Charlotte St., Exit.

Catholic Herald

Mildly intrigued by a visit here from the Vatican:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kafka sunday never ends&btnG=Google Search

Holy See (vatican City State)
Region
Holy See (vatican City)
City
Vatican
ISP
Holy See - Vatican City State

This made me think of a brief stint I did at the Catholic Herald. One week i wrote a ficticious piece, under the daft name Fingal Mackeen about my (non-existent) Catholic childhood, evoking the smell of beeswax and other objects of nostalgia. I felt slightly guilty when someone wrote to the paper saying how moved they were by the article, how it reminded them of their own childhood.

symbolic support

My sense of some of the ‘democratic’ potential of blogging is contained in this post on anonymity, and was implicit in these words of Benjamin. (Of course, there are all kinds of other potentials too). The defence against this democratic tendency often involves attempting to reintroduce the social supports of the offline world. as such it is uncomfortable with anonymity. Thus:

The prurient and finally conformist demand to pick away at the anonymous I, a bodiless script, until it reveals the contours of the person underneath. And this, not through wanting to touch reality, but only to secure some Symbolic foothold – establishing that your interlocutor is a woman, student, unemployed, non-professional, or that he/she wears some other convenient categorical label that allows you to place him or her, to restore the proper order of things.

Risible Rhetorical Riffs

Not sure what to call this little rhetorical manoeuvre, but here’s an example of it - the polemical target is Terry Eagleton:

"The only conception he has of "questioning the foundations of the western way of life" is his own set of political opinions." [My italics]

It’s as if Eagleton’s ‘opinions’ are just some personal hobby-horse or idiosyncrasy*, the actual content of which is irrelevant. If someone’s ‘politics’ are marked by (say) a concern for social justice and democratic accountability, then he opposes a tyranny not because its existence ‘happens’ to offend ‘his own’ opinions but because of its injustice and unaccountability. I put ‘his own’ in scare quotes because these politics will in most cases be hardly just ‘his’ – they will be universal or certainly non-personal values that he believes in. If someone advocates torture, her ‘opinion’ is certainly different from my own, but I oppose it because of a commitment to certain universal values. Johaan Hari pulled a similar stunt some time ago, pretending that I was simply unable to tolerate a (ie any) different opinion. Of course, I was intolerant of his piece not because it was ‘different’ but because it was demonstrable nonsense. In any case, how can you disagree with someone who’s opinions are NOT different from your own?? The notion is trivially nonsensical.

coffee & public sphere

via Wood's Lot, an article on coffee and the public sphere. Excerpt:

Historians of stimulants have tried to invest coffee with characteristics that would explain its agreeability to the bourgeoisie. Coffee does not contain alcohol and can easily be promoted as its antidote, as a means to maintain energetic sobriety and keep working, a disposition in line with the ascetic ethos of the agents of early capitalism. There is no shortage of advertising material from the period to support such a view. Drawing on puritan coffee propaganda, the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch asserts that, with coffee, rationalism entered the physiology of man. Its somatic effects associate it with the exhortation to constant alertness and activity.However, to Habermas, the chemical constituents and invigorating effect of coffee do not play any overt role in the constitution of the public sphere. As a thinker with Marxist allegiances, he avoids the fetishism that seems to inhere in the genre of commodity histories, in which objects of consumption take on unexpected powers and become protagonists in adventurous narratives

dream in colour

what if, as part of growing old, people lost the ability to see in colour? The world turned monochrome, with reds and blues and greens returning only nocturnally in dreams, from which people awoke, heavy with nostalgia, to the diurnal greyness.






But perhaps more appropriate would be the other way round, and colour came only with age, like a September Spring. That would be a beautiful compensation. And the young would look forward not so much to being old, as to sharing the new world, and being able to understand the poetry and films made by the old, ro read empty words like 'crimson' and 'orange'.

Irony clause

added to notes on rhetoric:

Irony To give your comments a protective coat, it is always worthwhile intimating, hinting, allusively indicating that you are 'being ironic'. Retroactive irony can also be used - declare after receiving criticism that your opponent has perhaps 'missed some of the irony' of the post. No one will inquire too deeply into 'missed irony' for fear of redoubling their original oversight. Note, you do not have to actually be ironic, simply append 'guess the tone' or 'tongue firmly in cheek' and your opponent will be reluctant to entangle himself in the invisible gauze spun around your words. That your tongue, along with the rest of you, is de facto firmly between your 'cheeks' will pass without notice.

Notes on rhetoric is of course a light-hearted catalogue of some of the tired strategies, fatuous devices and inane clichés used in blogging (& elsewhere). It takes the form of mock ‘advice’ to fellow bloggers, written in a particular style. Very occasionally it gets mistaken - by the terminally earnest or inattentive - for a series of positive recommendations. How, erm, ironic.

memento

"In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work on the world that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuili and televised experience: never in any previous civilisation have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless."

But anyway, reading these lines I for some reason thought of Damien Hirst, for whom the 'great metaphysical questions' are cynically repeated as blank pastiche.

In particular, Hirst's titles - 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living ' 'The Fate of Man', etc. There is not, nor is there meant to be, a necesssary or interesting relation between title and work. These titles do little more than signifiy the title of an artwork (like Lewis Carroll's 'the name of this poem is called'). They connote titles rather than being titles, nodding to the doxa that art 'deals with' such questions as Death and so forth. This is something weaker than irony, a kind of nihilistic repetition of 'the great metaphysical preoccupations'. It's unlikely that even the buyers of Hirst's work are 'fooled' by all this, that they genuinely think his work has metaphysical seriousness. They are content to play the game, knowing the counters are empty, mere signatures of preoccupations long sinced dissolved in irony and advertising.

Another note on postmodern irony

I read that one philosopher-blogger declared that everything he says is a joke. A declaration which would itself be a fairly predictable self-cancelling philosophical joke, no sooner made than evaporating in a question mark. Regardless, the remark reminded me of the empty, faux-ludic nihilism of contemporary ‘irony’ – serving no purpose, devoid of critical or satirical intent, endlessly putting its own speech in quotation marks and the world in brackets. Sometimes it poses as a Deconstructive provisionality, a radicalism so subtle & subjunctive as to leave things exactly as they were before; other times it is a paralysed mockery, its suspicion of seriousness, commitment or Causes merely the alibi of political compliance and withdrawal. (Such ‘philosophical’ versions are doubtless on a cultural continuum with the vacuous and smug sniggering of what k-punk calls Popism). The ‘ironical’ attitude, where it theorises, claims to be aware of contingency, limitedness, the possibilities of untruth. It claims to speak and act from a kind of meta-level. But this supposed meta-level is just one more stance within the world. Irony is no escape. And the only appropriate response to the endless reminders of contingency etc is ‘Well obviously, and..?’

symbolicity ii: the benignant efficacies of concealment

"Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of Symbols In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation; here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance."

Carlyle

'Symbolicity'

“A Symbol is felt to be such before any possible meaning is consciously recognised; i.e., an object or event which is felt to be more important than reason can immediately explain” (Coleridge)

D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick: “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly”.

So, we can respond to the 'being symbolic' before we recognise a symbolised content. And any 'symbolised content' (eg Lawrence goes on to say that Moby Dick "is the deepest blood-being of the white race"!) leaves a remainder, a kind of object a which it further charges with 'significance' in failing to name.

Thus, the quality of ‘being symbolic’ and the quality symbolised are not only separable and non-dependent (i.e. something does not have the quality of being symbolic by virtue of what it symbolises), but there seems to be a sense in which we respond to the former, with the latter as (sometimes) a kind of pretext.

But my question is a point of information. Isn't there a name for this quality of 'being symbolic'. It's related to Eric Santner's distinction between seeing that something has significance (eg hieroglyphs) and the 'what' of signification. I'm sure, though, there's some specific term for this symbolic charge that things have before we know or are able to guess what is meant?

mimetic zeal: ummers

Just looking at the sitemetre for notes on rhetoric, I came across a comment about the trend for starting replies or posts with ‘um’ – as in (something like) ‘um, that’s precisely my point’. Used to suggest your opponent’s statement was puzzling obvious/ plain stupid. It’s interesting just how mimetically contagious these little tics can be, these lexical solidarities, as when people started using ‘redact’ to mean ‘withdraw’ or ‘delete’. A little micro-community of redactors sprang up, only to vanish shortly afterwards.

'Is the much celebrated Spinozan imitatio afecti, the impersonal circulation of affects bypassing persons, not the very logic of publicity, of video clips..'

'All objectifying knowledge about our position in society, in a social class, in a cultural tradition and history is preceded by a relation of belonging upon which we can never entirely reflect.'

'The Unconscious is history'

'It is because we are implicated in the world that there is implicit content in what we think and say about it. in order to free our thinking of the implicit, it is not sufficient to perform the return of thought onto itself which is commonly associated with the idea of reflexivity; and only the illusion of the omnipotence of thought could lead one to believe that the most radical doubt is capable of suspending the presuppositions, linked to our various affiliations, memberships, implications, that we engage in our thoughts. The unconscious is history - the collective history that has produced our categories of thought, and the individual history through which they have been inculcated into us'.

Bourdieu, Pascallian Meditations

Immanent confidence

I think we need to stop thinking of confidence as an ‘affect’, as if it were some sort of ‘subjective’ add-on to behaviour. ‘Confidence’, if that’s the word, is immanent in forms of behaviour, dispositions, speech acts etc. or is the name for the assumptions that guide such behaviour. It’s not some kind of buzz-feeling that accompanies action. Perhaps the ‘the feeling of confidence’ would in that case be the self-awareness of what one already is, not ‘experience’ but its reflection.

[obviously, this is in reference to recent discussions of 'confidence' and class, at antigram etc]

x&y

X. speaks in ponderous banalities, but he speaks as someone who is used to having these banalities listened to, taken seriously, who expects them to be taken seriously, who thinks that the accent and diction in which they are couched, with various Latinates and formal terms, lends them gravitas, and so on. Y, on the other hand, is hesitant, checking himself, apologising for his idiom, acutely aware of what he takes to be the gap between this idiom and the language appropriate to talking about ideas etc. someone like Y. who wants to be part of the academic world, will probably have to digest and mimic much of the language of X. He will often over-compensate, appearing mannered, or his words will always be ghosted with a kind of irony. His language will have the stain but also the sometimes huge advantages of being ‘an acquired speech’ – hesitating between an especial dexterity and a tendency to self-parody. The distance between the language he grew up speaking and the language in which he makes his adult living is never forgotten. (With X, of course, the distance was never noticed, did not exist.)

rhetoric of experience

My reading of Yeats this afternoon was somewhat diverted by the debate on Experience at antigram & elsewhere.

“Even the things that once excited me beyond measure seem to me mere rhetoric” (Yeats, 1910, to Lady Gregory, re reading Swinburne).

Another way of putting this might be: what I once mistook for pure immediate emotion was in fact produced by identifiable rhetorical devices. Or: when I thought I was responding to content, I was in fact reacting to the formal devices in which that content was ‘couched’.

Experience is produced by forms, structures, categories that only later, or by labours of estrangement or analysis, make themselves visible. The value sometimes put on experience – ‘you can’t take away the fact that I experienced it that way, that that is how I experienced it’ – can be at the expense of such labour, which precisely does ‘take away’ this self-evidence/ self-authorisation (which is sometimes thought to indicate some irreducible individuality), and so it should.

Moreover, and I think this goes back to the post on cultural difference, people often regard themselves as experiencing raw data, brute facts – thus, the proverbial English person who thinks that ‘American loudness’ is immediately given in experience rather than being that ‘objective mirage’, that effect of difference, I mentioned before. What constitutes experience is culturally, and categorically, determined.

n.b. It’s presumably not only the mediated, culturally saturated nature of experience that needs examining, but the category of ‘experience’ itself and its historical variability (recall the key role of the Erlebnis/Erfahrung distinction in 20th C German thinking).

Having got all that out of the way, I’m a little puzzled by antigram's initial claim that ‘arguments from experience are always arguments from fantasy’. How so? Any attempts (in the comments thread) to elicit from DM how he arrives at this idea, or why we should find it plausible is blanked, as far as I can tell. As it stands, then, I see no reason to pursue it. (Jodi Dean seems to second DM's proposition, even though her own post on British ‘spatial navigation’ would appear to be an object lesson in illegitimate arguments form experience.)

It seems to me that the first thing to be done here is sort out different kinds of ‘argument from experience’.

If, having only experienced one kind of toilet, I tour the continent and experience several different kinds and thus begin to see that my, English, toilet is culturally interesting, then this seems fair enough to begin with at least. If as a child I am humiliated by a French teacher and develop some general idea about the sadism of the French, then that’s something altogether different. Or if I assume that my experience – of anger, say – is automatically representative (eg of class or ethnic anger). ‘Experience’ covers too variegated a range of experiences, and ways of arguing ‘from’ these experiences are similarly diverse. I’m assuming that antigram is only talking about a particular kind of argument from experience. But i'd also like to make another point...

One sometimes gets the idea that experiences are only some sort of ‘private’ affect that bear no necessary relation to the structures ‘around’ them. But experience should be thought of, rather, in terms of durable dispositions, Bourdieu's ‘habitus’, ways of seeing and reacting which are fully part of those structures, which because they are not simply private can be rounded on and read as social hieroglyphs.

So for Bourdieu, the visceral disgust that a French haute-bourgeois feels at the way a worker eats their dinner is of course part of a system of such dispositions, linked by homology, and reposing on a certain categorical structure; this structure reproduces certain social divisions. So it is that the haute-bourgeois should be able, given certain shocks, estrangements or whatever, be able to read this ‘raw experience’ as socially and ideologically eloquent. And so it is that any of us should be able to argue or theorise ‘from’ our own experience… which is what I suspect K-Punk was doing in the first place.

After the Bergson woman had left the cafe, I noticed she had left an index card behind on which was written the following:

I have always understood Deleuze’s philosophy as one of burglary and
(mis) appropriation. The ‘filtration’ of his philosophy through the vitality of
one’s own desire is in fact its realisation. Being true to Deleuze is to
practice rather than interpret him; or, to interpret him correctly is to pass
beyond interpretation. How few philosophers do we take at their word? Such credulity is often the most radical form of subversion.

Was this aimed at myself? It was difficult to imagine otherwise. Next time I saw her she was passing an ice cream vendor. 'Can i interest you in some strawberry ice cream' the vendor asked; 'you can interest me, sure, but I won't be buying any'. She found this retort uproariously funny - this kind of 'humour' is undoubtedly one of her bad points.

'So what was with the index card?'

She explained that the costive, hermetic character of contemporary academic work stems partly from a kind of compartmentalisation, whereby thinking has dwindled to a professional specialism or skill rather than injunction to change your mode of life.

I rolled my eyes

'Time and again, she opined, the most 'sophisticated' cultural or philosophical theory fails to make one iota of difference to how these people experience the world or relate to others. Out of work they desire only those Objects of designated Consensual Enjoyment - the family, the shopping mall, the trashy magazine and TV, but they enjoy them with that 'ironic-pretence of guilt' enjoyment which is the very signature of their entire being-in-the world and the glue of their collective solidarity.'

Glimmer of Life

Received a letter from my mother. It contains the following:

"Someone killed a hedgehog by throwing it hard at your dad's car last night, he came in most upset by it. He found it at the side of the car with the imprint of it on his window. He said there may have been a glimmer of life in it when he found it."

Freud Memorial Lecture

Zizek is giving the Freud Memorial lecture on 8th July: 'On The Amorous Enlightenment of Adults.'

yo, exchange value

Odd. Last week I sold a second-hand coffee machine on ebay and actually got more than I paid for it in the first place. Meanwhile, I was thinking of bidding for a bookcase that ended up going for 20 pounds less than it would have cost new (ie 200). The mentality seems to be ‘that’s a bargain, I must have it’, like its ontologically a bargain irrespective of what price you pay for it. Then somehow you’ve ‘won’ the item, like your wily strategy of paying over the odds outsmarted the other poor saps. Perhaps ebay should be required to say, instead of ‘you’ve won the item’, “you’ve paid some money in exchange for a second-hand commodity."

Two argumentative fallacies noted in passing.

You make some generalisation about X; your opponent objects to the content of this generalisation. You say ‘but we make generalisations all the time, surely you can’t object to generalisations’ – you thus overlook the obvious point that it isn’t the fact of generalisation being objected to but the particular generalisation you in fact made.

Similarly, you make some specific assertion of cultural difference – ‘X people don’t respect personal space’; someone objects to this characterisation. You say, ‘but surely you recognise that there are cultural differences’. You pretend that the objection to the particular difference asserted was really an objection to the assertion of difference

Objection to content is misrepresented as an objection to the categories through which the content is articulated.

'negative testing'

"The use of the term ‘non-literate’ to describe cultures that are not based on literacy is an example of what Michel Certeau calls ‘negative testing,’ in which a condition of lack and perpetual deficiency (the “non” in non literate) is ascribed the object of research. No longer possessing autonomy (for it exists now only in relation to the criteria by which the dominant order defines itself), the Other culture is disempowered and is unhinged from its own principles of organisation…. A research gap ensues because what constitutes the literate is specific while the non-literate becomes vague (it can be anything that is not literate)."

Moe Meyer, 'Dance and the Politics of Orality'.

> the important thing, then, would be to discover and describe those 'principles of organisation' (we find such an attempt in the work of Walter Ong, for example) rather than simply compile an inventory of what 'literate' principles are lacking. Generalisations based on such 'negative testing' are often not so much false, then, as useless - like saying Essex is a non-zoroastrian society.

All the same, the moment of 'negative testing' must presumably be necessary to any investigation?

'Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois' - Andy Warhol (attributed) diagnosing part of what would later be termed Aaronovitch syndrome.

'Where's it coming from?'

I remember, some years ago, a well-attended seminar at Oxford given by a fairly senior academic, Dr X. It was on colonial discourse. Afterwards a number of questions followed, including one from an American graduate student that was heavily critical. The criticisms were in no way ‘personal’ but were certainly articulated with some force. Dr X did not address them directly. He replied instead as follows: “I’m detecting quite a lot of hostility in what you’re saying, and I’m just wondering where that hostility is coming from.” He said this with an air of almost irenic enquiry or gentle concern.

But precisely this position of enunciation, this irenic enquiry, is not a possible one. Its clinical (in both senses) denial of the argument offered, deliberate non-recognition, patronising concern, assumed luxury of detachment – all compose a position of power that refuses to speak its name.

Incidentally, nor are ‘hostility’ and the argument necessarily dissociable. In other words, far from the argument being ‘motivated’ by hostility (and just a kind of mask for this hostility) it is, or can be, equally true that the hostility (read passion) is motivated by the argument. And it is worth pointing out too that we can indeed have a passionate interest (the canard of ‘disinterested truth’ is an academic fiction) in getting to the truth, rather than this passion automatically feeding the prosecution case, whether that case be couched in academicising or psychologising banalities.

Golem

Camouflage

Roger Caillois destabilized the benign reading of mimicry, presenting a psychoanalytical examination where the dialogue between self and environment is called into question. Caillois drew attention to the lack of a rational connection between camouflage and survival, and as Dawn Ades explained, both Caillois and fellow camouflage essayist, Jacques Delamain, “challenge any neat division between scientific classification of natural phenomena and poetic metaphors found in nature.”[2] Caillois pointed out that the adaptation hypothesis of camouflage is flawed in numerous ways. For example, insects which are unpalatable anyway are still camouflaged, as are insects which are hunted by smell, which makes any efforts at visual disguise redundant. Some insects are so well-camouflaged that they are pruned by gardeners, or the “even sadder” case of the Phyllia, who “browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves…”[3] or, cannot find each other when it comes time to mate. The enigma of disguise as display is evident in the Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who “haphazardly gather and collect on their shells the seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live … deck[ing] themselves in whatever is offered to them, including some of the most conspicuous elements…”

via here

Dogmatic antiDogmatists

I’ve noticed a tendency of referring to atheists – including myself – as ‘dogmatic’. ‘You atheists are so dogmatic’ D. says to me, before employing all kinds of predictable sophistries (‘God is a way of keeping open the space of what we don’t know’. The exact reverse of the truth btw). It’s a tedious rhetorical trick, for the following reasons. Firstly, as if theists, by contrast, are famously open to the possibility of god’s non-existence, always flirting with the option that their whole belief system is founded on illusion and error. Secondly, it of course begs the question: implying that the issue is still in the balance, it could go either way. This, of course, is precisely what atheists don’t think. (but neither do theists). It’s a similar move to creationists talking about ‘dogmatic evolutionists’; and no doubt there were once ‘dogmatic round-earthers’..

John Berger: Ten Dispatches About Place

Berger has a new book, Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

Meanwhile, I came across this:

I’m getting into a train . . . i’ll call you later’Ten dispatches about place
By John Berger

1. Somebody inquires: Are you still a marxist? Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx, who prophesied and analysed the devastation? The answer might be that people, many people, have lost all their political bearings. Mapless, they do not know where they are heading.

2. Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home but a chosen destination. Road-signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others on business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realise they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, long-itude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.
They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance which separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.
Sometimes a few of these travellers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it’s as if they don’t travel, as if they always remain where they already are.

3. The details in the image on this page were taken by Anabell Guerrero in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte near Calais and the Channel tunnel. On orders from the British and French governments the shelter was recently shut down. Several hundred people were sheltering there, many hoping to make it to Britain. The man in the photographs - Guerrero prefers not to disclose his name - is from Zaire.
Month by month millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.
After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.
Thanks to Guerrero’s image we can take account of how a man’s fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend. Portrait of an emigrant continent.

4. “I’m going down the stairs in an underground station to take the B line. Crowded here. Where are you? Really! What’s the weather like? Getting into the train - call you later . . .”
Of the billions of mobile telephone conversations taking place every hour in the world’s cities and suburbs, most, whether they are private or business calls, begin with a statement about the caller’s whereabouts. People need straight away to pinpoint where they are. It is as if they are pursued by doubts suggesting that they may be nowhere. Surrounded by so many abstractions, they have to invent and share their own transient landmarks.
More than 30 years ago Guy Debord prophetically wrote: “The accumulation of mass-produced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporate restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places.”
The key term of the present global chaos is de- or re-localisation. This does not only refer to the practice of moving production to wherever labour is cheapest and regulations minimal. It also contains the offshore demented dream of the new ongoing power: the dream of undermining the status and confidence of all previous fixed places, so that the entire world becomes a single fluid market.
The consumer is essentially somebody who feels or is made to feel lost unless he or she is consuming. Brand names and logos become the place names of the Nowhere.
Other signs announcing Freedom or Democracy, terms plundered from earlier historical periods, are also used to confuse. In the past a common tactic employed by those defending their homeland against invaders was to change the road signs so that the one indicating Zaragoza pointed in the opposite direction towards Burgos. Today it is not defenders but foreign invaders who switch signs to confuse local populations, confuse them about who is governing who, the nature of happiness, the extent of grief, or where eternity is to be found. And the aim of all these misdirections is to persuade people that being a client is the ultimate salvation.
Yet clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where they live and die.

5. Extensive areas which were once rural places are being turned into zones. The details of the process vary according to the continent - Africa or central America or southeast Asia. The initial dismembering however always comes from elsewhere and from corporate interests pursuing their appetite for ever more accumulation, which means seizing natural resources (fish in Lake Victoria, wood in the Amazon, petrol wherever it is to be found, uranium in Gabon, etc), regardless of to whom the land or water belongs.
The ensuing exploitation soon demands airports, military and paramilitary bases to defend what it is being syphoned off, and collaboration with the local mafiosi. Tribal war, famine and genocide may follow.
People in such zones lose all sense of residence: children become orphans (even when they are not) women become slaves, men desperadoes. Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space.

6. Meanwhile - and political resistance often begins in a meanwhile - the most important thing to grasp and remember is that those who profit from the present chaos, with their embedded commentators in the media, continuously misinform and misdirect. Their declarations and all the plundered terms they are in the habit of using should never be argued with. They have to be rejected outright and abandoned. They will get nobody anywhere.
The information technology developed by the corporations and their armies so they could dominate their Nowhere more speedily is being used by others as a means of communication throughout the Everywhere they are struggling towards.
The Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant puts this very well: “The way to resist globalisation is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.”
We are establishing our own landmarks, naming places, and finding poetry. Yes, in the meanwhile poetry is to be found. Gareth Evans:
As the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey
as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind
as the thin birches whisper their stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks
as the leaves of the hedge store the light the day thought it had lost
as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a sparrow in the turning air
as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark
hold everything dear

7. Their Nowhere generates a strange, because unprecedented, awareness of time. Digital time. It continues forever uninterrupted through day and night, the seasons, birth and death. As indifferent as money. Yet, although continuous, it is utterly single. It is the time of the present kept apart from the past and future. Within it only the present is weight-bearing, the other two lack gravity. Time is no longer a colonnade, but a single column of ones and zeros. A vertical time with nothing surrounding it, except absence.
Read a few pages of Emily Dickinson and then go and see Lars Von Trier’s film of Dogville. In Dickinson’s poetry the presence of the eternal is attendant in every pause. The film, by contrast, remorselessly shows what happens when any trace of the eternal is erased from daily life. What happens is that all words and their entire language are rendered meaningless.
Within a single present, within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or established.

8. We will take our bearings within another time-set. The eternal, according to Spinoza (who was Marx’s dearest philosopher) is now. It is not something awaiting us, but something we encounter during those brief yet timeless moments when everything accommodates everything and no exchange is inadequate.
In her urgent book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Sonit quotes the Sandinista poet Gioconda Belli describing the moment when they overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua: “Two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.”
The fact that the US and its mercenaries later destroyed the Sandinistas in no way diminishes that moment existing in the past, present and future.

9. A kilometre down the road from where I’m writing, there is a field in which four burros graze, two mares and two foals. They are a particularly small species. The black-bordered ears of the mares, when they prick them, come up to my chin. The foals, only a few weeks old, are the size of large terrier dogs, with the difference that their heads are almost as large as their sides.
I climb over the fence and sit in the field with my back against the trunk of an apple tree. They have made their own tracks across the field and some pass under very low branches where I would have to stoop double. They watch me. There are two areas where there is no grass at all, just reddish earth, and it is to one of these rings that they come many times a day to roll on their backs. Mare first, then foal. The foals already have their black stripe across their shoulders.
Now they approach me. They smell of donkeys and bran - not the smell of horses, more discreet. The mares touch the top of my head with their lower jaws. Their muzzles are white. Around their eyes are flies, far more agitated than their own questioning glances.
When they stand in the shade by the edge of the wood the flies go away, and they can stand there almost motionless for half an hour. In the shade at midday time slows down. When one of the foals suckles (ass’s milk is the closest to human milk) the mare’s ears lie right back and point to her tail.
Surrounded by the four of them in the sunlight, my attention fixes on their legs, all 16 of them. Their slenderness, their sheerness, their containment of concentration, their surety (horses legs look hysterical by comparison). Theirs are legs for crossing mountains no horse could tackle, legs for carrying loads which are unimaginable if one considers only the knees, the shanks, the fetlocks, the hocks, the cannon-bones, the pastern-joints, the hooves. Donkey’s legs.
They wander away, heads down, grazing, their ears missing nothing; I watch them, eyes skinned. In our exchanges such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude.
Four burros in a field, month of June, year 2005.

10. Yes, I’m still amongst other things a marxist.

Desire

There is a passage in Joyce's The Dead that tells us much about desire. As the annual dinner dance breaks up, Gretta, Gabriel's wife, is profiled at the top of the stairs; she is singing an Irish song. For a moment her husband Gabriel fails to recognise her:

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife

But the revealing line is that she appears to Gabriel ‘like a symbol of something’. The fact of being ‘symbolic’ is enough, prior to any symbolised content. He apprehends ‘that’ she signifies but not ‘what’, and it this which excites Gabriel’s sexual desire, when his wife becomes vaguely hieroglyphic.

What is also curious here is the link between the aesthetic and desire, proverbially kept apart in the Kantian regime. For when Gabriel sees Gretta as symbol (or rather resembling a symbol) he places her in an imaginary art-work, a picture that thinks might be called ‘distant music’. So it is that this ‘aestheticising’ move - when Gretta has been replaced by an image of herself, turned into a signifier of some opaque X - is simultaneously the onset of desire. It is this, the state of 'having significance' which is a property of the aesthetic - that gets under the skin.



But this brief parable of desire is re-writable at once on a political level. For the ‘distant music’ to which Gretta is attuned is an Irish song, in the old ‘Irish tonality’. It transports her to the West of Ireland, to her youth and into Irish tradition (both things already invested with significance earlier in the tale). Gabriel, the Anglicised ‘West Briton’, the Dubliner, who was earlier in the story berated for not knowing what should be his own (i.e. his own country), who is ‘cultivated’ in English and continental culture, is nonetheless aroused precisely when Gretta is suddenly attuned to Irish tradition and to the West.

It is thus also the fact of cultural difference, and of cultural alienation, which curiously excites Gabriel. Arguably, however, the ultimate ‘content’ of his wife’s strangeness, turns out to be desire itself – Michael Furey’s fatal love. It is this which at the end of the tale is revealed to be the true X ‘symbolised’ by Gretta’s ‘distance’, and which removes him from his wife just at that point when he had thought himself closest. What arouses Gabriel leads him ultimately toward a traumatic encounter with her own passionat attachment, an encounter which leaves him unrecognisable to himself.

nb, if anyone fancies contributing to an inordinately large dental bill (or anything else), a donation button has appeared on the right hand side of the page.

Misrepresenting Metaphor

Ok, this relates both to the comments on metaphor, below, and to the previous post on meaning and representation. Lakoff understands metaphor as cross domain mapping, which is to say as a cognitive operation. Time is understood in terms of space – “let’s face the future” “let’s put that behind us” etc. Metaphor helps us know one ‘domain’ by reading it in terms of another. And conversely, we might argue, for example, that thinking of time in terms of space blocks our true understanding of time – it is miscognition, or misrepresentation. This is all fine. But the additional point is that such metaphors are selected not only for their cognitive adequacy, but for the forms of life which they enable, facilitate and produce. The Greeks practised the art of memory. As part of this, it was useful to conceive of memory as a house, with different categories of mnemonic object ‘located’ in different rooms. The point of this was not at all to better conceptualise what memory was really like (ie correct cognition), it was to improve one’s memory. And it apparently worked – the metaphor, we might say, changed its object (rather than forming a ‘correct representation’ of it). Or again, thinking of the past as ‘behind’ us helps organise our relation to the world - thinking of the past as infront of us and future as that dark place behind us, into which we reverse, might be part of a radically different organisation of life. So, in many cases metaphor needs to be understood not in terms of ‘how well does it conceptualise its object’, but in terms of ‘what does it make available’, how does it help us get around, organise our lives etc.

Ulysses: returning to the same point

Wanted to return to the comments Ulysses and just expand a little. Georg Lakoff talks about metaphor as ‘cross-domain’ mapping. For example, when you say ‘she was really cold to me’, emotion is understood – or ‘mapped’ – in terms of temperature; when we say ‘the past is behind me’, time is mapped in terms of space. One ‘domain’ (the target domain) is understood in terms of the other (the source domain).

So it is that Ulysses is understood as a kind of cross-domain mapping with 1904 Dublin as the target domain and Homeric myth as source domain. It's this which seems to me only half-true. What happens rather is that the ‘source domain’ (the Homeric) is broken up and disseminated through the target domain; and instead of being a domain of stable meaning which spontaneously 'reads' early 20th C Dublin, it is used, almost as the unconscious would use it, for jokes, puns, semantic hyperlinks and so on. As with the unconscious too, there is ‘overdetermination’ – Molly is not only Penelope but at one point Circe too, so that ‘penelope’ and ‘circe’ slide and reattach. New resemblances and significances are produced from the ruins of a distant mythic substrate.

If we see this from the point of view of novelistic construction, it is clear that a mythic element, such as the ‘no man’ of the Cyclops episode, is not approached in terms of ‘what is the contemporary equivalent of this? (ie who is the modern signifier of this signified)’ but ‘what different meanings can this signifier generate?’ You then put the signifier to work in the text, like a little programme, throwing up various puns, correspondences etc

Deleuzian Belch

The reason why books on Deleuze are so often disappointing is that they offer only paraphrasable ideas, whereas the pleasure of reading Deleuze himself lies in a style of thinking and writing that indeed comes to rest in paraphrasable ideas but also moves through and beyond them.

Having said that, I was recently looking at an essay on Deleuze and the logic of sensation by Jennifer Slack. It offers (I think) an account of Deleuze's critique of ‘Meaning’ – Meaning in the sense of a ‘hidden’ signified, a ‘deep’ content that replaces the thing itself. Meaning is here equated with representation. We hear a scream, a hiccup. ‘What does it mean?’ = ‘what does it represent?’: (Slack:)“Are you a scream of lost love representing recognition in a narrative of pain and abandonment? Are you a cry of happiness representing release in a narrative of joy?” Slack continues: “Deleuze writes that this practised application of representation ‘implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate’… Even though a scream ‘no more resembles what it signals than a word resembles what it designates’, we demand to know what narrative, what organisation of intelligible relationships renders this response – a scream, a tear, a frisson – a knowable object.”

This seems to me baffling and confused (yes, these things may be all mine). Now obviously a scream does not ‘resemble’ what it 'signals' in the sense that an iconic sign does. A scream is, presumably, something like an index or manifestation of X (as 'signal' indeed implies) as opposed to a ‘representation’ of X. The fact that it does not ‘resemble’ what it signals in no way rules out questions about what it ‘signals’ (more on this shortly). What also seems slightly remiss, above, is that the phrase she quotes from Deleuze about ‘the relationship of an image to an object..’ specifically concerns figurative painting (it’s from the Bacon book) rather than a more general ‘application of representation’. The concepts patiently extracted from Bacon are transposed elsewhere and made into generalities (wheras Deleuze talks about empiricism as extracting concpets from multiplicities).

Anyway, what seems strange to me is an apparent conflation of meaning and representation. Again, the ‘logic of representation’ as summarised by Slack seems to be that a thing only has value as a bearer (or representative) of its Meaning; instead of this, we must grasp the thing in terms of its immediate affects on the bodies around it, in terms of what it produces and the relations it sets up . The obvious response to this is that ‘Meaning’ is not eccentric to affects, production and enacted relations.

For example, the ‘meaning’ of sticking two fingers up at someone does not lie in its ‘representing’ the expression ‘fuck off’ but also in what it does – intimidates, disrespects, threatens or whatever. More generally, anything from a burp (Slack’s own eg, I think) is not meaningful because it ‘represents’ something but because it intervenes in an already meaning-full world. The belch does not ‘represent’ some content. It breaks up the stilted formalism of the job interview, derails the awkward silence of a dinner party, or confirms some laddish solidarity. The effects of this belch will fully depend on what field of meaning it interrupts (or corroborates). The disturbance that something makes within an extant field of meaning, the relations it produces, are its meanings. Within a different meaning-full world it would not have the same repercussions nor incite the same disturbances.

Sometimes, in Deleuzian commentary, there is this elusive and favoured notion of the a-signifying mark or pure sensation, spots or lines of unclothed intensity anarchically murdering (common) sense. This, somehow, is the naked thing-in-itself divested of Meaning. But what has escaped the net of signification is fully mediated by what it has escaped just as nudity is mediated by clothing. Only within and in relation to this world is it 'a-signifying' and, as such, belongs to it by way of negation. And I think GD would give me an approving belch on this one.

Just a note on Ulysses

I tire of hearing the line that Joyce shows how modern life reveals deep mythic structures, how the Homeric narrative silently supports the 'surface story' behind the backs of the characters themselves. But there are few one to one and systematic Homeric parallels in Ulysses. It is not as if incidents in the immediate story are systemically translatable back into their Homeric ‘equivalents’, their hidden reality. Take for example the ‘no man’ of the Cyclops episode – this epithet could refer to the narrator but also to Bloom, whose polyoptical view of things (he can always 'see the othe fellow's point of view'), various names (Bloom/ Flower/ Virag) and fleeting connection with Everyman make him well fitted to this. Odysseus’ 20 year exile is glimpsed, arguably, in the 20-1 odds on Throwaway, like a tiny ironic splinter of the original story. The story before us does not peel away to reveal its Homeric contours. The blinding of Polyphemus, for instance, is not simply translated into Bloom’s metaphorical blinding of the monofocal Citizen, but is glimpsed in the sweep’s brush that nearly has the anonymous narrator’s eye out. In such trivial incidents are glimpsed the refracted light of the dead mythic star. The Homeric content is shattered, re-distributed, a single element appearing in Joyce’s Dublin as several splinters. What these shards (or sometimes brief jokes) do is not bridge the seeming gap between present and mythic past but to measure it.

I explain all this to Gutner in the pub. 'in literary terms, Ulysses is postmodernism's transitional object' he states boldly before ordering a plate of fried kidneys from a singing barmaid and dashing off to the bog.

Nous in the Classroom

In Gastro, an extraterritorial French café, H. and I talk about teaching. What is it that goes on in the classroom on a good day, on a day when teaching feels most worthwhile. It’s not about the successful transmission of some content – which is often the kind of model used. ‘something happens’ H. suggests, ‘it’s not an event but something happens’. ‘How to define this something?’ I say that what happens, in this situation that we both recognise, is that the class is thinking. I don’t mean merely that individuals in the class are doing some thinking. The thinking is not the sum of such individual contributions but the thinking of the class as a composite, including us.’ H: ‘exactly, and in such conditions, it is possible to speak of a ‘we’.. a ‘we’ transpires. It may not be a ‘we’ that is there next time, but for the duration of the class, there is this ‘we’'. This is why, although the ‘something happens’ is not an ‘event’ necessarily, it has this in common with the event – a ‘we’ emerges as the subject of a thinking, and one tries, or hopes, in subsequent classes, to bear fidelity to this We.

Jameson on zizek

A fairly non-commital review of The Parallax View in the LRB. I'm slightly curious, though, about the Theory/ Philosophy distinction J. makes here:

I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about Zizek’s project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical. It knows no master code (not even Lacan’s) and no definitive formulation; but must be rearticulated in the localterms of all the figurations into which it can be extrapolated, from ethics to neurosurgery, from religious fundamentalism to The Matrix, from Abu Ghraib to German Idealism.

I should have mentioned before..

No posts here for three months.

Point Zero

There is an essay by Blanchot – 'Man at Point Zero' - where he speaks of the desire to return to the origin: the point where art first emerges from non-art, where society emerges from nature, and so on. And he suggests that these attempts are not so much misguided desires for an impossible purity or immaculate conception, but a kind of thought experiment, a strategic hypothesis allowing the thinker or artist to round on and displace the self-evidence of the present. Not then an illusory construct but an imaginary one, Blanchot suggests, but he goes on ‘imaginary, almost according to the meaning given this word by mathematics’. I’m curious to know what this ‘mathematical’ sense of imaginary is.

Index Card 5: Body and Writing.

Walter Benjamin on Proust:

"The doctors were powerless in the face of his malady; not so the writer, who very systematically placed it in his service. To begin with the most external aspect, he was a perfect stage director of his sickness.. Even as a writer of letters he extracted the most singular effects from his malady. 'The wheezing of my breath is drowning out the sorrow of my pen..' But that is not all, nor is it the fact that his sickness removed him from fashionable living. This asthma became part of his art - if indeed his art did not create it. Proust's syntax rhythmically and step by step reproduces the fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections invariably are the deep breath with which he shakes off the weight of memories. On a larger scale, however, the threatening suffocating crisis was death, which he was constantly aware of, even when writing. A physiology of style would take us into the innermost core of his creativeness."

Barthes on Michelet:

'Michelet's disease is the migraine, that mixture of vertigo and nausea.. Michelet organises his physical weakness as a parasite would do, i.e., he burrows into the heart of historical substance, feeds on it, grows in it, and existing only by its means triumphantly invades it. Work, in other words being a nutritive habit in which every weakness is certain of being a value, migraines are here transferred, i.e., rescued, endowed with signification.."

Re Proust, then: it is not as a disguised referent that asthma enters his work ('ha, here we see a veiled mention of his illness'), but something like the very rhythm of asthma, which underwrites his sentences and gives to them a singularity of cadence. Asthma is carried over into the prose 'metaphorically': just as metaphor refunctions the familiar within the unfamiliar (or vice versa), so the rhythm of asthma is transmuted within the unfamiliar terrain of writing. The work does not refer to asthma but incorporates it, uses and tranforms it. Compare this with WB's own heart condition, the periodic palpitations, which he 'reintroduced' into his writing. Just as his body had periodically to pause, so it is with his prose. Benjamin's insight into Proust is thus simultaneously a mirror held up to his self.

This is what Barthes will name 'style', the revelation and resurrection within the work of the writer's body -

'Whatever is distinctive in a text is bodily, it is where the writer's desire shows through: whatever is styleless is so because it is disembodied."

les mots et les choses 1

Signs of madness

In the following quote from Foucault's madness book, we glimpse something of Walter Benajmin's world of allegory -

The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if the world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear.. Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organised it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.

Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deiphered except in the esotericism of knowledge

.

Thinking through thinking

I remember (can’t recall who or where) someone smiling at a ‘Deleuzian’ who nonetheless prepared a genealogical tree of Deleuze’s thought. One thinks, similarly, of the Derridean who, when the logic of his rhetoric is revealed to him, appeals instead to the integrity of his intentions. Or people who are happy to talk about ‘positions of enunciation’, ‘discursive context’, ‘phatic functions’ and so on, while displaying wanton disregard for these in their actual human interactions.

Time and again, thinking operates only within the penumbra of the desk lamp, wilfully blind to its own implications, unable to translate itself into practice or to move from one domain into another - esp. into the domain of the everyday. ‘Deleuze’, or whoever, becomes one more Playstation of the intellect into which a pale narcissus plugs before returning to a life unruffled and intact. (And some of the best writing, some of the best blogs are those in which the author's theoretical or philosophical thought is fully immanent in their everyday observations).

But the point here is not simply to underline the too-familiar contrast between thinking and practice, to repeat the adage that thinking is one thing but life quite another. Firstly, because there is already a thinking embodied in those everyday actions and relations, so that it’s not look, you think this but do that; its look, effectively you think this. Secondly, though, and perhaps obviously, there is a point at which the idea, to think itself further, must pass beyond itself into life; but this passing through itself is also a coming into itself, a completion. The idea which is blind to its implications (and to its implication in the world) is stunted, partial. The actualisation of the idea (in the everyday and in the concrete) is in fact its continuation.

Citability

Am doing some work on ‘transmissibility’ vs. ‘citation’ in Walter Benjamin, as in:

“Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority”

“The transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability”

I’m interested in any thoughts (or citations) on this citability.
For WB, Citation breaks up the integrity of tradition and makes it say new things, meanwhile using the vestigial authority that clings to the cited fragments.

To cite involves the paradox of choosing the very authority on which you rely. The conjuring trick of modernism. (postmodern citation, by contrast, is blank - the vestige of authority now wiped.)

That which is transmitted, by contrast, is merely received, taken over – you must accommodate to it, rather than vice versa.

The intuition, too, that something precious in tradition could only be released posthumously and with the impact of a new and foreign context.

Index Card 4: Adjacentism

WB:

In the performance of the clown, there is an obvious reference to the economy. In his abrupt movements he imitates both the machines which push the material and the economic boom which pushes the merchandise..

Adorno to WB:

Throughout your texts there is a tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire's work directly to adjacent features in the social history of the time, preferably economic features. I have in mind the passage about the duty on wine, certain statements about the barricades, or the above mentioned passage about the arcades. I feel this artificiality wherever you put things in metaphorical rather than categorical terms.

This tendency is named 'adjacentism'. But it is a tendency which needs to be understood not as faulty conceptual thought (eg insufficient mediation etc), but as something like a surrealist technique, a way of administering to thought a sudden jolt through the abrupt 'montage' of superstructural and infrastructural levels. Benjamin does not posit a causal link between these two levels. He leaves the connection open. The hinge joining the two phenomenon together is the silence of a connection as yet unnameable by theory.

Index card 3: Adorno/ Benjamin

Adorno:

Thinkers of major significance and power will often produce insights which
address their objects with the utmost fidelity and yet at the same time are
insights into the thinkers themselves. This was the case with Benjamin.

'Benjamin and his object of study were, so to speak, twin sides of a metaphor, or two bodies which at a certain instant and angle reflect oneanother. Benjamin's skill is to capture this moment of interface, of mutual illumination. This moment is what he called a monad.'

Index Card 2: 'The shelter of your Illness'

Proust:

"One day, noticing a swelling inhis stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour that 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."

Kafka:

"From my tubercolosis this one now derives the kind of immense support a child gets from clinging to its mother's skirts. What more can one hope for? Has not the war been splendidly concluded? It is tubercolosis, and that is the end."

Illness is the exemption certificate the writer craves in order to abjure the world without guilt. There is this secret pact between the writer (of a certain sort) and death, or more precisely Fate. Fate confiscates your life, freeing up the capacity for creative work. Fate gives you your freedom.

The wild Irish; or, a note on stereotypes

Eagleton’s recent discussion of stereotyping is criticised here. I haven’t read the TE article, but the summary mentions a familiar defence of stereotypes – i.e. that they are often true, or at least broadly accurate. This overlooks a couple of rather obvious points. Every stereotype-net will of course catch something. Hence, the predictable faux-naïve defence ‘but I’ve met people like this’, the ‘I’m just saying, a lot of Irish actually are…’. But even where the net apparently catches its ‘examples’ or can be deemed to have some sort of accuracy, what makes it a stereotype is (as I pointed out in the comments) that it essentialises what are historically contingent features. The English stereotype of the lawless Irish (under colonial rule) overlooked that it was this foreign and imposed law that was being resisted or disavowed, not ‘Law itself’. (Indeed, ‘Irish’ itself might be seen as proto-stereotypical, since a diverse population, having in common the fact being of under colonial rule, is then turned into a positive entity, ‘The Irish’.) Likewise, with stereotypes of ‘lazy’ colonised peoples etc - they don’t want to work for you etc. Stereotyping is de-historicising, edits out context/ relations of power and so on. The other (I think obvious) point about the faux naïve ‘empiricist’ defence is that the particular trait chosen for the stereotype is always eloquent over and above its ‘accuracy’. The point concerns the choice of this particular trait. The trait chosen, far from being some neutral observation, is made to serve as a figure for the whole class of people concerned. Or, it is such a figure in the false guise of an observation.

Index card 1: Benjamin

.. the unity of a word which is not itself present but instead represents, as it were, the configuration of its various nuances and possibilities of meaning: an Idea in Benjamin's sense of the word.

The 'meaning' of the word is not directly present before us, nor held in the Dictionary's safe deposit box; we do not scratch the surface of the word to glimpse the meaning within, for its meaning lies 'outside' it in its potential couplings and usages and relations.

... similarly, a person is defined by his or her relations, which always await definition; no amount of intent introspection will allow us to see what is only visible in our commerce with the world.

Posts marked 'index card' are literally notes found on some index cards I was sorting through last night. Often it is unclear what is being quoted and from where - the cards are perhaps 10 yrs old.

In response to earlier posts on literature and 'subtraction,' a reader sends me the following passage from Umberto Eco's Open Work:

Any work of art can be viewed as a message to be decoded by an addressee. But unlike most messages, instead of aiming at transmitting a univocal meaning, the work of art succeeds precisely insofar as it appears ambiguous and open-ended. The notion of the open work can be satisfactorily reformulated according to Jakobson's definition of the "poetic" function of language." Poetic language deliberately uses terms in a way that will radically alter their referential function (by establishing, among them, syntactic relationships that violate the usual laws of the code). It eliminates the possibility for a univocal decoding; it gives the addressee the feeling that the current code has been violated to such an extent that it can no longer help. The addressee thus finds himself in the situation of a cryptographer forced to decode a message whose code is unknown, and who therefore has to learn the code of the message from the message itself." At this point, the addressee will find himself so personally involved with the message that his attention will gradually move from the signifieds, to which the message was supposed to refer, to the structure itself of the signifiers, and by so doing will comply with the demands of the poetic message, whose very ambiguity rests on the fact that it proposes itself as the main object of attention: "This emphasis of the message on its own self is called the poetic function..." When we speak of art as an autonomous process, as form for form's sake, we are stressing a particular aspect of the artistic message which communication theory and structural linguistics would define as follows: "The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language."* To this extent, ambiguity is not an accessory to the message: it is its fundamental feature. This is what forces the addressee to approach the message in a different fashion, not to use it as a mere vehicle (totally irrelevant once he has grasped the content it is carrying) but rather to see it as a constant source of continually shifting meanings—a source whose typical structure, begging relentlessly to be decoded, is organized so as to coordinate all the addressee's possible decodings and force him to repeatedly question the validity of their interpretations by referring them back to the structure of the message."

*In an endnote Eco adds: This does not mean that the signifieds (when they are there) do not count. On the contrary, the poetic message so effectively forces us to question the signifieds to which it refers that we often have to return to the message in order to find, in its patterns of signification, the roots of their problematic nature. Even in the case of preexisting signifieds (say, the Trojan War in the Iliad), the poetic message casts a new, richer light on them, thereby becoming a means to further knowledge.

In his “Ulysses Gramophone: Here Say Yes In Joyce” Jacques Derrida speaks of Ulysses as an “overpotentialized text,” as a text which has “already [. . .] anticipated [. . .] the scene about academic competence and the ingenuity of metadiscourse” (281). Ulysses anticipates its own exegeses, anticipates whatever hermeneutics are developed to systematize and contain its meaning productions, and, because of this anticipation, Ulysses evades comprehensive understanding. Finnegans Wake shows the same behavior. In both these works there are multiple textual maneuvers which lead to overpotentialization: portmanteau words, structural and semantic intratextual references, metatextual words and passages, language games which subvert their own rules, and dialectics which produce confusion and multiple meanings instead of clarity. Collectively these maneuvers create a kind of metatextual atmosphere wherein the text seems to be not only talking about itself, to be showing a textual self-awareness, but seems to be reading its reader and addressing its reader. For every move the reader makes to pigeonhole the text, there is the countermove, by the text, which signifies “Yes. I’ve thought of that already. Guess again.”

So out of reach of common hearts

Discussion here about chess. It is difficult (not everywhere and always, sure) to play chess without also reflexively signalling that one is ‘the sort of person who plays chess’. Not that that’s a ‘bad thing’. G. began playing chess at Café Amato in Soho. It wasn’t just about signalling that he was the ‘sort of person who plays chess’; it was about signalling that ‘this is the sort of café in which people play chess’ – which, thereafter, it indeed became. He thus half-succeeded in recreating, in a little corner of London, some wish-image of European café society. C. got me playing chess about 3 years ago. For him it is doubtless a signifier of the cerebral but also of a certain partly imaginary era populated by Beckett and Duchamp and Debord. I agree with IT that chess is an important reference point for a certain modernism. Pared down, pure form, hermetic, with a hint of aristocratic apartness. The suggestion that this cerebral hermetic game is played in the shadow of immanent catastrophe, so that chess is both a defiant turning away from this and its own appropriate metaphor (endgame)

What do they say?
That Lugaidh Redstripe and that wife of his
Sat at this chess board, waiting for their end.
They knew that there was nothing that could save them,
And so played chess as they had any night
For years, and waited for the stroke of sword.
I never heard a death so out of reach
Of common hearts, a high and comely end. (Yeats)

_____

Something also about the fusing of ‘aesthetics’ and pure aggression. Fischer I think said that he wanted to crush his opponent’s ego. The opponent is encircled and defeated, his moves only serve a larger attacking orchestration of which he/she is utterly unaware and of which he is now the hapless and crestfallen victim. the fact that this ‘crushing of the ego’ has been accomplished by a poker-faced neutrality, a cold violence of intelligence, only adds to the enjoyment. Thus, the satisfaction of the checkmate is both a ‘detached’ aesthetic satisfaction, that something complex has been conceived and executed with such aplomb and the satisfaction of a knockout punch. Not that I’d know, mind.

Conversation on a Country Path (Well, somwhere near St. Pancras)

The Bergson woman was busy laughing at a stranger’s head. When she saw me, however, she continued our previous conversation at exactly the point we’d left it. Uncanny.

‘Is it not language which allows us to call forth particular things from the uninterrupted continuum of the visible?’

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘The word mountain allows us to separate the mountain itself from undifferentiated background - you know the argument in any case. The template of language divides the mundane continuum into the shapes of reality. When we see these shapes we forget that, in some sense, we are also seeing the template.

‘Animals, I said, who do not have language, are nonetheless able to pick out categories of object from the seamless visible. When you throw your dog a ball it does not matter that it is not the same ball as yesterday. The dog does not see the particular ball, only the basic repeatable pattern. There is a sense in which the dog intuitively grasps the concept ‘ball’.

It was as if a gnat had landed on her shoulder. She continued -

‘There is, to be sure, an implicit language of things, and human language is the most perfect expression and realisation of this. The world is ‘poor in language’ and awaits human nomination. The dog, lacking the word ‘ball’ does not fully know the ball, anymore than, not having the words ‘week’ ‘hour’ ‘day’, he fully knows time’

I was taken aback. ‘I’ve been calling you ‘the Bergson woman’ – are you in fact the Heidegger woman??’

‘For the time being.’

random nuts and blots

via here, this quote from Foucault:

All my books, be it Madness and Society or this one here [Discipline and Punish], are—if you like—little toolboxes. If people want to open them, and use this or that sentence, this or that idea or analysis as a screwdriver or wrench to short-circuit, dismantle, or explode the systems of power, including perhaps those systems from which these books of mine have emerged—all right, all the better. (16)

.. the temptation to hear ‘Theory’ here.

The ‘toolbox’ metaphor implies of course a pragmatic imperative: use what works – in shedding light on its object, opening up new lines of thought, producing new readings etc. The point is whether the tools are useful rather than true. If the ‘effects’ are interesting, stimulating, etc, then fine. If this does describe much of what is called ‘Theory’, then the argument that Theory draws on epistemologically or logically inconsistent concepts would be wide of the mark; or rather, the argument would have to be that this bracketing off or postponement of the question of truth, its subordination to the criterion of use or effect, was finally not feasible or defensible.

If it is difficult not to think of ‘Theory’ here, it’s also to be reminded (As SEK does) that literary analysis has long since been characterised, and at its very best, by such a ‘toolbox’ approach. And rather than being some defect or quirk, the question is what about the literary object asks for this kind of thinking. This is hardly an original thought, to be sure, but ‘literature’ has been the place where a certain non-systematic, partly mimetic thinking, a thinking which tinkers, invents and steals, has found expression. Or, ‘literature’ is the concession to which such thinking has been confined. (The tool must 'fit' (and know) its object before dismantling it, but does not thereby have to resemble it).

The more recent trend of proper-name tagging perhaps obscures this continuity, and in any case needs to be seen in relation to the institutional conditions of academic production rather than (only) in relation to ‘intellectual history’.

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The ‘toolbox’ metaphor reminded me also of the notion of literary criticism machines – the Iser machine, the DeMan etc,

Sometimes the machine can only be used by its inventor (and this is of interest in itself), sometimes not - we might still encounter someone using a 1982 DeMan, having long-ago ensured his tenure and perhaps drawing new crowds because of the élan with which he handles his now rather antique apparatus. One argument would be that the ‘toolbox’ model has to some extent replaced the machine model. This conveniently recalls the modernism/ postmodernism distinction. However, it doesn’t quite fit the facts.

I think also that the machines themselves were valued for similarly ‘pragmatic’ reasons – for their ability to re-awaken perception, suddenly reconfigure the available literary ‘facts’, produce an ‘intellectual high’, effectively re-invent the text.

Perhaps one could also look at it the other way round, and see the texts themselves as machines – The Hamlet machine has been particularly effective in generating readings, certain strategic or stubborn silences in its design ensure endless copy. Ulysses, of course, and by its own admission, is an apparatus geared to prolonging its own interpretive life.

To my mind the best machines are the ones that give the impression of being bastards – of being generated by the text they interpret, and yet rendering the text new and unfamiliar. (Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka, to some extent). Or rather, it is able to use the text not simply to ilustrate pre-exisitng concepts but to produce new ones.

Danger in the Voice

'Danger in the voice. Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice confuses us and misleads us to assertions that do not at all reflect our opinion', Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human (aphorism 333).

'The flute produces (mimics) a human voice without logos, and the moment a human voice is without logos it becomes demonic and abysmal'. (ere)

via here (this seems to be missing, for one), via here:

Entr'acte (Entreato)

speaking in your place

A thought in relation to the three quotes below: The subject is not first of all a free subject but one shackled by the Symbolic – by language and by convention. Already franked propositions and pre-set grammars of response are clamped into the soul. But freedom happens when this subject, first of all entrapped and tangled in the Symbolic, is forced to make space outside these received significances - or forced to recognise and name the specificity of his/her singular relation to these pre-given significances. And without the ‘concentration’ (under pressure of an arbitrary decree or law) that Proust speaks of you’ll find these pre-given grammars and utterances speaking in your place. Another thought would be that much of Beckett’s prose is about the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of this ‘freedom’.

But my train of thought led me yet further. If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience, more or less the same for each of us, since when we speak of bad weather, a war, a taxi rank, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden full of flowers, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were no more than this, no doubt a sort of cinematograph film of these things would be sufficient and the ‘style’, the ‘literature’ that departed from the simple date that they provide would be superfluous and artificial. But was it true that reality was no more than this? If I tried to understand what actually happens at the moment when a thing makes some particular impression upon one – on the day, for instance, when as I crossed the bridge over the Vivonne the shadow of a cloud upon the water made me cry: “Gosh!” and jump for joy; or the occasion when, hearing a phrase of Bergotte’s, all that I had disengaged from my impression was the not especially relevant remark: “How splendid!”; or the words I had once heard Bloch use in exasperation at some piece of bad behaviour, words quite inappropriate to a very commonplace incident: “I must say that that sort of conduct seems to me absolutely fantastic!”; or that evening when, flattered at the politeness which the Guarmantes had shown to me as their guest and also a little intoxicated by the wines which I had drunk in their house, I could not help saying to myself half aloud as I came away alone: “They really are delightful people and I should be happy to see them everyday of my life” – I realised that the words in each case were a long way removed from the impressions that I or Bloch had in fact received. So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word does not have to be “invented” by a great writer – for it exists already in each one of us – has to be translated by him. The function and the task of the writer are those of a translator.

constraint is the nurse of invention

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution."

Igor Stravinsky

"Writers, when they are bound hand and foot by the tyranny of a monarch or of a school of poetry, by the constraints of prosodic laws or of a state religion, often attain a power of concentration from which they would have been dispensed under a system of political liberty or literary anarchy."

Proust

Elias Canetti on Kafka's Letters To Felice

"To call these letters a document would be saying too little, unless one were to apply the same title to the life-testimonies of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky. For my part, I can only say that these letters have penetrated me like an actual life, and that they are now so enigmatic and familiar to me that it seems they have been mental possessions of mine from the moment when I first began to accomodate human beings entirely in my mind, in order to arrive, time and again, at a fresh understanding of them."

Academic Tagging ii

In a previous post on the practice of academic tagging, I asked someone (rhetorically): 'does Gramsci say ‘I will use Marx’s concept of class to explore how..’, no, he just uses it.’ The reason that Gramsci (for example) doesn’t say something like this isn’t just that such locutions weren’t in vogue at the time. It’s something more basic and philosophically significant – For Gramsci et al Marx had not simply coined a new concept; he had revealed the existence of class.

The current tagging practice, then, contains its own implicit epistemology. It seems to bracket off the question of whether some aspect of the world has been revealed. What we have, rather, are a stockpile of optional tools, which can be ‘used’ to produce ‘interesting’ and ‘new’ readings. These machine parts can be discarded when they cease to produce such readings.

Now, I admit that my attitude here is ambivalent. On the one hand, I of course share this practice of using whatever tools seem to yield results; moreover, I think it is important to keep visible the gap between concept and object, the maintain the provisional, hesitant relation between Idea and Thing. But this procedural hesitancy should surely be in deference to the Object itself, a reminder that the world revealed by these concepts is never exhausted by them.

My impression is that the current practice is not about such hesitancy, exactly. It is about reaffirming the vitality and preserving the glamour of the new machine parts. The Lacanian reading of Wordsworth renews Lacan more than it illuminates the poet, who is returned to Lethe when the reading is complete.

Form without content can be useful if it shows that the form has a content of its own.

More obtuse and obvious stuff.

In another post I remarked on the curious self-satisfied smile often seen on the face of bourgeois Shakespeare spectators, most notably at the ‘New Globe’. ‘Benign reassurance’ I called it.

Whether it’s Hamlet saying it will cost Ophelia a groaning to take off his edge or Timon’s despair, suicide, sexual disgust, extreme violence - all are robbed of their appropriate affect and replaced by this smile of cultural self-satisfaction and self-congratulation. This, needless to say, has nothing to do with responding to a ‘literary effect’. It is as though the plays endlessly emit ‘Shakespeare’s Genius’, to which these spectators are peculiarly attuned. This ‘attunement’ is one insignia of the taste-culture to which they belong.
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B_ has no interest in literature or philosophy at all. She’s happy watching the soaps and reading various magazines. But occasionally, as a gesture, she suggests I read her something. So I once read her Hamlet’s famous mortal coil soliloquy. When I got to the bit about “in that sleep of death what dreams may come” she’d had enough. It wasn’t that she thought it boring and unintelligible. She was disturbed by the idea of death as an endless dream-troubled sleep. It activated a memory from when she was much younger. This, then, was not one of the recognised modes of ‘literary response’. It was not ‘appreciation’ (that distanced and slightly playful relation to things which is the mark of legitimate culture). Instead, what happens in such cases is that some content cuts directly into one’s flesh and into one’s experience, short-circuiting the ‘literary effect’. From a certain point of view, it was a kind of category error. And yet..
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'The influence exerted on the Irish people by Parnell defies critical analysis. He had a speech defect and a delicate physique; he was ignorant of the history of his native land; his short and fragmentary speeches lacked eloquence, poetry and humour; his cold and formal bearing separated him from his own colleagues; he was a Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and, as a crowning disgrace, he spoke with a distinct English accent.'

This is from 'The Shade of Parnell' by James Joyce. What difference would it make, in terms of our reading, in terms of the kind of things we get from the text, if there was no Parnell, if this text lacked a historical referent, if this was not an essay but part of a fiction? In some ways, perhaps not a great deal (Joyce shows how identification works not inspite of a leader's 'defects' but precisely because of them..). In other ways, the subtraction of the 'shem' of truth would automatically re-orientate our reading. Try it, try it with other texts - remove the shem from its mouth and enjoy the fiction of reading it as fiction.

An obtuse and obvious post on 'literary effect'

In response to this post on ‘literature as literature’, a question was posed as to what we respond to when we respond to a literary text, and how we respond. What is the 'literary effect' (Deleuze speaks of 'a literary effect, as we speak of an electromagnetic effect') and is there some definable phenomenology of literary response? [I don't think these questions are the right ones, but that's for another post].

One very rudimentary response to this question, but one you get even from many literary critics, is that we are responding to some fictional representation of x just as we would respond to the actual situation. Of course we are moved by Hamlet because the situation of a young man grieving for his father is moving; we would be moved by this in 'real life' so of course we are moved by its adequate representation.

In this explanation there is no reference to anything specifically literary. The 'literary' disappears into the 'situation' represented. Of course, the argument goes, there is immense literary skill, but this lies in its self-erasure. We respond to the situation, and the success of the literary devices is precisely in being able to draw us into this situation without drawing attention on themselves.

This answer obviously falls short, first of all, in only applying to a fairly restricted kind of literary object – you can see how it works in relation to Hamlet, but not How it is. But even in the former case, there is an obvious sense in which we don't respond to a literary situation as we would respond to the analogous real situation. This may seem both obvious and obtuse, but here goes. If we met, in real life, someone grieving over the death of their father, simply sat in a corner weeping inconsolably, saying nothing, for hours and days, we would certainly be moved, upset, concerned etc. If we went to see a play entirely taken up with someone sat in a corner weeping inconsolably, we'd probably walk out. If, mentally, you transpose the real griever onto the stage, and subtract only the reality if his grief, so that there is no difference at the immediate perceptual level, the response is nonetheless utterly different. For what has been subtracted is only the knowledge that it is grief. Our aesthetic/ literary response is surely predicated on this 'subtraction'. Is not the literary effect precisely something freed up and enabled by the bracketing off, the cancellation of the ‘real’ response?

7/2 cf here.