Distance

Roland Barthes:

It seems to me I learn more about France during a walk through the village than in whole weeks in Paris…. The distance makes everything signify. In Paris, in the street, I am bombarded with information, not signification.

What distinction, exactly, is Barthes making here? How is ‘information’ being used and doesn’t information also have ‘significance’?

The phrase ‘bombarded with information’ recalls many descriptions of the city (most obviously Benjamin on Baudelaire) as a place where the individual is over-crowded with data, assailed with petty shocks on every side. Everything, and from every direction, is ‘in your face’. ‘In your face’ is not ‘near’, because ‘nearness’ presupposes distance, differentiated space. The city, says Benjamin, relates to the mathematical sublime: Number, we might say, eclipses significance. Signification has no room in which to breathe.

I take ‘information’, in Barthes’ statement, to be a kind of instant & consumable significance. Information lives and dies in being consumed. Units of information, moreover, have a neutrality and equality. A computer can store these units without having to discriminate between ‘information’ about casualties in a war and information about soap powder sales. And Information arrives at where we are. It comes to our desktop.

‘Signification’ cannot be stored, nor is it instantaneous. Signification is an invitation to depart. The instant, rather than being the unit of meaning, at once opens up into a duration of interpretation. It is a clue not a fact. Signification, also, asks us to weigh importance, not simply to divide into ‘bites’/ units.

The eclipse of distance is, says Benjamin, one of the defining experiences of the city dweller:

To move in this crowd was natural.. no matter how great the distance the individual cared to keep from it, he was still coloured by it and, unlike Engels, unable to view it from without.

Engels can see the city because he is not one of its children:

The charm of his description [of London] lies in the intersecting of unshakeable critical integrity with an old fashioned attitude. The writer came from a Germany which was still provincial.

Thus Engels can make observations like this:

In London one can roam for hours without seeing the slightest indication that open countryside is nearby.

This is essentially a ‘provincial’ perception, i.e., it is made from the point of view of a place where open countryside is an everyday experience. From this point of view, London appears as a place of privation. Its streets have pathos. The Londoner, Benjamin implies, lacks the distance across which to see this lack. Signification is elsewhere.

Starvation

While we are posting things written by others, here is a short piece by someone I met in Prague, in the lovely Café Blatouch. J. writes parables and, I suppose, you could say that he composes pictures which can be inspected. After I returned to London, he would send me his short prose pieces accompanied by a rough translation. Sometimes I would take this rough and smoothen it into lean unlovely English. Here is a little piece called ‘Starvation’. Those of you who don’t like this kind of thing (i.e., ‘literature’& all that), who have Charlotte Street filed under ‘Political blogs’ for example (which is your prerogative), look away now.

**

'He is starving. He sits and dreams of food. But he has placed himself in such a position that the prospect of finding food is very small. Shadows line his ribs. One day, a day like any other, a day without augury or expectation, he is brought a fabulous feast on a silver platter. His reaction is two-fold. First, disbelief: why this sudden miracle? No, he thinks, starvation acts like an hallucinogen and the feast is only the product of his desperate fancy. But secondly, realising that there is indeed food infront of him, he begins to question whether his stomach can cope after such long abstinence. The woman holding the platter of food looks at him, expectant, waiting. Embarrassed by the extremity of his need and with little confidence in his chaste and withered stomach, he mumbles something about indigestion, politely shaking his head. As the woman walks away with his meal, he thinks he catches on her face a look of disappointment. It has been so long since he ate that hunger itself, defeated and ignored, had left his body. Only occasionally would its memory, like an empty word, flicker through his insides. But as the woman departs, he feels, foreign yet familiar, the recrudescence of hunger – a pain, a rodent pain – stirring once more in his anorexic stomach.

Perhaps it is slightly different. Yes, the starving man dreams of food. But his dreams have grown fantastical with desire. Fat ripe fruits bursting through their own skin, meats swollen with succulence, breads, gooey puddings and rich and steaming delights of all kinds. Indeed, so inflated with fantasy are these dream foods, so replete with want, that when real nourishment does arrive he simply fails to recognise it. As his starvation continues, so does the food of his dreams become even more rare and extravagant, more and more remote from the shapes, colours and textures of anything real. Finally, in the last days, he yearns for things which are entirely the product of his imagination, which have altogether lost contact with the world; things which, were they suddenly to materialise before him, would, of course, be inedible.

Guest Post

Like most of you, I don’t yet have a clear account of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Like anyone with a critical or even curious mind (I supposed) there are questions to which I’d like to know the answer and blanks that I’d like to fill. That the ‘official’ account is still incomplete, that the initial reports were confused and contradictory, that many pertinent details await public scrutiny – these are surely banal truths.

So I would just like to say how struck I was, partly as regards the press but also very much in the blogosphere, by an eager credulity to accept the very first version spun from the presses and by a subsequent impatience with any sustained questioning of the version of events made available to the public. There were those (self-styled leftists even) who, even before the dead man had been identified, pre-emptively barked at civil liberties ‘fuckwits’ and human rights do-gooders for asking questions.

There was nothing at this stage, absolutely zilch, even to licence the conclusion that the dead man was a suicide bomber. But there was an alarming will to believe. This carnival of credulity did not come to an abrupt end when it was discovered that an innocent man had been killed. There was no embarrassment or compunction in the relevant quarters at the foolish readiness, the jettisoning of inquiring, and in some cases the audible enjoyment, with which they had greeted what was now obviously tragic.

Instead, the dismissal of any attempt to point out inconsistencies or holes in the official narrative continued. The ‘bulky winter jacket’, ‘the vaulting of the ticket barrier’ had quickly become impatient and defensive facts pointing unilaterally to the required conclusion. Those who dawdled with their doubts were diverting attention from important government work.

Now, the questioners have been of all political persuasions. And the questions asked are ones that should be asked in any democratically accountable state. And yet the implication, the ‘rumour’ is that even to raise questions is to declare a political position, or is to be guilty of certain unacceptable political allegiances, or to be some kind of ‘conspiracy nut’. What should be the duty of any thinking citizen is instead evidence of an ‘agenda’, the genuine need for information and answers construable only as hostility to the state.

A more general point, and certainly not original: there is a tendency to assume that anyone who does question the official account, which in this case seems self-evidently wanting and question-provoking, must somehow have another - often ‘sinister’ - account up their sleeve with which to replace it, i.e., those who interrogate and ask questions about the state are at once under suspicion.

That the mere existence of critical questioning is thought to denote a political programme is, needless to say, profoundly inimical to democratic debate and accountability.

Various

A reader kindly draws my attention to an interesting and timely article on Victorian anti-intellectualism. An extract here:

The practical nature of the English mind, its deep respect for facts, its pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means to ends, its ready appeal to common sense - and therefore, negatively, its suspicion of abstract and imaginative speculation - have always been characteristic of the nation. What distinguishes the Victorian period is that the conditions of life tended to increase this bias, to lessen the contrary influences of theological and classical studies, and thus to make what may be called a kind of anti-intellectualism a conspicuous attitude of the time. 2 This is not to forget that many of the Victorians were intellectuals nor that the age of Mill and Darwin made significant contributions to thought......
If “the extremely practical character of the English people” made them, as Mill recognized, excel all the nations of Europe “as men of business and industriels,” their commercial activity, in its turn, deepened this inherited bent. The minds which made the machines, which organized factories and solved the problems of supply and distribution - and did so under high competitive pressure - received an indelible training in practical contrivance. It was, as Carlyle said in 1829, the age of machinery in the inward as well as outward sense of the word; “the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends.” When Mill spoke in 1835 of the celebrity of England resting on her docks, her canals, and her railroads, he added, “In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense;… and for doing all those things which are best done where man most resembles a machine, with the precision of a machine.” [Thanks Robert]

Hear Badiou and others talk about Deleuze here. And a new (short) post by me at the increasingly busy Long Sunday.

Speaking of anti-intellectualism, K-Punk nicely skewers a (familar) contemporary example here. In the example cited, note in particular cases [see comments] a clumsy eagerness to demonstrate with one hand a knowledge that’s immediately made fun of with the other.

Proust, Reading and Friendship

"No doubt friendship, friendship for individuals, is a frivolous thing, and reading is a friendship. But at least it is a sincere friendship, and the fact that it is directed to one who is dead, who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving. It is, moreover, a friendship unencumbered with all that makes up the ugliness of other kinds. Since we are all, we the living, only the dead who have not yet assumed our roles, all these compliments, all these greetings in the hall which we call deference, gratitude, devotion, and in which we mingle so many lies, are sterile and tiresome. [....] In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its first purity. With books, no amiability. These friends, if we spend an evening with them, it is truly because we desire them. In their case, at least, we often leave only with regret. And with none of those thoughts, when we have left, that spoil friendship. What did they think of us? Didn't we lack tact? Did we please? All these agitations of friendship come to an end at the threshold of that pure and calm friendship that reading is. No more deference; we laugh at what Moliere says only to the exact degree that we find him funy; when he bores us, we are not afraid to appear bored, and when we decidedly have had enough of being with him, we put him back in his palce as bluntly as if he had neither genius nor fame. The atmosphere of that pure friendship is silence, purer thatn speech. For we speak for others, but we keep silent for ourselves.

Franz Kafka and the Aesthetics of Reading

‘Altogether,’ Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollak, ‘I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, at a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.’

'The only true Bolshevist writer'

Whilst in Yorkshire, I’ve been returning to certain passages of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. My old pencil marks and underlinings suggest a preoccupation with Marx’s concept of ‘the human’, in particular the ‘human’ as a possibility as opposed to an establishes fact. Also, the exemplary and utopian humanity of the writer:

The writer does not regard his work as a means to an end, they are an end in themselves. So little are they a ‘means’ for himself, and for others, that he will, if necessary, sacrifice his own existence to their existence.

The writer, even the most isolated writer, such as a Kafka, establishes him/her self as one concrete cell of a potential social reality in which the means>end relation of our current economic rationality has been reversed. Here, in the writer’s garret, is the organisation of life towards the endless end of creative self-fulfilment glimpsed.

This is what makes someone like Kafka – superficially the most a-social, isolated figure – deeply ‘political’. Kafka permits nothing to divert him from his writing, even ‘his own existence’. Certainly, he does not allow even an intimate relation (that between himself and Felice) to obstruct his writing, ingeniously and demonically diverting the relationship into an epistolary one. The relation exists only in and through writing, its creature, its theatre. But this inversion of the standard means-end relation arguably leaves its structure in tact: in doing this, the flesh and blood individual Felice becomes only a means to serve his writing.


At various points, Marx suggests that ‘humanity’ consists in going beyond and negating Nature – i.e., ‘Nature’ in the sense of the realm of necessity:

Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist.

Once pleasures and desires are not subservient to immediate need (ie immured in the realm of necessity, of the basic re-production of life) they can be ‘cultivated’, developed as ends in themselves. Sex as reproduction, food as negation of hunger: these are not-yet human. For most of history, the majority of the species has had most of its energy consumed in - and confiscated by – reproducing its basic conditions of existence. However, in certain places, among certain classes, groups of people were able to devote energies – surplus energies - to pleasures and activities which were enjoyed as ends in themselves. (Eg, once there is no longer the imperative to reproduce, sex can be divorced from utility and its inherent pleasures explored. This is human sexuality).

Indeed, the problem has always presented itself to societies of how to have energy left over for free creative activity. The ‘solution’ to this problem, hitherto, has been to divide society up into classes. One class is largely confined to the realm of necessity; the other can devote its time to the free play of the faculties.


However, the ‘free play’ available to the dominant class is invariably distorted and compromised by the exploitation through which it has been purchased. The price paid by others in immiseration and suffering means that the leisure and creativity of the dominant class is prevented from being fully human.


Now, when Marx comes to industrial society, it is clearly no longer merely a case of this division between the ‘inhuman’ realm of necessity and reproduction and the higher realm of creative fulfilment (albeit compromised and necessarily ‘ideological’ because of the price to be paid for its realisation). So, as a final fascinating pointer, this passage:

Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver… He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can demand the service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the condition sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.

*The title of the post is (apparently) Brecht's intriging description of Kafka.

Monsters Cannot be Announced

Some time ago I promised a post on monsters. Well, it exists as a draft. I'll post it next week when back from Yorkshire. So, in the meantime, here are some select quotes and images, starting with Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters:



'Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light'

John Evelyn's Diary, 1660:

I saw in Southwark at St. Margarites faire, a monstrous birth of Twinns, both femals & most perfectly shaped, save that they were joyn’d breast to breast, & incorporated at the navil, having their armes thrown about each other …: It was reported quick in May last, & produced neere Turne-style Holbourn: well exentrated & preserved till now:
We saw also a poore Woman, that had a living Child of one yeare old, who had its head, neck, with part of a Thigh growing out about Spina dorsi: The head had the place of Eyes & nose, but none perfected. The head monstrous, rather resembling a greate Wenn; and hanging on the buttocks, at side whereoff, & not in the due place, were (as I remembred) the excrements it avoided …

Lyotard:

a libidinal monster with the huge fat head of a man full of warrior's thoughts and petty quarrels, and with the soft body of young amorous Rhenane--a monster which never achieves the realization of its unity, because of this very incapacity, and it is this 'failure' which is marked in the interminable theoretical suspense. .... the hermaphrodite, another monster in which femininity and masculinity are indiscernibly exchanged, thereby thwarting the reassurance of sexual difference"

To begin with, what is a monster? Etymology has a bit of a shock up its sleeve there:
‘monster’ comes from ‘monstrare,’ ‘to show.’ A monster is something which is shown,
pointed at, exhibited at fairs, and so on. [---] If you don’t want to be a monster, you’ve got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species.

"Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: 'here are our monsters',
without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Deleuze:

I would imagine myself approaching an author from behind, and making him a child,
who would indeed be his and would, never- theless, be monstrous. That the child would be his was very important because the author had to say,in effect, everything I made him say. But that the child be monstrous was also a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret dis- charges which have given me much pleasure.


Habermas: The monstrous act itself was new. And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with their hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,



Hegel:

“The activity of distinction is the power and labor of understanding, of the most
wonderful and greatest, or rather of the absolute power. The circle in which it remains enclosed and contains its moments as substance, is the immediate and for that reason not wonderful relationship. But that accidental things separated from their own realm, things bound up which are truly real only in their context with others, that these achieve a genuine existence and a particulated [abgesonderte] freedom, is the monstrous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I.”

A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought, whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation is at once rewarded with a certain understanding... Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existing patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech .... Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the world coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

Herbert Marcuse

An interesting and timely tribute to Herbert Marcuse here, with excellent links - eg this little clip of Marcuse speaking.

A Note on Notes on Rhetoric

re notes on rhetoric I was thinking it would be good to link to particular instances. So if readers encounter nice examples, email me or leave in comments box. Recent additions to the notes include:

Chorus It is axiomatic that your opponent always speaks as part of a ‘chorus’ or ‘company’, whereas you of course speak as an autonomous individual. Whereas your opponent merely chimes in with a consensus, you have the courage to speak out and tell it like it is - as is the case with all the others who support your position.

The Left (ii) An umbrella organization consisting exclusively of students on the one hand, and, on the other, middle-class people who like hosting dinner parties. Contrary to a lingering misconception, The Left has nothing to do with the working class, who are actually quite content with their lot.

Postmodern - use to refer to any jargon unfamiliar to you. Apparently the term has a more precise meaning, but this is only according to people who write in unfamiliar jargon.

Note

I'm off to Yorkshire for a few days. Light posting, probably.

Nonsense to live by...

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body 'will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

As someone once said: "nonsense isn't it? But nonsense to live and die by".

Wyndham Lewis

Picked up a lovely second hand copy of Wyndham Lewis’ The Demon of Progress in the Arts. Lewis is the subject of an interesting early book by Jameson, who contends that Lewis’s ‘reactionary’ viewpoint nonetheless, precisely as reactionary, offers a critical vantage point from which to think about capitalism and the arts. Anyway, here are a couple of quotations on the theme of the New in modernism. It’s wrong, I think, but productively wrong:

In the eighteenth and in the seventeenth centuries there was the homogeneity of the discipline, the like-thinking of a classical norm. The turning point was political; the era of political revolution was followed by the era of perpetual revolution in the arts. Half-way through the last century the revolutionary zest, the turmoil of schools, the roaring of slogans and watchwords, began to assume a crazy intensity. But at present, halfway through the twentieth century, revolution, of a visual kind, appears to have stabilised at a point which is as far as it is possible to go technically, without disappearing altogether – without the arts committing suicide. There are several schools on the continent which the slightest push would tip over the blankness of the great zero.

For the last hundred years the art student has found himself at the centre of a brawl between old and new, assailed by the claims of schools or of leading artists to be ahead in the race, or to possess some secret of technical up-to-dateness..

The mercurial masters of the budding century had to give the student mass a new sensation every few years, or even, if they felt they were losing ground, every few months, by going red, or by going blue.

Reading List

A piece by John Berger in yesterday's Observer on the London bombings.

A belated link to the Kafka Diaries, now on the blogroll.

Jacqueline Rose's new book, The Question of Zion was reviewed in this Satruday's Guardian. It looks worthy of serious attention. Anyway, there's a chapter available online here. Here is an excerpt:

In May 2004 Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and take out the settlements was defeated in a poll of his party, Likud. "If, God forbid, there is a disengagement," states Nissim Bracha of Gush Katif, one of the key settlements in Gaza designated by the plan, "I am going to destroy everything."22 For Hagi Ben Artzi, religious Zionist and member of Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful), a national disaster is approaching: "And not an ordinary disaster, but in monstrous proportions--the collapse of the process of Jewish redemption."23 To remove one settlement is to destroy not just the spiritual foundations of Zionism, not just the State of Israel, but the whole world. A minimal return of land--enacted unilaterally, without negotiation with the Palestinians, and promising nothing even vaguely close to a viable Palestinian statehood--is a violation of the Torah. Ben Artzi will commit himself to mesirut nevesh, or total devotion (when asked, he does not object to the analogy with the Islamic concept of martyrdom).

Catastrophe will be met with catastrophe. The word of God transcends the laws of state. "We have another partner in these decisions," Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party explained, as he threatened to withdraw from the coalition in response to Sharon's plan, "the master of the universe. We must show the master of the universe that we are willing to sacrifice our souls for the land."24 According to one strand of Jewish thought, God's personal dignity requires the redemption of Israel. Without it, his name is profaned.25 Ariel Sharon is guilty of defilement. Behind the rhetoric we can recognize the signs of more prosaic forms of disgust. "That this beautiful place will become the home of Arabs," states Ofra Shoat of Bdolah (another threatened settlement in Gaza), "This is something I can't digest."26

These voices are not representative of the whole of Israel--far from it; more than half of the nation supported Sharon's disengagement plan. But today in Israel, catastrophe has become an identity. Ha'aretz feature writer Doron Rosenblum entitles a recent article "Cashing In on Catastrophe," or "how it comes about that every event and/or terrorist attack 'only proves', and even reinforces, what we already thought anyway."27 In a cruel twist, horror, however genuinely feared, redeems Israel's view of itself.

A Note on Enlightenment

Paradoxically, the crisis of Enlightenment arose from within, and indeed from its most cherished principles. The problem is that this principle is self-reflexive. If reason must subject all beliefs to criticism, it must also subject its own tribunal to criticism. To exempt its tribunal from scrutiny would be nothing less than ‘dogmatism’, accepting beliefs on authority, which is the very opposite of reason. The criticism of reason therefore became the meta-criticism of reason. If the Enlightenment was the age of criticism, the 1790s were the age of meta-criticism. All the doubts about the authority of reason, which are so often said to be characteristic of our ‘post-modern’ age, were already apparent in late eighteenth-century Germany.

From Frederick Beiser’s Hegel.

[This being, incidentally: An elementary lesson on the Enlightenment and its necessary supplement of self-doubt, and on how, contrary to the vain cat-calls made by sundry (philosophically illiterate) skull-heads, this self-doubt is not simply synonymous with some nebulous entity called ‘post-modernism’, this last being so often little more than an opaque gas compounded of the atoms of indignation and disgusted/ frustrated grunts of those who are prevented from grasping anything lying outside their drastically foreshortened purview of the world on account of their being chained to the ballast of Common Sense and stuffed with pre-digested journalese pap. Gracias]

See also Alphonse's post.

Eyeless In Gaza

Innumerable things, but for example, this article, or Matt's post, led to the following reflection:

We often commend in an academic way, or for reasons of cultural or literary distinction, phrases or concepts which we make no attempt to actually take at their word, let alone put into practice. How many of us, for example, will invoke the Benjaminian line about history been written by the victors, without really thinking about how this is true even now in the present, and what has to be done to wrest events away from their embodiment in official accounts, or, indeed, simply from oblivion, from willed amnesia.

The vanquished and the relatively powerless, on the other hand, denied even their own names (note the scare quotes still used by some in refering to the Palestinians) and stories (again, the nakbah of the Palestinians), are relentlessly accused of seemingly endemic mendacity and malice. The media is said to be dominated by their representatives. If a reporter or historian uses such sources he is necessarily 'biased', since he has not tried to 'verify' them - ie submit them to others who are judged capable of verification. Some time ago, I responded to one such 'unverified report' as follows:

"Who can verify these stories?" The fact that we cannot verify them (because those who would verify such stories are not granted legitimacy, because the
‘legitimate’ scribes will not grant them verification), that official accounts have no interest in their verification or even registration, that History, written by the victors, does not feel answerable to such stories and can let them spill into oblivion with impunity, that even to draw attention to such stories is met by accusations of unacceptable complicities, that one is re-directed to more 'worthy' items and suddenly deafened by ideologues screaming for 'context'- all this is of course precisely the problem.

____

'But of course, Benjamin was writing about a different era, about the 1930's, whereas today.. '

"whereas today": thus every generation slips into the arrogant and indolent belief that "there has been history, but there is no longer any," and the still incendiary ideas of the past are treated as so many antiquarian puzzles or stages in a history now complete.

enbee, An interesting exchange between Alph & Alain on the subject of the West Bank and other things here.

Rallying to the Cause

Why did the house go up in flames? Because it was made of wood, or because of an arson attack? Or because of an insurance claim? Choose one only. As you’ll all know, even way back in the day, solid ol’ Aristotle distinguished four levels of causality (ha, only four?): material, efficient, formal, final, if I remember aright. When it comes to certain tings, tho’, there can only be the one cause, for sure, and in single and peculiar instances things can be only their own cause, spinning round and round in their own wee tautology, and the curses of Sycorax on anyone who says otherwise. Like, for instance, the only cause of football hooliganism is the hooligans. So if there’s a footy match between two fierce rivals, and the security is really lax, and the barriers are all broken, and a horrid spat breaks out, then this is only and always attributable only to the hooligans, and to refer to any other level of causality is insensitive and perhaps wicked. And the historians, when they come to explain the hooliganism of the 1980's will doubtless also say that the only proper explanation is that there existed many hooligans. Anyway, please insert other examples as you see fit.

Oh Monstrous!

I hope to write something on monsters and the monstrous, as discussed here. In the meantime, do consult this (aborted?) work-in-progess Encyclopedia of the Marvelous, the Monstrous, and the Grotesque, it contains an eclectic number of entries, and definitions such as this:


Acephalous. 'Having no part of the body specially organized as a head' .

Lacanian Dictionary

An appendix has been added to the Critical Dictionary - 'Towards a Further Understanding of Lacan'. Again, notational and initially just for my own use, so don't expect anything comprehensive.

A Vulgar Reading

The alibi of the aesthetic.

The aesthetic: A peculiar mode of appreciation that wishes to place in brackets or disavow the obvious content of a work and stress instead form and symbolism.

The aesthetic attitude dismisses as vulgar any suggestion that a work might have a ‘palpable design upon us,’ excite our desire, militancy, disgust etc. It commends those disinterested responses which attend only to the formal and figurative aspects of the work, and those works engineered to elicit such a response. A straw target you suggest. So perhaps a few (sketchy) examples are called for.



If I were to write an essay on the ‘alibi of the aesthetic’, my first example might be John Berger’s discussion of the Franz Hals’ Regents and Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House. You perhaps remember Berger’s point: At the time of painting the picture, the old Hals was utterly destitute. The portrait was of the administrators of that charity on which he’d become dependent. As the camera searches the faces in the picture, you sense this relation of dependency, suspicion, distance; and okay, the administrators are dressed in their official symbolic garb, but Hals has revealed in the faces something else, an assumed dignity which is also fragile, vulnerable. So then Berger reads us a passage from a book of art criticism in which all this is forgotten in talk of ‘pictorial unity’ ‘subtle modulations of colour’ ‘coherent design’ etc. Content is bracketed off and/or made subordinate to form.

This content, which is unsettling, which asks questions, which discloses something about the situation of Hals – not just biographically but historically speaking – is sublated; the painting is primarily a thing of beauty, an episode in art history, and its content is swallowed up therein. You don’t have to confront it. So, for Berger, the language of form employed by the art critic is the repression of an uncompromising content.

Exhibit 2 might be Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of ‘taste culture’. I do not have the space here to go into details, save to say that ‘taste’ (ie bourgeois taste) typically privileges form over content. For example, upper class food typically stresses form and mode of presentation, downplaying questions of whether food is “filling” etc (utility based questions). Something similar happens with regard to art. Bourdieu quotes too very revealing theatre/ opera reviews – revealing, that is, as regards taste presuppositions.

“What struck me most is this: nothing could be obscene on the stage of our premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, sylphs, sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity” [emphasis added]

Ok, the second quote:

“There are obscene postures… in Hair, the nakedness fails to be symbolic”

The ballerinas, thinks the critic, could never be ‘obscene’, because their nakedness is always either figurative or seamlessly integrated into a formal whole – the sexuality of what is before us, and the possibility of a (vulgar) sexual response is dissolved into that peculiar kind of enjoyment termed ‘aesthetic’. The aesthetic performs a strange alchemy whereby the obvious and literal is emptied of its content, leaving behind something numinous and pure (of which it is a mere sign) something that abstains from the world, that proposes nothing – or only the anodyne security of universal human truths.

In Hair, the signal failure, the elementary violation of decorum and taste is that the nakedness is a) not a sign of something else and b) likely to produce a “natural” response. The overt sexual content has not been sublated by form or symbolism. Those who draw attention to the literal/ obvious level (e.g. when someone remarks that a painted mythological female figure is “sexy”) can be dismissed as “vulgar” or – precisely – “tasteless. What this also tells us is this: that the elevation to the “symbolic” is, simultaneously, the suspension of the literal and/or functional, the “vulgar” level of sense. And symbolic readings can be almost something like a “get out clause” wherein the “obvious” or gross significance of an image (or whatever) is bracketed off and “disowned”.

It seems to me that, often, the idea that there might actually be in the content a proposal or question that’s radical and disturbing, that it might directly address your existence, is lost in a certain kind of ‘aesthetic appreciation’. To illustrate (well, suggest really, because I don’t have time to illustrate), just two examples - the radical and hardly consoling proposals of Proust on Friendship and Genet on Betrayal. One confronts always the ‘excuse’ that these are metaphors, or only intelligible within the overarching aesthetic design. They are either signs or architectural units: in both cases they point beyond & deny themselves.

No, Proust really does think that friendship is a vain distraction, that the only worthwhile relations are those with the silent dead (reading); friendship does not enrich or enlarge your thoughts, and the solitary pursuit of writing demands the rejection of such relations. Genet is not using betrayal as a metaphor for something else– betrayal is the definitive act of radical freedom, freedom as caprice and cruelty, capable of renouncing even what is most dear to it; i.e., even if you renounce what seems intimate, most one’s own there will still be an ‘I’ left, triumphant, defiant, stubborn.

In fact, the examples are legion. Whether it is Kafka (Kafka speaks of books that break open the frozen substance inside us) or any other of the authors who really interest me, there is in these writers a content which burns a hole in the given social substance, which is indifferent to the Symbolic Order in which the writer lives, and which, taken seriously, is incompatible with a life lived pragmatically within that order. And the view of literature as no more than a painless supplement to such a life is anathema to such texts.

I have strayed a bit.. the point is to suggest that the ‘aesthetic’ is often a denial of content, a defusing of its radicalism; the content is placed in parentheses. And yet the critics by insisting on the aesthetic (defined as the suspension of content) have turned things on their head. For it is almost always the case that the form of the work – the innovations in form – have resulted from a rigorous effort on the part of the artist to work-through some specific content, to think through the formal consequences of a certain content. And because only through this form could this content have come to expression.

Marx and Consciousness

I’ve been suggesting that Engels’ remark on ‘false consciousness” shouldn’t be dismissed too hastily, that it should instead be related to a line of comments about consciousness and ‘becoming conscious’ found not just in Engels but also Marx. Not that I’m going to develop this argument now, save by citing this fascinating passage from Marx:

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be — as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion — to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

Moral Clarity

This via Lenin:

Moral Relativism. Aka historicism. The denial of any unified, objective standard of value. The diametric opposite of Moral Equivalence (q.v.).

Moral Equivalence. Judgment of the United States government by the same unified, objective standard of value as the governments of other countries. The diametric opposite of Moral Relativism (q.v.).

Moral Clarity. The Zen-like state of mind from which it is possible accuse the same political enemy, simultaneously, of both Moral Relativism and Moral Equivalence.


nb, new post at Long Sunday

Not the Badiou Meme

Okay, some time ago Fort Kant initiated a ‘meme’ on Badiou’s fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. He takes his cue from the Vienna Circle’s voting on the truth or falsehood of certain propositions. The meme then passes from here to here.

Of course, I have no intention of doing the meme. I would just like to take up something from AvW’s response. Now, Alph. has yet to reach the propositions themselves, struck instead by certain rhetorical gestures -

..... And this immediately places Badiou in the corps of clerks labouring away at the maintenance of the Art Market, which is fuelled constantly, and desperately, by the seemingly gratuitous issue of such prescriptions, Art is This, Art is That. It IS this, really, if hiddenly, and ought then be rendered more obviously itself (but not too obviously. It mustn‘t become out and out criticism). The predicates are of no consequence whatsoever.

Alphonse is right. Before one sets about the content, what’s remarkable is the strident intoning of ‘Art is’. It seems to me that the chords struck by this intoning are like those of a manifesto. That is, Badiou’s ‘Theses’ = precisely the kind of statement one would expect to be made, pre-emptively, by a Movement in order to authorise and anticipate its own artistic practice.

A manifesto can indeed read like a theoretical statement, but it is theory of a peculiar kind. It does not try and distil, from the history of art (or from individual genres) an ‘essence’ or explain an evolution (cf Lukacs, Theory of the Novel). It is not arriving after the fact, but before it. This is surely a definitively Modernist gesture. Theory as ‘prolepsis’.

This kind of theory cannot be ‘disproved’ by drawing attention to some neglected pocket of art history, some genre that has escaped its criteria. Nor will it be disproved by subsequent artistic productions, since its only objective is to sanction or initiate artistic productions defined by fidelity to this very ‘theory.’

The reason I would call this a definitively Modernist gesture is that it involves a conscious jettisoning of tradition and traditional authority. The manifesto replaces tradition – as the taken-for-granted, unconscious inheritance – with a self-consciously chosen set of prescriptions and precepts. The manifesto claims to rest not on some unfathomable ground, but on a Thought that is wholly transparent to itself.

The manifesto erects its own foundations, but also places those foundations on display as part and parcel of the work. No dark earth remains concealed, no hidden source of authority (made more authoritative by its hiddenness), only the ‘outworks’ of purposive construction and the making of new constellations. The Futurist Manifesto, for example, if it is a theoretical statement, is also part of Futurism.

The manifesto both punctures a whole in established practices and, simultaneously, inaugurates something else. This ‘something else’ cannot be described by the established practices. This, at least, is the manifesto’s wager. The theory defined in the manifesto awaits the blessing of a posterity which it also hopes to create.

Heidegger is sometimes put on stage as Badiou’s great adversary. As usual with such defining oppositions, there is also striking symmetry. Art, for Heidegger, discloses something forgotten, actively forgotten by current forms of knowledge and thought; at the same time it discloses the poverty of those current forms, so that we are not then able to return to them. The deeply forgotten greets us as foreign but also makes strange the familiar. For Badiou, Art, equally, seems to disclose a Truth, a Truth which, once it has addressed us, demands our fidelity and forbids our return to what currently is. But it discloses a Truth which opens into the future, and a truth which is inseparable from the fidelity to it. Perhaps what separates the two – H & B - is only the sliver of a rhetoric of ‘depth’ and uncovering. (Badiou's Art as Heidegger's folded inside out).

If what I have said is true, that Badiou’s ‘Theses’ has the form of a manifesto, can we presume that this is deliberate, that Badiou is indeed striking a ‘first blow’, stating an ‘a-priori’? This seems to be the case. Or are we dealing with a kind of nostalgia for a Modernism, a Modernist gesture, no longer in fact possible?

Ps, while i work out the precise relation between CS and LS, I'm cross posting this at Ls - it won't happen again.

Various Forms of Indifference

This:

During their coverage of the breaking news events yesterday, several FOX News hosts or reporters made comments that are raising some eyebrows. The network's Washington Managing Editor Brit Hume told host Shepard Smith, that when he heard about the London bombings, he saw it as an investment opportunity:

"I mean, my first thought when I heard -- just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, "Hmmm, time to buy." Others may have thought that as well.

This, and this. I have some further thoughts about this over at Long Sunday.

London Attacks

At this stage, contradictory reports as to whether there were warnings of the attacks - see here.

See also here.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

I wouldn’t want to invoke the name of George Steiner too often, but his observations on the anti-intellectualism of English culture certainly carry weight. Whereas in continental Europe, epithets like Thinker and Intellectual are used all the time in a neutral descriptive sense, or as approbation, in England they sound inevitably presumptuous and are handled only with sneering inverted commas.

Any thought not fastened to the here and now, not concerned with fixing some local difficulty is deemed an indulgence. Any idea without an exact equivalent in sterling or status is automatically suspect and marks you as a fool. The peculiarly English phrase ‘Come off it’ hints at the culture’s default position: that things have a perfectly plain significance which they wear on their surface, and if you wish to deny this commonsensical meaning and replace it with some other, you’d better have a bloody good reason.

__

So anyway, while at B’s house, I read a section of Francis Wheen’s ‘How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World’. The book is - how to put it - eccentrically eclectic: Structuralism and New Age Mysticism are, it seems, helpfully placed in the same category - just as, I suppose, Italian and Spanish food are simply sub-categories of ‘Foreign Food’.

It’s difficult to characterise Wheen’s treatment of certain French thinkers. ‘Cursory’ is way too generous (as, indeed, is ‘treatment’). His remarks on Lacan appear to be borrowed wholesale from Sokal, everyone’s favourite refutation by proxy of continental philosophy, postmodernism, whatever you like. The Sokal book was a fair trade off – around 8.99 to have your prejudices returned to you in tact + official permission not to have to read all that incomprehensible nonsense.

Anyway, Wheen’s benignly taken Sokal’s argument on trust. He quotes one of Lacan’s little formulas, adding that any numerate (!) student can see this is nonsense. Like his Authority, Sokal, he seems to think that Lacan is offering some kind of mathematical proof. Had he made some attempt to read the object of his ridicule he would find, for example, this:

At the risk of a certain amount of opprobrium, I have indicated how far I have gone in distorting mathematical algorithms in my own use of them

At which point one is tempted to interject that one of the ways mumbo-jumbo enters the world is when people attack authors they haven’t read relying on the arguments and authority of others.

Too late, however, Wheen has already moved on to Deleuze. A single paragraph, picked at random, constitutes the case for the prosecution. It’s enough to conclude that Deleuze is a peddler of unadulterated gibberish, his corpus of writing nonsense. Just pause, if you will, to ask what you’re being asked to believe here: that a man spent his professional career writing page after page, book after book without any discernable meaning. That in itself would be some feat. One would think that meaning might flare up here or there though some chance concatenation of words. Having to sustain meaninglessness so vigilantly, so systematically, allowing no loophole for sense, over decades - this would probably be enough to explain Deleuze’s suicide. Anyway, not only to do this, but to persuade others that you were articulating new and difficult concepts, to have, even whilst you were alive, created a whole army of earnest commentators, explicators of non-existent meanings– all this is nothing short of miraculous and, you would think, worthy of some begrudging admiration from Wheen.

Anyway, try Wheen’s trick yourself. All it takes is that peculiar fusion of arrogance and ignorance endemic to a certain strain of English anti-intellectualism. Simply pluck a passage at random from any philosopher – Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, in doesn’t matter – parachute this exotic bundle of philosophical matter into the everyday life of your reader, pausing to confirm his/ her complicity, his/her ignorance of and indifference towards the philosophical tradition from which the author in question speaks, sit back and enjoy the chortle chorus. This can be performed endlessly to endlessly confirm your own robust common sense, which is seemingly in need of constant reminders that it is the proper and default response to reality.

While you’re at it, make sure you forget a lesson so elementary that I insult you by stating it: That if you abstract from its context a language which presupposes/ requires a certain philosophical education and training, a familiarity with the philosophical sense of certain words (‘singularity’, ‘event’ for example) as opposed to their everyday sense, if you place this language before a readership who lack not only the necessary pre-understanding but the desire to acquire it, it will indeed appear as without meaning – just as an object on the far horizon will always appear smaller than one in the foreground.

Spectacular Cruelty

A very very belated footnote to Jodi’s series of posts on cruelty. This is from Montaigne’s essay on the subject:

I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil wars; you can find nothing in ancient history more extreme than what we witness every day. [..] If o had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man’s limbs and would lop them off and would cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and new forms of murder, not from hatred or for gain but for the sole purpose of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony, while hearing his screams and groans. For there you have the farthest point that cruelty can reach: ‘Ut homo hominem, non iratus, mon timens, tantum spectaturus occident’ [That man should kill man not in anger or in fear but merely for the spectacle’]

the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent

This post is to be read in conjunction with the one on Rumsfeld. The following is from Fredric Jameson’s 2002 book Singular Modernity:

In Oskar Lafontaine’s recent memoir of his fate under the new Schroeder administration in Germany, he complains of the widespread description of his market adversaries in that government as ‘modernizers’:

The words ‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’ have been degraded to fashionable concepts under which you can think anything at all. If you try to figure out what the people called ‘modernizers’ today understand under the term ‘modernity’, you find that it is little else than economic and social adaptation to the supposed constraints of the global market. [..] Thus, the Anglo-Saxons have no legal protection against layoffs, so if we want to be modern we have get rid of our protection in that area as well. In many countries the social safety net is being seriously reduced, so if we want to be modern we have to reduce it drastically as well [..] Modernity has simply become a word for the conformity to such economic constraints. The question of how we want to live together and what kind of society we want has become a completely unmodern question and is no longer posed at all.

So, once again, we have the confiscation of certain key words, their transformation into mere signals, the replacement of meaningful speech by vague noises of approbation or vilification, and this in the service of a political agenda. Jameson continues:

If free-market positions can be systematically identified with modernity and habitually grasped as representing what is modern, then the free market people have won a fundamental victory.. The point is that the holders of the opposite position have nowhere to go terminologically. The adversaries of the free market, such as the socialists, can only be classed in the negative or privative category of the unmodern, the traditionalist, or even, since they clearly resist progress and modernity, of the hardliners.

So, it is not just that words are turned into boo-hoorah terms. In each case, the ‘hoorah’ term is used to naturalise a particular line of capitalism’s development, to equate the development of the 'free-market' (itself a significant terminological victory) with development per se, to render inevitable what is only contingent, to insist, effectively, that ‘the economy’ is ultimately not a matter for democratic decision, any more than the weather is. Indeed, the placing of the economy outside democratic ‘interference’ has long been equated with ‘freedom’ as such.

It’s a familiar notion – that political struggle is partly a discursive struggle over the ‘ownership’ and the right to use certain words. It would seem from the above that the emptier the words are of meaning the greater their political usefulness – so that, for example, it is only because ‘modernity’ has been turned into a mere signifier that it can then be attached to such things as ‘no legal protection against lay-offs’ and so on. It is this perversion of language by the powerful that radicals must ceaselessly contest, not by insisting on equally arbitrary meanings but by restoring to words their forgotten potentials, by renaming the world in such a way that it becomes newly intelligible and open to transformation.

Symbolic Cramps

Although I 've been very interested in Badiou's concept of the Event for some time, the mathematical theory that grounds Badiou's work is something I'm utterly unfamiliar with. So, I've recently made some very tentative forays into this stuff, dabbling in the odd equation, entertaining cursory thoughts on set theory etc.

Think, for example of the predictable paradoxes produced by 'the set of all that exists'. How can this set include itself? If we create another set to include it, the paradox simply recurs. My first and provisional thought is: is it not at moments like this, when the symbolic language buckles - is this not a sign of the Real? It is the Real which cramps our symbolic codes and structures into paradox. But this needs refining. There are two positions here: 1. these 'kinks' in the Symbolic indicate the presence of the Real, which is not directly visible but only in the ruffles and distortions its leaves on the surface of our language(s); or, 2. that 'the real' is just the name we give to this outer limit of the symbolic. Where our symbolic languages reach an impass, these impasses indicates their boundary, and the Real is the name for what's 'beyond the boundary'.

I also thought here of one of Borges' parables, which articulates a related notion. It notes the curious points of paradox and contradiction, the 'knots' in our basic categories - the paradoxes of Zeno and so on - and concludes that these constitute a series of loose ends, or unravelled signs that this universe we inhabit is 'unreal', that the inter-subjective fiction we nominate 'reality' doesn't in fact 'add up'. Here -

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Or, if you prefer:

We... have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it as enduring, mysterious, visible, omnipresent in space and stable in time; but we have consented to tenuous and eternal intervals of illogicalness in its architecture that we might know it as false.'

With a bit of tweaking, we can translate this as: the architecture of our symbolic systems runs into insoluble difficulties at the edges. These insolubles are the index of what we cannot directly know, are indeed 'caused' by this unknowable and unnameable X, which bends our symbolic systems of knowledge into puzzle and paradox.

Needless to say, all this is rather, or vaguely, Lacanian. See, for example, Bruce Fink:

".. a symbolic system brings with it a syntax - a set of rules or laws - that is not inherent in the "pre-existing" reality. The resulting possibilities and impossibilities can thus be seen to derive from the way in which the symbolic matrix is constructed..." (Please note I have quoted slightly out of context to suite my own purposes.)

Gnats

Ah, lieth everything already withered and grey which but lately stood green and many-hued on this meadow! And how much honey of hope did I carry hence into my beehives!

Those young hearts have already all become old--and not old even! only weary, ordinary, comfortable:--they declare it: "We have again become pious."

Of late did I see them run forth at early morn with valorous steps: but the feet of their knowledge became weary, and now do they malign even their morning valour!

Verily, many of them once lifted their legs like the dancer; to them winked the laughter of my wisdom:--then did they bethink themselves. Just now have I seen them bent down--to creep to the cross.

Around light and liberty did they once flutter like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles.

Did perhaps their hearts despond, because lonesomeness had swallowed me like a whale? Did their ear perhaps hearken yearningly-long for me IN VAIN, and for my trumpet-notes and herald-calls?

--Ah! Ever are there but few of those whose hearts have persistent courage and exuberance; and in such remaineth also the spirit patient. The rest, however, are COWARDLY.

From the New Transmitters..

The other approach to thinking about ‘ideology’ is of course to work from examples of patently ideological speech - eg the ‘old/ new Europe’ distinction as used by Donald Rumsfeld - ‘New Europe’ is to be celebrated; ‘Old Europe’ is jeered, reproached. What is ideological here? There are a number of things to consider:

The obvious point here being that ‘new’ and ‘old’ are used simply as boo/ hoorah words without any real meaning. The old/ new Europe distinction had in fact precious little to do with chronology or history at all. The 'Old' simply designated those who, listening to their domestic population, had been somewhat reserved in embracing US policy; ‘New’ was a code word for those who simply toed the line (or, if you prefer, heroically defied their native population). Berlusconi, with his tedious old corporate capitalism, who paid no attention to domestic opposition to the war, was New. Spain was New. France and Germany were ‘Old’. Language is rendered meaningless when used in this way. What's ideological is not just this 'boo/hoorah' usage, but its role in selling state power to the weakminded.

Beyond Rumsfeld, the distinction rests on a (familiar) reflex valorisation of the New and denigration of the Old. New = positive, forward-looking; Old = redundant. But, and as the slowest mind can grasp, something is no more good because it is New than good because it is Near - New is an empty formal category and cannot automatically be tagged with value. But this is a fairly ingrained cultural assumption, not just a category error. Walter Benjamin and others wrote about the monotonous celebration of Newness and the concentration of collective attention on the New which was integral to modern capitalism. The New typically meant simply ‘the latest’ – the latest step of a Progress apparently pre-determined. It was used to consolidate a version of Progress in which a particular line of capitalism’s development was seen as an inevitable, natural progression. The New saluted this progression; the old ignored it and so ensured its own obsolescence. Needless to say, this conception of history, as inevitably moving in a certain direction that we have to salute or ignore was, Benjamin suggested, itself archaic, ie mythic. In any case, the New is never simply new – ‘from the New transmitters came the old stupidities’. Culture's consist of old and new elements. Any binary Old/ New distinction is probably going to conceal more than it illuminates. This is almost too elementary to point out.

Back to ideology, then. We are talking about false distinctions and category errors that function to legitimise a certain culture, in general, and certain policies in particular. The old(-)/new(+) distinction is a culturally ingrained one, assumed rather than invented by Rumsfeld. We then have Rumsfeld’s use of this ideological (pre-existing) distinction to cement one of his own. The first layer helps legitimise a whole culture, the second expedites the policies of a particular State.
Needless to say, the Old/ New Europe distinction wants to pass itself off as an ‘idea’, a thought, and there are plenty of scribblers and commenters eagerly waiting to analyse it in those terms, and thereby to reproduce the mirage of intellectual content necessary for the ideology to do its work.

For more of the endless reserves of meaning to be extracted from Donald Rumsfeld's words, see here.

ps.

Always sad when some unpaid sap leaps in to defend demonstrably nonsensical state propaganda. This person, for example, hasn't even understood the original post, hence his oddly confused comment about Poland as 'empty formal category'. He then stupidly conflates Poland with its government and overlooks the facts of Polish popular opinion, as befits his polemical purposes. The same blogger elsewhere takes an obviously mannered, tongue in cheek piece of prose and earnestly complains about its syntax. Tone-deaf, politically short-sighted, clueless.

The Other Place

Over at Long Sunday, Alain has posted an exchange of correspondence between Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse. It's a necessary read. Marcuse:

A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot he deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews - merely because they were Jews - that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite.

Also on LS, there's an interview with China Mieville.

Camera Obscura

It is an often-taught and often-forgotten lesson that ideology is designed to promote the dignity and clear conscience of a given class at the same time that it discredits their adversaries; indeed, these two operations are one and the same, and as a cultural or intellectual object ideology may be defined as just such a reversible structure, a complex of ideas which appears either systematic or functional depending on the side from which it is approached. Thus, the feudal code of ‘honour’ discredits those classes unable to defend themselves; the Protestant work ethic holds up the idleness and conspicuous waste of the nobility to shame; the nineteenth-century notion of middle-class ‘distinction’.. separates middle classes from workers in their way of living their own body…. (fredric jameson)

Now there is a passage in Sartre’s Critique where he says that colonial racism is not, primarily, a belief system, it is the means of solidarity among the colonisers, it organises a body of people and pays off their conscience. This isn’t quite the same thing as what’s being said above, but perhaps both point in the same direction: that Ideology needs to be understood as functional and relational, or rather it is defined (and I think this is more of less what Althusser says) as that wherein the functional predominates over the ideational/ theoretical. In ideology ideas operate primarily to marshal and repel, to rationalise, denigrate, or to organise and preserve historical amnesia.

For those inhabiting the ideology, of course, it is impossible to live it this way (or at least this is what was supposed until recently) - so that for the racist or Protestant bourgeois the belief stands and is subjectivised precisely as a conviction and an idea in its own right, not as a means, a functional tool, a way of denigrating and claiming natural ascendancy over a rival class. And so, in a perfectly explicable way, might not one say their ‘consciousness’ is false? For their way of living the belief – their solemn reverence or whatever - is at odds with its genesis and function.
It is as if the belief qua belief is an imaginary thing, in which nonetheless the reigning class is invested, whilst the real work of the belief, assigned to it by history, goes on behind the actors’ backs.

Needless to say, I’m not buying this idea, just offering it to the learned and responsive community of CS readers. Nor am I wanting to flog the false consciousness horse, just to speculate about this word 'ideology'.