Coronavirus, Politics and Fantasy

There were two different but I think ultimately related responses to the spread of the coronavirus which I found interesting. One was the attitude of Spectatorship. This is manifest in a number of ways. Someone at work (in March) said “it’s this month’s story, next month it’ll be something else.” And there were very similar expressions, such as “its been Brexit for god knows how long, now it’s all Corona Corona.” Its as if Coronavirus, Brexit and so on, exist “in the media”, exist on a kind of screen and “we” are only the observers of this spectacle which takes place, which unfolds, separately, and is organised by – and largely affects – others. We are not in the picture. The Second, albeit fringe response, is those who claim the whole thing is a “hoax”, or pretext; those who claim that They have got Us where They want us, in a position of fear and subjection. This is usually accompanied by pseudo hard facts, e.g. that the virus is comparable to the flu, and asserts that the extra measures are purely instruments of control.

These two responses are clearly related. 

The first assumes a relation of spectatorship with regard to the screen, whilst the second posits a They behind the screen. Or rather, the first alludes only to a kind of nebulous They behind the screen (“they’re saying we’ll go into lockdown on Friday” or whatever). The second offers a more localised and defined They, with malign intentions and power.

It is also understandable how the one attitude might flip into the other. We have, on the one hand, this screen, on which events unfold, and then, on the other, the homeostasis of everyday life, the auditorium from which we watch the screen. Occasionally, however, something appears which seems to come towards us, and to impinge on, to collapse, that distance we enjoy with regard to the screen. It threatens to come “too close” to the homeostasis of everyday life. 

Covid fell into this category. The prohibition, god forbid, on going to the pub, the wearing of masks and the keeping of distances. We were dealing with a part-suspension of everyday life, the “news” coming too close for comfort, to our front door and even into the home, destroying the distance. At this point, the They can be posited as something defined and malign, the They of the “hoax” brigade. 

This positing of something coming from Outside and disturbing everyday life perhaps then accounts for the alignment between the Hoaxers or self-declared sceptics and certain Brexit attitudes. 

The EU directives, which in the so-called popular imagination, the surrogate “popular imagination” in the tabloid press, took the form of arbitrary and irrational disruptions to everyday life – directives concerning the shape of bananas, speed limits on children’s roundabouts and so on. Their irrationality and arbitrariness was in fact a sign of their Otherness. 

The EU performed two roles in popular fantasy. On the one hand the arbitrary irrational directives, like certain versions of the Superego. On the other hand, the stealing of resources. This is not just any old stealing of resources. Those who steal are also enjoying this, laughing at us, “taking the piss”. That is, there is also, as part of the same amalgam, a national humiliation fantasy. 

Needless to say, and very obviously, the ‘stealing of resources’ fantasy, and its supporting “national humiliation” fantasy, is almost always allied to racism. ‘The immigrant’ is represented as draining the resources of .. the NHS.. the benefits system. Yes, he or she is doing this, but also relishing this. Always there is this figure of the mocking smiling Other. “We” are somehow being exploited, taken advantage of, and need to “stand up to” the Other stealing our resources. All of this, but briefly, is proto-fascistic. It performatively brings into being an enraged and humiliated “We”, primed for retaliation.

Regarding Covid, the measures brought in by states around the world did indeed suspend everyday life in various ways. This suspension of everyday life introduced as a result of the virus, is sometimes cited as a preparation for authoritarianism, not just by the Hoax brigade but by political commentators and philosophers. And yet, it seems to me, that the more authoritarian regimes, the Right-wing regimes, the overtly capitalistic regimes, were reluctant to impose effective measures, and in fact failed to do so. The places that introduced effective pre-emptive measures were the likes of Greece, Kerala, New Zealand. These places tended not to first ask the question “Is saving lives good for the economy?” 

I see the virus, coming as it did from the Outside, from outside politics, as a simple imperative. Or rather a meaningless intrusion to which the only proper response was an ethical imperative to save lives and alleviate suffering. A demand which one could either answer with appropriate measures or prevaricate and compromise. In this sense the virus acted as an instrument exposing the ethical poverty of Conservative priorities and ethics: “I’d rather die as a freeborn citizen doing the things that freeborn citizens do than cower like a dog in a kennel because the government has ordered me to do so”.

The state-engineered suspension of everyday life may well advertise the power of the state. That much is obvious. But it also demonstrates that the order of things can indeed be suspended, that its necessity is illusory. The abandoning of market mechanisms, temporary nationalisations, the discovery that the “magic money tree” does indeed exist...

Many people, when the so-called lockdown first began, were taken aback by the birdsong, the silence, the air. At the same time of course, something appalling and to a degree preventable was unfolding. But the pause, the parenthesis, the ingress of air, as if from Elsewhere was both literal and also the figure for an opening, a breech in the homeostasis of the everyday life, an interregnum wherein various new possibilities came within the radius of thought and action. 

Allegory and the Hermetic: Benjamin, Blavatsky and Yeats

There is, for Walter Benjamin, an affinity, a pull of analogy, between allegory and the esoteric, the occult and hermetic.

It must not be assumed that there is anything accidental about the fact that the allegorical is related [..] to the fragmentary, untidy, and disordered character of magician’ dens or alchemists laboratories familiar above all to the baroque.

We might note in passing how typically Benjaminian this is: Offering us, in place of an idea or an argument, a brief image to be unpacked; bringing into alignment two phenomenon – the allegorical imagination and the magician’s den - and simply noting the symmetry, the “attraction”. This is what Adorno called ‘adjacentism”: the placing of two phenomenon side by side without the appropriate layers of explanation. But for Benjamin this gap was perhaps a portal though which the reader might enter the text.

Using a similar adjacentism, we might offer this portrait of the living room of a young W.B. Yeats:

A few evenings ago I called on my friend, W.B. Yeats.. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genuis. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well known symbolic artists everywhere books and papers, in apparently endless profusion.

Symbols and iconography from heterogeneous traditions are rent from their context and rearranged for purely aesthetic and private contemplation, imbued with new meanings built on the ruins of their former significance. There is no apparent hierarchy or order. One would not want to make too much of such a brief snapshot, save to observe that an inventory of this untidy “Interior” is also the chosen furniture of the early poems - the same jumble of arcania. It is of course very similar to that Georgian interior depicted in Yeats’s early short story “Rosa Alchemica”, wherein the family portraits, the ancestral line and the ascendancy tradition it reflects and presupposes, had been replaced by a similarly eclectic stockpile of symbols.

Yeats is of course drawn to that world of secrecy and the occult, Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, which Benjamin mentions as being the object-world appropriate to the allegorical disposition. Or rather, from Benjamin’s object-orientated way of thinking, this disposition is incarnate in these very objects. In Benjamin the “objective correlative” comes before or is coeval with the subjective disposition it “expresses”. Expression exists outside us in the objects that intimate what we are feeling.   

The Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: there is something shabby, histrionic and frankly fraudulent about those Secret Societies and Occult organisations that Yeats gets involved in. Less emphasised is the fact that Yeats seems at once aware of this but also able to strategically suspend that awareness, perhaps as an actor does. There is a kind of heroic balancing act between dubiety and credulity, assumed authority and absurd theatrical bluff, sacrament and pantomime. This hesitation is I think constitutive of Yeats in many different arenas, and to trace its origins would require other detours into his social class and the particular exit from that class engineered by his father. Authority, having been subtracted by history, is retrieved via performance.  

In any case, I wanted briefly to reflect on the affinity between such occult interests and the allegorical disposition, by looking at one of Yeats’s collaborators and erstwhile masters, the theosophist and author Madame Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a deracinated and nomadic Russian aristocrat, or déclassé aristocrat. Detached from the tradition of her origin, but retaining its aura, its retinue of ghosts, she felt able to assemble the signs and symbols of various other traditions, with little felt concern for their original context or meaning.

The symbolic regalia of various traditions, emptied of their temporal and contextual depth, are instead seen as expressions or cryptic signs of another, secret Tradition, accessible only by initiates. Whether it be Christian or Buddhist symbols, these are now redefined as ‘codes’ and ‘glyphs’ to be unlocked by an adept. Blavatsky calls them “esoteric emblems”, which she defines as follows:

A concrete visible/ picture or sign representing principles, or a series of principles, recognizable by those who have received certain instructions.

This returns us inevitably to the world of Benjamin’s Allegory. Having been drained – partially or entirely - of their original meaning, another esoteric sense must now be imported if these symbols are to be fully understood. This other sense, belonging to this hermetic tradition, is never fully present, but only ‘glimmers’ here and there or shows its face like some chance image we see in the clouds, or the face of the Virgin glimpsed in the bark of a tree. In effect, the symbols are delivered into the hands of Blavatsky or her initiates. They become “dead letters”:

Blavatsky: “To accept the dead-letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a grosser error and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage South Sea Islander”.

Benjamin: “the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects”

And this is why, also, it is useful to see much of the early Yeats’s poetry in these terms. It is not that Yeats is “influenced” by Blavatsky, but that he shares many of the same assumptions about Symbols. He speaks of his own early poetry in terms of “half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol”, just as Blavatsky states that “Through all [Symbols] there glimmer something of a divine idea.” But because sense only “glimmers”, there is never full presence, only endless postponement, indirection. The subjective attitude corresponding to this is one of pensive immersion, a mind pregnant with some imminent but elusive revelation.

This is what we find in Yeats’ early books of poetry (carefully designed physical objects in their own right): on the one hand, the profusion of emblems without temporal distinction, the jumble of fragmentary meanings and enigmatic clues, the whole furniture of Allegorical existence. Simultaneously, a melancholy movement from sign to sign, the dim intimation of what never arrives.

But if sense only “glimmers” from sign to sign without any kind of telos or emergence of Meaning, then Meaning itself can only arrive in the form of some exogenous lightning, or revelation from outside, which the sheer circularity of the allegorist’s endeavour seems then to crave and call forth.

It is this exogenous lightning which the allegorist himself must provide: “The arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects”. If the light glimmers endlessly from symbol to symbol, then the allegorist makes an executive decision to impose or fix meaning in order that the ‘glimmering’ is replaced by some outside illumination and the symbol is now lit up with a new significance.

In order that this external illumination does not seem like a mere act of will - the allegorist as a demiurge assigning meaning by fiat - there is the necessary claim to “privileged knowledge” and to a “higher authority” which is never, however, disclosed. One does not have to reveal this knowledge, to display the master key, only to presuppose and gesture towards its existence. It is the form of authority without its content.

It would perhaps be a productive line of enquiry to relate this, the decay of content and the persistence of form, to Kafka’s diagnosis of a “sickness of tradition” as the key to Modern times and Modernist literature. That is, the persistence of certain forms after the wisdom and truth they previously embodied has decayed. Their consequent openness to new manipulations by modern artists and writers, who both lament the decay but revel in the new creative possibilities. Perhaps the subject of another post (or series thereof).

"The evident power of words": Modernism and Poetic Language

Common to modernist literature and philosophy is surely an emphasis on the substantiality of Language. That is to say, the way that words do not simply report on or represent actions or experiences, but are themselves actions or experiences or are at least internal to experiences and actions. 

Words, purged of their representational function, become incantatory. They perform actions, create and call forth:

This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme’s supposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value, and in the force they possess to attain the depths of reality. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that cannot be represented – in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.

The dream is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now communal magic. It unfolds in the recesses of the souls of the initiates. This is the poetics of Symbolism: 

It seems that poetry is more than ever attached to a magical conception of art. This powerful current […] that Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme awakened in France, has dug its bed so deep that every spring dreams of flowing into it. The most knowledgeable art has had, for more than half a century, the ambition of charging words with a primitive power

But beyond Symbolism, we see what is surely the keynote of a certain modernist attitude to language: a language which is no longer about representation, which does not “express” a definable content; instead, it enacts, performs: conjures, summons, commands:

And one understands a poem not when one grasps its thoughts […] but when one is lead by it to the mode of existence that it signifies, provoked to a certain tension, exaltation or destruction [..] one should say that poetic meaning has to do with existence itself.

 We might trace a line between this and Deleuze’s contention that “Style, in a great writer, is always also a style of life, not at all something personal, but the invention of a possibility of life, of a mode of existence.” Each work of art is a kind of manifesto directly embodying (rather than describing) a way of being.  An artistic manifesto is also a manifestation of its own content, and an instance of what it maps out.

We have moved from a view of literary language as something that comes after or lags behind existence - depicting it however meticulously - to a celebration of language as the first note of a new rhythm of life.

Words as Cries: Blanchot, Valery, Wittgenstein

Maurice Blanchot quotes Valery thus:  “poetry is the attempt to [..]restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, tears, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express.”

Poetry aspires not to music but to the condition of crying or kissing. Perhaps another way of saying this is that poetry aspires not to represent feelings but to manifest and amplify them in the same way that a cry or a kiss does.  A cry or kiss does not simply express a pre-existing affect, it is directly that affect. A cry continues and transforms the pain which it “expresses”, and poetry then gives further definition and depth to this cry. 

This is perhaps a profane juxtaposition, but there is something related in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein suggests that even apparently descriptive phrases are modes of, for example, crying or moaning:  "A cry is not a description [.. ] And the words “I am afraid” may approximate more, or less, to being a cry." And: 

I have a toothache” is no more the description of behaviour than moaning is. To call it a description is misleading in a discussion like this […] of course, “toothache” is not only a substitute for moaning. But it is also a substitute for moaning. 

 If we agree with Wittgenstein, then poetry is not, in this respect, radically different from the language of everyday life. It is kind of refinement of it. It finds new ways of moaning, crying, raging. It allows our cries and moans to breath and expand in different ways. It uses, for Valery, the articulate as a route back into depths of the pre-articulate. 

Perhaps both Valery and Wittgenstein are examples of Modern attempts to restore to language some of its materiality and executive force. That is, to view words as things which - rather than reporting on what they express -  partake in what they “express” (by way of emanation, for example), which are also actions/ are more like actions. 

I'd like to expand on this in the next post. 

Symbolicity, or the Immanent Melancholy of Symbols: Hegel, Santner, Lacan and Others..

In Hegel, the emergence of the symbol is also the disappearance of the Thing in its immediacy. Once light becomes a symbol of Divinity rather than divinity itself, it only points towards a divinity which is not itself present, or is only present through the proxy of the symbol. The symbol signifies the thing rather than directly being the thing. The Thing itself has slipped away and left the consolation of the symbol.

The distinction between the symbol and the thing, the symbol and its meaning, has exercised and vexed much modern literature and latterly psychoanalysis. In particular, the way that, after symbol and thing separate, the symbol or signifier becomes an enigmatic object of interest in its own right.

Eric Santner, scholar of German literature, whose work is deeply informed by a psychoanalytic set of references and assumptions, gives two examples of this separation, one ontogenetic and one historical.

Ontogenetically, what the Mother gives the child, eg food, is always a sign of love, but never the Thing itself. The food etc is always the symbolic proxy of an x which is never directly present, but whose enigmatic message is dimly sensed in the material signs consumed by the child.

Historically, we are always surrounded by the signs of now extinct forms of life, written or material, which confront us as so many ‘hieroglyphs in the desert’ (a phrase he borrows from Lacan). Again, these are enigmatic signifiers of that which is not fully present.

Santner explains that the foremost property of these signs is that ‘significity’ exceeds meaning. This neologism, “significity”, indicates that we are aware that something signifies without fully understanding what. Things often have the flavour of “being symbolic” without us having any access to what it is they symbolise or signify.

There are two relevant quotations here, both cited in William Tindall’s book The Literary Symbol. Firstly, from Auden: “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.”

Put another way, symbols often have the quality of ‘being symbolic’ prior to any symbolised content. It is this quality which can be called ‘symbolicity’. The second quotation is from D.H. Lawrence (on Moby Dick:) “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly”

So it is that the quality of ‘being symbolic’ and the quality symbolised do not simply fit together. Again, Slavoj Zizek gives the example of Jaws, which is clearly ‘symbolic’ but without clearly ‘meaning’ something in particular.

Tindall goes on to say that Lawrence is finally ‘unable to resist’ positing a meaning: ‘he [Moby Dick] is the deepest blood-being of the white race’. At this point it becomes clear that when you come to ‘name’ the symbol like this there’s always a sense of disappointment, because, ‘no, that’s not it’. We immediately feel that something has been lost in ‘naming’ the meaning, but not because it is the ‘wrong’ interpretation. Any naming would have been ‘wrong’.  The ‘being symbolic’ is still there, a silent, magnetic remainder even after the thing, the meaning has been (apparently) disclosed.

For Santner and others it is this – this magnetic remainder - that drew us to the symbol in the first place. There is a sense in which we respond to the ‘symbolicity’, more than we are seduced by the short-change of its ‘meaning’.

Before saying more on this ‘remainder’, let us return to Tindall:

“At the end of his Comedy Dante, guided now by Saint Bernard, contemplates an enormous rose, bathed in radiance and attended by angelic bees. This white flower with yellow centre seems a garden of concentric petals within which Beatrice, the Virgin, and all the redeemed occupy suitable chairs. Penultimate, that rose is the most impressive and the most efficacious of “shadowy prefaces,” as Dante calls them, to his ultimate vision of circles and light.”

The Symbol, it seems, frequently has this ‘prefatory’ character. The symbol is this shadowy preface. The presence of the symbolic, even prior to revealed content, holds open the possibility of something to come. Because it is the ‘shadowy preface’ and not the Thing itself, it opens an obscure expectancy which is disappointed by any concrete content. Symbols, perhaps, before they symbolise anything, embody this expectancy.

 At the same time, in this reading at least, symbols also embody loss, in that the eventual content never equals the initial (the promise of) ‘symbolicity’. The surplus of symbolicity over content means that an emptiness always adheres to the content, a sense of ‘that’s not it’. And the fascination with the Symbolic – i.e. ‘being symbolic’ as opposed to symbolised content – is an adherence to this loss and with the symbol’s immanent melancholy.

We might then speculate whether what draws us to symbols, irrespective of their content, is their ability to give body to these affects: loss, expectancy, desire, and the curious commingling of the three. We are very close to Walter Benjamin on allegory here, for whom it is the form of a certain figurative language which is expressive rather than the content.

__

A final (for the time being) thought. I’m sceptical of the psychoanalytic example Santner provides. He - or Lacan – seems to assume that the child experiences things already as “signs”. That is, might the child experience the Mother’s milk – or whatever it may be – not as a sign of Love but as love itself, in the same way that Hegel says the Zoroastrians relate to light. There is not some inaccessible ‘Love’ for which the child only has a series of signs pointing backwards to the concealed Thing. Rather is there a Love immanent to its multiple manifestations, like Spinoza’s God.

"Words Obey my Call:" Yeats and Adorno

I’ve always been intrigued by a phrase from Yeats’s poem ‘Words’, from The Green Helmet (1910): “words obey my call”.

“Words obey my call” may seem like a statement of what all writers wish for. But not quite. The relation of words to the writer is arguably not one of “obedience”; this implies discipline, power, and, crucially, the externality of words. Ideally, words “express” or disclose the call of the writer. Words are, indissolubly, the call of the writer. But “words obey my call” places a sliver of foreignness, of resistance, between writer and word.

“Words obey my call” is one of a constellation of examples in the middle and late Yeats in which he draws attention to his own agency in handling words, in making poetry. “Here’s an old story I’ve remade;” “I declare this tower is my symbol” and a host of other instances. In many instances, there is the sense of discipline in handling some recalcitrant material. 

Absent from the early Yeats, by contrast, is this awareness of the process of making, of poetic labour, and something like its opposite. Rather than the sense of words and poetic images as things ‘commanded’ by the poet, as the products of his own poesis, we have a poet for whom words and images have a kind of magical autonomy. They float weightlessly above a void, hallucinatory, disembodied. The poet then contemplates these things almost as a dreamer contemplates the contents of his dream, or as what Theodor Adorno calls a phantasmagoria:

The phantasmagoria tends toward dream.. it mirrors subjectivity by confronting it with the product of its own labour, but in such a way that the labour that has gone into it is no longer identifiable. The dreamer encounters his own image impotently, as if it were a miracle.. The object he has forgotten he has made is dangled magically before his eyes.

The poem which might be the text-book illustration of Adorno’s point is “Song of the Wandering Aengus”: 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk along the long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Like other early Yeats poems, there is an initial appearance of nature being near and ready to hand - “I went out to the hazel wood”. But it is at once clear that this is a pastoral - generic - environment, a stage-set for a fantasy of labour (catching the fish) as effortless and spontaneous. It then becomes clear that this is also an image for poetic creation and of the “catching” of the poetic image. The moment of this poetic catching is, familiarly enough in early Yeats, that of twilight or dream, a liminal time when things lose their determinate outlines. Stars lose their distance and solemnity to dance like moths in some depthless foreground.

The “glimmering” of the girl is the indeterminate flickering of absence and presence which marks her off as Other from the well-defined shapes of the quotidian and every day. She has been fantastically transfigured and set glowing with a magic which renders her doubly unreal. But the unreality which shines through her will also cause her to vanish without trace, having failed to realize some solid artistic form. 

What we have here is a phantasmagorical image of the poetic act: The image comes into being indeterminately - “something”, “someone” - opaque to the poet himself, the formation of a preternatural object which cannot be controlled but only consumed. This consumable image then appears to interpellate him personally (it calls him by his name). He becomes the passive addressee of his own creation. The poem pictures emblematically the productive energies of the poet alienated from himself, dancing before his eyes estranged.

There is a sense, the early Yeats, that “It [is] the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not my conscious intention that produced the effect.” And it is this sense of the autonomy of symbols, their independence, which then mean they have to be controlled, subject to discipline: "Words obey my call".

Children and the Joints of Language

If we were to speak of the joints of language, we would be speaking of the explicit and implicit rules that join words to each other, and words to their meanings.

Perhaps it is an obvious point, but for children, young children of around 3 or 5, say, these joints are not as set. Or each word has multiple joints. There are possibilities of combination not available to the adult, or the typical adult.

We know already that children construct their own grammars. “Me do it” I would say as a child – not a sentence I had heard any adult speak, but made according to rules I had extracted from the adult world and adapted.  To some extent, children make their own language within, or sometimes against, the adult language.

What intrigues me at the moment is my son’s line in insults. In general, he finds them funny. He’s half-surprised by them. Curiosities that spring from this mouth. Here are a few, with some cursory comments:

Scubious potman. For the child, parts of language, what we would identify as prefixes, roots, suffixes, but also just individual sounds, can be snapped off and readily recombined in unexpected ways. This results in the kind of “portmanteau” words that Lewis Carroll and later Joyce would use for their own literary purposes and effects. Resetting of the joints of language, but also accessing the creative desire responsible for that endless resetting. 

Train fluff  Of course, with any word there is an expected axis of combination. If we write “train__” there is a kind of “chain of possibilities” for the blank space: carriage, track, driver, wreck. The child is able to easily discard and reach beyond this chain. To put it another way, the disparate is within easy reach. Not only that, but there’s clearly an energy or charge, often a laughter, that comes from joining the disparate, breaking the seals, dislocating the joints.

Sunlit patio Clearly, this is in a different category. A ready-made phrase reused, in this case with a certain comic venom. I think he’d had it read to him in a book about pirates in suburbia. It’s something he’s heard but not fully understood and is therefore a shard of language, opaque and object-like that can be used like a pointed stick. Because the phrase isn’t full of meaning, it can be injected with the child’s own glee or rage. This is presumably what parts of language are for the child..  objects a-glow with meaning, not yet fully metabolised. Hieroglyphs of a world into which they have entered at an oblique angle. There are other instances where he understands a phrase but enjoys matching it with a dissonant tone - "Christmas decoration!" - and so tilting its meaning. Perhaps ‘sunlit patio’ was in fact in this latter category.

I leave you with three more:

Eyeball bat

Nipple bin

Neck fight

"The Discipline of Vanity"; The Historical Sense in Yeats and Bowen

In a previous post I took Yeats’s story Rosa Alchemica to be a kind of historical snapshot. The ancestral family portraits decorating the narrator's Dublin Georgian house were portraits of Irish political and public dignitaries, people of status. One imagines a kind of mantle handed down through the generations, a mantle which the narrator - severed from his ancestry by history- has now discarded and replaced with a private, idiosyncratic, rather than collective iconography. The vacancy left by history has been filled by personal arcania, even as the narrator is aware how precarious these recent acquisitions are

This might be one instance of Yeats’s “historical sense” – his awareness that he is not just “living through history”, as we say when some great event is taking place, but “living history”, in the sense that one is not the spectator of the event but an agent, that one's experience carries history's watermark.  

The historical sense, as George Lukacs and others have argued*, becomes available only under certain conditions:  in times of war or disruption in particular, or (perhaps as part of that) when a certain class or ruling bloc (the case of the Protestant Ascendancy) is playing out its endgame, has reached the stages of its terminal decline. In the case of the Ascendancy in Ireland, this decline was accelerated by forces external to Ireland itself. The locus of power did not simply pass to from one class to another through internal struggles, but was also abruptly removed through Westminster edict, and through the 'foreign' political and economic imperatives of what we might call the colonial power.

There is, presumably, a kind of indignity in that, a sense of not being able to fully “own” your decline. And there are, in response, countervailing Ascendancy strategies to retain dignity and self-image in the face of historical departure. Few writers have catalogued this whole process, the experiential and ideological correlatives of the historical loss of power, more than the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.

Bowen’s Court was one of a number of Anglo-Irish Big Houses, the estate houses of the Protestant Landed class in Ireland, many of them attacked or destroyed in the Irish War of independence. It was owned by the Bowens' until the 1950’s, Elizabeth being the last of the line. The house is the most obvious symbol and repository of family - and class - tradition:  “[T]he family house felt the authority of its long tradition”. For much of this time, she suggests, “[the Bowen’s] relation to history was an unconscious one”. They are aware of tradition but not the fact of being historical. There is a subtle but important difference. For an awareness of being historical is also an admission of eventual decline and originary injustice.

She is able - as they were not - to see historically the family, and the class that it represented:

Having obtained their position through an injustice, they enjoyed that position through privilege. They honoured, if they did not justify, their own class, its traditions, its rule of life. If they formed a too-grand idea of themselves, they did at least exert themselves to live up to this: even vanity involves one kind of discipline.

“The discipline of vanity” is a beautifully apt phrase for, among other Anglo-Irish figures, W.B. Yeats. But this is also something that becomes visible only at the end of the line. In retrospect, or at least twilight, the fragility of the collective self-image, its raison d’etre, the precariousness of its foundations become available where they had before been only implicit or disavowed. At the end of line we pass from amnesia to remembrance.

What also becomes visible at this terminal point are the “ghosts”:

No, life in the big house, in its circle of trees, is saturated with character: this is, I suppose, the element of the spell. The indefinite ghosts of the past, of the dead who have lived here and pursued this same routine of life adds something, a sort of order, a reason for living, to every minute and hour. This is the order, the form of life, the tradition to which big house people still sacrifice much.

This ‘presence of the dead’ is what constitutes tradition, the sense of invisible governance – the sense that you’re not just inventing your actions, form of life, but participating in immemorial habits etc. But what’s interesting is that elsewhere in Bowen’s Court, she says that she wasn’t initially ‘conscious’ of them as ghosts. Once you become conscious of them as ghosts, that’s a symptom that tradition has ‘snapped’. Their invisible hand is no longer effortlessly at work in the present. They have left the body of the present and been set adrift. There is a line separation, across which they become visible. 

Its in this context – the loss of historical authority and power, and the emergence of a now “ghostly” past - that the historian Roy Foster interprets the occult and magical interests of Yeats and other Protestant intellectuals. The occult and secret societies were theatrical set-ups where power and authority, lost as historic realities, were somehow both reclaimed and staged by absurd contrivance - as if to display their arbitrariness. And it is at this time too that the Anglo-Irish develops its antiquarian interest in the Gaelic speaking peasant culture of the West of Ireland, also in decline, also populated with ghosts. It as if the Anglo-Irish seek out what is both an escape from and a mirror image of its own situation.

I’d like to look at Yeats’s relation to both these in a future post.

*"Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them"

Masks and Impersonal Affects: Hegel and Deleuze.

Hegel first. In Greek acting, he suggests, the masked actor is the pure instrument of speech, no more than a “vitalised statue”. What we hear in this speech is not “character”, the signature of some person or other, but language, poetry itself. As Hegel puts it: “words had full poetic rights”.

The function of the mask worn by actors is to block individuality so that language itself might speak. The ‘pathos’ of the mask is some fixed attitude of woe, joy or horror. It is in no way ‘particularized,’ i.e., not yet woven into the fabric of an individual’s character, a personal story.

The mask is in this sense a way of isolating and extracting certain affects or attitudes from the complications of a ‘who,’ from the contingencies of the individual person. In other words, when we see an attitude or affect embodied in an individual person it is contaminated by the ‘flavour’ of that person, our sense of their personality and status – them as a totality colouring all individual manifestations. The whole ‘colours’ and corrupts the particular. The mask, in erasing the face and transferring attention to the voice - a voice presumably intoned and therefore also de-subjectified – liberates these affects. The attitude or affect achieves an autonomy, becomes free-floating, with an energy of  its own rather than one informed by the force and context of the ‘individual character’.

The function of the mask, therefore, is not to suppress expression, to stifle the face as the locus of spirit, but rather to displace expressive efficacy into the voice and to liberate the affect from its anchorage in the individual subject, to ‘de-subjectify’ expression and bring us in contact with free-floating affects.

This is connected to what Deleuze says about the close-up in cinema. The close up effectively turns the face into a kind of mask: “when we see the face of a fleeing coward in close-up, we see ‘cowardice’ in person, freed from its actualisation in a particular person.” We encounter cowardice without the coward, rage or love extracted from the enraged, from the lover. These emotions shine through the face, as when we say something like “his face was a picture of terror.” 

What I'm curious about, what it would be good to explore another time, is whether there is something politically liberating about this? 

On Symbols and the Symbolic; Hegel and others.

Hegel’s Aesthetics, is among other things, a sustained reflection on Signs and Symbols and their relation to Spirit in its various stages of evolution. To what extent does spirit embody itself or fail to embody itself, what degree of adequation is there between matter and spirit, sign and meaning?

One of Hegel’s early examples is the Zoroastrian religion. The Zoroastrians, in Hegel’s description, directly worship light. Light is not a symbol of the Divine, “a mere expression and image or symbol,” but the Divine itself. In this sense, Zoroastrianism does not worship ‘graven images’ at all since ‘images,’ graven or otherwise, have not yet arisen. “the adequate representation of the divine is found and enunciated directly in the external existent.”

When we reach the stage when light is, by contrast, a symbol of divinity, we have lost divinity or meaning in its immediacy. Light now “points away from itself” towards that which cannot fully be present. The symbol stands in for the “thing itself” which is elsewhere. We could also put this the other way around and say the appearance of the symbol is simultaneously the disappearance of the thing.

Another other relevant example here is Hegel on the mystic bread of Catholicism:

In this mystical identity there is nothing purely symbolical, the latter only arises in the reformed doctrine, because here the spiritual is explicitly severed from the sensuous, and the external object is taken in that case as a mere pointing to a meaning differentiated therefrom [emphasis added]

For Catholicism the bread is not a ‘symbol’ at all, it literally becomes the body of Christ. Only when there is not this ‘real presence’ can it be classified as ‘symbolic’. In the “reformed doctrine”, bread, rather than being the actual flesh, is now only a signifier. It “points towards” that which is not immediately present. Immediate presence, then, rather than symbolism. But, conversely, this entails that we ought to incorporate into our definition of the Symbolic a loss of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some presence has departed. And so the symbol is therefore not only the representation of some thing (light, flesh) but an index of its absence. In this sense Symbols are therefore always ‘haunted’, the ghostly presence of that which has slipped through the symbolic net.(Just for illustration we might think of Yeats’s relation to the Rose, circling but unable to access the Thing behind the representation).

The symbol, then, in Hegel’s reading, is less some arbitrary sign, than a kind of memory of what is now out of reach, the symbol is a meaning dwindled to its own resemblance. As such it seems closer to Benjamin’s definition of the allegorical sign rather than the classic romantic concept of the symbol, which asserted precisely the reconciliation of sign and meaning.

Arguably, this loss of immediate presence then opens up room for two related things: desire on the one hand (for that which has escaped the substitution of symbol for thing) and interpretation (which enters the space left vacant by the birth of the symbol).

The caveat to the above, however, is that Hegel is not writing about the symbol per se, but – as he sees it – a stage in its evolution. From the “first unity” of meaning and sensuous representation as we find it (for example) in the worship of light, we pass through a series of necessary stages to a point where meaning is fully embodied in its symbolic envelope without surplus.  

To recap: With the birth of the Symbol, there is no longer an immediate identity between meaning and its sensuous envelope but a relation – ‘instead of appearing as an immediate identity asserts itself only as a mere comparison of the two.’ So, for example, Divinity is comparable to light not immediately identified with it. And  in dwindling to mere comparison, what now becomes visible are the differences between symbol and thing (a relation of negation). The two things have been severed: 

Symbolising therefore becomes a conscious severance of the explicitly clear meaning from its sensuous associated picture.

But from this art, that recognises the difference between the picture or symbol and Meaning, we move to a very interesting stage: 

This art has indeed an inkling of the inadequacy of its pictures and shapes and yet can call in aid nothing but the distortion of shapes to the point of the boundlessness of a purely quantitative sublimity [..] a world of blatant contrivances, incredibilities and miracles.. 

What I think Hegel implies is that, after the severance of the symbol from direct identity, or immediate meaning, what happens is then a frantic attempt to ‘fill up’, to reclaim the vacant space, the “non-identity”, with fantastication and agitated invention. In this art, there is a mad proliferation of the Symbolic which, attempts to recolonise, to crowd with representation, with sublimity of number (as we perhaps find it in Bosch?) what has been vacated by the withdrawal of immediate meaning.

Again, for Hegel, this ‘moment’, of fantastication and baroque invention, an explosion of signification, is a phase on the way to an eventual reconciliation of symbol and meaning. But if we put aside this grand arc of reconciliation, we can best read the Aesthetics as a number of semi-fictional models, or myths, detailing the possible relations between symbol and meaning, matter and spirit, subjectivity and its expression.

And so Hegel’s description of the symbolic mode, and the inadequacy or gap between symbol and meaning, of absence and the attempt to populate that absence with signs, is very close to the Modernist preoccupation with the postponed reconciliation between sign and meaning, sense and spirit. In particular that Baroque sense of invention, initially an attempt to fill the vacancy, which then breaks free and becomes a self-delighting creation of signs and symbols [to be continued].