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..?’