It is not only the word ‘enlightenment’ that is routinely pressed into the polemical service of the present; various enlightenment thinkers are also dragged into court to produce condemnations of islamofascism etc, before being returned to the oblivion and indifference appropriate to anything genuinely different from Today. The latest is Thomas Paine – & the intellectual sloth (and borderline plagiarism) with which his ventriloquist, C.Hitchens, makes him mouth various unexceptional platitudes is exposed rather lethally by John Barrell. He begins by quoting CH as follows: If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason.’ That’s it, isn’t it – the dark times, the islamofascist threat, are vile anti-bodies injected into our jaded imaginations, our etiolated ballet box world, so that we might once again discover democracy and 'our way of life' as precarious, threatened and (therefore) all the more prized.
In a world where economic and political power are increasingly unaccountable, democracy etc need to be re-thought and transformed from within, not simply given booster jabs from conjured external threats. What’s required is not an external demon which affords us a false measure of the value of our democracy etc, and consolidates its present state, but the intellectual and political work, the resetting of parameters, that allows us to measure the insufficiency of that present state, and make it, thereby, the object of radical transformation.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Friday, November 24, 2006
A Theological Approach to Zizek
Well, I was sat outside a certain café on Chalton Street today and these two academics from the British Library (just round the corner) plonked themselves on my table. One of them had a paper on ‘Philip Larkin: A Theological Approach’ (or somesuch) and was gleefully talking theology department politics with his sidekick – all the little buzzwords and terms of art. So at one point, and not for any reason I remember, the sidekick mentions Zizek, and the Theological Approach to Philip Larkin replies with ‘Oh, I understand he’s a complete charlatan’, where ‘understand’ means of course ‘have heard’ or ‘this is the consensus among the Theological Approach people isn’t it?’. He then goes on to reproduce his available stock of Zizek hearsay, to nods of recognition from the other. And the point of this anecdote is, well, not very much. Other than this word ‘charlatan’ and the concept of ‘charlatanry’ in the academic community – it is, in fact, a spectre they are constantly having to exorcise. It haunts all academic communities. Not because these communities are full of impostures, but there is an element of ‘imposture’ that accompanies their increasingly specialised activities.
One has to give off, to emit, certain social/group signs, which are not simply the same as intellectual content, but signs of elective belonging to a community, signs of a specific rhetorical competence, signs that one knows the recognised moves and the shibbolethic names. This includes what is pejoratively dismissed as ‘jargon’ but goes beyond it. It incorporates the in-house lingua franca, the 'correct' (but often quickly remaindered) capital, and so forth. And it can happen that someone who has mastery of the recognised insignia but little intellectual content can achieve greater success than one inversely blessed. So…there is always the haunting possibility that one has been seduced by the game and its signifiers, that one is responding to this as much as anything else.
Moreover, it is an unsurprising and frequently observed law that when one academic groupuscule encounters the linguistic and rhetorical signs of another, it can see only an empty game, a protective cordon around nothing. And in that moment, it catches sight of its own image in the glass.
One has to give off, to emit, certain social/group signs, which are not simply the same as intellectual content, but signs of elective belonging to a community, signs of a specific rhetorical competence, signs that one knows the recognised moves and the shibbolethic names. This includes what is pejoratively dismissed as ‘jargon’ but goes beyond it. It incorporates the in-house lingua franca, the 'correct' (but often quickly remaindered) capital, and so forth. And it can happen that someone who has mastery of the recognised insignia but little intellectual content can achieve greater success than one inversely blessed. So…there is always the haunting possibility that one has been seduced by the game and its signifiers, that one is responding to this as much as anything else.
Moreover, it is an unsurprising and frequently observed law that when one academic groupuscule encounters the linguistic and rhetorical signs of another, it can see only an empty game, a protective cordon around nothing. And in that moment, it catches sight of its own image in the glass.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Blogging out of place
Some time ago I was sent an email inviting me to write on the question ‘Why blog?’ The belated response below concerns, of course, only my own reasons.
For some time I’d kept a notebook with thoughts on things I’d been reading and so on. The blog was really a continuation of this. But what differentiates the blog from the private notebook is the fact of having a potential readership – this knowledge (irrespective of who or how many) is enough to enable and urge a legibility beyond the merely private. This, for me, touches also on one of the attractions of blogging. You don’t have to commodify your site to entice a certain ‘community’. You don’t have to worry about sales. You can pretty much write anything, no matter how idiosyncratic, esoteric, odd, and someone will gravitate toward it. The blog will, effectively, select its own audience. Needless to say, there are plenty of bloggers who worry terribly about 'hits', and modify their blog content accordingly (consciously or unconsciously). There are blogs that imitate magazines, or in other ways mime the forms and content of the printworld, some address their wares to an established category of reader, but none of these things are a necessity of blogging.
CS started somewhere in-between the private notebook and the academic text. The content and tone were to be experimental, draft-like. Thoughts and ideas, written in the pseudonymous voice of Kaplan could be cast into print and cast before the big virtual Nobody. They were to embody transient convictions and incomplete ideas. Out in the open, these would be tested, clarified, found wanting or whatever. The pseudonym was key, in escaping the censorship of the proper name. This brings me to a second more general point about blogging.
There is the line from Nietzsche, that a thought comes when it wants, it is not initiated by the ‘I’. Such self-manifesting thoughts have their own force and logic, which the I must listen to, pursue, develop. But ordinarily there comes a moment when the writer must make these thoughts accountable to (organise them around) his proper name. In short, the ‘I’ must ‘assume responsibility’ for its thoughts, make them consistent with one another and with the name of the I. Blogging escapes this necessity. Thoughts are collected under the pseudonym but not organised by it. The pseudonym need only differentiate you from other bloggers. It bears little responsibility. Any flack directed at posts is born by the pseudonym; the author escapes untouched.
Again, there are blogs which make the full facts of authorship available: name, picture, profession. The words on the page are given a reassuring Symbolic support. The blog is, as it were, registered. There are others who, for whatever reasons, have slipped the proper name and professional title that elsewhere slant or constrain their speech. Adopting something that’s obviously a mask, you can dispense with the necessary everyday mask that carries your name.
The pseudonym is not only a fiction that facilitates a truth. There is, I think, a further point.
The anonymity of blogging seems to irk some people. One does not know to whom (the category of person) one is speaking. Frequently, a convenient and stereotyped role has to be invented for the interlocutor – s/he must be a Revolutionary Student, a Hysterical Woman, a Middle Class Liberal etc. Once a place has been assigned his/her discourse no longer has to be taken as read but is coloured in advance by a Symbolic classification. Note also the glee/ relief when a bloggers identity is partially uncovered or disclosed– the routine appeal to Lenin’s student status , the change of tone when it was discovered, for example, that the author of Alphonse van Worden was a woman. One is no longer confined to addressing the posts themselves; one can now assign them their place, address some familiar Symbolic niche. The anonymity of blogging promises, perhaps, dialogue stripped of such Categorical supports.
The possibility of blogging here is related to a possibility inherent in writing. The written ‘I’ is stripped of its symbolic clothing – those signs in the voice or demeanour that lend it authority, register its ‘grade of culture’, assign it gender, class, age etc. The words must themselves speak, can circulate freely. It is for this reason I imagine a blogosphere of pseudonyms. There is nothing allowing us to ‘register’ the author, to assign him/ her Symbolic place. No pictures, no names, professions. No one declares their place of enunciation; nothing is delivered upfront to the Police*. There is only the romance of the Name: a disguise and revelation at once.
[* 'that regime which assigns things and people their place, which prescribes a certain order']
For some time I’d kept a notebook with thoughts on things I’d been reading and so on. The blog was really a continuation of this. But what differentiates the blog from the private notebook is the fact of having a potential readership – this knowledge (irrespective of who or how many) is enough to enable and urge a legibility beyond the merely private. This, for me, touches also on one of the attractions of blogging. You don’t have to commodify your site to entice a certain ‘community’. You don’t have to worry about sales. You can pretty much write anything, no matter how idiosyncratic, esoteric, odd, and someone will gravitate toward it. The blog will, effectively, select its own audience. Needless to say, there are plenty of bloggers who worry terribly about 'hits', and modify their blog content accordingly (consciously or unconsciously). There are blogs that imitate magazines, or in other ways mime the forms and content of the printworld, some address their wares to an established category of reader, but none of these things are a necessity of blogging.
CS started somewhere in-between the private notebook and the academic text. The content and tone were to be experimental, draft-like. Thoughts and ideas, written in the pseudonymous voice of Kaplan could be cast into print and cast before the big virtual Nobody. They were to embody transient convictions and incomplete ideas. Out in the open, these would be tested, clarified, found wanting or whatever. The pseudonym was key, in escaping the censorship of the proper name. This brings me to a second more general point about blogging.
There is the line from Nietzsche, that a thought comes when it wants, it is not initiated by the ‘I’. Such self-manifesting thoughts have their own force and logic, which the I must listen to, pursue, develop. But ordinarily there comes a moment when the writer must make these thoughts accountable to (organise them around) his proper name. In short, the ‘I’ must ‘assume responsibility’ for its thoughts, make them consistent with one another and with the name of the I. Blogging escapes this necessity. Thoughts are collected under the pseudonym but not organised by it. The pseudonym need only differentiate you from other bloggers. It bears little responsibility. Any flack directed at posts is born by the pseudonym; the author escapes untouched.
Again, there are blogs which make the full facts of authorship available: name, picture, profession. The words on the page are given a reassuring Symbolic support. The blog is, as it were, registered. There are others who, for whatever reasons, have slipped the proper name and professional title that elsewhere slant or constrain their speech. Adopting something that’s obviously a mask, you can dispense with the necessary everyday mask that carries your name.
The pseudonym is not only a fiction that facilitates a truth. There is, I think, a further point.
The anonymity of blogging seems to irk some people. One does not know to whom (the category of person) one is speaking. Frequently, a convenient and stereotyped role has to be invented for the interlocutor – s/he must be a Revolutionary Student, a Hysterical Woman, a Middle Class Liberal etc. Once a place has been assigned his/her discourse no longer has to be taken as read but is coloured in advance by a Symbolic classification. Note also the glee/ relief when a bloggers identity is partially uncovered or disclosed– the routine appeal to Lenin’s student status , the change of tone when it was discovered, for example, that the author of Alphonse van Worden was a woman. One is no longer confined to addressing the posts themselves; one can now assign them their place, address some familiar Symbolic niche. The anonymity of blogging promises, perhaps, dialogue stripped of such Categorical supports.
The possibility of blogging here is related to a possibility inherent in writing. The written ‘I’ is stripped of its symbolic clothing – those signs in the voice or demeanour that lend it authority, register its ‘grade of culture’, assign it gender, class, age etc. The words must themselves speak, can circulate freely. It is for this reason I imagine a blogosphere of pseudonyms. There is nothing allowing us to ‘register’ the author, to assign him/ her Symbolic place. No pictures, no names, professions. No one declares their place of enunciation; nothing is delivered upfront to the Police*. There is only the romance of the Name: a disguise and revelation at once.
[* 'that regime which assigns things and people their place, which prescribes a certain order']
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Aaronovitch Syndrome (once again)
China Mieville has an article on the lies of our rulers (via Lenin):
In cases like Aaronovitch, there is a certain earnest investment in the game that seems at times to go beyond that of the actual players. They, the 'public intellectuals', have neither the cynical reckoning of the politician nor the cynical disbelief of the disenfranchised. What they appear not to countenance is that there is the selling of policy on the one hand, and the actual conception and planning of that policy on the other, and that these two may differ radically. Such suggestions are typically dismissed as ‘crude’ or vulgar (as if their own earnest literalism was a badge of maturity). A Pseudo-Zizekian defence of such people might be to say that there is something almost heroic about assuming as true and holding to a ‘symbolic fiction’ peddled with casual cynicism by those in power - as if adhering with ‘wilful naivety’ to the Order of the Lie might thereby secure its eventual truth; as if 'it's important that someone believes this stuff, so it might as well be me'. But anyways..
In the case of those who are ex-radicals, such ‘crude’ analyses remind them, no doubt, of the kind of arguments they used to advance in their elapsed youth, and must, on that account, be disowned all the more forcefully. There is a routine assumption, it’s grains of truth hardened into doctrine, that the opinions you form when practically caught up in the world - Home, Job, Family etc - are automatically more mature and nuanced than when, less socially and financially secure, you looked at the world askance.
It seems to me that the ‘cynical’ view of politics, far from being the badge of a phantasy middle-class, is a popular one, the view of those who are at ten removes from the spectacle, the disenfranchised. The journos and scribblers, the academics hauled before the Newsnight cameras, on the other hand, feel close enough to the spectacle, the game, to believe that they might just be players. They are in sight of the crumbs from the table rather than being excluded from the feast.
But back to the phantasy and real ‘middle class’, one last time. It’s clear that much pro-war opinion came from the middle class intelligentsia, journalists and scribes of one sort or another - not that they choose to see themselves that way, or to see their own opinion as a mere expression of their class or as the mental sublimate of their fancy diet. Indeed, as others have pointed out, if the dinner-party chatterati label names anyone, it names Blairite Islingtonians. (Similarly, the pro-war bloggers were academics, journalists, disgruntled sub-editors and so on). Anti-war positions, on the other hand, could be heard –among countless other places - in many a local working class pub, and it would be as meaningful referring to these as ‘pub orthodoxies’ as ‘bruschetta orthodoxies’ (i.e. equally meaningless), except this would backfire rhetorically and appear snooty.
So it is no accident, that in the face of genuinely popular opposition to the war, extending through all classes of the population, and despite commonly expressed cynicism regarding the official justifications, those same journos and scribblers chose to invent instead an infantile pantomime of stock characters, and to throw stones at the phantoms of their own brains.
Of course, though the fundamental purpose of these lies isn’t to be convincing, that doesn’t stop some people being convinced. And as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, governments make the ‘reasonable assumption’ that ‘public intellectuals’ are the most gullible when it comes to propaganda. Witness, for example, David Aaronovitch’s thunderous 2003 declaration about the legendary WMDS: “If nothing
is eventually found, I – as a supporter of the war – will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US, ever again..”
In cases like Aaronovitch, there is a certain earnest investment in the game that seems at times to go beyond that of the actual players. They, the 'public intellectuals', have neither the cynical reckoning of the politician nor the cynical disbelief of the disenfranchised. What they appear not to countenance is that there is the selling of policy on the one hand, and the actual conception and planning of that policy on the other, and that these two may differ radically. Such suggestions are typically dismissed as ‘crude’ or vulgar (as if their own earnest literalism was a badge of maturity). A Pseudo-Zizekian defence of such people might be to say that there is something almost heroic about assuming as true and holding to a ‘symbolic fiction’ peddled with casual cynicism by those in power - as if adhering with ‘wilful naivety’ to the Order of the Lie might thereby secure its eventual truth; as if 'it's important that someone believes this stuff, so it might as well be me'. But anyways..
In the case of those who are ex-radicals, such ‘crude’ analyses remind them, no doubt, of the kind of arguments they used to advance in their elapsed youth, and must, on that account, be disowned all the more forcefully. There is a routine assumption, it’s grains of truth hardened into doctrine, that the opinions you form when practically caught up in the world - Home, Job, Family etc - are automatically more mature and nuanced than when, less socially and financially secure, you looked at the world askance.
It seems to me that the ‘cynical’ view of politics, far from being the badge of a phantasy middle-class, is a popular one, the view of those who are at ten removes from the spectacle, the disenfranchised. The journos and scribblers, the academics hauled before the Newsnight cameras, on the other hand, feel close enough to the spectacle, the game, to believe that they might just be players. They are in sight of the crumbs from the table rather than being excluded from the feast.
But back to the phantasy and real ‘middle class’, one last time. It’s clear that much pro-war opinion came from the middle class intelligentsia, journalists and scribes of one sort or another - not that they choose to see themselves that way, or to see their own opinion as a mere expression of their class or as the mental sublimate of their fancy diet. Indeed, as others have pointed out, if the dinner-party chatterati label names anyone, it names Blairite Islingtonians. (Similarly, the pro-war bloggers were academics, journalists, disgruntled sub-editors and so on). Anti-war positions, on the other hand, could be heard –among countless other places - in many a local working class pub, and it would be as meaningful referring to these as ‘pub orthodoxies’ as ‘bruschetta orthodoxies’ (i.e. equally meaningless), except this would backfire rhetorically and appear snooty.
So it is no accident, that in the face of genuinely popular opposition to the war, extending through all classes of the population, and despite commonly expressed cynicism regarding the official justifications, those same journos and scribblers chose to invent instead an infantile pantomime of stock characters, and to throw stones at the phantoms of their own brains.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
(added to notes on rhetoric)
The Pub The Pub is always a sign of blokish familiarity and common sense. Do end a discussion with “right, I’m off down the pub”, so indicating a sensibly English awareness of the limits of mere intellectual debate and touching base with the Real World. (The mere mention of this last is sufficient to debunk certain kinds of high-flown jargon.) Of course, this gesture (of touching base with The Real World) can be performed without having to visit the pub or even leave your armchair – you can also break off a debate by reference to some favoured TV program that requires attention, preferably ‘the football’ or something Popular (never, God forbid, ‘an Ingmar Bergman film’ or ‘a documentary about Heidegger’). Always remember: You are at one with the Common People (who go down the pub and watch telly) and not at all part of the despicable Middle Class/ Intelligentsia.
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