Saturday, July 28, 2007

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

Friday, July 27, 2007

'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?

Thursday, July 26, 2007

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..'

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

'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.'

Monday, July 23, 2007

'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

Friday, July 20, 2007

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.)

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

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.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

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."