Ister

Very Rough Reflections on Yeats, Psychoanalysis and Class

Currently reading a full-length psychoanalytic study of Yeats, which as one might expect starts with the family, in particular the maternal/ paternal matrix. What this familial starting point neglects is the way in which the family is always the mediation of a larger social reality, in particular the reality of class and of the Symbolic Order. Within the family, the Symbolic Order itself is reflected and idiosyncratically skewed. So, for example, Susan Yeats’s silence, the silence of the Mother, is not only some primary datum out of which we then trace its effects upon the son etc, it is a class silence.

What does this mean? Yeats’s father renounces his class or ‘caste’ background. Initially he trains in Law at Trinity College, he becomes a barrister. He has family lands in Kildare. This is given up in order to become a portrait painter and enter bohemia. Even so, Susan still writes ‘barrister’ as Father’s Profession on the birth certificate of William. Her silence, then, is (in part) the embodied refusal to recognise John Yeats’s abandonment of the Ascendancy ‘game’, his renunciation of his symbolic mandate, ‘barrister’, his negation of the symbolic order into which he was born and the embrace of a non-traditional ‘community’ defined precisely by this gesture of negation, i.e. bohemia. His wife remains married to the mandate, A Miss Haversham inside her own marriage.

Moreover, JBY’s abrupt renunciation of his ‘tradition’ and traditional titles leads to a number of other effects within the 'realm of authority'. Financial difficulties mean that W.B. Yeats & siblings are offloaded onto the grandparents. The symbolic title of patriarch remains with the Grandfather while the father is condemned as ‘irresponsible’ etc (loses his crown, as it were).

We might also say that JBY has removed a certain ground from under his son’s feet. In contemporary terms he has unplugged from the Symbolic, supported now only by the ‘community’ of art and whatever authority clings to his own loquacity and performance. Legitimate forms of authority and authorisation were available to JBY – the ‘mandate’ of barrister, landlord, the Trinity College ‘investiture’ etc. But none of these can be available in the same way to his son. W.B. Yeats himself cannot now re-enter that abandoned jettisoned world without some reflexive gesture of affirmation. It is no longer simply given, inherited, a self-evident choice. The break has already been instituted.

But the further point which needs emphasising here is that the question of authority, of the Name of the Father (i.e. of Symbolic Titles) which is felt acutely within the Yeats household, is simultaneously the central question put to the Ascendancy itself, a class or 'caste' (Roy Foster's term) historically on its way out.

The question has been eloquently described by Elizabeth Bowen: the condition of a ruling class/ caste left without its legitimacy, its historical guarantee, faced thereby with what it always already was – reliant on a kind of bluff of authority, gestures without substance, objective spirit without the spirit.

The Symbolic Titles of this class lack any ‘underwriting’. Nothing underwrites them. Increasingly, the authority which is supposed to derive from tradition, & from hegemony, must instead be achieved through performance. Performative authority is supercharged as ‘inborn’ authority wanes or is exposed as counterfeit. They must themselves become ‘counterfeiters’.

(incomplete, not entirely coherent, and doubtless to be revised)

Northwest

One must go further: culture itself, culture in general, is essentially, before anything, even a priori, the culture of death ... There is no culture without a cult of ancestors, a ritualization of mourning and sacrifice, institutional places and modes of burial, even if they are only for the ashes of incineration ... Because every culture entails a treatise or treatment of death, each of them treats the end according to a different partition. (Jacques Derrida, Aporias, p. 43)

Just Saying: The Literal as Code

Say two people meet in the street. One says:

‘I see you have a number of grey hairs’

The person is offended, the other replies ‘no, I’m just saying, you really do have a number of grey hairs’ – as though their speech were just some neutral recording apparatus. There is, of course, no ‘just saying’. What such faux-naïve literalism studiously ignores are:

the available conventions of address, the context of enunciation, the selection of this speech act from among others, the whole phatic aspect of communication, the inter-personal relation performatively set-up by a speech act.

Cleaving to the literal constitutes a kind of low-level violence done to such implicit rules of human communication, the rules pertaining to context and convention, part of what Zizek calls the big Other, through which communication is inevitably mediated – thus even these ‘gray hair’ comments are only meaningful as violations of background rules.

One gets this kind of thing very often in the blogosphere too. ‘Now some woman called Jane Smith has sprung to Derrida’s defence’. Now the person may indeed be a woman who is indeed called ‘Jane Smith’, but the statement works – in rather obvious ways - to undermine the woman’s authority. (If J.Smith happens to be a fairly well known professor specialising in Derrida, then the nature of the rhetorical act is even clearer). But the writer will, like the observer of grey hairs, plead literal truth.

This can lead to the paradoxical phenomenon of: the literal as code: a care taken to say things which are literally true, which constitute a ‘just saying,’ but whose real meaning derives from the act of speaking, context of address, the assumed position of enunciation, the silenced alternative etc

I’m thinking that the ‘just saying’ defence and the ‘irony’ defence – the faux-naïve insistence on the literal and the insistent (non-naïve) suspension of the literal are somehow twin, linked strategies/errors. But I’ll come back to it.

Testimony

Testimony’s filtration through the sieve of a subject is not seen as corrupting. On the contrary, this subjective filtration grants testimony its value. (here)

Gaze of another

Have you ever watched a program, or a film, because someone dear to you, but a long way away, watches it or has watched and loved it, so that you are not so much watching it, but watching their watching, sharing their watch, suddenly snug and with them again?.

As I watched the film, last night, the ghost of her viewing flickered through me.

from the Sublime to the Ugly

Re the publicity for ‘Ugly Betty’ note how ‘ugliness’ is merely signified – by thick specs, teeth braces, dowdy clothes, shapeless hair. Any contact with some real ugliness is safely foreclosed. Indeed, the appearance of ugliness as signifier is, simultaneously, the repression, the tucking away behind a screen of any ‘real’ ugliness. And the reverse is thereby posited as true: that ugliness is merely a question of signifiers. I quote this merely as cipher and example (of something or other).

Here is Zizek on the Ugly:

Contrary to the standard idealist argument that conceives ugliness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the ontological primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defense against the Ugly in its repulsive existence – or, rather, against existence tout court, since, as we shall see, what is ugly is ultimately the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as such. The ugly object is an object that is in the wrong place, that ‘shouldn’t be there’. This does not mean that the ugly object is no longer ugly the moment we relocate it to its proper place; rather, an ugly object is ‘in itself’ out of place, because of the distorted
balance between its ‘representation’ (the symbolic features we perceive’) and 'existence’ – being ugly, out of place, is the excess of existence over representation

As opposed, then, to an excess of representation over existence.

n.b., 3 categories that might be brought into conversation: The Monstrous, The Ugly, The Horrible (as it appears in Sartre).

Liberal /Fascist

Lenin quotes Martin Amis:

There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.

It flashed across my mind that there’s something exemplary here – the self-congratulatory tone that hums through a certain kind of liberalism says ‘Look, we experience our liberal beliefs as a sacrifice, for what we give up is this vulgar fascism that all of us feel and even perhaps know to be true. Our beliefs do not spring naturally from our soul, they are a constant and harrowing obligation! We suffer them like a punishment. How noble we are to resist our vulgar-fascist default setting. And the implicit warning: you’re lucky, and should be grateful, that we are so self-sacrificing, that we don’t give free reign to our obscene- superego voice.

Beckett

I came across this nice piece on Samuel Beckett by his friend the poet John Montague. Extract:

when I teased him about the confusions about his birthday, he still stuck to Good Friday, April 13, 1906, despite the birth certificate recording May 13. 'I have it from a good source,' he said. 'Not the Dublin City Records,' I replied. 'A far better source,' he grinned, 'someone at the heart of the problem.' Then with one flat Dublin phrase, he swept my friendly prodding away:
'The mother!' His look dared me to contradict that authority.

Stalker (1979)

La Pavoni

Update 2: As promised (to some), photos of espresso made with the new Pavoni:

I have the opportunity to buy a second-hand model of one these espresso machines.

Would be curious to know if anyone has any personal experience of them. Email me or leave a comment if so.

update: This makes it look rather faffy to say the least (don't feel obliged to watch the whole thing!)

Exit reality via Peter Cook Sock Puppet

It's always diverting to see how people ended up at your blog. Some searches read like the germ cell of some surrealist text "exit reality via charlotte". This was followed by 'Peter Cook cunt' (perhaps slightly harsh, that), and then 'How to draw a sock puppet'. Now I admit to have used a number of sock puppets in my time, but am at a loss to know why drawing one requires any particular skill.

Just to repeat myself

In the strange temporality of the media-world, great sea-changes in human consciousness, abrupt shifts in the Zeitgeist and epoch-inaugurating actions and speeches happen with alarming regularity, or can be telescoped through the lens of a few prepackaged headlines, before being inexplicably dispatched to oblivion by the ‘next big thing’.Meanwhile, one can only hope that the rage against injustice and the silent weaving of hope persists, ineluctably, beneath the noise of the news.

Often, the appropriate task is to insist that the news is not new. Nothing is being inaugurated, nothing has shifted, no great issue has suddenly been localised and brought to light. Instead, look, this is the same thing as before with its spoonbait of novelty. Instead also, look over here in this other media-neglected place where something really is being localised and brought to light. The Zeitgeist is not in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch or Endemol.

In the café today I picked up a copy of the News of the World, which has a bizarre piece on Jade Goody of the Big Brother racism furore. Titled ‘Jade on Trial’, it has a large picture of her face contorted with upset (the tabloid obsession with Goody’s physiognomy is another issue), and claims to have extracted the ‘confession’ of racism from her. Not then an ‘interview’ exactly but a ‘trial’ or interrogation. Goody is clearly desperate, repeatedly insisting ‘I was wrong’, saying whatever she thinks is necessary, having to mouth words doubtless drilled into her by her agent along with the imperative Admit! What she must give up is her claim to be a rational agent: 'I'm not anybody to say what's racist and what isn't'. She must assume as her own the disfiguring perception of others. The paper has it on video too!

There is a kind of ‘show trial’ logic here - the spectacle is not the confession but the extraction of a confession. This is the real object of interest or rather enjoyment. This confession is extracted under duress but cannot be seen to be obviously (eg physically) forced. It is not a sign of external coercion but of subjective breakdown. .

The spectacle requires precisely that the audience is aware of the ‘untruth’ of the confession - the speaker has had to assume words that are not his/ hers in an attempt to save themselves. This is their humiliation. It's not that she has coughed up her soul, but that she has been made to perform the idiotic ritual of so doing. That it is performed is enough – the unforgivable thing would be to refuse to appear on stage. At the same time what this ritual (which passes under the pretext of a judicial process precisely visible qua pretext) celebrates is - as semblance - the power of an apparatus able to produce this abjection.

This little ritual, needless to say, isn't confined to today's NOTW.

(modified 24/1)

ceaseless message

Voices.Voices. Listen, my heart, as only
saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them
off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,
kneeling and didn't notice at all:
so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure
God's voice - far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind
and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence. (Rilke)

1. Wind, Voice and Spirit have always been linked. A whole literary tradition senses in the wind’s breath the stir of Creation or else the restless whisper of the dead. Wind seems to signal life minus existence, either in anticipation or arrears. Again, this may help account for the two principle forms of the Wind-Spirit-Voice: as melancholy lament, exiled and ‘unhoused’ (the note of grief and posthumous exile); or as the wordless Word that quickens matter into life, or glosses the mere letter with meaning.

2. re Rilke, above: the 'power of the voice' refers not to any specific & pronounced message, but the breach made in silence. The voice, prior to saying anything, announces this breach – it begins, strange and premonitory.

All the Dead Voices etc

Out of the old man’s memory, out of the undertow of Isolde’s aria, a voice reciting something once known: O lost . . . ghost, come back again . . . How does that go?

I’ve been reading Mladan Dolar’s book, A Voice and Nothing More. I’m struck, first, by two twin aspects of the voice : the voice as the guarantor of meaning and the voice as the obscure surplus that eludes sense. These turn out to be two facets of the same thing.

The voice gathers up and binds the clutter of letters or phonemes in a single sonority and so ensures their adherence to Meaning. It is the a-signifying envelope of sense, carrying significance but not of it. As such, it perpetually threatens to separate out along its own curve, gravitating toward pure sound, rebellious and self-delighting.

Or again, as Dolar says, Voice always seems pregnant with meaning as other mere noises do not. The voice seems directly to embody this very promise of meaning, without being exhausted by any particular significance.

The voice stands for a validity and power of address contained in meaningful speech but finally independent of it. The voice is this obscure excess that isn’t simply about meaning.

These twin aspects of the voice, as described by Dolar, seem to me related to two typical forms the voice takes in cultural products: the ghost-voice of melancholy or of the restless dead, unquiet and often scarcely audible (see quote above); and the sudden Word that punctures the present with some unanswerable warning or command.

Now both these voices are what is termed ‘acousmatic’ (‘it cannot be localised within the field of the visible’). Perhaps, in vaguely psychoanalytic terms, these two voices can be termed that of the mother (the original acousmatic voice, whose source the as yet uncoordinated child cannot localise) and that of the Father (but typically the Symbolic father, the voice of the deity). On the one hand, then, the call of some lost object; on the other, the unmediated Law.

If the above makes sense (it was written very quickly), I would be interested to hear from others who are reading or have read the Dolar book, or anyone who has thought about this question. I’m currently exploring how both kinds of voice inhabit the poetry of the early Yeats. There is what Yeats himself names the ‘pure note of Celtic sadness’, and there is a connected yet in some ways opposite voice, sudden and commanding, intervening in the frame of the poem yet somehow sourced elsewhere. This last is not the (melancholy) note of deferred sense but the sudden ‘report’ of delivered meaning.

update: Just came across this, which is very good. I'm also put in mind of my differences with D. over Bob Dylan's current voice. He thinks it has tremendous pathos because if its cracked quality, whereas to me it's not so much a noble voice that's been cracked as (to use an unfortunate expression) pure crack - a kind of wheedling, depthless nasal noise. A rather quaint way of putting it would be that for me it has no 'interiority', it's more like a wheeze, like the accidental noise produced by some defective ventricle.

re various celebrities accused of racism, the idea that the answer to the question lies within them, as in a casket, so that only they finally know whether they are or not. They will, no doubt, open the casket on national TV – they will perform their sincerity, as though they themselves (their own private knowledge) were the final point of adjudication.

The reality is that the racism lies 'outside' them in their actions, their slips, their elementary failures of respect etc, and all that the 'inner realm of sincerity' knows to disavow. There is no question 'are they a racist?' which is separate from the question 'do they do racist things'. Far from being the final point of adjudication, they are the last people we should consult, just as we would not consult someone to discover whether they are (for example) generous or a fraudulent. Nor is it that the contents of the 'inner casket' are really insincere. The person may indeed really believe that he/she 'takes people as they are' etc, just as a mean person may genuinely believe themselves generous. Finally, the routine confession of the accused is of small importance because, to make use of the Lacanian formula, they themselves do not know how the Other appears to them. What they say and do knows different and more revealing things than the 'innermost self' - with its 'pre-Copernican' view of its own importance.

Needless to say, though, the opening of the casket is itself only a public ritual to appease the God of Appearances.

nb can't really comment in particular on Cbb, as I haven't been watching it, but here's someone who has.

So, I bumped into the Bergson woman again. I told her about the positive feedback here at Charlotte St. Curiously, she was already aware of it. At that point a pigeon interrupted our chat, trying to land on the table. It was a particularly manky (as we say in Bradford) specimen, with a sort of retractable abscess in place of a leg. She wondered why no one had yet invented a device for hoovering up pigeons. I thought the idea ridiculous for the simply reason that you’d end up taking out other small animals. ‘What, small animals in Central London?’ she retorted. ‘Yea, squirrels.’ ‘Squirrels!?’ ‘Sure, they’re being increasingly forced into urban centres in search of food’. But she insisted that the hoovering up would be confined to places like Trafalgar Square or Soho Square. ‘Well, I did once see a polecat in Soho Square’. She looked incredulous, and I had to admit that it was on a lead, the pet of some archly eccentric bohemian, and would doubtless escape the attentions of the hoovering device. I tried another line of questioning: ‘would the pigeons be killed in the hoover bag or released elsewhere?’ ‘Oh, released elsewhere, miles away, in some remote piece of countryside where there’s no dried vomit to peck at, see how they cope!’

Once I was at a café in Highgate when a flightless pigeon bobbed under our table. It had no legs to speak of, but a rancorous opening in it its belly. Still, like some automaton it continued pecking at random debris. A diner complained about its presence and one of the chefs came and placed a box on top of it, slid some cardboard under the box, took the thing away and placed it under a nearby tree. What a way to die.

ps am moving, and won't have proper internet access until thursday.