Friendship, 2

A reader comments on the Friendship post:

"We really will not form friendship bonds with people who do not share the same thought process though".

I wanted to qualify this, or turn it around: in a friendship you have 'thought processes' that you couldn't have had outside the friendship, no? (Granted, I may be talking about certain kinds of friendship here). A conversation inside a friendship will lead to a place neither friend would have arrived at individually. This is partly what I meant by 'composition' - the thought of a friendship, irreducible to the 'thought processes' of either friend.

Perhaps sometimes, the thinking of a friend, in its very obstinate refusal to mirror or correspond with our own thinking, acts as a creative irritant - the necessary creative irritant which, precisely, one could not fashion oneself. And so, the friendship turns on something beyond this difference in thinking. (The idea, here, of a kind of still point on which the friendship turns?)

Finally, is there not something in excess about friendship: it exceeds the plane of identity/ difference. There is nothing on that plane which explains the friendship - or rather, there always is, so that its explanatory value is limited. That is, there are always points of identity and difference, in varying degrees in varying friendships. (If there is close resemblance, it is a mirroring; if none, 'opposites attract' - and all that's in between). Rather, the relation exceeds its parts; the parts escape into the relation.

Virtual Cottard

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features....

The 'Cottard' is also a rhetorical stategy much used in the blogosphere. Comments should appear suitably encrypted, arch, playful, never quite divulging their meaning. Your interlocuter tries to pin you down, to answer you, but the indefinite ironical form in which your ideas are couched facilitates your escape - you're already elsewhere, or on another level, smiling knowingly. "That is not what I meant at all". Perhaps less Cottard and more the Cheshire cat, a smile without a body of ideas, concerned only to maintain your position of enunciation outside or above the conversation.

On Friendship

Bump into F. who is organizing a conference on friendship. Comments on how issue of friendship often framed by question of similarity & difference. Is the friend like or unlike; is the friendship based on the perception of resemblance or of difference.

2 things:

1. If we do think of friendship in terms of likeness, then isn't it often the case that I am friends with x not so much because she is like or unlike me, but because when with her I am unlike myself. I am translated out of myself, in this way, only with this person.

2. There is a presupposition that the basic units are two individuals, and that friendship is a relation between these two pre-existing individuals. But isn't a friendship rather a composition. Our commitment to the friendship is a commitment to the unity of this composition. The subject of the friendship, its 'we', is a third supernumerary 'we'.

Or, friendship as a line between two points, but the points are just the places the line ends; it does not 'join' the two ends.

Example. My frienship with G. This friendship has a code. It is not the code of friendship but only of this friendship. It is neither mine nor his, but composed only in and by the friendship - the creature of the friendship. This code is formed by the peculiar configuation of G. and I. (The code is the subject-language of the friendship).

This is why we often form friendships with people apparently 'unlike' us (or why the question of likeness/ unlikeness is not primary): because of the peculiarity of the composition. The elements of the composition are 'unlike' judged simply on the axis of resemblance, but as elements of a composition there is no problem.

Friendship:

M Foucault: Let us speak about friends, then, but I will not speakto you of friends as such. I belong perhaps to a rather old-fashioned generation for whom friendship is something at oncecapital and superstitious. And I confess that I always have some difficulty in completely superimposing or integrating relationships of friendship with organizations, political groups, schools of thought,or academic circles. Friendship for me is a kind of a secret Freemasonry, but with some visible points. You spoke of Deleuze who is clearly someone of great importance for me. I consider him to bethe greatest current French philosopher.

[will update this]

willing servants

'In 1855, the year of the first Paris Exposition, Victor Hugo .. announced: “Progress is the footstep of God himself.” '

In the crystal palace of modernity, the signs of Progress were put on display.. Here is exhibit a, the railway; here is exhibit b, the workhouse, exhibit c, the new labour laws..

Return now to the typical address of political leaders in the times we're living. Whenever they face contestation, they have to hide what is happening by swiftly erecting a wall of opaque words. The conclusion of Jacques Chirac's address was a perfect example: instead of challenging the false concept of modernisation, its brutal dismantling is referred to as if it were some chapter in natural science. "The world of work", as the president announced, "in perpetual evolution....."

The economy (rather than this economic system) has its own mechanisms and laws. To be intelligent is to recognise - the objectivity of the economy’s workings and, therefore, your comparative impotence; to recognise that our fate is to be the managers, clerks, administrators; to salute, or assist with guile, what is in any case inevitable - . Progress, Modernisation, the New…..

The particular world organised by capitalism is the Universal; it is synonymous with the natural development of humanity as such. The ideas which function in this particular situation for this particular class or group are universal ideas. 'Modernization' on behalf of humanity etc

An Enlightenment concept: Ideology. Withholding the human world from humanity by dressing it up as nature, as the unfolding of reason, as a process without a subject. An Enlightenment task: to reveal instances where what is taken for nature, or passed off as nature, is in fact merely custom or human contrivance, or even merely the alibi of the powerful; to show that what is proclaimed as a universal - Progress, Modernisation, is only the attempt to place a particular organisation of the world beyond scrutiny and discussion. Demonstrating that something is custom or convention, or mere deception, rather than a fact of nature, is to deliver it into the hands of humanity.

“But, once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants”

role call

'The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.'

(here)

Boo-Hurrah for the Enlightenment

One should always try and rescue words from the work they are made to do in the current rhetorical marketplace, to set aright what stupidity and polemic have turned upside down or reduced to convenient and misleading abbreviation. . One presently rather overworked term is ‘Enlightenment’.

The Virtual Stoa has some questions about the term. He writes:

I think it's worth having answers to questions like these -- otherwise you just end up in a position where you can cheerlead for "the Enlightenment" (the rule of law! democracy! science!) or just slag it off for the bad things you vaguely associate with it somewhere along the way (racism! sexism! Revolutionary Terror!) without letting anything as complicated as history or evidence get in the way of your arguments. And that'd be a shame.

The conditional tense is presumably ironic. But if Chris or anyone thinks that the polemicists who have reduced 'Enlightenment' to a cheap catchphrase just need a few hours in the library, or that the said phrasemongers would welcome enlightenment as to the meaning of Enlightenment, that they actually care about this as a historical or philosophical question, then we are dealing with something akin to a category error.

It will then become evident

The tribunal of reason comes not to terrorise the unenlightened with an external doctrine or fixed measure, but to squint at it sideways until its kernel of truth can be discerned. It does not present the world with an altogether new principle, but allows it to discover the meaning of its existing principles. It compels a mystified humanity to go beyond itself, not by starting again from degree zero, but by a more rigorous form of fidelity. See the following Enlightenment document:

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

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.

Balzac on Coffee

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. ....... coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. ...Coffee changes over time. Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended. For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power. When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days. Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. ...this coffee falls into your stomach ... it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder. ...When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more,... you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie. The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing... One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state ... some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. ... We found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

I'm curious.. has anyone tried Balzac's 'brutal method'?

note on method 3

"I believe it is axiomatic that a philosophy which does not include within itself a theory of its own particular situation, which does not make a place for some essential self-consciousness along with consciousness of the object with which it is concerned, which does not provide for some basic explanation of its own knowledge at the same time that it goes on knowing what it is supposed to know, is bound to end up drawing its own eye eithout realising it."

Again with the Zizek

In the email this morning: the Winter edition of the Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory contains an mp3 interview with Zizek. Meanwhile, Jodi ponders the extent to which Z. has become the mere vendor of his own reified thoughts.

Tell me about your Motherland

The Enlightenment and its Romantic aftermath gave birth to two doctrines distinguished only by the letter s.* The first was that people had the right to self-determination; the second was that peoples had such a right. The former belief is the keystone of modern democracy, and indeed of socialism; the second is a piece of romantic mystification, a fact which has not prevented a good many on the political Left from endorsing it. Nor has its philosophical basis been much examined in the standard literature on nationalism.

from: Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism and the Case of Ireland".

Can you psychoanalyse A People and not be complicit with this 'romantic mystification'???

petit aspect a

It can be rhetorically useful to assert that an event/policy is identical with a particular 'positive' consequence/ aspect thereof, regardless of whether this was the primary purpose of the policy. Objecting to the event is nothing more or less than objecting to this single aspect. The carpet bombing of the village has stopped the operations of the terrorist cell, therefore 1) this action is henceforth deemed 'the removal of the terrorist cell' & 2) those objecting to this policy are simply 'those who wished to see the terrorist operations continue'. As with other rhetorical strategies, sheer repetition can more than make up for sheer vacuity.

Morning Reading

Jonathan L. Beller on Deleuze & Cinema etc, via comments at Le Colonel Chabert.

And L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze

A(nother) note on rhetoric

If your opponent supports some group of people on account of its being oppressed, persecuted, marginalised etc, assert that he/she actually supports their beliefs and culture. Suppose for example, your opponent expresses his solidarity with some oppressed Catholic peasants in Latin America, he is necessarily a supporter of neo-feudal theocracy, sexual repression, draconian anti-abortion law etc, in league with reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces etc

Say things like:

Are you really comfortable being on the same side as someone who believes that a piece of bread is the flesh of God??

Talks

Zizek's master class on Lacan at Birkbeck college.

Ranciere at the ICA, 27th March.

Letters

In relation to an earlier post on letters and letters writing, it is probable that I was thinking of this:

"It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters we receive from a person should be more or less similiar to oneanother and combine to trace an image of the writer sufficiently different from the preson we know to constitute a second personality"

Proust, ROTP, iii, 66.

Secure in the bay of his illness

The writer: someone who is most at home when (and in) writing. What makes someone a writer rather than, say, a philosopher who writes, is that his thoughts do not precede his writing. His writing reveals his ideas to him.

The experience the writer has is of his writing as a clearing
where he himself becomes visible.

Let's say this writer has been to a conference, a conference populated by speakers, by people who like speaking and know how to project their voice and lend to their words the appertunance of charm. The conference confiscates the writer's energies from him, forces him to submit to an alien rule of sociability. So then, on the train returning home from the conference, looking out of the windows at the old docklands, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the winter sun, then he begins to write. Becuase this returning home after conference exhaustion, this is itself a figure of writing.

"One day noticing a small swelling on his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the non-distant end'

Perhaps not to this extent, but the writer is sometimes caught wishing for illness, as for a bay into which he can sail and disembark. Here, disburdedned of temporal duties he can set up his work station. Here, with his writing tablet, his fountain pen, he can begin the ritual of summoning his hidden self to the table.

S.B Arkem-Low

National Homeland

'The Firbolgs-----‘bagmen’ in Irish-----were the mythical people who are said to have inhabited the island before the arrival of the Celts. If there were still any of them around today, they could no doubt claim prior and proper possession of the place, in resistance to Celtic colonialism.'

From Terry Eagleton, Nationalism and the Case of Ireland.

Dropped out of the calendar

I always attributed the phrase 'a day that had dropped out of the calendar' to Walter Benjamin, but I've almost certainly misremembered it. He said something to that effect, although it was, I think, in a revolutionary and historical context. But every year there are days which seem to have 'dropped out of the calendar', by which I mean only two things:

1) A day like today, in February, when I can walk down the street without a coat, sit out on the balcony reading, breathing in what feels almost like spring air. So it's like a Spring day, or a promise of that, interpolated into February.



2.) A day which doesn't fit its designated name. So, on or near Christmas for example, people will say 'it feels like a Sunday' or simply 'what day is it?' But in particular, and these are curiously among my favourites, those days that fall between the end of Christmas and the beginning of the New Year - days which seem to have no place, supernumerary days, where time seems to pause, idle days but without guilt, for time itself is stalling not you. These days are, in time, what a railway station is spatially.

2 Interviews

Both lucid and interesting. This, with Lacan (from 1957); and this (via A Gauche) with Badiou.

Here is Badiou on Zizek, which I quote partly because of my (near) agreement with it, partly becuase of what I take to be the twinkle of humour in it:


I think that the brilliant work of Žižek is something like the creation of a conceptual matrix that has the power to shed new light on a great field of cultural facts: movies, books, sexual differences, sexual practices, psychoanalysis, and so on. And so I read Žižek as a strange and completely new composition, the composition of a conceptual nucleus between Lacan and German Idealism. He is an absolutely singular unification of Lacan and Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. With this sort of conceptual nucleus, with this conceptual matrix, Žižek can interpret anything in the world. You can ask him, ‘What do you think about this horrible movie?’ And he will have a brilliant interpretation that is much better than the actual movie because his conceptual matrix is very strong and very convincing.

As if..

Last week I had to assess some student presentations. One student gave an interesting talk about ‘Virtual worlds’, a cyberspace phenomenon I hadn’t really been aware of. These are fictional or imaginary worlds given graphic realisation online. They are not copies of particular real locations; nor are they necessarily fantastic (comic-book scifi escapism). Some generic hotel, bar or beach would be typical, it seems. Computer users enter into and ‘hang out’ in these spaces, through some iconic on-screen representation of themselves. However, it is not a game as such - there is no specific task or grid of rules, the time of a visit is not pre-determined. It’s simply a space to 'hang out', but from which the body is exempt.

Now according to the student, people apparently purchase objects or space within these worlds. A virtual island has recently been bought for a significant sum. One enters into a world which is in some sense fictional, and yet there is the desire for and possibility of possession.

This led to some random thoughts on fictional worlds and the category of the ‘fictional’ in general. Of course in one sense, a novel by Dickens or Proust (or whoever) constructs a recognisable ‘world’, similar to but distinct from that of the reader. One enters into this little universe, which has its peculiar feel, a whole phenomenology of characteristic ‘experiences’, the illusion even of textures and odours. Reading Proust or Dickens is to dwell in this world. And withdrawing from such a world can be an abrupt and vaguely disappointing transition. Not wanting to put the book down is among other things a desire to cleave to a certain world, to abide with and in it. It, too then is a ‘virtual world’. But at no stage, when we read the description of a clock on the mantelpiece, of an old sturdy chair do we, or can we say ‘I want to buy that’. Of course, it’s ridiculous. But when we talk about fictional objects, it would seem that not all fictional objects are equally fictional.



I wonder if readers might recommend something on this subject, ie, a possible taxonomy of fictions and degrees of fiction, including legal and political examples. In the film Michael Collins, DeValera, after the 1916 Rising, but before the Irish Free State, DeValera is made to say “We must act as if the Republic is a fact”. I’m unsure whether it’s an actual quote but the idea is that of the enabling fiction. Acting in fidelity to the fiction produces real and otherwise unrealisable effects. What we might question is how this Republic is any less fictional than the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” which it would replace? Is the latter not itself a legal fiction supported and made solid by law, bureaucratic structures and military force? Now before Ireland gained any kind of independence, DeValera also forms, and heads, a ‘cabinet’ with designated ministers. Is this cabinet qua cabinet a fictional entity? Does it await the nod of a posterity - which it also helps bring about - to make it ‘real’? But if it is a fictional entity it is obviously not so in the same way as Mme Verdurin’s Drawing room, or the ‘Elsinore’ that a theatre audience (agree to) see before them on the stage.

These are banal points. But what would interest me is a book which dealt with the category of the fictional without confining itself to the literary, and which when it did look at literary-fictional worlds saw them in relation to the that inescapable quota or fiction which is part of the very texture of (and not the opposite of) reality.

If you knew for certain..

In the pub with G., remembering from university those ‘thought experiments’ much beloved by certain philosophers of the ‘analytical’ persuasion. Such as: if you knew for certain that torturing Mr X would yield knowledge of the whereabouts of 7 hostages who would otherwise die, would it be legitimate..

G. thinks these are valid tools of philosophical enquiry. I reply that they invariably seem to involve some impossible posited ‘certainty.’ Since this certainty is an abstraction, it can surely have little or no practical moral value. It appears almost as a tool forcing you to accept the conclusion in question.. ‘If you knew for certain that feeding a live human being to some rats would prevent nuclear bombs being dropped on every capital city in the world…”. These curious hypotheticals are like ruses permitting some particular fantasy-scene of cruelty or whatever. And with the alibi of disinterested theoretical speculation.

Easter 1916; or, the politics of weather erosion.

Let’s begin with a possible addition to the ‘notes on rhetoric’: if your opponent proposes a stark moral choice, you reply 'if only reality were that simple’ and accuse him/her of blinkered binary thinking or whatever. If the shoe is on the other foot, your opponent is unnecessarily complicating (sophistry, over-analysis) the simple reality of the matter. In both cases there is an appeal to a ‘reality’ that is either being obscured through theory and over-analysis or forced into an artificial or schematic framework. Reality can be impossibly messy or obtrusively obvious, depending on your rhetorical purpose.



This rhetorical appeal - to a reality that debunks our cherished myths or mere theories - is commonplace. I've been reading a number of recent articles on the 1916 rising in Ireland, the subject of a recent book by Charles Townshend. Although these reviews ranged from the frankly shrill and silly to the academically serious, they all at some point invoked the sobriety of reality against various dangerous imaginary intoxicants. (Always tricky move in the case of history, as the ‘reality’ in question no longer exists. )

First, the historian Mathew Kelly in the LRB. It’s a detailed and interesting review, but here is Kelly quoting from the Proclamation of the Republic:

“The Irish republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irish woman” .

‘The reality’, he adds ‘was much more complicated’. An odd remark for two reasons. It is surely little more than a banality that 'reality will be more complicated' than an engaged historic actor can grasp. (Why would we need historians otherwise?). Secondly, the Proclamation was presumably a political-rhetorical act of a certain kind, not an intended 'representation of reality'. Of course ‘reality’ is ‘more complicated’ than a pre-emptive rhetorical strike. (Arguably, the Proclamation was a peculiar variant of ‘Performative speech act’).. Here we have the gesture of debunking but with no intellectual content.

Undoubtely the worst of the articles on offer was Martin Kettle’s in the Guardian. Again, the usual device:

“At the heart of all recent refusals to bow the knee to the celebration of heroic violence has been a belated recognition of the reality of the Northern Ireland experience”.

1916 is an example of such ‘celebration’, ‘but’, he intones [ha]:

“there is a long and dignified tradition of resistance  to the fetishizing of 1916. it stretches in an unbroken line from Eoin Macneill’s original attempt to countermand the rising”

It is difficult to see how MacNeill could have been de-fetishizing what had not yet been fetishized, but in any case the point is wrong. MacNeill’s objections to the rising were strategic. He thought military action by the rebels must be in response to some provocation or clampdown by the British. (Does Kettle imagine that MacNeill thought 'I'd better countermand the rising before it gets bloody fetishised'?). But once more, ‘fetish’ is there simply to suggest quasi-religious obsession. In terms of historical veracity or logic, it is nonsense. Kettle’s illogic and distortion result from his determination to see dangerous romantic myth on the one hand and sober reality on the other. He also telescopes the past through the present in an attempt to produce spurious journalistic relevance:

“It is also the legacy of a state born in martyrdom and violence, created around the romance of the deed, whose origins are steeped in the pseudoreligious cult of the transformative blood sacrifice and purging authenticity of the acts of a committed minority that al-Qaida or Hamas could recognise.”

This is of course absurd hyperbole. What modern state has not been 'born in violence'? (and gone on to celebrate its violent inception). But it's worth noting how many writers stress the 'blood sacrifice' stuff when writing about the rising. (Kettle also throws in 'cult' to suggest some kind of brainwashed messianism). In fact the only rebel who uttered such rhetoric was Pearse, and though this rhetoric may have proved effective in certain respects, it would be rather silly to think this represented a common ideology. James Connolly, and the Irish Citizen Army, for example, certainly had no such belief in 'blood sacrifice'. And mention of Connolly should remind us also that that Rising comprised an alliance between two groups, the IRB and the Citizen Army, not knitted together by a single political doctrine but by the belief that only force would effectively end British Rule. The elevation of Pearse's peculiar Christological speeches and poetry to some kind of representative status is, then, itself a transparently political manoeuvre, which would have political violence (when used by one 'side') inevitably tagged as regressive, irrational, romantic and, more to the point, pathological.

Finally, even the eminent Roy Foster is not exempt from a weaker variation of this kind of ploy. Here he delivers a killer punch:

'Nowadays, the icons of 1916 are features on the Dublin tourist trail, which includes a "Rebel Tour" -even if the "bullet-holes" on the GPO's pillars have recently been declared to be nothing more than weather erosion'

What exactly is the force of that ‘even if’, other than a meaningless bathos? Should the tour now be abandoned? I have read at least one historian make a persuasive case for the bullet holes thesis – why is this automatically trumped by the anonymous ‘declaration’? Presumably because weather erosion is a factum brutum, bullet holes are an ‘interpretation’; one is simply present in reality, the other a sentimental projection; ‘weather erosion’ has the prosaic certainty of science and nature on its side, bullet holes form part of some mythological narrative. (The ‘rebel tour’ is in fact conducted by a published historian, and is certainly no exercise in icon- or hagiography)

Were the rebels inspired to violent action by Romantic myth, or was a certain rhetoric enlisted (by some) in the service of a violence already deemed necessary. In any case, the ease with which phrases like ‘romantic myth’ spin off the tongue should be sufficient grounds for caution. Such clotted, automatic phrases are themselves often the symptoms of real 'myth' at work. It would be convenient if myths always resided in the past rather than the present, if they belonged to the pre-modern rather than the contemporary, it they were never on the side of liberal democracy, if the latter were simply synonymous with enlightenment.. But this is just wishful thinking. The significant (and toughest) myths are the ones so embedded in our present that they can pass themselves off as the wide-eyed presentation of the real.

Joining Hands

Over at ReadySteadyBook, a review of a new Memoir of Samuel Beckett. It mentions in passing that Beckett considered writing a play based on Shakespeare's sonnet 71:


No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

cf this from Keats:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Please see Ellis Sharp's fully justified corrective to my lazy cutandpaste of an online version of Shakespeare's sonnet.

A new rhetorical trick

Thus, a new rhetorical device is given us: let us call it the Galloway.

The Virtual Stoa was ridiculing Stephen Pollard, who’d been forced to retract a potentially libellous post on Interpal (the usual). To cut a long story short, one of the comment-box rejoinders went something like:

‘Do you really want to be in the same camp as Galloway on this one?’

Delightful. And can be pushed to absurd limits: ‘Small dogs should not be thrown in the air and volleyed’ ‘Oh Really, you’re not concerned that this places you in the same camp as Galloway?" Needless to say, for 'Galloway' you can substitute a designated bogeyman of your choice.

Nb. A lone emailer demanded to know why I ‘defend Galloway’. In case anyone else is proposing to ask me such a question, my answer to him was: “Find one positive word about Galloway on this blog and we can talk’.

Donkeys and Nubbly Jumpers

Emma Brockes interviewing Benjamin Zephaniah:

I ask him what he is reading at the moment. "Chomsky", he says. "I am always reading Chomsky."
I tell him I find Chomsky hard work. "Really?" he says. "Really? That's cos you ain't got a Birmingham accent." And he throws back his head and brays like a donkey.

Thus, Zephaniah's comment is magically 'refuted' by his own laugh. As punishment for mentioning Chomsky, Brockes turns him into a donkey. More of this in a minute.

First, the notorious Chomsky interview. An interview in which Chomsky manages to speak in scare quotes (as do those notorious ironists teenagers, it seems), in which Chomsky's own replies are subordinate to Brockes' interpolations, in which her interviewee 'vibrates' and 'threatens to explode' like some faulty electrical appliance; in which he stands indicted by his choice in jumpers, and so on. But the point is that Brockes' style of 'interview' is hardly unique. Reading it, I was first reminded of the appalling Hari-Negri encounter in which, among many other things, that fact that Negri was being interviewed only yards from Buckingham palace was enough to dismiss any claims to radicalism.

The genre is characterized by a number of features: the subordination of speech and ideas to pop-psychological profiling, moving the physical and circumstantial details of the interview to centre stage, the inclusion of the interviewer as a protagonist effectively on a par with his/her subject.

Let us take the second of these. The interviewer draws attention to physical details: the interviewee is eating a biscuit, has nasal hair, a spot of saliva escapes from her mouth, he's rubbing his forehead or wearing scruffy moccasins. This is perhaps not that different from those pictures of celebrities in Hello etc in which cellulite and other 'imperfections' are ringed with white pen. Goodness, this great thinker/ Famous person actually inhabits a body, and is surrounded by all the untidiness of corporeal worldly existence! But the details are more importantly used to smuggle in banalities and stereotypes under guise of neutral description. Thus, Chomsky's 'nubbly jumper' at once gestures to a whole 'alternative' politics, a crankiness, confirmed also by his choice of footwear; Negri's chance proximity to Buckingham Palace spuriously serves as a metaphor for his proximity to Power; Zephaniah's 'donkey' laugh undercuts his claims to intellectuality with a revelation of an animal soul.

X suggests that these details are 'just setting the scene'. Except the interview is little more than a mis-en-scene. What Brockes, Hari etc are trying to do is create a little piece of theatre, with its expressive props and its two protagonists. What the interviewee actually says can be included only in so far as it adds to the scene. Words are on the same expressive level as donkey laughs and nubbly jumpers. And what typically ends up being staged is a curious exercise in ressentiment. The interviewer is the Puck who, 'safely back in the office', places an asses head on her subject.

Infinite Jest

Regarding my previous post on Big Brother, a reader sends me the following from the endnotes of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It's part of an imaginary filmography:

"Cage III - Free Show" - Cosgrove Watt, P.A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.

(re 'infinite jest' - what other books/ films can readers think of that lift their titles from Hamlet (discounting Tom Stoppard). I'll start you off with A Cut-Purse of the Empire', billed as a 'fascinating and fatal account of George Bush's assumption of the presidency'

Note on method

The pieces in Einbahnstrasse, however, are not images like the Platonic myths of the cave or the chariot. Rather, they are scribbled picture-puzzles, parabolic evocations of something that cannot be said in words. They do not want to stop conceptual thought so much as to shock through their enigmatic form and thereby get thought moving, because thought in its traditional conceptual form seems rigid, conventioanl, and outmoded. What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is compelling - that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought, and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.

Adorno, 'Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse, in Notes to Literature, vol. ii

Benjamin is a connoisseur of city experience. In Naples, he notes, the living room spills out onto the street; in Paris, he will treat the street as his living room. Much of his work is composed in cafes. The non-linear layout of urban space, the ambush of advertising signs, and the unexpected encounter: these are incorporated into the work as principles of construction. The vehicles of incorporation are form and metaphor, which lift city experience from the world of empirical fact into the world of thought, thereby illuminating each in the estranging embrace of the other.

Comments eaten by ghosts etc

I'm going to change the blog template soon. I'm also dispensing with haloscan, seen as how it eventually eats all your comments - many ingenious lovely things are gone that I should have saved. Does anyone know whether blogger's own comments also disappear eventually (well, yes, everything does, i know..). So, because I don't know how to pour existing haloscan comments into the new vessel, I'm afraid that extant replies and thoughts will be lost.


Speaking of words being virtually consumed, always been intrigued by this from Kafka:

The easy possibility of letter writing must [..] have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. [..] Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can hold. All else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this simply nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it..

When he says ghost, does he mean the spectre of Felice (or whomever) generated by the writing? Is he saying that one never quite writes to an actual person, always partly to an imaginary point, an enabling fantasy? He speaks also of his own ghost. Again, does he mean that the ‘I’ of the letter lives and breathes only in paper and ink? That writing inevitably produces a residue of fiction, a second 'I' who accrues between the sentences and who does not survive the transition back to everyday life?

Walter benjamin remarks somewhere that someone's letters (say his to Adorno), laid end to end, have their own rhythm, their own story, parallel to but distinct from the rhythms of the life. They join hands with each other over the author's head. They seem to exist in a parallel time, or even to be the lines traced by a parallel self, a 'ghost' even - a ghost of the possible.

ps wonder who this mysterious individual is (sitemeter):

Domain Name (Unknown)
IP Address 71.214.85.# (Unknown Organization)
71.214.85.6
ISP Unknown ISP
Location Continent : Unknown
Country : Unknown Country
Lat/Long : unknown

Blog Herald

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Walter Benjamin

That curious supplement called reality

Another thought occasioned by "Big Brother": that curious supplement called 'reality'. ie, the audience of Big Brother knows it's choreographed, manipulated, artificial etc, and yet the fact that it is 'real' continues to be the crucial 'ingredient'. If the same 'housemates' sitting on the sofa yawning and exchanging small talk were part of a scripted soap opera, you'd of course think it utterly boring and not worthy of a minute's time. But the identical scene with identical dialogue becomes engrossing soley due to the knowledge that it is 'real' - it''s that little supplement that holds the attention in place, that transfigures the actionless, badly written TV drama into something deserving of your fascination.

Now, at the risk of a making a rather ridiculous leap, this 'supplement' of reality figures also, but in a different way, in the Wilkomirski affair. Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments was published as the memoir of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. It was praised as profoundly moving, a literary masterpiece, 'visceral power' and haunting prose that would grave itself in your memory and so on. The author turned out to be an imposter, a fraud. His 'memories' were fictions. With considerable embarassment the book was withdrawn, the reviewers who had praised it were made to look foolish, as if mistaken not just about its status as memoir but about its literary worth.. What then had happened to the haunting prose, the painfully moving descriptions? Had these simply disappeared down the plughole along with its reality? Seemingly yes. Although technically independent of autobiographical veracity, these literary qualities had nonetheless t0 be underwritten by it. Like the shem in the Golem's mouth, once removed, the thing loses life and animation.

Catlitter

X asks me about Gallowaycat. No, I have nothing to say about that in particular (nb surely one imitates rather than, as some would have it, impersonates a cat), other than:

Laughter, at those who, clearly addicted to and enjoying this spectacle, seek to place themselves morally above those participating..
As if this sneering condescension at the inanities and degradations of the game weren’t already the game itself; as if their particular brand of smug derision, of ironic enjoyment isn't itself manufactured by the show; as if those who are on-screen and visible are degrading themselves significantly more than the million invisible voyeurs lapping up the snuff theatre.

Admirably they perform their Big Brother task: mop up whatever morsel of scandal we place in front of your nose, talk about it eagerly and with excitement as if you’d just thought of it yourself. At no point reject it as tedious unimportant guff and continue with your own agenda.

Moretti and the Ptolemaic Monstrous

The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that whcih can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared.. is heralded by a species of monsters.

Franco Moretti’s latest work proposes a shift in literary studies from the individual canonical text in all its cross-grained opacity to a "construction of abstract models" based on larger quantitative movements. Part of his chapter on graphs deals with a familiar question: does a form like the novel take off, develop and decline due to some internal logic, or is there (for example) a dialectical relation between it and the reality it claims to represent or respond to. Or both. Moretti’s analogy is the Ptolemaic system:

It’s only when Ptolemaic astronomy begins to generate one ‘monstrosity’ after another, writes Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that ‘the time comes to give a competitor a chance’ chance’—and the same is true here: a historical novel written in 1800, such as Castle Rackrent (or in 1805, like Waverley’s abandoned first draft) simply didn’t have the incredible opportunity to reshape the literary field that the collapse of the gothic offered Waverley in 1814.

The successor or competitor form enters the field not through its sheer originality or brilliance, but due to impasses that have developed within the hitherto dominant, creating a space for intervention. What I find interesting here are two things. Firstly, a suggestive model – or sketch thereof – of how the emergence and disappearance of forms is provoked by, is the result of meeting or failing to meet (in however indirect and deferred a way), a historical world outside them. As Moretti puts it:

The process is, however, open to a ‘Kuhnian’ reading, where a genre exhausts its potentialities—and the time comes to give a competitor a chance—when its inner form can no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality: at which point, either the genre betrays its form in the name of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it betrays reality in the name ofform, becoming a ‘dull epigone’ indeed.

Secondly, though, a certain notion of the ‘monstrous’. Here’s another account of its appearance in the Ptolemaic system:

"The concept of the epicycle was one of the characteristic features of the Ptolemaic system. In the centuries following its formulation, the gradual accumulation of astronomical data by medieval Christian and Moslem astronomers revealed further irregularities in the movements of the planets which required further adjustments to the traditional geocentric system. To account for these irregularities, more and more epicycles were proposed and as time went on the theory underwent successive modifications and amendments. By the early sixteenth century the whole Ptolemaic system had become, in the words of a contemporary astronomer, "a Monstrosity", a fantastically involved system entailing a vast and evergrowing complexity of epicycles."

Now perhaps Moretti touches on this (I haven’t read him in enough detail to say), but where and what is the literary equivalent of this ‘monstrous’? Joyce's Ulysses was referred to as a 'monster', but this was because it escaped the nets of existing classification, it was a herald of the new which could not be named according to the old and available forms. It appeared monstrous only according to those forms. But the Ptolemaic monstrous is a kind of hypertrophy or mutation within those old forms. The old system over-proliferates, bulges and becomes baroque in an attempt to accommodate growing ‘irregularities’ in reality. We thus have a kind of creative flourishing, a production of the unfamiliar (the 'grotesque' multiple epicycles etc), but as a defense against new material and a determination to stick to the old. A defense against the new rather than an attempt to run with it is the source of monstrous innovation. I wonder then, what the literary equivalents of such a ‘defensive monstrous’ would be??

(On Moretti, see also here & comments)

Accept no imitations

Like Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch is a middle class media type who endlessly opines about middle class media types. This might be thought an admirable exercise in self criticism, did he not also seem to exempt himself from said category. This very gesture of self-exemption being, no doubt, itself quintessentially middle-class - the illusion of being outside the game and its stakes can be entertained only by those economically comfortable enough to be leisured and ludic. (The gesture is also, no doubt, just a pre-emptive and guilty act of disavowal that’s peculiarly and comically English). But anyway, Aaronovitch has now ventured into the blogworld proclaiming:

For quite a while now some of the best bloggers have imitated us columnists

This usefully encapsulates what is to my mind the exact reverse of the truth. There are indeed blogs who are parasitic on print journalism, in terms of subject matter and rhetorical style, and who, even as they launch another polemical attack on their chosen columnist, pay him/her the tribute of mimesis. And there is indeed a certain blog contingent whose posts bear the subscript or at least aspiration that ‘this will appear in tomorrow’s Times’, but these have only one foot in the blogworld. Some resemble nothing so much as those early filmmakers who still obeyed the rules of theatrical space, or the photographers who took their cue from portrait painting. And as Nietzsche said:

The profoundest and least exhausted blogs will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees.

Odradek

Over at Long Sunday, Amie writes:

As you know the title of the text in which Odradek appears is translated as 'The Cares of a Family Man', which is suggestive enough, it being a matter of Kafka. A somewhat more literal translation of the German 'Die Sorge eines Hausvaters' would be 'Thhe Concern of a House Father.' The House Father, who is the narrator, is concerned for he just cannot account for or settle accounts with this strange 'being' of wood and thread who keeps unraveling all accounts and laughs when called to account for itself! (Is it also Kafka's laughter?)

Odradek is the unclassifiable, anachronistic thing, the fugitive objet, that prevents the House Father setting his house in order. Its presence results in - or facilitates - a kind of postponement which is perhaps glossed also by this passage:

'"I could conceive of another Abraham - to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer -, an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demands for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fal back on, he cannot leave - this the Bible also realised, for it says: " He set his house in order"'

n.b., If anyone has an electronic copy of Zizek's "Odradek as a Political Category", I'd be curious to see it.

Dead in his own lifetime

“when someone is dead, you can see it from two hundred yards away,” says Goya in a play we wrote, “his silhouette goes cold.”’

What Berger makes Goya say in his play is connected also to another of Berger’s favourite notions, this time from Walter Benjamin, that storytellers are “death’s secretaries”. What he means by this, I think, is that with stories their end is in their beginning. Each event bears the silhouette the End. This is also what Goya sees around the dead. Their life is ‘closed’. It has become the story leading up to their death. To use Benjamin’s example, the man who dies at 35 becomes, through death’s fiat, the man who was always going to die at 35. Death seems to give a kind of ‘verdict’ on the life. It takes a life but releases its meaning. I remember, when Debord commited suicide, a friend rang me distraught. It was as if this one act had thrown new shadows over the man's work.

But Benjamin acknowledges that this very idea of death, and of storytelling, belongs to pre-modern times. We no longer think of death as something that exchanges a life for its meaning. We no longer accept the sense of destiny or ‘telos’ implicit in the storyteller’s art. Storytelling, where events are summoned and defined by an End they do not know, denies the openness of lived experience; it distorts the actuality of time as ‘just one thing happening after another’. The veil of finality that Death lends to life is the false consciousness of time.

So although Benjamin is attracted to the World of the storyteller, just as he is attracted to archaic and outmoded things of all kinds, his literary production takes its cue instead from the modern world of street signs, snapshots, the ‘insistent, jerky nearness’ of the advertisement.

Nonetheless, the bond between death and significance is preserved and held to be necessary. Because what fascinates Benjamin is historical transience. It is not so much that death releases a thing’s eventual meaning. The death of historical phenomenon – whether it be something like the Paris arcades or, more generally, a whole culturally specific form of life – empties them of their ‘illusio’, our ready investment in them, their unshakeable immediacy, their ‘blinding obviousness’. Drained of this immediate significance they are left behind as so many enigmas and questions, or perhaps just objects of condescension and disbelief. But this draining away of (obvious) meaning is paradoxically the condition required by critical thinking to retrieve meaning on another level. It creates the distance in which interpretation can thrive. In order to penetrate its sense the thinker must first encounter the thing as opaque, stained with nonsense.

But there is a further twist. Benjamin’s point is that in staring into the enigmatic objects and behaviours of the past, especially the earliest forms of the Modern, the present too is made strange, illuminated from a point outside it - marked with death. Through the peculiar nature of his historical studies, Benjamin is able to outflank the present and see it as already historical. As Adorno says of WB:

He is compelled.. to scrutinise living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, ‘ur-historical’ and abruptly release their significance.. He viewed the modern world as archaic.

This ‘outflanking’ puts WB in a peculiar position. To some extent, it involves an over-familiarity with Death. It is this which WB finds also in Kafka, as in:

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’

Benjamin himself, I think, said that what enabled him to see the present as already historical was a new phase of capitalism in which things were no sooner supercharged with value than they were consigned to obsolescence and oblivion, the presently ‘archaic’ had only last week been the latest thing. The ceaseless (and monotonous) production of novelty and fashion was infact orchestrated by Death. But what I also think allows Benjamin to be a ‘survivor’ in the very time he lives in, to see that time as already past, is something else. It is a sense of approaching historical catastrophe (What he himself called "An inner intimation of coming events"). It is this sense – sometimes quite obscure, sometimes faced full on – which to me links the world of WB with those of Kafka and Bruno Schulz.