we cannot judge a ... period of revolutionary upheaval by its own selfconsciousness"

Or (alt. trans):

'Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness.'

Marx

Now, why would it be wrong (dare one say 'false'?) to judge a period by its 'own consciousness of itself'??

Sweet lord, you play me false (1)

'Ideology', like 'culture,' seems to be one of those terms that are both indispensible and indefinable. There was recently a debate, of sorts, at Lenin’s Tomb about ideology and ‘false consciousness’. The term ‘false consciousness’, never used by Marx, is an Engels coinage:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence, he imagines false or apparent motives.

So, the questions raised were, firstly, is the notion of ‘false consciousness’ actually intelligible and, secondly, is there anything like a corresponding concept in Marx?

The notion that false consciousness might be meaningful didn’t have many takers. How can consciousness be ‘false’ – is it like a false leg or false teeth, someone asked caustically? This rather appealed to me, as if consciousness might be a some kind of prosthetic attachment, superimposed on the lame body, inorganic and uncanny. Here we have ‘false’ not as ‘incorrect’ but as ‘imitation,’ related to various other uses denoting deception, dissimulation, insincerity. ‘He’s so false’ can mean ‘he’s smarmy’ or ‘all appearance’, he is acting. If ‘false consciousness’ means anything, its unlikely that it has to do with dissembling or pretence, of acting only for the sake of ‘appearances’. Granted.

The reading that commonly comes out of the Engels quote, above, is that false consciousness refers (perhaps not very carefully or accurately) to how people are unaware of the real motives for their actions (or, sometimes, of the consequences and function of their actions). Whatever one thinks of such ideas (and they are often thought insidious*), it’s surely the case, just on an anecdotal level, that we in fact use something like them all the time, as when we say ‘I now realise I was doing it out of resentment/ jealousy etc’. Retrospectively, our behaviour is revealed to us as not coincident with our self-understanding at the time. Only afterwards – through the detour of 'painful experience' - are our ‘true’ motives available. Two things here though: it’s not that our ‘true motives’ were somehow there and fully articulated and we just covered them up. Also, our ‘self-understanding at the time’ wasn’t just a cognitive error that could be rectified in the same way that you could rectify the belief that badgers are amphibious.

One can begin to imagine, perhaps, how this notion of ‘false consciousness’ might be expanded beyond the level of individuals and individual psychology. For example, those ironists of the work place, who imagine themselves subversive, critically detached from the system, but whose stance is in fact the very pre-condition of the systems functioning. Here, its not so much a split between different levels of ‘motive’, but a split between - putting it roughly – individual consciousness and the requirements of the system:

'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.

***
One should also bear in mind, I think, that much of the language that we use to talk about such things – over-identification, and ‘subject positions’ etc etc was, obviously, not available to Marx, that he was surely moving towards concepts to which the given language was insufficient. This means that simply taking this insufficient language at the level of the letter might be to miss the potential of thought that was moving through that language, breaking it open and recasting it.
***
The above should not be taken to imply that I’m in agreement with, or want to rescue the notion of ‘false consciousness’ as it stands. I’m interested in trying to tease out what such a notion might have been moving towards.

*Intuitively, people find this a rather insidious notion, taken to imply that others (the Party for example) have access to the ‘truth’ of one’s behaviour. A similar discomfort is expressed at the use of phrases like ‘objectively reactionary’, which again is taken to imply that the truth of your actions is not something with which you yourself are conversant. Irrespective of your perceptions and stated motives (I am acting out of pure benevolence), the reality of what you are doing exists on another level. (Personally, I think its perfectly meaningful to speak of things as ‘objectively reactionary’ etc, but I won’t go into that here.)

'Kabbalah' & mechanical reproduction

Am experiencing, at the moment almost complete blogger's blog, in this case a sub-set of writir's block. So, have resorted, a la BBC, to screening repeats.

The commodity known as ‘Madonna’ is apparently immersed in the Kabbalah. Shrewd choice: One bypasses Judaism proper and goes straight to its secret doctrine, its disavowed ghosts, and all that is cryptic and encoded. As an obscenely rich celebrity a mere religion is not enough, one requires the spiritual equivalent of an exclusive designer item. One thinks that secrecy and encryption are automatically signs of spiritual distinction – hallmarks, as it were of spiritual gold. Just as one goes to the gym to work on one’s body, one can also employ a Kabbalist to work on the spirit.

“Kabbalah was popular among Christian intellectuals during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, who reinterpreted its doctrines to fit into their Christian dogma. For example, one such source (the Kabbalah Denudata, commonly available in new age bookstores) states that the Ten Sefirot have something to do with the Christian Trinity because they are sometimes divided up into groups of three, despite the fact that the Sefirot are divided up into many groups of varying numbers, that these groupings overlap, that the grouping he refers to is not comprised of a father, son and spirit, but of a male, a female and neutral, and so forth. Others have wrenched kabbalistic symbolism out of context for use in tarot card readings and other forms of divination and magic that were never a part of the original Jewish teachings.”

Source: http://www.jewfaq.org/kabbalah.htm

In 1888 S. L. McGregor Mathers published THE KABALLAH UNVEILED, his English translation of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata. A number of intellectuals and petit-bourgeois cranks were drawn to the Kabbalah partly because it promised access to a ‘higher’ form of spiritual authority when, typically, routes to more worldly authority were blocked. The Kabbalah offered a kind of symbolic mandate which elevated one through the ceiling of the social hierachy to a vantage point above it.

This is not exactly the case with Madonna. Firstly, one might say 'Kabbalah' occupies the same place in her imagination as does ‘Tibet’ in that of other celebs, except that the signifier ‘Tibet’ is already taken and one has to therefore distinguish oneself from it. Why such celebrities require their ‘Tibet’ is another question. It is partly predicated upon the mistaken belief that the ‘aura’ conferred on them largely by modern techniques of reproduction* (and of course by the celebrity’s hyper-inflated exchange value) must have some spiritual equivalent, or rather is co-substantial with spiritual aura. It is a kind of category error, yes, but one of course endemic to capitalism itself.

*there is a sense in which what Benjamin called mechanical reproduction actually confers 'aura' (of a phoney sort) as opposed to draining it from the object. ie, the object only becomes an 'original' (with that cache we grant to 'originals') by force of its reproductions. But we look at the picture (or whatever) as though this 'being the original' were part of its very texture. Saying, in front of the Mona Lisa 'I can't believe i'm finally infront of the original' is really not that different from the movie fan who finally gets to see his idol in the flesh. And by then, the flesh, the actual canvas, seem unbelievable, unreal.

Perfumery

The meaning of Perfume, or, rather, vice-versa:

But what comes nearest to a woman’s perfume is the meaning of a thing. An object which has a meaning points over its shoulder to another object, a general situation.. It exists under our eyes, but is not really visible. Meaning is an intermediary between the present thing which supports it and the absent object which it designates; it retains within itself a little of the former and already points to the latter. It is never completely pure; there is in it, as it were, the memory of the forms and colors from which it emanates.. It does not exhibit itself; it holds itself back.. For Baudelaire whose spleen always demanded an ‘elsewhere’, it was the very symbol of non-satisfaction; a thing which has meaning is always an unsatisfied thing.. it will be seen that in Baudelaire the words ‘perfume’, ‘thought’ and ‘secret’ are more or less synonymous.

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.

Most of Zizek's online articles are collected here.

Spurious has a typically interesting essay on Thomas Bernhard over at the excellent ReadySteadyBook.

Here is a discussion of the idea of blogs having sponsors/ patrons. Now, if anyone would like to act on this idea, i.e., in relation to Charlotte Street, I would, doubtless, be more than accomodating & would promise to give up work and write at least two posts a day.

Softly, Softly

There’s a village. A Kurdish mountain village in Eastern Anatolia. One night a wolf comes and kills many chickens and ravishes a lamb. Next morning everyone leaves the village, the men with rifles, the women with dogs and the children with sticks. It is not for the first time this has happened and they know what to do. They are going to encircle the wolf. Slowly the circle closes, getting smaller, with the wolf in the middle. Finally, its no larger than a small room. The dogs are growling. The men are holding their ropes and rifles and the end is very near. So.. you’ve guessed what they’re going to do. Wait. They slip a cord over the wolf’s neck and attached to the cord is a bell! Then they disperse and let the wolf go free.

Last night I witnessed Alain Badiou, performing an intriguing lecture, as part of the Birkbeck Adieu Derrida series. Perhaps others will offer a summary of the whole. Below is a bitty paraphrase of a section of the lecture, a section concerning Derrida.

Derrida's goal: to inscribe the inexistent

Our experience of the world is always an experience of discursive imposition. Our being- in-the-world is being marked by certain discourses - our needs, pleasures, experiences are organised and channelled by these discourses. But there always exists a point that escapes this imposition. And this can be called a vanishing point.

The task of Derrida is to localise this point, this vanishing. The problem, the question = what is it to seize this vanishing point as vanishing. Well, it cannot be ‘seized,’ only localised. That is, thought can be brought into the proximity of this point. You can’t show it as there – look, it’s there (pointing).

To show the vanishing point while letting it vanish. Now Badiou then circled around this point, pursuing (so to speak) a number of figures – the figure of the hunt, the map, the path, the clearing in the forest. Each of these constituted an ‘approach’ to Derrida, a different approximation.

Now, I read somewhere that Badiou’s philosophy is, by design, 'indifferent to the language in which it is conveyed' – that is, it does not seek to embed thought in a privileged language from which it is inseparable. Not exactly contradicting this, but to me slightly surprising, was a whole excursus which seemed to somehow perform its own subject matter. That is, it pursued something it did not wish to catch.

So:

Derrida is the contrary to the hunter. The hunter hopes that the animal will stop. So that he can put an end to the vanishing of the animal.

Derrida hopes that the vanishing will not cease to vanish, that it can be shown without any interruption of its vanishing.

To show from a good distance the localisation of this vanishing.. to get as close as possible. ‘Softly, softly’ (whispered)

Derrida’s ingenuity = in resisting the discursive imposition so as to be able to say, ‘the vanishing point is in that region’. (In Glas he localises the vanishing point between the impenetrable conceptuality of Hegel and the relentlessly perverse Genet.)

The vanishing point is the treasure. I have a map. It is vague, but it is enough – or is it – to stop walking on the treasure. It’s a question of tact.

What allows Derrida his ‘approach’ is a ‘speculative gentleness’. And he uses a ‘vanishing language’, a language which slips through our fingers, and must be allowed to do so, so as to experience a kind of vanishing without ‘capturing’ it.

Badiou ends with the suitably gnomic: ‘The vanishing spring is summer’.

nb May I add that through the intermediary of some forbidding footwear I was introduced, briefly, to two eminent bloggers.

nb here is a Badiou interview.

Here's a clearer overview of the lecture. Et ici.

A Rewarding Project

I was looking up this phrase from Milton:

'Dissolve me into ecstasies' (it's from il Penseroso) when I came across this statement:

'Few projects are as rewarding or challenging as finding the right partner for building or maintaining your pipe organ.'

Expression expresses

J. Hillis Miller:

‘Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a series of brilliant sections in the Blue and Brown Books, argues against our normal, one might say our ‘Platonic’ assumption that we understand the expression on a face by comparing it to a state of mind that expression expresses.. No, says Wittgenstein, the expression is in the face, just as the meaning of a word is in the word. Neither the face nor the word refer to anything outside itself.’

I’d like to post something on this over at the Other Place, but would like to solicit comments here first. Quickly, a number of points. I’m not sure the ‘Platonic’ assumption described by JHM necessarily is our default understanding. I’m also not sure the word/ face analogy is helpful.

Having said that, what I’d like to write about is the notion of ‘expression’ and how W. challenges this notion, as he does in the Blue and Brown books but also, as I discovered on holiday, in Culture and Value.

Part of W.’s problem is that the structure of language goes against the grain of what he’s saying. Eg, even to say ‘the expression is in the face’ spontaneously creates a picture of a container, and the implication that this ‘container’ is different from and even indifferent towards what it contains. Having to italicise the preposition ‘in’ is itself a sign of having to push against the spontaneous meanings produced by the grammar alone.

Incidentally, doesn’t this last point in turn go against the idea that the meaning is ‘in’ the word? Isn’t it rather that Hillis Miller (and W. would see this) are trying to introduce a meaning which the words themselves resist? The nouns and prepositions and verbs seem to have a ‘co-efficient of inertia’ which deflects meanings along pre-prepared lines. If that’s the case, then there’s clearly no equivalent of this in facial expression. One would never say, I’m trying to express something but the inertia of my face is deflecting it along pre-given lines. Well, you might say it for a laugh.

Anyway, these are just random fledgling thoughts.

Plus Ca Change

Was reading through Barthes’ Criticism and Truth yesterday, and the arguments between the Old and the New criticism.

The Old criticism regards itself as the objective, neutral language. It is scarcely a ‘language’ at all, just the reflection of the way things are. The New, by contrast, is always either 'subjective' or partisan - it is smuggling in a political agenda.

The Old speaks with a fluency that is natural, the New with clunking artifice. It is mere ‘jargon’. The Old answers to the steady contours of the world, the New creates unreal distinctions and wants to change the world by fiat.

The New criticism’s ‘jargon’ is both utterly ‘incomprehensible’ and, at the same time, renders familiar ideas unnecessarily obscure. It is the argot of a tribe rather than the idiom of everyman.
You know the story. Gradually the New becomes the Old, sinks into the texture of the world and seems one with it, and so another New comes along, and is attacked in the same terms.

The fact that this pattern was long ago diagnosed hasn’t stopped it being endlessly replayed.

Articles

This article search facility looks useful. I discovered interviews with Berger and Zizek, some Derrida and Edward Said obituaries and, a random example, Eagleton on Dickens:

Social life, as usual with Dickens, is just a bewildering assortment of eccentrics, grotesques, amiable idiots and moral monstrosities. They have no language in common, as each sports his or her unique mode of speech like an eye-catching disability. The only thing they share, ironically, is solitude. Jo is an orphan, like so many Dickensian children; but being orphaned is now a collective condition, as society disowns responsibility for its citizens.

What governs this world, as in Little Dorrit or Great Expectations, is money. But money is no longer just in the miserliness of a Fagin: it is now a system that imprisons and denatures even those supposed to be in command of it. The staggeringly rich financier in Little Dorrit, Merdle (another suggestively excremental name), is a mouse of a man terrified of his own butler and driven finally to suicide. The government officials who supposedly run the state bureaucracy advise you confidentially to steer well clear of it. Crime, poverty and deepening inequality are now apparently "Nobody's Fault" -- one of Dickens's original titles for Bleak House.

Comments Policy

At school we had an English teacher with a posh accent who used words like ‘cursory’ and ‘equivocation’, and after class we’d be giggling and mimicking him and saying ‘cursory’ and ‘equivocation’ in hyper-posh voices. You can witness something similar over at HP, who are wriggling with adolescent glee at the mention of Roland Barthes & the sighting of non-demotic language here at Charlotte Street.

Anyway, It’s probably no coincidence that after HP linked to this post a number of suitably witless and abusive (in one case homophobic) remarks began to appear in various comments threads below. Needless to say, the policy here, as at other civilised forums, is that comments of an abusive nature – whether directed at me or other commenters - will be deleted and the posters banned. I have therefore deleted the abusive ones. The purely witless can remain.

Finally, I must just take time to address one of the more bizarre inventions from the comments box at HP. One of the ferrets in that particular sack assured another that Kaplan was ‘unemployed’ and had ‘posted about his unemployment’. Needless to say, neither of these inexplicable claims has any basis in reality. However, I hear from others that petty slanders are not only common at HP, they're pretty much a house speciality.

Something's Missing

From here (see 'Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing')

I would like to remind us right away that numerous so-called utopian dreams – for example, television, the possibility of travelling to other planets, moving faster than sound – have been fulfilled. However, in so far as these dreams have been realised, they all operate as though the best thing about them had been forgotten - one is not happy about them. As they have been realised, the dreams themselves have assumed a peculiar character of sobriety, of the spirit of positivism, and beyond that, of boredom. It is not simply a matter of presupposing that what really is has limitations as opposed to that which has infinitely imaginable possibilities. Rather I mean something concrete, namely that one sees oneself almost always deceived: the fulfilment of the wish takes something away from the substance of the wishes.

By way of illustration, Adorno draws our attention to those fairy tales where someone has to use the third of three wishes to take back the consequences of the previous ones – the wish was sabotaged by its realisation. If Adorno's right, that the ‘disappointment’ of the wish is not just an instance of the contrast between open-ended possibility and closed actuality, then what is the reason for the seemingly in-built ‘let-down’?

Answers in the comments, please.

Anyway, a brief reflection that may or may not be related to the above. One of the problems with much science fiction, I think, esp. cinematic science fiction, is that it envisages a world which is uniformly New. From the shiny suits to the towering reflective surfaces of the buildings, the white sheen that emanates from updated gadgets and means of transport. Everything - all the way down - has been updated, transformed. It’s as if the future arrives synchronously all at once.

We know different. The newest flat-screen computer perches on a Formica table from the 1970’s; someone on an old bicycle recognisable to Dickens rides to her work at an astrophysics lab; someone surfs the internet in the morning, then darns a sock in the afternoon. The future comes in piecemeal, cheek-by-jowl with what’s been the same for centuries. And not only that. Technology itself gets caught in time. This five year old computer appears practically archaic, as this 5 year old fence obviously doesn’t. Different times co-habit the world. You get something of this, if I recall, in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The space ship is cluttered with aging technology and tattered furniture – this is not the uniformly pristine and transfigured world of the typical sci-fi flick.

So two meagre suggestions regarding Adorno’s point:

1. is it that some of the ‘utopian wishes’ he mentions disappoint because we somehow thought they were signs of or would herald the arrival of the synchronous/ complete future?

2. or is it that these particular dreams, while they were imaginary, were in part inevitably figures - so, for example, the travelling to other planets, while it is imaginary is a figurative expression of something which history makes the category error of interpreting literally

Essentially useful

Walter Benjamin. Perhaps now, when he is no longer exactly fashionable, would be a good time to return to him. But silently, without fuss, smuggle him into your thinking. There is a very well known Benjamin note:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Now what interests me is that last rather Brechtian notion, of things, including concepts and ideas, coming into their own when used. Especially concepts and ideas. i.e., Their essence resides outside them in their possible modes of employment, the relations to which they give rise, the possibilities they open up or activate..

I understand X not when I have prised it open and discovered its meaning, purely through an effort of comprehension; I understand it when I successfully put it to use. When it opens doors and sheds light, when it reconfigures a field of objects or liberates things from the skin of their familiarity.

This is perhaps the element of truth in the familiar theoretical gesture of saying, for example, ‘I will now use Lacan to interpret Wordsworth’s prelude’ etc – What’s wrong with such formulations is that they are not untypically disingenuous. What takes place is not interpretation but illustration. It is a mechanical and unedifying spectacle. But the basic intuition – that the interpretation of a concept is in a sense like musical 'interpretation', ie it is about practice and embodiment rather than pure intellection - this, surely this is worth tarrying with.

The idea is that concepts only have their life and meaning in the activity of interpreting, ie when they are grappling with, when they are in some sense wedded to (&feeding off) an object. Looking at the concept on its own, prior to its employment is not to confront the pure ‘uncluttered’ concept, but instead is a kind of residue of interpretive work already carried out. Examining the concept-at-rest is no more the key to understanding it than is examining, say, the tractor at rest.

(Come to think of it, a suggestion of the above is present when we us expressions like 'I've got the idea of it now' - say when we're showing someone how to ride a bike or use a tool. 'Getting the Idea' is about being able to use it rather than disinterestingly contemplating a concept).

See some reflections on the above here.

The Big Other? No Thanks!

Lenin draws attention to some Zizekian reflections on the EU voting. Now, I must admit, that on hearing of the emphatic ‘Non’ some of my own thoughts were along vaguely Zizekian lines:

There was a perception that the ‘Yes vote’ was the preserve of those ‘in the know’, those privy to a certain expert knowledge - a knowledge of what was ‘inevitable’, necessary. The ‘yes’ vote had the nod, the royal seal of History. The ‘no’ unthinkable – if we voted no ‘something would happen’.

Curiously this reminded my, in passing, of something from Zizek’s repertoire of examples, an incident that triggers the Iranian revolution. For some reason, a demonstrator refuses to obey a policeman. A basic contract has been broken. It’s unthinkable, and yet there it is. What really strikes the crowd of onlookers is that this unthinkable thing has taken place and nothing happens. There is no seismic movement; the fabric of reality doesn’t suddenly come apart at the seams. Everything is as it was and yet utterly different. All that has been subtracted from reality is, Zizek tells us, the illusion of the big Other – the idea that the policeman is supported by, embodies Authority, Inevitability, Order. ‘The appearance is broken’. ‘See,’ the crowd says, ‘nothing happens’.The prohibition was phoney.

Now, when news came in of the Dutch vote I wondered whether it would have been quite so emphatic not for the French result. Not that the Dutch were imitating or whatever. It’s that the French vote broke the appearance. ‘See’ the French Non declared, ‘nothing happens’. We’ve done the unthinkable and the world’s still here.

‘European unification’ had seemed to move under the spell of inevitability, as if unmoored from human control, and could be used to justify various measures – eg economic reforms – under duress of History. And the ‘yes’ men seemed to understand and be au fait with the secret knowledge of History. They embodied the big Other and spoke on its behalf. (In fact, a particular political and economic agenda was being smuggled in under the sign of Progress).

Perhaps Zizek might consider whether the referendum’s 'Non' wasn’t in part an answer to the question Do you not believe in the big Other?

Naturally, before you jump in eagerly, I realise that the very idea of a referendum on the big Other is inherently contradictory – let the majority decide for me, even if I’m part of it. The majority is always Other than me, and once it has spoken things are out of my hands. I accede to its Delphic voice. Saying 'Progress has decided' and saying 'The Majority has decided' aren't, from a certain point of view, that different.

Bruschetta and Chips

I saw in the paper the other day another snide reference to the 'bruschetta brigade'. What is the imitative zeal that sends a phrase like the ‘brushetta brigade’ through the press and blogosphere? What makes it so infectious?

For those non-U.K. readers, this phrase designates a certain middle-class, dinner-party attending contingent. Perhaps more specifically, it equates this leisured class with left-liberal/ intellectual opinion. Behind it is a history of cognate terms - chattering classes, intelligentsia – which are all pejorative designations for a perceived group of ‘liberal intellectuals’. They are all terms which designate people removed from practicality and from the real world, who guiltlessly enjoy bandying ideas and opinion without bearing any of the consequences, who are therefore ‘irresponsible’ and so on. Here is ‘mere talk’; meanwhile others must make tough decisions etc. ‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme. So, after been coined by David Aaronovitch it was eagerly seized on and reproduced by predictable others.

Being flippant, perhaps ‘bruscetta’ is the giveaway here. It’s likely that anyone who, like Aaronovitch, refers to bruscetta with such casual familiarity is on that account probably one of the people designated by the term ‘bruschetta crowd’ – a habitué of the dinner party, the bourgeois get-together, or a whole array of media soirees where canapés aplenty are on offer. Aaronovitch is of course absolutely part of the class of people he pejoratively designates. A well rewarded bourgeois opinion monger, whose ‘opinions’ are free of consequence or accountability; or rather, accountable only to newspaper sales figures. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps he heads off to the boozers and caffs of Roman Road at the weekend to gorge himself on pies and animated proletarian discussion. I doubt it

Of course there are people who, from the privilege of their dining rooms, or fancy restaurants, pontificate about a world from which they are safely insulated. But these are as likely to be High Tories, or a Michael Winner or an Aaronovitcha as ‘left-liberals’ or anyone else. What we are dealing with is a tiresome and well-rehearsed gesture of self-disavowal – intellectuals and pontificators of a certain hue drawing on exisitng reserves of anti-intellectualism in order to denigrate fellow pontificators whose opinion they don’t like. It's as boring and obvious as that. I suspect this also relies on a familiar and patronising line to the effect that 'left opinion' emanates largely from the 'middle-classes,' their misguided preoccupations and wishy-washy idealism, rather than being anchored in the 'real world'.

Finally, there was also, in the ‘bruschetta brigade’ trope a more specific project, a familiar rhetorical trick or fallacy whereby you discolour a particular argument through tying it to some disliked group. (Of course, referring an argument back to the question of 'who speaks' is basic sophistry). In this case, the particular suggestion was that the anti-war argument was somehow the preserve of an ensconced and self-referential metropolitan elite. This is course is nonsense, but (nonsense + familiar mytheme) quickly congeals into fact.

nb The predictable chorus from HP in response to the above post is dissected here.

Memes and mimesis

The fragmentary thoughts on Wittgenstein (made into an excellently absurd meme by Carl) below have born slightly less fragmentary fruit elsewhere.

Incidentally, the new meme is to parody/ render absurd an existing meme, including the new meme.

In Theory

‘Theory’ is today a frequent object of polemic. The critics of ‘Theory’ sometimes speak as if it were only a comparatively recent academic trend, an empty category, a camouflage for political saboteurs. It was perhaps timely of Pas Au-Dela, then, to re-discover this Adorno piece, in which the question of Theory is addressed directly and the existence of Theory defended against its critics. The most elementary definition of theoretical thought, A. reminds us, is in contrast to practice and practical thought. Theoretical thinking is an activity not simply subordinate to current practical ends, it is not instrumental. Not ‘how can we sell this commodity’ but ‘what is a commodity’.

Another way of putting this is that theory sullenly refuses the continual command imperatives of the world in which we live, and is prepared, A. again reminds us, to think an idea or concept through to its roots – even if that means uprooting it - rather than asking only how can it be used. Practicality is indeed a kind of ‘call’ - the world solicits us, impatiently, to direct our attention to the reproduction or extension of what is, and frowns on genuine thought as mere dallying. The crude reproach of schoolmates on learning that one is pursuing a philosophy or English degree – ‘But what will you do with that?’ contains the categorical imperative against which theory has to dig in its heels.

For Adorno the very existence of theory, as non-instrumental thought, is, like the very existence of art, utopian in-itself prior to any specific contents. At the same time, the relative autonomy of theory, and of art, is both a symptom and an illusion. Any genuinely Marxist approach cannot really posit that theory is innocent of practical concerns. Indeed, critics like Aijaz Ahmad(In Theory) have convincingly demonstrated some of the ways in which theory can indeed be the instrument of group self-promotion within the academy. Similarly, the retreat of art into its own sphere in the end performs a familiar role within bourgeois society. Both theory and art are both impossible and necessary. They retain, in their name and their concept, the possibility of a freedom which is at once confiscated by the world in which they exist.

A nicely indicative example of the 'anti-theory' position.